Feeding at the trough

A Bloomberg report today is headlined, "Clinton Loaned Her Campaign $6.4 Million, Aide Says." The current iteration of the story begins:

Hillary Clinton has loaned her Democratic presidential bid $6.4 million since April 11, bringing her personal investment in her campaign this year to $11.4 million.

Clinton gave her campaign $5 million on April 11, $1 million on May 1 and $425,000 on May 5, spokesman Howard Wolfson said today. She loaned $5 million in January, and had $10.3 million in unpaid bills as of March 31.

Read it all here, though it isn't until the end of the story that the real punch line appears:

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, amassed a fortune of $109 million from 2000 through 2007, according to her campaign.

Think about that for a moment.

When the Clintons moved to the White House, they did not even own a home. The joke was that they'd always lived in public housing. Granted, it was a governor's mansion, but they were a couple of "modest means" (as the Washington Post phrased it in this report last year). The Clinton presidency was a disaster financially for the family; having not much money in the first place, they owed $11-12 million in legal fees when leaving office. The house which Mrs. Clinton used to establish New York residency was essentially a gift from supporters; they had no money to even make a down payment.

Since leaving office, the Clintons have become quite wealthy, reporting taxable earnings of some $109 million. Mrs. Clinton is a United States Senator. President Clinton gives speeches.

Years ago, one might demonstrate just how corrupt the government of Mexico was by asking how a man of very modest means could be elected President, and the leave office six years later worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Not pesos, but dollars.

Things have certainly changed since the year before I was born, when Congress granted President Truman a pension of $25,000 a year, plus a small office and staff, because it was embarrassing that he was unable to reply to all of his mail.

Wanted: More Congressmen Like This

When reading the following in the February 2008 issue of First Things, I immediately thought of my 26-year-old State Representative who was then running in the Republican primary for the seat being vacated by Congressman Ray LaHood -- a seat previously held by the likes of Bob Michel and Everett Dirkson. This was the kind of thing any Congressman needed to read, especially one who could be at the beginning of his service, even more especially from a state in which both parties thrive on corruption.

So at his victory party on Primary Night -- young Aaron Schock received nearly 3/4ths of the votes --I asked him if he'd knew about First Things and George Weigel's article on Henry Hyde. No, he said, but Henry Hyde was one of his heroes and he'd like to read it. I saw him at another event a week or so later and handed him a copy, and I do hope that he's read it. And now that it's available on the World Wide Web for all to see, I commend it to you. The original is here and it's not so much about a good conservative, but about a politician who knew the purpose of the United States Congress. You might want to send it to your Congrescritter!

Henry Hyde (1924-2007)

by George Weigel

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In September 1984, I had a sabbatical year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. One day—while I was having lunch with a Seattle congressman, Joel Pritchard, then in the midst of a bout of chemotherapy—a portly gentleman came up to our table to ask Joel how he was feeling. Congressman Pritchard introduced me to Congressman Henry Hyde, who politely asked what I was doing in town. I explained that I was exploring Catholic thought on war and peace at the Wilson Center. Hyde smiled and went off to his own lunch.

Fifteen minutes later, he came back and asked me, “Have you ever written anything on church and state?” I replied that I had and would be happy to send him some things, which I did. As it turned out, Hyde had been asked to give a lecture at the Notre Dame Law School in response to the “I’m personally opposed, but . . .” abortion politics of Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro. (Note to younger readers: Cuomo was a three-term governor of New York; Ferraro was the vice-presidential candidate on a ticket that carried one state and the District of Columbia.) So I pitched in with the drafting of the speech, which was intended both as a rebuttal to Cuomoism and as a positive statement of how Catholic understandings of the dignity of the human person should engage the public square—a phrase then just coming into the national vocabulary.

From such an accidental beginning came one of the great friendships of my life and a twenty-year collaboration that would teach me a lot about how American politics really works.

Henry Hyde, who died on November 29, 2007, was, without exaggeration, a singularity. As Clement Attlee once said of Winston Churchill, Henry’s personality resembled a layer cake. There was the Hyde who reveled in the contact sport that is Illinois politics and who regaled friends with Mr. Dooley-like stories of campaign shenanigans and naughtiness (on both sides of the partisan divide). And there was the Hyde who was a close student of history, one of the most avid readers in the House of Representatives.

There was the Hyde who was the undisputed legislative leader of the American pro-life movement, the man who almost single-handedly kept the federal treasury out of the abortion business. And there was the Hyde who defied some conservative orthodoxies by arguing that it was nonsensical to claim that the Second Amendment created a constitutional right for eighteen-year-olds to own AK-47s and other assault weapons.

There was the Hyde whom Cokie Roberts (no conservative) once described to me as “the smartest man in Congress.” And there was the Hyde who was one of the best joke-tellers of all time.

There was Hyde, the ambitious politician. And there was the Hyde who passed up what would turn out, later, to be a chance to become Speaker of the House, because he had given his word to minority leader Bob Michel to vote for Michel’s candidate for whip.

There was the Hyde who was a master of rhetorical cut and thrust, the greatest extemporaneous debater in recent congressional history. And there was the Hyde whom the likes of Nancy Pelosi liked, respected, and perhaps even came to love.

One indelible memory that captures Henry Hyde in full involved Thanksgiving 1986. Henry’s prostate was giving him grief, so he spent the holiday in Georgetown University Hospital. When I went to visit him on Thanksgiving Day, I found him sitting up in bed, tubes running in and out of him, smoking a six-inch-long cigar, watching TV as his beloved Bears played the Lions—and reading a massive tome on William Wilberforce, the British parliamentary scourge of the slave trade. I asked Henry whether he’d had a lot of visitors. He replied that a guy who was interested in running for his seat had come in and expressed grave concern. Said Henry, in a growling whisper, “I told him, ‘The last words you’ll ever hear me say are gonna be, ‘Get your foot off the oxygen hose.’”

He loved the U.S. House of Representatives, and, while he made important contributions to foreign policy as one who married a profound concern for international human rights to a principled anticommunism, I think Henry most enjoyed chairing the Judiciary Committee after the Republicans took control of the House in January 1995. His remarks during the committee’s first meeting under his chairmanship are worth remembering:

In our American system, justice is not an abstraction. Like all the virtues, justice is a moral habit; we become a just society by acting justly. The duty to “promote justice,” which we lay upon ourselves when we pledge to defend the Constitution, is a duty we exercise through the instrument of the law. [For] the “rule of law” distinguishes civilized societies from barbarism.

That simple phrase—“the rule of law”—should lift our hearts. To be sure, it has little of the evocative power of Lincoln’s call to rebuild a national community with “malice toward none” and “charity for all”; to celebrate the “rule of law” may stir our souls less than MacArthur’s moving call to “Duty, Honor, Country.” But if that phrase lacks the eloquence of Lincoln and MacArthur, it nonetheless calls us to a noble way of life.

Legislators—makers of laws in a democratic republic—are involved in a vital task. Ours is not just a job; public service in the Congress is not just a career. What we do here we ought to do as a matter of vocation: as a matter of giving flesh and blood to our convictions about justice—our moral duty to give everyone his due. I have been in public life long enough to know that not every moment in politics is filled with nobility. But I have also been in public life long enough to know that those who surrender to cynicism and deny any nobility to the making of the laws end up doing grave damage to the rule of law—and to justice. If we don’t believe that what we are doing here can rise above the brokering of raw interests—if we do not believe that politics and the making of the law can contribute to the ennobling of American democracy—then we have no moral claim to a seat in the Congress of the United States.

It was a touching confession of political faith, and Henry’s conclusion was met with applause and cheers. Even such sworn partisan foes as the ranking minority member, John Conyers, and the ultra-pro-choice Patricia Schroeder were moved and leaned across to shake the new chairman’s hand. (Chuck Schumer, if memory serves, continued to eat a jelly doughnut while chatting on the dais with his friend Howard Berman of California.)

In less than four years’ time, of course, chairing the Judiciary Committee got Henry embroiled in the impeachment inquiry against President Clinton. Hyde was a model of fairness throughout, as even a Clinton defender like Barney Frank acknowledged. His own falls from grace, decades in the past, were dredged up by reporters, aided and abetted (I am convinced) by unscrupulous Clintonistas, all of whom somehow imagined that the impeachment inquiry was about extracurricular sex. Henry was hurt, badly, and even talked of resigning. I remember telling him that no two people I had ever met had been more married than he and Jeanne (who had died in 1992), and that he owed it both to her forgiveness and his duty to press ahead. Which he did, in the conviction that President Clinton had put the Congress and the country in an impossible position. How could the nation have as its highest law-enforcement official a man guilty of a crime—­perjury—for which more than a hundred other men and women were serving time in federal prisons?

When the House managers solemnly carried the Articles of Impeachment across the Capitol to the Senate, Henry Hyde saw in Trent Lott’s eyes (as he told me later that night) that “we’re not going to make it; Trent won’t fight.” Rather than let the trial of the president descend into farce, Henry tried heroically, through the force of argument and rhetoric, to keep the country focused on the nobility of the rule of law, as he did in opening the Senate trial for the House managers:

Every senator in this chamber has taken an oath to do impartial justice under the Constitution. The president of the United States took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in his testimony before the grand jury, just as he had, on two occasions, sworn a solemn oath to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.”

The case before you, Senators, is about the taking of oaths: the president’s oaths, and your own oaths. That is why your judgment must rise above politics, above partisanship, above polling data. This case is a test of whether what the Founding Fathers described as “sacred honor” still has meaning in these United States: two hundred twenty-two years after those words—sacred honor—were inscribed in our national charter of freedom. . . .

In recent months, it has often been asked—it has too often been asked—so what? What is the harm done by this lying, by this perjury? The answer would have been clear to those who once pledged their sacred honor to the cause of liberty. The answer would have been clear to those who crafted the world’s most enduring constitution. And the answer should be clear to us, the heirs of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.

No greater harm can be done than breaking the covenant of trust between the president and the people; among the three branches of our government; and between the country and the world. For to break that covenant of trust is to dissolve the mortar that binds the foundation stones of our freedom into a secure and solid edifice. And to break the covenant of trust by violating one’s oath is to do grave damage to the rule of law among us.

The Senate acquitted the president, but students of American history will read Henry Hyde’s remarks during the impeachment inquiry and trial for decades after President Clinton’s memoir (with its bitter criticisms of Hyde) is pulped.

Late in the Reagan years, House Speaker Jim Wright (of all people) asked Henry to speak at a luncheon Wright was hosting for newly elected members of Congress. Henry graciously congratulated the neophyte solons, cracked a few jokes, and then got very serious. “You are basking in the glow of victory,” he told them, “and that is entirely understandable. But permit me to suggest, on the basis of long experience, that if you don’t know what you’re prepared to lose your seat for, you’re going to do a lot of damage up here. You have to know what you’re willing to lose everything for if you’re going to be the kind of member of Congress this country needs.” That was Henry Hyde. And even his most bitter enemies knew that he spoke the truth.

Once, addressing the National Right to Life Convention, Henry reminded the ground troops of the pro-life movement that they were not “playing to the gallery, but to the angels, and to Him who made the angels.” Last November 29, I imagined the angels giving him a rousing Chicago-style welcome. So, I expect, did today’s holy innocents, the unborn, whose cause he led for decades with wisdom, wit, and effect. It seems too much to ask that we’ll ever see his like again. How blessed we were, as a nation under God and under the rule of law, to have had his services for so long.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His most recent book is Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism (Doubleday).

This Is a Federal Crime?

This is the National Public Radio lead on the Marion Jones story:

Track star Marion Jones was sentenced Friday to six months in prison for lying about using steroids, and two months concurrently for her role in a check-fraud scheme. The sentencing judge said Jones' punishment should send a message to athletes who cheat with performance-enhancing drugs.

Here's the Bloomberg.com lead:

Marion Jones, the record-breaking sprinter who tearfully confessed she used steroids after years of public denial, was sentenced to six months in prison for lying in two federal grand jury investigations.

Jones, 32, of Austin, Texas, pleaded guilty in October to two counts of obstruction of justice in probes of steroid use in sports and a check cashing scheme allegedly involving fellow athlete Tim Montgomery. The judge assailed her for deceiving fans about using banned substances and rejected a defense bid to avoid prison.

And here's how CTV (Canada's largest private TV network) begins the story:

Former Olympian Marion Jones was sentenced to six months in jail Friday after admitting she lied to investigators when questioned about her use of steroids and a cheque-fraud scheme.

You may want to go back and read those leads or, for that matter, the full articles again, for there's something fishy there. Very fishy.

Mike Lopresti over at USA Today describes it pretty well, though he doesn't catch what is wrong about Jones' prosecution and sentence:

Steroids will not put a sport legend in the slammer. Nor will HGH. Confirmed cheaters are often defrocked of glory and honor and — even more painful — commercial endorsements. But that won't open the cell door. Performance enhancement is usually not a ticket to the big house.

But lying can be.

Read that again. Jones was not charged, prosecuted, convicted, or sentenced because she cheated. All those things happened because when investigators asked her if she cheated, she said no, she didn't. Yes, she lied. Yes, that is wrong; she shouldn't have done that. But is it a federal offense? Should it be a federal offense to declare your innocence to an investigator who has not placed you under an oath to tell the truth?

This is only the latest big story like this. Remember Scooter Libby, jailed for the same reason. Here is Slate's Christopher Hitchens' description of that case:

Mr. Libby was not charged with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Nobody was ever charged with breaking that law, designed to shield the names of covert agents. Indeed, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined that the law had not been broken in the first place.

The identity of the person who disclosed the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak—his name is Richard Armitage, incidentally—was known to those investigating the non-illegal leak before the full-dress inquiry began to grind its way through the system, incidentally imprisoning one reporter and consuming thousands of man hours of government time (and in time of war, at that).

In the other two "counts" in the case, both involving conversations with reporters (Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time), Judge Reggie Walton threw out the Miller count while the jury found for Libby on the Cooper count.

The call to Russert was not about Plame in any case; it was a complaint from the vice president's office about Chris Matthews, who was felt by some to have been overstressing the Jewish names associated with the removal of Saddam Hussein. Russert was called in his capacity as bureau chief; any chitchat about Wilson and Plame was secondary.

The call was made after Robert Novak had put his fateful column (generated by Richard Armitage) on the wire, and after he had mentioned Plame's identity to Karl Rove.

The Washington Post quotes the judge who sentenced Libby:

"My take on it," Walton said, is that the trial did not prove Libby knew that Plame worked in an undercover capacity when he disclosed her identity to several reporters. Still, the judge added, "anybody at that high-level position had a unique and special obligation before they said anything about anything associated with a national security agency [to] . . . make every conceivable effort" to verify their status before releasing information about them.

"While there is no evidence that Mr. Libby knew what the situation was, he surely did not take any efforts to find out," Walton said. "I think public officials need to know if they are going to step over the line, there are going to be consequences. . . . [What Libby did] causes people to think our government does not work for them."

Or think back to Martha Stewart's conviction -- the Feds questioned her about a suspicious stock sale, but ultimately there was nothing illegal about that sale.

Three examples of prominent people spending time in the federal slammer, not because crimes were committed, but because when federal cops started asking questions, they didn't give the right answers.

Jerry Pournelle near the end of today's Chaos Manor Mail reminds us of the real lesson here:

never talk to any bureaucrat on or off the record without paying not only a lot of attention to what you are saying, but in the context that this is an enemy who is seeking to advance his career by jailing you. Alas, that applies to the FBI Agent investigating a real crime: cooperation with them can lead to disaster. I wish that were not true.

There was a time when the police always assumed you were inaccurate, and the only time the perjury laws applied was when you were warned that you testified under penalty of perjury. You are not under penalty of perjury in a casual conversation with your friendly neighborhood government employee of any stripe.

Martha Stewart was jailed for denying that she did something that wasn't a crime had she done it. I could add many examples.

The judge in the Marion Jones case says he has imposed the maximum to "send a message." Think about the implications of being used as a horrible example to send a message.

It's enough to remind one of a Benjamin Franklin quip that Congressman Ron Paul used in a 2000 address:

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powel anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic if you can keep it," responded Franklin.

We're not keeping it well at all.

Gingrich: We're Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare

Personal moral failings (which rightly led to his fall from office) aside, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been one of very few men or women in American politics in the last generation who has consistently come up with, or popularized, good ideas that, if implemented, would lead to positive solutions to many of our most serious problems. Thoughtful, optimistic, and frequently right, Mr. Gingrich is one of those people I can listen to and I will have learned something interesting in the process.

This is an address he gave at a Jewish National Fund meeting last Nov 15 in Atlanta. (Hat tip to Dr. Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail.) You can also read it here or listen to the Podcast.

Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare

I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.

I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.

I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10th at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called Troublesome Young Men, which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness, as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.

Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for al Qaeda and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.

And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?

Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out-bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.

Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is al Qaeda. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" — it's very strong language — the answer is 75% yes, 75 to 16.

The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.

When asked whether or not al Qaeda is a threat, 89% of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at al Qaeda and the rise of Islamist terrorism.

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.

Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.

It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy — in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?

And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the number one threat in intelligence movies is the CIA?

I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, To Live and Die in L.A., which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.

Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either a Right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency? Go look at The Bourne Ultimatum. Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.

And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.

And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote Black Hawk Down, has enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of Black Hawk Down. It's a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave."

And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.

But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote Guests of the Ayatollah, which is the Iranian hostage of 1979, which he entitled [sic; subtitled], "The First Shots in Iran's War Against America." So in the Bowden worldview, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.

And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible.

And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq."

I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.

So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.' "

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red vs. blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.

And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."

I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and it's getting worse every year.

None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.

I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."

I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that.

Now what do we need?

We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.

Iran produces 60% of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40% of its gasoline. The entire 60% is produced at one huge refinery.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked, "What's your vision of the Cold War?" He said, "Four words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And 11 years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.

Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were thrilled to buy and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to blow up. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's our equipment blowing up."

In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."

We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an alliance with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We have every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape the world. It'll be a very big project. It's much closer to World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It will require real effort, real intensity and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.

We had better take this seriously because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.

I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation long before they have that power.

What Might Giuliani's Nomination Mean?

In the (current) December 2007 issue of First Things, Hadley Arkes offers a compelling essay on what the cost of nominating and electing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as President by the Republican Party would be. I won't pretend to know how American Whigs would have stood regarding today's "life issues." This was, after all, a party that failed to survive the slavery debate. But neither were the Whigs afraid to play the "personal morality card" at election time.

It is fair to be clear about my perspective as I introduce Prof. Arkes' essay. Just before going to bed on the eve of the 2004 election, I wrote the following on LutherLink's Table Talk on my decision on for whom I was going to vote. I began with some thoughts on the Democratic candidate's record regarding the war in Iraq, then continued:

[Sen. Kerry] is a Catholic who is able to make a difference in our culture of death, and not only does he choose not to do so, he tries to make support of that culture sound morally virtuous. Whether the ones to be killed are pre-born infants or the enemies of our nation, it doesn't seem to matter.

My phrasing of the above comments, plus others I've made on TABLE TALK the last couple of years, make plain that I am not enamored of President Bush, either. His expansion of federal power over that of state and local governments (plus schools), his administration's obsession for secrecy, and his unwillingness to exercise any control over federal spending (the massive expansion of Medicare entitlements when the program is already plunging into bankruptcy is merely the icing, granted, a thick gob of icing, on cakes of pork) had me gagging over his presidency from the beginning. The pretexts for war with Iraq -- WMD, if anyone cares to recall, was actually only one of them, and one for which there was no dispute except where to find them until our boys were already surrounding Iraq and poised to invade -- were the most obscene since the US invaded to start the Mexican War. Alas, unlike 1846-47 there were no Whigs 2 years ago to challenge the President and even NPR was as anti-war as Hearst's papers had been in 1898.

As an expatriate Californian resident in Illinois, it's pretty clear that "my" electoral votes will be cast for the Democrat. And until last week, I fully intended to vote for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian.

But in the morning, while I may hold my nose doing it, I'm going to vote for President Bush's re-election. With him in office the mass sacrifice of human embryos to blood-thirsty gods of "science" will be (at least for a time) averted and the world will know that the United States of America, for all her faults, will not be afraid to act boldly in her defense.

I vote pro-life. And with that, here's the beginning of Hadley Arkes' essay:

Abortion Politics 2008
by Hadley Arkes

For reasons quite plausible, even to people on the pro-life side, Rudolph Giuliani persists in standing well ahead of the pack of the Republican candidates for president. He has sounded the traditional Republican themes: preserving the Bush tax cuts, seeking free-market solutions to problems such as medical care, and standing firm on the war in Iraq.

But there is in his campaign a sobering truth that cannot be evaded: The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics. And that would be the case regardless of whether pro-lifers respond to his nomination by refusing to vote for Giuliani, forming a third party, or folding themselves into a coalition that succeeds in electing Giuliani.

I often meet, here in the East, conservatives of an old stripe: eager to vote for a Republican but repelled by what they have seen as a party in which the religious and the pro-lifers have a marked leverage. Are there enough of these voters to convert, say, New Jersey and Connecticut into Red States? There might be if the old-line conservatives see a massive defection from the party on the part of the pro-lifers. For that will be a sign that the party is becoming habitable again for people like themselves, who may come to define again its character.

What is engaged here is a truth about the nature of political parties that has gone remarkably unappreciated: Parties have the means of changing their own constituencies or their composition. By altering their appeals, they drive some groups out and bring others in. If a Republican party, reconstituted in this way, manages to win, the Republican establishment will readily draw the lesson that they can win convincingly without pro-lifers and their bundle of causes: the destruction of embryos in research, assisted suicide, the resistance to same-sex marriage. Indeed, a Republican party shorn of those people and their baggage may seem to offer a stronger, more durable majority than the party that eked out victories by narrow margins in 2000 and 2004.

Pro-life voters may subordinate their concerns and join the new coalition, but the lesson extracted will be the same: “The Republican party can win when the pro-life issue is thrust from the center to the periphery of the party’s concerns. Even the pro-lifers do not see themselves as one-issue voters; they will give primacy to other concerns as the crises before us make other issues indeed more urgent. They will content themselves with symbolic gestures or modest measures rationed out to them. For they know that, when their interest collides with others, the party will have to subordinate their concerns to nearly anything that seems more pressing.” And, for all practical purposes, nearly any interest will trump the interests of the pro-life community.

For those concerned about the life issues, the choices offered by a Giuliani nomination are bleak. This melancholy state of things is deepened by the awareness that there are powerful considerations moving the pro-lifers toward accommodation. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, the Republican party has become, ever more clearly, the pro-life party in our politics. And, just as clearly, the “right to abortion,” with its theme of sexual liberation, has become the central peg on which the interests of the Democratic party have been arranged. Under these conditions, the pro-life movement has become bound up inescapably with the fate of the Republican party.

But the White House cannot be preserved for the Republicans—and the pro-life movement—without solving the problem of the war in Iraq. To this task Giuliani brings no military credentials, but he seems to have the tenacity to see the war through to victory and to bring the Republicans through as a party that need not apologize for a war that was undertaken for good reasons. Even the pro-lifers may recognize then that the war claims a certain precedence or preeminence in the issues now pressing. The pro-life issue may have to be submerged at this moment as a matter of high strategy, for the interests of the country and for the survival of the Republican party as the pro-life party.

For years now, the pro-life movement has followed a strategy of moving in incremental steps, unfolding a plan of principle with, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln, the object being to put abortion “in the course of ultimate extinction.” But a successful candidacy by Giuliani would subtly put in place a scheme whose tendency and object would be to put the pro-life movement itself on the course of ultimate extinction.

For the rest, read here -- but you will need to be a registered subscriber to First Things (which I recommend highly) to read. Or read a copy in the library or (go ahead, buy it!) at your newsstand now.

Making the Least of a Good Situation

It seems to be a time for conservative soul searching. Last Wednesday OpinionJournal - Federation reprinted an essay by William Voegeli in the Fall 2007 Claremont Review of Books, where he describes the accomplishments (or the lack therof) of US conservatives since the Reagan Revolution. My title comes from this line from late in the essay: "Between 1981 and 2006, conservatives made the least of a good situation. If the more difficult years ahead are not going to be a debacle, conservatives need to wrestle with some important strategic questions." But let's let Mr. Voegeli first set the context.

The Trouble With Limited Government
Why even Reagan couldn't stop spending from skyrocketing--and what to do about it.

BY WILLIAM VOEGELI
Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

A quarter century ago president Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In 1981, the year of that speech, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 2006, it spent $2,655 billion. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president--in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.

To put the point another way, if per capita spending after 1980 had grown at the rate of inflation, federal outlays would have been $1,883 billion in 2006 instead of $2,655 billion. The 41% increase from 1981 to 2006 is considerably lower than the 94% increase in real per capita spending in the previous 25 years, from 1956 to 1981. In the past two decades, the federal establishment grew steadily, rather than dramatically. Nonetheless, Reagan's pledge to curb the government's size and influence has hardly been fulfilled. Inflation-adjusted federal spending increased in every year but two over the past 26 years.

Military spending is a minor factor in the overall growth of government. It was 23.2% of federal spending and 5.2% of gross domestic product in 1981. Those percentages peaked in 1987 at 28.1% and 6.1%, respectively. Defense spending fell steadily thereafter, and was just over 16% of the federal budget and 3% of GDP from 1999 through 2001. Since September 11, defense spending has climbed to 20% of the federal budget and 4% of GDP. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both figures are lower than they were at any point during Jimmy Carter's presidency.

The engine driving the growth of government has been "human resources"--the Office of Management and Budget's category that includes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other programs for health, education, veterans and income security. Spending on human resources in 1981 was $362 billion, slightly more than half (53.4%) of all federal outlays. That proportion declined to slightly less than half (49.7%) by the time Reagan left office in 1989. But it turns out there was a peace dividend after the fall of the Berlin Wall: National defense spending dropped from 26.5% of federal outlays in 1989 to 16.1% in 1999. That savings--a tenth of the budget--migrated to human resources, where spending climbed to 60% of outlays by 1995. The category has stayed above that level ever since, reaching almost two-thirds of federal spending (65.6%) and 13.1% of GDP in 2003.

The numbers confirm what every despondent conservative already knows. Since Reagan's stunning victory in 1980, conservative journals have annihilated forests to print articles about excessive government spending. Conservative think tanks have produced sweeping plans for reducing the welfare state. Republicans occupied the White House for 18 of the 26 years after 1980, and held a Senate majority for 16 1/2 years and a House majority for 12 years. Yet the result is a federal establishment bigger and more influential today than in 1980.

Read it all here or in the original.

That's actually the "good news" part of the essay. The rest outlines the bad news: ways in which conservatives blew a quarter-century of governing (or, as has been said in other situations, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory), and even lost (or did they just throw in the towel?) the debate while they were ruling. And then asks, having lost the debate, is it nonetheless possible to emerge once again with a positive message? Do read it.

Tip o' the hat to Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail (you do read that, don't you?).

What's Next for Conservatives?

The Intercollegiate Review first appeared in my mailbox some 30 years ago -- presumedly they got my address from Youth for Reagan after we went to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City to work for Gov. Reagan. Subtitled "A Journal of Scholarship & Opinion," it is published twice during the academic year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to provide "a thoughtful and thought-provoking interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary issues by digging to the roots: first principles, philosophy and religion, cultural and historical forces."

IR was my introduction to the intellectual, academic side of the conservative movement -- names like Russell Kirk, Stanley Jaki, Richard Weaver are among the better-known. I am now getting to the point of not being surprised to find that those interviewed, writing or discussed in publications such as First Things or Mars Hill Audio appear throughout my archives of The Intercollegiate Review.

At least for me, ISI's purpose, "to convey to successive generations of college youth a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and virtuous society," has been met. Which is why I've supported ISI (perhaps best known for its Choosing the Right College) over the years and am glad to continue receiving its publications.

All this is to introduce the "Editor's Note" by Mark C. Henrie that appears in the latest (Vol. 42, No. 2, Fall 2007) issue of The Intercollegiate Review:

As the 2007-8 academic year begins, the political struggle in Washington over continued U.S. military engagement in Iraq is reaching a new intensity. Arguments are advanced, tactics debated, blame assigned, contextual narratives proffered—all in an attempt to score partisan advantages. It will be decades before we are able to come to a disinterested historical assessment of the Iraq adventure: after all, even today we do not yet have such an account of Vietnam. Perhaps it really is true that by taking the fight to “them” “over there” we have prevented, so far, another attach “over here.” What is certainly true, however, is that the political sound and fury over Iraq has distracted us from a deeper effort to grasp the new relationship between the West and Islam that was heralded by 9/11. In the face of a new—or rather, very old?—adversary, our political class has simply recycled shopworn theories and discovered precedents for the unprecedented in strained historical analogies.

Thus, in one form or another, both liberals and neoconservatives have agreed that terrorism is best understood as a “symptom” of the desperate situation of backward societies lacking economic opportunity and political liberty. The prescription that follows is that we must address the “root causes” of terrorism in the Middle East—either through ameliorative liberal concessions or by muscular Wilsonian democratization. Once these societies are modernized, all will be well. The only problem with this excellent theology is that the actual 9/11 hijackers were not the wretched of the earth but rather educated, largely middle-class Saudis who had long resided in European cities. Subsequent events such as London’s 7/7 Underground bombing and this summer’s “doctor’s plot” in Scotland seem to show that it is not Arabian backwardness but rather Western modernity that is “the problem,” the “root cause.” What then? In a similar vein, it is often said, hopefully, that Islam is due for a Reformation. Alas, it is not implausible that Wahhabism itself is the Islamic Reformation. What then?

We shrink from such questions because, for at least two centuries, we have presumed a “universal” history in which the West represents the vanguard of mankind, behind which all humanity will at length follow, so that all will inevitably become “like us”—enlightened, largely secular, liberal democrats. We have not considered the possibility that “modernization” may lead to quite different destinations. The Cold War struggle with Soviet communism was an ideological conflict precisely because both communism and Western liberal democracy laid claim to the status of the “vanguard within the vanguard” in the West’s universal history. The current interaction with a resurgent Islam is not an ideological conflict, however, precisely because Islam rejects the universality of the West’s history.

American conservatives have to hand a rich repertoire of arguments, concept, and theories concerning ideological struggle, a legacy of our leadership role in the Cold War. We lack, however, similar resources for understanding a “civilizational” conflict. We need new thinking for a new historical circumstance.
                                        —Mark C. Henrie

For what it's worth, I'm not so sure that American conservatives -- who must be distinguished from the neo-conservatives who have done much of the thinking for President Bush's administration, or the faux-conservatives who long-ago hijacked the Republican Congressional leadership -- actually lack such resources. The conservative critique of neo-conservatism -- and most of the thoughts behind Henrie's "Editor's Note" above could have been written before the disaster that began on September 11, 2001, and were written by some in the build-up for the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- points me in that direction. But we may need to re-discover them.