President Paul: Rand Rising?

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com

March 11, 2013 4:00 A.M.

Palm Beach, Fla. — Those who doubted that Rand Paul was will running for president need to change their minds after considering how he energized the conservative grass roots with his 13-hour Senate filibuster last week.

Paul took a narrow issue — as he put it, “whether an American can be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime” — and captured the attention of political activists. As social media lit up with praise for his efforts, many of his fellow senators joined him on the floor, in solidarity with his demand that the Obama administration answer a question it had legalistically evaded for days. Representative Keith Rothfus of Pennsylvania was part of a group of House members who went to the Senate floor to “stand with Rand.” “The atmosphere was electric, “ he says. “Republicans felt we were advancing.”
The day after the filibuster, Attorney General Eric Holder capitulated and finally gave Paul a direct answer: “‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ The answer to that question is no.” 
Rand Paul isn’t as direct when asked whether he is running for president, but he says he is “seriously” considering it. If he does enter the race, he will clearly do so by stepping out of what he views as an establishment straitjacket that keeps conservatives from communicating their message to young people, Hispanics, and disillusioned independents.
“We’ve got to appeal to younger voters, the West Coast, people who view Republicans as in league with crony capitalists and the wealthy, and those who are suspicious of endless foreign interventions,” he says. “Otherwise, we are going to become a niche product for red states.”
Much of the GOP establishment obviously resents Rand Paul’s arrival on the national stage. Take John McCain, who tangled frequently with Rand’s father, Ron Paul, when they both ran in the GOP primaries in 2008. A front-page photo in the New York Times captured him glowering as he happened to share an elevator with Rand Paul in the Capitol building last week. McCain told reporters that if the younger Paul “wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids.”
But at the annual Club for Growth meeting here in Palm Beach, it wasn’t kids in the audience who greeted Paul as a hero, giving him a standing ovation both before and after his talk last Friday. The Club for Growth is a group of sober-minded business owners and investors who have proved their political clout by helping elect tea-party-oriented senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Rand Paul himself.
Some Club members are already in Paul’s corner for 2016. “He has broadened his appeal to include three issues that 75 percent of the American people agree with,” says George Yeager, an investment counselor from New York. “He wants a balanced-budget amendment, term limits, and a questioning of mindless nation-building overseas.”
Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who is now president of the Heritage Foundation, told Club members that he “couldn’t think of a more dramatic contrast between some senators having dinner with President Obama on the same night last week that Rand Paul and his allies were making their courageous stand.” In his view, “the balance of power in the Senate GOP caucus is shifting.” He noted that key members of the Senate leadership, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Jerry Moran of Kansas, came to the Senate floor in support of Paul’s effort.  
If Paul ran for president, he would no doubt be the underdog, given the Republican Party’s post-Reagan penchant for nominating only establishment figures. But two consecutive presidential defeats have discredited the establishment in the eyes of many activists. 
Mallory Factor, who runs a popular “Monday Meeting” of conservative activists in Charleston, S.C., had Paul speak to his group recently and reported that the response was very favorable. “He has a fresh appeal,” Factor says. “And the mailing lists he inherits from his father’s two campaigns are a huge fundraising and organizational head start” in South Carolina and other states that will vote early in the 2016 nominating process.
The reaction in other early-voting states is also favorable. “I don’t think you can underestimate how big of a moment this was,” conservative Iowa talk-radio host Steve Deace told Politico, speaking of Paul’s filibuster. “If the Iowa caucuses were tomorrow, he would win in a landslide.”
Even Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential effort, told Politico that Paul could be a formidable candidate. “I can’t tell you how many hours and meetings are devoted to discussing the candidate’s vision in a campaign,” said Schmidt. “Well, you wouldn’t have to do that with him. . . . He’s got the right combination of principles, oratory skills, smarts, and showmanship.”
Now that Paul has seized the limelight, he will begin a process of being grilled and dissected by a media that is largely hostile to his libertarian message. He delivers that message more smoothly and effectively than his father does  — the elder Paul has been tagged at times as cranky — but Paul’s strength, his freshness, is also a potential weakness. After his upset GOP-primary win for the Senate in 2010, the neophyte Paul, who has held office for only two years, gave a now-infamous interview on MSNBC in which he disastrously questioned the constitutionality of parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Since then, Paul has done a better job of steering what he calls “a middle ground between pure libertarianism and traditional conservatism,” but some GOP leaders still view him as a loose cannon. One senator told me privately that if Paul runs, GOP voters would be unlikely to shake a sense that Paul “has a veiled radical agenda that would undermine the military, leave Israel in the lurch, and savage programs many people depend on.” 
By all appearances, Paul is trying to assuage these misgivings. He recently met with the leadership of the American Israel Political Action Committee and made his first trip to Israel. He has put his legislative staff to work on veterans’ issues and pointed out that reforming the Pentagon will help ensure U.S. military strength. 
Most important, he has developed a good relationship with Minority Leader McConnell, his fellow Kentuckian. Paul’s former campaign manager is now leading McConnell’s 2014 reelection effort, and McConnell has allowed Paul a great deal of freedom to offer amendments of his choosing on the Senate floor. All of this makes it harder for people to depict Paul as a fringe figure in the Senate.
But for all his efforts, some Republicans — those who blame the Tea Party for the GOP’s failure to take back the Senate from Democrats in 2012 — would probably treat a Paul candidacy as an insurgency they need to suppress. They will insist that Paul won’t appeal to women, moderates, and people who will be suspicious of his Kentucky drawl.  
But even those who are hostile to Paul should welcome his candidacy. If his star-making filibuster is any indication, his entry in the race will help make the GOP attractive to younger voters and people who are traditionally suspicious of both major parties. For a party that clearly had an “outreach” problem to those voters in 2008 and 2012, that can only be helpful.

A.N. Wilson Reviews 'C.S. Lewis: A Life'

The Odd Story of C.S. Lewis, an Extremely Odd Man

The author who understood so little about the emotional life still speaks eloquently to millions of us 50 years after his death, writes A.N. Wilson.

by A.N. Wilson  | March 10, 2013 9:59 AM EDT

The Daily Beast

http://www.dailybeast.com

C.S. Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford, circa 1950. (John Chillingworth/Getty)

C.S. Lewis died on Nov. 22, 1963: the very day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Few people attended his funeral in Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford, partly because his brother, Major Warnie Lewis, had taken to his bed with a whiskey bottle when Lewis died and told no one of the burial arrangements. The figures around the grave included his estranged friend J.R.R. Tolkien, some members of their famous discussion-group called the Inklings, who had not convened for more than a decade, and his stepsons, themselves by then not the best of friends. Many considered that Lewis’s influence as a Christian apologist was on the wane. But, 50 years on, he is regarded in many circles, especially among American Christians, as “the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism.” His Narnia books, now made into films, break box-office records. His fame is greater than it ever was.

There have been plenty of biographies of Lewis—I once wrote one myself—but I do not think there has been a better one than Alister McGrath’s. He is a punctilious and enthusiastic reader of all Lewis’s work—the children’s stories, the science fiction, the Christian apologetics, and the excellent literary criticism and literary history. He is from Northern Ireland, as Lewis was himself, and he is especially astute about drawing out the essentially Northern Irish qualities of this very odd man. And he is sympathetic to the real oddness of his story.

Having written a book on the same theme, I have had phases of being been obsessed by Lewis myself. I do not believe McGrath entirely explains the extreme oddness, but his narrative has a truly lucid fluency that presents all the case for the baffled reader to consider. And what McGrath is especially good at doing is painstakingly reconstructing the chronology. Lewis wrote a compellingly readable autobiography called Surprised by Joy. He then, to his surprise, married a woman called Joy (whom he scarcely knew), which certainly surprised his friends. But then his friends did not know very much about him, and the autobiography antedated the marriage. “Joy” in Lewis’s book was the word he used for those extraordinary moments, almost mystical moments, in which he had been overcome since early childhood by a sense of yearning, a sense of excitement as another world intruded itself upon his inner life. He felt this, for example, as a boy when reading George Macdonald’s Phantastes.

It was against the background of this truly bizarre domestic situation that Lewis wrote the works of Christian apologetics and the Narnia stories which are now so celebrated.

What makes Surprised by Joy so, well, so surprising—once you know Lewis’s story more fully—is to see how he manages to distort and rearrange the events of his life to make them into a good story. The book is a sort of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and it is understandable that he should, therefore, concentrate on the development of his religious ideas—first as a schoolboy atheist, then soldier in the First World War, brilliant Oxford scholar, winning a Triple First Degree, and getting a job as a fellow of Magdalen College. Then, the befriending various Christian scholars, most notably the inspirational philologist J.R.R. Tolkien who, in a memorable midnight walk with Lewis, persuaded his friend that Christianity, though a myth, was a myth that was true.

Where McGrath is so good is in sorting out the truth of this story. Lewis remembered, shortly after his conversation with Tolkien, being driven in the sidecar of his brother’s motorbike to an outdoor zoo—Whipsnade. In the course of this journey, he decided he believed in the Incarnation of Christ. He remembered his exultation as the two brothers walked together among bluebells. But, McGrath, points out, it was September—when bluebells are not in flower! McGrath cunningly shows us that the moment of epiphany must in fact have come two years later, when Lewis went to the zoo with his lover, or former lover Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen.

Mrs. Moore is the most understandable omission from Lewis’s autobiography. (Another being Lewis’s obsession with sadism; he nicknamed himself Philomastix, or Lover of the Whip). McGrath deals with the whole story remarkably fairly. Lewis trained as an officer to fight in the First World War, and shared a room with a man called Paddy Moore. The two boys agreed that if either were killed in the war, the other would look after the dead one’s parent. Moore was killed. Lewis had already begun a relationship with Janey Moore, with whom he subsequently lived for the rest of his life. When I wrote my life of Lewis, I speculated, as others have done, that they must have been lovers—though this was always hotly contested in those days by some of Lewis’s more pious admirers. When my book was published, Maureen, Mrs. Moore’s daughter, smilingly told me she was glad I had realized what she had been trying to tell me during our conversations about her mother.

Lewis lost his own mother when he was 9 years old. He called Mrs. Moore by a variety of names, but one of them was “Mother.” It is not clear whether he stopped being her lover because of his religious conversion, or whether this inner event postdated the cooling of their relationship, which became increasingly unhappy. Warnie, Lewis’s collapsed brother, an unsuccessful army major, also shared the household, having frequent drinking binges. I was told by Walter Hooper, who served as Lewis’s secretary at the end of his life that the major could polish off three bottles of whisky in a day.

It was against the background of this truly bizarre domestic situation that Lewis wrote the works of Christian apologetics and the Narnia stories that are now so celebrated. After Mrs. Moore died, Lewis married an American divorcée, whose sons inherited the royalties to his books. It must be an inheritance worth millions, though Lewis himself, who never mastered the idea that you had to pay tax, was in a perpetual state of financial anxiety, believing that if you gave money away to good causes or friends, it would not count as income. (God saw his kindness, but the tax man did not.)

In the last decade or so of his life, Lewis gave up being an apologist, feeling he had lost his knack. He concentrated more on the children’s stories and on more meditative stuff, such as a lovely book on the Psalms. His faith was challenged, though not shaken, by the painful cancer death of his wife, and this searing experience produced the heart-rending book A Grief Observed, which was the inspiration for the play (and movie) Shadowlands.

Until reading McGrath, I had never before been so struck by the fact that Lewis was a poet manqué. Of course I had known this—it is the most obvious fact about Lewis the writer. His earliest printed works were poems, but they were no good. He never quite recognized this fact, and the people he truly hated tended to be poets. One of his first pupils at Magdalen was dear old John Betjeman, later poet laureate, but Lewis the sadist treated him abominably. Lewis loathed T.S. Eliot and could not see any virtue in Eliot’s work, even after he became a Christian. Lewis once had a fight in a pub with the poet Roy Campbell. To this degree, he was the classic case (we have all met them in university life) of the secondary talent who could not endure primary talents. Brilliant as an exponent of the virtues in Spenser, Dante, Chaucer, Lewis could not write his own poetry.

Yet toward Tolkien he remained wonderfully generous. Without Lewis’s prompting, there would have been no Lord of the Rings. The only new bit in McGrath’s book that made me cry was a letter he has unearthed in which Lewis proposed Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature. By then the friends were more or less estranged. Tolkien disliked Lewis’s Narnia books intensely and he resented his friend’s marriage to Mrs. Davidson. Yet Lewis never returned Tolkien’s rancor. The cooling of friendship is as sad as the death of other kinds of love, and McGrath conveys this beautifully. His book evokes with aching honesty that vanished male world of heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking Oxford, the world in which emotions are not investigated, not understood, and left at home with the usually unhappy womenfolk. What makes Lewis such a surprising figure is that he who understood so little about the emotional life can still, 50 years after his life, speak so eloquently to millions upon millions of human souls, not one of whom would have found him a soulmate if they had actually known him.

Green cars have a dirty little secret

By Bjorn Lomborg

The Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com

March 11, 2013

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of "zero emissions," and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars' limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it's truly green, right? Not really.

For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars—whether it's a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio's ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf—don't contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don't emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

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While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.

So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.

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Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, on how Washington's fuel standards are increasing the price of cars and gas. Photos: Associated Press

To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: "Don't Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much."

If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin. This is a far cry from "zero emissions." Over its entire lifetime, the electric car will be responsible for 8.7 tons of carbon dioxide less than the average conventional car.

Those 8.7 tons may sound like a considerable amount, but it's not. The current best estimate of the global warming damage of an extra ton of carbon-dioxide is about $5. This means an optimistic assessment of the avoided carbon-dioxide associated with an electric car will allow the owner to spare the world about $44 in climate damage. On the European emissions market, credit for 8.7 tons of carbon-dioxide costs $48.

Yet the U.S. federal government essentially subsidizes electric-car buyers with up to $7,500. In addition, more than $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans go directly to battery and electric-car manufacturers like California-based Fisker Automotive andTesla Motors . This is a very poor deal for taxpayers.

The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.

Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).

A version of this article appeared March 11, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Green Cars Have a Dirty Little Secret.

The Pop-Tart Terrorist

By George F. Will, Published: March 8

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Rodney Francis is insufficiently ambitious. The pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis has entered the fray over guns, violence and humanity’s fallen nature with a plan for a “buyback” of children’s toy guns. And toy swords and other make-believe weapons. There is, however, a loophole in the pastor’s panacea. He neglects the problem of ominously nibbled and menacingly brandished breakfast pastries.
Joshua Welch — a boy, wouldn’t you know; no good can come of these turbulent creatures — who is 7, was suspended from second grade in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County last week because of his “Pop-Tart pistol.” While eating a rectangular fruit-filled sugary something — nutritionist Michelle Obama probably disapproves of it, and don’t let Michael Bloomberg get started — Joshua tried biting it into the shape of a mountain but decided it looked more like a gun. So with gender-specific perversity, he did the natural thing. He said, “Bang, bang.”
But is this really natural? Or is nature taking a back seat to nurture, yet again? Is Joshua’s “bang, bang” a manifestation of some prompting in our defective social atmosphere, and therefore something society could and should stamp out?
While some might enjoy dog-paddling around in this deep philosophic water, Joshua’s school, taking its cue from Hamlet, did not allow its resolve to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” More eager to act than to think, the school suspended Joshua and sent a letter to all the pupils’ parents, urging them to discuss the “incident” — which the school includes in the category “classroom disruptions” — with their children “in a manner you deem most appropriate.”
Ah, yes. The all-purpose adjective “appropriate.” The letter said “one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures” and, although “no physical threats were made and no one was harmed,” the code of student conduct stipulates “appropriate consequences.” The letter, suffused with the therapeutic ethic, suggested that parents help their children “share their feelings” about all this. It also said the school counselor is available, presumably to cope with Post-Pastry Trauma Syndrome.
By now, Americans may be numb to such imbecilities committed by the government institutions to which they entrust their children for instruction. Nothing surprises after that 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl was labeled a “terroristic threat,” suspended from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she talked about shooting herself and others with her Hello Kitty gun that shoots bubbles. But looking on the bright side, perhaps we should welcome these multiplying episodes as tutorials about the nature of the regulatory state that swaddles us ever more snuggly with its caring. If so, give thanks for the four Minnesota state legislators whose bill would ban “bullying” at school.
They define this as the use of words, images or actions that interfere with an individual’s ability “to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment.” Bullying may include, among many other things, conduct that has a “detrimental effect” on a student’s “emotional health.” Or conduct that “creates or exacerbates a real or perceived imbalance of power between students.” Or violates a student’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Or conduct that “does not rise to the level of harassment” but “relates to” — yes, relates to — “the actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, creed, religion, national origin, immigration status, sex, age, marital status, familial status, socioeconomic status, physical appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, academic status, disability, or status with regard to public assistance, age, or any additional characteristic defined” in another Minnesota statute.
If this becomes law, it will further empower the kind of relentless improvers and mindless protectors who panic over Pop-Tart pistols and discern terrorism in Hello Kitty bubble guns. Such people in Minnesota will be deciding what behavior — speech, usually — damages a “supportive learning environment.” They will be sniffing out how students’ speech or other behavior has real or perceived — by whom? — effects on the balance of “power” between other students. And school bureaucracies will ponder whether what Sally told Eleanor about Brad’s behavior with Pam after the prom violated Brad’s, or perhaps Pam’s, “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is — let us not mince words — inappropriate.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive.
Read more on this subject: Alexandra Petri: Pop-Tart ‘gun’ suspension: Seriously, folks?

Film Review: 'Oz the Great and Powerful'

MOVIES

Oz’s Countless Computer-Generated Bells and Whistles Don’t Quite Capture the Magic of the MGM Classic

By Rex Reed 3/06 10:38am

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“So much happened before they got there.” How I loved that original tag line in the first full-page ad that preceded the Broadway opening of the smash-hit musical Wicked.And it applies again to the 3D Disney extravaganza that serves as a $200 million prequel to one of the greatest MGM musicals of all time, the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Nothing in it comes close to the magic, the originality or the everlasting entertainment value of the original, which only cost $2.777 million and didn’t use a single computer-generated graphic. This says more about how much better movies were in 1939 than they are today. Still, I had enough fun to predict that history (or at least a tiny piece of it) seems destined to repeat itself. People just can’t get enough of this stuff. To paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, include me in.

It’s not the same Oz without Judy Garland, the Cowardly Lion, a dancing Scarecrow who only wants a brain, a Tin Man who needs a lube job “and Toto, too” to boot it forward. But Oz the Great and Powerful is not about how they got there. It’s about how the Wizard got there first. In an assembly of passages from the 14 imaginative L. Frank Baum books, the movie, directed by Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) on sound stages in Michigan, traces the origins of the Wizard—a second-rate con man named Oscar Diggs, who is called Oz for short. Don’t expect anything like the beloved Frank Morgan. This Oz is played by, of all people, the odd, peripatetic, slightly pretentious James Franco. (Robert Downey Jr. dropped out and Johnny Depp turned it down.) Between writing poetry, editing literary magazines, exhibiting his artwork in trendy galleries, directing gay porno flicks like the forthcoming Interior. Leather Bar. and making dubious history as the worst M.C. in the history of the Academy Awards, he also acts. Miscast in a stovepipe hat and long waistcoat, sporting a turn-of-the-century moustache and carrying his bag of hokum in a strange briefcase, he looks like Jack the Ripper. But cut him some slack. He’s supposed to be playing a jerk. And he grows on you.

Like the original, the film begins in a black-and-white prologue, with Oz as an obnoxious egomaniac and fake illusionist in a cheap traveling carnival in 1905 Kansas. One foot ahead of the sheriff, he gets sucked into the funnel of a ferocious cyclone/tornado and, like Dorothy years later, gets transported over the rainbow to the merry old land of Technicolor poppies, flying baboons, 3D butterflies and flowers the size of Volkswagens, but, disappointingly, no ruby red slippers and only a handful of Munchkins, who do not sing “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.” (This is not a musical, and the thing I miss most is the score by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg.) I also miss Margaret Hamilton, but there are witches here—three of them, to be exact. Glinda the good witch still travels in a bubble, but instead of Billie Burke, she is now Michelle Williams in a prom dress and a Mae West wig. Glinda believes the amateur magician is the true Wizard, sent according to prophecy to save the good citizens of Oz from the wicked witch Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and her evil sister Theodora (Mila Kunis), who have their doubts about this weirdo Wizard. Oz and his two loyal new companions, a flying monkey named Finley (voiced by Zach Braff, who also plays the Wizard’s bumbling assistant back in Kansas) and a tiny broken china doll (voiced by Joey King) that Oz repairs with glue, which hasn’t been invented yet in Munchkin Land, chug along a faded, broken yellow brick road that is nothing like the one at MGM and is badly in need of a mason, on their way to the Emerald City, which now looks like a lime Jell-O mold. Oz and his friends face death in their dangerous new surroundings, like the ones in countless Danny Kaye movies. Before it’s over, the audience is assaulted by spears, barrels, hot sparks and a whopper of a fireworks show. Children will be delighted, although at two hours and seven minutes, the length alone might land younger toddlers in harm’s way from attention deficit.

James Franco is a mixed blessing. In the scenes in which he faces innumerable perils adapting to his new life in Oz, a lighter touch is needed than he is able to provide. As his lumpy, humorless chores as an Oscar host proved, comedy is not his forte. Still, with so much big-budget razzle and dazzle, there is always plenty to look at, another surprise around every corner. I don’t think L. Frank Baum is moaning in his grave. Tucked into the screenplay, by Mitchell Kapner and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his play Rabbit Hole, there is even a tidy talisman to take home: faith, optimism and courage can conquer the forces of evil if they come from a truly Christmas heart.

rreed@observer.com

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

Running Time 127 minutes

Written by Mitchell Kapner, David Lindsay-Abaire and L. Frank Baum (novel)

Directed by Sam Raimi

Starring James Franco, Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz

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topics: movi

What Rand Paul Misses

By Andrew C. McCarthy http://www.nationalreview.com March 9, 2013 2:00 A.M . . It was Wednesday, shortly before Senator Rand Paul’s bravura 13-hour filibuster, the Jimmy Stewart star turn in Paul’s crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of his own making: the killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces — a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly zero times in the 20 years since jihadists commenced hostilities by bombing the World Trade Center. At a hearing of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Ted Cruz was grilling Attorney General Eric Holder. Cruz seemed beside himself — in the theatrical spirit of the day — over Holder’s refusal to concede that the imaginary use of lethal force conjured up by Paul would be, under any and all circumstances, unconstitutional. The attorney general preferred the fuzzier term “inappropriate” — at least until Senator Cruz finally browbeat him into saying that by “inappropriate” he meant “unconstitutional.” Fuzzy was better. To be sure, Cruz is an accomplished constitutional scholar and a favorite of mine, and I can say neither of those things about the attorney general. Yet my sympathies were with Holder. I found myself wishing he’d stood by his equivocal guns. I need to be careful here. To cross Paul admirers can mean being cast into the neocon darkness, along with all those other cogs in the military-industrial complex who dream of a global American empire — and that’s even when the offense is not compounded by suggesting that Eric Holder might have been right about something. So let me say outright: I am against using our armed forces to kill our citizens in our homeland. That puts me in the same camp as about 99.9 percent of Americans. In part, that owes to our natural, patriotic predilection. But there’s another part of the explanation — just as important, but less well noticed: After 20 years, we understand the particular conflict we are in. We can confidently say that, in the war authorized by Congress a dozen years ago, we do not need to use lethal military force inside our country. You see, there is a right way to do what Senator Paul says he wants to do, a way that does not involve messing around with the Constitution in a manner we will come to regret. Contrary to Senator Paul’s assertions, and those of senators Cruz and Mike Lee, who lent their voices and scholarly heft to Paul’s filibuster, the Constitution does not prohibit the use of lethal force in the United States against American citizens who collude with the enemy. American history and jurisprudence teach that American citizens who join the enemy may be treated as the enemy: captured without warrant, detained indefinitely without trial, interrogated without counsel, accused of war crimes without grand-jury proceedings, tried by military commission without the protections of civilian due process, and executed promptly after conviction. That is because these measures are permissible under the laws of war, and the Constitution accommodates the laws of war — they are the rule of law when Congress has authorized warfare. Under the laws of war, enemy combatants may be subjected to lethal force — that’s usually the idea. It makes no sense to conclude that the Constitution abides all the aforementioned departures from peacetime due process but prohibits the killing of American enemy combatants . . . particularly when the proponents of this novel claim are quick to concede that the government is free to use lethal force against American enemy combatants once they leave our territory. The Constitution enables the government to marshal all the might necessary, under any conceivable circumstances, to quell threats to the United States. The Framers, with a humility that contrasts sharply with our certitude, understood that some threats could be existential in nature. While the senators busied themselves during the Paul filibuster with Alice in Wonderland and “Stand with Rand” tweets, it might have been worthwhile for someone to read Hamilton’s trenchant observation (from Federalist 23) that it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them. The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite; and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed. Heedlessly, Senator Paul and his supporters figure they have a handle on the infinite. We can safely assume, they tell us, that the Constitution bars attacks in the U.S. on Americans who — if you can follow this — appear to be non-combatants, even if they may be working with the enemy, as long as they are not engaged in “imminent” violence. Really? Let’s imagine something that, unlike Senator Paul’s speculations, is actually foreseeable — a scenario based on the way our enemies function, as remote from the Washington debate as that may be. Let’s suppose we have an American scholar of Islam fulfilling the role of the Blind Sheikh — i.e., a jurist schooled in sharia with sufficient academic depth to be qualified to issue fatwas approving terrorist attacks. Ostensibly, our American sheikh might be sitting passively in a mosque, a café, or an apartment. He certainly doesn’t look like an enemy combatant — especially if, as was the case with the Blind Sheikh, various maladies render him incapable of building a bomb, carrying out an assassination, or doing most things of use to a jihadist cell. Yet in the enemy’s doctrine, attacks cannot happen until he green-lights them. Senator Paul says he’s fine with lethal force against imminent threats. So, when does our sheikh get imminent? When the phone rings? When some other innocent-looking young man comes into the café, sits down at his table, and starts whispering in his ear? Now, after 20 years, it is probably safe to say there is no need to have our armed forces on alert for this contingency. If the executive branch has enough intel to know who and where this sheikh is, the FBI can arrest him, just as the FBI arrested José Padilla as he disembarked from a plane in Chicago in 2002 — every bit the enemy combatant, though not yet acting on his mass-murder plot. That is how war power has always worked under the Constitution: Having the technical law-of-war justification to kill José Padilla does not require you to kill him. You do what is sensible under the circumstances. In the ongoing conflict, the enemy does not have fortifications inside our territory that would enable its operatives to keep the police at bay. As long as we catch them in time, our enemies can be safely taken into custody. And if we catch them on the precipice of deadly action, ordinary law-enforcement principles allow for the use of lethal force to stop them. But that may not always be the case. We could have enemies with much greater capabilities, enemies including traitorous Americans. The fact that we do not appear to need lethal military force in the homeland in this conflict does not mean we will never need it. So leave the Constitution alone. The Constitution does not tell us what should or must be done in a particular situation. It tells us the outer limits of what is legitimate in all threat situations. To shackle our power to meet a threat, as Hamilton explained, is to put us in peril. The goal, according to Senator Paul, is to shackle the president. That is done by trimming his sails in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), not by trimming his constitutional power. Senator Paul has the controversy he sought because the Obama administration arrogantly claimed nigh-limitless power to kill anyone, anywhere, at the president’s whim. There is no reason to believe the president actually intends to abuse such power — he has not done so to this point and, as National Review’s Editors point out, “the day an administration starts killing Americans with drones at cafés — to borrow one of Rand Paul’s hypotheticals — is the day impeachment proceedings begin.” So, assuming the administration is simply trying to protect the president’s institutional turf, it has made the error of conflating the theoretically limitless power the Constitution could potentially vest in the president if a threat were dire enough with the finite authorization Congress has actually given the president for the use of force in this conflict. Senators Paul and Cruz have suggested that the constitutional claim they’ve posited — viz., presidents are not empowered to kill Americans on American soil absent an imminent threat of violence — is “easy,” “clear,” and “obvious.” I respectfully disagree. It is none of those things. What is easy, clear, and obvious is that if we do not need certain troublesome authorities to fight a war successfully, Congress can withhold them. Why does it make a difference whether this curtailment comes from the AUMF rather than the Constitution? Because, absent a sudden-attack situation, the Constitution makes Congress the master of what force is lawfully authorized, while our tradition holds that the courts are masters of what the Constitution means. Since 2004, courts have made themselves a part of the national-security equation to an unprecedented degree. When challenged to construe constitutional doctrines, they seek to impose logic. Senator Paul’s proposal of a Constitution-based no-lethal-force exception to the principle that an American who joins the enemy may be treated like the enemy is not logical. To iron out the inconsistencies, the courts may well conclude that if Americans are not to be treated as enemy combatants for purposes of lethal force, they should not be treated as enemy combatants for purposes of capture, detention, interrogation, and military war-crimes trials. Furthermore, if they follow the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s 2008Boumediene decision, courts may well conclude that any core constitutional protections extended to American citizens must also be extended to alien enemy combatants. That would be the end of the law-of-war approach to counterterrorism. Is that Senator Paul’s objective? I do not know. Many of his libertarian supporters would welcome it. Most Americans would disagree, recognizing that the war paradigm has been instrumental in preventing a reprise of 9/11. I do know this: If all the senator really has in mind is some curtailment of presidential overreach, the right way to do that is to limit the AUMF. If his ambition is greater, if he believes the country would be better off ending the war paradigm and returning to peacetime due process, the forthright way to do that is to repeal the AUMF. That would be a terrible mistake, but one we could withstand, however painfully. What we might not be able to withstand is the shackling of constitutional powers we may someday need to sustain the United States. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books. Permalink

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