Fearless Leader! Volokh argues that Krugman has gone over the edge in an Web column comparing George W Bush to Ferdinand Marcos and charging him with "creating a cult of personality" based on "mass arrests, and ... Big-Brotherish schemes of public surveillance."

 
Moon's Men: Leftie economist Max Sawicky caught a WaPo snippet on a new round of Administration appointees:

David L. Caprara, a Bush I Housing and Urban Development Department official and Virginia state official and more recently head of the American Family Coalition, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon-affiliated group, was named director of VISTA.

(The original press release may be found here.)

Sun Myung Moon has maintained extensive contacts within both Bush administrations, but the Moonies' involvement has been kept largely quiet, despite the Unification Church's ownership of such outlets as the Washington Times. Caprara, a successful political operative, is a longtime Unification Church member who has written glowing encomiums for the "Heavenly Father."

It goes without saying that the beliefs of the Moonies -- which include, amongst other things, the ideas that Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah returned to Earth, one cannot enter heaven without being married by Moon (to the point that Moon actually appointed a wife and held a marriage ceremony for Christ), and that Moon's late son is the master of the entire spirit world, including Jesus and all angels -- are not particularly congenial to Christians.

An example of Moon's beliefs are found in the "Tradition Book," a kind of BCP for the Moonies. Its teachings on abortion are markedly opposed to those of the White House's evangelical allies:

[W]e do not view abortion as a sin, as it relates not to a violation of the spirit self but the physical life. ... If certain tests (e.g., amniocentesis or chorionic samples) confirm that the unborn child has irreversible deformities that would seriously inhibit life (i.e., spina bifida, Down's syndrome, etc.) it is appropriate to abort .... Abortion is appropriate if the child was conceived through rape, incest, or any circumstance involving a break in the spiritual order.

There have been charges by former Unification Church members that Moonies have been ordered by church leaders to have abortions for transgressions causing "break[s] in the spiritual order," such as having children without permission.

The Moonies are dedicated to the idea of a Unified, not Christian, America; a 1993 speech by Moon warned that "America had better realize the real meaning and value of the Unification Church," and the Unification Church works through literally thousands of organizations and corporations throughout the world to spread its beliefs.

Arguably, a Moonie in charge of VISTA is in a position to steer thousands of workers into Unification organizations, to the detriment of secular and Christian nonprofits. This is something unlikely to go unnoticed by evangelicals already unsure of the direction of Bush's "faith-based alliances" plan.

 
Protection, rejection, and infection: LeanLeft checks out Kristof's NYT column on an alleged White House plot against condom use. (Yes, this post is a reworking of my comments there. *shrug*) LL zeroes in on faulty information, disseminated usually by religious organizations, "that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron."

This claim is frequently made, and is based on tests done in the 1980s on surgical gloves, which were less stringent than tests done on condoms. (Today, surgical gloves are tested to the same, or almost the same, standards.) CDC tests have proven that HIV and other STDs do not pass through condoms; longitudinal studies have shown that, for example, in actively-sexual couples in which one partner is HIV-positive, and the other HIV-negative, correct and consistent condom use reduces the possibility of infection to effectively zero, while inconsistent use increases the probability dramatically.

In this matter, ideology should never trump reality. Abstinence is a wonderful thing (though I doubt I'm the only conservative who adds a silent "for others" at the end of that statement), but it's not a panacea, and is unlikely to ever be -- history has never shown otherwise. Given this, it's simply purblind to discourage condom use.

However, is it true that "[t]he Bush administration position basically condemns people to death by H.I.V./AIDS"? Is American failure to send condoms overseas responsible for the staggering rate of HIV infection in Africa? Certainly not, and that kind of irresponsible exaggeration is no better than the wild charges of a Noam Chomsky or Ann Coulter.

For example, adoption of condoms in Africa is slow, due to social pressure (some men consider using them an affront to their masculinity, while women and other men avoid them because of their association with prostitution), religious opposition (from Muslim, Christian, and animist quarters), and an imperfect understanding of what HIV and AIDS are and how HIV is transmitted. It's telling that, according to USAID, "Botswana ... has the highest per capita condom availability in Africa, yet adult HIV prevalence is still increasing." Obviously, condoms alone aren't a solution; USAID suggests a three-pronged attack, combining abstinence, monogamy, and condom use.

I sympathize with those who fear that we're heading down a road of ill-considered and ill-fated policies. But there's no excuse for exaggeration and scaremongering in public policy debates.

The gang that couldn't shoot straight might be our own military, according to an article sent over by the Daily Review on the decline of marksmanship in the modern Armed Forces. The article buttresses tDR's thesis that conscription wouldn't reduce the quality of the American military. (Other arguments in the article should not be construed as those of tDR. At least, I'm pretty sure they shouldn't.)

Interesting article, though the gratutious dig at "kinder, gentler co-ed recruits" grates. The M-16, in its original incarnation as the AR-15 Armalite, was adopted in part because it was a lighter weapon with a lower recoil -- but it was developed in 1956, long before a "co-ed" military was considered; the Air Force found that the assault rifle was the ideal size for Asian airbase guards in the Far East.

 
"God's Machine": After following a long series of questionable (and, in the case of TELRIC pricing, inexplicable) decisions by the FCC, it's encouraging to see some signs of progress amongst the Commission's leadership. Since the FCC has been exploring, primarily at the behest of Disney, methods of copy-protecting broadcast signals, Powell's statement is a welcome sign that the Commission is keeping consumer interests in mind.

 
What's that again? The White House does the best "glass is half-full" spin it can:

In a clear sign that the economy is stalling, the Labor Department reported today that the nation's payrolls fell for a second straight month in December. ... Employers shed 101,000 jobs outside the farming sector in December, the department said, defying Wall Street's expectations for modest job growth. And the number of jobs lost in November was revised upward to 88,000, from a previously reported decline of 40,000.

Speaking to members of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington just hours after the employment report was released, Vice President Dick Cheney conceded that while "this economy is growing, it could be growing faster."

The BLS report is here. Unemployment ticked up a bit, and discouraged workers down, but neither change is significant.

Named and shamed: Kids today! When nothing else works, maybe this will.

 
The mind of a maniac: David Ignatius squeezes inside the brain of an al-Qaeda operative, based on conversations with government contacts. Some interesting tidbits, assuming Ignatius' info is good: the U.S., or its allies, may have enough information on al-Qaeda communications channels to mount disinformation campaigns; al-Qaeda is still planning large-scale attacks against the U.S. as well as the more remote incidents in places like Bali; and bin Laden is alive.

Pickering fences: Sometimes a minor battle can change the face of a major war. The Democrats and the White House have chosen as their dueling ground the Administration's re-nomination of appellate candidate Charles Pickering, whose last stab at the circuit was parried by Democratic senators. Howard Kurtz calls the imbroglio "a warm-up for the battle that everyone expects, over the next Supreme Court vacancy." Byron York at NRO details the cross burning case that's been giving the judge heartburn, finding Pickering's actions "a real-world solution to the kind of real-world problem that the justice system deals with every day." On the other side of the divide, Joe Conason does some in-depth oppo, finding a memo from the notorious State Sovereignty Commission -- though it says more about Pickering's anti-union stance than his feelings on race relations.

Fetch that luggage, elect that President: Following up on our previous post regarding the need for Republicans to reassess their attitude towards the black electorate, California GOP Secretary Shannon Reeves, who already publicly attacked would-be party chair Bill Back, has aired his grievances in an e-mail to GOP party board members that praised the President for "set[ting] the example" of inclusion and diversity, while condemning the party for not living up to its own standards. One particularly egregious example: when Reeves travelled to Philadelphia as a credentialed delegate for the California GOP, "no less than six times did white delegates dismissively tell [him to] fetch them a taxi or carry their luggage."

"I'm Trent -- fly me!" Perhaps displaced and disgraced Senator Trent Lott can help arrange porters and taxi services from LaGuardia for the next convention -- Lott has pulled rank on Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to take control of the Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation, an issue of little import to Mississippi, but of great interest to some of his campaign contributors, including ABXPAC ($2,500), APAPAC ($5,000), AAPAC ($4,500), ASTAPAC ($500), FEDEXPAC ($5,000), LMEPAC ($8,000), BoeingPAC ($5,000), UAPAC ($1,000), and UPSPAC ($17,000), plus the ever-popular bundled contributions from affiliated individuals. Lott, well aware that he can't depend on the broad-based contributions he got as top dog in the Senate, has evidently decided that his best bet for political survival is stabling a small number of deep pockets whose well-being directly depends on fairly esoteric government regulations.

 
The Prince and the Policeman: Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi arrived in Moscow for a summit with Putin, where North Korea and the disputed northern islands are on the table ... The Moscow Times reports on the newest hobby of the bored oligarchs: setting up elaborate pranks, such as pretending to be policemen who offer bribes or, in a more sinister vein, SWAT teams who arrest and detain random passers-by ... The Japan Times notes that the Japanese government has identified a Korean spy, Kim Se Ho, as the linchpin of the DPRK's abduction of Japanese nationals ... Chinese house organ People's Daily announces its government's concern over the DPRK's pullout of the NPT, and says that America knows force is not an option ... Egyptian Al Ahram describes a roundup of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest Islamist groups who now threatens Egypt's foreign policy as well as domestic security ... Ha'aretz reports on how Sharon's press conference last night turned into a political diatribe, prompting the Central Elections Committee to yank him off the air (Jerusalem Post coverage here) ... The Russian Foreign Ministry denies reports that Moscow has offered Saddam a chance at exile ... Turkish Prime Minister Gul arrived in Tehran to discuss the coming war, while Bill Safire warns that diplomatic games by regional players threaten the freedoms of a post-Saddam Iraq.

 
Boxes and Briefs: Eugene Volokh lists the high points of the Hamdi decision here.

 
Babble On! Referring to today's post on reintroducing conscription, The Daily Review says,

You write that a draft would have a 'predictably dismal effect ... on the quality of our military.' You mean, like the military that won World War 2?

Babbler: Touche! In my defense, that same military conducted studies showing that only 10-20% of conscripted soldiers, when faced with the enemy, even fired their rifles. As David Grossman documented in his work On Killing, the development of a professionalized military and its rituals have created a warrior caste known for near-100% engagement with the enemy. So I do think that there's a value in the professionalization (and ritualization) of the military in that sense.

There's also the point that the technology of the military has changed radically from World War II. Even the lowliest infantry grunt is surrounded with technology that requires a great deal of training and experience in use, from anti-tank weapons to GPS locators to UAV drones -- and, with the advent of Force XXI initiatives like Land Warrior, soldiering will become even more of an esoteric skillset. I wouldn't go so far as to say that a conscript army couldn't make use of these technologies, but I do find a sigificant benefit in having a set of professionals for whom training in and with that equipment under battlefield conditions is an everyday job.

Nonetheless, perhaps those "dismal effects" aren't so "predictable" after all. Thanks for the note!

-tWB

The Daily Review replies (in part):

Several of my friends who have spent time in the military have remarked that in their experience few things more complicated than a screwdriver actually work in the heat of battle, leading me to suspect that the technology of our modern armed forces is not too formidable an intellectual task for the average conscript to master. In any case, a large number of jobs in the military do not require advanced degrees (again, I know this from discussing the personal experiences of those in the military). While the technology of the U.S. armed forces has changed radically since WW2, so has the education of the average American of conscription age. Besides, it is amazing what people can learn when they have no choice.

Babble On! Roberta asks,

I'd like a reference for the "white are disproportionately represented in front-line troops" statement in your "Is it drafty" post today. Who says so? (I believe you didn't make it up, I'd just like to find out more about that.)

Babbler:I appreciate you keeping me honest -- I should have included a cite in the original post. Mea culpa!

The numbers come from the DoD's 2000 population representation survey, published for the Senate Committee on Armed Forces. The figures below refer to occupational distribution within racial categories.

For the Army and Marines, the two branches where individuals are most likely to see infantry combat, 30.51% and 24.66% (respectively) of whites are in the infantry and gun crew occupations, compared to 15.31% and 11.91% of blacks. By the same token, more blacks by percentage are in medical, administrative, craft and logistical occupations. Hispanics and other minorities are also less likely to serve in infantry and gun crew positions.

Slightly more blacks by percentage are found in the Naval "infantry, seamanship and gun crew" category, but how you interpret that depends on whether you consider all seamen to be front-line troops. In the Air Force, Hispanics are slightly more inclined than other racial groups to be in the infantry and gun crew category, but I don't know enough about Air Force internal workings to say why that should be, or what particular occupations are lumped in under that rubric.

Thanks again,

-tWB

 
Is it drafty in here? As reported last week, Reps. Conyers and Rangel are considering introducing legislation to reinstate the draft, on the basis "that people of color ... are disproportionately killed and injured while serving as ground troops on the front line." Leaving aside the predictably dismal effect this would have on the quality of our military, what the honorable Representatives didn't mention (or don't realize) is that, relative to whites, racial minorities in the Armed Forces are more likely to serve in logistical, medical, and professional capacities than in front-line combat. So, what's the problem again?

 
Roll out the bloggers, again: If I didn't know better, I'd suspect I had an evil twin in the form of Rohan & Trevalyan, flip sides of the same blogging coin. The best way to describe him would be a mescaline-fueled P.J. O'Rourke: he does for Hamas what P.J. did for the Sandinistas. Be sure to check him out, though be aware that the site is rather, um, offensive.

Port this: On a completely unrelated, and unusually personal, note -- Safari is excellent, a revelation after having used by IE and Navigator for MacOS X. Like its cousin OmniWeb, it's a powerful example of the Cocoa (nee NeXTStep) programming environment. It does have a strange habit of randomly closing blogger.com pages, though. In terms of joy, I'd rank it somewhere just below tawny ports, and just above that Asparation hybrid they're selling at grocery stores these days. Says something about my sad, empty life, doesn't it?

"We declare jihad -- on your taste buds!" Proof that it doesn't take Southern Baptists or the Anglican Church to crassly commercialize a religion: Mecca-Cola.

 
Undomesticated terror: Matthew Hale, leader of white-supremacist cult World Church of the Creator, has been arrested by federal agents on charges of attempting to arrange an execution of the judge presiding over a trademark dispute involving his group (previous post on this ruling is here).

Back in the box: The Fourth Circuit court opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld dropped today (full text), reversing the district court's decision and holding that the government retains broad powers over American citizens captured in foreign combat zones. Hamdi will remain in the Naval brig in Norfolk, VA, pending further action by the government.

I've only had opportunity to skim the opinion, but it provides sweeping support to the government, especially inasmuch as it finds the Mobb Declaration "sufficient to confirm that Hamdi's detention conforms with a legitimate exercise of [Presidential] war powers" and that Pub. Law 107-40 (the Congressional authorization of force) was a de facto declaration of war for purposes of the case. Unsurprisingly, there's a heavy reliance upon Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 25 (1942), which will further strengthen government briefs that depend upon that rather singular case.

 
Keep them bloggies rolling: The Goblin Queen (resident of the Olympic stadium formerly known as Hell's Kitchen) has two things she doesn't like about fellow liberals and one thing she likes about first dates ... David Horowitz discusses CAIR attacks on his online magazine (all related to the Trifokovic article mentioned below -- David, I'm not going to say I told you so!) ... WorldWideRant takes stock of the Beeb's "Talking Point" and asks, "What the heck is 'the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour' supposed to mean?" ... Howard Bashman notes a Federal Circuit decision that requires a graduate degree in molecular biology, and a curious equitable tolling decision from the Fourth Circuit evidently decided on the proposition that a filing delayed is justice denied ... Scoobie Davis calls Michael Savage's book "invective word salad" and promises an in-depth look at Savage Nation in a new watchblog, similar to his Ann Coulter blog.

 
Yankees going home? With some neoconservatives advocating troop withdrawal from South Korea, putative anti-Americanism in the ROK has become a hot-button issue. The New York Times says American troops feel as threatened by the streets behind them as the border in front of them; the conservative Chosun Ilbo (the WSJ of the Korean peninsula) notes that anti-American demonstrations could lower the nation's credit rating, but cited conciliatory words from Donald Rumsfeld on the issue. The Korea Times covers a conference of Korean media elites warning of an "affective, emotional and passive dislike of America" fed by an "irresponsible" media, while the Donga Ilbo suggests that the recent candlelight vigils held in response to the accidental deaths of two Korean children were manipulations of public sentiment by anti-American interests.

 
Elvis Priestly and Che-sus Christ: Memphis is one of those towns that stays with you over the state line and all the way down the highway home: Beale Street blues, vinegary ribs with a side of honey-sweet tamales, and rain coming down like the hot rivers of hell. Not to mention the Elvis impersonator I ran into in a barbecue joint across the street from Graceland, the slightly-paunchy fiftysomething with the purple suit, British accent, and priest's collar. Turns out that the collar was come by honest-like.

There's a great irony in the Anglican church ("Cake, or death!") coming down hard on an Elvis-impersonating priest, since this is the same church whose Bishops thought dressing Jesus like Che Guevara made for a bang-up advertising campaign. Nonetheless, should I find myself in Toronto, I might just duck into the Graceland Independent Anglican Church for a little bit of that hunka-hunka burnin' grace.

 
Blog o' the day: Straight from the Blogger.com index page, it's Tech Law Advisor (which, of course, should not be construed as provision of legal advice). TLA bills itself as a "blawg," or "law blog," which leads one to consider the advisability of coining a neologism from a neologism -- but TLA provides fodder for more constructive consideration as well.

Economists behaving oddly at J. Bradford DeLong's site, including proof that even corporations aren't rational actors, and a Lockean defense of bad manners. See it here.

 
Exit the Justice? Is Rhenquist giving the White House advance notice of an imminent retirement? Unlikely. First, Rehnquist has valid and pressing policy reasons to meet with the President -- his end-of-year report on the federal courts, to be released tomorrow, deals extensively with the need for judicial pay raises and the broken judicial confirmation system, both perennial topics for the Chief Justice. (The 1989 Ethics Reform Act barred judges from receiving honoraria and limited income from sources such as teaching and writing, but the promised pay increases to make up for the lost income never materialized. The bipartisan Feinstein-Biggert bill, which provided a 9.6% increase in judicial pay, died in committee in both the House and Senate, and it's likely that Rehnquist is searching for White House support to ensure that it doesn't get lost in the 108th Congress as well.) Second, Rehnquist has no real incentive to retire. He's in good health, wields enormous influence, and lives the dream of every judge -- that, as his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan put it, "each decree as statute rank / And never be reversed en banc."

Any Rehnquist retirement is likely to depend on the outcome of the 2004 elections;he may choose to follow in the footsteps of Oliver Ellsworth, the third Chief Justice, who gave his resignation to a lame-duck Adams following the election of Thomas Jefferson. (History buffs may recall, as conservative legal scholars assuredly do, that it was the spate of "midnight appointees" to the bench that resulted in Federalist domination of the court system, and the all-important decision in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).)

No retirements seem likely in the near future, though O'Connor still leads most lists of potentials. The swinging Justice, a former cowgirl known to indulge in whitewater sports with her clerks, is in excellent health, but the same can't be said of her husband, who has serious heart problems. All the other Justices are either relatively young or remain in good health, and few have any outside incentives to leave.

 
Divisive dividends: The President's fiscal-strategy package isn't due out until tomorrow, but everyone's heard the lede: the elimination of the individual tax on dividend earnings.

Leaving aside the predictable accusations of (upper) class warfare -- yes, the direct benefits are mostly limited to the top 10% of wage earners, and the most obvious value will accrue to the extremely rich dynasties who are sustained entirely by dividends, but that is an observation, not an indictment -- I have to wonder about some side-effects of this plan. We'll certainly hear more tomorrow and the coming days, from both the media and qualified economic observers, but here's some first-order questions I'd like to leave open in the meantime:

1. The tax elimination deals a heavy blow to the bond market.

The primary incentive is only to move money from bonds into stocks. Eliminating taxes on dividends has the effect of increasing the value of stocks vis a vis bonds. However, beyond that, it's not clear from where the White House expects capital to flow into the stock market.

The proposal will hurt cities, and increase state tax rates. The slumping economy has confronted cities with sudden and dramatic drops in revenue, a crisis that has prompted them to borrow where feasible to take up the slack. Since tax-free munis will have no real advantages over untaxed dividends, and other (taxable) bonds will be at a disadvantage, the cost of capital for governments will rise. Likely increases in state income taxes (and possibly the installation of income taxes in states like Texas) will take money out of taxpayers' pockets that otherwise would stay put.

2. Eliminating dividend taxes won't stimulate the new economy companies.

The elimination will make zero-dividend stocks less attractive. This is especially important because the fastest-growing stocks of the '90s, such as Microsoft, don't pay dividends. Dividend tax elimination won't do a thing to help those companies whose capital woes have crippled the economy.

Every penny spent paying dividends comes from future growth. Consider the plight of a company like Verizon, which pays over four billion dollars per year in investor dividends, four billion dollars that didn't go to capital purchases, expansion, or investment. Without some sort of countervailing support -- such as eliminating corporate taxation of dividends -- that's money that is simply lost to business investment, which has been the Achilles' heel of the failing economy.

3. Corporations, not individuals, should reap the benefit of dividend tax elimination.

Debt is tax-favored over dividend payments. Arguably, the proposal removes the tax from the wrong side of the equation: corporations still pay tax on dividends within income, but can deduct from income interest payments on debt. This makes taking on debt -- and exposing oneself to over-leveraging -- attractive to corporations, while dividend payments are simply a cost burden. Eliminating corporate dividend taxes would shift the playing field away from capital gains as a measure of stock value, since earnings not paid out as dividends would mean a higher tax burden.

Stock-option incentives are still attractive. Enron, WorldCom, GE, and other companies have shown us that executive stock options only divorce management's interests from those of their shareholders. If dividends are the major source of a stock's value, however, then stock options are virtually worthless, and direct stock payments would become standard executive compensation, encouraging business leaders to manage for the long term.

How many of these concerns are justified? Only the economists know. More, I'm sure, to come....

 
Junk Science: Did the Chinese discover America? Gavin Menzies says yes, and claims he has evidence to show that a Middle Kingdom admiral named Zheng He circumnavigated the world. Scholars and skeptics aren't buying it.

Gods and Senators: Hard-right columnist Deroy Murdock has his take on the racial history of both major parties here.

 
The next front line? The Red Army, rampant corruption, a Supreme Soviet and a ghostly martial anthem: the Soviet Union lives on in an obscure quasi-nation called Transnistria (or "The Dnestr Moldovan Republic" to its ethnically Slavic inhabitants), a country where statues of Lenin crowd the streets and anyone with ready cash can take away as many rifles, anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired missiles, and land mines as they can carry over the border. Small wonder Washington is strengthening diplomatic ties with democratic neighbor Moldova.

 
A republic and an empire: Michael Ignatieff, who knows a bit about the tyrannies of the world outside, offers praise and caution for an imperial America in the latest New York Times Magazine.

 
Whither Putin? The Moscow Times suggests that the Russian President's "cloak of professional deceptiveness is visibly beginning to wear thin" as pressure from his ever-failing military mounts. (However, it's wise to remember that Putin has an 83% approval rating amongst Russians -- a massive, albeit fragile, advantage.)

The MT also adds a new term to the business lexicon: the "industrial war," combining Chekist amorality and corporate dispassion into some truly nasty power plays. Perhaps Cold War Kremlinologists could find a new lease on life as financial analysts...

Globalization at work: Israeli citizens aren't the only ones who suffer from suicide bombings. The global dissemination of low-income workers results in people not only journeying into harm's way, but often limits their willingness to cooperate with public safety and medical personnel. Some are beginning to ask if the profits are worth the costs.

 
"Like magic fingers at a cheap motel": Ideo-spam site Media Whores Online, where denial of service replaces the service of dialogue, has returned from hiatus, the better to mail flood ... well, anyone with whom they disagree. Quick, duck!

The windmills are thataway: The perpetually-perspicacious Eugene Volokh (academic, legal scholar, Second Amendment expert) confronts the "classic mistakes of a certain form of conservative commentary."

"Or I'll turn this blog right around, do you hear me?" 18-year-old Ben Shapiro has garnered praise from Daniel Pipes (who I respect greatly) and Ann Coulter (who I ... well, never mind that). But a recent post of his might prompt some to reconsider their words. (A rather trenchant rebuttal to Shapiro is here.)

Shapiro's core argument -- that the actions of a depraved man were no more than the reflections of "the state of modern womanhood" -- is worse than incoherent: it is ungentlemanly. (I suppose that's the Old Southerner in me speaking.) But I do think that the argument should end there; he is evidently unwilling to offer an apology, and it is asking too much of most adolescents for them to take account of their actions. Spurious certitude is a curse of youth that seems a blessing -- at the time.

 
"And the Lamb punched the seventh chad": Reliably-bizarre CounterPunch has brought a new strain of paranoia to the new year: George W. Bush intends to, as Buckley so famously put it, immanentize the eschaton and "usur[p] the role usually ascribed to the Messiah."

Most writers would be a bit cautious or perhaps a bit more thoroughly sourced before accusing the President of attempting to confront the Antichrist at Megiddo, but Michael Ortiz Hill -- an author of books that suggest the future may be perceived in dreams -- is not dissuaded. Bush "is delusional and the shape of his delusion is specifically apocalyptic in belief and intent. ... '[H]e has gradually (and easily) come to see himself as an agent of God who has been called by him to 'restore the earth to God's control', a 'chosen vessel', so to speak, to bring in the Restoration of All Things.'"

CounterPunch's fact checkers are evidently still on holiday: Hill quotes Bush as saying, "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation." (The quote was actually attributed by Bob Woodward to an American intelligence operative in Afghanistan.) He charges Bush with adhering to an apocalyptic worldview given to him by shadowy Christian evangelicals, but fails to note that Bush has repudiated the admixture of the cities Dei and Mundi: As Bush said while governor of Texas, "Any time the church enters the realm of politics the church runs the real risk of losing its mission. ... Politics is a world of give and take, of polls, of human vision. The church is built on the absolute principles of the Word of God, not the word of man."

Hill gets bonus points for mentioning the chiliastic Montanists (whose unknowing spiritual descendants can be found in any charismatic church today) and noting that Revelation was considered one of the antilegomena, though he dances around the fact that Revelation was most disdained in heretical Antioch; doesn't describe why Revelation was on the disputed list (it was a question of authorship, not content); and fails to mention the other antilegomena (the Books of Jude, Hebrews, 2nd and 3rd John, 2nd Peter, James and Jude). Nonetheless, interesting historical dicta don't make an argument.

CounterPunch likes to brag that it "stay[s] beyond the pale." It seems that, by that measure, it's a success.

 
Asia in hot heavy water: The potential conflagration in North Korea is warming up the foreign policy hot stove league. Some views from around the fire:

Bill Safire wants Russia and China to "take the lead in straightening out North Korea" ... Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute suggests that America should at least consider "encourag[ing] South Korea and Japan to make their own decisions about going nuclear" in order to either cow the DPRK or create a "a nuclear balance of power in northeast Asia" ... James S. Robbins doesn't say how we should deal with North Korea, but explains why the Asian crisis provides a rationale for war against Iraq ... Buckley discusses why you can't starve the cold, even if it feeds a fever ... Paul Krugman uses a thumbnail sketch of game theory to argue that the Administration backed the DPRK into a corner ... A CounterPunch writer seems weirdly elated by North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship, crowing that "Not all whipping boys sit passively by and allow themselves to be thrashed without a fight" ... Ben Stein spins the conspiracy yarn that Iraq and the DPRK are in cahoots to head the U.S. off at the pass.

Birddogging the DMZ: Leftist activist Patrick Carkin provides context for America's continuing defense of the Korean line of demarcation. Readers may recall the 1976 "hatchet incident," in which two American officers engaged in a tree-trimming operation within what was then the Joint Security Area, a routine and well-established procedure, were hacked to death by North Korean soldiers. The American response was "Operation Paul Bunyan," a massive show of force that enlisted the aid of an infantry platoon, armed helicopters and B-52 overflights to advance, engage and remove the offending trees. Carkin mentions the hatchet incident and several others to support his contention that "the fighting has never stopped" between America and the DPRK.

 
Time to air out the Big Tent: There's every reason to hope that the mausoleum's-worth of skeletons falling out of the GOP's closet will force the party into a reassessment of its tangled history with Southern Dixiecrats. There's also every reason to fear that it will, instead, act like cold water on hot glass, cracking the party down the middle.

In 1960, Republicans were 20% of the black electorate. Today, it's closer to 1 in 20, and it's not entirely clear where that 5% is hiding. This has nothing to do with GOP policies -- polls show that around 1/3 of black voters hold political views consonant with American conservatism -- and everything to do with the conviction that the Big Tent has a "No Room" sign for blacks. This situation cannot continue; it will change, but whether the GOP can avoid a factional power struggle of the sort that ripped it apart in the 1960s depends on the moral courage of the coming generation of GOP leaders.

The news has been getting worse for the GOP: Trent Lott gave the "racist Republicans" angle legs, and so the media has been quick to dredge up heretofore ignored stories fitting that notion. (This is not any Democratic bias in the media at work: the bandwagon effect is a rising tide that swamps all boats.)

The Contra Costa Times published a story Saturday that Bill Back, a Bush ally running for the California GOP chair, sent out an e-mail newsletter in 1999 that included an article suggesting that "history might have taken a better turn" if the Union had lost the Civil War, and that "The real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction." (A Google cache of the article, which indulges in some highly speculative and questionable historical what-iffery, is here.) Back, according to the state party's Secretary, "resisted ... efforts to bring party activities to Oakland and reach out to African-Americans." His only statement on the matter (to date) was materially the same quasi-culpa attempted by Lott: apologizing "if someone was offended by it or hurt by it because it was never my intent to hurt or offend people." Gosh, he seems to be saying, Sorry if you're all thin-skinned and such about that slavery thing.

Some readers may remember the Reagan/Bush AAG for Civil Rights, William Bradford Reynolds, point man on the ill-fated Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). Reynolds once infamously called Clarence Thomas "the right kind of affirmative action working the right way." Whether Reynolds meant it as a backroom slur against the Supreme Court Justice, or if he meant something more innocuous -- that Thomas had gotten to his position by hard work and talent -- is impossible to say, but statements like his, Lott's, and Back's show that too many leaders of the GOP Just Don't Get It. There is a basic insensitivity in their words that cannot be solely ascribed to naive innocence; after all, is it that hard to say that the Confederacy was in the wrong, 138 years after Appomattox? If these Republicans think that blacks should put the manacles of slavery and chains of segregation behind them, can we not ask revanchist Dixiecrats to stop romanticizing an antiquated empire of enslavement and its backwoods Bonapartes?

President Bush has made some tentative steps towards repairing the fractured relationship between the black electorate and the GOP. He quickly learned from his campaign appearance at Bob Jones University (N.B.: a qualified defense of that school by Jay Nordlinger is here) that campaigning for Old South support only costs New South votes (and prompted in part the bitter departure of RNC veteran Faye Anderson). His speech to the NAACP was encouraging, if couched in the passive tense. And, of course, he has appointed a large number of highly qualified minorities -- blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, etc. -- to a wide variety of positions within his Administration, with nary a hint of tokenism. This is not a racist White House. Even given the battered relationship between the White House and outgoing Congressman J.C. Watts -- which was more about reapportionment than race -- the Administration has made critical if sporadic efforts to show voters that the GOP is a tent of many colors. But now the Administration, and responsible Republican officials in all positions, must confront head-on the Republican Party's problematic (or Faustian) relationship with Southern racists and segregationists. We can no longer whitewash the elephant.

At the beginning of the last election cycle, black public officials comprised in part 39 Congresspeople, 12 state executives, 156 state senators, 429 state representatives, 809 members of county governing councils, 451 mayors, 3,351 city councilmembers, 908 judges and magistrates, 67 police chiefs and sheriffs, and 1,863 school board officials. Only a scant handful were Republicans, although -- ceteris paribus and political strategies notwithstanding -- 2,700 of the roughly 9,000 total officials should have been from the GOP as measured by the political philosophies of the black electorate. It is politically unsound and ethically unwise to cripple tomorrow's conservatives to placate yesterday's segregationists.

The time of the Trent Lotts and the Bill Backs of the GOP is done. Now Republicans must display the courage they ask of others: to "rise up," as Lincoln implored the soldiers of the Union, "to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government."