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July 9, 2012 $4.99 FOSTER ON BS LOU CANNON on Rodney King

The Imperial . . . and His President . . . Discontents John Yoo Andrew C. McCarthy Kevin D. Williamson

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re you tired of building your portfolio and seeing it wither But cracks started showing in late March. IBD noted distribution A in a punishing market downtrend? Read Investor’s Business days were piling up on the major indexes. On March 28 - just one Daily® every day and you’ll stay in step with the market. day after the market hit a new high - IBD told readers the uptrend was under pressure, which presented a proper time to book some IBD uses 27 market cycles of history-proven analysis and rules profits, cut any losses and begin raising cash. Five days later to interpret the daily price and volume changes in the market further heavy selling indicated the market was in a new correction. indexes. Then we clearly tell you each day in The Big Picture market column if stocks are rising, falling, or changing course. IBD is not always perfect. But we don’t argue with the market and we quickly correct any missteps. On April 25, the S&P 500 You should be buying when the market is rising. But when offered a tentative sign that the correction was over. But quickly, signs of weakness accumulate, you should raise cash and that uptrend was under pressure and the market was back in a start moving to the sidelines. That’s the safest place to watch a correction on May 4. The market can turn on a dime and IBD correction unfold. helps you recognize the shift and take action to protect your portfolio and maximize your gains. How does IBD do it year after year? We keep track of market declines with increased trading volume. This is called distribution Put IBD to work for you and stay on the right side of the market. and it happens when big investors like mutual funds sell shares Try IBD free for two weeks and get our market timing analysis, more aggressively. A flurry of distribution days in just a few weeks exclusive stocks lists showing companies with big potential, tells you a rising market can easily fall into a correction or even a proprietary stock ratings to help you gauge the strength of your bear market. stock, investor training and more! Plus, you get IBD’s legendary editorials, including cartoonist Michael Ramirez, IBD saw the market confirm its new uptrend last Dec. 20, giving you key insights on the issues facing the nation. giving readers the green light to begin buying stocks. The market advanced as much as 20% as scores of top-rated stocks broke Call 1.800.831.2525 now or go to investors.com/freeibd out and ran higher.

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JULY 9, 2012 | VOLUME LXIV, NO. 13 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 15 The Immigration Proclamation With his recent change of immigration Lou Cannon on Rodney King p. 22 policy, President Obama once again has brushed aside the founding principles BOOKS, ARTS that hold our Constitution together. His move & MANNERS has pushed executive power beyond all constitutional limits—even in the view of this 38 THE 51ST STAR reviews Political writer, an academic defender of a vigorous Woman: The Big Little Life of presidency. John Yoo , by Peter Collier.

40 AMERICA’S ILIAD COVER: ROMAN GENN Tracy Lee Simmons reviews Fateful Lightning: A New ARTICLES History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 15 THE IMMIGRATION PROCLAMATION by John Yoo by Allen C. Guelzo. President Obama may not ignore laws he dislikes. 43 STILL GUILTY 17 LEAKER-IN-CHIEF by Andrew C. McCarthy Kevin D. Williamson reviews Alger Voters should hold the administration accountable for its dangerous disclosures. Hiss: Why He Chose Treason, by Christina Shelton. 20 THE BUSH-OBAMA YEARS by Jonah Goldberg Why should run against our 43rd president. 44 THE STRUGGLES OF ANNA Florence King reviews Lots of 21 REFORMED SWINGER by Kevin D. Williamson Candles, Plenty of Cake: Pennsylvania is a Democratic state, but Romney could win it. A Memoir, by Anna Quindlen.

22 RODNEY KING REMEMBERED by Lou Cannon 46 FILM: HOSTILE CREATORS Three myths about the beating that changed the world. Ross Douthat reviews Prometheus.

25 STEPPING IN IT by Daniel Foster 47 CITY DESK: Does technology make a post-bulls**t world possible—or desirable? TO THE SCAFFOLD! considers the sidewalk shed. FEATURES 28 SEX AND THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST by SECTIONS Will the Left debate marriage honestly? 2 Letters to the Editor 30 QUESTIONS ON TAIWAN by Jay Nordlinger 4 The Week The wonderfulness and anxiety of a little-known country. 36 The Long View ...... 37 Athwart ...... James Lileks MONSTROSITY BY THE MALL by Catesby Leigh 33 42 Poetry ...... Daniel Mark Epstein , D.C., deserves a better Eisenhower memorial. 48 Happy Warrior ...... Mark Steyn

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Questionable Questions JULY 9 ISSUE; PRINTED JUNE 21 I was surprised to notice that, in the June 11 issue of NR, The Week touted the EDITOR Richard Lowry necessity of the American Community Survey. This survey is unconstitutional.

Senior Editors Yes, according to the federal courts, the Census Bureau may ask questions on Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones its decennial survey that go beyond a mere enumeration of the individuals in the Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts Literary Editor Michael Potemra , as long as those questions asked are necessary and proper for the Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson performance of the government’s obligations. But the American Community National Correspondent John J. Miller Political Reporter Robert Costa Survey is distinct and separate from the decennial census that the Constitution Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors authorizes. First, the American Community Survey is taken every year, while Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz Robert VerBruggen the law requires the U.S. Census to be taken every ten years. And second, the Research Director Katherine Connell Executive Secretary Frances Bronson ACS is barred from being used for reapportionment, which is the purpose of the Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace U.S. Census as outlined in the Constitution. Contributing Editors Robert H. Bork / Shannen Coffin Failure to respond to this survey can result in serious fines. NR should not Ross Douthat / Roman Genn Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg have endorsed this unconstitutional imposition on citizens’ privacy. Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne David B. Rivkin Jr. / Reihan Salam Philip L. Cochran IV NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez Phoenix, Ariz. Managing Editor Edward John Craig Columnist John Fund News Editor Daniel Foster Editorial Associate Katrina Trinko Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Developer Wendy Weihs Trouble in Tomorrowland Web Production Assistant Anthony Boiano Charles C. W. Cooke seems to have stumbled over an in - EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan cident having to do with a famous writer. Contributors Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman In “Back to Tomorrowland” (May 28), Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans Mr. Cooke recounts the story of an Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter “un fortunate employee” who was George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler fired on his first day at Dis - David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune D. Keith Mano / ney when he was overheard Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber joking about making a porno- Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman graphic animated film. That “unfortunate em - Accountant Zofia Baraniak Business Services ployee” was none other than the much-awarded Alex Batey / Kate Murdock Elena Reut / Lucy Zepeda Harlan Ellison, a writer a good number of Circulation Manager Jason Ng your readers and staff should be familiar with. WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 He has written across many genres, including science SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 fiction, fantasy, mystery, and nonfiction. He has also written for the movies, ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Advertising Director Jim Fowler television, and comics. Mr. Ellison told the story of his firing in Stalking the Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet Nightmare. ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett

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n Not that those work permits are going to be of much use . . . See page 14.

n During a press conference, President Obama said that the private sector was “doing fine.” Republicans hooted, and Dem o crats claimed the words were taken out of context. Obama was expressing his theory of the economy perfectly clearly: The main drag on the economy is cutbacks in state and local government. In a speech in Cleveland, he elaborated on his views. Governor Romney, he said, wants to slash regula- tions, cut taxes on the wealthy, and “strip down government to national security and a few other basic functions.” This plat- form, he argued, amounts to repeating the policies of the George W. Bush administration: policies that led to wage stag- nation and then an economic crisis. Now of course Romney will not, and Bush certainly did not, try to create a night- watchman state. No sane person believes that Bush’s tax cuts caused the financial crisis, although Obama skillfully seeks to foster that impression. The vast majority of job losses have come from the private sector. Obama’s argument, it should be immediately clear to anyone paying attention, is equal parts caricature, non sequitur, and spin. Lucky for him a lot of peo- ple are not paying attention; even luckier for him how many of them are .

n Obama has through executive fiat enacted a law rejected by Congress: the DREAM Act, which would confer legal status the workplace, and only after security is established to tackle on certain illegal immigrants and provide them with work per- the question of what to do about those illegal immigrants still mits. As policy, this is unwise; as process, it is unconstitution- here. The policy question is, however, somewhat beside the al. The president does not have the power to create an amnesty point right now. What Romney should have said—should still program under his own authority: Congress writes the laws, say—is that the president has a constitutional duty to faithful- and the president enforces them. We have the president’s own ly execute the laws, that this president has abandoned his post, word on that, of course: A year ago he told the Spanish- and that the next president won’t. language TV network Univision that he did not have the power to act on his own in such matters, and “that for me to simply n appeared to suggest that today’s Republican party through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not nominate —a claim previously made would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” He most prominently by Barack Obama—and praised his father’s knew better then. He knows better now. Congress was right to tax-hiking budget deal of 1990. A few days earlier he had reject amnesty earlier, but even those in Congress who support urged Republicans to stop pledging to oppose all tax increases, the underlying policy should not let this arrogation of power reasoning that this pledge would block even a budget deal that stand. included ten dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of new taxes. For Republicans to take Bush’s advice on taxes would n Mitt Romney responded to President Obama’s lawless sus- be to adopt a strange negotiating strategy. The time to think pension of immigration laws by lamely complaining that it had through a response to a budget deal with 10:1 spending cuts for blocked a long-term legislative solution. He is speaking softly tax increases is when such a deal is actually on the table: which because his team wants to court Hispanics and accepts the is not now, and not any time in the foreseeable future. Bush’s view that the way to do that is to moderate on immigration. It’s line about Reagan is perverse, treating Reagan’s success in a reductive way of looking at Hispanics, and treats them as pulling the Republican party rightward as a repudiation of him. an interest group rather than fellow citizens. It’s also short- And just a few weeks ago the party gave its presidential nom- sighted, since those Hispanics who think of themselves as part ination to a man whose record is less conservative than . . . that of an ethnic interest group are the ones least likely to vote of Jeb Bush, come to think of it. It is Bush’s impressive record Republican. We think the best policy is to reduce the illegal- that will keep conservatives thinking highly of him even as we

ROMAN GENN immigrant population through enforcement at the border and disagree with his recent remarks.

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THE WEEK n Whoever is leaking about President Obama’s national- n When the conference of Catholic bishops opposed Obamacare security programs should be tapped to write the president’s because it would provide taxpayer funding for abortions, the authorized biography. When reports appeared in the press about Catholic Health Association (CHA) enthusiastically endorsed the secret programs during the Bush administration, they usually law. CHA, which tends to prioritize “” over spiritu- had a disapproving tone. The sources were identified as discon- al orthodoxy, also reacted warmly to the president’s proposed tented insiders. If the Obama leakers are discontented, it is only accommodation (really an accounting trick) on Obamacare’s because they want the president to get more political credit for contraception and abortifacient mandate. But all CHA offered what they consider his tough-minded effectiveness. Bipartisan was encouraging statements; it never accepted the “accommoda- outrage at the revelation of so much classified information tion,” and has now officially rejected the proposal as “unduly forced Eric Holder to ask U.S. attorneys serving under him to cumbersome” and “unlikely to adequately meet the religious hunt down the leakers. Good luck. Republicans including Mitt concerns” of its members. With this, even the most liber- Romney are calling for a special prosecutor. They don’t trust al of formal Catholic institutions has denounced the mandate. Holder’s picks. They also know that the best way to cut a Of all President Obama’s accomplishments, bringing Catholics swath of destruction through an administration is to subject it to together across the political divide has to be the unlikeliest. the tender mercies of a special prosecutor. As Andy McCarthy argues elsewhere in this issue, such prosecutors—accountable n It’s no longer cool to call to no one and standing outside the executive branch—are an Obama cool, says Angela Rye, offense against the constitutional order. In the end, there is executive director of the Con - only one condign punishment for the president’s destructively gressional Black Caucus: “The boastful team: to chase the lot of them out of Washington in term cool could in some ways November. be deemed racial.” She cited as evidence n Attorney General Eric Holder is facing new calls for his Crossroads ad, “Cool,” which resignation, along with a House vote to hold him in contempt of juxtaposes Obama’s celebrity Congress, for failing to turn over documents that could assist an status with his administrative investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. That’s the program incompetence. Rye, of course, in which agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms did not mention that the Obama and Explosives deliberately allowed drug cartels to traffic more team has spent the last four than 1,000 guns into Mexico, and made no attempt to track the years cultivating exactly this weapons as they changed hands. Two of the guns from Fast and “cool” image—whether in the Furious were later found at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s pages of Ebony, where Obama Angela Rye murder. For a brief while, Holder negotiated with Rep re sen - was hailed as one of the “25 Coolest Brothers of All Time,” or in ta tive Darrell Issa, who is leading the investigation, to avoid the mansions of Hollywood stars such as George Clooney and contempt charges. Then President Obama invoked executive Sarah Jessica Parker. Earlier this month, the first lady called privilege to shield the documents. Operation Drag Out and Obama “a pretty cool dad.” Do not judge Mrs. Obama too harsh- Dissem ble continues. ly: These code words can be awfully tricky.

n Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), speaking n Sometimes the mask slips, or falls thuddingly to the ground— at the American Enterprise Institute, stood up for political par- and we are better off for it. In the first week of June, Les Moon - ticipation and against the Obama administration’s attempts to ves, the head of CBS News, attended a fundraiser for Barack silence its critics with tactics the senator rightly described as Obama in Beverly Hills. He said that “ultimately journalism has Nixonian. “The campaign has rifled through one donor’s changed” and that “partisanship is very much a part of journalism divorce records,” he said in a pre-speech interview. “They’ve now.” The rest of the mainstream media shares Moonves’s poli- got the IRS, the SEC, and other agencies going after contribu- tics, just not his candor. tors, trying to frighten people and intimidate them out of exer- cising their rights to participate in the American political n To poetically inclined members of the Occupy movement, discourse.” Obama strategist David Axelrod recently echoed T. S. Eliot’s 1925 prediction that the world would end “not with Nancy Pelosi’s call for undercutting First Amendment pro - a bang but a whimper” must seem apposite. After all of the tections for political speech. The Democrats are particularly rhetoric and the repeated promise of a spring return, the vanguard ex ercised by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave gen - of the revolution has hit the north side of the karmic cycle. erously to ’s campaign and who promises to Declaring its own movement dead, the Canadian anti-capitalist fund nonprofit groups critical of the president and his agenda, group Adbusters addressed an open letter to the “wild cats, do- and by Charles and David Koch, the libertarian philanthropists gooders and steadfast rebels out there,” in which it labeled who have supported worthy projects ranging from the Cato Occupy a counterrevolutionary force, “seduced by salaries, Institute to FreedomWorks. Senator McConnell specifically comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash, and minor celebrity sta- defended the Koch brothers, and Adelson deserves praise for tus”: “There has been a [sic] unfortunate consolidation of power his commitment to public affairs as well. A republic needs in #OWS.” Adbusters hopes that “the next big bang to capture the active citizens—and politicians are looking to silence some world’s imagination could come not from a thousand encamp- of them when they speak balefully of the influence of “big ments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams.” This could money.” be the stuff of parody, but it’s legit, and it points to a deeper truth:

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THE WEEK The movement is not yet ready to face the fact that the American n Almost every Congress passes a “miscellaneous tariff bill” to public is not interested in what it has to sell. suspend duties on products that U.S. companies use when there is no American maker of those products and the duties raise little n The federal government’s quota on imported sugar raises revenue. Senator Jim DeMint has objected to this practice not prices for consumers—Americans pay nearly twice the global because he is a fan of tariffs but because it reminds him of price—for the benefit of well-connected producers. The Senate earmarks: The direct benefits of lifting the tariffs go to specific narrowly rejected a bill to end the quota, with 16 Democrats vot- companies. Some business groups have been concerned about ing for it and 16 Republicans against. Senator Marco Rubio, dis- DeMint’s stance. Senate Republican leaders have found an inge- appointingly, was one of the Republicans against. Forced to nious solution: Instruct the International Trade Commission to decide between old-style Florida politics and the values of the review its tariffs to find ones that meet the criteria for suspen- Tea Party, he made the wrong choice. sion—no domestic maker, not much revenue—and recommend

The Storm Approaches

ITH Greece in turmoil, Spain not much better off, Take Japan. The Japanese government needs to per- and the rest of Europe on edge, the U.S. has manently increase revenues or reduce spending by 10.5 W been sitting on the periphery of a major European percent of GDP in order to put its finances on a glide path crisis in a manner that is reminiscent of the period pre - to the target debt-to-GDP ratio. The authors’ assumption ceding World War II. As then, many Americans seem con- that the Japanese government will implement policies to vinced that European troubles will never spread across contain spending on health care and pensions is particu- the Atlantic Ocean. larly relevant, given Japan’s graying population. At its core, the crisis is one of investor confidence, and Some European countries, such as Sweden and Switz - it comes in response to sober analysis of the finances of erland, have already taken steps to curb their deficits and southern-European countries. Their deficits are large; have little or no work to do. Others, such as those in their future looks bleak because so many of them have southern Europe, do not expect dramatic increases in enacted entitlement programs that grow without bound, entitlement spending, so their long-run picture is not as and because the recent financial crisis put overwhelming bleak as might be expected. strains on their near-term budgets. Consider, finally, the United States. It is in a different As economists struggle over the design of reforms to situation from that of the Europeans, but not in the way restore stability to international financial markets, their we would hope for. Our fiscal gap is the third highest, fol- starting point is to define the problem. While there can be lowing Japan’s and New Zealand’s. As bad as things are much debate about how to achieve balanced budgets, in Europe, the chart suggests that there is no European the question of how much balancing is needed—and in nation in worse shape than the United States over the which countries—is a matter of arithmetic. long run. Not Spain. Not Italy. Not Greece. The crisis looks A recent series of papers from the Organisation for set on crossing the Atlantic after all. Eco nomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ex - plores the relevant calculations. One study, by econo- —KEVIN A. HASSETT mists Rossana Merola and Douglas Sutherland, focuses on long-term projections for OECD member countries. The authors calculate fiscal gaps—the immediate and Fiscal Gaps permanent changes in the governments’ financial posi- Required change in government finances to reduce debt tion that are required to ensure that debt meets a spe cific to 75 percent of GDP by 2050 target by a certain time. When assessing how much “fis- 12 cal consolidation” is needed, the authors estimate the 10

potential effects of threats to smooth budgetary reform, P D 8 G

such as unexpected shocks or rapidly aging populations. f o

t 6 n

The nearby chart presents one of their scenarios, e r c

e 4

which takes into account an increase in spending on P health-care programs and pensions but assumes that 2 certain policies will be in place to control for these quick- 0

Italy ly rising expenditures. The chart shows the change re - JapanKorea Spain Austria Canada FinlandFrance Greece Ireland Poland Australia Belgium Denmark Germany Hungary Portugal Sweden Switzerland quired to stabilize debt at 75 percent of GDP in 26 OECD LuxembourgNetherlandsNew Zealand United States Czech Republic Slovak Republic countries by 2050. Whether this target is high or low, it unquestionably represents a circumstance far superior to SOURCE: MEROLA, R. AND D. SUTHERLAND (2012), “FISCAL CONSOLIDATION: PART 3. LONG-RUN PROJECTIONS AND FISCAL GAP CALCULATIONS,” OECD the current trajectory. ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT WORKING PAPERS, NO. 934, OECD PUBLISHING

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THE WEEK that Congress suspend all of them. Abolishing those tariffs would that created the wildlife refuge and the entire 26,000-acre pre- be better than suspending them, but the bill is a good idea, and it serve it belongs to. Though Buckley is usually thought of as a has DeMint’s blessing. stalwart political conservative, he was also what he termed a “conservative conservationist,” with a particular love for nature n An Obama campaign ad claims that the president’s policies and bird-watching. In a 1979 speech, he defended his view of have resulted in the creation of 2.7 million green jobs. What environmentalism by citing Edmund Burke’s admonition that we exactly is a “green job”? At a recent congressional hearing, are but “temporary possessors and life-renters.” We join his six Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) got Labor Department children in thinking a James L. Buckley Visitor Center would be officials to admit that the term includes, among other occupa- a “wonderful and appropriate honor.” tions, bus drivers, science teachers, bike-shop employees, and even, believe it or not, sellers of antiques and used clothes (it’s n The fight for supremacy between the Egyptian army and recycling!). This means the tally should be increased by two, the Muslim Brothers will decide much else in the Middle since Obama created jobs for himself and Joe Biden by recy- East. They are the only organized forces in the country. The cling worn-out economic theories. Unfortunately for them, just former is secular, the latter religious; and they are equal in the as was true with Solyndra and many similar fiascos, lavish black arts of mobilizing power. The Muslim Brothers and expenditures of government cash may not be able to stave off the their ideological allies won a majority in parliamentary elec- pink slips. tions. A special parliamentary committee looked about to draft a new Islamist constitution, and this would have broken forever the army’s grip. The first response of the generals on n James Lovelock is in bad odor with the environmentalist the military council was to try to railroad into office a presi- movement, and the smell is wonderful. The 92-year-old dent with powers superior to those of parliament. Having British scientist is the inventor of the Gaia theory and wide- contrived reasons why popular Muslim Brother candidates ly regarded as the father of modern environmentalism. He could not run for election, they arranged what was supposed has long been a proponent of nuclear power. And he calls to be a foregone contest for the presidency between Mu ham - wind turbines “ugly and useless.” He has now made some mad Mursi, a rather colorless Islamist, and Ahmed Shafiq, interesting comments to the Guardian. “It’s just the way the one of their own. Just to be on the safe side, the military humans are that if there’s a cause of some coun cil has detected small illegalities and used them as a pre- sort, a religion starts forming around it. It text for closing parliament altogether and threatening to just so happens that the green religion arrest anyone who tries to enter its building. Should their man is now taking over from the Christian Shafiq emerge as president, he will have reserved executive religion. I don’t think people have and legislative powers enabling him to draft a constitution noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of favorable to the military. Should the Muslim Brothers’ candi- terms that religions use. The greens use date Mursi, on the contrary, prove the winner, more craft guilt. You can’t win people round by and even stronger measures are bound to follow, up to and saying they are guilty for putting including civil war. One thing is certain: What has been cele -

CO2 in the air.” Lovelock is brated as the Arab Spring turns out to be a classic exhibition discovering another sim- of Third World power politics. ilarity: the condemna- tion of heretics. n The Obama administration is working its way through var- ious iterations of wishfulness on Syria. First, there was the Annan Plan, the handiwork of former U.N. Secretary-General n Charles Barron, an aging black radical and demagogue, is on Kofi Annan, who had supposedly gotten Bashar Assad’s the verge of winning the Democratic primary for New York’s assent to a cease-fire. U.N. observers were last seen fleeing 8th congressional district. The retiring incumbent, Ed Towns, Syria because of the violence. Then there was the Yemeni So - has endorsed him, and so have several of New York’s most lu tion, premised on getting Russian support to ease Assad out powerful unions. If he wins the primary, it is almost certain he of power but leave the governing structure intact, as occurred will win the general election in this safe Democratic district. when President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in Yemen. Barron has a long history of hateful rhetoric: He has compared Except the Russians are sending helicopters to Syria and show to , derided in his own community, no interest in tossing Assad overboard—if that’s even in their and supported Moammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe. Some power. Granted, there are no good, easy options in Syria. If local Jewish Democrats have condemned him, but the Dem - Assad is overthrown, Sunni hard-liners may take power, and ocratic party’s leadership has remained silent. Prominent the country’s Christians have reason to fear their fate. Yet it Republicans and the national GOP worked, with some success, is hard to see how anyone could be worse than Assad, in terms to stop the rise of racist David Duke. Is it too much to ask of both our interests and humanitarian considerations. He is Democrats to do the same with their own bigots? part of a hostile Iran-Hezbollah-Russia axis, and has em- barked on a murderous bout of repression that is on the verge n Representative Bob Turner (R., N.Y.) introduced legislation in of becoming a full-blown campaign of ethnic cleansing (he is June to rename the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center an Alawite governing a Sunni country). Whether we like it or in Queens after former New York senator James Buckley. It not, a proxy war is already raging in Syria between pro-Assad would be a fitting tribute: Buckley co-sponsored the bill in 1972 Iran and the country’s anti-Assad Sunni neighbors. We should

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THE WEEK seek to maximize our influence and empower the best ele- he had trouble remembering the names of obscure U.N. bodies: ments of the chaotic opposition by training and equipping He simply called them all the Ad Hoc Committee for Screwing rebel fighters we consider worthy of our support. Ultimately, Israel. we should want to tip the scales against a dictator aligned with our enemies. FDR called Somoza “our son of a bitch.” Assad n A Russian court has upheld a law that bans gay-pride is theirs. parades in Moscow anytime in the next 100 years. The term does seem excessive; surely 80 or 90 years would have done the n In the People’s Republic of China, horrors occur daily, and trick. But setting that aside, along with those pesky freedom-of- quietly. But occasionally something leaks out. This is particu- speech issues, the ban is both bad and good for conservatism. larly true in the age of the Internet and social media. A woman On one hand, it’s bad, because there are few more effective named Feng Jianmei was discovered pregnant. Seven months. arguments against gay marriage than a gay-pride parade: She already had a child. So she was obliged to pay $6,300 for “We’re here, we’re queer, and never mind those lesbian bikers this second. She did not have the money. So she was kidnapped, and whip-wielding transsexuals gyrating in bikinis to 30-year- beaten, and dragged to a hospital, where she was given injec- old Grace Jones hits, we’re regular family-values types, just tions that killed and induced delivery of her baby. Photos made like you.” But to see the good side, consider this comment it onto the Internet showing the mother on her hospital bed with from an Atlantic blogger: “I can see the G8 meeting protest ral- the corpse. Forced abortion and sterilization are routine in the lies, the UN General Assembly events, the websites taunting PRC. This was the cause against which Chen Guangcheng, the Putin and his judges, and more. The gay crowd will harrass “blind peasant lawyer,” crusaded. These horrors will not end [sic] and torment and undermine and prevail over those trying until the Communist Party’s lock on power does. to repress them. This ban is a gift.” At last, we know what it takes to get the Left to condemn Russia. Better half a century n In July, the Canadian parliament voted to repeal Section 13 late than never. of the Human Rights Act, which bans “hate speech” on the Inter - net. The bill was brought forward by Conservative MP Brian n In an eccentric anti-state outcry, a 70-year-old Scot wrote a Storseth, who argued that Section 13 directly contravened the letter to the editor of his local newspaper against the imminent Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the provision in Canadian law passage of the Olympic torch through his area, suggesting that it Like a divorcé who won’t stop talking about his ex, the folks at HBO are embarrassingly obsessed with Republicans.

that guarantees freedom of speech. The bill passed by a slim was a fascist symbol and alluding to its Nazi origins. The irony is majority. Repeal was just. As it stood, the Human Rights Act that his protest of a benign tradition actually incited an encounter operated as a dangerous invitation for frivolous cases and war- with a more threatening species of government overreach: Two ranted the intrusion of civil servants into an area that is properly plainclothes police officers came to his home to inform him that served by judges and lawyers. But not everyone was happy with he shouldn’t write things of that nature when the Olympics are the outcome. Randall Garrison of the New Democratic party involved. He simply laughed at them. “I just found it completely complained that to remove the provisions would strip the human- daft that a letter to the Courier had led to this,” he told the paper. rights commission of its power to “educate” Canadians and to He should be careful, talking like that. shut down undesirable websites. There could be no stronger case for repeal. n Like a divorcé who won’t stop talking about his ex, the folks at HBO are embarrassingly obsessed with Republicans. First n An Economist reporter recently noted the existence of a United HBO’s medieval fantasy show Game of Thrones included a scene Nations body bearing the eclectic name of Open-ended Ad Hoc in which George W. Bush’s severed head appears, fleetingly and Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and obliquely (and with a bad haircut), impaled on a stick. The show’s Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major creators admit that the head is modeled after the former president Conferences and Summits in the Economic and but explain that they needed a head for the scene and just Social Fields. Our first reaction on reading this was probably the happened to have a Bush model lying around. Meanwhile, Alan same as yours: Good thing it’s Open-ended, because if the end Ball, the creator of HBO’s vampire series True Blood, says this were closed, it just wouldn’t work at all. (It’s times like these that year’s story line was inspired by the Republican primaries, and make you wish you were Angela Merkel, because in German the he has added a character based on . Ball says of name would all be one word.) Anyway, when this item made the Santorum: “What’s terrifying is how many people agree with Internet rounds (via blogs and e-mail; it’s too long for Twitter), him.” For a guy who writes about vampires all day, he sure is U.N. hands rushed to defend the Open-ended Ad Hoc Working easily frightened. Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated . . . well, let’s just call it the OAHWGGAICIFM . . . ah, the hell with it. For n The covered a story emblematic of modern brevity’s sake, we will adopt a friend’s solution for times when America—a story out of Coney Island, that iconic place. At P.S.

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90, children in five kindergarten classes practiced for months to to resist. Pedophilia, autoeroticism, homosexuality—Levick sing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” at their gradua- recorded it all, sometimes detailing the gamier bits in Greek. tion. (Whether kindergartners should have graduation is anoth- “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins,” he er matter.) It was to be their big finale. They were going to wave lamented, then drew a moral lesson: “When nature intends them little American flags. But the principal “marched in on a recent to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idle- rehearsal and ordered a CD playing the anthem to be shut off, ness.”A couple of decades later George Orwell wrote, “It is not staffers said. She told the teachers to drop the song from the easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.” program. ‘We don’t want to offend other cultures,’ they quoted Clearly he never went to Antarctica. her as explaining.” The principal substituted a Justin Bieber song, “Baby.” (“Are we an item? Girl, quit playing.”) After an n Rodney King did a great deal of damage to the world before uproar, the principal yanked that song, too. An America that will he became famous. He was a serial miscreant and a felon who not permit kindergartners to sing “God Bless the U.S.A.” led Los Angeles police on a freeway chase in order to avoid because it would “offend other cultures” is an America on punishment for drunk driving and thereby suffering the revoca- very shaky ground. But there’s a silver lining to this story: tion of his parole on an earlier robbery conviction. He resisted Apparently, immigrant parents of P.S. 90 kids—men and women arrest, and the police beat him savagely. A videotape of the epi - who hail from Pakistan, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere—love sode became an incendiary grenade in the hand of the grievance the song. industry, and the officers’ acquittal resulted in riots that killed 55 people, injured thousands more, and destroyed hundreds of n Adidas likes to do oddball things with millions of dollars’ worth of property. Enraged at an injustice sneakers: It has attached puffy wings to them, suffered by a black man, at the hands, chiefly, of white police, applied giant logos in 216-point type, and rioters launched an anti-Korean pogrom, the reverberations of collaborated with the avant-garde Japanese which are felt to this day among Koreans in Los Angeles. King fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto on a line would go on to a long career of substance abuse, vehicular of high-style kicks. Ace race-hustler Jesse chaos, and crime, among other things striking his wife with a Jackson has of course found an angle car. His misdeeds were a personal disgrace; what followed on this, describing a pair of Adidas them was a national one. Dead at 47. R.I.P. sneakers recently created by Amer - ican designer Jeremy Scott as an n As a boy, Ray Bradbury went to a carnival, where a magician exercise in human degradation. pointed an electrified sword at him and shouted, “Live forever!” The offending sneaks feature a bright That didn’t happen—Bradbury died on June 5 at the age of 91— orange anklet connected to a thoroughly but the words he wrote in short stories such as “The Pedestrian,” ugly purple shoe by a plastic chain. The Reverend Jackson “A Sound of Thunder,” and “All Summer in a Day” will survive regarded this as a racist evocation of because . . . as long as people read. (Before buying the latest iGadget for because black guys like sneakers, we guess. The shoes had your kids, be sure to look over “The Veldt.”) The value of great nothing at all to do with slavery, but nonetheless have been dri- literature was an important theme of his work. Fahrenheit 451, ven from the market by the spurious campaign against them. his popular early novel, is about firemen who burn books. In a Design is one of the few economic sectors in which the United commonly overlooked detail, the reason for the burning in States remains an undisputed world leader, and the farther away Bradbury’s dystopia isn’t an overbearing government but rather the icy finger of politics is kept from it, the better. (The fashion an apathetic public. A villain explains what happened, in words world would do well to return the favor, incidentally. Looking that approach prophecy: “School is shortened, discipline at you, Anna Wintour.) And it appears that the Reverend relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English Jackson is losing his touch: The ethnic minority associated with and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely Adidas is Asians, not blacks, yet somehow nobody thought to ignored. . . . No wonder associate the shoes with debt peonage among 19th-century rail- books stopped selling.” Brad - road and the bitter memory of the Anti-Chinese League. bury wrote to the end, and his Asians have managed without a Jesse Jackson of their own. So latest piece appeared in The could everybody else. New Yorker just before his death. It was a brief mem - n They say every guy looks handsome in a tuxedo—but that’s oir, in which the man who no guarantee that he’s a gentleman, especially if he’s a penguin. wrote The Martian Chron - Recently revealed notes taken by George Murray Levick, the icles reached back to his boy- medical officer on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910–13 Antarctic hood, as he so often did, and AP / expedition, show him shocked to the bottom of his Edwardian recalled his fondness for the soul by the penguins’ insatiable eagerness to mate, with their Tarzan and John Carter tales LENDON C vigor matched by a lack of selectivity: “This afternoon I saw a of Edgar Rice Burroughs: “I

LENOX M most extraordinary site [sic]. A Penguin was actually engaged would go out to that lawn : in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its on summer nights and reach own species.” (Levick went on to provide a play-by-play up to the red light of Mars description of the act.) Later he witnessed “another act of aston- and say, ‘Take me home!’”

ADIDASishing BRADBURY depravity,” the rape of an injured female who was unable R.I.P.

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EUROPE No Greek Rescue

UroPEAN politicians in mid-June were rejoicing that stability had been restored both to international mar- E kets and to European Union politics by the Spanish “bailout.” That rejoicing lasted less than half a day. By the closing of Wall Street on the day after the Greek elections, the markets were again demanding punitive interest for lending to Spain. The initial response to the Greek election results—a vic tory for the pro-euro-zone New party—was a modest rise in Europe’s stock markets and a slight rally in the bond markets, with Spanish, Italian, and Greek yields all falling slightly, in that last case to 25.38 percent. on arriving at a G20 meeting, Italy’s “technocratic” prime minister, Mario Monti, commented buoyantly: “This allows us to have a more serene vision for the future of the European Union and for the euro zone.” An hour later, the markets were demanding ever-higher interest rates from both Spain (the highest level so far at 7.1 percent) and Italy (6.1 percent and rising), and those paid to predict future trends were all saying that the news from Athens had changed nothing. They were wrong. The Greek elections were the worst possi- ble outcome for the euro and for financial stability. A victory of the left-wing Syriza party would almost certainly have forced Greece out of the euro. Its policy stance—staying in the euro, Antonis Samaras, leader of Greece’s victorious New Democracy party refusing to pay back loans, demanding more of them from Germany—was so plainly absurd that it would have enabled Meanwhile, the euro problem will remain unfixed while the German chancellor Angela Merkel to maneuver Greece out Greek tragicomedy staggers on for a few more acts. Let us (with or without a bribe to go). That exit would have strength- assume that a new multi-party government is formed under the ened the remaining euro, given German voters some excuse for leadership of New Democracy, which then negotiates a slight Berlin’s continued shelling-out of subsidies to Spain, Italy, and loosening of the terms of its relationship with Berlin—an extend- other weak sisters, and—as a bonus—derailed the Euro-Left’s ed debt-repayment schedule, perhaps. That would not even give campaign, led by French president François Hollande but large- it breathing space. Greece’s main problem is that its currency ly inspired by Syriza, to replace austerity with “growth” as the overvaluation within the euro is on the order of 30 percent or EU’s new economic “strategy.” more. No new government—however successful at restoring the “Growth” in the mouth of the Left is a synonym for more nation’s public finances—can possibly improve the productivity public spending. It offers no real prospect of stimulating the of Greek workers by one-third in any space of time. The more the greater productivity that alone causes growth without infla- EU softens the terms of its assistance, moreover, the less incen- tion. It cannot possibly surmount the barrier represented by tive Athens will have for trying. And the harder it tries, the more the massive currency overvaluation of Mediterranean coun- likely it is to provoke social unrest, to strengthen Syriza, and to tries inside the euro. But when all the economic indicators are weaken the commitment of the main center-left party, Pasok, to down, it would certainly be attractive to voters, and it might its governing partners and the deal with the EU. enjoy a brief illusory “success” before it ran into higher infla- None of these developments will make Greece more attrac- tion and investor flight. tive to investors. So the euro-crisis will sputter along until Syriza’s usefulness to conservatives is its candor. It voices Greece leaves the euro. Ideally, there would eventually be a the primitive instincts of Europe’s Left. As John o’Sullivan managed departure not only of Greece but also of other wrote in a recent issue of NATIoNAL rEvIEW, it translates into Mediterranean countries suffering from overvaluation; maybe policy the fun-anarchism of Italian playwright Dario Fo: a neat split into “northern” and “southern” euros. Failing that, “Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!” No government within hailing there could be a turbulent collapse of the whole system amid distance of reality can endorse that. But Hollande, newly sovereign-debtor defaults, banking chaos, and a wider crisis strengthened with a parliamentary majority, actually proposes for the EU. Those who are most committed to keeping the euro a diluted and more respectable version of it. others on the in its present state, with all its current members, in the name left—for instance, Labour’s Ed Miliband in Britain—are ral- of “ever closer” union, are those most responsible for magni- NEWSCOM / EPA

/ lying to his banner. At best, therefore, the EU is likely to be fying the risks. divided and maybe paralyzed over broad economic policy for some time, probably until Hollande’s policy either collapses EDITOR’S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW or is abandoned behind a smokescreen of cultural-Left ges- will appear in three weeks.

ORESTIS PANAGIOTOU tures.

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remains a country formed of immi- grants—there is no American people with a shared race, history, and culture that existed before and independent of the United States. Deportation of every illegal alien not only would turn the nation’s back on this unique character, but would take years, consume valuable resources, and cripple the economy. On the other hand, the United States cannot condone rampant disregard of the and must exercise control of its borders. Our immigration laws strike a balance that pleases no one and results in bizarre absurdities: For example, the uneducated sneak across the border with relative impunity while scientists who receive Ph.D.s at American universities must go home. A sensible beginning for reform might include a fast path to citizenship for alien children brought here illegally by their parents. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, supports a provi- The Immigration sion along these lines; another version appears in the DREAM Act, which would grant residency status for two years to ille- Proclamation gal aliens who came to the U.S. as minors President Obama may not ignore laws he dislikes and have graduated from high school. Their status would ripen into permanent residency if they completed two years of BY JOHN YOO college or served in the military. The bill failed to overcome a Senate filibuster, RESIDENT BARACk OBAMA once immigration laws against illegal aliens however, so President Obama—surely again has brushed aside the who meet certain criteria: They came to seeking to secure Hispanic support for found ing principles that hold the United States at an age younger than his reelection—decided to evade the con- P our Constitution together. His 16 and are currently under 30, have not gressional logjam and impose his own signature health-care scheme depends on committed any ma jor crimes, are in school version. the claim that the Constitution places no or have graduated or served in the armed But a basic constitutional obstacle limits on Congress’s power to regulate. forces, and have resided in the U.S. for at stands in his way. Article I, Section 8 Fearing that the Supreme Court would least five years. Such aliens—who may gives Congress, not the president, the overturn that law, he attacked this spring number as many as 800,000—may now authority “to establish a uniform rule of the very power of judicial review—the seek work permits for two-year periods naturalization”—the process by which Court’s right to re fuse to enforce laws that without fear of deportation. “It makes aliens become citizens. Although the violate the Constitution. In just a few no sense to expel talented young people Constitution does not explicitly assign short years, he has disregarded the central who for all intents and purposes are border control and immigration to any functions of two of the three branches of Amer icans,” the president said at a Rose branch of government, the Supreme government. Garden press conference. Obama no Court inferred in the Chinese Exclusion With his recent change of immigration doubt acted from a variety of policy and Cases (1889) that these authorities also policy, President Obama has now gone political motives, some of them likely reside with Congress. The extensive Im - a perfect 0-for-3. The Department of admirable. But his move has pushed exec- migration and Naturalization Act sets out Homeland Security will no longer enforce utive power beyond all constitutional grounds for deportation and defines the limits—even in the view of this writer, an limited cases in which the executive Mr. Yoo, who served in the Bush Justice Department academic defender of a vigorous presi- branch may suspend the deportation of from 2001 to 2003, is a law professor at the dency and a Justice De part ment lawyer in illegal aliens (extreme hardship, for ex - University of California at Berkeley and a visiting the Bush administration. ample). It does not give the president scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the There is a broad consensus that Amer - authority to interrupt the deportation author, most recently, of Taming Globalization: ica’s immigration regime cries out for of whole classes of illegal aliens, and International Law, the U.S. Constitution, fundamental reform. Unlike most other certainly not in numbers approaching

and the New World Order. nations of the world, the United States 800,000 people. ROMAN GENN

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According to the Supreme Court’s use of either of these constitutional pow- immigration laws is tantamount to the decision in Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952), ers here. Bush administration’s claim that the For - a case in which the Court blocked Pres - A president may decline to carry out a eign In tel li gence Surveillance Act could ident Tru man’s attempt to prevent a strike congressional command in only two situ- not limit the interception of terrorist e- of the nation’s steel mills during the ations. First, the president may and should mails and phone calls. But there is a world Korean War, a choice by Congress to refuse to execute congressional statutes of constitutional difference between re - grant the executive only a narrow power that violate the Constitution, because the fusing to enforce laws that violate the over a domestic matter makes presidential Constitution is the highest form of law. If Constitution and impede the executive’s reaching for broader power unconstitu- federal officials had to enforce every con- response to a national-security emergency tional. While I believe that Youngstown gressional enactment, they “must close (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws be - does not control the president’s exercise their eyes on the constitution, and see only cause of disagreements with Congress of his commander-in-chief authority in the law,” as Chief Justice John Marshall over policy (Obama). wartime, it certainly applies to domestic wrote in the Supreme Court’s Marbury v. The second exception to executive affairs exclusively controlled by Con - Mad i son decision (1803) recognizing the enforcement of federal law is prosecutor- gress, such as immigration. power of judicial review. “This doctrine ial discretion. Discretion recognizes that President Obama’s claim that he may would subvert the very foundation of limited time and resources prevent the defer the deportation of so many aliens at all written constitutions.” In the War on executive from pursuing every violation once rends the fabric of the Con stitu tion Ter ror, the Bush administration argued of federal law. The Justice De part ment and is incompatible with the rule of law. that the president could refuse to execute must choose priorities and prosecute the Under Article II, Section 3, the president laws that infringed on the executive’s cases that cause the most harm, have the has the duty to “take Care that the Laws consti tutional national-security powers. greatest impact, deter the most dangerous be faithfully executed.” The Framers in - Otherwise, a Congress with a different criminals, and so on. The Obama admin- cluded this provision to make sure that the view of foreign policy could order the istration has raised prosecutorial discre- president could not simply cancel legisla- military to refuse to carry out the presi- tion as cover for its rewriting of the tion he didn’t like, as had the British king. dent’s orders as commander-in-chief. immigration laws. “Our nation’s immi- Obama’s claim that he may defer the deportation of so many aliens at once rends the fabric of the Constitution and is incompatible with the rule of law.

Since the days of Mach i a vel li, through When , Andrew Jack - gration laws must be enforced in a firm Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu to the son, , and Frank lin and sensible manner,” Homeland Se- Fram ers, executing the laws (along with Roosevelt refused to enforce a law, they curity Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a protecting national security) has formed did so because it violated their executive press release. “But they are not designed the very core of the executive power. powers under the Constitution or the indi- to be blindly enforced without considera- As Alexander Hamilton explained in vidual rights of citizens. Upon assuming tion given to the individual circumstances Fed eralist 75: “The execution of the laws office, for example, Jef ferson dropped all of each case. Nor are they designed to and the employment of the common prosecutions under the Sedition Act remove productive young people to coun- strength, either for this purpose or for (which made criticism of the government tries where they may not have lived or the common defense, seem to comprise a crime) and pardoned anyone convicted even speak the language. Discretion, all the functions of the executive magis- under “a law unauthorized by the Con - which is used in so many other areas, is trate.” sti tu tion, and therefore null.” President especially justified here.” Under this understanding of presiden- Lin coln refused to obey a writ of habeas But discretion means deciding whether tial power, President Obama may not corpus to release Confederate prisoners to enforce federal law in particular cases. refuse to carry out an act of Congress issued by Chief Justice Roger Taney A president acting in good faith cannot simply because he disagrees with it. The (author of the Dred Scott decision), invoke discretion to cancel a law—espe- Framers gave the president only two tools because it intruded on his power as cially if the executive branch is enforcing to limit unwise laws. First, the president commander-in-chief to respond to the the rest of the laws governing the relevant has a qualified veto over legislation, outbreak of the Civil War. policy area (as the administration is doing which, Hamilton argued in Federalist 73, The executive’s right to ignore uncon - with respect to immigration). Imagine the would not just serve as a “shield to the stitutional legislation cannot include precedent. A President Mitt Romney could executive” but also “furnish[ ] an addi- Obama’s immigration scheme. No one can repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to tional security against the enaction of claim with a straight face that Congress’s fine or prosecute health insurers who improper laws.” Sec ond, the Framers command that the government deport ille- failed to sell policies that met federal gave the president the right of pardon, gal aliens—regardless of their age—vio- demands, or consumers who failed to buy which he could use to free those unjustly lates the Constitution. Democrats may well policies as required by the individual man- convicted. Pres i dent Obama has not made argue that Oba ma’s refusal to enforce the date. He could lower tax rates simply by

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declining to prosecute anyone who re - Based on that routine consultation, he fused to pay capital-gains or income “withheld a limited number of details.” taxes above Bush-tax-cut levels. he Leaker-in- Translation: The administration asked the could give industry a boost by ordering Times not to publish some information the ePA to stop enforcement of environ- Chief but gave the green light on the trove that mental laws. was published. Indeed, Sanger thanks the What is to be done? We should not ex - Voters should hold the administration administration’s press team for “setting pect any resistance from the media and accountable for its dangerous disclosures up interviews with all levels of the White academic elites who spent the Bush years house staff” and brags that “almost every complaining about the return of the impe- BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY senior member of the president’s national rial presidency and the shredding of the security team” sat for interviews, “some Constitution. They have been silent when here is about as much reason more than once.” confronted with Oba ma signing state- to investigate the Obama ad - The leaked information got out be - ments identical in kind to those they ministration’s leaks of classi- cause Obama wanted it out—perhaps decried under the Bush administration, or T fied information to the New because, in a time of crushing long-term the use of drones to kill American citizens York Times as there is to investigate who unemployment and staggering debt, he is abroad. won the last Super Bowl. This is not a unable to campaign on his economic and Instead, opponents of President Oba- whodunit calling for meticulous gum - legislative record. having hewed to the ma’s immigration unilateralism should shoe work. We can just read the newspa- very Bush/Cheney counterterrorism tac- place their hopes in Congress and the per’s fawning accounts of Obama at war tics he decried as a candidate in 2008, political process. Congress could pass instead. Obama can stand as Slayer of Osama and legislation overriding the Obama plan and By now we’re familiar with the legend- all-around anti-terrorist tough guy. enacting the beginnings of its own im - making tales: of the peerlessly erudite Instead, the leaks have tarnished the migration reform. Admittedly, this is a tall commander-in-chief thumbing through president. And that, at bottom, is the order. But even if no such legislation is Aquinas and Augustine with one hand point. The relevance of the leak scandal is passed, Congress could cut the funding while flipping through his “kill list” not the potential of criminal liability for and personnel of the Im mi gra tion and (enemy combatants he designates for officials who exposed national-defense Customs enforcement agency involved in death) with the other; of a Barack Obama secrets. The scandal is about political the Obama program, refuse to confirm who had the courage to continue the accountability. It is about a president who political appointees to the Department of cyber-war sabotage of Iran’s nuclear pro- has spawned a culture of recklessness homeland Security, and hold oversight gram, an effort begun by George W. Bush hearings. (whose administration had the good Meanwhile, states could require that sense to keep it secret). What is note - businesses continue not to employ illegal worthy is that, when it comes to disclos- Head of School Opportunity immigrants, even those with an Obama ing sources, the Times reporters can’t help work permit. The permits have no autho- themselves. They name names: current TASIS The American School in Switzerland, an independent boarding and day school rization in federal law, and so cannot pre- administration insiders such as national- providing excellence in American educa- empt state regulations. This option may security adviser Thomas Donilon, and tion based on the traditional values and ideals of Western civilization, is seeking an accom- gather support if the Su preme Court up- Obama intimates such as former White plished educational leader for July 2013. holds Arizona’s immigration law, which house chief of staff William Daley, who TASIS, the oldest American boarding school in seeks to enforce federal immigration law has transitioned seamlessly to the Obama Europe, serves 630 students of 55 nationalities where the Obama administration would reelection effort. even when the Times in grades Pre-K to 13 on a magnificent cam- pus near Lugano, in the southern part of not. And if Mitt romney wins in Novem - withholds names, we are treated to first- Switzerland near the Italian border. The School ber, he could reverse the Obama policy on hand accounts of critical meetings in offers unparalleled opportunities through a broad-based academic program—Core his first day in office simply by ordering which the president and a handful of top Knowledge, EAL, American AP, and Inter- the Department of homeland Security to intelligence officials deliberate over the national Baccalaureate curricula—and a varied extra-curricular program enriched enforce the federal immigration laws most sensitive matters of national de - by travel throughout Europe. properly. fense. Qualifications include a solid liberal arts edu- It is right to feel compassion for the The Times’s disclosures about the cation, experience in boarding schools, blameless children of illegal immigrants, “Stux net” computer worm deployed administration, and hiring, as well as expertise in the management of school operations. but we should not show it by setting aside against Iran were drawn from reporter International experience or experience with the Constitution that has served our nation David Sanger’s new work of hagiogra- multi-lingual educational programs or institu- tions, a strong interest in European culture, so well. The president is refusing to en - phy, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s and the ability to build rapport and loyalty with force a federal law simply because he dis- Secret Wars and Surprising Use of constituencies and faculty are most desirable. agrees with a policy choice by Con gress. It American Power. In it, Sanger acknowl- For more information on this premier European is an abuse of power incompatible with the edges that he followed “the practice of career opportunity contact Reni Scheifele, vision of the Constitution’s Framers, and the Times in reporting on national securi- TASIS, CH6926 Montagnola, Switzerland, or email [email protected]. one that even the most stalwart defenders ty” by approaching “senior government The deadline for applications of an energetic executive should not officials” regarding “the potential risks of is September 28, 2012. support. publication of sensitive information.”

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with classified information, politicizing upholding of the independent-counsel of classified information. So while the its disclosure to a shocking degree. statute (in Morrison v. Olson), special Times stories lionize him for bringing his The recent, sensational Times stories prosecutors violate the separation-of- keen lawyer’s mind to counterterrorism are far from singular. At the dawn of the powers doctrine. The Constitution en - policy, Obama can bring his lawyer’s administration, the president and his dows the president with all executive mind to press conferences, cynically tak- attorney general, Eric Holder, authorized power. The police power any federal ing umbrage at the mere suggestion that the release of classified memoranda out- prosecutor exercises is thus the presi- his administration could possibly have lining the CIA’s Bush-era “enhanced- dent’s, not his own; that power cannot be leaked secret intel while knowing very interrogation program.” Obama could taken away from the president and vested well that his reckless disclosures are not simply have ended the program (or, more in an independent actor. Consequently, if legally actionable. precisely, reaffirmed its end, since the a prosecutor is independent, he is legally Finally, there is a practical problem: A harsh tactics, rarely used in any event, had illegitimate. criminal investigation is a gold-plated been on ice for years). But Obama needed Yet if the prosecutor is dependent on invitation for relevant witnesses to de - to satisfy his anti-Bush base, to whom a the president’s indulgence, he is too po - cline to cooperate with Congress in “reckoning” on “torture” had been pro - litically compromised to conduct an in- examining and exposing the adminis- mised during the campaign. Nonpartisan vestigation with integrity. So it is that tration’s heedlessness. Once prosecutors intelligence professionals strenuously ob - congressional Republicans have scoffed start spouting about the requirements of jected that such revelations could only at Holder’s assignment of the leak inves- grand-jury secrecy and potential witness- strengthen America’s enemies, who train tigation to two U.S. attorneys and a team es rebuff congressional inquiries “on the for what they are likely to encounter in the of lawyers from the Justice Department’s advice of counsel” owing to the ongoing event of capture. The White House turned national-security division. These investi- Justice Department probe, the issue goes a deaf ear. gators report to Holder and, ultimately, dark—certainly until months after the The administration was similarly rash Obama. One of the U.S. attorneys select- election. when it came to the killing of bin Laden ed to conduct the investigation is a long- That is exactly what the administration and the seizure from his compound of time Obama donor who helped the 2008 wants, and it would be a terrible outcome. an intelligence trove: It publicized these campaign vet potential running mates. In To be sure, public dread about the econo- occurrences before much of that informa- theory, it is conceivable that an adminis- my will dominate the campaign. National tion could be exploited against our ene- tration could draft into service a lawyer security, however, is the president’s prin- mies, by cooperating extensively in the of such rectitude that he would proceed cipal obligation. Indeed, it is the main publication of Obama’s Wars, another flat- objectively despite conflicts of interest rationale for the federal government’s tering account of the president’s prowess, and while reporting directly to the at - existence. The shameful exposure of de - this time by Washington Post reporter Bob torney general. It is beyond laughable, fense secrets puts the lie to Obama’s pos- Woodward. In sum, throughout Obama’s though, to imagine such a scenario in this, turing as a stalwart commander-in-chief. tenure, intelligence has been placed in the the most politicized Justice Department It not only endangers the lives of intelli- service of politics; security consequences in American history. gence sources and informants who have have been secondary. Even if the constitutional and political taken grave risks in our behalf; it exposes This pattern has outraged leading objections to a special prosecutor were intelligence methodology, putting ene- Sen ate Republicans, as well as the occa- not insuperable, there is yet another legal mies on notice of their vulnerabilities. sional Democrat, such as Senator Dianne hurdle: the president’s plenary authority Just as alarmingly, the inability to keep Feinstein (D., Calif.). A drumbeat has over classified information. The intelli- secrets enrages allies on the cooperation thus begun for the appointment of an gence community and its work product of whose intelligence services we de - independent counsel to probe the latest, belong to the executive branch. The pres- pend. Without the information they pro- brazen administration leaks of defense ident has the power to approve the de - vide, the government cannot as effectively secrets. But this would be foolish, for a classification of any intelligence he protect American lives; and they will not number of reasons. chooses to disseminate, for any reason or provide it if they think talking to the U.S. Several years back, Congress wisely no reason. This is why it matters who is administration is no different from talking bade good riddance to the sunsetting president. If, as patently appears to be the to . independent-counsel law. The institution case, Obama authorized his underlings to National-security leaking should be a of “independent counsel” (or “special discuss national-defense secrets with the salient issue in the 2012 election. It will prosecutor”) is an unconstitutional mon- press, and if the administration officials not be if Congress sloughs off its over- strosity. Put aside the horror of a lawyer who did so reasonably understood them- sight responsibilities and consigns the with boundless resources and subpoena selves to be acting with the approval of matter to the black hole of a pointless power whose only task is to make a case, their chain of command, there would be criminal investigation. In the unlikely any case, against a suspect: something no prosecutable case. event that there have been provable vio- that has damaged the capacity to govern The criminal law does not concern lations of law, -year statute of of every administration from Reagan to itself with how irresponsible a govern- limitations leaves plenty of time for a Bush 43. More fundamentally, as Su - ment official is. For a prosecutor, the only Romney Justice Department to indict preme Court Justice ex - question is whether there has been a criminals down the road. For now, the plained 24 years ago in his brilliantly knowing, willful violation of statutes only thing that matters is political ac - prescient dissent from the high court’s proscribing the unauthorized disclosure countability.

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Office by his predecessor, a Republican He doesn’t have to be rude about it. president, we had the largest deficits in There are defenses—some good, some The Bush- history up to that time,” Carney contin- not so good—of what Bush did. But it’s ued. “Now, something happened in those important to appreciate the nature of the Obama Years eight years, and it was not fiscal responsi- moment we’re in on the right. The Tea bility. And that is unfortunate. We had a Party began in no small part as a delayed Why Mitt Romney should run situation in eight years where record sur- Bush backlash. Many conservatives were against our 43rd president pluses were turned into rec ord deficits.” deeply frustrated with Bush’s presidency Even leaving out all the objections but felt compelled to defend him given the BY JONAH GOLDBERG about circumstances beyond Bush’s con- asininity of his most vocal critics, particu- trol (September 11, for instance, and the larly during a war. And then, to compound f you agree with the approach I Democrats’ capturing Congress in 2006), the problem, they were asked to vote for just described, if you want to give this makes no sense. The implication is John McCain. the policies of the last dec ade that because Bush left Oba ma with record Those frustrations were exacerbated in ‘I another try, then you should vote deficits, Obama is free to smash the the twilight of Bush’s presidency as he for Mr. Romney,” declared Pres i dent records and blame it on Bush. responded to the financial crisis with even Obama in his June 14 economic address But just because what Obama and his more seeming apostasies (some of which in Cleveland. “We can’t afford to jeopar- surrogates do with the facts is ludicrous may in fact have been necessary). Newt dize our future by repeating the mistakes doesn’t mean the facts are wrong. And the Gingrich noticed this very early in the of the past,” he added. “Not now, not simple truth is that Bush—or, to be more Obama presidency. Here he is at the when there’s so much at stake.” generous, the GOP under Bush—did Conservative Political Action Conference Obama hammered in his point: Mitt spend an enormous amount of money in in 2009: “The great irony of where we are Romney is George W. Bush, and a vote the 2000s. Under Bush, the federal gov- today is that we have a Bush-Obama big- for Romney is a vote for a return to Bush. ernment spent more than 3 percent of spending program that was bipartisan in And Bush was bad, very, very bad. GDP on anti-poverty programs for the its nature. Last year, the Bush-Obama This wasn’t exactly a daring new line first time. Education spending rose 58 plan had a $180 billion stimulus package of reasoning from President Obama. If percent faster than inflation. Medicare in the spring—which failed. It came back you’ve missed it, I hope your coma or Part D—the largest expansion of entitle- with a $345 billion housing package in the solitary confinement was otherwise pleas- ments since the Great Society (until summer—which failed. It then had a $700 ant. from the start of his presidency, Obamacare)—was a top Bush priority. billion Wall Street spending package in Obama has had a tendency to blame his Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley, created a October—which failed. It had a $4 trillion predecessor for most of his and, more whole new cabinet agency (the De part - federal Reserve guarantee—which failed. important, our problems. Blaming Bush is ment of Homeland Security), and was the The Bush-Obama plan was continued. Obama’s sweet spot, his comfort zone, originator of the bailouts, TARP, and the We didn’t get real change.” and his obsession all at once. It is where first stimulus program. Gingrich was wrong in one important he goes whenever he is confronted about And there’s simply no reason Mitt respect. We did get real change—for the his own shortcomings. When his audi- Romney shouldn’t say so. He is running worse. President Obama likes to say that ences consent to let him be clear, Obama as the “grown-up” intent on re stor ing Romney is Bush “on steroids.” But from is clear about this: Bush is the problem. order and fiscal sanity to Wash ington and a conservative fiscal perspective, it’s And it’s not just Obama himself. The growth to the economy. He should make Obama who is Bush on steroids. Obama president’s entire entourage of advisers his indictment of Wash ing ton’s profli - got a huge surge in one-time spending in reflexively blame Bush for all of their gacy bipartisan. After all, if he becomes 2009 to deal with the financial crisis and woes. Obama did everything right—all pres ident, his job won’t be just to stop then turned it into the “new normal” in credible econ o mists agree! Team Obama’s Obama’s overspending, but to stop budgetary terms. Be tween the end of only mistake was underestimating how Washington’s. Making the case that Bush World War II and Ob ama, federal spend- much damage Bush did. and the GOP were part of the problem ing had never exceeded 23.5 percent of Intriguingly, the White House tends to gives that effort—and Romney—credi- GDP. The average for the Bush years was make this argument most forcefully pre- bility. 19.6 percent. In 2009, thanks to measures cisely where it is most stupid: on the issue begun by Bush and expanded by Obama, of spending. White House press secretary spending broke 25 percent, and it has Jay Carney recently did it at his daily stayed above 23.5 percent for Oba ma’s press briefing. Bill Clinton had mischie- entire presidency. In the last four years vously bragged about how he was the last we’ve added $6.3 trillion in federal debt, president to preside over a budget sur - with $5 trillion of it fully on Obama’s plus. Asked about this, Carney offered a watch. In 2008, debt held by the public familiar liberal history lesson: Clinton was 40.5 percent of GDP. It’s now 74.2 be queathed Bush surpluses, and Bush percent and growing. squandered them. Remember, Bush appointed Ben Ber - “Eight years later, when President nan ke, and Obama reappointed him. Obama took office, handed the Oval Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner were

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Bush-administration officials whose pol i - Americans today who are voting and cies were carried forward and expanded legally imbibing alcoholic beverages who by Obama. Reformed had not been born the last time Penn - Of course, there are important differ- sylvania gave its Electoral College votes ences between Bush and Obama, and Swinger to a man with an “R.” next to his name. between their records and philosophies. Pennsylvania can put a But Mitt Romney is under no obligation Pennsylvania is a Democratic state, man in the Senate and a pro-life Repub - to bring them up if they do not bolster his but Romney could win it lican in the governor’s mansion, but can’t effort to defeat President Oba ma. quite see its way to endorsing a , Aside from the fact that it’s true, the BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON a George W. Bush, or a John McCain for beauty of this argument is that it rips away the White House. Obama’s main political identity. Obama n Philadelphia, a very grand old gen- Main Line Republicans may be the last still poses as an outsider in Washington, tleman is taking friends to lunch at the of the unreconstructed pre-Gingrich GOP. stymied by entrenched interests and the Union League. “This club is going to “Republican voters in the Philadelphia Bush legacy. It’s a bi zarre posture for a I hell,” he says, his eyes darting around suburbs are more liberal on guns, gays, president who got pretty much his entire the dining room. “They let Democrats join and abortion than Democrats are in the agenda enacted before the end of his sec- now. Can you imagine? And I hear they rest of the state,” says Terry Madonna, the ond year in office. By arguing that Obama even let”—here he casts sidelong conspir- highly regarded scholar of politics at is Bush on steroids, Romney would peg atorial glances around the table—“I hear Franklin and Marshall College. “Obama’s Obama as part of the problem with they even let Jews in.” This last bit is de - moves on gay rights, his talking about Washington. Independents, who still dis- livered in a pro-grade stage whisper that contraception—that’s popular.” But this is like Bush but are increasingly weary of leaves nearby businessmen squirming. He not going to be a guns-gays-abortion elec- Obama, would be heartened to have their doses his snapper soup with sherry, a twin- tion. In the gloaming of the economy, the cognitive dissonance resolved. kle of gleeful malice in his eye. It’s his lit- sunshine promises of Barack Obama are The key is to make Bush’s spending, tle joke: As everybody in the room knows, dim memories, even within sight of the not his tax cuts, the salient issue. Thanks the grand old gentleman is himself Jewish, polo field in Bryn Mawr and the man - to a complaisant media, Obama and the in precisely the style that William F. sions of Villanova (average family income Democrats have been successful in cast- Buckley Jr. was Irish-American, which is $366,904). Along Lancaster Avenue, the ing the Bush tax cuts as the sum total of to say about a half a degree below Ralph main business thoroughfare through the Bush’s domestic and economic policy Lauren on the WASPiness scale. He has suburban townships of Lower Merion and (and they don’t even give him credit for performed this ritual before, and presum- Radnor, vacant storefronts document the the cuts that go to the middle class, which ably it is his way of letting the Establish - unfulfilled promise of Pennsylvania’s ane- Obama wants to keep—more continu- ment of which he is a pillar know that mic recovery. ity!). Right now, Obama has Romney the things forgiven are not necessarily things Even with the employment and invest- rich guy defending tax cuts for rich guys. forgotten. ment boom associated with the Marcellus Wouldn’t it be better to have Obama The Union League may be the citadel Shale, employment in Pennsylvania is the big spender defending big spending? of Philadelphia Republicans, but their growing at half the national average, and A bipartisan indictment of Wash ington heartland is in the suburbs and their spine the national average stinks. would bring about just that. is the Main Line, the vestigial accretion And that is Mitt Romney’s opening There’s little reason to expect a Re- of enmansioned old money congealed here, if he has one. “We’ve elected some publican backlash to this tactic. By stress- west of the city along the tracks of the of the most liberal Democrats,” Madonna ing continuity while pointing out how old Pennsylvania Railroad. These are at says. “Ed Rendell was very liberal social- much worse Obama has made things, best Chamber of Commerce Republicans, ly and spent out of his mind—$4 billion in Romney would avoid needlessly antago- and their conservatism is for the most community development on top of every- nizing Republicans who still have warm part a conservatism of manners. If you thing else. But in 1990 we reelected Bob feelings for Bush. And he need not spare thought country-club Republicans were Casey Sr. by 1 million votes, in spite of the the congressional GOP, which was in fair-weather friends, the cricket-club Re - voters’ knowing about him being not only many respects the greater scoundrel. publicans are bound to disappoint you. As pro-life but wildly pro-life. We’re capable This critique is perfectly consonant with they have, over and over. of electing liberals and conservatives of what you hear on Every four years, there is a little act of all kinds. Tom Corbett is pro-life, and he every day, and with the themes of the political theater that unfolds like this: won by nine points. It all depends on Tea Party. Indeed, Rom ney is behind the Pundits proclaim that the presidential elec- what’s happening in any particular elec- curve. The current Republican congres- tion might very well be decided in Penn - tion.” Or on what’s not happening: strong sional leadership got this message years sylvania, and that Pennsylvania will be economic growth. ago. “I believe we did not just lose our decided in the four suburban counties “Young people coming out of college— majority, we lost our way,” Representative ringing Philadelphia: Bucks, Montgom - the opportunities just plain aren’t there,” Mike Pence famously said. Boehner, ery, Delaware, and Chester. Pennsyl - says Robert Godshall, a 50-year veteran Cantor, Ryan, and the rest of the leader- vania’s status as a perennial swing state is of Pennsylvania politics who represents ship have made similar statements. Why proclaimed. And then Pennsylvania votes upper Montgomery County in the state shouldn’t Romney? for the Democrat. There are millions of legislature. “Our overall unemployment

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has dropped, and it’s less than the national “In 2008 we were the second-most- average, but that’s only because of the advertised-to and third-most-visited state,” Marcellus Shale. If that weren’t in play at Madonna says. “And Romney’s coming Rodney King this point, we’d be up there, maybe higher through on this little bus, while his cam- than the national average.” His advice to paign has not spent a nickel on a commer- Remembered Romney: Keep hitting energy. “The EPA cial. The Obama campaign is spending, to is not friendly,” he says, “and people in the say nothing of the PACs. Romney has to Three myths about the beating that industry know that. This is going to be explain what he will do different from changed the world tougher for Obama than people think—it Obama and be more specific about what isn’t automatic.” Tom Smith, a coal-mine he’ll do. You can go a long way on just BY LOU CANNON operator from the western part of the state criticizing an incumbent during a reces- who is challenging Bob Casey Jr. for his sion. But, unlike Reagan, who had a full- FTER Rodney King drowned in Senate seat, has made federal energy reg- scale conservative platform, Romney’s a his backyard swimming pool ulation the centerpiece of his campaign. blank slate.” in the quiet suburban city of But it’s still an uphill fight for Romney. A Rialto, Calif., he was memor - Reagan also had a more conservative When Pennsylvania went for John F. electorate when he Godzilla’d his way ialized as a victim of police brutality. Kennedy in the presidential election of through Pennsylvania in 1980 and 1984. Every television viewer who saw the 1960, the Main Line went for Richard In subsequent years, the Philadelphia Left March 3, 1991, videotaped beating of Nixon two to one. Montgomery County, grew more militant and more effective, King by LAPD officers has a visual mem- once heralded by President Nixon as the which, along with a city wage tax and a ory of the incident—and memories, also, nation’s model Republican operation, crime problem, drove a great many urban of Los Angeles burning a year later after today has more registered Democrats than liberals out into the suburbs—where they the officers were acquitted by a jury in Republicans, as does neighboring Bucks promptly began voting for the same politi- suburban Simi Valley. Few know what County. Chester and Delaware counties cians and policies that rendered much of really happened. remain Republican, but are less robustly Philadelphia unlivable in the first place. In reporting King’s death at the age of so than in the past, and in the suburbs as a That along with a dose of blueblood dis- 47, the New York Times called him a whole there is less strong party identifica- dain for George W. Bush transformed the “symbol of the nation’s continuing racial tion and more independent voting behav- suburbs: Lower Merion, in which Dem - tensions.” The , which ior. ocrats had never controlled the local gov- in the wake of the beating called King an “It used to be the case that all you ernment, swung all the way over, and “African-American motorist,” with hind- needed was an ‘R.’ in back of your name,” Republicans now occupy a mere four of sight described him as a “drunk, unem- God shall says. “It was automatic.” In the 14 seats on the board of commission- ployed construction worker on parole Delaware County, legend had it that if you ers. They have lost control of the school [who] careened into the city’s conscious- weren’t registered as a Republican your board, too. The nearby town of Narberth ness in a white Hyundai.” The Reverend trash wouldn’t be picked up. That’s the elected the first Democratic mayor in its Al Sharpton said King was “a symbol of kind of clout that transcends local politics. history. To no one’s great surprise, Lower civil rights [who] represented the anti- “Philadelphia used to come out with a Merion school taxes doubled following police-brutality and anti-racial-profiling 250,000 Democratic majority in the pre - the Republicans’ collapse—in a township movement of our time.” All of these views sidential elections, but we could wipe in which nearly half of the children attend have something to recommend them. But that out in the suburbs,” Godshall recalls. private schools. Today the township of all of them also ignore—or actually per- “Today, it’s a little different.” Barack 57,000 has nearly a half-billion dollars in petuate—the many myths associated with Obama’s advantage over McCain in Phil - municipal debt including its residents’ the beating of King. adelphia in 2008 was nearly 500,000 share of county obligations. Republicans The overriding myth is that the officers votes, and the suburbs don’t hang together had a good year in 2010 in the Phila- made no attempt to take King into cus- politically any longer. Governor Corbett delphia suburbs, in part because of nation- tody peacefully and beat him with their lost Montgomery and Delaware counties al tea-party momentum but also because it heavy batons for no reason except that but won Bucks and Chester. Senator was the first election in which it became they were white and King was black. But Toomey split the counties and came out excruciatingly obvious even to wealthy there is no evidence in the audiotape that of the suburbs with a 22,000-vote deficit suburbanites that they were paying for the officers used any racial slur, and pros- that he made up in the Lehigh Valley and more local government than they could ecutors acknowledged in two criminal tri- elsewhere. afford. als that the officers made a considerable President Obama won those four coun- Like 2010, 2012 is going to be an elec- attempt—lasting more than eight min- ties by more than 200,000 votes in 2008 tion about what we can afford. Economic utes—to take King into custody without and is not taking them for granted this time stagnation is the headline issue, and the striking a blow. around: He has opened field offices left related question of burdensome govern- King was chased down by a husband- and right and already has aired two tele - ment debt and incontinent government and-wife California Highway Patrol team vision ads. Romney says he’s “all in” in spending is much on Americans’ minds. Pennsylvania, but it is not clear by “all in” That may not be enough to deliver Penn - Mr. Cannon is the author of Official he means what President Obama means sylvania to Mitt Romney, but it ought to be Negligence: How Rodney King and the by “all in.” enough to get him in the fight. Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

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after a 7.8-mile pursuit that reached a which King appeared to be attacking an that something else was at work. That speed of 115 mph on the freeway and officer. Unfortunately, Holliday’s footage something was the unedited videotape, 85 mph on city streets. When the chase of King’s charge was blurry. which jurors were seeing for the first time. ended, an obviously intoxicated King Myth No. 2 about the King beating was Prosecutors often present evidence that mocked Officer Melanie Singer and ig - that it was shown repeatedly on televi- could be damaging to their case before nored her order to exit his car and put his sion. In fact, only part of it was shown, the defense can, so they can put their own hands behind his back. Singer advanced and this part omitted the blurred footage. spin on it. At Simi Valley, prosecutors on King with pistol drawn—a practice that Holliday, who was not at all political, showed the unedited videotape in their the LAPD prohibits because of the danger called a police station to tell them about opening statement and bluntly admitted that the weapon could be knocked out of his tape. The desk officer brushed him to the jurors that King had set off the beat - the officer’s hand. LAPD sergeant Stacey off. Holliday took the tape to KTLA, his ing by charging an officer. I watched the Koon waved Singer off and instructed two favorite local station, which accepted it jurors as they saw the unedited tape. They other LAPD officers to jump on King and but was in no hurry to air it. The station were aghast. Three jurors told me after the handcuff him. King threw them off his manager showed it to the LAPD to deter- trial that they had suspected there was back. Koon then fired two electronic darts mine that it was not a hoax. A producer more to the videotape than they had seen from his stun gun at King. Each dart deliv- then edited out the blurry footage and on television. ers 50,000 volts of electricity and immobi- aired the remainder of the tape the next This isn’t to say there were no problems lizes most people. King fell to the ground day in a news program. An 81-second with holding the trial in Simi Valley, a popular bedroom community for police officers. Legal experts generally agree that the trial should not have been held there. The defense attorneys were pleas- antly surprised when an appeals court, defying precedents, granted the change of venue they had sought. The chief judge of this court told me ruefully after the riots that she had feared the trial and its media coverage might fan political passions in Los Angeles, where Mayor Tom Bradley and police chief Daryl Gates were en - gaged in a feud while the city simmered. Stanley Weisberg, the trial-court judge to whom the case had been assigned, com- plied with the appellate ruling by deciding to hold the trial in Ventura County, which had a new courthouse in Simi Valley with- Rodney King in 1992 in easy driving distance of his home. after being hit but clambered to his feet videotape, the only record of an arrest that Though the appeals court had specifically immediately and advanced on one of the had taken more than nine minutes, had ordered that the trial be moved outside of officers. His behavior convinced Koon become a 68-second videotape. The an - the L.A. media market, residents of Simi that he probably had been using the drug nouncer did not pass judgment on the offi- Valley watch the same television news PCP, though he had not been. cers but also did not mention that the tape and read the same newspapers as resi- Most of what the world knows about was partial. dents of Los Angeles. the King beating occurred after these I’m convinced from interviews I con- Weisberg did take one action that could events. George Holliday, the manager of ducted that KTLA, which was not hostile have helped the police contain the rioting. a small plumbing company, had been to the LAPD, made the edits for technical He gave the contending attorneys and the asleep in an apartment across the street reasons. The producer abhorred blurry LAPD a two-hour warning once the jury from where the officers were trying to footage—so much, said one technician, had reached its decision before allowing arrest King. He was awakened by the that he would probably have resisted the verdicts to be announced in court. But noise of sirens and a police helicopter. showing the first moon landing. KTLA the LAPD wasted these two hours. The Holliday was the proud owner of a brand shared the edited tape with other stations. underlying reason for their inaction was new Sony camcorder. He went to his bal- Most of these stations, and their networks, that Los Angeles authorities, beginning cony, saw the police cars across the street, used the tape without even knowing of the with Gates and Bradley, were certain that and began videotaping. But he was still cuts. all or some of the four officers would be learning to use the camcorder, which he Myth No. 3 is that the officers were convicted. NEWSCOM / steadied just as King, back on his feet, ran acquitted in police-friendly Simi Valley With the police unprepared, the worst GETTY / toward Officer Laurence Powell, who because of the composition of the jury, elements in South Los Angeles took over, AFP / swung wildly with his baton and struck which contained no black Americans. burning and looting to an extent unimag- King in the face. It was the first of 55 The jury was conservative, to be sure, ined during the 1965 Watts riots. Swaths

ROBERT SULLIVAN baton blows, but the only one before but my interviews with the jurors suggest of the city were set on fire, with the dam-

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age amounting to more than a billion dol- experimental predecessor, the YF-12, lars. worse, 55 people lost their lives and which was developed as an interceptor. another 2,000 were injured. at the height Stepping and because of various truths of physics of the riots, which began on april 29, having to do with parabolas, friction, and 1992, and lasted a week, rodney King In It gravity, it is highly unlikely to have ever made a tearful appearance in which he happened at all. pleaded: “Can we all get along?” The Does technology make a post-bulls**t I was called out on my bulls**t, respec- National Guard was deployed in force. world possible—or desirable? tively, by a guy in my fantasy-baseball President George H. w. Bush, trying to league, a girl at a party worrying over an calm the mobs, pledged “justice” in Los BY DANIEL FOSTER extra pound, and a friend with whom I was angeles. His promise led to a second trial marveling over the unrivaled badassery of of the officers, on charges of having vio- oward the end of this piece, I the american war machine. of course, lated King’s civil rights. Koon and Powell am going to make a dry but none of these inquisitors embarrassed me were convicted and sent to prison, and the mercifully brief argument for a unaided. To a one, each expressed an ini- other two officers were again acquitted. T corollary of technological neu- tial dubiousness about the proposition Looking back on these events, many tralism I arrogantly (and probably un - I’d just put forth and turned to his or her commentators have criticized the Simi justifiably) dub “Foster’s Corollary.” hip pocket for adjudication in the form of Valley jury and praised the federal jury in Viz., contra the optimists who think the the dread “smartphone.” Sixty years after Los angeles. In truth, the context of both Information revolution is ushering in a computer scientists and futurists started trials was disturbing. during the second new era of truth and transparency, notably writing about “cybernetics” and the possi- trial, Southern California feared there in politics, there is no new mode of infor- bility of “intelligence amplification” by would be another riot if the officers were mation dissemination that isn’t also a wedding human minds to information again acquitted. This fear seeped into the mode of information dissimulation. technology, here we were, my every anec- jury room. The foreman of this se ques- But before I do that, a few fun bits of dote questioned by a species of skeptical tered jury would look out on the city from trivia: Borg fact-checking me with their iPhones. his hotel room. once he quipped to a fel- did you know that the only major- when it comes to making friends at a low juror that at least the city wasn’t burn- league catcher ever to have a 30/30 cocktail party, the ability to remember (or ing yet. season—30 home runs and 30 stolen misremember) trivia like this is as valuable after the federal trial, a third trial was bases—was Iván “Pudge” rodríguez, as wearing a Purple Heart on your lapel. at held, this a civil affair that awarded who did it in the early aughts as a de - least it used to be until al Gore invented the rodney King $3.8 million in damages troit Tiger? Internet and Steve Jobs shrunk it to the size while absolving the individual officers of did you know that Marilyn Monroe, of a pack of cigarettes and issued it to every responsibility for his injuries. King was perennial paragon of american pulchri- man, woman, and child on the face of the wealthy for the rest of his short life, but he tude, tipped the scales at about a buck fifty Earth. Now the most casual of conversa- was not a happy man. He was repeatedly and wore a size-16 dress? tions stands in danger of derailment by any arrested, usually for drunk driving but did you know that, during develop- amateur sleuth with opposable thumbs. also for domestic violence. Twice he was ment, Lockheed test-mounted a 20mm (and I don’t think I’m the only victim here: sent briefly to rehabilitation facilities for cannon on the Sr-71 Blackbird but had to The top auto-complete for a Google search parole violations, but he was not charged scrap the idea after the Mach 3+ spy plane that begins “what size . . .” is “. . . was with crimes. No one in Los angeles had caught up to and was struck by its own Marilyn Monroe.”) the stomach for another rodney King rounds? But does the fact that my anecdotes case. Bet you didn’t know any of those turned out to be bulls**t mean I was lying I interviewed King and found him things. and neither, as it turns out, did I, when I relayed them? Hardly. I wouldn’t likeable and sympathetic. That’s the way because none of them is true. have put any of those statements into a he usually was when he was sober. It was More precisely, each of them is sworn affidavit, but I wasn’t cutting them another story when he was under the bulls**t: Pudge rodríguez is the only from whole cloth, either. and in any event, influence of drugs or alcohol, as he was catcher ever to have a 20/20 season, and he my intention was never to mislead. It was much of his life. did it in his 1999 MVP campaign while merely to demonstrate that I was an inter- King was a human being who had a still a Texas ranger. Marilyn Monroe esting person with something to add to poor start and did not deal well with his weighed anywhere from 118 to 140 the conversation. demons. He seemed on the brink of hap- pounds, and at her buxomest would This is the essence of the bulls**tter, piness last year, when he became engaged have probably worn a size 10, had not and what separates him from the liar. The to Cynthia Kelley, the forewoman of the nearly all of her clothes been custom- liar, like the truth-teller, is concerned with civil jury that awarded him damages. made. (a pause, here, of appreciation: Per what is the case: Specifically, he is con- Kelley was skillful in bringing a jury the records of Marilyn’s dressmaker, she cerned with conveying its opposite. But together but an admittedly poor swimmer. stood five-foot-five-and-a-half, and mea- the bulls**tter doesn’t care about the truth when she found King at the bottom of his sured a Platonic 36-22-36, the kind of fig- one way or the other. His intention isn’t to pool at 5 a.M., she did not dive in but ure you could set your hourglass by.) The make you believe something about the instead called 911. By the time the medics tall tale of the overtaken bullets is told not world, it’s to make you believe something arrived, King was dead. of the (unarmed) Blackbird, but of its about him—that he is charming or trust-

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That identity politics is as festooned with bulls**t as a cow pasture in the full ardor of spring wouldn’t be so bad if iden- tity politics weren’t also a powerful cur- rency. I’m not referring just to the material benefits, in the form of professional dis- tinction and book sales, respectively, that the successful marketing of Warren’s and Obama’s self-conceptions has accrued. Rather I have in mind things like the clas- sic bulls**t move of calling a piece of legislation primarily about tort law the “Paycheck Fairness Act” and implying that it would somehow make it more ille- gal than it currently is for employers to discriminate against women in the work- place. Or the tortured bulls**ttery of what was billed as the president’s “reversal” on gay marriage. (Any statement that begins Wore a size 16? Nope. with “At a certain point, I’ve just conclud- worthy, worthy or wise—and his method Bulls**t at its best is creative, engaging, ed that for me personally it is important for is not deception but rather the stitching of a means of enlivening and, as it were, fer- me to go ahead and affirm that I think . . .” a rich tapestry of guesstimation, rumor, tilizing human interaction—as harmless probably isn’t oriented toward truth.) embellishment, urban legend, and half- as telling a joke in the first person. And in Politics as a whole is lousy with remembered factoids. everything from small talk and first-date bulls**t, but what makes these avowals of That bulls**t is intentional (that a state- banter to diplomacy and the parenting of a identity politics the merde de la merde is ment qualifies as bulls**t not just by virtue young child, we see the manifold ways in that they are so blatantly intended to affect of its content but also by virtue of the state which bulls**t can soften a reality with a an audience’s beliefs not about the world of mind of its utterer), and that it falls short lot of sharp edges. In all these respects the but about the speaker—to demonstrate of full-blown lying, are features first iden- reign of bulls**t has been a happy one, that the speaker is worldly or subaltern, tified by the Princeton philosopher Harry and its rude interruption by the know-it- that he cares deeply about women or gays, Frankfurt in a 1986 essay entitled, simply alls with the 4G connections is a mixed etc.—which, you will recall, is the prima- enough, “On Bullshit.” bag at best. ry motive of the bulls**tter. At the same Frankfurt also captured that which But while our “intelligence amplifica- time, there is nothing especially notable makes bulls**t distinct from proffered tion” may be firming up the rule of brute about these examples save their recent- synonyms such as “balderdash,” “clap- facts—the sorts of things you can look up ness. And though I write this, as it were, trap,” “hokum,” “drivel,” “imposture,” and in indexes and almanacs—at cocktail par- from right to left, there are undoubtedly “quackery.” “Balderdash” suggests inco- ties, there remains another, more perni- countless examples of similar phenomena herence, “claptrap” and “hokum” the dust cious species of bulls**t, which proves among conservatives. Everybody poops. of ancient superstitions. “Drivel” implies even more resistant to technological miti- None of this is going to be sorted out triviality, and “imposture” and “quackery” gation. You won’t be surprised to hear that with an iPhone, or a Wikipedia entry, or are hallmarks of the confidence man. we find it in public affairs, and especially the gimmicky “Truth-o-Meter” of some Ordinary bulls**t is both more innocuous under the heading of “identity politics.” fact-checking website. That’s because than all that and far more pervasive. Exhibit A is Elizabeth Warren, who has there is no new mode of information dis- By way of example, Frankfurt serves up been able to withstand a barrage of doc- semination that isn’t also a mode of infor- the concept of the bull session: a group— umentary evidence casting doubt on her mation dissimulation. There is nothing, in usually male, usually sequestered—en - claim to be part American Indian by the relevant aspects, about the Internet that gaged in noncommittal talk, often about anchoring that claim not in genealogical makes it any different from Gutenberg’s sensitive subjects such as politics, religion, fact but in family lore—in other words, by printing press, which was after all every and sex. Think lager-toting dads of in - answering the charge that her Cherokee bit as useful to propagandists as it was to determinate politics gathered around a identification is probably false with the truth-seekers. Technology is bulls**t- charcoal grill to diagnose the country’s tacit admission that it is definitely neutral. Lo, so many paragraphs ago I problems. The point of thus “shooting the bulls**t. Exhibit B is President Obama, tentatively dubbed this thesis “Foster’s bull” is not, on Frankfurt’s analysis, to who did us the favor of admitting up front Corollary,” a name I’ll continue to use offer sincere avowals or considered be- that his 1995 autobiography is, at least in until some nerd with a BlackBerry points liefs, but to test-drive various thoughts and part, bulls**t, but who has managed to to an earlier elucidation of the same con- CORBIS / attitudes without committing to them, to escape focused interrogation on this point cept. feel out social boundaries and identify eight years into his public life and three- Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going potential commonalities and differences, plus years into his tenure as leader of the to go edit the Wikipedia entry on Iván

SUNSET BOULEVARD and above all to make conversation. free world. Rodríguez.

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You deserve a factual look at . . .            !

Arab Christianity, for centuries a dominant force in Middle East culture, religion and politics, now faces extinction in nearly every country in the region. Discrimination and persecution by Muslim governments, as well as murderous attacks by Islamic extremists, are driving Christians from their homelands by the millions. In fact, the only country in the Middle East in which Christians are safe—and where their numbers are growing—is Israel.  Muslims, Iraqi Christians live in deathly fear and must pray in The Middle East now has the fewest number of Christians and private. They now account for 40% of ’s refugees. the smallest share of the population that is Christian of any major Syria. While Syria’s one million Christians enjoyed some geographic region. A review of the deadly treatment faced by stability under the Assad regimes, civil unrest has now caused the Christians in nearly every Middle East nation reveals the reasons country’s Christians to fear for their lives. Indeed, some 100 why: Christians have been killed and many kidnapped since the unrest . Coptic Christians have lived in Egypt since 451 C.E. and began. Islamic militants have begun the ethnic cleansing of now number 5-8 million. But for decades they have suffered Christians in the Syrian city of Homs, and at least 90% of church burnings and murder at the Christians living there—as many as hands of radical Muslims who want Murderous attacks by Islamic 50,000 people—have been driven from Egypt free of religious minorities. their homes, according to the Dutch aid Under President Mubarak the military extremists are driving Christians from group, Church in Need. protected Christians and jailed their homelands by the millions. West Bank and Gaza. Since the extremists, but since Mubarak’s Islamic terrorist group Hamas violently overthrow attacks by Muslim radicals have increased, and the seized Gaza in 2007, half its tiny Christian community has fled. military has refused to make arrests. On New Year’s Day 2011, 21 Crucifixes and Christmas decorations are forbidden. Following a Christians were slaughtered and 79 were injured; during a protest December 2010 exhortation by Hamas officials to murder in Cairo, 27 were killed and 300 injured by Egyptian police. An Christians, Rami Ayyad, the owner of Gaza’s only Christian estimated 100,000 Copts have recently fled the country. bookstore was killed and his store torched. In the West Bank, the Iran. Under Iran’s ultra-conservative theocracy, it’s practically Christian population has plummeted as well, decreasing from 15% against the law to be Christian. In recent years, hundreds of of the population in 1950 to less than 2% now—only about 60,000 evangelical Christians have been arrested for “crimes against the souls. Before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Ramallah’s order,” including Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was condemned population was 90% Christian and Bethlehem’s was 80%. Today, to death because he refused to renounce his faith. Likewise, a Ramallah and Bethlehem are largely Islamic cities. After the Christian convert who started a “house church” was recently Palestinian Authority took over Bethlehem in 1995, Palestinian sentenced to two years in prison for “anti-Islamic propaganda.” gunmen attacked Christian homes and in 2002 seized and defiled Saudi Arabia. In Wahabist Saudi Arabia, Christian prayer, even in the Church of the Nativity. Today, Christians make up only a fifth private, is against the law—as is importing a Bible. Recently of the city’s population. officials strip-searched 29 Christian women and assaulted six Israel. During Jordan’s occupation of Jerusalem, from 1948 to Christian men after arresting them for holding a private prayer 1967, the city’s Christian population shrank by 50% to only meeting. They’ve had no trial and remain imprisoned with no 12,646. Today, under Israeli rule, that Christian community is word on their fate. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz growing, as is Israel’s entire Christian population—up bin Abdullah, recently decreed that it is “necessary to destroy all dramatically since 1948 to 154,000, about 2% of Israel’s total the churches of the region,” referring to the entire Arabian population. Christians serve in Israel’s legislative Knesset, its Peninsula. foreign ministry and on its Supreme Court. Israeli Arab Christians Iraq. Iraq’s Christian population, which once numbered 1.5 are on average extremely well educated and relatively affluent. In million, has shrunk to less than 250,000. No wonder: In the wake of short, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christians church burnings, kidnappings and the slaughter of Christians by feel safe and can flourish. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, holds that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Yet discrimination directed at Christians—as well as murder and ethnic cleansing—have always been a threat in the Arab Muslim world. It’s time our media stop whitewashing “clashes between Muslims and Christians” and start honestly reporting the outright ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities by Muslim radicals. It’s also time U.S. legislators start denying financial aid to Middle East nations that refuse to halt state-sponsored bias and Muslim violence against Christians.

This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your tax- Facts and Logic About the Middle East deductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals P.O. Box 590359 , CA 94159 and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational Gerardo Joffe, President work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail. 133 To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 6/19/2012 10:16 PM Page 28

Sex and the Social Scientist Will the Left debate marriage honestly?

BY RAMESH PONNURU

cIence has spoken: That’s what judges, professional accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psy- associations, and journalists have said about the effects chology.” on children of being raised by same-sex couples. It Social Science Research, an academic journal, has now quite S turns out, though, that science spoke with unwarranted effectively demonstrated that the debate is alive and well. Its July certainty. 2012 edition includes two papers by sociologists that explode the In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued bien-pensant consensus. The first, by Loren Marks of Louisiana a statement saying that “the evidence to date suggests that home State University, criticizes the body of research purporting to environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as demonstrate that children of same-sex couples do just as well as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable chil- other children. The second, by Mark Regnerus of the University dren’s psychosocial growth.” There was “not a single study” to of Texas, provides new evidence that they do not. Along with find the children of gay and lesbian parents “to be disadvantaged these papers the journal has published critical comments and the in any significant respect.” authors’ responses. The chief justice of the Iowa supreme court, throwing out the Marks zeroes in on the APA’s 2005 statement, finding it to be state’s law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, “not empirically warranted.” The APA cited 59 published studies: relied on the same evidence. He wrote that “sexual orientation an impressive number masking the non-definitiveness of each and gender have no effect on children raised by same-sex couples, one. More than three-quarters of the studies, Marks points out, and same-sex couples can raise children as well as opposite-sex “are based on small, non-representative, convenience samples of couples.” The view that children need a mother and a father is fewer than 100 participants.” Twenty-six of the studies used no “largely unsupported by reliable scientific studies.” heterosexual comparison groups. Of the 33 remaining studies, 13 Federal judge Vaughn Walker produced a similar, but even compared same-sex couples with single parents as child-rearers. more confident, “finding of fact” in the course of throwing out Few of the studies examined the children’s rates of criminality, a california voter initiative codifying the standard definition of drug abuse, or suicide. Almost none of them looked at outcomes marriage: “children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely for older adolescents or young adults who were raised by same- as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, success- sex couples. Marks notes, finally, that none of the 59 studies had

ful and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is statistical power: That is, they stood a significant chance of failing DARREN GYGI

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to find differences between populations even when they existed. shows that young adults who had parents in same-sex relation- Marks’s conclusion: “Not one of the 59 studies referenced . . . ships did worse, on average, than other young adults across a compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay range of variables. He does not show, or attempt to show, that parents and their children with a large, random, representative they had these worse outcomes because they had gay parents. He sample of married parents and their children.” suggests, in his response to his academic commenters, that his Regnerus’s research, funded by two conservative nonprofits main finding seems to be the superiority of the intact biological (the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation), avoided family compared with all tested alternatives. He suggests further many of the flaws of these earlier studies. It examined a large, ran- that household instability may play the leading causal role in dom sample of young American adults. It used intact biological generating divergent outcomes. It may be, that is, that the chief families as a comparison group. And it checked outcomes such as advantage of biological families over those with parents who rates of crime, sexually transmitted infections, and drug abuse. had been in same-sex relationships was the greater stability of the The chief limitation of the study—the one that its critics have former. seized on—is that not many same-sex couples have been raising These qualifications did not spare Regnerus a ferocious re - children continuously. Regnerus therefore grouped together peo- action from liberals. Four gay-rights groups issued a joint press ple who reported that they had a parent who had been involved in release trashing his study as “a flawed, misleading, and scientifi- one or more same-sex relationships. cally unsound paper that seeks to disparage lesbian and gay par- The results were depressing. Young adults who reported that ents.” Evan Wolfson, the head of one of those groups, Freedom to their fathers had had same-sex relationships were more likely than Marry, added, “The 2 million kids being raised by 1 million gay any of the other groups studied to be involved in crime; those who parents in this country are doing great, and would do even better said their mothers had had such relationships were second most if their parents didn’t have to deal with legal discrimination such likely. Those who had lesbian mothers (defined, again, as mothers as the denial of the freedom to marry, and ongoing attacks such as who had had same-sex relationships) were almost four times more this kind of pseudo-scientific misinformation and the disinforma- likely than those raised by still-married biological parents to be on tion agenda that’s funding it.” public assistance. They were more likely to receive such assis- Liberal journalists had similar reactions. An article by E. J. tance even than people who had been raised by single parents. Graff in The American Prospect denounced the study as “dan- Regnerus suggests that his main finding seems to be the superiority of the intact biological family compared with all tested alternatives.

They were, not surprisingly given that result, also the group gerous” (three times). She wrote that the social conservatism of most likely to be unemployed. They had the lowest educational- Regnerus and his funders “tells all you need to know about attainment level of any of the groups. Regnerus’s motivations,” and concluded that “Slate’s editors Young adults with gay fathers were five times as likely as those should be ashamed” of having let Regnerus summarize the study raised by their biological parents to report having recently had in an article for it. Molly Redden asked in : suicidal thoughts; those with lesbian mothers were more than “Will this embarrassing piece of statistical acrobatics mark the twice as likely. Rates of sexually transmitted infections were beginning of the end of Mark Regnerus’s credibility with re - much higher for those with gay or lesbian parents. Those with spectable news outlets?” Her answer: “Here’s hoping that more lesbian mothers reported that as children they were touched sex- news outlets will decide that his isn’t a voice we need at all.” ually by adults at a rate more than 11 times as high as the rate These hyperbolic reactions are in marked contrast to those of among those raised by their biological parents—and a rate almost the academic specialists who commented on the Regnerus study. twice as high as that of the next-highest group, those raised in Paul Amato, a professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State stepfamilies. They also reported the highest rate of any group for University, made it clear where his sympathies lie, writing, “It being forced to have sex against their will. Those with gay fathers would be unfortunate if the findings from the Regnerus study ranked second. As usual, children raised by their biological par- were used to undermine the social progress that has been made in ents had the best statistics. recent decades in protecting the rights of gays, lesbians, and their The emotional outcomes followed the same pattern. Those with children.” He makes several arguments against the idea that this lesbian mothers reported having felt the lowest degree of safety as research undermines the case for same-sex marriage. He does children; those with gay fathers were the next-lowest. Kids raised not, however, dismiss the work as pseudoscience, instead calling by gay or lesbian parents grew up to have the highest rates of de - it “probably the best that we can hope for, at least in the near pression of all of the groups. People who had gay fathers reported future.” the lowest levels of satisfaction with their current romantic rela- Cynthia Osborne, a professor of public affairs at the University tionships. People with lesbian mothers reported a rate of infidel ity of Texas, also cautions against basing marriage policy on the in their current relationships three times higher than that of people Regnerus study, but she nonetheless allows that it “is more scien- raised by still-married biological parents. tifically rigorous than most of the other studies in this area.” The Regnerus notes that his findings do not establish causality. He Marks and Regnerus papers, she writes, “push forward the field of

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family studies.” activists and journalists who favor same-sex marriage may hate the Regnerus study, but academics in the field, regardless of their views on marriage, have been taking it seriously. Questions on The research cannot settle the argument over same-sex mar- riage and does not purport to do so. Consider the argument of william Saletan, a writer for Slate who supports same-sex mar- Taiwan riage. He has been an honorable exception among liberal journal- ists in attempting to learn from the study rather than bury it. He The wonderfulness and anxiety of suggests that the poor outcomes associated with parents in same- sex relationships are the result of the instability that those of their a little-known country households in the study tended to exhibit. increasingly positive social attitudes about same-sex parents, BY JAY NORDLINGER and improvements in their legal status, might yield greater stabil- ity in the future. The kids being raised today by same-sex parents Taipei, Taiwan might thus have better outcomes—and the ones who will be raised aiwan is one of the most admirable countries in the tomorrow might have better ones still if governments agree to world, but that does not mean it is a well-known coun- recognize same-sex marriages. One counterargument to Saletan’s try. Say “Taiwan” to people, and they might well thesis, though, can also find support in the data: Outcomes did T respond, “Thailand?” Taiwanese diplomats in the west not appear to vary based on the “gay-friendliness” of the state in hear this all the time. Their country, however, is a model. it left which the children of gay men and lesbians were raised. behind dictatorship to become a liberal democracy, with a free Other supporters of same-sex marriage might argue thus: economy, flourishing. a Chinese dissident i know says Taiwan Recognition of same-sex marriage will not increase the number of is his “favorite place.” if Taiwan can have freedom of expres- kids being raised by same-sex couples, but it will confer social sion, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, an independent and legal benefits on those kids. Or: Refusing to recognize same- judiciary, the rule of law, multiparty elections, rotation in office, sex marriage is unjust discrimination regardless of the statistics. human rights—why not China? Osborne notes that we do not outlaw large families just because i have called Taiwan a “country,” but this is a fighting word studies find that they fare worse than smaller ones in some to some. it is definitely a fighting word to China’s ruling respects. amato concurs, writing that “too much attention” has Communists. To them, Taiwan is a Chinese island, a renegade been given to social science in the litigation over same-sex mar- province, to be brought to heel sooner or later, in some manner. riage. Chen-Shen Yen, a Taiwanese political scientist, sometimes Perhaps so. Yet there is no denying that the Regnerus and Marks appears on Chinese television. when he refers to Taiwan’s papers strengthen the case against same-sex marriage. if they are leader as “President Ma,” the Chinese censor beeps out the word treated with the seriousness they deserve, they especially strength- “President.” This word carries the unfortunate connotation of en the case against judges’ declaring same-sex marriage constitu- Taiwanese sovereignty, or nationhood. tionally mandatory. Judges cited the studies purporting to show Most of the people i encounter, here in Taiwan, consider that on average same-sex couples raise children just as well as Taiwan a “country” or “nation.” Some are startled that the ques- other parents in order to claim that legislators were not just wrong tion is even asked. Some will tell you that “Taiwan” is merely a to distinguish between such couples and marriages but had no geographical label—a word denoting an island. “The country is rational basis for doing so. Judges have found laws defining mar- the Republic of China.” Others like the idea of Taiwan, or riage as the union of a man and a woman unconstitutional on Taiwanness—and they dream of a Republic of Taiwan, inde- the theory that they discriminate against same-sex couples for no pendent of the “People’s Republic.” rational reason. That case just got harder to make, and it will get in her excellent book Why Taiwan Matters, Shelley Rigger, an harder still if other studies replicate Regnerus’s results. american professor, reports an interesting story. There is a web The liberal reaction to Regnerus has, for the most part, exhib- game called “ClickClickClick.” You click on a button, and this ited a kind of intolerance and closed-mindedness that can only action registers a click for your country. The country with the impede the pursuit of knowledge. (The liberal reaction to most clicks, in a set period, wins. in 2007, this game swept Marks—silence—has not been much better.) Recall that Evan Taiwan—and Taiwan, an island with 23 million people, won. wolfson, the activist, said that the 2 million children being This suggests a certain hunger for nationhood, or international raised by same-sex couples are doing great. all of them? How recognition, or something. does he know? That it might be politically advantageous, emo- One of the commonest questions here is, “Do you feel tionally satisfying, or intellectually convenient to suppose some- Taiwanese, or Chinese, or both?” Journalists have asked it, thing is so does not mean that it is so in reality, or that those who and pollsters have asked it, for years. a person’s answer deny that it is so should be shouted down. Liberalism has been depends on his family background, his own experience, his growing increasingly committed to the cause of same-sex mar- politics, his emotions—many things. One answer i hear a lot riage, and that trend seems certain to continue. it matters a great is, “i used to feel both Taiwanese and Chinese, but now i’m deal whether it will be committed to it in an increasingly illiber- feeling more and more Taiwanese.” Polls show that this is a al way. The Regnerus study may end up being even more im - national trend. Two decades ago, about a quarter of people portant for the future of intellectual inquiry than for the future considered themselves Chinese; now that number is maybe 5 of marriage. percent. Thirty percent considered themselves Taiwanese;

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now that number is around 50. A Taiwanese consciousness is about an hour and a half. There is a stream of Chinese tourists to being shaped. Taiwan. The PRC places restrictions on who can come—not just What almost everyone shares is resentment at being excluded any citizen of the People’s Republic can up and visit Taiwan— from international organizations. The word “isolated,” we might but plenty do (more than a million last year). reflect, comes from “island.” Taiwan is denied a seat at the U.N., By many accounts, the favorite activity of Chinese tourists of course. It cannot even get observer status, such as the PLO here is TV-watching. They stay in their hotel rooms, glued to the has. More amazingly, Taiwanese journalists can’t get credentials political talk shows. They marvel at the robust, sometimes wild to cover the U.N. China will not permit it—or, more accurately, back-and-forth. They see the government criticized, examined, the world’s countries permit China not to permit it. Taiwan slammed. This is something alien to their experience. Visiting would like access to the most modest and uncontroversial of the Taiwanese capital’s great skyscraper, Taipei 101, they see bodies, such as the International Civil Aviation Organization. practitioners, protesting the PRC’s persecution of But China and the world say no. Taiwan is allowed to compete their fellows. This, too, is alien. in the Olympics under the awkward name “Chinese Taipei.” Obviously, there are benefits to closer, warmer cross-strait Taiwanese womanhood is allowed to compete in beauty pa - relations. Taiwan can exercise its “soft power,” as an official geants under the same name. Otherwise ...not much. tells me. Chinese can get to know Taiwan, find out about a dif- As Chong-Pin Lin, another political scientist here, says, ferent way of life. Most important, the risk of war is reduced. But China is bent on “the strangulation of our international space.” there is a negative side to closer, warmer relations. “Absorption” The PRC wants Taiwan to be a nonentity—a non- person, so is another byword, or buzzword. Will the PRC absorb Taiwan? to speak—in the world. (By the way, Lin is a protégé of Jeane Kirk - Lin notes that “buying Taiwan is cheaper than attacking it.” patrick.) Diane Ying, the founder and publisher of Common - Take the case of A-mei, Taiwan’s most popular singer. She Wealth magazine, says that Taiwanese businessmen may well sang the national anthem at the 2000 inauguration of President have a better acquaintance of the world than do Taiwanese gov- Chen Shui-bian, of the DPP. China banned her for more than a ernment officials. They have more contacts, more opportunities. year. Coca-Cola, in the finest tradition of American capitalism, They’re apt to look down on government officials, whereas dropped her as a spokesman. Other entertainers in Taiwan got before it was the other way around. the message, loud and clear. Patriotism is well and good, but I ask many Taiwanese what they would have America do for who wants to be stuck in Taiwan’s market of 23 million, when them. Almost uniformly, they answer, “Help us get into interna- there’s China’s market of a billion-plus? tional organizations. Decrease our isolation in the world. Allow A great many are concerned about the compromising of us to develop and participate like a normal country.” (The other Taiwan’s media. The independent media have been a jewel in help they desire: advanced F-16 fighter jets.) Taiwan’s crown, since the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s. Though they may long for international recognition, and some- But China throws its weight and money around, and both are thing like normality, Taiwanese do not necessarily long for inde- considerable. Recently, a TV-station owner wanted to expand pendence. Or rather, they are unwilling to declare independence into China (or so the story goes). He fired one of his talk-show if it will mean a Chinese attack. “Status quo” is a byword on this hosts, who was strongly critical of the PRC and in favor of Tai- island. People are content with the way things are, for the fore- wanese independence. This was a gesture of goodwill to Beijing. seeable future. Better to live in a kind of limbo—“What are There is also the danger of self-censorship. Say you’re a we?”—than to risk losing the current freedom. We cannot predict Taiwanese news outlet, eyeing Chinese ad dollars. You think the course of . There may come a day when the you might pull some punches? Taiwanese feel impelled to “assume among the powers of the One outlet that is not much for punch-pulling is the Apple earth” the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature Daily, in whose lobby sits a bust of Hayek. That lets you know and of Nature’s God entitle them.” But that day is not at hand. where its sympathies lie. (Beneath the bust is a quotation from the great economist’s Nobel lecture: “The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the He terms “Left” and “Right” don’t make much sense in student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him Taiwanese politics. But “Blue” and “Green” do. The Blues against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to con- T are the Kuomintang (KMT), now in power, and the Greens trol society.”) The paper’s editor, Wei-Min Ma, confirms some- are the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The former is more thing I have already heard: As planes from Taiwan land in China, unification-minded—certainly more cautious, where China flight attendants warn passengers to leave their copies of the is concerned—and the latter is more independence-minded. Apple Daily behind. PRC authorities would not be happy to see Whoever is in power, “the government must walk a tightrope,” them. as Mab Huang says. (He too is a political scientist, once a stu- In any case, Taiwan can set an example, a democratic exam- dent of and Friedrich Hayek.) The government must ple, for China. Professor Yen says that the more sophisticated keep China at bay, clutch it close, assert Taiwan’s rights, not be Chinese tell him, “You need to remain outside China for a while, too loud about it, satisfy the United States—walk a tightrope to push us for democratic reform. If you become part of China, while juggling guavas. like Hong Kong, there will be no incentive for us to reform.” The Since 2008, Taiwan and the PRC have signed 16 agreements above-mentioned Taiwanese official, who is involved in cross- with each other. These agreements concern such matters as trade strait relations, says, “We can show them three things: that and travel. In previous times, you couldn’t fly directly from democracy is possible in Chinese culture; that democratization Taipei to, say, Shanghai. You had to go in a roundabout way— and economic growth can go hand in hand; and that democracy via Hong Kong, for example. But now you can fly directly, in need not mean chaos.”

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Taipei 101

hERE was a time, says Yen, when many Taiwanese emi- United States. Yes, we share political values, such as democracy, grated, leaving their homeland for the United States, capitalism, and human rights. But Taiwan means something to T Canada, Australia (all “Anglospheric” countries, interest- the U.S. strategically too.” The Apple Daily’s Ma says that Tai - ingly enough). But emigration has greatly slowed. Why? One wanese have the feeling that their country is just a pawn, a pawn reason, says Yen, is that there is less fear of a military confronta- in a grand game of East Asian chess, played by others. But tion with China. People are breathing easier. I can’t help thinking Americans might remember something, he says: “Taiwan is as of what some Israelis say: If the Iranians acquire nuclear pro-American a country as there is. We are your friends. Taiwan weapons, they don’t really have to use them to wreck Israel. The is a model for China, and if China becomes democratic, that will psychological effect will be devastating. People will stop com- be a great benefit to the United States. So, for more than one rea- ing, and will leave. son: Don’t abandon us.” Yen says that Taiwan is something like Georgia, the ex–Soviet has said that Israel’s survival depends republic: close to its adversary and far from its help. he jokes that on two things: the will of the people to live and the support of the Taiwan should trade places with Cuba: It would be cozy to the United States. Some Taiwanese tell me that their own country’s United States, and thousands of miles from the PRC. Plus, “we survival, as a liberal democracy, depends on the support of the have similar weather, we both love baseball.” United States. The Taiwanese certainly have a will to live: Taipei Taiwanese may fear war less, but the PRC still has 1,500 mis- is one of the most vibrant cities you will ever see. There are im - siles pointed at them. That concentrates the mind, and hurts the portant differences between Taiwan and Israel, not least in mili- heart. There are Taiwanese who are deeply resentful of those mis- tary standing: Israel is stronger against its (many) enemies than siles pointed at them, by their “brother Chinese.” The question of Taiwan is against China. But the similarities are worth pondering. the United States and its support of Taiwan is a sensitive and Both countries wish for normality in a world that won’t give it important one here. For decades, the U.S. has followed a policy of to them. Both countries find themselves isolated in the “world “strategic ambiguity”: “Will we or won’t we?” Will the United community.” There are American scholars and analysts who States come to Taiwan’s defense, in the event of a Chinese attack, say—not so bluntly, of course—“Let’s throw Taiwan to the or not? Early in his presidency—April 2001—George W. Bush wolves, because our relationship with the PRC is so much more departed from this policy, saying that the U.S. would do “what - important. Why should this one little island disrupt relations with ever it takes” to defend Taiwan. he later denied that he intended a coming superpower? The tail must not wag the dog.” There are any change. I asked a White house national-security official, “Did many who would be happy, or at least willing, to throw Israel to the president simply slip, or was he trying to establish an American the wolves too—a tiny country in the vast Middle East, bringing commitment?” The official gave me an amused look and, citing an on headache after headache. old ad slogan, said, “Only his hairdresser knows for sure.” Taiwan and Israel are small and vulnerable , not I ask many Taiwanese the terrible question: “If China attacks, able to count on other democracies to back them up. They are do you think the U.S. will defend Taiwan? Will Washington lift potential Czechoslovakias: feedable to the tiger, in the hope that a finger?” A few say, hopefully, “I don’t know.” A few say, “It the tiger will get full. depends”—for example, on whether Taiwan “provoked” the These are dark thoughts, but Taiwan is too booming, too bois- attack by declaring independence. A few say, “I doubt it,” or, “In - terous, and too wonderful to allow dark thoughts for long. I will creasingly unlikely.” Someone says, “You’ll send us arms, but paraphrase that Taiwanese official: The ultimate disposition of not men.” Most say, flatly and somberly, “No.” One woman says, Taiwan, or of the ROC–PRC relationship, is some distance into “Particularly after Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t think you’ll do the future. Our children or grandchildren will have to handle the anything.” Almost everyone goes on to say that China could gob- endgame. In the meantime, let us do all we can to achieve har- CORBIS / ble Taiwan quickly, presenting the world with a fait accompli. mony across the Strait. Let us keep violence at bay, hang on, and But the Taiwanese official involved in cross-strait relations keep going, until such time as the danger passes and we can get

TOP PHOTO says, “Don’t forget that Taiwan is of some strategic value to the on with life.

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dirt or, quite possibly, more serious problems involving struc- tural deterioration. Not that you should worry about that. Gehry is rigorously Monstrosity testing his scrims’ metallic fabric, whose vertical warp of widely spaced stainless-steel wires is welded to a textured weft of stainless-steel cables—just as Pei tested a mock-up of his By the Mall brave new wall system. Forget about the Stata center, the “$300 million fixer-upper,” as a Boston Globe columnist dubbed Gehry’s quirky, leaky computer-science building at MIT, where Washington, D.C., deserves a better multiple mishaps led to a lawsuit against the starchitect that was Eisenhower memorial settled out of court. Forget about the piles of snow and ice rolling off Gehry’s business-school building at case Western Reserve BY CATESBY LEIGH University in cleveland, or the hundreds of reflective cladding panels that had to be sanded down at his Walt Disney concert Hall in Los angeles to relieve the acute thermal discomfort of ack in 2004, the National Gallery of art hosted a schol- people living nearby. arly symposium to explore the wonders of its East Trust him. Building, which earlier that year the american Institute B of architects had honored with a Twenty-Five-Year award, for being a building that had stood the test of time. Or had S long as he’s not being paid with your tax dollars, that it? is. Frank Gehry is, after all, an experimental architect. The schematically non-orthogonal geometries of I. M. Pei’s a His histrionic, quasi-sculptural deconstructivism repre- East Building are decidedly unpopular by comparison with the sents a viral reaction against the postwar epidemic of functional- harmonious form and detail of John Russell Pope’s West Build - ist boxes littering city and suburb alike, not only in the United ing, completed in 1941. More to the point, by the time the gallery States but the world over. published the proceedings of the academic powwow in a lavish- It so happens that this epidemic of visual sterility manifested ly illustrated volume, the East Building was experiencing a major itself most conspicuously, so far as our nation’s capital is con- structural failure. The marble cladding system Pei designed—the cerned, in the vicinity of Gehry’s proposed Ike memorial. We’re illustrious architect had once proclaimed it “a technological talking about a veritable wasteland—ugly federal office build- breakthrough for the construction of masonry walls”—was buck- ings, a tangle of freeways, railway tracks running along the rights- ling, with two-by-five-foot marble panels tilting out as their of-way of what should be and Virginia avenues—in anchors came unstuck from the building’s load-bearing concrete Washington’s southwest quadrant, a forlorn district that is mainly frame. Now all 16,200 marble panels are being reinstalled, at a the creation of misguided midcentury redevelopment under the cost of $85 million. banner of “urban renewal.” The wasteland extends right up to Who’s footing the bill? You are, dear reader, in your cherished the south side of Independence avenue, which is lined with capacity as a U.S. taxpayer. bureaucrat-container-boxes for the Departments of Education, Predictably, devotees of cutting-edge architecture have pre- Transportation, Energy, and Health and Human Services, along ferred to ignore the lessons of Pei’s failure. Some are now singing with the Voice of america’s moderne Wilbur J. cohen Building— the praises of Frank Gehry’s even more unpopular design for an a somewhat less depressingly simplistic structure. oversized, unfocused, and very expensive memorial to Dwight D. Before Gehry’s involvement with the project, the congression- Eisenhower, to be erected a stone’s throw from Washington’s ally chartered Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial commission Mall. But the Gehry scheme, and the competition process by (EMc) decided to consolidate the drab forecourt and rather which he won the commission, are being questioned by a hand- messy streetscape in front of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Depart - ful of congressmen, including Darrell E. Issa (R., calif.), the ment of Education Building into a bloated, urban-renewal-scale powerful chairman of the House committee on Oversight and memorial site. Bad idea. Reform. One of Ike’s granddaughters, Susan Eisenhower, mean- The site lies between the Johnson Building to its south and while has emerged as the public face of opposition to the design. Independence avenue. a portion of Maryland avenue that The “technological breakthrough” in Gehry’s memorial currently merges with Independence in front of the Johnson design consists of gargantuan, billboard-like metallic scrims, Building will be eliminated. The longest of Gehry’s stainless- most likely to be fabricated in a translucent pattern showing steel “tapestries” will filter rather than block views of the relent- photograph-based representations of the rural landscape lessly dull, rectilinear Johnson Building, whose front spans two of Ike’s childhood. Elevated 20 feet above ground level, these full blocks across the avenue from the Smithsonian air and Space scrims will hang from towering cylindrical shafts, 80 feet tall Museum. The two shorter metal scrims, set perpendicular to and 11 feet in diameter. The ten shafts will be clad in limestone. the Johnson Building, will define the Eisenhower Memorial at least 80 percent of the four-acre memorial’s extravagant $142 precinct. The Maryland avenue right-of-way, which is situated million price tag will be covered by taxpayers. and so, of course, on a diagonal axis with the capitol building, will be planted with will the cost of the scrims’ maintenance or repair, the need for grass. Trees will frame northeasterly views of the capitol. which will arise from guano smudges and windblown trash and a memorial to a great american military commander and statesman such as Ike should be monumental. It should be impos- Mr. Leigh is an art and architecture critic based in Washington, D.C. ing in its structural and anthropomorphic character, whether it be

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Gehry’s stainless-steel ‘tapestries’ by day and night

a sculptural or an architectural creation, or both. A good statue or memorial through augmented reality.” It’s as if the EMC antici- relief sculpture would convey a sense of the anatomical structure pated that the dispiriting “reality” of its new-paradigm, ever-so- beneath the figure’s clothing instead of settling for a photograph- 21st-century presidential memorial would require high-tech ic likeness. Whether abstract or figurative, a monument to Ike “augmentation.” should have a powerful, magnetic presence. Its effect should be direct, inspirational, and immune to factoidal trivialization masquerading as historical “interpretation.” EHRy, then, has fallen into the obvious trap of designing Gehry, now 83, hasn’t designed a monument. He has designed not a memorial in a park but a bling-laden memorial a stage set decked out with sculptural and landscape elements G theme park. To be sure, the site was chosen partly on the- and a bevy of inscriptions. Against the quasi-photographic back- matic grounds. The bureaucratic or museological occupants of drop of leafless sycamore trees and farm buildings provided by the adjacent container-boxes were deemed significant because the scrims, the current design concept includes a statue of Ike Ike created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as a military cadet—substituted for a statue of Ike as a barefoot the Interstate Highway System, and the Federal Aviation farmboy, to mollify the Eisenhower family and other critics— Administration while nurturing the nation’s space program and looking out into the memorial space, with its photo-derived the Voice of America. But the mere fact that a site can be themed sculpture groups of Ike exhorting troops on D-day and, after his to Ike’s political career doesn’t mean it’s the best place for this two-term presidency, examining a globe. The statuary will be memorial. And plopping down a memorial park the size of four situated amid lithic piles that might or might not be intended to football fields next door to the Mall—itself an enormous green evoke ruins. space extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and Gehry’s entire design, in other words, is diffuse, scenographic, connected to a spacious riverfront park system—is an exercise in and pictorial as opposed to focused, symbolic, and monumental. overkill. The architect in fact collaborated with theater artist Robert That reality leaves two alternatives: A different site should Wilson on “creating a scene,” as Wilson put it, that would encap- have been chosen, or intelligent redevelopment of the selected sulate the essential Ike. The Kansas-landscape scrims and the site should have been part of the memorial program. In the latter farmboy statue resulted from that collaboration, and it is clear case, a simple Ike memorial would have been the focus of a small they represent the heart and soul of Gehry’s deeply inadequate public square or piazza whose intimate scale would have provid- vision of the memorial. On the other hand, it is the EMC’s fault, ed a welcome contrast to the titanic expanse of the Mall and the not Gehry’s, that the memorial program includes a Web-based low-grade urban fabric south of Independence Avenue. That LLP , “electronic companion memorial” involving a downloadable small square would have been spatially defined by new mixed- mobile-device application—an infotainment feature intended to use buildings that would have introduced much-needed ground- “engage and enthrall” visitors by allowing them “to view histor- level retail—shops, an outdoor café, restaurants—into the Mall’s

GEHRY PARTNERS ical footage, speeches, and events in the context of the physical immediate vicinity. The commemorative and commercial com-

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ponents of such redevelopment at the site would have played professionals capable of ensuring sound execution of the chosen mutually reinforcing roles in attracting people. design. This approach to the selected site is refreshingly evident in one The Eisenhower family is now united in opposition to Gehry’s of the designs submitted in the Ike-memorial counter-competition design, and specifically to the metal scrims. Representative Issa sponsored last year by the National Civic Art Society and the is waiting for GSA to turn over documents pertaining to the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art. (I am a co-founder of memorial competition, and this has delayed review of the Gehry the NCAS and retired from its board of directors in 2008.) The scheme by the National Capital Planning Commission—one of architect, Francisco Ruiz, came up with an overly complicated two key review boards, along with the Commission of Fine sculptural and architectural program for the memorial, including Arts—until the fall. Fine Arts has already fallen for Gehry’s a freestanding classical column and a pair of temple-pavilions memorial concept like a ton of bricks, and left to its own devices, connected by an arcade. But he grasped the essence of the site NCPC will probably approve it as well. Siciliano and other EMC problem: the need for new space-shaping buildings, including members—including vice chairman Senator Daniel K. Inouye mixed-use structures, which he situated along the Maryland (D., Hawaii), who was awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in Avenue axis. Ruiz’s urbanistic concept, incompatible with the World War II—are sounding the “Greatest Generation” theme in EMC’s neo-urban-renewal memorial program, could easily be favor of the memorial’s speedy realization before that generation reconciled with a simpler monumental design, perhaps a fountain is entirely gone. But the Greatest Generation already has plenty surrounding a portrait statue of Ike atop a high pedestal adorned of World War II memorials—abroad as well as in the United with allegorical reliefs symbolizing his roles as president, gener- States, on the Mall and, of course, at Arlington National Ceme - al, and citizen (he served as president of in tery, the biggest war memorial of all. the last capacity). Such a design was in fact submitted in the NCAS-ICAA counter-competition by architect Milton Grenfell and architect and sculptor Brian Kramer. T’S possible, if not likely, that disaster will be averted. The official memorial competition is another sticking point, as Several Republican congressmen, along with Northern there are doubts that Gehry emerged victorious from a level play- I Virginia Democrat Jim Moran, have come out against the ing field. First of all, EMC chairman Rocco Siciliano—a deco- design or even called for a new competition. No opposition has rated World War II vet, Eisenhower-administration official, and emerged in the Senate, at least partly because both Kansas sena- retired business executive—is a Gehry fan who was a member of tors serve on the EMC and have stood by Gehry. In the executive the Los Angeles Philharmonic building committee that oversaw branch, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar—who controls the the Disney Concert Hall project. Siciliano started dropping National Park Service, which will own and operate the Ike Gehry’s name at the very first EMC meeting, back in 2001, and memorial—has come out in favor of taking the time “to get it informed the commission of the architect’s interest in the memo- right.” rial project long before the competition. The competition process Salazar could wind up brokering a compromise between the commission established has fostered suspicion that the objec- the EMC and the Eisenhowers whereby Gehry’s scrims are tive was to maximize Gehry’s chances of winning. scrapped—or at least significantly downsized. If his scrims go, The competition was administered under the Design Ex - that would mark the bitter end of the architect’s original concept, cellence Program of the General Services Administration (GSA), leaving a residual pastiche of stone, statuary, and inscriptions. a program that is supposed to line up talented, experienced Such a compromise might be politically appealing because architects for federal building projects. Announcement of the Congress has already appropriated over $60 million for the competition was therefore restricted to the Federal Business memorial, of which the EMC has spent a significant portion. The Opportunities website. Notices also appeared on the websites of temptation to pour good money after bad could prove well-nigh the EMC, GSA, and the main professional associations for archi- irresistible, but so could the political pressure not to. Here’s tects and landscape architects. In addition, GSA sent letters to 30 hoping Congress will just say no. architectural or landscape-architectural offices to notify them of To get the memorial right, there should be a new competition the competition. At this first stage, the competition involved not with a commonsense program. The goal should be to secure a the submission of memorial designs but rather the submission of simple, sustainable, dignified design for the memorial as a means portfolios of previous work. A paltry total of 44 submissions of enhancing the vitality and value, both cultural and economic, resulted. These were reduced to a short list of seven design teams, of its site—whether that turns out to be the space in front of the which were invited to submit non-binding visions of the form Johnson Building or not. The Ike-memorial program, in other an Ike memorial might take. Then four finalists were asked to words, should be conceived in holistic terms, in the spirit of the further refine those visions. L’Enfant Plan (1791) for Washington, which so lucidly embraces It should be noted that David Eisenhower, one of Ike’s four the synergies between the practical and the symbolic realms grandchildren, vouched for the integrity of the competition involved in building great cities. process after Gehry came out on top in March 2009. (Eisenhower Unlike the EMC-sponsored charade, the new competition resigned from the memorial commission last December.) Still, at should allow classical as well as modernist designers a fair shot best, the commission and GSA found an extremely unsatisfacto- at winning, with design professionals from both camps constitut- ry way to run what should have been an open competition involv- ing a minority on a jury consisting mainly of laymen. Of course, ing maximum publicity as well as the submission of memorial there is no guaranteeing that a great memorial would result from designs in the first stage—and by artists as well as architects. Had such a process. But it is a good deal more likely that a decent the winning entry been submitted by an inexperienced artist or memorial, at least, would. In this instance, that would be cause architect, the EMC could have paired him or her with veteran for celebration.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

moments. Just close your eyes and Patient refuses to engage, merely di - imagine that you’re wrong, that we’re recting all questions and conversation- on the wrong track, that what you’ve al gambits to his “entourage.” done isn’t working.” Patient entirely confrontational. Re - Bethesda Mental Patient’s eyes remain open. He is fuses to engage doctor on any level. In frozen in place. Suggestive of cognitive fact, patient insists on sitting on several Health Clinic brain lock. cushions to maintain his higher eye- Patient immovable for rest of ses- level position vis-à-vis doctor. En - Doctor’s Notes sion. Secret Service detail carries him tour age gathers around patient’s feet, to presidential limo. staring adoringly. 6/12 In an attempt to break down patient’s reinforced narcissism, doctor begins Had first session with new patient. 6/22 asking about the economy and unem- Always difficult to start a new series of ployment. Doctor is rebuffed by the treatments, this time slightly more dif- Patient arrives unscheduled. He has just journalists, who demand to inspect ficult due to the presence of Secret seen a series of poll results suggesting the doctor’s credentials. Further, they Service personnel in session room. Very a dismal outcome in November. Patient insinuate that the doctor is somehow hard to get patient to focus on his cur- is slightly unnerved by this “new” in - “in the pay” of “Big Pharma” and “agi- rent delusional self-image and do the formation. tating” against what they accuse doctor hard work of seeing himself as real and Doctor painstakingly reviews the of calling “Obamacare.” When doctor human and flawed when he’s surround- events of the past three years using the reminds them that he already works for ed and protected by armed guards. Internet. As he and patient review the the government, in a sense—Bethesda When asked to wait outside, the Se- information, patient becomes increas- Clinic is a Navy-run organization— cret Service detail complied, which ingly agitated. “Where did all this they scoff and suggest that it’s racism. allowed patient and doctor precious come from?” patient demands. Patient Doctor is on the one hand pleased— moments to connect. When queried as is dumb founded to discover high un em- patient came to him delusional and out to the key issues that the patient feels ployment, sluggish economic growth, of touch, and is now returned to his sta- need attention, he just shrugged. It’s all discontented voters. Patient clicks tic psychosis of malignant and rein- going well, no problems, all good, etc. through the Web in increasing rage. forced narcissism. Patient is clearly delusional. Po - Directed, at first, at Patient J. Biden (see On the other hand, patient is no tential for malignant narcissism. Up - “BIDEN, J”: presents with Tourette’s; closer to facing reality than he was hill climb. Medication not indicated as medication crucial for functioning af - before, and repeated suggestions for per 25th Amendment to the Constitu - fect) and then at all others, including medication and/or more invasive thera- tion according to clinic’s in-house (and especially) doctor. pies are totally ignored. attorney. This is of course normal. Patients often identify the doctor as the source of the problem. Blame-shifting is in 6/30 6/19 fact a positive sign—it suggests that the delusional bubble is being burst; Patient arrives on time and looking Patient arrives in golf attire, which patient understands that there is, in fact, good. Patient speaks in affable and seems oddly cavalier. In an attempt to a problem. pleasant tones, and convinces doctor jumpstart transference, doctor asks Once the delusional and psychotic that patient is, in fact, quite healthy both about the round—patient proudly cognition is removed, patient’s natural mentally and physically. Further, pa - shows his card—and then doctor men- malignant narcissism will reemerge. tient lays out a compelling vision for tions, in passing, that doctor’s net worth Probably next week. the future of America, as well as a has declined 65 percent since patient thoughtful and sobering analysis of took office. Meant to rattle his cage a the problems that the patient inherited bit, did the opposite. Patient launches 6/25 from his predecessors. into a highly detailed rebuttal, suggest- Doctor please help me recommends ing that doctor’s net worth has actually Patient arrives early for scheduled ses- that patient please help me he’s watch- increased in the past four years “if you sion, accompanied by members of the ing me write this cease all treatment look at it right.” Doctor remains uncon- press. Joe Klein (also a patient) serves he’s watching me write this and making vinced, and asks patient to engage in as unofficial spokesman for the group, me say these things because he’s so a thought experiment. which includes several New York Times amazingly healthy and well-balanced “What if you’re wrong?” doctor reporters, assorted bloggers, and the please help me. asks. “Just go with me here for a few editorial staff of The New Republic. Patient ceases all treatment.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Uncle Sam Meets Aunt Jemima

He Voyager spacecraft has reached the edge of the Jobs Act of 2012, which does not reform agriculture, grow solar system, and is now poised to become an any food, or create any jobs. Hence the name. Be assured it undocumented resident of the galaxy beyond. contains impenetrable passages, probably along the lines of T Impressive! It contains a record that has a small this: speech by . depressing. It’s like imagining aliens discovering a ruined earth in the distant future and The floor price of a soy bean, soy-related, or soy-adjacent finding a can of Billy Beer as the sole evidence of civili- substance as defined by the Agriculture Nomenclature Clari - zation. Horrible to think that it might crash on a primitive fication Act of 1934 (as amended by the Obfuscation Protocols planet, and centuries from now we find a civilization that of 1974 and 1984) shall be no less than 90 percent of the base- line established by the optimal price as averaged between A.d. worships a toothy deity in a sweater and imagines the devil 1112 and 2011, unless the peak per-bushel market rate ad- as a killer rabbit. vanced on a weekly basis by less than 12 percent per shoobity That’s if anyone finds it: The spacecraft will reach the floobity doobity (see also, Cosby amendments), etc. nearest star in 40,000 years, or roughly half the length of President Obama’s recent Ohio speech about the economy, Translation: Here’s a check. and even then they may not be able to read it, unless some- But what about pancake topping? you ask. does the bill one can dig out an old turntable. address rich, delicious fluids that enhance our pancake expe- It is a remarkable accomplishment, and demonstrates that rience? Rest easy. The Hill reports that Chuck Schumer has gummint is awesome so let’s have a lot more, okay? That added an amendment that specifically addresses the gaping, was the message from the president’s Ohio peroration, in shrieking hole in the nation’s syrup-awareness problems: which he cited the Hoover dam and the moon shot as things “The amendment allows the secretary of Agriculture to intro- We did together via the nimble digits of federal authority. duce grants to states and tribal areas in an effort to promote A stern rebuke to all those tea-party types who quiver in a maple syrup production through education and research, nat- constant state of agitation over the prospect of a useful ural resource sustainability within the maple syrup industry, hydroelectric project. market production and efforts to expand maple sugaring So, we’re going to Mars, Mr. President? No. We need to activities.” focus on the things we need to do today, like expanding Thank heavens there’s education and research, so we don’t syrup awareness. fall behind China, which plans to put a maple tree on the Let’s back up. Hoover dam? Hah! Just try to build one moon in 2017. today. environmentalists—who hate any dam not construct- Popcorn gets a handout, too: The Market Access Program, ed by a buck-toothed aquatic mammal—would discover that a $200 million Ag department subsidy, gives $250,000 to the project would have a disparate impact on the breeding the Popcorn Board, which raises awareness about popcorn, habits of the red-speckled amoeba, without which the entire possibly to locate the one person in America who is unaware biosphere would collapse so quickly Jon Corzine would of popcorn, and thinks Orville Redenbacher was a World issue a low whistle of admiration. We might be able to return War I flying ace. It’s possible that the government may tie to the moon, but this whole “one step for mankind” business this into some anti-bullying initiative that promotes popcorn is ableist and sexist. It would have to be an inclusive voyage, awareness while addressing self-image problems of gay with elizabeth Warren riding down a wheelchair ramp to adolescents, and fund some videos under the theme “It Gets the moon’s surface. Butter.” You could oppose it, if you’re a homophobe who The Interstate Highway System was an example of We hates farmers. doing something big, but highways encourage the suburbs, So that’s us, then? Once a nation that flung objects into which are bad because constant exposure to lawn-mower deep space, now a broke and bloated society that dribbles exhaust turns people into Republicans, and because freeways dollars around to tell people popcorn is nutritious and deli- encourage gasoline consumption, which leads directly to cious? It’s easy to say we don’t do anything big anymore, but polar bears drowning and the Atlantic Ocean lapping at 42nd who’s this we, really? Take away the declinists and defeatists Street. (Any day now.) The only big things left to construct, and the anti-exceptionalist transnationalists who regard the in Obama’s view, are invisible bureaucratic apparatuses that country as a big hunk of dumb wood in need of some whit- control your life. That’s pretty cool, but they make for bad tlin’ down, and you’re left with the people who do things like photo ops. The laws and regulations of the Good Things for put a tiny computer in everyone’s pocket that not only everybody Act of 2014 may barely fit on a 2-terabyte hard phones for pizza and takes high-def movies but downloads drive, but it’s a lousy backdrop for a speech. the most recent photos from our craft on Mars. That changed Some of these big things contain a multitudinous array of the way we live. That is a big thing. wonders. Let us consider the Agriculture Reform, Food, and We have a car on Mars, you know. That’s rather American. And if it finds a giant lake of syrup, we’ll send humans! If Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. only to prop up the price.

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a biographer many times over). kirk - wondering about two questions. as she patrick made halting attempts to write put it, they were, “How could people do The 51st an autobiography. She is better off with this?” and “How could other people let this book by collier. apparently, she was them?” Star reluctant to write in a personal vein. col - Smitten by France, she went to that lier has given us the woman in full. His is country, where she was an eyewitness to JAY NORDLINGER an admiring biography, but he lets her the great struggle between Sartre and his have it, when she deserves it. supporters and camus and his. Sartre was Jeane Duane Jordan was born in 1926 by far the more popular, of course, but she in Duncan, Okla. Duncan is where erle P. was definitely with camus. For one thing, Halliburton started his oil company. in she liked “his elevation of the human the first decade of the 21st century, his dimension over the political one; his focus name would be a hate-word of the left. on the impact of ideas and the personal Jeane’s father worked in the oil industry. consequences of ideologies.” Journalists, writing about her, often re - along the way, she met the man who ferred to her dad as a “wildcatter.” collier would become her husband, evron kirk - reports that she objected to this, indignant- patrick, called “kirk.” He was a political ly: Her dad had been a driller—a contract scientist and Democratic activist. collier worker, not a speculator. Get it right. calls him “the Pygmalion who would in - Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane The family moved to when she tellectually sculpt” Jeane Jordan. He was Kirkpatrick, by Peter Collier (Encounter, was twelve. But she would always con- married when they met—to a woman 368 pp., $25.99) sider herself a westerner. and she saw named evelyn, who had just had a baby. reagan, an illinoisan who settled in cali - He had been married before, too, to a wo - illiam F. Buckley Jr. said fornia, as a fellow westerner. man named Doris, with whom he had of Jeane kirkpatrick, “She She was something of a queer one, also had children. But he had “outgrown” ought to be woven into the Jeane Jordan. To buy her first book, she Doris, collier writes, and his marriage to W flag as the 51st star.” When saved up her allowance: The book was a evelyn was “disintegrating.” So . . . i was introduced to kirkpatrick, i quoted thesaurus. in high school, a boy asked in this book, Doris and evelyn play the this remark. She said, “That was the nicest her to go to the movies. She said, “No, i’m role that discarded spouses are supposed thing anybody has ever said about me.” i going to stay home tonight and read to play: They are hustled off the stage so said, “it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever Papers.” Her family was that the show can go on, with the stars in said about anybody.” strongly Democratic, and she would be place. No one will ever write a book She was u.S. ambassador to the united the same, for as long as she could. Her about Doris or evelyn. Jeane had trouble Nations during President reagan’s first father joked—if it was a joke—that she acknowledging her husband’s first mar- term. But she was much more than that: could bring home any boy she wanted, as riages, as people do. She stood for a point of view. This view long as he wasn’t a republican. after having three sons, Jeane took was anti-communist, pro-american, pro- after high school, she went to Stephens her Ph.D. from columbia. This was in West. She was the kind of Democrat college in , and then to Barnard 1968—a terrible year for the country and who was mortified by american weak- in New york. Her field of choice was world, from the kirkpatrick point of ness abroad and american weakness at political science. She may have been a view. in 1967, The New York Review of home. She was an intellectual, an academ- Democrat, but, even then, she was a dif- Books had printed its infamous cover, ic, with a taste for political combat. and ferent kind of Democrat: She knew that show ing how to make a molotov cocktail. she was unafraid. William Safire wrote Hiss was a liar. During the 1948 cam- kirkpatrick wrote the editors, “Please do that she had “the courage of ronald rea- paign, she attended a Wallace for Presi - not ever send me another issue of your gan’s convictions.” dent rally, at which Pete Seeger played the revolting rag.” She was alarmed by mc - Once, i interviewed lincoln Diaz- banjo. (He’s still at it—i saw him at an Gov ernism. She thought that america’s Balart, the cuban-american politician, event last month.) She did not like what abandonment of South Vietnam was “the about his journey, intellectual and politi- she saw and heard at the rally. She voted most shameful display of irresponsibility cal. He was one of those Democrats who for Truman. Forty years later, she wrote, “i and inhumanity in our history.” She crossed over into the republican party. am retrospectively proud of myself for thought carterism a disaster. She was He said, “Jeane kirkpatrick was my soul- having resisted, at 21, the temptation of ready for reagan. mate.” many of us could say something radical politics.” richard V. allen, reagan’s first national- similar. She learned about the Holocaust, and security adviser, told collier, “Jeane and She now has a biography, Political would be forevermore a staunch friend of were the only two Woman, by Peter collier. it is a superb one the Jews. She learned about women who made Nancy nervous. The (from a writer who has proven himself as in general. She spent the rest of her life president had an intellectual spark with

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both of them.” He was happy to send Ronald Reagan had given her . . . and Kirkpatrick to the U.N. She was still a seemed to want to put it around her neck.” Democrat, but he had been one too, until She died in 2006, on a significant date: he was over 50. December 7. Kirkpatrick’s tenure at the U.N. was For several years, starting in about electrifying—even some who despised 1998, I called her every chance I got, on her had to concede this. Collier brings it all any pretext: to solicit her opinion, to ask I M back to life. The Soviets, those tricksters, her to write for NATIoNAl REvIEW, which P O R T A N T forged a letter from the South African she did. (Being uncertain of her byline, I intelligence chief to Kirkpatrick, express- asked, “Are you Jeane Kirkpatrick or N O T I C E ing “gratitude.” They did this kind of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick?” “Ouf,” she said, “I thing: When Sakharov won the Nobel suppose I can do without the ‘J.’ at this to all National Review Peace Prize in 1975, they forged a tele - point.”) She had a wonderful voice: some- gram of congratulations from Pinochet. times haughty and didactic, sometimes subscribers! In a saner world, Kirkpatrick would purring, even sexy. People such as the have been lionized by feminists: She had Saturday Night Live gang mocked her risen from the oil patch to the command- looks as mannish and severe. They could ing heights of U.S. foreign policy. But be. But she could be very attractive, and her views were wrong (“wrong”). She she knew it, I think.       We are moving our told Collier, “Gloria Steinem called me a In writing this biography, Peter Collier female impersonator. Can you believe has written an intellectual history and a subscription-fulfillment      that? Naomi Wolf said I was ‘a woman political history of America in the second    office from without a uterus’—I who have three kids half of the 20th century. But it’s a bio - while she, when she made this comment, graphy too, worthy of the life. If you loved Mount   Morris, Ill. had none.” I am reminded of a bumper Kirkpatrick, you will fall in love all over    to Palm Coast, Fla. sticker that appeared during the 2008 again. You will hear her and see her Please continue    Kirkpatrick’s tenure at the U.N. was to be vigilant:      There are fraudulent electrifying—even some who despised agencies   soliciting her had to concede this. your    National Review presidential campaign, alluding to Sarah (with her “repertory of tics,” in Collier’s subscription !  renewal Palin: “She’s not a woman, she’s a Repub - phrase). If you didn’t love her, you may without    our authorization. li can.” gain new respect for her. And if she is Please reply only to Would you like a statement that is unknown to you—what a treat you have in   pure Kirkpatrick, nothing but? She told store! National Review an interviewer, sometime in the ’80s, Two or three years ago, I gave a talk    renewal notices or “Having and raising babies is more inter- in which I cited Kirkpatrick. Afterward,     esting than giving speeches at the United a mother and daughter came up to me. bills—make sure the Nations. Believe me.” “My daughter knows Jeane Kirkpatrick’s     return address is So much time did the Reagan people grandson,” said the mother. The daughter spend fighting one another, it’s a wonder said that someone—I forget who it was, I     Palm Coast, Fla. they had time for the Cold War. Even - hope not a teacher—had told the grand- Ignore   all requests for tually, Kirkpatrick was shoved out of the son, “Jeane Kirkpatrick was a terrorist.” renewal that are not administration. But she remained a big That was appalling, of course. But, hon-     directly payable deal, from coast to coast. She finally be - estly, I was just slightly pleased: After     came a Republican, in 1985. It was a all this time, she can still get under their to National Review. wrenching experience for her, as it is for skin.     some. “I would rather be a liberal.” Her Kirkpatrick said that, in the 1960s and If you receive any mail or fans wanted her to run for president in ’70s, America did something like try to telephone     offer that makes 1988, and she flirted with the idea, but ulti- commit suicide. But “the suicide attempt    you suspicious contact mately stood aside. failed.” She was one of those who thwart- Her last 15 years are somewhat painful ed it. Years ago, she had some advice for [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. to read about, for Kirkpatrick wrestled a friend of mine, who was just starting Your cooperation with family problems, health problems, out in the work world: “Try to make your     other problems. Collier paints a striking employment relate to the life of your      is greatly appreciated. picture of her on her deathbed: “She some- times.” Kirkpatrick herself did, and she times held the Medal of Freedom that made a wonderful dent.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS reappraisals. And the Civil War industry ments, hardware, provisions, disease ensures that they keep coming. Only a mortality, civilian opinion, and the America’s few weeks ago, we learned of a new esti- aftershocks of Reconstruction, and mate of the accidentally or deliberately offers a newly minted evaluation of Iliad underplayed number of those killed, ways we ought to think about the cata- raised from the 600,000 figure we all clysm? TRACY LEE SIMMONS grew up with to 720,000. Guelzo’s ambitions are imperial. Now, as if on cue, a new book ap - While avid to tell the entire story of the pears. Allen C. Guelzo, professor of his- war as a war, blood and gore and gun- tory at Gettysburg College and author of powder and dust and dysentery and all, other nutritious works on the period, he has opted mostly for the second, joins the heady roster of scholars and lit- broader course, and he has, against the erary men who have set out to recount odds, produced a book smoothly acces- meticulously and pronounce upon mag- sible to any curious adult who lacks a isterially the greatest, most sustained deeper knowledge of the time. catastrophe in the annals of the United He employs a long runway into the States. Like its worthy predecessors, story, springboarding poignantly, as Fateful Lightning can claim a compact others have done, from the chilly day completeness (no small feat), but unlike of Lincoln’s second inaugural. But his Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War them, it can also claim the benefit of an excursion immediately takes us back and Reconstruction, by Allen C. Guelzo ever-burgeoning pool of the latest infor- much farther, to the fallible age of the (Oxford, 592 pp., $19.95) mation, which is another reason we hit Founders, and moves forward to the a reset button every few years—there’s days when the seeds of sectional dis- vERY generation christens always more to account for: new facts sent were sown and a bitter crop grew its own favored Civil War to digest, new interpretations to vet. Yet as the decades progressed toward Fort book, almost by clockwork. this book is comprehensively economi- Sumter. Here he shows himself a deft E Twenty-five years ago, James McPherson brought forth his richly awarded and eminently readable Battle Allen C. Guelzo has, against the odds, Cry of Freedom, just as—some 25 years earlier—the Bruce Catton volumes were produced a book smoothly accessible scaling the bestseller lists, and just as—a to any curious adult who lacks a couple of decades before that—Ste - phen vincent Benét’s epic poem John deeper knowledge of the time. Brown’s Body treated the years between 1859 and 1865 with sweep and lyricism cal, as exactingly accurate as scholar- reader of crafty politicking, exploring for a more literary readership. All three ship allows, and, befitting its subject, with precision the flawed strategy of labors garnered a Pulitzer Prize. When sober. the of 1820 and it comes to the Civil War, we Americans Any historian out to pen a full ac - the failure of Henry Clay with the have chosen not to skimp; we take it in count of the Civil War must decide Great one of 1850, showing how the bracing drafts. People who can scarcely what kind of book to write. Should it balances all seemed doomed to go out muster the attention required to read a be a grand catalogue of colossal battles of kilter as soon as they were created. meaty magazine article happily com - and the brave, saucy characters that Slavery, both as an inherited engine of mit to long, elaborate, detail-drunken flooded the ranks on both sides, with economic power and as a powder keg, tomes on the struggle that has made all the drama ready-made for spirited is dealt with as it ought to be—direct- us who we are today, from the grandeur retelling for the sake of a predominant- ly, evidentially, unsentimentally, un - of the Thirteenth Amendment to Gone ly self-captivated audience? (Shelby com fortably. with the Wind to tacky (and misshapen) Foote’s capacious three-volume narra- Eventually, the principals take the Confederate-battle-flag car plates. tive history—a fine literary achieve- stage—Lincoln, Lee, McClellan, Sher - The thirst never gets slaked. We pine ment if ever there was one, which took man, Joe Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, for the perfect history of a war that four times as long to write as it took the Ulysses S. Grant. Personalities prance refuses to loosen its hold on our imagi- war to be waged—is of this type, and and strut. The war itself, with all its bat- nations and, here and there after all these the approach requires no defense. It’s tles, bivouacs, night marches, and terror, years, loyalties. Still, we cannot have Homer’s.) Or should the book be an gets played out with the necessary too many Civil War books because we academic disquisition on larger sig - detail, though Guelzo the historian is cannot have too many appraisals and nificance and historical meaning, on concerned with context and truth before the multiple causes and effects of the theater, with how the wins and losses on Mr. Simmons is the author of Climbing war, political and otherwise, one that the field fit into the larger puzzle of the Parnassus. He is currently writing a book on methodically factors in up-to-date conflict, altering for example the revolv- Thomas Jefferson. findings on things like troop move- ing shades of sympathy and antipathy of

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS the British and the French toward the and illustration, in the work that the It seems only human nature to hang the Confederacy. professional historian can best do. This label irrational on what we do not un - Guelzo assembles the story ably, but is a book not of history alone but of derstand, since it is easy for us to he injects no adrenaline into the reader; historiography as well: It’s not only assume that something must be irra- his manner isn’t breathless. But neither about the tales but also about the tional if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actual- is it exactly that of a dry lecturer. “No tellers and elucidators who have, over ly reflect more on the limits of our inge- one in American history,” he tells us, time, determined how we view the war. nuity than on any supposed irrationality “has ever looked less like a great general Perusing a good deal of literary mater- in what we are studying. For that reason than Ulysses Grant,” and then explains ial from books, tracts, and intellectual it should come as a practical and fun - simply and efficiently how such an un - periodicals of the day, Guelzo ranges damental warning not to impute ir - likely figure won a war. All the familiar far as a cultural historian, into regions rationality to people in the study of figures get woven nicely into the tapes- of poetry and applied psychology. his tory . . . too quickly. try. Asides on passing characters rarely Explaining how even the most rep- fail to pull up tasty nuggets, spicy bits of utable historians can fall victim to And with this we know we are in the information we either forgot or, more stereotypes other historians before them presence of a deliberative mind. How likely, never knew, yet all of which keep have advanced uncritically, he takes on easily, we’re reminded, can history as a sometimes knotty, intricate tale rolling the supposition that politicians on both we know it arise from idle speculating apace. sides fell victim to “irrational” thinking and a hunger for convenient conclu- Perhaps the book’s strongest points, and acting in the decade before the sions. Recounting battles with color and though, lie in the realm of explication shooting began: dash is one thing, but thinking clearly and cogently about the most incendiary event in American history requires more than a bit of caution and tact. BOBOLINK Guelzo is nothing if not tactful, and he works with a vigilance made need- You rise from dry meadowgrass ful by the momentous investment of With a laborious flutter, more passion the Civil War has inspired for Wing-action than the shortness of your flight the past 150 years. Readers in search Would seem to call for of major revisionist departures from orthodox thinking on the war will be disappointed. But the author of Lin­- And so it seems obvious coln­and­Douglas:­The­Debates­That Flying for you is a steep effort Defined­ America, Lincoln’s­ Eman­- Nature exacts, though not without amends, cipation­Proclamation:­The­End­of Bobolink, reedbird; Slavery­ in­ America, and Abraham Lincoln:­ Redeemer­ President has The wiry tones of your song earned the right to paint the wide pan - Set forth a waltz in clear whistles orama. For those of us who prefer to take our At first, so well-sustained! But then you break history as straight prose, the apparatus Down the bars, stampede of scholarship can become something of an encumbrance, and the abundant Your notes into a reckless footnotes could have been ushered into Song fantasia piped at lightning speed the back as endnotes so we wouldn’t No one can follow—not the barn swallow have to swat those gnats at the bottom Who soars with such grace, of the page from our peripheral vision. But that’s less than a quibble. Fateful Lightning could serve as foundation Not the bird-watcher stalking reading in any college course on the The field, not blind Tom with all his skill Civil War, though it’s too well com- At sound-catching, his passion for filling posed to be deemed a textbook, as text- Darkness with music. books, in the humanities, anyway, tend to be directed not to students eager to Ricebird, reedbird, bobolink, learn but to academic consumers out only to pass the test. This book was writ- Your song is the strained apology ten to be read, not merely consulted, and For all of the weak-winged, condemned to sing, it can be read profitably by general read- Because we cannot fly. ers, especially those wishing to probe past the choreographed bromides of the —DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN History Channel.

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on elite. His father’s suicide left the Fortunately, she has a hell of a story to Still family in a condition that biographer tell and many illuminating details and G. Edward White famously described anecdotes to add. Like many liberals of as “shabby gentility.” He was a highly his time, Hiss seems to have been radi- accomplished student but, in the judg- calized in part by the Sacco and Vanzetti Guilty ment of , a medi - controversy, and he was drawn quickly KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON ocre mind. As a young man, he learned to the subversive Left. Early in his to sneer at business while availing him- career in government, he joined Lee self of every benefit to be derived from Pressman—who would himself later his wealthy and well-connected friends. be outed as a Soviet spy—in defending He was a member of the self-loathing Franklin Roosevelt’s central-planning elite. ambitions. Throughout Shelton’s telling Like most of his kind, Hiss drew pre- of the tale, one cannot but notice that

cisely the wrong lesson from the Great Hiss’s fellow traitors not only shared his  Depression—that the state should at - ideological commitment but were in the tempt to manage the economy—and  main  the  same sort  of people. That latter was, like most New Dealers, prepared

to endorse extraordinarily authoritarian   

steps to put that vision into action. CAN YOU TRUST Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason, Shelton insightfully identifies    Hiss’s       by Christina Shelton (Threshold, support of Roosevelt’s court-packing NATIONAL REVIEW?    352 pp., $26) scheme as a critical indicator of his views: CanW hyou trust National i d Review f dl?      T is unlikely that we ever will have Yes. Please do so when planning  a proper reckoning of the Amer ican Hiss’s advocacy of bypassing constitu- your estate. Keep us standing Left’s culpability in the world wide tional restraints and his open disregard athwart history, yelling Stop. I Communist enterprise—the for both the constitutional principle of

and , the Stasi, the Holodomor, the separation of powers and for the prece- By remembering National Review 100 million corpses. It is a testament to dent of an independent, nonpoliticized in your will, estate, or trust, you the perversity of human nature that in judiciary are astounding, and sympto- will leave a legacy of continued the two main political efforts to uproot matic of his leftist . Soviet agents from U.S. institutions, the Using the judiciary as a political instru- support for those conservative villains in the popular mind are not those ment of state power is a characteristic causes and beliefs that will be as vital to future generations as they who enabled the enslavement of entire feature of both Communist and Fascist nations but the imperfect men who tried regimes. Hiss felt that “we were entitled are to ours. Please contact: to stop them. We never had a Nuremberg to think of ourselves—and we most cer- trial for Communists—we would have tainly did—as a select few.” This claim Jim Kilbridge had to hang too many veterans of the by Hiss reflects the recurring elitism National Review Roosevelt administration. Instead, we of a higher wisdom that is thoroughly 215 Lexington Avenue had the perjury case of Alger Hiss. And embedded in the ideologies of the left: New York, NY 10016 we keep having it. the “enlightened” know best; authori - 212-679-7330 ext. 2826 Christina Shelton, a former analyst at tative leadership is needed to direct the the Defense Intelligence Agency, has masses; a vanguard is required to ad - produced a new study of the case. In the vance the revolution; and so on and so course of her rigorous and carefully doc- forth. Alger saw himself and his col- umented analysis, she offers a persua- leagues as that vanguard. “Rated One of sive explanation not only of why Hiss ‘Best Value’ Hotels.” ... Zagats chose treason but of why so many others Unhappily, the prose above is indica- did as well. It is a thing: a good tive of Shelton’s style when exploring book about an important subject. the political relevance of Hiss’s views Shelton’s telling of the story is in a and activities—a bit clunky and blus- sense Nixonian. Hiss was the archety - tery. Her tone and style are much more pal East Coast liberal-establishment sophisticated when she is engaged in man: son of an executive, Johns Hop - more straightforward reportage on the New York’s all suite hotel is located in kins, Harvard Law, a protégé of Felix intricacies of Hiss’s world. One suspects the heart of the city, near corporations, theatre & great restaurants. Affordable Frankfurter, law clerk to Oliver Wendell that she is throwing in a bit of red-meat elegance with all the amenities of home. Holmes, attorney at Choate, Hall, & boob bait for marketing purposes. Her Stew art, State Department, United Na- argument is well reasoned and often 149 E. 39th St. (Bet 3rd & Lex) New York, NY 10016 tions. But Hiss was a member of the most compelling, but her performance is oc- Reservations 1-800-248-9999 Ask about our special National Review rates. dangerous class: the barely-hanging- casionally nine-fingered.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS fact may be of more consequence than against Hiss,” Shelton writes, “there the former. The confrontation between are still those today who cannot bring Alger Hiss and exposed themselves to assimilate that evidence The a cultural fault line, and those who have and acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a been (and remain) sympathetic to Hiss Soviet asset and guilty of . Struggles and his ilk seem to do so not out of any They focus on Hiss’s message, not his sophisticated understanding of Marxist- actions.” Likewise, they focus on the Of Anna Leninist doctrine or midcentury history character defects of Richard Nixon and but out of dread of aligning themselves Joseph McCarthy, apparently unable with the loathsome likes of Nixon. It is to distinguish conventional if severe FLORENCE KING unsurprising that Hiss, in the decades human failings (Nixon’s megalomania, after his release from prison, found him- McCarthy’s dipsomania) from the moral self enthusiastically welcomed at New depravity of men who were engaged in York’s New School for Social Research, the greatest campaign of mass murder where, as Shelton reports, he was a reg- documented in the history of civiliza- ular lecturer, and at other elite institu- tion. tions, including Brandeis and Columbia. It is just possible to understand the Nixon’s downfall coincided with a sympathy for Russian Communism in refreshed interest in Hiss among liber- the context of the 1930s and the rise of als. Nazi Germany. But Hiss’s embrace was Hiss gave substantial cooperation, a broad and lasting one: As Shelton including access to his papers, to his - notes, he was denying the crimes of Mao torian Allen Weinstein, who began his and Castro as late as 1975. Hiss argued, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir, researches holding the conventional among other things, that the scale of by Anna Quindlen (Random House, liberal faith in Hiss’s innocence. The Mao’s killing must have been exagger- 208 pp., $26) evidence convinced him of the contrary, ated, since so many Chinese opposed to and the publication of his book, Per­- Communism had left the country as he MEMoIR, while not hemmed jury, in 1978 was the occasion for a came to power, and therefore “the prob- in by the strict classical rules sustained campaign by The­ Nation lem of liquidation which Mao would that define poetry, nonetheless and other leftist outlets to discredit have undertaken must have been mini- A needs a certain amount of con- him. Tribal ties are highly resistant to mized.” Here Shelton cannot avoid trol to give it narrative thrust, a modicum evidence (and apparently immune to a parenthetical: “Was Hiss really sug- of suspense, and something resembling shame), and that is why the case of Hiss gesting that Mao killed fewer people an orderly timeline. Do not expect such continues to be newly litigated each because there were less available to leisurely, reflective writing from Anna gen eration. kill?” The Chinese who escaped the Quindlen. She was born at the perfect sta- Shelton makes a sledgehammer of chairman’s terror are blessed not to have tistical moment to experience firsthand the a case that this is unnecessary. The found out. death by a thousand choices inflicted on strongest section of the book is titled It is impossible to dispute Shelton’s American women by the feminist move- simply “The Evidence,” and it is a sus- overall verdict. The word “treason” car- ment, and her memoir is a scattershot tained artillery assault: the GRU general ries a great deal of emotional weight, over view of every conflict, emotion, expe- who fingered Hiss, the U.S. ambassador a sense of being the worst crime of rience, wish, regret, and opinion she has who warned Roosevelt, the Soviet de - which one could be guilty. But it is not: ever had from her birth in 1952 to her pub- fect ors who knew his secret, Whittaker Benedict Arnold and Guy Fawkes were lisher’s deadline for this manuscript. Chambers and the other turncoats, the traitors—Hermann Göring and Joseph The consummate child of her times, KGB operatives, the Communist-party Goebbels were loyal to the end. Hiss and Quindlen went along to get along, and she members who plotted alongside Hiss, his associates did in fact choose treason, has gotten along quite well. The proto ty p - the U.S. State Department officials who but treason was hardly the worst of their ical Having-It-All feminist as well as the corroborated Chambers’s evidence, the crimes. They chose to further the work Ur-Boomer, she made an ideal culture- Daily­Worker editor, the foreign intel - of bloody-minded gangsters engaged in watcher for the New­York­Times, churning ligence operatives: The question has the mass extermination of nations and out op-eds packed with de rigueur “rele- never been Hiss’s word against Cham - the permanent enslavement of the sur- vance” and a column called “Life in bers’s and the Pumpkin Papers, but vivors. To make an average-sized grave- the Thirties” that delivered bottomless Hiss’s word against a large and com- stone for each of their victims would em pathy to beleaguered career women pelling body of evidence. require 900 times more marble than was who, like Quindlen, had their children That evidence has in recent years used in the dome of the Taj Mahal. They later in life and got caught up in the guilty been supplemented by the declassified were the very worst men that modern conflicts of what she calls “manic mother- Venona transcripts, by Hungarian intel- civilization has produced, abetted by hood.” Her commentary won her the pres- ligence documents, and, most damn - those who may have been among our ingly, by KGB documents. “Despite the brightest but were by no means among Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, existence of overwhelming evidence our best. Fredericksburg, VA 22404.

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tigious empathy chair at the women’s col- having them in her early thirties when it walks,” and she attempts to write the same lege of hard knocks and led to a Pulitzer was the Boomer feminist thing to do. way, by fashioning sentences that scream Prize. This is a powerful story, or would be “Quote Me!”: The women’s movement The daughter of an Italian-American if Quindlen had told it all in one place was “the Industrial Revolution without mother and Irish-American father, Quind - instead of here and there throughout the sweatshops.” “One of the useful things len, the oldest of five children, realized book. She seems torn between the need to about age is realizing that conventional early on that something wonderful would tell it and a reluctance to call our undivid- wisdom is often simply inertia with a inevitably be taken from her: the brownie ed attention to it. It would take a sturdy raft candy coating of conformity.” “And we do bowl that she was allowed to lick when to navigate her turbulent conflicts, but have to make our peace with diminished her mother baked. At first she had it all here and there one comes across hints that expectations, bit by bit, the road not taken, to herself, but then came those times the “cake” in her title refers not to the cen- the role not filled.” Her fierce objection to when her mother went to the hospital terpiece of her 60th-birthday party this the cliché that a person who dies “is in a and returned a week later with a red- year, but to all those baking bowls of yore better place” inspires her defense of the faced, wailing baby. As the younger chil- that she never got to lick. here and now, where clouds are always dren came along, they got first dibs on the She blames children for women’s lone- “scudding” and waves become “swells.” icing bowl, and Anna morphed into an liness, which she calls the “girlfriend inter- The only good part of this book is near assistant mother who was expected to regnum”—the years when busy mothers the end when, after scrupulously denying help care for them. have no real friends except other busy that she is defending the Catholic Church, “Where she was always felt like a mothers they just happen to be thrown she does just that. “For me, being Catholic safe place,” she says of her mother, but together with—and makes a case for is like being Irish or Italian or Caucasian, her love collided with the contempt for “some one not obliged by blood or mar- not a faith but an immutable, identify - housewives she imbibed as a teen in the riage to support, advise, and love you.” ing characteristic with which I was born early feminist years. She came to look Such unequivocal revelations are not her and with which I will die.” Then, after down on her mother’s generation of wo - style, however. She tends to make her unin- announcing that she has always used con- men and vowed to be what the feminists tentional points by protesting too much, traception, she continues: “[Catholicism] were calling “a person in her own right.” as when, even today, “my head swivels is woven into the fabric of my self, in both But then, when she was 19, her mother when a little voice cries ‘Mommy!’ in a the warp and woof, so that it seems if you was diagnosed with terminal ovarian can- crowded supermarket.” pulled its threads, all the rest would un - cer and her father ordered her to quit col- She also falls into the trap of uninten- ravel.” lege and come home to care for her and tional humor: “I built my entire existence If a stranger were to stop her on the run the household for himself and the around my children, wrote only during street and say, “The Lord be with you,” younger children. school hours, didn’t write at all when there she says, she would automatically reply She reacted bitterly, blaming “the tradi- was a school vacation or an ear infection,” “And with your spirit,” or preferably, “Et tion of Irish-Catholic households to sacri- yet even now, years later, when the clock cum spiritu tuo, the Latin of the Church of fice their daughters. . . . I felt powerless, moves close to 3 P.M., she claims she expe- my childhood.” She follows this with a trapped, enfeebled. . . . I was afraid of the riences “a spasm of loneliness.” If this is firm denial that she is a language tradi- briars of housewifery . . . taking away supposed to tug at our heartstrings, it does. tionalist opposed to making rituals under- Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir It reminds me of Lassie, ears pricking up standable to the masses, then launches a and leaving me with The Joy of Cooking, as her primitive instinct tells her that it’s vigorous attack on the tin-eared translators Jacqueline Susann, and slipcovers.” She time to go wait in the schoolyard. who changed no room at the inn to no was horrified to learn that her mother, who This is one of the hardest books to re- room at the place where travelers lodged. was only 40, had consulted the doctor in view that has ever crossed my desk. It’s “I cringed,” she writes. “It sounded as the first place because she assumed that divided into topical chapters, but they though the Holy Family got shut out of a her ovarian symptoms meant that she was mean nothing because everything is all cut-rate motel.” pregnant. But the baby turned out to be a over the place, and mostly comes down to She goes on in this vein, condemning cancer, and as the inoperable lump grew Quindlen talking about herself and what it the Church for harboring pedophiles and bigger, the only clothes that would fit her means to be a Boomer. “My muscles are putting down women, then following her were her old maternity dresses. “A woman tight but my skin is loose. I am physically condemnations with sentiments that come who had spent the best years of her life fit but forever infertile. My hair is still very close to a defense of transubstantia- in maternity clothes, she sickened and thick, but much of it is gray.” And her dim- tion and the Virgin Birth. “Our grandpar- died in them as well.” ples, “once tiny divots, are now deep fur- ents were devout, our parents observant, By the time her purgatory as woman rows.” But not to worry, because Boomers and we are haphazard,” she says wistful- of the house was up, Quindlen had had it are going to be the generation that changed ly. “Atheism is a game for younger peo- with conformity, whether to Irish-Catholic what it means to be an old lady, just as they ple, who are so sure of what they’re sure traditions, Italian-Catholic traditions, or changed what it means to be a lady. Proof? of.” the traditions governing the hierarchy of Her own daughter, raised in the Madeleine This whole tiresome, egocentric book is baking-bowl licking. While still in her Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clin - about Anna Quindlen doing battle. First early twenties she asked a doctor to tie her ton era, asked her, “Can a man be secretary she got her feminist up, then she got her tubes so she would never have children. of state?” Boomer up, but she finally got her Irish But he refused, and so she wound up Quindlen never walks, she “power- up, and it made me like her at last.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS dial earth, opening his movie with shots this stew of myth and science, action Film of glaciers and rocks and rushing, seeth- and horror—Genesis and darwin, Char - ing water on an as-yet-lifeless planet. But iots of the Gods and H. P. lovecraft, in place of Malick’s hidden, inscrutable Rosemary’s Baby and, well, Alien—is the Hostile Jehovah, Prometheus gives us a towering, stuff of which great pop blockbusters are albino extraterrestial, who stands over made, and with Scott behind the camera Creators the fjord, drinks some sort of potion, and you know the movie will have the visual lets his body fragment and dissolve, sow- style to live up to these aspirations. ROSS DOUTHAT ing the water with fragments of what What it lacks, though, is the script- will presumably become our own human doctoring necessary to make its story hold idley Scott’S Prometheus dNA. together. in part, Prometheus suffers from seems to have been made as a A few moments of screen time and the horror-movie habit of featuring char- kind of rebuke to those publi- untold millennia of history later, we meet acters who behave so witlessly that the R cations that attempt to distill our protagonists: two archaeologists, part- audience finds itself rooting for the mon- their movie reviews down to simple letter ners and perhaps lovers, whose excava- ster instead. elba’s pilot and theron’s grades. if i were forced, whether by a tions have revealed an image common to executive seem to be competing for an flamethrower-wielding charlize theron every ancient civilization, showing a titan- award for Most oblivious leadership of a or an ooze-dripping alien parasite, to as- ic figure being worshiped by our ancestors trillion-dollar Mission to an extremely sign such a grade to Scott’s return to the even as he gestures toward a constellation dangerous Planet. their alien-fodder sub- universe he first explored in the original in the sky. this constellation, inevitably, ordinates switch from blind, existential Alien, i would have to give it a middling becomes the destination for an expedi- terror to “Hey, there’s a cute little snake” mark: a c-plus, or if i were feeling gen - tion—a purely scientific mission, insists idiocy the instant the plot demands it. the erous a B-minus. But that sounds like a the female archaeologist (Noomi Rapace), movie’s most horrifying/riveting scene, in a missionary’s daughter who still wears which a character performs emergency her father’s cross, but veterans of the Alien self-surgery to remove a creature gestating franchise are well aware that the corpora- beneath her flesh, is followed by an un - tion paying for the ship and the crew may intentionally comic coda in which that be inclined to disagree. same character staggers through the ship, that crew includes Rapace’s cock sure bloodied and stomach-stapled, and no - partner (logan Marshall-Green), the body seems to care or even notice. ship’s laid-back captain (idris elba), the this is the kind of lazy writing that’s corporation’s icy representative (theron), forgivable in a low-budget slasher film, and a gaggle of geologists, biologists, but not in a movie with Prometheus’s and mercenaries not long for this mortal ambitions. But worse than the laziness coil. it also has an android, the silky david problem is the lindelof problem. Scott’s (Michael Fassbender), whose persona is movie shares a writer, damon lindelof, modeled on Peter o’toole’s t. e. law - with ABc’s famous plane-crash serial, rence (thanks to repeat viewings of david Lost, and this presumably explains why it lean’s epic during the long space voyage) shares that show’s infuriating habit of fea- and whose formal obedience to his human turing plot twists and plot devices that cry makers masks obscure and possibly sinis- out for an explanation, and then resolutely Noomi Rapace in Prometheus ter motives. refusing to explain them. grade suitable to a so-so romantic comedy together, this cast—all of the perfor- the overall design is somewhat clearer or a flabby superhero flick. Prometheus mances, too, are A-grade—set out to ex- in Prometheus than it ever was on Lost, deserves better, and it deserves worse: plore the world they find awaiting them: a mercifully. But the narrative blueprint still this is a blockbuster that merits a flat-out planet of vast, mausoleum-like structures, includes far too many blind alleys and A for some of its components, and some- containing intimations, sculptural and bridges to nowhere. From the meaning thing between a c and a d-minus for holographic, of the ancient race of “engi- of the pictograms that set the movie in the rest. neers” that the company is seeking, but no motion, to david the android’s various the grade-A material starts with the sign (at least at first) of their actual flesh- maneuverings and double-crosses, to the concept, which takes the primal dread and-blood existence. What does exist, in hinted-at connection between the film’s inherent in the Alien universe and blows it flesh and slime and acid, is Something finale and the plot of the original Alien, the . up to cosmic proportions. From its open- else, or maybe various Something elses: story presents tease after tease without ing sequences, the arc of Prometheus not the familiar xenomorph of the original offering a payoff.

FOX FILM CORP offers a kind of pessimistic counterpoint

/ Alien, but what might be its evolutionary the final tease is the suggestion of a to the “why are we here?” yearnings that antecedents, which slither and burrow, sequel. the best material in Prometheus is animated terrence Malick’s Tree of Life impregnate and destroy—until slowly, certainly powerful enough to justify one. last year. like that film, Scott’s traces slowly, it begins to dawn on our heroes But the worst aspects of the movie suggest FREE PRODUCTIONS - mankind’s quest for understanding all the that the makers they seek might not exact- that any follow-up will be just as flawed,

SCOTT way back to the fire and ice of a primor- ly be our friends. and just as ultimately frustrating.

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ny is displayed; don’t worry about it, it’s walk sheds replaced the Bowery flop- City Desk someplace in Brooklyn or the Bronx, house. Their interiors filled up with you’ve never been there. If demolition is pushcarts, cardboard mattresses, blankets, the game, there may also be a funnel to bodies. A blind man would know he was To the direct detritus into a dumpster. Fancy under a sidewalk shed by the tang of addresses seem to get fancier sidewalk urine. Then came Giuliani and the prob- Scaffold! sheds—the elevation of the deck is high- lem miraculously (as far as the great er, the look is airier. The parapets of the and the good were concerned) vanished. sidewalk sheds in front of the Waldorf- The occupy movement brought a brief Astoria display pictures of a frieze. Why and lesser return of the bumoisie, but they didn’t Phidias think of that? Then when too have moved on. The sheds remain, Lord Elgin took the picture off the mar- however, for the next social crisis (the bles, the Turks could have just put up double dip? an obama loss?). another. Sidewalk sheds are weapons in the war Every sidewalk shed adds its bit to the of landlords and commercial tenants. A botheration of city life, by the din of its shed either hides signage or obscures it in going up and the constriction of foot traf- gloom. When building and renter are on fic beneath it—New Yorkers move fast good terms, the parapets display tempo- RICHARD BROOKHISER except when they don’t, and one strolling rary signs telling the world (or at least the mama in a thicket of bridge legs can bring world across the street) what businesses ou hear it sometimes before a street to a halt—and when I first moved are imprisoned below. When owner and you see it—the pang pang here I looked to the day when all the sheds renter go to war, up goes a shed, and en- pang of rhythmic hammering, would come down. But I soon realized joy your new location in Howe Caverns, Y the clang of dropped metal, that they were never coming down; when baby. one of my favorite restaurants had the smock of dropped wood. When you one is dismantled, another arises down folding glass doors and, in good weather, turn the corner you see the familiar sight: the street. In the country standard “Long sidewalk tables on a block so charming it a crew of Central Americans or Africans Black Veil,” the condemned man sings might have been in Italy, except there humping pipes, girders, planks, and ply- The scaffold is high and eternity’s near. were children and people paid their taxes. wood from a truck and throwing them up Sidewalk sheds are near you wherever Then there was blood; a sidewalk shed into the air. Another scaffold is going up. The technical name for these urban portes cochères is sidewalk sheds, and the Every sidewalk shed adds its bit to the city requires them whenever there is seri- botheration of city life. ous construction, demolition, or ordinary repair. Any building, from 19th-century you are, and they stay up for eternity. But appeared, brooding over the new San brick or brownstone runts, to gargoyled I have learned to love them. They are a Gimignano like Mothra. This went on for beaux-arts matrons, to the white-brick sign of life, creative destruction made vis- at least a year, until the restaurant owner slabs of Camelot, to the glass Rubik’s ible, like cutting hair or clipping toenails. took his staff and his tiramisu to a new cubes of postmodernism’s nightmares, is Detroit has no sidewalk sheds, only coy- location down the street. liable to grow a ground-floor girdle. The otes. Mayor Bloomberg, whose attention basic design is everywhere the same. The Sidewalk sheds serve multiple pur - nothing escapes, has decided to reform verticals, or bridge legs, are thick metal poses, from the harmless and useful to the the sidewalk shed. An international de - pipes. Slimmer pipes, with pinched ends, unseemly and dishonorable. The horizon- sign competition was announced in 2009 are clamped alongside to form horizontal tal braces are a forum for masculine dis- and the winner was a 28-year-old ar - braces, or X-shaped cross braces. The play. The black kids who knocked off a chitecture student at the university of business end—what prevents tools, work- few quick chin-ups at the end of the last Pennsylvania, who came up with a design men, or random cornices from toppling century have sons chinning themselves he called urban umbrellas. The supports onto your head—is the deck. Metal beams now. When it rains, the sidewalk shed look a little bit like old Paris metro en - clamped to the tops of the bridge legs run doubles as the forgetful man’s umbrella. trances or fan vaulting for unbelievers. across the sidewalk, metal runners are Everyone carries a mental map of the Since ribbed metal and blue plywood laid at right angles over the beams, and sheds along his daily commute which, would spoil the effect, the decks and the a ribbed metal sheet surmounted by with the help of awnings, doorways, trees, parapets will be made of some sort of wooden planks is laid over the runners. and loading docks, can be a point-to-point clear plastic. Any smoke from forbidden Plywood parapets offer extra insurance route to the Number 6 train and dryness. cigarettes will waft away between the against objects or people rolling into the The traveler’s aid can equally become arms of the umbrellas. This being New street. The prevailing color scheme of the caravanserai of the homeless. In the York, the first prototype was not unveiled plywood these days seems to be dark Seventies and Eighties, when the only until last December. When a new shed blue, though I can remember parapets response to people living on the street was went up this month, down the street from of forest green. to insist that they were poor, not mad, and my front door, all I heard was pang pang The address of the construction compa- wring hands in a kabuki of crisis, side- pang and clang and smock.

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Happy Warrior BY MARK STEYN Mr. Powell and His Peers

LL political lives,” said the British politician to differences closer to home: In Iraq, the aforementioned Enoch Powell many years ago, “unless they Mr. Blair thought he was fighting a war for his party’s famous are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, “values” only to find that his party and its voters thought he ‘A end in failure, because that is the nature of was fighting a war for another country’s interests. politics and of human affairs.” It’s certainly the nature of pol- Powell was famous and notorious, loved and hated, for a itics in the Westminster system. Consider the dazzling Tony single political intervention, the so-called Rivers of Blood Blair of 1997, and the universally reviled “Bliar” of a decade speech on immigration, the one that ended his career. How - later, skulking into premature retirement against his will ever, his personal favorite among his many speeches was the and cursed as a warmongering Bush stooge who’d sold his one on what NR readers may find his rather arcane objection soul and gotten nothing in return. to the 1953 Royal Titles Bill, addressing modifications to Powell himself spent the final third of his life as his own dic- the Queen’s style in her various realms. He denounced the tum’s ultimate cautionary tale. Asked in his twilight how he changes as “a sham . . . something which we have invented to would wish to be remembered, he replied, “I should like to have blind ourselves to the reality.” I would hazard that was also his been killed in the war,” which seems a tad gloomy even for him. objection to “values”—that too often they’re something we Yet, upon his centenary this month, I found myself struck not for invent to blind ourselves to reality. Likewise “Europe” as a the first time by his relevance. Not because he got everything political construct, and “” as a civilizational right, but because he got enough right of the things that almost virtue. To oppose them is to embrace nationalism, or nativism, everybody else got totally wrong and that haunt us still. Powell or racism, or something else polite society disdains to put in its is little known in America, and his antipathy to the United portfolio of “values.” Powell thought it impossible to “foresee States dated back at least as far as the 1943 Churchill-Roosevelt how a country can be peaceably governed in which the com- Casablanca summit, which he attended as a staff offi cer. position of the population is progressively going to change.” Thereafter, he was never well disposed toward Uncle Sam, That’s to say, rapid one-way biculturalism is inherently trans- which avuncular epithet almost certainly never passed his oddly formative. That would seem to be stating the obvious, but stat- sculpted and forbidding lips: As he once conceded, he was ing the obvious became more difficult in an age of “values,” “allergic” to “the things that are typically American.” This “aller- and arguing against values and virtue and moral preening gy” was about all he had in common with his bête noire, the was tougher than arguing against monetary policy. faux-Tory technocrat Euro-fetishist Edward Heath. On almost He had been a professor of Greek at 25, the youngest every other matter, Heath was wrong, and Powell was right. brigadier in the British army, a reforming health minister, and In Britain’s Daily Mail, his biographer Simon Heffer re - then he gave one speech and it was all over. The British state minded readers of a few of them. In 1957 (pre–Milton Fried - is fulsome with its baubles: Harold Macmillan, the prime man), he insisted that public debt would lead to economic minister who put Powell in the cabinet, was garlanded with an decline, and that government should denationalize the public earldom; Edward Heath, the Tory leader who fired him, was sector and use the proceeds for tax cuts. The European Union? made a Knight of the Garter; even the mediocrity who pre- Incompatible with self-government. The euro? It would lead, ceded him as health minister got a baronetcy and a peerage. inevitably, to the loss of economic sovereignty. You might But almost alone among his generation of cabinet ministers, argue that all the above is entirely obvious—except that, to Enoch died as plain old Mr. Powell. varying degrees, Messrs. Obama and Hollande, Frau Merkel, Which, in its way, was fitting. Out on the streets, he was, like the Spanish government, and the Greek electorate are busy Madonna or Bono, one of those rare uninominal celebrities: To trying to disprove the obvious 15 years after Powell’s death. the despair of captive leftie passengers, cabbies the length and He was a diligent attender of the Conservative Philosophy breadth of the realm enthused about “Enoch.” A decade after Group. On one occasion, just before the Argentines invaded his death and in a jurisdiction for which he had little use, John the Falklands, Mrs. Thatcher spoke about the Christian con- O’Sullivan and I took a taxi ride in Dublin in which our driver cept of the just war and Western values. “We do not fight for ended his disquisition on immigration with the words, “Enoch values,” said Powell. “I would fight for this country even if it got it right.” I once wrote a piece on the increasingly crusty and had a Com munist government.” “Nonsense, Enoch,” snapped reactionary Aussie feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Fe - Maggie. “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend male Eunuch, which a waggish editor headlined “The Female our values.” Powell stuck to his guns. “No, Prime Minister, Enoch,” confident that every reader would get the joke. values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. Most of today’s political class will end their lives as fail- They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.” John Casey, ures, too, and without even the consolations of contrarianism. co-founder of the group, asserted that Mrs. Thatcher had just But, on statism, Europe, multiculturalism, and much else, been confronted with the difference between British Toryism Powell taught a very basic lesson—that any sane person and American Republicanism. Be that as it may, it also applied should be instinctively skeptical when all the smart people agree. The “unforeseen consequences” are usually out there Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com). on the not-so-far horizon looming large in plain sight.

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