In Search of the American Mind

I saw an ad last week for Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason (as I was skimming my new issue of the New York Review of Books).

I was hanging out at Borders with my oldest son, where I was also reading the Atlantic Monthly - a store copy, as I'm not a subscriber (the edition had the best piece on public education I've seen in a long time, Sandra Tsing Loh's, "Tales Out of School," which is a must read).

I walked around the store see if they had a copy of the Jacoby volume, but no luck.

My son wanted to shop for a new hip sweatshirt jacket for school over at Tilly's, so I gathered up the books I did find, and headed to the checkout. Russell Kirk's, The Conservative Mind, Jim Mann's, The Rise of the Vulcans, and John McCain's Faith of My Fathers, put me back about 50 bucks.

I'm about a quarter of the way through McCain's book, which I thought I'd better read sooner rather than later, as I've pretty much been the Arizona Senator's biggest neocon blogging buddy on the web!

In any case, back to Jacoby's book. The New York Times has a review of it, and you're going to love this:

There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book, “The Age of American Unreason,” in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”

For more than a decade there have been growing symptoms of this affliction, from fundamentalist assaults on the teaching of evolution to the Bush administration’s willful disavowal of expert opinion on global warming and strategies for prosecuting the war in Iraq. Conservatives have turned the term “intellectual,” like the term “ liberal,” into a dirty word in politics (even though neo-conservative intellectuals played a formative role in making the case for war against Iraq); policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making everyone an authority on everything. Traditional policy channels involving careful analysis and debate have been circumvented by the Bush White House in favor of bold, gut-level calls, and reasoned public discussions have increasingly given way to noisy partisan warfare among politicians, commentators and bloggers alike.

Noisy partisan warfare? I'll say!

Not only that, when everyone's an authority, nobody is. There goes that Ph.D. in political science!

Seriously, the reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, argues that Jacoby's book is excellent, even if it treads less-than-originally over familiar educational-literary ground. Here's more:

As Ms. Jacoby sees it, there are several key reasons for “the resurgent American anti-intellectualism of the past 20 years.” To begin with, television, video games and the Internet have created a “culture of distraction” that has shortened attention spans and left people with “less time and desire” for “two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation.”

The eclipse of print culture by video culture began in the 1960s, Ms. Jacoby argues, adding that the ascendance of youth culture in that decade also promoted an attitude denigrating the importance of tradition, history and knowledge.

By the ’80s, she goes on, self-education was giving way to self-improvement, core curriculums were giving way to classes intended to boost self-esteem, and old-fashioned striving after achievement was giving way to a rabid pursuit of celebrity and fame. The old middlebrow culture, which prized information and aspiration — and which manifested itself, during the post-World War II years, in a growing number of museums and symphony orchestras, and a Book-of-the-Month club avidity for reading — was replaced by a mass culture that revolved around television and blockbuster movies and rock music.

Reminds me a little here of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind, which I bought right when it came out in 1987, but didn't read until I started my current position as a professor of political science.

Jacoby's topic, anti-intellectualism, is a big one for me, as I sometimes just can't get a handle on the intense oppostion to books, learning, and anything having to do with a life of the mind among many students today.

Of course, I'm at community college, so I've got kids often with so many disadvantages that it's little wonder that many haven't been acculturated in a home environment of books and ideas. But as the passages here illustrate, it's more than that, from TV and electronic entertainment, to the entitlement culture the denigrates the hard work that is the essence of academic excellence.

Will things get better?

I'm not optimistic. I was a young punk skateboarder in my teens, but I loved to read at the same time. Robert Ludlum was my favorite, but I'd read a classic here and there. In college I couldn't get enough, and often took classes - like French History Since 1789 and Shakespeare - that were not necessary for my personal graduation curriculum. I just loved school.

And I think that's what it's going to take, some kind of home-based, personal avocation toward learning. We have no national standards, outside of NCLB, which is watered down and violates federalism for many conservatives anyway. So the burden of acculturation has to reside at the level of the family. Parents must engage in a home environment of "concerted cultivation," even if such a program is not exactly deliberate or explicit.

What does this mean? Well, there's got to be a rich language environment of kids at home, with ample opportunity and resources to engage in intellectual pursuits crucial for early human development. Everyone seems to know this, with all the talk in recent years of childhood brain development and the need for intellectual stimulation of infants.

But it's more than that: It seems that home environments need to have a sense of simple rigor, as well as the granting of individual autonomy of growth to the child. How are parenting styles situated in the context of the need to cultivate children's development and independence of thought? Reading is key, certainly, but it's the effort to pull all things together, art, politics, sports into a whole of daily life that creates the concerted family stimulation necessary for building accumulated advantages of learning and mobility.

Governments can't do this, so while I've yet to read Jacoby or other recent pedagogical tracts, educational policies that seek to turn this around have got to change the culture of the home.

Whether that's by setting tougher standards at school or by creating greater incentives for parents and kids to experience the benefits of learning and growth, such an agenda must be a large part of social and educational policy moving forward. Unfortunately, I doubt the emphasis on greater family and personal responsibility will go over all that well with progressive educators. But until it does, expect more ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.

I've got to hang it up here for the night.

My youngest son picked out a book at Ralphs, Thimbletack's Mission, and we need to get a bit of it finished before my we brush teeth and hit the sack.

It's a special occasion tonight as well, for my oldest boy's away this week at his school's "science camp" in San Bernardino Mountains - which in a way, is another element of the concerted cultivation that my oldest's been lucky enough to have.

I feel blessed sometimes with the opportunities I've had to learn, and it's natural to pass along the love of ideas and achievement to my offspring. Can we pass along these ethics to our people and our nation as a whole?

Feminist Hat Trick: It Doesn't Get Any Better!

Well, by now you've seen my post on Hillary Clinton's "invisible woman" campaign, as well as the follow up on the Charlotte Allen uproar at the Washington Post.

Well, it turns out that the feminist Torquemadas are just starting to roll. Linda Hirshman's been axed from her writing gig over at Talking Points Memo, apparently for not toeing the Obama line this last week during WaPo's "Allen affair."

But hey, without further ado, here's the first person account:

Hi there. Linda Hirshman here. I just got the boot from TPM Café, where I have been blogging for more than a year. Back story: I published a piece on the cover of the Outlook section of the Washington Post last Sunday, March 2, on the class divide in Hillary Clinton's female supporters. Since I criticized the scribbling females of the blogosphere, the article elicited the predictable onslaught of response from them. But when I sent Andrew Golis, my normal contact at TPM Café, my response to post, I got an email telling me TPM had pulled my posting privileges (I don't normally publish email exchanges, but I have no personal relationship with any of the people at TPM, including Golis, and this seems like a fairly straightforward public business communication with no personal material involved.): "For the time being, we're cycling our regular contributers [sic] at the Coffee house and trying to cut down the number of folks with at will posting privileges. If you occasionally have a piece I'd of course love to check it out. But unfortunately we're limiting the number of people who post regularly."

I must admit I was a little surprised. I have not been fired in a long time (decades, really), and I think I'm having a pretty good run in the crowded precincts of political commentary. True, my last few postings at TPM Café were not in keeping with the overwhelming majority of their articles, making and making the case for Senator Barack Obama. I questioned the value of an Idaho caucus victory. I criticized Maureen Dowd's column suggesting that when a perfect female candidate came along, the media would be delighted to support her. I suggested that "Josh" might have waited to get more survey results before he posted his video embracing the ultimately erroneous Zogby predictions for the California primary the afternoon before the primary. But I thought that the new media of the blogosphere was actually established in part to offset what they considered the tendency of the MSM to cut its coverage to suit its preexisting, largely establishment, predilections. So I was blithely oblivious to the possibility that my dissenting views on the inevitability and divinity of the Obama candidacy might cause a problem. Never bashful, I thought I'd press the messenger.

Now this is a woman for my heart!

Questioning poll findings favoring an Obama win? Oh, the audacity!!

If you check the post Hirshman's got some of the e-mail from TPM, and don't miss the closing:

They do not appear to have deacquisitioned Ruth Rosen, who is one of the Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama!™ which of course only supports my most paranoid thoughts.

"Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama," eh?

That's a mouthful, at the least (and check some of Hirshman's links, where you'll see some insight to the feminist divide, not to mention Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review).

There's Something About Charlotte (She's No Dim Bulb)

Well, since I'm having fun with feminist apoplexy this afternoon, I'll throw in Noemie Emery's take on the Charlotte Allen imbroglio from the Washington Post last week.

Here's Emery:

LAST SUNDAY, OUR friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, "dim." Readers swooned, feminists shrieked (Katha Pollitt in a riposte on the Post's website), and Post higher-ups raised the white flag of contrition, unaware, so it seems, that exactly two days later--on Tuesday, March 4--the paper itself had run two major stories that proved every point Allen made.

On page one, a feminist warhorse, still mourning the death of the ERA many years earlier, told a room filled with unoccupied chairs that the reason men voted for Barack Obama was solely to thwart women's hopes. "Would they like white man instead of a black man? Of course. But they'll take a black man over a woman. I never thought, in 2008, that we'd still be dealing with this." Well, neither did we, and that wasn't the worst of it. Obama was being...polite. He had the gall to pull Hillary's chair out when the debates started, "immediately establishing the upper hand in their interaction," and putting the uppity girl in her place. "You can bet that's a calculated move," the feminist said, "and it's absolutely demeaning." Any day now, he may hold the door open, and things will really get ugly. Are there no depths to which men will not go?

"One Way or Another, Women Will Decide it," went another big story--this time on A7, with pictures--with more of the deeply oppressed. One is a nurse who has suffered a lifetime of grievance, from her father who refused to let her shoot pool as a child, to doctors who expect some respect from the nurses, to her husband, who soaked the "Hillary!" sign she put up in the garden when he watered the lawn with a hose. Then there is the body-piercing artiste from South Austin (a typical voter if ever there was one) who weighed in with her unique take on events:

The tattoo gun vibrated in Wendy Ramirez's hand as she leaned over the man's arm, gracefully etching the outline of a woman's torso onto his skin. For 18 years she has worked in this male-dominated field, having to endure such comments as "Little girl, you don't know what you're doing."..."Many men don't respect women," she says.

There is the black woman, torn between loyalties: "When Hillary Clinton announced she was running, I was like, hands down, that's it. I'm voting for her. Then I see this stream of light that is Barack Obama, and at first I was like, what is he, crazy? I felt pressure on both sides," she says. And there's the white lawyer, who's strictly for Hillary: "A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, 'My ancestors came to this country in chains; I'm voting for Barack.' I told him, 'Well, my sisters came here in chains, and on their periods; I'm voting for Hillary.'" Evil slaveholders made women have periods! Who knew?

Then, there's the piece that ran in the Nation (main home of Ms. Pollitt), written by a cluster of feminists (Gloria Steinem among them) who met to make sense of it all:

Two days after the Texas debate a group of old friends broke out the good china for a light breakfast of strong coffee, blueberry muffins, and fresh-squeezed orange juice .it was a casual gathering, but one that settled down to business quickly How, we wondered did a historic breakthrough moment for which we have all longed and worked risk becoming marred by having to choose between "race cards" and "gender cards" .What happened, we wondered, to the last four decades of discussion about tokenism and multiple identities and the complex intersections of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class?

Well, gee, we don't know, girls, except that maybe all this talk of "identities" created a climate in which valid critiques of the tactics or policies of individual candidates became a lethal assault upon every non-white or woman who ever drew breath?

And, what action did they take at this "power breakfast"? Well, none, except deciding to meet again, and eat even more muffins. "As we gathered up the empty plates, we recommitted ourselves to further joint discussions about how to attain that collective better future, however many early mornings, late nights and urns of coffee into the future that make take." Whatever it takes. Who says women don't have the stomach for really gut-wrenching political battles? Realities such as these make satire redundant.

Don't hush, sweet Charlotte. You make even more sense than you know.

Emery's the best!

Well, next to Charlotte Allen!!

Latin America's Arc of Revolutionary Destruction

Mary Anastasia O'Grady's the best journalist writing on Latin America, as she demonstrates once more in her column today, "The FARC Files":

Colombia's precision air strike 10 days ago, on a guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador, killed rebel leader Raúl Reyes. That was big. But the capture of his computer may turn out to be a far more important development in Colombia's struggle to preserve its democracy.

Reyes was the No. 2 leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been at war with the Colombian government for more than four decades. His violent demise is a fitting end to a life devoted to masterminding atrocities against civilians. But the computer records expose new details of the terrorist strategy to bring down the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, including a far greater degree of collaboration between the FARC and four Latin heads of government than had been previously known. In addition to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, they are President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega and Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Mr. Chávez is said to have been visibly distressed when told of the death of Reyes, a man he clearly admired. He also may have realized that he played a role in his hero's death, since it was later reported that the Colombian military had located the camp by intercepting a phone call to Reyes from the Venezuelan president.

Mr. Chávez rapidly ordered 10 battalions to the Colombian border. Should the Colombian military cross into Venezuela in search of FARC, he warned, it would mean war. That may have seemed like an unnecessary act of machismo. But the Colombia military has long claimed that the FARC uses both Ecuador and Venezuela as safe havens. Now it had shown that it wasn't afraid to act on that information.

There is a third explanation for Mr. Chávez's panic when he learned of the strike: He was alarmed about the possibility that his links with Reyes would be exposed. Sure enough, when the Colombian national police retrieved Reyes's body from Ecuador, it also brought back several computers from the camp. Documents on those laptops show that Mr. Chávez and Reyes were not only ideological comrades, but also business partners and political allies in the effort to wrest power from Mr. Uribe.

The tactical discussions found in the documents are hair-raising enough....

The more significant revelation is the relationship between the FARC and Mr. Chávez, Mr. Correa, Mr. Morales and Mr. Ortega. All four, it turns out, support FARC violence and treachery against Mr. Uribe.

This reminds me of the Soviet Union's policy of supporting Marxist-Leninist insurgencies around the world in the '70s and '80s. The Reagan administration came to power after the atrophied Carter years determined to restore America's rightful position in the global hieararchy of powers.

While America's unrivaled by the Soviets today, we now face challenges to the South no less significant than when Reagan was in office. John McCain recognizes this:

We must also work together to counter the propaganda of demagogues who threaten the security and prosperity of the Americas. Hugo Chávez has overseen the dismantling of Venezuela's democracy by undermining the parliament, the judiciary, the media, free labor unions, and private enterprises. His regime is acquiring advanced military equipment. And it is trying to build a global anti-American axis. My administration will work to marginalize such nefarious influences.

And not too soon!!

Let's just hope Barack Obama's not elected. In the Illinois' Senator's major policy statement from last fall, there's no mention of the ominous Latin American spector rising around Chavez and his FARC allies.

Yet, there's no shortage of Che Guevara posters at Obama campaign offices:

Hillary Clinton's Invisible Woman Misogyny

I've been frankly amazed at Hillary Clinton's resiliency this election. She's dramatically come back from the brink three times thus far: after losing the Iowa caucuses, after Barack Obama's South Carolina victory, and after winning Texas and Ohio last week.

You'd think the Hillary spin this week would be "you ain't seen nothin' yet"!

But no, the latest meme's that Hillary's burdened by her age, stereotyped as a washed-up over-50 "invisible woman." Or at least that's what Tina Brown argues at Newsweek:

Much has been written about how boomer women have rallied to Hillary's cause (she won an impressive 67 percent of the white women voting in Ohio; they were 44 percent of the total). It's fashionable to write off this core element of her base as rabid paleo-feminists fighting the tired old gender wars of the past. But Hillary's appeal to the boomer gals is wider and deeper than that. Cynthia Ruccia, a grass-roots political organizer in Columbus, told me that in these last beleaguered weeks, women started showing up in waves at Clinton headquarters—women who told her they had never volunteered in a campaign before. "There was just an outpouring about the way she was being treated by the media," Ruccia said. "It was something we hadn't seen in a long time. We all felt, as women, we had made a lot of progress, and we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down."

It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."

Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV's most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.

What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twentysomething daughters don't share their view of her heroic role. Instead they've been swept up by that new Barack magic. It's not their fault, and not Hillary's, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House.

It's not just Tina Brown.

Leslie Bennetts at yesterday's Los Angeles Times boosted the over-50 misogyny angle as well:

This is not how the story line was expected to go, dammit, and the impatience of the (mostly male) punditocracy is palpable. Doesn't Hillary Clinton know she was supposed to lose decisively in Ohio or Texas last week so that Barack Obama could unify the Democratic Party and sail to victory in November?

Except that she didn't lose -- and, boy, are some people annoyed about that! Why doesn't she just get out of the way? The media have sorted it all out so neatly: He is young, glamorous, charismatic and funny; he represents the future. She is older, strident, earnest and humorless; she is the past. He inspires; she hectors. Ugh!

Not only is Clinton well beyond the age when our culture deems women to have lost most of their value, but so are all too many of her supporters -- and there are few things this country is less interested in than aging women. America requires that females be (or at least appear) young and sexually desirable. Once they've passed the age of facile objectification and commodification, they're supposed to disappear. How dare they not cooperate with our national insistence that older women become invisible?....

So why won't Clinton just scram? I mean, you can't drive a stake through that woman's heart! She just keeps getting up and fighting on, like some incredibly irritating pop-up doll that won't stay down, no matter how many times you smash it to the ground. Not only does "the bitch" (as one McCain supporter memorably called her) insist on staying in the race, but her supporters are getting all riled up and defying the pressure to make her go away. News reports chronicle the anger of older female voters who are simply refusing to go along with the triumphalist narrative of Obama's inevitability. Who do they think they are?

In most of the news coverage, the idea of representation -- the fundamental point of democracy and the reason ours exists, if memory serves -- never even comes up. But the fact is that an enormous segment of the electorate spends most of its time below the radar of American culture. Younger women may be the tip of the iceberg, the part we're able to see, but its hulking body -- the vast cohort of older women we so rarely hear from -- remains submerged.

Many people would like to keep it that way. A quarter of a century ago, the wife of a major Hollywood mogul told me that she couldn't stand Los Angeles because women here became invisible after they passed the age of 25. Although that number may be somewhat higher elsewhere, a good case could be made that such attitudes have permeated our entire society in the intervening years. How many major studio movies (not indie films; that's cheating) have you seen lately that star older women? How many presidential candidates have you heard talking about the needs of older women?

Well, there it is, the invisible woman!

I must be pretty removed from gender studies, but Hillary's campaign illustrates to me that we need more women in politics. We should be seeing less stress on gender - "are you running as a woman" - and more on experience, qualifications, and platform.

Hillary looks good and she's obviously got the physical stamina and fire in the belly to out-campaign most men her age.

Not only that, some in the youth cohort are "Hot for Hillary"!

New York Governor Spitzer to Resign

The timing couldn't be better: Precisely when the Democrats should be basking in the glow of a crucial off-season special election, this week's media cycle will be consumed by New York's big Democratic Party scandal.

The buzz is that New York's Governor Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, is expected to resign after reports of his solicitation of prostitution. Here's the YouTube of Spitzer's afternoon press conference:

Here's the story from FOX:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is expected to submit his resignation to the New York General Assembly Monday night after allegations surfaced earlier in the day that he is "Client 9," named in a federal prostitution case.

Four arrests were made last week in connection to the alleged high-dollar ring, known as the Emperors Club VIP. According to a law enforcement official, Spitzer was named in court papers as a client after being taped arranging a meeting with one of the prostitutes.

The New York Times reports that the governor's travel records show he was in Washington in mid-February. It also says one of the ring's clients arranged to meet with a prostitute during that time.

Allahpundit over at Hot Air's got transcripted communications from the prostitute sting indicating that "Client-9" (allegedly Spitzer) "would ask you to do things, like, you might not think were safe..."

Here's the New York Times' story:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation.

The wiretap captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The person briefed on the case and the law enforcement official identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat, today made a brief public appearance during which he apologized for his behavior, and described it as a “private matter.” He did not address his political future.

Spitzer's probably the last politician most observers would've expected to get caught up in a prostitution sting. A super-hard-nosed prosecutor who made his mark by hammering ethics, Spitzer's married with three daughters.

About his decline and undoubted fall, Allah warns, "Wife and kids, so schadenfreude isn’t in order."

Well, considering that many argued that the GOP lost the Congress in 2006 due to widespread ethical scandals, I certainly wouldn't mind - over the course of this year - if Spitzer's misfortunes weren't unique within his party.

Iraq Progress is a Joke?

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with this, but I guess somebody's got to do it.

The latest antiwar controversy over Iraq again involves Michael O'Hanlon and his new "Iraq Update" at the New York Times.

O'Hanlon's data confirm what's been the most important development in foreign policy over the last year: We're winning in Iraq. Take a look at the chart, comparing monthly figures:

• Civilian deaths in February 2008 are down by 2000 compared to February 2007.
• 36 U.S. soldiers died this February, compared to 81 a year ago.
• Iraqi security forces number 425,000 strong, an addition of over 100,000 troops from last year.
• Iraqi security deaths are down by 40, a statistic drawn from a larger absolute number than in February 2007.
• Daily insurgent attacks were at 65 last month, compared to 210 for February of last year.

Again, check the chart.

O'Hanlon doesn't spend too much time on the numbers in his discussion, although he does try to bring a little more rigor to the measurement of continuing progress with the introduction of a new index:

IRAQ’S security turnaround has continued through the winter. The question for 2008 is whether Iraqi security forces can preserve and build on this improvement as they increasingly bear more of the responsibility as the number of American troops declines...

The most intriguing area of late is the sphere of politics. To track progress, we have established “Brookings benchmarks” — a set of goals on the political front similar to the broader benchmarks set for Baghdad by Congress last year. Our 11 benchmarks include establishing provincial election laws, reaching an oil-revenue sharing accord, enacting pension and amnesty laws, passing annual federal budgets, hiring Sunni volunteers into the security forces, holding a fair referendum on the disputed northern oil city of Kirkuk, and purging extremists from government ministries and security forces.

At the moment, we give the Iraqis a score of 5 out of 11 (our system allows a score of 0, 0.5, or 1 for each category, and is dynamic, meaning we can subtract points for backsliding). It is far too soon to predict that Iraq is headed for stability or sectarian reconciliation. But it is also clear that those who assert that its politics are totally broken have not kept up with the news.

This is an op-ed piece, so we'd need to see an elaboration of the statistical indicators for each category under analysis (see O'Hanlon's earlier Brookings essay for a bit more complete discussion, minus the "Brooking Benchmarks"). Unfortunately, O'Hanlon doesn't do this, and his failure to provide a link to a larger database is problematic for political consumption (he thus sets himself up for abuse).

Still, especially on government reform, O'Hanlon's markers match up with other various analyses pointing to Iraq's political progress resulting from increased military security (as measured by Congress' own benchmarks of Iraq success).

Now, we've seen a few new outbursts of terrorist violence over the weekend and this morning, which goes to show that for all of our success, significant challenges in both the military and political realms remain.

But to hear the left blogosphere discuss the situation, you'd think it was all a joke. O'Hanlon's been a source of ongoing ridicule on the left, which has questioned his progressive national security credentials follwing his favorable reports on the war. For example, O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack set off a firestorm last year with a report that suggested the U.S. would prevail in Iraq.

So it's no suprise to see the lefty blogger-kiddies up in arms about O'Hanlon's latest update. Matthew Yglesias goes so far as to compare "Brookings Benchmarks" to "Disney Dollars":

I think Brookings Benchmarks are kind of like Disney Dollars, i.e. funny money.

So, it's a joke: Real military success and political progress, discussed in an op-ed report, is equivalent to corporate play-money tokens sold by Walt Disney?

I've said many times that no amount of progress in Iraq will satisfy the nihilist antiwar contingent.

While Americans are fighting and dying for the consolidation of a free and democratic Iraq, we've got beer-addled leftist bloggers (and obviously self-proclaimed experts in strategic studies) watching the news on TV, pounding-down a few pale ales, and pumping-out blog posts at some dirty Washington flophouse.

Well, don't that beat all - and to this is what the Democratic candidates and the congressional majority pander?

See more at Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Celebrating Murder in Gaza: Crossing the Rubicon of Violence

The Gaza Strip erupted in celebration at the news of eight Jewish students murdered in Jerusalem, via YouTube:

Here's Caroline Glick on the extremism:

Between Iran, Egypt, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah, Fatah and the Israeli Arab leadership, the incitement level this week was so high, that the violence level crossed a Rubicon. It was only a question of when and where the bullets and bombs would start exploding not whether or not they would.

So the Palestinian Arabs and their friends have decided to murder Jews studying Torah in Jerusalem. They decided to go to the heart of the religious Zionist movement and open fire knowing the sort of passions such an attack will provoke. Apparently the terrorist was a Jerusalemite. One television channel reported that he lived in Jabel Mukhaber – a neighborhood abutting Armon HaNatziv. Not surprising.

The third stage of the Palestinian jihad against Israel has been germinating for months and now it is taking off. And the role that Israeli Arabs will play in this round will likely be an expanded one.

Here's Power Line:

You may have heard that when news reached Gaza that eight teenagers had been murdered in the library of a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, thousands of Arabs in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate. Tom Gross links to the footage -- broadcast on Israeli television news, taken from Palestinian television news -- of Gazans handing out sweets and candies to passing motorists honking their horns in joy. Gross wonders why the footage is not broadcast in the West: "Might it spoil the sympathy for Palestinians that the BBC, CNN, and others are trying to ram down viewers’ throats all the time?" I think we all know the answer to that question.

Note something else: There's evidence that Hezbollah in Lebanon coordinated with Hamas on the Jerusalem murders. Hezbollah, of course, is Iran's major proxy in Southern Lebanon. Can people really deny any longer that the entire Persian Gulf region is intent on the elimination of the Jewish state an its people?

The terrorist threat to Israel and the West can be eliminated, but it will take total war thinking. People will continue to die until the West considers such strategy?

Democrats Take Hastert's Seat, Roiling Speculation

Partisans on both sides of the aisle are reacting to the Democratic candidate's special election victory in the Illinois congressional district of Dennis Hastert, the former GOP House Speaker. Here's the New York Times:

Congressional Democrats on Sunday were celebrating an election victory that they said increased their confidence of holding the House in November and affirmed that party positions on the Iraq war and health care were resonating with voters.

At the same time, they said the victory, taking over the Illinois seat held for two decades by Dennis J. Hastert, who became the most powerful Republican in Congress, showed that Democrats can run strongly in the more than two dozen House seats being vacated by Republicans, particularly given the party’s financial advantage.

The election of Bill Foster, a physicist, for the 14th Congressional District provided special satisfaction to Democrats since it means that their party in the past two years has won seats held by two of their arch foes — Mr. Hastert, the former speaker who left Congress last fall, and Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader from Texas.
“It was a remarkable repudiation of Republican status quo, showing that voters all across America are eager for change,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said Sunday.

Check out the Politico's coverage as well, indicating a considerable psychological defeat for GOP congressional hopefuls:

For National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.), every week seems to bring a new set of problems. On Saturday night, things got even worse.

With Democrat Bill Foster’s victory in the Illinois 14th District special election, Democrats now hold the seats occupied only 21 months ago by former Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Texas) — the two GOP lawmakers who ran the House from 1998 to 2006.

Since September, Cole has faced a barrage of bad news:

• The NRCC lags behind the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by nearly $30 million in cash on hand.

• GOP House leadership endured an embarrassing scuffle when Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) tried to fire Cole’s top two staffers, during which Cole threatened to resign.

• There has been a wave of retirement announcements by veteran Republican lawmakers that will force the NRCC to defend what were once seen as safe GOP seats.

• Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) was indicted on 35 federal corruption charges, which puts another Republican-controlled district in play.

• And the FBI continues its criminal investigation into a brewing accounting scandal that centers on the former NRCC treasurer’s activities.

But the GOP’s defeat in Illinois’ special election Saturday may trump those setbacks, at least in the short term. Cole and the House Republican leadership are blaming the loss directly on GOP candidate Jim Oberweis. A dairy owner who lost three consecutive statewide elections before Saturday, Oberweis has a long history of political baggage. He won the recent nomination without receiving the support of his Republican primary rival, state Sen. Chris Lauzen.

“By itself, this would not be that big of a deal, but coupled with everything else it will just deflate the [House Republican] Conference,” said an aide to one top GOP lawmaker. “And symbolically, losing Hastert’s seat is like the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad for Republicans.”

Cole and the NRCC are desperately spinning Oberweis’ defeat as an isolated incident that is not endemic of further GOP losses in the fall. NRCC Communications Director Karen Hanretty, new to the panel after the previous spokeswoman resigned last month, said, “The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend. In fact, there has been no national trend this entire election season.”

An isolated incident? That's a good one!

Face it: The GOP's facing the potential for one of the biggest Democratic years since 1964. The symbolism of taking the former House Speaker's seat is enormous, and portends for Democratic prospects.

Here's Bill Kristol's thoughts on this:

Buried inside Sunday’s papers was a noteworthy election result. In a special election to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, first-time Democratic candidate Bill Foster emerged victorious. George Bush easily carried the district in 2004, as has every recent G.O.P. presidential candidate.

This Democratic pickup suggests that, for now, we’re in an electoral environment more like 2006 than 2004. Foster’s eight-percentage-point improvement on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in the district mirrors the general shift in the electorate from 2004, when Bush won and the Republicans held Congress, to 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress and ran on average about eight points ahead of the G.O.P. Most surveys have shown the Democrats retaining that sizable advantage over the last 16 months. Saturday’s special election would appear to confirm these polls.

This isn’t encouraging for G.O.P. prospects in 2008. Nor is this: It’s rare for a party to win a third consecutive term in the White House. The only time it’s been done since World War II was in 1988. Then the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, had a job approval rating on Election Day in the high 50s. George Bush looks likely to remain stuck in the 30s. Factor in the prospect of a recession (the bad housing and job market reports at the end of last week were politically chilling) and the fact that a large majority already thinks the country’s going in the wrong direction. Add to the mix a huge turnout so far in the Democratic presidential primaries, far above that for the Republican contests, even when both parties still had competitive races.

As former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power would say: Ergh!

We still have a long way to go until the general election.

Campaigns matter, and the dynamics in Illinois can't be replicated exactly around the country (a presidential election's won in the Electoral College, where so far prospects look good for McCain).

But if there ever was a wake-call for the GOP, this one's it.

Fighting to Win: Advocating Total War in the Age of Sacred Terror

In an entry yesterday, I cited Daniel Doron, at the Wall Street Journal, where he argued against Israel's current military strategies:

The massacre of rabbinical students Thursday at a Jerusalem seminary highlights the failure of the powerful Israeli military to stop the assaults of Palestinian terrorists. It also reveals serious deficiencies in Israel's strategy and tactics....

Israeli governments have done little to stop the massive rearmament of Hamas in Gaza with Iranian weapons, bought with Saudi money and transported into Gaza with the connivance of Egypt. Israel did not even press its great ally, the U.S., to lean on Egypt and put an end to this flagrant violation of its peace agreement with Israel -- a peace agreement for which Egypt is rewarded by billions in U.S. aid.

But the worst failures stem from adoption of a no-win strategy....

Israel could achieve military victory by eliminating or incarcerating Hamas's leadership, not two or three a month (so that they are replaceable) but a few hundred at once. By breaking its command structure and its logistical apparatus, Hamas can be rendered inoperative.

But for this to happen, Israel and Western democracies must treat the terrorists' mortal challenge as a war for survival, not as a series of skirmishes. And in war, you must fight to win, by all traditional means.

Now, Doron suggests in his conclusion that Israel should use "all traditional means,'' but that's rather ambiguous. How far should Israel go in defeating the demonic alliance Middle Eastern terrorist organizations intent on the Jewish state's complete and utter annihilation?

Will locking up "a few hundred at once" really stem the unending onslaught of terrorist mayhem facing the nation?

Dana Pico over at Common Sense Political Thought has his doubts, and he's made a powerful argument against Israel's cat-and-mouse limited war doctrine:

The last paragraph is correct, but the preceding one demonstrates Mr. Doron’s intellectual problem; his problem is that he is an educated Western classical liberal....

The current Western classical liberal paradigm for war is fighting to take out the political and military leadership of the enemy, and that’s just what Mr. Doron suggested, “eliminating or incarcerating Hamas’s leadership, not two or three a month . . . but a few hundred at once.” The obvious question to ask is: when was the last time that such a strategy won a war?

The Allies won World War II by killing millions of Germans and Italians and Japanese, to near the point of exterminating their population of fighting-aged men, and by so thoroughly destroying their countries’ infrastructures that no resumption of hostilities was possible. The Germans started it, but it was really the Allies who turned Europe into a charnal house, via concentrated aerial bombardment and massive physical invasion. The Japanese started it, but it was the United States which killed and bombed Japan into submission, so thoroughly beaten that Emperor Hirohito forced a surrender before invasion was necessary. In short, we didn’t just defeat the fascists’ leadership, we didn’t take out several thousand political and military leaders, but we battered their countries into submission.

That concept of war is simply no longer within the boundaries of current Western thinking; we no longer accept the notion of actually destroying a nation in the process of beating it militarily. That kind of thought went out the window beginning in Vietnam, and was gone completely by the time of the two Persian Gulf Wars.

Pico's absolutely correct, and he hits upon an extremely important question: What's the limit of war fighting doctrine in today's long-war against fundamentalist terrorism?

Well, it turns out that Michael Scheuer addresses this question precisely at today's Los Angeles Times, "Break Out the Shock and Awe":

In this age of mindless phrases, such as "out-of-the-box thinking" and "a time for change," another silly phrase -- favored by presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush -- is causing America's defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The phrase is "small, light and fast," and it refers to the kind of military that they think we need to have.

"Small, light and fast" means not your grandfather's Army -- far fewer heavy weapons and far less of the ground infantry that made up the conventional forces the United States has always relied on in major wars. Instead, its proponents believe, the U.S. military should rely more on covert operations and special forces to fight counterinsurgencies and irregular wars.

To varying degrees, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama want this as well. Obama, for example, recently called for "more special operations resources along the Afghan-Pakistan border."

But this approach cannot work. One lesson of the last decade is that our leaders' efforts to win wars with the CIA-led clandestine service and U.S. Special Forces in the lead only delivers defeat. We cannot fight a worldwide uprising of radical Islamists with the type of forces once thought most appropriate to suppress rebels on tiny Caribbean islands....

The sad truth is that Washington's increasing over-reliance on clandestine and special forces to fight our enemies is the result of our political class' terror of condemnation by the media, academia, the just-war theorists and the European elite if it uses America's full military power. Notwithstanding the murderous war in the Balkans and the Rwandan genocide, U.S. leaders have bought into the ahistorical assertion that human nature and war today are radically different from and far less bloody than they were in the eras of Alexander and Caesar.

Unwilling to apply full conventional military power against our enemies, American officials instead hope that light forces, counterinsurgency tactics and precision weapons will beat our foes with few casualties, little or no collateral damage -- and no bad publicity.

Well, bunk. Victory is not possible if only covert forces are employed, and presidents from both parties have lied about their effectiveness because they will not tell Americans the politically incorrect truth. The fact is that in this global war against non-uniformed, religiously motivated foes who live with and are supported by their civilian brethren, and who are perfectly willing to use a nuclear device against the U.S., victory is only possible through the use of massive, largely indiscriminate military force.

So if that's what it's going to take - absolutely "battering countries into submission" through the application of "massive, largely indiscriminate force" (to borrow from both passages) - then why haven't we done so?

Well, what's not mentioned here - at least not as explicitly as it should be - is the problem of the killing of civilians. Are we ready to employ America's unprecedented military preponderance in wars of total, scorched earth annihilation (and is Israel)?

Obviously not.

Staying with the U.S. case, this is not to say that recent American military victories weren't decisive, for example in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were, but they were incomplete: They were not wars of total annihilation on the scale of the Second World War.

If we're really going to fight our enemies indiscriminately, we need to be ready to kill men, women, and children. We need to be willing to deploy bombing campaigns on the scale of Dresden and Tokyo, and in killing we need to make no distinction between enemy soldiers and enemy civilians.

Are we ready to do this? I don't think so.

But note something here: James McPherson recently reviewed Mark Neely's, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction at the New York Review of Books (click here).

Neely's making the case that the Civil War was not a total war on the scale of World War II. McPherson takes Neely's argument apart, showing that on most measures rarely has war been as total as the conflict between the states.

But what's useful about McPherson's piece is the elaboration of the total war doctrine itself:

The concept of 'total war' had arisen as a way of describing the horrifying destruction of lives and resources in World War II. The generation of historians who experienced that cataclysm used this phrase to describe the American Civil War as well. That conflict cost more American lives than World War II, even though the United States in 1861 had less than one quarter the population of 1941, and it left large portions of the South looking like bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan.

The Civil War mobilized human and economic resources in the Confederacy and the Union on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except perhaps World War II. For actual combat duty, the war of 1861-1865 mustered a larger proportion of American manpower than that of 1941-1945. And in another comparison with the global conflagration, the victorious power in the Civil War did all it could to devastate the enemy's economy as well as the morale of its homefront population. Union armies were remarkably successful in this effort. The Civil War wiped out two thirds of the assessed value of the South's livestock, and more than half of its farm machinery - not to mention one quarter of the Confederacy's white men of military age. While Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.

McPherson uses this discussion to cast initial aspersion on Neely's case that the Civil War was historically limited.

But our purpose here is to consider whether the West stands ready to fight modern wars on this scale of destruction. The United States is more powerful in the absolute sense today than in any time in American history, and our present level of defense spending - at 3.9 percent of GDP - is at comparable historical lows for the post-WWII era.

Obviously, we could rain down exponentially more destruction on our enemies today than in any war Americans have fought in history, and we could afford to as well.

Is that what we want to do?

Personally, I'm all for fighting futher along the continuum toward total war than we are today. But I doubt society is.

We're not likely to achieve the "lasting victory" both Pico and Scheuer recommend unless we engage in the total scale of destruction that McPherson describes.

Until we do, we should not be surprised to see future attacks on the United States of at least the scale of September 11, 2001.

International Women's Day: Advancing Radical Feminism?

Yesterday was "International Women's Day." What goes on during such a commemoration?

Well, for some, the day's mostly used to advance the left's radical feminist agenda, as this news report indicates:

Eagle Forum, a leading pro-family organization founded by Phyllis Schlafly, author of Feminist Fantasies, condemns the U.S. Government's endorsement of the worldwide feminist event, International Women's Day. According to its website, IWD is a "global day connecting all women around the world and inspiring them to achieve their full potential." Back in 1911, the very first IWD was celebrated in order to campaign for such noble ideals as women's right to work, to vote, and to hold public office.

Today, IWD serves to advance radical feminism in the form of promoting pro-abortion and pro-gay rights legislation, ratification of ERA, affirmative action for women, Title IX, government babysitting services, and government wage control, commonly camouflaged as "pay equity" or "comparable worth." The supporting organizations are not women's groups, but feminist groups, including Feminist Peace Network, Aurora Women's Network, UNESCO, and the United Nations Development Fund for Women, also known as UNIFEM. Even media groups, such as CNN, the BBC, and Aljazeera TV have signed on as sponsors. Tomorrow, over 450 rallies and "events" are planned in 44 different countries across the globe.

"The United States Government has no business supporting IWD," said Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly. "The radical feminists know that they can't complain about American women because we are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived, so they search the globe for oppression in other countries using taxpayer dollars."

Now Phyllis Schlafly's got some pretty strong views on women's rights, so make what you will of her comments. It's nevertheless interesting that not one of the major national news dailies comes up when plugging "International Woman's Day" in a Google search this morning, while leftist media outlets are well represented.

It turns out that my young neocon blogging buddy GSGF has a post up on this, which has engendered a litttle debate.

I'd just add a few points:

It is true, as GSGF notes, that hundreds of thousands of women are eliminated annually in Third World nations that elevate boys as more valuable. The New York Times reported the massive scale of women’s human rights violations in China this week:

For more than three decades, the restriction on births has been a centerpiece of government economic and social policy. Local officials receive performance ratings based partly on how well residents adhere to the restrictions. In the 1980s, officials routinely forced women to abort fetuses that would have resulted in above-quota births, and both men and women were often forced to undergo sterilization operations.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/world/asia/29china.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The article omits the intense prevalence in female infanticide in the country, which is considered widespread in other developing countries as well:

The phenomenon of female infanticide is as old as many cultures, and has likely accounted for millions of gender-selective deaths throughout history. It remains a critical concern in a number of “Third World” countries today, notably the two most populous countries on earth, China and India. In all cases, specifically female infanticide reflects the low status accorded to women in most parts of the world; it is arguably the most brutal and destructive manifestation of the anti-female bias that pervades “patriarchal” societies. It is closely linked to the phenomena of sex-selective abortion, which targets female fetuses almost exclusively, and neglect of girl children.

Source: http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

Also, academic research correlates the treatment of women to levels of democratization:

ARE predominantly Muslim societies distinctly disadvantaged in democratization? Some observers, noting what appears to be an especially high incidence of authoritarianism in the Islamic world, have held that Islam may be incompatible with open government … Muslim societies are not more prone to political violence; nor are they less “secular” than non-Muslim societies; and interpersonal trust is not necessarily lower in Muslim societies. But one factor does help explain the democratic deficit: the subordination of women."

Source: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/world_politics/v055/55.1fish.html

I think the lack of sympathy for women’s rights is found in the attacks on “cultural relativism” by authoritarianism’s apologists.

But certainly, the West is best:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

Source: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_snd-west.html

Well, I don't know if we should call it "International Gendercide Day," but there's certainly some consensus to that effect, at least outside the ranks of the radical feminist contingents.

McCain Sitting Pretty While Dems Self-Destruct

John McCain's sitting in the "catbird seat" amid the continued nomination battle for the Democrats.

The Washington Post has the story, which goes against arguments that the Arizona Senator would be somewhat weakened by near-exclusive media focus on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has sketched out an ambitious plan to exploit the ongoing bickering between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), through weeks of heavy fundraising, a trip abroad, policy speeches and a biography tour aimed at broadening his appeal beyond traditional Republican voters.

As his rivals clash over who is qualified to answer a 3 a.m. phone call in the White House, McCain will meet with foreign leaders in Europe and the Middle East. While Obama and Clinton argue about do-over primaries in Florida and Michigan, McCain will be free to roam the country, giving speeches, holding town-hall meetings and raking up cash.

The strategy is being launched as some in the Republican Party worry that McCain will be forgotten amid the news media's intense focus on the Democratic presidential race. "Understandably," McCain quipped to reporters on his plane last week. "I'll be watching, too."

The evolving plan also calls for the Republican National Committee to use the time to seed the conservative echo chamber -- blogs, talk radio and independent groups -- with red-meat rhetoric and ammunition about the lack of Democratic qualifications.

"You'd rather be the definer than the defined," said Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director.

Few in either party thought it would be like this. Many more expected that the Democrats would settle quickly on a nominee while the fractured Republican Party dithered. As recently as January, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum predicted that the GOP was "headed for a brokered convention. I don't think we're going to get a nominee."

Publicly, McCain shrugs when asked whether the Democratic battle helps or hurts his nascent general election campaign. Some senior GOP strategists, including former White House adviser Karl Rove, fear that the red-hot Democratic contest could make McCain look irrelevant, forcing him out of the daily news reports.

"Mr. McCain becomes less interesting to the media. Stories about him move off page one and grow smaller. TV coverage becomes spotty and short," Rove wrote in an opinion article published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.

But top McCain advisers think it is a gift, and the push to raise money -- verging on desperate after Obama's $55 million haul in February -- has already been unleashed.

I obviously think prolonged Democratic infighting is a Godsend.

The Democrats really are going to the convention, so not only will we be having a feast of brutal mudslinging leading up to the party's key forthcoming primary contests, it's also nearly impossible for either candidate to have a majority of the convention delegates at the end of formal caucus and primary voting in May.

Unless the DNC intervenes to solve the Florida and Michigan controversy early, Hillary will hammer the "disenfranchisment" argument all the way to Denver. Meanwhile, the party's oppositional contingents of antiwar and netroots fanatics will mount there own attacks on the candidates, pulling the campaign's debate further to the left.

Public opinion polls already show dead-heat matchups between McCain and both Democrats, so the sustained bickering positions the Republican nominee to make the case for experience and maturity precisely when the Democrats will look their most petty.

Academic Steroids: The Ethics of Brain Enhancement

Do academics "juice-up" their teaching and research with performance enhancing drugs?

Actually yes, but how does this compare to steroid use in competitive athletics? Pretty closely, according to this New York Times article:

SO far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors’ urine. And if there are illicit trainers on campuses, shady tutors with wraparound sunglasses and ties to basement labs in Italy, no one has exposed them.

Yet an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness, to improve their academic performance. The former is approved to treat attention deficit disorder, the latter narcolepsy, and both are considered more effective, and more widely available, than the drugs circulating in dorms a generation ago.

Letters flooded the journal, and an online debate immediately bubbled up. The journal has been conducting its own, more rigorous survey, and so far at least 20 respondents have said that they used the drugs for nonmedical purposes, according to Philip Campbell, the journal’s editor in chief. The debate has also caught fire on the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education, where academics and students are sniping at one another.

But is prescription tweaking to perform on exams, or prepare presentations and grants, really the same as injecting hormones to chase down a home run record, or win the Tour de France?

Some argue that such use could be worse, given the potentially deep impact on society. And the behavior of academics in particular, as intellectual leaders, could serve as an example to others.

In his book “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution,” Francis Fukuyama raises the broader issue of performance enhancement: “The original purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not turn healthy people into gods.” He and others point out that increased use of such drugs could raise the standard of what is considered “normal” performance and widen the gap between those who have access to the medications and those who don’t — and even erode the relationship between struggle and the building of character.

Having been around the block on a lot of these issues, let me be perfectly honest: A couple of cups of coffee, some Tylenol, and a dose or two of ephedrine will get go a long way toward boosting cognitive ability, or at least academic stamina, which is almost a prerequisite to get through a graduate program these days.

But I obviously don't advocate it, and now with the growing and widespread abuse of presciption ADHD and other medications among youngsters and college students, it seems academics have an even greater responsibility to set standards of propriety and rectitude.

While Derek Jeter and Eli Manning are obviously the most important role models for millions of young, aspiring athletes in the United States, I'd argue that classroom professors in the long-run are the most important influence on a young adult's life after the parents.

I've never even entertained the idea that one of the high-powered lectures offered by one of my research professors was power-boosted by a hefty dose of Methylphenidate, or some other stimulatory medicine.

I certainly wouldn't expect my students to think such thoughts about me when I enter the classroom, and I don't want my own boys selecting classes in college on the basis of tox-screening stats instead of research reputation.

Radical Schizophrenia? Making Sense of Democratic Party Constituencies

Outside of psychiatric medicine, the notion of schizophrenia suggests "a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements."

We've seen a lot of irrationality this campaign season on the right of the spectrum, which thankfully has moved largely toward remission. But as the Democratic race becomes increasingly frenetic, we're seeing snowballing incoherence among the competing factions of the Democratic Party base.

First, note Ari Berman's argument that the fundamental dividing line among Democrats is between Hillary Clinton's political machine and the Democratic National Committe under Chairman Howard Dean.

The Democratic establishment apparently dissed Dean, belittling his stronghold among grassroots internet activists as insignificant and immature.

Berman suggests instead that Dean's an unheralded genius, and the real party split is between those who champion old-guard centrist triangluation versus the progressive insurgency seeking to uproot the party from below. According to Berman, Obama's heir to the Dean legacy: There's amicable relations between Dean and Obama, suggesting synergy between Obama and the netroots. Here's a key passage:

The race for the Democratic nomination is a window into how the candidates view the future of the party, which is being shaped in large part by Dean's efforts. Are Clinton and Obama similarly committed to Dean's [winning all] fifty-state strategy? How much faith would each, as the Democratic nominee, put in the party's grassroots? In the Internet era, the party is less about elder statesmen sitting in Washington than millions of people across the country organizing locally around issues and candidates....

Dean and Obama have understood how the party is changing -and have embraced it. Clinton, thus far, has not.

Howard Dean and Bill Clinton were both pragmatic, moderate governors of rural states who shared an affinity for balanced budgets and free trade. But ever since Dean became a presidential candidate, his relationship with the Clintons has been rocky....

Tensions have cooled since then, and both Clintons have voiced their support for Dean's fifty-state strategy. Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party.

Okay, if Berman's sources are credible Obama's essentially got the DNC in the tank, while the Clinton's will run an off-the-shelf establishment campaign with 1990s-era Clintonites (like Harold Ickes, EMILY's List and Clinton allies in organized labor, and party media-and-money men like Terry McAuliffe and Howard Wolfson).

The problem here is that genuine netroots activists - the very people who catapulted Dean to frontrunner status in the 2004 pre-primary season - aren't cooperating with the analysis.

Jerome Armstrong - a comrade-in-arms to Dail Kos' Markos Moulitsas - indicates that he's not in love with either Clinton or Obama, but has nevertheles thrown in his lot with the New York Senator, a position most likely adopted by much of the blog's readership:

It continues to amaze me - the contortions that folks who dearly want Obama to win will rationalize to themselves about his candidacy. Now, I thought the 2003-2006 netroots was all about the 'fighting dems' that invigorated the Democratic Party with a strong sense of partisanship and Howard Dean's "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" candidacy. But then The Nation comes along, and rewrites that entire history to say that really, it was all just a precursor, that really, "Obama is Dean 2.0"....

I don't find myself in love with a candidacy in this nomination fight. I had a number of candidates that I supported, a few I really liked, and they all dropped out. In the choice between Clinton and Obama, I don't see much of a difference in substantive policy, nor in the people running their campaigns, and basically chose Clinton because I think she's got a better shot at winning than the gamble of going with the untested Obama.

So here we have one of the founders of the netroots movement debunking the Dean-Obama nexus.
But wait!

You've got to get a load out of FireDogLake's blogger, who's jumped into this debate to straigthen things out.

Jerome is essentially right that there are really no meaningful policy differences to be divined between our two candidates, and Samantha Powers' comments now about Obama's likelihood of revising his withdrawal plans if elected serve simply to remind us that the tea leaves people are currently reading during the campaign re: policy really mean nothing. If Obama were a true anti-occupation believer, he could have jumped full guns behind Lamont when he had the chance instead of ducking and running through the state and pulling the plug on his participation in a Lamont multi-platform ad buy.

So, we have no progressive candidate. We have no Wellstone, no Feingold, no ideologically based movement person. My question is this: which of these candidates is more likely to reveal an inner Lieberman of some form once in power? I don't have an answer. People can believe what they choose to believe, but both candidates have Liebermanish historical tendencies and both propel narratives reminiscent of Lieberman, the earlier years.

You'll have to wade through the rest of this terribly written post. But understand that "Liebermanish historical tendencies" refer to any deviation from the netroots' fundamentally retreatist agenda, and neither Clinton nor Obama have any credibility on the issue. Indeed, look at the language FDL reserves specially for Hillary Clinton:

It so happens that, once [John] Edwards dropped out, more of the online readership sorted itself to Obama. Now, I can't see any meaningful policy reasons for having done so (and Edwards hasn't endorsed), so to me it seems more like a consolidation of the anti-Clinton movement among tech literate activists than it seems like anything about any ideologically or policy based progressive agenda....

I conclude from this that the hundreds of millions of dollars at least that have poured into branding Hillary Clinton - whose policies in general I hardly care for - as a lesbo cunning corrupt cold calculating bitch, have altogether not been without their effect on many online activists and readers in particular.

So as you can see, the comparison so far here reveals considerable incoherence and schizophrenia in the various directions the Democratic partisans are moving.

But note something else, especially with the crude FireDogLake: The hardliners in the base want absolute purity in a candidate, assumably to get the most ideological doctrinaire leftist installed in the Oval Office in January. They'll thus have in position their own Manchurian Candidate to implement a radical anitwar agenda that even the most hardened activists in INTERNATIONAL Answer would love.

Another problem: Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have exceedingly advocated the hard-left antiwar agenda, which includes a couple of years worth of commitments by both candidates to withdraw virtually unconditionally from Iraq upon taking office. Either all of this left-wing blogging ferment is simple oneupsmanship or there truly is a seriously unhinged strata of radical diehards simply too perplexed by their tremendous opportunity this year to unite around a standard-bearer.

In closing, be sure to read Abe Greenwald at Commentary and his elucidation of both Clinton and Obama's antiwar bona fides. They're both desperately ready for an antiwar surrender, in Afghanistan, Iraq, it doesn't matter - just get the troops out as fast as possible:

We’ve had our formidable challenges in both theaters, [but we know] from Hillary that it’s too late to win in Iraq, and from Obama that we need to withdraw from Iraq immediately and pick up the pace in Afghanistan. We must, you see, stop fighting somewhere.

I'll have more later.

See also my earlier post, "Crash: More on the Coming Democratic Train Wreck."