From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, February 16, 2006 11:38 A.M. EST

We're Outta Here
Just for a short vacation, though. Back Monday, Feb. 27.

Second Thoughts About Gore
Usually when Al Gore gives a speech, left-wing blogs are filled with enthusiastic reviews. But we haven't noticed a single plaudit for, or even defense of, Gore's weekend speech in Saudi Arabia, which we noted Monday. So we thought we'd offer one. To recap, here is what Gore said, as reported by the Associated Press:

Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment.

Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions.

We objected strenuously to this, for the obvious reasons. But later we thought of another way of looking at it. Think of the message Gore is delivering to the Saudis:

  • If your countrymen attack America, you will be "indiscriminately rounded up," held in "unforgivable" conditions and subjected to "terrible abuses."

  • And don't bother trying to appeal to American public opinion. Most Americans already oppose such treatment, but Bush is too crazy and mean to care.

If the Saudis take Gore seriously--a big if, but remember that they don't know him as well as we do--they will be way too scared to try any terrorism any time soon.

Why the Delay? No, Wait! Why the Hurry?

"Let's see. The vice president of the United States accidentally shot someone while bird-hunting on a Texas ranch. It took the White House nearly 24 hours to share that information with the rest of the nation. . . . The rest of the world might have been in the dark forever if Ms. Armstrong had not chosen to share the news with a reporter from the paper in Corpus Christi."--editorial, New York Times, Feb. 14

" 'Ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,' Mr. Cheney said, appearing a bit shaken in a hastily arranged interview on Fox News to provide his version of events in a just-the-facts monotone."--news story, New York Times, Feb. 16

A Warrening Shot
Mickey Kaus thinks he has a winning political message for the Democrats: "Return to Normalcy." In a footnote, he credits our Peggy Noonan for coming up with the idea, back in July 2004--and he thinks it still has promise even though it wasn't a success for John Kerry*. We halfheartedly agree! That is, we'd say Kaus's is the best advice anyone has given the Dems in years.

It still has lots of problems, though. To see why, consider how Kaus develops the theme with respect to foreign policy:

The essential premise is that Bush has stretched the military, the Constitution and the civility of our politics to the limit in reaction to the threat of future 9/11s. All this fevered straining and leveraging may have been appropriate at the time, but there's no real need to keep running in hyperdrive.

We can routinize the anti-terror struggle the way we routinized the Cold War, when just as much was at stake. We don't have to make an end run around the Constitution or a duly-passed statute (wiretapping). We don't have to torture prisoners or hold them forever without hearings. We don't have to slight disaster relief (Katrina) because the Department of Homeland Security worries only about terrorists. We don't have to unmask CIA agents in a desperate effort to build a case for war. We don't have to alienate our allies.

We don't have to run giant deficits to finance our armed forces, as if the "Global War on Terror" were a temporary crisis that will be over in three years. It's not. It's a semi-permanent part of the landscape. Democrats can contain the terrorist threat the way, for four decades, they helped contain the Russians--while (as during the Cold War) we allow ourselves to turn our attention to domestic problems such as health care and Social Security.

We agree with Kaus that there is among Americans a longing for pre-9/11 "normalcy." Certainly we feel it. But only among antigovernment paranoiacs and civil-liberties fetishists does the normalcy for which they long consist chiefly of the absence of spying on or "torturing" terrorists. Those people are vanishingly few in number; many of those who profess to be concerned about these policies are merely using them as a medium for their Bush-hatred.

For normal Americans, normalcy consists primarily of feeling safe from terrorist attacks, as we did on 9/10. But 9/11 rendered self-evidently fatuous the notion that we can feel safe by returning to pre-9/11 policies, as the paranoiacs and fetishists (and, seemingly, Kaus) urge. The more aggressive the government's approach to preventing terrorism, the safer normal people will feel (at least as long as there is not another major attack).

Kaus goes astray because he is mixing historical metaphors. "Return to normalcy" was not a Cold War-era phrase, but rather an interwar one. It was Warren G. Harding in 1920 who promised a return to normalcy after the perturbation of World War I and Wilsonianism. What differentiates 1920 from both the Cold War and the present is that in 1920 the war was over. Normalcy had already largely returned.

The Cold War-era slogan Kaus is looking for is not "return to normalcy" but "politics ends at the water's edge"--an idea that went by the boards after the Democratic crackup over Vietnam and again in 2002 after making a brief post-9/11 reappearance.

The Democrats cannot diminish the GOP edge on national security by playing down the threat of terrorism, or by claiming that less aggressive means of fighting it will somehow be more effective. The only way to do it is by minimizing the actual substantive differences--that is, by moving far in the Republican direction on national security. To some extent Kaus endorses this view:

[Some left-wing Kaus pal] wants a full-blooded campaign that tells voters the Bush approach to the terror, including the Iraq War, is "completely wrongheaded." But Iraq has alredy [sic] been invaded--whoever is president is going to have to deal with the reality that exists now. The abnormal--an experiment in Iraqi democracy--is now the normal. Or, rather, it needs to be the normal. Isn't it easier to simply convince the public that a Dem approach will be just as effective at making the best of that situation, at a tolerable casualty level? Democrats, after all, already have the votes of Americans who think Bush's approach is "completely wrongheaded."

But therein lies the problem. A significant portion of the Democratic base is implacably opposed to the war effort, whether for reasons personal (hatred of Bush), ideological (hostility to American military intervention, or to America itself) or both. This was true, too, during the post-Vietnam phase of the Cold War (1968-91); and that, more than anything else, is why the Democrats lost five out of six presidential elections during that period, winning only the anomalous 1976 post-Watergate contest.

The advantage of the "return to normalcy," Kaus argues, is that it would change the nation's focus to domestic policy, where the Dems have an advantage. Bill Clinton, of course, did this in 1992--but only after normalcy had already returned with the end of the Cold War. Kaus's advice is, as we say, the best we've heard anyone offer the Democrats, but it may be a very long time before it becomes feasible to follow.

* The haughty, French-looking Mas--yeah, come to think of it, Kerry isn't normal enough for this to have worked.

Then Again, Maybe We're Brainwashed Too!
An interesting kerfuffle has broken out over a post by a blogger named Glenn Greenwald, who offers what he seems to think is a devastating critique of conservatism in America. Greenwald argues that the terrorist surveillance program is anathema to "conservative ideology," which stands for "a restrained Federal Government which was to be distrusted." This is a narrow point that is arguable either way, but Greenwald wants to make a much more ambitious indictment of contemporary conservatism, to wit:

It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe [sic] to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day--social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required--a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal"--or, for that matter, a "conservative"--is now no longer a function of one's actual political views, but is a function purely of one's personal loyalty to George Bush.

There are two separate claims here: first, that conservatives improperly label people "liberal" for their "failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush"; second, that such blind loyalty is common in conservative ranks. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

The claim about labeling people liberal, Greenwald writes, is "most illustratively" seen "in how Bush followers talk about Andrew Sullivan." But Sullivan, whom we like personally and about whom we've written extensively in the past, is sui generis--so idiosyncratic, both ideologically and psychologically, that if he is the most illustrative example of a trend, it probably isn't a trend at all.

Greenwald lists five other conservatives whom he claims other conservatives have called "liberal": ex-Rep. Bob Barr and Sens. John McCain, Chuck Hagel, John Sununu and George Voinovich. But he provides no examples of conservatives labeling McCain, Hagel or Sununu.

The examples in the other two cases are weak: He links to an Oliver North column that harshly criticizes Voinovich for opposing Ambassador John Bolton's nomination but does not call him a liberal; and (via a post of his own on another blog) to a Washington Post piece about the tepid response Barr--who since leaving Congress has worked with the ACLU in opposing antiterror measures on civil-liberties grounds. Particularly revealing, according to Greenwald, is this quote:

One man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.

This is the closest Greenwald comes to showing that conservatives label other conservatives "liberals" because the latter are not blindly loyal to Bush. Note that in this quote Sorcinelli does not actually use the word "liberal" and does not refer to Bush by name (hence the brackets).

It's certainly true that conservatives have their differences with the five men Greenwald mentions--but those differences are over substance: (among other things) with Sununu on the Patriot Act, with Hagel on Patriot and Iraq, with Barr on security vs. civil liberties, with Voinovich on Bolton, with McCain on free speech, taxes and "torture." Blind loyalty has nothing to do with it; indeed, many conservatives still feel betrayed by Bush for his signing the McCain-Feingold campaign censorship law.

We conducted our own test of Greenwald's claim: We e-mailed Bruce Bartlett, a friendly acquaintance, frequent correspondent and author of a forthcoming book called "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," which drew favorable notice in the New York Times earlier this week. We asked him if anyone on the right has called him a "liberal" owing to his criticisms of Bush. "Not really," he said. "The worst that people have said is that I am an opportunist seeking to curry favor with liberals by bashing Bush or something like that."

Greenwald cites several conservative pundits and bloggers who he claims are "authoritarian cultists"--i.e., blind followers of Bush. In at least two of these cases, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, we can rebut his assertion off the top of our head: Coulter opposed--harshly--the nomination not only of Harriet Miers but also of John Roberts. As for Malkin, Google "immigration" and "Bush" on her site and you'll see she's anything but an uncritical follower of the president. (Greenwald also calls them extremists, and we won't argue--but that's a different criticism.)

This column has been accused (though not by Greenwald) of being excessively pro-Bush, yet we suspect we'd find plenty to agree with in Bartlett's book. On the other hand, in the three areas that matter most to us--the war, the courts and taxes, in that order--Bush has, notwithstanding a few lapses, been excellent by our lights.

To some extent, too, the pro-Bush sentiment on the right that so upsets Greenwald is a product of the anti-Bush fanaticism of the left. There is a sort of Newton's Third Law of politics, which was at work during the previous administration as well. People on the left who reviled Bill Clinton's policies in such areas as trade, welfare and capital punishment nonetheless backed him, and supported him fervently when Congress impeached him.

For most conservatives, Bush is not perfect but he is far better than the alternatives that were on offer in 2000 and 2004. Those on the left who look at the right and see blind loyalty for the most part are actually viewing a reflection of their own blind hate.

Why Did The French Plant Trees on the Champs Elysées?
"Jacques Chirac, French president, on Wednesday ordered the Clemenceau, a retired warship, to abandon its voyage to an Indian shipbreaking yard and return to France only days before a state visit to India. France's dramatic U-turn is a victory for environmental pressure groups."--Financial Times, Feb. 15

Sleepy Time Down South
A report on an "antiwar" protest in the Carolinian, student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, includes this excellent quote from Scott Trent, "a member of the World Can't Wait-Greensboro Chapter" (ellipsis in original):

"If we had gone to bed five years ago and woken up today . . . we'd be pretty shocked," stated Trent.

He has a point. Even for a hippie layabout, five years is a long time to sleep.

(Hat tip: Jon Sanders.)

The New Math--I
In response to an item yesterday, quite a few readers sent us e-mails like this one, which carried the subject line "Innumeracy is worse than illiteracy":

Regarding your question in today's Best of the Web, "What's 50% times 2?," the answer is 25%.

Perhaps you meant something like, "What's 50% plus 50%?," the answer to which is 100%.

When we were growing up, we learned that x times 2 equals x plus x. This New Math is just too darned complicated for us.

The New Math--II
John Podhoretz on National Review Online's The Corner writes:

New Gallup poll, not kidding, says on the one hand that 52 percent of those polled believe things are going well in the country, and on the other hand that 59 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction. Umm...that's simply absurd. The poll is a Rube Goldberg machine. Does it ever occur to Gallup that maybe when it gets results like this that clearly indicate those polled have no consistent idea about what they think from one second to the other, the poll might be trash and should be thrown in the garbage can and tried again?

But there's no inconsistency. Things can be good but getting worse, just as you can be driving fast but slowing down or far from home but getting closer. All this poll shows is that a significant proportion of Americans have at least an intuitive grasp of basic calculus.

Big Deal, Our Cat Just Had Her Eighth
"Officer's Fatal Accident Is His Second"--headline, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), Feb. 15

'I've Forgotten More Than You'll Ever Know'
"Alzheimer's Progresses More Quickly in the Highly Educated"--headline, HealthDayNews, Feb. 15

'I Wish I Knew How to Quit Ewe'
"A man who pleaded no contest to a sodomy charge involving a sheep says he should not have to register as a sex offender," the Associated Press reports from Battle Creek, Mich.

Kinda reminds us of that movie, "Brokebaaaack Mountain."

What's Worse, They're All Little Green Jobs
"Lack of New Jobs Mars Growth Outlook"--headline, Financial Times, Feb. 15

Thanks for the Tip!--XLIX
"Health Tip: Avoid Needless Ultrasounds of Fetus"--headline, HealthDayNews, Feb. 16

Bottom Story of the Day
"Wausau-Area Schools Not Closing"--headline, Wausau (Wis.) Daily Herald, Feb. 16

ABC: Anchorman Battles Choice
Elizabeth Vargas, co-anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," has become a host--not of a new talk show, but of a fetus. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that although it was an unplanned pregnancy, she does not intend to have an abortion:

"This was about as unplanned as it gets," says Vargas, coanchor of ABC World News Tonight. "I was shocked. I had just signed on to a brand-new job that I was thrilled to have. . . . Also, at 43 1/2, it's not like I was thinking, 'Let's get pregnant.' " . . .

Vargas' pregnancy also impacts the show. Most notably, there won't be any more trips to Iraq. Her last was in mid-December.

"Any war zone is off the table," she says. ". . . Even if I might be willing to go to Iraq right now, somebody else's life hangs in the balance."

Somebody else's life? Liz, it's just a clump of tissue! It's bad enough that the antichoice fanatics are driving up ratings at Fox by making all their fetuses watch O'Reilly and Hannity and Hume, but et tu, ABC?

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Ed Lasky, Michael Segal, John Williamson, Bill Pearce, Victor Feske, Dave Hagen, Gordon Haave, Michael Griffis, Mitchell Lewis, Dennis White, Bob Routier, David Nelson, Samuel Walker, R.W. Dyche, Don Hubschman, Ruth Papazian, Bill Heyman, Benjamin Mittman and Kevin Kennedy. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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