by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, January 15, 2003 1:24 P.M. EST

Europe Wakes Up?
"As America's European allies confront evidence of terrorist activity in their own backyards, they are increasing defensive action against what many see as a growing vulnerability to attack," the Christian Science Monitor reports. Even Germany, where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently won re-election by stirring up resentment of America, "is taking the threat so seriously that it has begun preparing a defense plan against a bioterror attack using agents such as ricin or smallpox."

European fear is well founded. Most recently, Britain has been investigating several Algerian men who police say had ricin, a deadly poison derived from castor beans, for which there is no known antidote. CNN has a fact sheet on ricin, a timeline of the investigation and a report on the latest development: the stabbing death of Stephen Oake, a police detective who was searching an apartment as part of the ricin investigation:

Police say Oake, 40, died in a struggle with one of the three men about an hour after officers first entered the apartment.

One of the suspects managed to break free of police and grabbed a knife in the kitchen. Father-of-three Oake, 40, died from stab wounds to his chest and three colleagues were injured.

CNN adds that "critics were quick to question why the suspects were not handcuffed and the officers unarmed, The Associated Press said." Maybe because authorities across the pond aren't yet taking the terror threat quite seriously enough.

Don't Get Real, Get Ideal
Writing in London's Guardian, Ian Buruma, a self-described "squeamish namby-pamby European wimp," makes a telling point about the Iraq debate:

There is, in fact, a parallel here with the occupation of Japan after the second world war. The Japanese prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru, divided the American occupiers into realists and idealists. The realists were rightwing conservatives, who worked together with Japanese conservatives to maintain an authoritarian, pro-business regime, governed by old bureaucrats, some of whom had been war criminals. The idealists were Democratic New Dealers, who encouraged trade unionists, socialists and Japanese liberals to establish an American-style democracy.

The idealists managed to push through many necessary reforms in the early years of the occupation, and Japanese democracy, such as it is, owes them a great debt. But once the cold war began, realism prevailed, war criminals were released from prison, leftists purged, and Japan became a conservative, bureaucratic, de facto one-party state.

My point is that the neo-conservatives today, as far as Iraq is concerned, are the idealists, and if their revolutionary ideals have any chance of succeeding, they will have to prevail over the realists, the oil men and the country-club Republicans, who will surely stand in their way. The irony here is that what is left of the left, on the whole, shares the views of the old right. Few believe in a democratic revolution in the Middle East, and even fewer think it is up to America to enforce it.

Stupidity Watch
British novelist David Cornwell--writing under his pen name, John Le Carré--has penned a hysterical anti-American screed for the Times of London. A sample:

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

Now, Cornwell is a fiction writer, but even fiction has to have enough plausibility to maintain the reader's suspension of disbelief. Cornwell's description of America is simply delusional; it bears not the slightest resemblence to reality, as anyone who lives here knows.

It's noteworthy that those who argue for regime continuation in Iraq insist that Saddam's opponents meet an impossible burden of proof (Cornwell hints at this, declaring that "Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain"). But anti-American polemicists seldom feel any obligation to construct even the barest factual foundation for their accusations. What evidence does Cornwell have that America's freedoms "are being systematically eroded"? Only this:

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic." It was gone by the time he'd finished shopping.

That's how totalitarianism always takes hold, isn't it? First they came for the bumper stickers, and I wasn't a bumper sticker, so I did nothing . . .

The Onion Imitates National Review

"Strategically it makes more sense to confront the less-formidable power first, much as we invaded Italy before Germany. If it eventually comes to a shooting war with Korea, it would be better for U.S. troops to have come off a victory against Iraq, rather than to know that after a brutal war against Pyongyang, more fighting looms in the Middle East. And psychologically, we might also gain some deterrence by previous success in Iraq, which the Americans at least associate with Middle Eastern terrorism in a way they do not with North Korea."--Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, Jan. 10

" 'For years, Kim Jong Il has acted in blatant disregard of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons, and last week, he rejected it outright,' Bush told reporters after a National Security Council meeting on North Korea. 'We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to remain in the hands of volatile, unpredictable leaders. Which is exactly why we must act quickly and decisively against Saddam Hussein.' "--the Onion, Jan. 15

You Don't Say--I
"Media Outlets Prepare to Cover Possible War With Iraq"--headline, National Public Radio "Morning Edition" Web page, Jan. 13

The Perils of Paulin
Columbia University won't offer anti-Semitic Irish poet and visiting professor Tom Paulin a permanent teaching position, according to a press release from the Zionist Organization of America. ZOA had called on Columbia to dump Paulin, who has advocated the terrorist murder of American Jews living in Israel's disputed territories.

Room to Let? No Dice, Cadet.
Matt Piasecki, a junior at Pennsylvania State University, says he's been denied an apartment because he's an ROTC cadet, the Daily Collegian reports:

Piasecki, a two-and-a-half-year member of Penn State's Navy ROTC program, went to the Apartment Store . . . with his friend Kevin Hodges (junior-management science and information systems) in early December. The two planned to add their signatures to a four-person lease on an apartment. . . .

After looking over Piasecki's application, a representative of the Apartment Store informed him he would not be accepted as a client. She had noticed that Piasecki planned to graduate in May, at which point the ROTC member would become an active member of the military.

Based on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act (SSCRA) of 1940, the Apartment Store denied rental to Piasecki, Hodges said.

The act, designed to protect soldiers and their families, allows a person to terminate certain contracts, including residential leases, in the event that he or she is forced to relocate for military duty. The act protects people from suffering any consequences as a result of such cancellations.

The Apartment Store apparently did not want to enter into a lease it might be legally prohibited from enforcing. But Bruce Heim, CEO of the Apartment Store and a 1963 West Point graduate, tells the Collegian he'll rectify the matter. "The policy is we rent to anybody," he says. "I'll make sure this is taken care of."

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that clients signed up with a company called Roommate Finders.com only to find themselves inundated with anti-Semitic spam:

The e-mail messages that users received were mostly articles taken from Web sites, including articles from mainstream news outlets and sites that question historical accounts of the Holocaust. One message discussed the role of Jews in prostitution in the last century, while another concluded, "The Hitler 'gas chambers' never existed."

One client "said that when she wrote to Roommate Finders last week complaining about the messages and asking to have her apartment listing removed, she received an article on Jewish slumlords in response, sent from a Roommate Finders' address." The founder of Roommate Finders, Michael Santomauro, also runs a Holocaust-denial Web site.

The Cartoon That Got the Mullahs' Goat
Yesterday we noted the furor in Iran over a 1937 American political cartoon depicting a judge who resembles the late, unlamented Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A kindly reader has sent us a link to a copy of the cartoon; click on this item's title if you'd like to see it.

Movers and Quakers
Reader Bruce Phinney tells us we erred in yesterday's item about various antiwar idiocies:

In the reference to the American Friends Service Committee, they are equated with the Quakers. They encourage this. I, and many other Quakers, would politely yet strongly disagree. The American Friends Service Committee began as a Quaker organization, but today consists of Quakers and (what they call) like-minded people who support a particular liberal agenda. They are definitely not representative of Quakers as a whole. Two American presidents, Hoover and Nixon, both Quakers, would not have been part of this group as it is today. The vast majority of American Quakers today would not either.

A close analogy could be made between the relationship of the Catholic Worker Movement to the Roman Catholic Church, and the relationship of the AFSC to the Society of Friends (the Quakers). Each is a small group, founded by members of the larger religious denomination. Each is today anti-American, very politically correct, and supportive of almost any government or any movement that is leftist and opposed to the U.S., unlike the larger religious denominations.

Our apologies to sane Quakers everywhere. We also heard from Carl Ryan, a reporter for the Toledo Blade, who said we made another mistake:

We may not be living on the Left Bank here in Toledo and northwest Ohio, but we're not that bad. The story you linked about our (few in number) peace demonstrators most certainly did not run on page one. It appeared inside, on the front of our local news section.

OK, so it was a slow news day for us. That space between the tire ads has to be filled with something. How about a correction?

Consider it done. No one took issue with our characterization of Toledo as the most boring place in the world, and several readers called our attention to the lyrics of "Toledo," a 1975 John Denver song:

Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, is like being nowhere at all
All through the day how the hours rush by
You sit in the park and you watch the grass die . . .

You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio
Well I spent a week there one day
They've got entertainment to dazzle your eyes
Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise

Behind the Death-Penalty Disparity
Illinois Republican George Ryan wasn't the only departing governor to declare a moratorium on executions; Maryland Democrat Parris Glendening, who left office today, did so as well. Unlike Ryan, however, Glendening did not clear out death row; and unlike Ryan's Democratic successor, Rod Blagojevich, Maryland's new governor, Republican Bob Ehrlich, promises to end the moratorium.

The basis of Glendening's moratorium was the claim of racially disparate sentencing. Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane notes that Maryland taxpayers shelled out $225,000 for a study, which Kane calls "bat guano," showing that blacks who kill whites are more likely to get the death penalty than those who kill blacks. "Death-penalty opponents went immediately into poor, oppressed black man mode when they heard the news," Kane writes.

But it turns out the reason for the disparity is jurisdiction, not race. Prosecutors in suburban Baltimore County are much more likely to seek the death penalty than those in the city of Baltimore, which is independent from the county:

Baltimore County, in 20 years, has had fewer homicides than Baltimore City has had in the past two. The overwhelming majority of Baltimore City homicide victims are black. We should expect more white homicide victims in Baltimore County because more whites live there. . . .

With an African-American annual body count that should stagger the imagination, Baltimore's state's attorneys . . . routinely refuse to seek the death penalty. Adolf Eichmann couldn't get the death penalty here.

Here are a couple of suggestions for future studies that won't get done. Let's have a study of exactly why state's attorneys in Baltimore, where most of the black victims are, shy away from the death penalty.

Then--in the interest of investigating a real racial disparity--let's have a treatise on why black murderers choose white victims far more frequently than white murderers choose black ones.

Mike Bloomberg's New York
New York's "Republican" mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has promised "to support--in any way he could--Democrats who voted for an 18.5% property tax hike in November," the New York Sun reports. "Mr. Bloomberg wasn't specific about the kind of support he would offer, but council members said he has offered both his presence on the campaign trail and his substantial fundraising weight to members who bucked their constituents to support his initiatives." Bloomberg made the pledge during a dinner at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence; two Republican city councilmen walked out.

And We Thought He'd Been Rehabilitated
"A California businessman pardoned by former President Clinton for a 1983 fraud conviction involving a hair-growth product has been arrested on tax evasion charges," the Associated Press reports. Almon Glenn Braswell paid Clinton brother-in-law Hugh Rodham $200,000 to arrange the pardon; Rodham gave the money back after a public outcry. Rodham's sister is New York's junior senator.

A Politically Correct Dilemma
"The rise of singletons, divorcees and young people setting up home on their own may be a significant threat to the world's environment and wildlife," London's Independent reports, citing "a radical new study." If this is true, it's a real puzzle for the politically correct left, which generally does not favor marriage for anyone except gay couples. If marriage turns out to be good for Mother Earth, whatever will these folks do?

You Don't Say--II
"Smog Not Beneficial, EPA Concludes"--headline Environment News Service, Jan. 7

You Don't Say--III
"Richmond Police Chief Says More Officers Are Key to Fight Crime"--headline, WWBT-TV Web site (Richmond, Va.), Jan. 14

You Don't Say--IV
"Political Correctness Haunts the Left at Berkeley"--headline, Ronald Radosh op-ed piece, New York Sun, Jan. 15 (not available online)

Not Too Brite--XLIV
"Italian police seized more than $1 million in counterfeit $100 notes intended for the Middle East," Reuters reports from Rome. Police say the bills "were of a very high quality . . . making them a real threat." Oddly Enough!

Diverse White Males
Is this a joke? A slick Web site advertises what purports to be a Portland, Ore.-based consulting firm called White Men as Full Diversity Partners. Yeah, it's gotta be a joke. The biography of partner Bill Proudman begins by saying that in 1996 he "pioneered a white male only diversity workshop."

Then again, as Instapundit.com notes, there is something to be said for celebrating diversity.

Who Is Peggy Loonan?
Today's New York Times carries a curious pro-abortion op-ed piece. (If you want to write us and object to the term pro-abortion, please read the Times piece first. The author criticizes an abortion-rights group for changing its name, removing the word abortion and adding the word pro-choice.)

Anyway, what's odd about this piece is the byline. The article is supposedly written by one Peggy Loonan. What's next for the Times op-ed page? Bob Lartley praising Bill Clinton for raising taxes? James Laranto on how the Saudis really are our friends?

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Bush takes a powder, and Eugene Scalia resigns.
• Lee Harris on the intellectual roots of anti-Americanism.
• Collin Levey: Pop music's long decline since the days of the Bee Gees.
• James Wolcott reviews Gardner Botsford's "A Life of Privilege, Mostly."