by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 2:38 P.M. EST

What's the Good Word?
We've long been convinced that history will eventually come to regard George W. Bush as a near-great president, or possibly even a great one, chiefly for his bold foreign-policy vision. The Associated Press's Nedra Pickler reports that President Bush has repaid our confidence in him:

Bush is known as a plainspoken man, a straight-talker. So how did a word like "kerfuffle" come out of his mouth?

It's not an everyday word; it means a commotion or fuss. Bush casually used it during a question-and-answer session after a speech at the City Club here. Someone had asked about his administration's warrantless surveillance program, which has stirred concern about whether it exceeds the bounds of his authority and violates the law.

Saying the program had "created quite a kerfuffle in the press," Bush gave his rationale for authorizing it.

No question, the program has riled some Republicans and Democrats. But Bush may be the only politician who says it has caused a kerfuffle. An aide said he has heard Bush use the word privately before, but not in public.

If Nedra did less pickling and more digging, she might have discovered what blogress Bridget Johnson already knows:

We'd like to congratulate Opinion Journal's James Taranto, though, for obviously having the president's ear, for having a regular reader in the commander in chief, for perhaps having shared a pint (O'Douls for the prez) recently. One doesn't just start saying "kerfuffle" without influence.

For the record, we haven't had any personal contact with Bush since he became president, and we know not if he is among our readers--though some of his aides are. The White House has not confirmed whether there is any connection between our campaign to popularize "kerfuffle" and Bush's employment of the word, but we are grateful to him all the same. And we'd be grateful to you if you'd purchase a kerfuffle T-shirt or two.

A Friend Indeed
"US President George W. Bush said he hoped to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran with diplomacy, but warned Tehran he would 'use military might' if necessary to defend Israel," reports Agence France-Presse:

"The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace," the US president said after a speech defending the war in Iraq.

"I made it clear, and I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," said Bush, who was apparently referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel.

This seems like as good an excuse as any to take a second whack at Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose shoddy anti-Israel screed, published under the aegis of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has won praise from David Duke. Yesterday we eviscerated their moral case against Israel but passed over their dismissal of Israel's strategic value. On that question, reader James Brothers makes an excellent point:

Many years ago I sponsored a Jordanian officer at the U.S. Army Field Artillery Center at Fort Sill, Okla. Ibrahim was quite critical of both Israel and U.S. Middle Eastern policy. He could not understand why the U.S. was so unequivocally pro-Israel.

That is until I asked him the following question: If the Soviet Union attacked the U.S., which side would Jordan be on? He replied that it would depend, but that generally Jordan was pro- Western. Then I asked him which side Israel would be on. You could almost see the light bulb go off. His reply was simply, "Oh."

The Middle East is an important part of the world for the U.S. and the West. But as pro-Western as some of the countries may be, only Israel is a dependable friend of the U.S. And that in the final analysis is the reason why we support Israel. When the chips are down and the excrement hits the rotary air-moving device, we know the Israelis will be right there with us trying to clean up the mess. We really have no idea what any of the other countries in the Middle East will do.

A truculent Frenchman whose name we'll withhold offered this comment (quoting verbatim):

Let me strongly advice to you to return to school and learn to read, because the title of the study is "The Israel Lobby" and not "The Jewish Lobby". But you now it perfectly. Your goal is to pillory as anti-Semite any people criticizing Israels policies. And it works...for the moment.

This led us to muse that the close U.S. relationship with Israel has a psychological basis as well as a moral and strategic one. Both the U.S. and Israel, after all, are immigrant nations, founded and originally settled by people who, for various reasons, got the hell out of Europe. One can see why Europeans who stayed behind, and whose societies are considerably less dynamic than either ours or Israel's, would resent those who rejected the European way.

Further, World War II left Europe owing an incalculable moral debt to both America and the Jews: America because it saved Europe from its own savagery, Jews because they were the primary victims of that savagery. European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are often hard to tell apart, and it may be because they both reflect a self-loathing aspect of the European psyche--a neurotic need to compensate for an overwhelming sense of historical guilt.

Oh What a Heroine
From a column by Hassan Al-Haifi in the Yemen Times:

For all the ugliness that the current White House administration and the Neo-con/Zionist Establishment represent, there are indeed shining beacons that remind us and the rest of the world that there is still really a lot of latent and apparent good left in America. If not for anything else worth citing, Rachel Corrie is the embodiment of all that good and more. . . .

It is not an easy thing to forget Rachel Corrie, although two [actually three] years has passed since her untimely and tragic death. Two years have passed and to this day every effort is being made to erase her existence and the tragic memory of her untimely and brutal murder by the ugly Zionist ethnic cleansing machine. . . . Yes, Rachel Corrie was a martyr in all the implications of the word. . . .

Yes, Rachel Corrie could never be forgotten, even if the New York Theater Workshop cows down to Zionist lobby demands that the theatrical masterpiece work promoted by Vanessa Redgrave and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," should be postponed indefinitely from showing in New York. This is how America rewards a true heroine of its own, who gave her life to an American Caterpillar tractor provided by the US Government to one of the most oppressive regimes of all times. Why? Because Rachel Corrie really represented what America should have been all about and the ruling establishment in the US simply could not stomach such idealism.

She "gave her life to a tractor"? Actually, it was a bulldozer, and she was accidentally run over when she stood in front of it in an effort to stop Israel from destroying weapons-smuggling tunnels. That would hardly seem to qualify her for martyrdom, though clearly she's an inspiration to deranged anti-Semites everywhere.

Defeatist Losers
Call us Polyannaish, but although we are annoyed by the incessant drumbeat of defeatism over Iraq, we find it hard to get worried about it. Will it lead to another Vietnam--i.e., an ignominious withdrawal? It seems unlikely. It certainly won't happen on President Bush's watch. And who, faced with the responsibility of actually making the decision, would pull out of Iraq, leaving behind a potential base for terrorists who could one day attack America again?

The thing to keep in mind is that the people who complain about how terrible the war is, or who take the weaselly position that they're for the war but it's all gone wrong because the Bush administration is irredeemably "incompetent," are doing so for reasons that have little to do with the actual war. Some have always opposed it on ideological grounds. Others are seeking partisan advantage. Still others--and many of our fellow pundits fall into this category--are simply succumbing to peer pressure. They feel as though they have to gang up on President Bush because that's what all the cool kids inside the Beltway are doing right now. Perhaps one day they will be mature enough to make up their own minds about things.

Polls suggest that public opinion has of late turned decisively against the war. But it strikes us that these feelings do not run very deep, and indeed may be partly the result of the same sort of peer pressure. We noted yesterday that the turnout for anniversary antiwar rallies was tiny, both in the U.S. and elsewhere; and San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius has another observation of note:

My teenage daughter and I attended an anti-war rally last weekend in Walnut Creek, but you couldn't really say we made a point of it. It was more like we were going by, saw the crowd and stopped in to hear the music.

There was an old-fashioned folksinger there, complete with an acoustic guitar and a Bob Dylan-style harmonica holder around his neck. His look may have been retro, but he certainly wasn't. We estimated his age at 20.

And that was the funny thing. He was one of the few young people there. There were a lot more people my age than my daughter's age in the crowd.

It was like that throughout the Bay Area, if not beyond, last weekend at the many rallies marking the third anniversary of the Iraq war. The crowds were small, but, beyond that, they were more Woodstock than MTV.

Where did all the student activists go?

Vietnam-style defeatism, it seems to us, is an ingrained impulse of aging hippies, politicians and journalists. We don't think think this bunch of losers really speak for America.

Bad News for the Tourism Industry
"Race to Blast Tourists Into Space Is On"--headline, NewsMax.com, March 20

Thanks for the Tip!--LVI
"Health Tip: Oh, My Aching Head"--headline, HealthDayNews, March 20

Clinton to Annapolis: Leave My Cat Alone!
"Annapolis Welcomes Spring by Burning Socks"--headline, Associated Press, March 20

Bottom Story of the Day
"Gore Not Planning to Run for President"--headline, Associated Press, March 20

Who's the Boss?
"After being surprised by her husband's role in the Dubai ports deal, Sen. Hillary Clinton has insisted that Bill Clinton give her 'final say' over what he says and does, well-placed sources said," New York's Daily News reports:

The former President agreed to give his wife a veto to avoid his habit of making controversial headlines that could hurt her chances of returning to the White House, multiple sources told the Daily News.

"He knows it's Hillary's time now," said an adviser close to both Clintons who expects to play a key role in her likely 2008 presidential campaign.

Now perhaps this is more gossip than news, but can you imagine the outcry if, when Bill Clinton held office and Hillary didn't, someone had floated the story that he had demanded a "veto" over her public statements?

C'mon, Bill, don't just stay home and bake cookies! Be a man, for heaven's sake!

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Christopher Hitchens: Iraq is no "distraction" from al Qaeda.
• Brendan Miniter: The nation won't follow unless the president leads.
• Martin Johnson: Everyone remembers baseball's Negro Leagues. Here's the story of the basketball counterpart.