by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 4:14 P.M. EDT

Iraq and the Liberal Baby Boomers
In an essay on CBS News's Web site, the network's Dotty Lynch laments the lack of anti-Iraq sentiment among kids today:

As the war in Iraq rages on I keep asking myself: Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?

For the past four months, I was at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, surrounded by idealistic young people and their liberal professors. There was virtually no support for the war (except for the offspring of a few famous neo-cons) but neither was there serious organized activity to try to stop it.

Large groups of students traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild it and another group went to Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. But why so quiet about Iraq?

Lynch, who says that as a lass during the Vietnam era she "was passionately against the war," then considers various theories to explain why Iraq is not another Vietnam. It's pretty trite stuff, but what's interesting is the underlying premise: that Vietnam is the norm--that in the usual course of things, as we put it a while back, "a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal."

America's defeat in Vietnam was a triumph for Americans of a certain ideological and generational profile. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, made this clear earlier this month in a commencement address at the State University of New York's New Paltz campus:

When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. OK, that's not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace--but maybe there were larger forces at play.

Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

Our children, we vowed, would never know that.

So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: "My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon." Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: "OK, that's not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play."

Then, the perversity of reveling in tragedy. To most Americans, the retreat from Vietnam and the resignation of Nixon were at best necessary evils; but to the liberal baby boomer they were, and at least to Sulzberger they remain, points of pride. The baleful consequences of Vietnam and Watergate--boat people, the Khmer Rouge's massacres, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the impeachment of Bill Clinton--go unmentioned in Sulzberger's speech.

But Sulzberger also makes clear that his generation's celebration of Vietnam and Watergate was not solely, perhaps not even primarily, malicious in nature. It was motivated by a kind of misguided adolescent idealism: "We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government," Sulzberger proclaims. "Our children, we vowed, would never know that."

As a newly minted college grad back in the 1970s, Sulzberger imagined that Vietnam and Watergate spelled the end of war and corruption. He still hasn't outgrown his disappointment that this turned out not to be the case. He knows his intentions were pure and is still wrestling with whether the world let him down or he let the world down.

In his new book, "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore), Shelby Steele reflects on the origins and endurance of this attitude:

One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one's self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. . . . But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past.

The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. . . . It doesn't matter, for example, that there was honor in America's acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgment of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority--and thus, adult authority--despite the good it achieved.

In fact, the baby boomers were too young to be implicated one way or another in the civil rights struggle: The oldest of them turned 18 in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. All of the credit for the triumph of civil rights, as well as the blame for what it had to overcome, belongs to earlier generations.

But the success of the civil rights movement might have fed the baby boomers' political delusions in another way. When Sulzberger was born in 1951, Jim Crow still prevailed. He was 2 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education and 12 when the Civil Rights Act became law. By the time he finished college at 22, American racism was history (though of course some of its aftereffects linger to this day).

The triumph of civil rights was the culmination of a struggle that began before the Civil War, but to a boy growing up in the 1960s and coming of age in the early 1970s, it must have seemed to have happened very suddenly. If this is so, then there was a certain logic to Sulzberger's triumphalism circa 1974: If America could so quickly abolish racism, why shouldn't it be able to vanquish war and corruption with equal ease--or, indeed, with greater ease, given how enlightened Sulzberger and his cohorts imagined themselves to be?

Baby-boomer liberalism, with its smug sense of moral superiority and its impatience with America's imperfections, is today the prevailing worldview among many of our elite institutions, not least the so-called mainstream media. This explains why Dotty Lynch is puzzled that Iraq hasn't become another Vietnam.

The answer to her question is that Iraq isn't Vietnam because "Vietnam" was the product of a peculiar set of conditions at an unusual moment in history--a moment that has long since passed.

Run for Your Lives! It's a Landslide!--II
In an item yesterday we asked if readers could come up with news articles from 1994 that anticipated the Republican landslide that year. A reader named Pete said he tried and failed to do so at the time:

This comment brought to mind a senior high school project we helped our son with that year (not going to mention his name because he's in the "think-tank world"). We had collected all the New York Times print versions from Labor Day through November to look for bias in their reporting leading up to the election and after the election.

When it turned out to be a GOP landslide, we went back through, searching for articles referring to the Contract With America or other things that might have signaled dissatisfaction or what might be the preconditions leading to a landslide. We catalogued placement (first page above the fold or below the fold; national page; editorial page).

I don't have our son's paper to remember all the analysis and conclusions but here's a summary recollection:

Except for the day the Contract was announced (and even that got very little reporting, as I recall), there was no follow-up article, no article of consequence sensing any political unease or vulnerability for the Democrats, nothing indicating that the Republicans were "on to something".

I hate to give OpinionJournal's staff any work, but you might want to go back and explore the Times archives to repeat this experiment: if there was a budding landslide, the New York Times was completely ignorant of it. And after the fact, they seemed completely uninterested in what, if anything, had caused it.

The professionally indignant liberals at Media Matters, however, did uncover one Times piece anticipating a GOP takeover. Written by Adam "Major League" Clymer, the piece ran Oct. 26, 1994, 13 days before the election. MM found seven other articles speculating about the possibility of big Republican gains, including a takeover of one or both houses of Congress: one each from the Associated Press and USA Today, two from the Washington Post and three from the Christian Science Monitor.

The earliest, from the Post, ran June 26, almost a month later in the cycle than the AP "landslide" article we cited yesterday, and it was considerably more modest in its prediction: "Some [Democratic] party officials believe the Democrats are in danger of losing control of the Senate and that their losses in the House could leave the Republicans holding the largest number of seats since the mid-1950s."

Exclusive Club
"More than 20 babies have been aborted in advanced pregnancy because scans showed that they had club feet, a deformity readily corrected by surgery or physiotherapy," reports the Sunday Times of London:

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics covering the years from 1996 to 2004, a further four babies were aborted because they had webbed fingers or extra digits, which are also corrected by simple surgery. All the terminations took place late in pregnancy, after 20 weeks. . . .

News of the terminations has reignited the debate over how scanning and gene technology may enable the creation of "designer babies." In 2002 it emerged that a baby had been aborted late--at 28 weeks--after scans found that it [sic] had a cleft palate, another readily corrected condition.

The reasons for these abortions may not be as trivial as the Times makes them out to be, as all of the deformities mentioned in the story can be symptoms of more serious diseases or syndromes.

Still, what's curious about this is that the Times reporter seems to be at pains to cast the objection to this practice as being to the supposed end ("the creation of 'designer babies' ") rather than means (abortion). In truth, corrective surgery is much more an act of "design" than feticide is, and the story is not about the creation of perfect babies but about the destruction of imperfect ones.

Discomfort with abortion in such a case is a normal moral intuition, but one that threatens the cause of abortion on demand. For if abortion is unjustified for this reason, the implication is that abortion is wrong unless justified by a better reason. This in turn implies that any woman who has an abortion (or man who abets that decision) bears some level of moral guilt.

This does not necessarily lead to an absolutist antiabortion position, as it leaves vast room for disagreement over the degree of moral culpability, the degree to which various circumstances weigh against it, and the morality and practicality of enforcing such moral views through law.

The pro-abortion side of this debate finds it expedient to avoid such questions altogether--but this requires suppressing or at least evading the disgust any normal person feels over abortion for arguably frivolous or inhumane reasons. "Abortion rights" would be more secure in the long run if those who advocate them found a way to acknowledge basic moral intuitions rather than avoiding or waging war against them.

The Crazy Old Princess Bride in the Attic
From yesterday's White House briefing with Press Secretary Tony Snow:

Helen Thomas: Why did the President pick a man [Karl Zinsmeister] who is so contemptible of the public servants in Washington to be his adviser--saying, "People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings"? Why would he pick such a man to be a domestic adviser?

Snow: You meant contemptuous, as opposed to contemptible, I think.

From "The Princess Bride" (1987):

Inigo Montoya: You are sure nobody's follow' us?

Vizzini: As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable. . . .

Vizzini: Inconceivable. . . .

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]

Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In all seriousness, given how much trouble she has with the English language, what is Helen Thomas doing in the White House?

Zero-Tolerance Watch
A special education student in Naples, Fla., "who kicked a Naples teacher's aide and spent several hours in juvenile jail is facing felony battery charges," reports the Associated Press.

The alleged perp, Takovia Allen, "is being charged with battery on a public education employee. It's possible she will enter a program that includes counseling. If she completes the program successfully the charges could be dropped."

Did we mention she's 6 years old?

Email Ends; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit
"E-mail's ambiguity has special implications for minorities and women, because it tends to feed the preconceptions of a recipient. 'You sign your e-mail with a name that people can use to make inferences about your ethnicity,' says [the University of Chicago's Nicholas] Epley. A misspelling in a black colleague's e-mail may be seen as ignorance, whereas a similar error by a white colleague might be excused as a typo."--Christian Science Monitor, May 15

It's a Start

"Japanese Government Prepares to Wage War on Fat"--headline, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, May 28

"Butt Police Issue $2,700 in Fines"--headline, Australian Associated Press, May 31

Hang Out With That Crowd and You'll Never Meet Anyone Nice
"Security Council Meeting Degenerates"--headline, Associated Press, May 30

Awkward Headline in Newspaper Was
"Reported Gunfire at Capitol Wasn't"--headline, Arizona Republic, May 27

Her Technique Needs a Little Work
"Woman Hit by Lightning While Praying"--headline, Associated Press, May 30

Unless You Put Milk on It
"Corn Farmers Say Supply Crunch From Ethanol Is Just Fine"--headline, Associated Press, May 30

Lionel Hutz Represents the Plaintiffs
"Cartoon, CNN Sue Cablevision"--headline, Multichannel News, May 30

Good News for Houyhnhnms
"Supreme Court Won't Consider Yahoo Case"--headline, Associated Press, May 30

Deadly Dull

"Intruder Shot After Breaking Into Boring Woman's Home"--headline, KATU-TV Web site (Portland, Ore.), May 30

"Madonna Snaps at Bored Audience"--headline, ContactMusic.com, May 31

Bottom Story of the Day
"No Pattern in Deaths at Zoo"--headline, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 31

No Noose Is Good News
The Associated Press reports on the latest fitness innovation:

If you think keeping fit is merely mind over matter, Lester Clancy has an invention for you--a cordless jump-rope.

That's right, a jump-rope minus the rope. All that's left is two handles, so you jump over the pretend rope. Or if you are truly lazy, you can pretend to jump over the pretend rope. . . .

Why jump rope without a rope?

It's perfect for the clumsy, Clancy said. "If you are still jumping, you're still using your legs as well as your arms, and getting the cardiovascular workout. You just don't have to worry about tripping on the rope."

It is also good for mental institutions and prisons where rope is a suicide risk, said Clancy.

For our part, we prefer water sports, but we can't swim. Thank goodness for dehydrated water!

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Mike Walsh, Clay Waters, Thomas Dillon, Joel Golbert, S. Murphy, Charlie Gaylord, Scott Wright, Steven Platzer, C.E. Dobkin, Ethel Fenig, Michael Zukerman, Michael Segal, Scott Offen, Ed Lasky, Jack Archer, Brian Gnad, Leland Hein, David Hyman, James Crutcher, Mark Murray, Steve Roberts, Rochi Ebner, Matthew du Mee, Andy Phillips, Dennis Powell, Joseph DeMartino, David Englet, John Neal, Stefan Sharkansky, Kyle Kyllan, Dan O'Shea, Mary Pinkowish, Rex Pommier, Robert Elworth and John Sanders. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Maybe the CIA could use a few amateurs.
• Mary Ann Glendon (from First Things): A few principles for our immigration policy.
• Holman Jenkins: Al Gore's new movie is the feel-good hit of the summer--but not much more.