How Could Silda Stand By Her Man?

Silda Wall Spitzer, the troubled wife of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, stood queitly at his side on Monday afternoon as her sex-trading husband apologized publically for his unethical escapades.

How could she do it? Why would she? Why reprise the role of standing-by-her-man at a time when many felt the man in question was hardly deserving? Haven't we all been through this too many times before?

The Los Angeles Times tackles the issue:

It was the way she stood there, enduring.

Silda Wall Spitzer did not say a word as her husband, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, brusquely apologized to his family and the public after he was allegedly caught on a wiretap doing business with a high-priced prostitution ring. Her face was drawn. But she took her husband's hand as they left the room.

This scandal has many salacious details, but it was the image of Silda Wall Spitzer at her man's side that dominated conversations across the country Tuesday.

That moment of public humiliation stayed with people -- men and women, Democrats and Republicans. At a beauty salon in Brooklyn Heights, at the Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in midtown Atlanta, at a Denver office building, at a bar in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the same questions came up:

How could she?

Why did she?

Haven't we seen this play one too many times?

Why do we go through this ritual of public shame and repentance, with the political wife standing mutely before the TV cameras as her husband admits his sexual indiscretion?

"I find it nauseating . . . phony and awful," said Leah Schanzer, 38, a doctoral student who stopped for coffee at a Starbucks in New York City. She gave an exaggerated shudder.

"It makes it seem like she's Susie Homemaker," said her friend Leslie Heller, 47. "She shouldn't be standing there, next to him"....

Newspaper websites have been swamped with thousands of comments on the case; gleeful barbs are being tossed around the blogosphere.

But to many -- especially women -- the tawdry details added up to more than another generic scandal. When they looked at Silda Wall Spitzer's weary face, it felt personal.

"She should've said, 'This is your fight. This is your battle. You stand there and get yourself out of it,' " said Linda Walters, 61.

I have to admit, when I saw Silda Spitzer up there I had mixed feelings. Indeed, I did see her stance as signifying the loyal and forgiving wife, ready to move forward as a couple, perhaps even sacrificing her own dignity for her husband's.

But I also thought of her is a beautiful, apparently capable woman, of whom Spitzer's lucky to be with. The governor had it all: A fabulous wife, three loving daughters, a powerful political position, and a future.

Why blow that? What could be worth throwing it all away, especially in the ultimate, even evil, hypocrisy of the sex-trading sin.

It's hard to understand, but obviously stories like this are the most fascinating: They combine sex, power, and plain old hurt. Unfortunately, much of the pain is on display in the visage of Silda Wall Spitzer.

See also:

* The Public Ordeal of a Private Person.

* Spitzer Aides Say Governor Will Resign Today.

* Silda Spitzer, the Wife Who Gave Up Career to Back Politics and Ambition.

* Spitzer's Wife Kinda Hot When Not Weeping or Whatever.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Hamsher Rejects Spitzer Resignation, Endorses Legal Prostitution

Well, the partisans are lining up around the Spitzer Client 9 scandal, but frankly at least one of the hard-lefty positions is implacably over the top.

Jane Hamsher not only thinks Spitzer's transgressions don't rate resignation from office, she advocates full-blown legal prostitution, arguing that sexual solicitation laws seek to "make the lives of prostitutes worse":

And for the record, as someone who thinks prostitution should be legal - and that most laws restricting it are written to make the lives of prostitutes worse, not better - I don't plan to be calling for Spitzer's resignation any time soon.

Hamsher's touting the left's culture of death precisely as ABC News reports that a 22 year-old call girl has identified Spitzer as one of her best customers:

A 22-year-old escort found on another call-girl Web site claimed to ABC News in a phone interview that Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been one of her customers two years ago when he was New York attorney general and that he was a nice guy who tipped well.

"He didn't do anything that wasn't clean," she said, adding that she knew who he was because he had made calls from the attorney general's office in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Federal investigators say there is no evidence Spitzer used state money or campaign funds to pay the prostitutes, but that the way he moved an estimated $40,000 through various accounts violated federal money laundering laws.

"These are serious laws and laws that given the amount of money involved here could mean a prison term of 10 to 18 months," Sean O'Shea, a former federal prosecutor specializing in financial crimes, said.

A prison term is one of the issues holding up the governor's resignation as well as whether or not he pleads guilty to criminal charges.

Other than that, lawyers close to the case say New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is prepared to resign and has his letter written.

Obviously it's in Spitzer's interest to work out a plea deal eliminating possible imprisonment, and thus it's at least reasonable to see him holding off on the resignation until he's got a deal.

This process can't be prolonged, however. In the meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for pro-prostitution heel-digging among the Hamsherite screeching nihilists on the far left-wing fringe.

Note too: If Spitzer was a Republican governor I'd be calling for his resignation just as loudly - he needs to go, irrespective of partisan loyalties. There's no room for that behavior, especially while in the public's trust. I can't justify it, and neither should the America-bashing left.

Obama Takes Mississippi

Wow, my first post writing M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I!

I'm excited, but not so much for Barack Obama, who won the Mississippi primary tonight.

Frankly, I'd say the shady socialist's got the nomination in the tank, and for all of my ribbing of Hillary Clinton, I'd rather see her as the nominee - mainly because I expect she'd be more likely to moderate back to a traditional liberal internationalist foreign policy than is Obama.

(I don't love some of the antiwar elements of such a foreign policy orientation, but it is internationalist, free-trading, and - in the right hands - recognizes the primacy of power in world politics, which is preferable to an international policy of cozying up with dictators).

But check the New York Times background on Obama in Mississippi:

Senator Barack Obama won Mississippi’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, building his delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the final contest before the nominating fight heads to Pennsylvania for a six-week showdown.

Mr. Obama’s victory was built on a wave of support among blacks, who made up half of those who turned out to vote, according to exit polls conducted by television networks and The Associated Press. The polls found that roughly 90 percent of black voters supported Mr. Obama, but only a third of white voters did.

With 92 percent of precincts reporting across Mississippi, Mr. Obama led Mrs. Clinton 59 percent to 39 percent.

“It’s just another win in our column, and we are getting more delegates,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in declaring victory in an interview on CNN from Chicago, where he arrived Tuesday evening after spending the day in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. “I am grateful to the people of Mississippi for the wonderful support. What we’ve tried to do is steadily make sure that in each state we are making the case about the need for change in this country.”

Hillary Clinton's obviously still solidly in the race, and it's not out of the question for her to win the nomination via the "nuclear option," i.e., by leveraging the superdelegate vote, which she'll be able to do more credibly if she can win a couple more of the remaining primaries on the Democratic calendar.

No matter what happens, Clinton's aggressive policy of taking the nomination to the convention's going to harken to 1968, particulary if she indeed secures the party's nod, alienating the left's hardline antiwar base.

Stay tuned for more updates on these developments.

Democrats Deny Iraq

Michael O'Hanlon, over at USA Today, argues that the Democrats badly underestimate - even deny - our continued progress in Iraq, a point I've been making here for quite some time.

Here's O'Hanlon:

Most Democrats — in fact, most Americans — believe that the Iraq war has been a huge mistake for this country. Accordingly, it's no real surprise that Democrats will nominate a presidential candidate who sees Iraq as they see it: anguished by the loss of life, deeply upset by the damage done to America's reputation, and angered by the unilateralism and poor war planning of the Bush administration.

These viewpoints are sincere, legitimate and defensible. But they sometimes fail to fold in the reality of how far Iraq has come in the past 12 months under the new surge-based strategy of Gen. David Petraeus. Most Democrats seem to belittle or even deny the progress, despite a 75% reduction in violence and the beginnings of Iraqi political compromise.

To be sure, it is understandably hard for Democrats and other administration critics to believe that a war fought so badly at first could take a turn for the better. We are not used to such things in the modern era. Arguably, one has to go back to the American Civil War to find a parallel, and even that is a poor analogy because President Lincoln's performance in that war was clearly far better than President Bush's has been in this one, to put it mildly. That said, if Democrats cannot get beyond their viewpoint, they could suffer badly in the fall as a result. Even more important, the nation could suffer as we waste an election campaign refighting the debates of 2002 and 2003 rather than looking to the future.

The Democratic position — embraced particularly by Sen. Barack Obama but also by Sen. Hillary Clinton — is that we need to make haste for the exits. Obama rigidly calls for pulling nearly all combat forces out of Iraq within about a year of Inauguration Day. Clinton's position leaves room for some flexibility, though her words on the campaign trail are generally similar to Obama's. But neither candidate's approach would be supported by most leaders — American or Iraqi — on the ground in Iraq. Only those who have concluded that the war is already lost tend to back such a position. And that latter viewpoint is far less common today than it was a year ago, or even months ago.

Read the whole thing.

O'Hanlon does a good job bringing together the various angles of the Democrats' Iraq dilemma. I would argue that he sometimes tries too hard to stick to the middle, for example, with his jab that McCain's "open-ended" commitment is over the top.

Still, O'Hanlon's right to point out the Democratic Party's nihilist opposition to American success in Iraq. What he could have added is that Clinton, Obama, and the surrender advocates up on Capital Hill are scared to death of alientating the anti-American base of the party's netroots contingent.

Nothing can happen on the ground in Iraq - no amount of military progress, no amount of political progress, or no amount of outside intervention from terror sponsors like Iran - to deflect the antiwar forces from their single-minder dertermination to backstab the American mission.

O'Hanlon's obviously responding to the regular attacks he gets from the kiddie-Kos-Kool-Aid types who routinely savage his reputation.

He does a good job. But even O'Hanlon has to realize that whatever persuasivness his arguments enjoy will be lost on America's enemies here at home.

Client 9 Solicited for 6 Years, Report Suggests

The New York Post reports that Governor Eliot Spitzer used prostitution services for 6 years (via Memeorandum):

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been soliciting high-priced hookers for at least six years and possibly for more than a decade, sources tell The Post.

The revelation yesterday that the crusading governor was in fact "Client 9" named in a federal prostitution indictment did not shock insiders in the city's sex industry.

Sources tell The Post that Spitzer had frequented high-priced hookers as far back as 2002 and possibly earlier.

Spitzer, who as attorney general lead investigations into prostitution, was among an elite group of powerbrokers and high-powered attorneys that regularly paid for dates at top escort agencies, sources said.

IRS investigators inadvertently stumbled upon Spitzer's secret life as a prostitute patron when his bank referred them to questionable wire transfers in his commercial bank account.

Allahpundit yesterday cautioned against schadenfreude. Apparently Wall Street missed that post.

Obama's Lucky to Be Black!

Hey, I don't mind taking pride in one's race, but when a major Clinton operative starts arguing Barack Obama's "lucky to be black" - which presumably gives him an edge this season - we've come a long way in race politics!

Here's CNN:

Barack Obama’s chief strategist said Tuesday that a comment by one of Hillary Clinton’s top fundraisers that Barack Obama would not be a major presidential contender if he were not black – coupled with Clinton’s “own inexplicable unwillingness" to deny that he was a Muslim during a recent interview – indicated “an insidious pattern that needs to be addressed."

David Axelrod called on the New York senator to drop former New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro from her finance committee. "When you wink and nod at offensive statements you're really sending a signal to your supporters that anything goes," said Axelrod.

Ferraro, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in 1984, told the (Torrance, California) Daily Breeze that "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Ferraro said the New York senator had suffered because the press "has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign."

Well there's more of the "invisible woman misogyny."

I thought I'd seen it all!

Sure must be rough running against the new messiah. First Obama wasn't black enough. Now he's the fortunate one!

Obama's Second Coming

My wife's been getting Rolling Stone delivered to our home.

I'm not sure why, since she's not some tattoed alternative rocker or some wild-eyed antiwar counter-culture provocateur. Actually, she's gets a lot of mags like Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, and maybe some subscription renewal incentive had a side deal for the left-wing music magazine.

No matter, I've been reading some of the articles.

It turns out Rolling Stone endorsed Barack Obama with this week's edition.

Why now? That's the first thought that comes to mind. If the mag's got any pull in the rockin' electorate, you'd think they might have laid down an endorsement, say, around the time of the New Hampshire primary. For all of their political reporting, maybe the editors really don't understand the imperatives of frontloading.

But what was really on my mind is the meat in the endorsement itself. Rolling Stone's apparently an alternative media tribune for the idealistic, if not the radical set. Their piece is a classic example of messiah-building on the left (more on that here and here). I mean, take a look at this yourself:

Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him "frankly, naive" for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America's most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton. And at no point did he go negative with personal attacks or character assassination; as much as they might have been justified, they didn't even seem tempting to him.

Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles. He recognizes that running for president is an opportunity to inspire an entire nation.

Obama was far more prepared for "Day One"?

Does that include things like feeding the multitude? Let's give Hillary Clinton some credit here for raising the issue.

Certainly, all this hard-left Obama-worship is exceptionally light on analysis. If Obama's divine, you'd think he'd a least hold his own during press conferences, as Michael Barone points out in comparison to John McCain:

McCain takes questions until the last reporter runs out of things to ask. Obama terminated a probing press conference last week after eight questions with the lame excuse that he was running late. Obama's oratory has been compared to John Kennedy's. But he doesn't have Kennedy's gift for gracefully parrying hostile questions.

Not so miraculous after all, it seems. At least Christ attended to the questions from the high priests.
But not only that. The Rolling Stone endorsement goes further, to rehash all the left-wing demonized talking-points against the last seven years. Speaking of Obama:

Obama ... [has] denounced the Republican campaign of fear. Early in the campaign, John Edwards took the lead, calling the War on Terror a campaign slogan, not a policy. Obama rejected the subtle imagery of false patriotism by not wearing a flag pin in his lapel, and he dismissed the broader notion that the Democratic Party had to find a way to buy into this entire load of fear-mongering War on Terror bullshit — to out-Republican the Republicans — and thus become, in his description of Hillary Clinton's macho posturing on foreign policy, little more than "Bush-Cheney lite."

We have a deeply divided nation, driven apart by economic policies that have deliberately created the largest income disparities in our history, with stunning tax breaks for the wealthiest and subsidies for giant industries. The income of the average citizen is stagnant, and his quality of life continues to slowly erode from inflation.

We are embittered and hobbled by the unnecessary and failed war in Iraq. We have been worn down by long years of fear- and hate-filled political strategies, assaults on constitutional freedoms, and levels of greed and cynicism, that — once seen for what they are — no people of moral values or ethics can tolerate.

A new president must heal these divides, must at long last face the hypocrisy and inequity of unprecedented government handouts to oil giants, hedge-fund barons, agriculture combines and drug companies. At the same time, the new president must transform our lethal energy economy — replacing oil and coal and the ethanol fraud with green alternatives and strict rain-forest preservation and tough international standards — before the planet becomes inhospitable for most human life....

We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril.

Whoa!

That's a lot, apocalyptic even. No wonder Obama's nomination is seen as no less than the second coming - he's our savior!

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.