As many of you know, I seriously considered and eventually declined to run in 2014 against Lindsey Graham. That doesn't stop me from continuing to encourage someone else to run and scream at the top of my lungs about how terrible Graham is as an elected senator from the state in which I live.

In fact, a day doesn't go by lately where I don't scream obscenities at the computer or the television because of the latest mind-boggling thing that Lindsey Graham has said or done. Speaking of the television, does Lindsey Graham have a gold-plated seat on the set of "On The Record"?  Can't Greta find someone else to whine and moan besides Graham at least once in a while?

But I digress.

Last week, Lindsey Graham came out with another whopper.

Faced with questions about the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone and email records of citizens, Graham pointed to a World War II-era program in which the federal government censored mail. He said it was appropriate at the time and that he would support reinstating the program if it aided security efforts.

"In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we're all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy," Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. "If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don't think it is."

I'm sorry.... WHAT?

You see that cute way Graham shows you under his skirt ... but then covers up real quick?

"Yeah, if I had my way... I'd read everyone's mail.  Unfortunately for you peons, I don't have that power.... YET!"

A lot of people said to me earlier this year... "Why would you run against Lindsey Graham when he's so good on national security."

My response:  REALLY?

Lindsey Graham has a history of articulating his statist views on topics ranging from civil liberties to immigration, but also on national security.  I like to remind people that as good as Graham might have become after the Benghazi attack, guess who helped create the circumstances that led to Benghazi?  

Graham was right in line with President Obama and John McCain as U.S. military assets were used in an unconstitutional manner to help NATO forces overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.  And lo and behold, Graham is shaking his fist wanting to invade Syria these days.

But back to the mail.  FreedomWorks cleverly responded to Graham's desire to read and censor all of our mail.

Graham, Obama’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, came out in full support of PRISM – the program that allows the government to spy on all American citizens.

First Graham voted to bail out Wall Street. Then he took part in the greatest spending spree the American government has ever experienced. Now he is making a mockery of the Bill of Rights.

It’s time to ask Lindsey Graham to lead by example. Will he stand by his own admitted principles? Or will he tell the American people “privacy for me, and not thee?”

Sign the petition and demand Senator Lindsey Graham reveal his email passwords. If Lindsey Graham is so eager to surrender our privacies as citizens, he should go first!

So awesome.

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people that would have to read Graham's mail. There'd be a lot of rambling love letters with a return address from Sedona, Arizona.

Graham needs to remember that he is hired and fired by the people of South Carolina. The facts show that Graham has more in common with John McCain, Barack Obama and the Washington DC crowd than he does with anyone who will see his name on a ballot next year.

While most reporters are giving the Senate Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration bill all the scrutiny one gives a birthday card from one's grandmother, the Washington Examiner's Byron York is taking a closer look.

He points out that the bill's supporters claim a thorough background check will be required before winning legal status.

“They will have to come forward and pass a rigorous background check,” Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Gang, said in April. “If they’re criminals, they won’t qualify.”

What Rubio and other Gang members don’t say as often is that even if a background check discovers significant criminal activity in an immigrant’s past, exceptions and waivers written into the bill will allow the immigrant to still achieve legal status. On top of that, the bill gives Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano virtually unlimited power to ignore many criminal acts and grant legal status whenever she chooses.

The Gang bill says an immigrant cannot be legalized if he has been convicted of a felony, or if he has been convicted of three or more misdemeanors. But as far as those misdemeanors are concerned, there are some big exceptions.

How big? Well, it doesn't count minor traffic offenses or state immigration violations. And while three misdemeanors would disqualify an immigrant, if the immigrant was convicted of those misdemeanors on the same day, they'd only count as one misdemeanor for some reason. Only problem is that courts frequently group together completely separate offenses for trial on the same day.

The legislation also gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to ignore an immigrant's record and grant legal status no matter how many convictions he has. "It is within Janet Napolitano’s discretion to decide what is in the public interest," York writes.

And depending on the jurisdiction, vehicular homicide, drunk driving, domestic violence, sex offenses and theft are all categorized as misdemeanors.

There are also cases in which even more serious crimes are negotiated down to misdemeanors. “Given the incessant pressures on district attorneys to accept a plea in exchange for downgrading the crime charged and to ignore most arrests entirely, it takes considerable effort to rack up two misdemeanor convictions — whether by dealing drugs, assaulting fellow gangbangers, stealing, or tagging,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald. “The bill’s authors apparently think that staying on the right side of the law is an insuperable burden and that having a criminal record is an ordinary part of being an American.”

It's kind of a wonder that Senator Marco Rubio calls these enforcements so "rigorous."

I am on sabbatical this coming year, and I will be at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a visiting fellow, working, if all goes as planned, on the second volume of a three-volume series entitled The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta (the first volume, which I am revising right now, will be subtitled The Persian Challenge; the second volume, The Athenian Challenge; and the third, The Imperial Venture).

We have rented a three-bedroom apartment in Mountain View -- about five miles from where I will have an office -- and we are beginning to plan the drive to Silicon Valley, which we will undertake in very late July and early August. Our aim is to do it in about ten days, to take the northern route, and to stop here and there to see the sites -- the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, Jackson Hole, Mt. St. Helens, and the coast road from Oregon south to Silicon Valley. In June, 2014, we will return by the southern route via Salt Lake City, Provo, Monument Valley, the Navajo Reservation, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, Mesa Verde, Taos, the Ghost Ranch, Santa Fe, and Tulsa.

There are, no doubt, plenty of other wonders to see, but we do not know what they are -- which is why I am writing to ask the cognoscenti who hang about Ricochet to advise us on what to see this July and August. We will start in Cleveland, Wisconsin; we will end up in Mountain View, California. What should we see in between that I have not already mentioned?

Let it never be said we don't tackle the tough subjects here at Ricochet.

Inspired by the brouhaha over the long and apparently quite technically accurate lesbian sex scenes in this year's Palme d'Or-winner "Blue Is the Warmest Color," The New York Times put together a debate billed on the homepage as "The Best and Worst Sex Scenes in Films," a story I clicked on in a deplorable hope for clips. No joy there, but scads of opinionating.

"Blue" courted controversy by starring two heterosexual women in a lesbian love story -- one directed by a man, yet. (Even the author of the graphic novel on which the movie is based was bothered by the director's "male gaze".) The Times asked the general question, "What's the difference between a good sex scene and a gratuitous one?" and let the panel declaim. The responders included film scholars, a literature professor, a producer, critics, and directors. Their arguments can be summarized as follows:

• Lesbian sex in particular is generally woefully inaccurate onscreen and is put up there solely to appeal to curious women and straight men, not to represent lesbian experience. Lesbian sex onscreen is voyeuristic, but not necessarily exploitative. (Elisabeth Ladenson, teacher of French and comparative literature at Columbia University, and the author of "Proust's Lesbianism.")
• The collapse of censorship and the necessity for ever-greater explicitness has killed off any genuine eroticism that ever existed on film. The banter of "Bringing Up Baby" is much sexier than the tutorials in "impressive scissoring" a la "Blue Is the Warmest Color". Less is more. (Richard Porton, an editor of Cineaste and  author of "Film and the Anarchist Imagination.")
• Sex can indeed be portrayed well onscreen. A good sex scene "is like a good car chase, shootout, fight or, to paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, murder scene. It has to be original, surprising and flawlessly executed, and most of all, it must enhance the characters and story in such a way that the film couldn’t live without it. A bad sex scene does none of the above." The scenes in "Blue Is the Warmest Color" serve the story and therefore succeed. (Jordan Mintzer,  movie critic for The Hollywood Reporter, author of “Conversations With James Gray,”  producer of Matt Porterfield’s films “Hamilton” and “Putty Hill.”)
• Americans just can't film sex. They are hopelessly puritanical about nudity, and have redirected their talents toward the violent and the juvenile. When they do try to film sex, they divorce the act from the story for the sake of tacky "money shots", resulting in hopelessly bad sex scenes. A good sex scene need not even involve nudity; it requires erotic attraction and emotional risk-taking on the part of the characters. (Armond White, editor and chief film critic for CityArts.)
• Sex scenes work onscreen when they illuminate character, not when they are trying to arouse the audience. They might not, in fact, be sexy at all. The central problem is that women are still being used disrespectfully onscreen, primarily because the film industry is still dominated by men. (Martha Coolidge, film director, former president of the Director’s Guild of America. Her films include "Rambling Rose," "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," "If These Walls Could Talk II" and "Valley Girl.")
• Mainstream Hollywood divorces sex from political discourse, which renders the scenes incapable of instructing or illuminating. It's only the sexually explicit media that now dare to bring a political consciousness to the art form. "For depictions that push against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableist, heteronormative beauty ideals – as it turns out, porn is now the place to look." (Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of the forthcoming manuscript “A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography” and a co-editor of “The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.”)

All righty then. Do you agree with any of these people? Is there such a thing as a good sex scene? (Personally, I'd sooner dispense with the grad-school disquisitions and rewatch Body Heat with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, but then I'm a philistine.) What do you think?

In one photograph:

You're doing a heck of a job, Jeff Zucker!

Avaricious consumers of news that you are, you’ve heard that the Associated Press unearthed a "Nazi SS Commander" in Minneapolis. If you read the story instead of the headlines or innumerable spin-offs that cascaded through the internet over the weekend, you may, or may not, have found the allegations conclusive. The graphics used to illustrate the story on local TV seem to constitute a general assumption of guilt:

The photo of the accused is from a story I wrote in 1990. 

This man's son is one of my oldest friends. He says his father was not a Nazi. Period. 

Do you have an open mind about this case? 

My friend Matt Kaufman shared this job posting on USAJOBS, the federal government's jobs site:

Join the IRS as a "diversity and inclusion specialist" and make $123,758.00 to $155,500.00 a year.

I put it on Twitter and someone responded, "I'm more of a diversity and inclusion generalist, but I would settle for $85k if they let me 'work' from home."

Don't everyone apply at once!

Late night talk shows stink. Stale monologues, unfunny patter with the house band, predictable guests pitching their latest product. It wasn't always this way. When I was a kid, Carson was must-see TV, but he went off the air two decades ago. Nearly all today's hosts mimic his moves, but without that whole "being entertaining" thing.

If I happen to flip channels after the local sports and weather, I'll come across the same tedious jokes I heard as a kid, but with Sarah Palin replacing Dan Quayle in the punchlines. Even though the hosts are monolithically liberal, I wish they would try to be original.

That's why Tony Katz is reinventing the nightly talk show. The long time radio host, commentator and cigar aficionado taped a few episodes of Tony Katz Tonight. The show features a group of entertaining, informed and funny guests chewing over pop culture and current events. Better yet, they can do it while enjoying scotch and a stogie.

The two episodes served as a proof of concept for me. I watched it because I knew a couple of the guests, but found myself laughing along as if I was a part of the conversation. I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud at Leno or Letterman, but I think  The X-Files was still on the air.

Tony has started a fundraiser to film a few more programs. Ultimately, he would like to take the act to Vegas; sort of a "Politically Incorrect meets Playboy After Dark," as he describes it.

While many conservatives sit around and talk about how to change culture, Tony just jumped in and did it. Admittedly, I often cringe at a lot of "conservative entertainment," but Tony Katz Tonight is actually entertaining. And very funny. Give it a spin.

He was a sharecropper's son. "We were so poor that the poor people called us poor," he would tell me years later. Everyone called him D.P. Carter, but I called my grandfather Paw Paw Carter. If you were to ask him what D.P. stood for, his eyes would light up with the mischief as he answered, "Darn Precious." Then came the laugh. I don't believe I've ever seen any human being laugh so much, so often, and with such marvelous abandon. He loved to regale us all with funny stories, but to tell the truth, I don't know how half of them ever ended. He would start laughing long before reaching the punchline, and his laughter would only increase until he was soon reduced to tears, unable to complete the joke -- and nobody cared because we were all laughing hysterically with him.  Never have I enjoyed the beginning of so many stories. 

His smile and laugh didn't come cheap, however. The youngest surviving of 12 children, he learned both the value and hardship of physical labor as a child. He once wrote of the house where his family lived: 

It was a big old house, with a chimney at each end of the house, the kitchen was separated from the house with a little walkway connecting the two together. There were cracks in the floor, and you could see the ground underneath, so [we] just swept the trash through the cracks. The house was three or four feet above the ground. There were cracks in the wall, and there were no glass windows. The windows had wooden shutters and when you opened them, there was the wide open space outside.

Even though his was a hard lot in life, the mischief (which appears to have been hereditary) was never far away. Once, when his father was taking a rare and well-deserved nap in the hammock outside, young D.P. tickled his nose with a feather, though not before putting a generous quantity of chicken droppings on the man's fingers. "He rubbed that stuff all over his face," Paw Paw said, while laughing of course. Then, with that characteristic twinkle, he added, "I got my ass beat, but it was worth it."  

Then there was the time that, as Paw Paw described it, "My older brother, Robert. went courtin'." You see, Robert already had his "courtin' suit," laid out and ready, as he was preparing to go call on a young lady and meet her family that evening. Well, there was the suit laying across the bed, complete with a handkerchief in the breast pocket. And there was little D.P. with his eye full of mischief. He removed the handkerchief and went to the kitchen, where his mother had some leftover corn bread sitting out. Taking a chunk of it and placing it in the middle of the handkerchief, he gathered up the corners and beat the cornbread into little pieces before carefully re-folding the handkerchief and placing it back in the breast pocket of the suit.  

It worked. That night, Robert was busy visiting with the object of his affection and her family when he had to sneeze. At the last second, he yanked the handkerchief out of his pocket, and a blast of cornbread showered everything and everyone in the room. "Did Robert come after you?" I would ask in July of 2009. "Oh he tried," Paw Paw said. Then with a grin he added, "I outran him."  

That was one of out lasts visits, as his prostate cancer was catching up with him. He was 93, though he always told people he was 27. We were sitting in his living room when he asked for his Bible, in which he had written the names of his siblings and parents, and had kept a record of sorts. He asked if I had time to listen to him talk about his family. I said of course, and added that I wanted to pass this information along to my children. "Oh please do," he said. Opening that worn and beautiful old book, he read the names, passed along photos, and we took a walk through history together. Only eight of his parents' 12 children survived. By 2009, Paw Paw was the only one living.  

As a young man, he took a job as a truck driver, delivering Jax beer out of New Orleans. My grandmother worked at a little diner in Church Point, Louisiana, just up the road from my favorite little town of Rayne. Jane had enough Acadian (Cajun) blood in her to do a normal person in completely, and Paw Paw described her as, "the cutest little coonass (Cajun) I'd ever seen." Jane's father was a minister, and wasn't especially fond of his daughter getting involved with a mischievous beer truck driver. But the courtship evolved and they eventually married (at which point Paw Paw tries to finish the story of them leaving the church in his delivery truck with all the beer bottles in the back, but he starts laughing again).

He was growing tired by this point in our visit, and so the hospice nurse assisted in getting him to bed, where he went to sleep as soon as he hit the pillow. "He's a special man," she said.   Reaching down toward the floor, I said, "From the time that I was this high, I always looked forward to visiting with Paw Paw Carter. I knew there would be jokes, smiles, and laughter."  She allowed as how even during his difficult days, when he was in pain, he made her laugh. I was gratified, though not surprised. It seems to be a family trait.  

The next time I saw him, he was in a nursing home and the prognosis was, as doctors euphemistically term it, "grave." He was wearing the World War II Veteran cap I had purchased for him from the D-Day Museum in New Orleans. He loved that hat. When the ambulance came to take him to the Emergency Room, he refused to leave without it. On that visit, which would be our last, he talked about his military service.  

He served in the Pacific Theater and was onboard a ship en route to Japan when the war ended, transforming a planned invasion force to an Army of occupation. I had seen the photos, some from battle fields, others from after hostilities ceased. I won't recount the stories in this space, but will say for the record that I understand why he hadn't talked about the war much over the years.  

Soon, before the conversation became excessively morbid, he returned to stories of happier days. Like the time he and my Uncle Lester had a wee too much to drink at a high school football game and took to the field to march with the band, for instance. Or the time they faked press credentials and got to watch a great deal of another game from the press box. Or the time he and Jane (Grandma), along with Uncle Lester and Aunt Lou, had gone to Beaumont, Texas to go "honky tonkin'," only to return home to Grandma's very stern and teetotaling sister Edna.  "I tried to act sober, but Lester was passed out," he said.  "Edna was standing their watching, I opened the car door and Lester just rolled out onto the ground," he said before the laughter took over again. "And you caught hell?" I asked. "Oh you got that right, boy," he laughed.  

Our families lend us a variety of traits from all corners. My grandfather had such a smooth grace and easygoing sense of humor, something he passed along to my Dad and, at least in some measure hopefully, to me. In any event, I know where my mischief originated. Paw Paw knew the value of humor because he knew what a hard life meant, and how it could be tempered. He was a good father to his children, his example lighting the way for my own father and for me, though, thankfully, at least my Dad never got me in trouble with the teacher by convincing me that if you leave the hair from a horse's tail in a bucket of rain water for two weeks it will turn into a snake. For me, Father's Day is about celebrating not only my own dad and his example, but the strength, character, and yes, humor, of generations of good men in our family, of which D.P. Carter was but one example.  

It was time for supper at the nursing home, and he didn't want to be late. I last saw him on his little electric scooter, wearing his WWII hat, motoring toward the dining room. I don't know what the policy is in Heaven regarding contraband, but I made sure that hat was in his casket. I'm sure Paw Paw came up with a good story. Of course, whether he could finish it through the laughter is another matter entirely. 

Paul Rahe has written a thoughtful post, The Iranians Will One Day Be Free, in which he muses on Iran's long-term prospects in light of the election of a relative moderate following the long nightmare of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I thought I'd supplement Prof. Rahe's reflections with a closer look at the winning candidate, Hassan Rouhani.

One of the main sources I used in composing this was Omri Ceren, who writes about the struggle between Western civilization and political Islam at Commentary and on his blog, Mere Rhetoric. He's also senior adviser for strategy at The Israel Project. Any theorizing, speculating, or conclusion-reaching is my own, however.

It might be easiest to distill all this as a question-and-answer, so let's have at it.

Q. What are Hassan Rouhani's political allegiances?

A. Rouhani comes from the camp of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a figure generally classified as moderate but whom Ceren identifies as more of a "conservative pragmatist". (Rafsanjani believes in a free market economy and objects to the deliberate antagonizing of America and the West, but was also instrumental in the selection of Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader.) Rouhani was Rafsanjani's Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in 1989 and continued in that position under Rafsanjani's successor, Mohammad Khatami. Rafsanjani endorsed Rouhani for the presidency following his own disqualification.

Q. How did Rouhani become a nominee in the first place?

A. I'm speculating here, but it looks as though this might have been a miscalculation for the sake of credibility -- although not necessarily a dangerous miscalculation from the point of view of the mullahs. Iran's Guardian Council culled the original list of candidates severely, slashing it from about 680 names down to eight. The candidates left standing were all connected in some way either to the Supreme Leader or to the security forces.

Hassan Rouhani's bona fides go all the way back the Iranian revolution, during which he was a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini. He stayed close to Khomeini while in exile and then moved up the political system once Khomeini seized power back in Iran. The regime might well have anticipated a result that was close enough to require a runoff, with Saeed Jalili -- Iran's nuclear negotatior under Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader's choice for president -- emerging the victor. Rouhani's landslide win precluded the possibility of a runoff.

As I say, though, the result is not necessarily ominous for the theocracy. Rouhani's name would not have remained on the list of candidates if the mullahs had any serious doubts about either his loyalty or his willingness to remain largely powerless.

Q. What does Rouhani's election imply about Iran's nuclear ambitions?

A. It's good news for Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Rouhani was Iran's chief nuclear negotiator with the EU3 (Britain, France, and Germany) during Khatami's presidency. His willingness to conciliate the West has been perceived in some quarters as hampering Iran's nuclear progress, an accusation he emphatically denies. The simple fact of Rouhani's election will take a great deal of heat off Iran, and will thus enable it to continue apace on its nuclear program -- whatever the true nature of that program might be. It's certainly going to be much harder now to impose sanctions, or even to suggest them. Remember that for all Rouhani's good p.r., all final decision-making about Iran's nuclear program lies, as it always did, with the ruling clerics.

Q. What can we expect from Rouhani in terms of foreign policy?

A. He's pretty much the antithesis of Ahmadinejad, in that he promotes (or says he promotes) a policy of "reconciliation and peace" with the West. Ceren makes the important point, though, that Iran has a long history of reaching out to the West while doing what it wants at home, and that it knows how easily the West can be divided against itself:

Skeptics, meanwhile, are likely to read Rouhani's call for dialogue with the West against a historical strategy of expanding Iran's nuclear program while conducting negotiations, especially negotiations with Europe. In September 2004 he described Iranian policy as pursuing both "confidence-building and... build[ing] up our technical capability... simultaneously" (http://is.gd/9UGVBp). Also in 2004, he bragged that "cooperating with Europe" allowed Iran to split the Europeans from the Americans so that Iran could keep pursuing its policies (http://is.gd/JCL060). During the election he boasted that his strategy allowed Iran to "complete[] the technology" it needed for its nuclear program (http://is.gd/uO1G3f). Iranian officials even had an internal codename for Rouhani’s strategy: it was described in a book by Rouhani's deputy at the Supreme National Security Council, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, as the "widen the transatlantic gap" strategy (http://is.gd/xOqN9X).

Q. What does the election result mean for Israel's plans (if they exist) to take out Iran's nuclear installations?

A. The likely eagerness of the United States to welcome Iran into the community of civilized nations will put some daylight (or perhaps I should say more daylight) between the US and Israel on the need for a military strike. (Note that I am not in a position to confirm that Israel has any such plans, but if they do exist, they depend on a uniformity of vision with the US.) At Ahmadinejad's worst, most fire-breathing moments, President Obama could scarcely stomach the prospect of a strike, so I doubt he would even consider it under this new Iranian administration.

Again, speculation alert: it would be dangerous in the extreme for Israel to conduct a strike without the concrete support of the US, so she'll have little choice but to move any plans to the back burner.

Q. But maybe that's okay. If a sane man has ascended to the presidency of Iran, isn't it possible that Israel can stop worrying about Iran's ultimate intentions toward her?

A. To answer that, I'll point out that on Syria, President-Elect Rouhani has not wavered in his support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Why the staunch support? Because Rouhani admires Assad's absolute rejection of any kind of rapprochement with Israel, ever.

This election, while certainly heartening in many respects, is unlikely to herald a new dawn of good relations between Iran and Israel, or at least not any time soon. A nuclear Iran is still a most unnerving prospect indeed.

Q. Is Rouhani a "Green"?

A. No. He was the beneficiary of a great many reform votes, primarily since all the other reform candidates were forbidden by the Guardian Council to run and the other reform contender, Mohammad Reza Aref, dropped out of the race. The candidates to his right divided their vote, while Rouhani was the only man standing to receive anti-government protest votes of every variety.

He is hardly a Green, though. During the student protests in 1999, he gave a speech in which he vowed to "crush [them] mercilessly and monumentally". He also called for the execution of those who had been arrested. In February 2011, during pro-democracy protests, he instructed the public to desist from demonstrating and obey Khameini. He also said at the time that the protests were meant to distract the public from the true enemy: the US and Israel.

Q. Can we expect Rouhani to accomplish anything?

A. He may well accomplish a good deal domestically -- he has declared his intention to construct a "civil rights charter" and has plans to restore the economy, which is the primary concern of many Iranian voters -- but on the international front, he's unlikely to accomplish much. Anything he might want to do will be trumped by Supreme Leader Khameini, who remains the last word on everything. Khameini decides what Iran's nuclear policy is, and he's already warned Rouhani not to make concessions to the West on that (or any) score. In February, remember, Khameini threw the Americans' offer of direct talks back in their faces. Expect the Americans and the West at large to reach out, Rouhani to record some pleasing sound bytes in response, and nothing significant to change.

I find the results of the recent Presidential election in Iran heartening. I do not mean to say that I am convinced that Hassan Rouhani will abandon Ayatollah Khamenei's quest to turn the Islamic Republic into a nuclear power. Nor do I mean that he will bring to an end the petty and not so petty tyranny of the mullahs and usher in genuinely free elections. I have no idea what he will do. He was among a group of candidates handpicked by Khamenei, and he may take direction from the old theocrat. Then, again, he may take seriously the promises he has made -- if for no other reason than that he was the one who made them.

What I find heartening is that there were contested elections, that the issues were actually debated, and that the Iranian people opted to choose by a landslide -- more than 50% of the vote in a race involving a host of contenders -- the man that echoed the thinking voiced in June 2009, in the last election by the candidates who promised reform.

What I have in mind is this. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a mixed regime. It gives lip service and more than lip service to two principles -- the rule of God's chosen representative on earth, and popular sovereignty. Those two principles are at odds with one another, and for the most part it has been the case that the theocrats rule. But the holding of elections, the fact that they are contested, and the fact that time and again one of the candidates chooses to differentiate himself from his rivals by proposing, in effect, that the revolution be set aside and Iran become a normal country -- this means that every so often the Iranian people are reminded that, in the final analysis, the country belongs to them.

One of the two principles will emerge victorious in the end. The holding of contested elections with serious debates virtually guarantees that the day will come when no one defers to the mullahs. It is in the nature of things that Hassan Rouhani will want to make his mark. He has been elected President; he has a mandate for action; and, if he has any self-respect, he will make the attempt. He may, of course, be a man without self-regard. He may be servile to the tips of his toes. He may knuckle under. But there will come a time when he has a successor who does not fit that bill --- and then, suddenly, when no one expects it, the theocratic structure will collapse like a house of cards. Such a development is baked in the cake. It is inherent in the constitution of the Islamic Republic that, as a theocracy, it cannot last.

Hillary Clinton told an audience in Chicago this week that the “great unfinished business of this century” is the creation of more opportunities for women. One can almost hear the gears turning in her head as she eyes the presidency in 2016.

What greater opportunity for a woman than to be president of the United States, and what greater chance for Americans to be redeemed from a sexist past than to elect the first female president?

To a crowd of adoring fans at the Clinton Global conference, Hillary chose her words purposely, planting seeds in the minds of the American public that what our country needs is a woman to lead the way into a fuller, brighter, and safer future:

When women participate in peacemaking and peacekeeping, we are safer and more secure, and when women participate in politics, the effects ripple throughout society.

The focus on gender politics is obvious, but notice that Clinton doesn’t veer into the typical war-on-women talking points. She doesn’t highlight wage disparity or reproductive rights; instead, she broadens her scope with the lofty and timely language of peace.

Her message, however, isn’t one of peace through strength or individual responsibility, but of security and, above all, safety. These are the “effects” of a feminized culture that have rippled throughout society, and these are the values Democrats will exploit in 2014 and 2016.

This is particularly true in light of current scandals that have exposed how a bloated and unaccountable government can violate the rights and liberties of American citizens. The Democrats momentarily found themselves on the defensive, but no longer.

They’ve turned the tide by changing the focus of the controversy, twisting it back on the right. The problem is no longer the threat of big government to American privacy and freedom, but libertarian and conservative “paranoid extremists” who don’t trust government to keep us safe and secure.

Clinton has gotten the message, and she’s going to run with it: we live in dangerous times and our enemies hide in shadows, so we need to trust our government to do anything it can to keep us safe and secure.

And who better to protect us, to make our country safe, to gather us up like chicks under her wing than a woman? Isn’t that what women do best? Nurture, promote peace, soothe the savage beast of man? Who better to guide us into an era of peace and security than the softer sex? Who better than Hillary Clinton?

The race for the presidency in 2016 has already begun. What strategy should conservatives employ in this climate of fear and gender politics? What is the conservative answer to Americans who are willing to sacrifice their liberty for security and to elect a woman as president simply because they believe they owe it to her?

Apparently, the democraczar occasionally indulges in feats of derring-do slighly more pedestrian than firing crossbows at whales or recovering priceless antiquities on Black Sea diving expeditions. From CBS Sports:

Back in 2005 [New England] Patriots owner Robert Kraft was in Russia when a funny thing happened: Russian president Vladimir Putin stole his $25,000 Super Bowl XXXIX ring. Actually for the past eight years, Kraft had let everyone believe he gave the ring to Putin as a gift, but the truth came out this week: Putin stole it -- or took it without asking if 'stole' is too strong of a word for you.

"I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, 'I can kill someone with this ring,'" Kraft said at an event this week, via the New York Post. "I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out."

Kraft might have helped America dodge World War III because instead of going after the ring, Kraft let Putin keep it -- at the insistence of the White House. Yes, someone at the White House called Kraft and insisted he let Putin keep the ring.

"It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present," Kraft said he was told on the White House call.

Congratulations to readers who've surmised that the White House response was a metaphor for everything that's been wrong with our policy towards Russia for the last decade.

Jeb Bush can sometimes show that he too has inherited his family’s, er, way with words (the Washington Post reports him as saying this):

 “Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans,” Bush said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to the Majority conference. “Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

 That, I think, could have been put rather better.

 The Post continues:

Bush said immigrants are an advantage that the United States has over China, Europe and Japan, which don’t have the same immigrant tradition and are struggling to find young laborers.

Really? They are struggling. Struggling?

Japan has its demographic issues (much less of a problem than is often thought, in my view), but let’s look at its supposed shortage of “young laborers”

 The Economist has the details:

Japan’s youth joblessness, which surged after its financial crisis in the early 1990s, has stayed high despite a fast fall in the overall workforce. A large class of hikikomori live with their parents, rarely leaving home and withdrawn from the workforce.

Oh.

China too is going to have to confront the reality of an aging population, but there’s no structural labor shortage there. And as for its alleged lack of “young laborers”, the New York Times has some information here:

Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education….China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally. But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries.

That last thing could never happen here of course.

Europe, Governor Bush, they could do with more “young laborers” over there, could they?  Really?

 Over to the Atlantic:

Europe's job market is a historic disaster. The EU unemployment rate set a new all-time high of 12.2 percent, according to today's estimates. But it's the youth unemployment crisis that's truly terrifying. In Spain, unemployment surged past 56 percent, and Greece now leads the rich world with an astonishing 62.5 percent of its youth workforce out of a job….Since April 2012, Greek youth unemployment has grown by about one percentage point a month. At that rate, it would pass 70 percent in early 2014. It is suddenly not insane to imagine a youth unemployment rate of 70 percent in the developed world. And that is insane. It should be noted that some people consider youth unemployment figures a bit hyperbolic. They prefer measures like "youth unemployment ratio, which takes the share of young people who are looking for work but can't find it and divides it by the entire population. Last year, the EU's youth unemployment ratio was 9.7 percent , less than half the youth unemployment rate of 23 percent.

But even the ratio fails to account for the millions of young people who have all but given up in their awful economies. There are 26 million young people in rich countries who are as "NEETS" (Not Employed, or in Education, or Training), according to the OECD.  Youth unemployment is bad for all the obvious reasons, including the big loss to future productivity and earnings. But Europe's youth unemployment is strange, because we've never seen a generation *this educated* also be this unemployed. Nearly 40 percent of Spain's 20-and early-30-somethings are college educated. In Greece, it's 30 percent.

Jeb Bush is not a stupid man, but it does  look (at least on this occasion)  as if his grasp of economic data was even less assured than his command of language.

The underlying problem, of course, is that Bush is stuck in a mid-twentieth century mindset dominated by a model of labor-intensive production that is now in rapid decline. Yes, of course there are skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants (and few of those opposed to Marco Rubio’s squalid legislative initiative are unreceptive to a degree of skills-based immigration), but the combined effect of automation and globalization is such that the assumption that more people must mean more, widely available and better-paid jobs is hopelessly dated, and hopelessly naïve.

To suggest that it still reflects reality is profoundly misleading.

First the British government goes all coy about who started the Great War, and now this.

 The Daily Mail reports:

It is often regarded as the British Army’s greatest military victory. Led into battle by the Duke of Wellington, UK troops routed Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, a triumph ushering in almost a century of peace and stability in Europe. But the Government is refusing to mark the battle’s 200th anniversary in 2015 amid suspicions it does not want to offend France. That decision is in stark contrast to Belgium - where the clash took place. The government in Brussels is spending at least £ 20 million on commemorative events, including restoring the battlefield.  Instead, there will only be ‘initiatives’ at military museums and ‘some commemorative activity’ at the Duke’s former homes.

Times are hard and the (enjoyable) suspicion that the government is worried about offending France does not seem to be based on very firm evidence (although that will not be enough to stop me sharing in it), but, even if this decision is not the latest outbreak of EU PC, it does appear to be yet another failure of imagination by a government that so often loses its way when it comes to anything to do with Europe.  

Worse than that, it is a missed opportunity. There is (officially, at least) a lot of worrying about how the UK lacks a national ‘story’ sufficiently attractive to foster patriotism in its younger, more multicultural/multiethnic generations. Despite the best efforts of Danny Boyle, the National Health Service is not, it seems, enough. Commemorating a hard-fought, heroic victory over a tyrant might, one would think, be a helpful  (and rather sound) addition to the narrative – and a useful history lesson too.

But it is not to be. 

Come to think about it, I'm not hearing a lot about the six-hundredth anniversary of Agincourt (also due in 2015) either. That was against the French too.

Hmmm...

In the aftermath of 9-11, US citizens were told that we needed a well-funded domestic security apparatus, capable of gathering intelligence and acting to thwart further terrorist attacks on our country. And so we created a Department of Homeland Security, staffed by professionals dedicated to preventing another jihadist attack.

 But we were simultaneously and relentlessly schooled in the need to employ only the most politically correct counter-terrorist techniques. We learned, for example, that singling out young Middle Eastern men for scrutiny at airport security checkpoints was an unacceptable manifestation of Islamophobia. Official attention was therefore directed on a random basis, with grandmothers in wheelchairs and toddlers in strollers treated no differently from anyone else. Over time, our Prime Directive became so ingrained that federal authorities could not focus on a radicalized Chechen immigrant family—despite warnings from Russian intelligence officials—until after the Tsarnaev brothers exploded their pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon. And even then, the immediate official response was to stress the even-handedness of the manhunt—with a search for hitherto unknown tax-protesting terrorists high on the list of possibilities.

In 2009, strict observance of the Prime Directive prevented action against a US Army officer known to be a pen pal of Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar al-Awlaki until after Major Hasan shot dead 13 fellow soldiers and wounded another 30 while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” in what is officially categorized as an unfortunate episode of “workplace violence.” In a moment of rare candor, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey, Jr. pinpointed our national security priority in the wake of Major Hasan’s bad day at the office:  “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” So in order to be fair to all, we are now being asked to shred each citizen’s Second Amendment rights as the only way to reduce “gun violence.” 

President Obama likes to say that “If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act”, but the actions contemplated are always in full compliance with the Prime Directive of politically correct diversity. 

Meanwhile, in a further display of fairness, our Department of Homeland Security warns law enforcement of the threat posed by the recently discharged veteran next door, while bulking up on armored vehicles and ammunition—1.6 billion rounds worth.  You can never be too careful when dealing with an imaginary, non-diverse terrorist threat.

But actual threats are tougher to address. After all, it is racist to put a fence on our southern border; keep track of foreigners entering and leaving the United States; question immigrants about their legal status when stopped by police for another reason; or even think about enforcing US immigration laws, except against those clueless souls dumb enough to apply and enter via the legal route. For them, we have a process that would do Kafka proud. 

Given this background, is it really surprising that our anti-terrorism professionals default to treating all of us exactly the same, vacuuming everyone’s personal data into one big fair-and-equitable database? The analysts at NSA know that there are would-be terrorists that mean to enter the United States and cause mayhem. But they also know that the Prime Directive prevents us stopping potential threats at the border or placing them under targeted surveillance once they get here. Therefore, the only politically correct thing to do with a very substantial budget is to monitor everyone, all the time, thereby preventing the tragedy of reducing diversity through a malignant focus on actual terrorist suspects. 

To boil this down to the essentials, just think of the NSA as the Internet equivalent of the TSA, conducting your own personal enhanced digital pat-down, 24 x 7 x 365.

Curious about something I read this morning, I just scrolled through the past week's worth of posts on the Main Feed. That's at least 50-60 posts. And unless I'm blind as a bat (which, at my age, I can't entirely rule out), there were exactly zero posts directly on the subject of immigration reform, and only one -- from Red Feline three days ago -- that sort of touched on it.

And yet what current issue -- other than Obamacare, which may or may not be in play -- is as likely to have as much long-term impact on the country as this one?  I find the lack of spirited discussion -- or even plain old outrage -- curious. Is it because it is just assumed that everyone here agrees?  That hasn't precluded hosts of posts on IRS targeting, Obamacare, and many other topics on which the majority of members here are even more likely to agree than on immigration. Or is it because people are somehow uncomfortable with the subject, sensing that there is no obvious alternative to either acquiescing, however reluctantly, in a significant re-engineering of the electorate or coming across as vaguely anti-Hispanic? But that doesn't sound like the Ricochet community at all.

Herewith, then, a contribution.

Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner this morning that in a radio interview yesterday Senator Rubio offered up two reasons why "legalization" must precede "security." First, noting that it would take at least four years to secure the border, “We cannot wait another four years with 11 million people living in this country illegally without knowing who they are or why they’re here.”

Huh? Why not? A lot of these people have been here a lot longer than four years.  What is going to be so traumatically worse about the next four? And what on earth is that bit about "without knowing who they are or why they are here?" When did this become the amnesty-for-amnesiacs bill? They know perfectly well who they are, and why they are here.

But his second justification is, if possible, even sillier. "We’re going to require them to pay a fine, and that’s the money that we are going to use to pay for the border security,” Rubio explained. “If we don’t get that fine money from the people that have violated our immigration laws, then the American taxpayer is going to have to pay for border security.”

Again, huh? Border security is one of the few things probably 80-90% of taxpayers are perfectly willing to pay for. Cowboy poetry festivals? Not so much. Border security? Fine, sign me up; I'll send the check tomorrow.

What is this nonsense?  If this is the best one of the lead sponsors of "comprehensive immigration reform" can come up with, can someone please help me understand why this whole thing is not already DOA outside of the Democratic Party?  Democratic support I wholly understand -- as Bill Maher admitted a week or so ago, the proposal simply mints "a lot of new Democrats."  But if you're not a Democratic Party apparatchik, what on earth is the rationale for supporting this?

Earlier this week, Yuval Levin, Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs, accepted the Bradley Prize, an honor that I noted a few months ago when it was announced. In his acceptance speech, he presented the following formulation:

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

...

Conservatives often begin from gratitude because we start from modest expectations of human affairs—we know that people are imperfect, and fallen, and weak; that human knowledge and power are not all they’re cracked up to be; and we’re enormously impressed by the institutions that have managed to make something great of this imperfect raw material. So we want to build on them because we don’t imagine we could do better starting from scratch.

Liberals often begin from outrage because they have much higher expectations—maybe even utopian expectations—about the perfectibility of human things and the potential of human knowledge and power. They’re often willing to ignore tradition and to push aside institutions that channel generations of wisdom because they think we can do better on our own.

This can sometimes leave conservatives feeling like we are the brakes on American life, while people on the left hold the steering wheel. Like they push for their idea of progress and we just want to go a little more slowly. But that’s a serious mistake.

The American idea of progressisthe tradition that we’re defending. It is made possible precisely by sustaining our deep ties to the ideals of liberty, and equality, and human dignity expressed in our founding and our institutions. The great moral advances in our history have involved the vindication of those principles—have involved America becoming more like itself.

Beautifully rendered. Yuval gracefully articulates what I've always thought is the major temperamental division between left and right: they're always outraged that things aren't perfect; we're always shocked that things aren't much worse.

We think we're possessed of a healthy skepticism, while they think we're pessimists with a slightly misanthropic streak. They think that they're optimists fueled by compassion, while we think they're often cockeyed pollyanas blind to the law of unintended consequences.

What do you think of conservatism as gratitude? What other word(s) might you use to describe conservatism's essence? Is there some (albeit limited) value to be taken from liberalism's propensity for outrage?

Am I mentioning Rick Santorum only because I know how many of you hate him? Possibly! But seriously, he said something yesterday that needs to be heard by political types on the right:

“One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single —factory worker went out there,” Santorum told a few hundred conservative activists at an “after-hours session” of the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

“When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are ‘Type As’ who want to succeed economically, we’re talking to a very small group of people,” he said. “No wonder they don’t think we care about them. No wonder they don’t think we understand them. Folks, if we’re going to win, you just need to think about who you talk to in your life.”

Trying to carve out a role as a leading populist in the 2016 field, Santorum insisted that Republicans must “talk to the folks who are worried about the next paycheck,” not the CEOs.

This makes so much sense to me that I am confused as to how the GOP and Romney messed it up so badly last year.

And whatever policy differences I have with Rick Santorum, I might note that there is absolutely no conflict -- the opposite, in fact -- between free market entrepreneurship and praising labor and individual contributions of employees.

There have been a number of developments regarding the civil war in Syria. For one thing, the Obama Administration has come to the conclusion that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against Syrian rebels, and now believes that it must arm the rebels against the regime.  It ought to go without saying that the use of chemical weapons is A Bad Thing, but everyone ought to understand that the arming of Syrian rebels may not represent the end of American involvement in Syria. Rather, it may only represent the beginnings of that involvement, and we may not like what comes next.

For the moment, as the New York Times story indicates, the Obama Administration has ruled out the implementation of a no-fly zone in Syria, which itself would constitute a military action; a no-fly zone is maintained through denying the enemy the ability to fly aircraft in the zone, of course, but it is also maintained by taking out enemy anti-aircraft batteries and missiles, and enemy radar that might undermine the maintenance of a no-fly zone by aircraft flown to enforce the no-fly rule.

The problem with arming the rebels, however, is that we may be arming elements we don't particularly like. I referenced this danger in the past. Forgive the fact that I am quoting myself immediately below, but I think it might be called for in this case:

There are calls for the administration to send arms to the Syrian opposition, but aiding the Free Syrian Army comes with a significant set of risks. There are allegations that armed opposition groups in Syria have engaged in significant human rights abuses, and offering aid to those groups might inadvertently benefit Islamists who are hostile to the United States and to American interests. Indeed, at least one UN official believes that anti-regime forces have used chemical weapons. The United States should not be eager to jump into bed with the Syrian opposition by giving arms and aid to religious fanatics and egregious violators of the laws of warfare.

I am sorry to report that my concerns on this score may have been justified: 

When a 14-year-old boy from the Syrian city of Aleppo named Mohammad Qatta was asked to bring one of his customers some coffee, he reportedly refused, saying, “Even if [Prophet] Mohammed comes back to life, I won’t.”

According to a story reported by two grassroots Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center, Qatta’s words got him killed. A group of Islamist rebels, driving by in a black car, reportedly heard the exchange. They stopped the car, grabbed the boy and took him away.

Qatta, in refusing to serve a customer coffee – it’s not clear why – had used a phrase that the Islamist rebels took as an insult toward the Prophet Mohammed, the most important figure in Islam. That offhand comment, made by a boy, was apparently enough for these rebels to warrant a grisly execution and public warning.

The rebels, according to ABC News’ reconstruction of the Syrian groups’ reports, appear to have whipped Qatta. When they brought him back to where they’d taken him, his head was wrapped by a shirt.

The rebels waited for a crowd to gather; Qatta’s parents were among them. Speaking in classical Arabic, they announced that Qatta had committed blasphemy and that anyone else who dared insult the Prophet Mohammed would share his fate. Then, the shirt still wrapped around the boy’s head, the rebels shot him in the mouth and neck.

And more:

A Syrian rebel group's pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda's replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group's influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well.

Lebanese Sheik Omar Bakri, a Salafist who says states must be governed by Muslim religious law, says al-Qaeda has assisted al Nusra for some time.

"They provided them early on with technical, military and financial support , especially when it came to setting up networks of foreign jihadis who were brought into Syria," Bakri says. "There will certainly be greater coordination between the two groups."

The United States, which supports the overthrow of Assad, designated al Nusra a terrorist entity in December. The Obama administration has said it wants to support only those insurgent groups that are not terrorist organizations.

As though it will be easy to ensure that money goes only to those rebel segments that the Obama Administration happens to like. More:

When the group Jabhat al Nusra first claimed responsibility for car and suicide bombings in Damascus that killed dozens last January, many of Syria’s revolutionaries claimed that the organization was a creation of the Syrian government, designed to discredit those who opposed the regime of President Bashar Assad and to hide the regime’s own brutal tactics.

Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad.

Not only does the group still conduct suicide bombings that have killed hundreds, but they’ve proved to be critical to the rebels’ military advance. In battle after battle across the country, Nusra and similar groups do the heaviest frontline fighting. Groups who call themselves the Free Syrian Army and report to military councils led by defected Syrian army officers move into the captured territory afterward.

The prominence of Nusra in the rebel cause worries U.S. and other Western officials, who say its operations rely on the same people and tactics that fueled al Qaida in Iraq – an assertion that is borne out by interviews with Nusra members in Syria.

Why are we giving arms to rebel elements when there is no guarantee whatsoever that those arms won't end up in the hands of terrorists who have professed hostility towards the United States and towards American interests, and who have actually carried out terrorist operations against the United States?

Policymaking is not made any easier by the fact that former president Bill Clinton is double-dog daring the Obama administration to be tough in Syria, lest President Obama look like "a fool" or "a wuss."  

I don't even pretend to understand the logic here. Surely, Bill Clinton knows that many of the Syrian rebel groups are non-fans of the United States and don't profess our moral values. Surely, he understands that our willingness to dip our toes into the waters of war in Syria might lead us to wade in those waters further in the future. Surely he realizes that there are no American national security interests at stake here--indeed, from an exceedingly cold realpolitik standpoint, if the United States really wanted to see its interests served, it would do everything within its power to ensure that the civil war in Syria goes on for as long as possible (the better to bleed Iran dry as it seeks to prop up the Assad regime and throws good money after bad in the process). And surely the former president realizes that while the human carnage in Syria is nothing short of horrific, there may be very little that the United States can do about that short of engaging in a full-scale war which would involve boots on the ground--a proposition for which there is no support whatsoever in the United States. Maybe the plan is that Hillary Clinton will eventually embrace all this tough, anti-fool/anti-wuss rhetoric in any run for the presidency, thus making her appear to be strong and resolute in the view of American voters. That may make for great politics, but it would make for a terrible foreign/military policy.

David Brooks's op-ed this week represents much of what is wrong with liberal "communitarians." They seem to think that strong communities mean strong central government bureaucracies, when, of course, it's the bureaucracy and centralized power that contribute to the demise of more local, trusted institutions. Brooks says:

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

As a friend summarized the argument to me: "Brooks's thesis, if I can try to gather myself to transcribe it, is that the loss of community in America is bad because it produces leakers who wish to expose Panopticon and are thus morally shallow." Brooks, in effect, says instead to  trust your executive agencies, er -- I mean,  your institutions! 

Then, over at Commentary, Peter Wehner somehow praises Brooks for "articulat[ing] a deeply conservative vision of society, social arrangements, authority and the (invisible) bonds that hold us together." But Wehner neglects to address what caused the disintegration of such mores.  

To Wehner's point, a strain of libertarianism is a cause; a libertine, egoistic mentality does little to encourage culture, norms, a reliance on (gasp) the advice of priests or rabbis, a kinship with neighbors, and so on. Furthermore --- and I think few libertarians acknowledge this point out of Tocqueville --- the individualization of Americans makes it easier for the government to intrude, as each person views his insecurity and isolation with fear and a subsequent willingness to give up some liberties in exchange for that government's protection and aid.

It is obvious, however, that the fundamental problem is not libertarians. Centralized federal government --- and the apparent comfort that comes with it --- makes community an unnecessary inconvenience. This phenomenon is perhaps exemplified by the painful anxiety to avoid one's nosy neighbors (yet the relative ease when the Man in Gray reads your e-mails).

Indeed, in our current (dire) situation, one actually needs a strain of libertarianism --- the kind that opposes centralizing everything and that welcomes a certain risk and discomfort in localizing services --- to create the preconditions for a revivification of community. Weaving a "social fabric" (Brooks's term) from millions of threads already hanging on a mild, faraway federal government is difficult, if not impossible. Once these threads with the Leviathan are cut (a kind of freedom), they can and must seek ties elsewhere --- in churches, towns, local clubs, etc.

But if Brooks's "conservative" plan to weaken the Leviathan is to place our trust in it, the results will disappoint both him and conservatives. Such a proposition suggests that Brooks does not even know how the Leviathan or communities come to exist.

In any dispute between Jon Kyl and Rand Paul, my sympathies lie with Kyl. I hope that's not a surprise. Thus, I note with interest this story in the Washington Free Beacon :

Former Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) criticized what he described as a resurgent isolationist streak in Congress during a breakfast discussion at the Capitol Hill Club on Tuesday.

...

Kyl took issue in particular with the views of Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), a prospective 2016 presidential candidate and a new member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“People like Sen. Rand Paul say ‘what the United States needs now is a foreign policy that is reluctant,’” said Kyl. “No. It does not need a reluctant foreign policy. You may decide at one point or another that you’re not going to engage in a particular situation either economically, or diplomatically, or potentially militarily. But you shouldn’t be reluctant about what your goals are, what your objectives are, and your willingness to commit whatever power, soft or hard, that you have at any given time, against the problem.”

Kyl added that Paul has “been very clear about his view that the United States, with regard to terrorism, should just have a position of containment, as if somehow you could contain these things.”

“Even containment has a concept behind it of doing something,” he continued. “And what happens when you have to apply force to that concept of containment, if you don’t have the capability?”

I would actually go farther than Kyl. I would suggest that Paul and extreme libertarians like him actually have no coherent foreign policy. They simply have a desire to withdraw to the homeland. But that is an instinct, not a theory or strategy. It has no evaluation of different foreign policy goals or matching of means and ends. In a world where other nations and even terrorist groups can easily project power across the oceans -- and where one third of our economy depends on international trade -- Paul's foreign policy cannot work.

Maybe some of the libertarians on Ricochet have a more intellectually developed approach to foreign policy. Any ideas?

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has earned much conservative praise for her colorful duels with President Obama. Now out-of-state Republicans are shocked to find her transformed into a passionate Obamacare booster.

Earlier today, Brewer challenged the authority of the Republican-led state legislature and rammed through a vast expansion of the Medicaid program through Obamacare. A “Brewer Coalition” of every Democrat and a handful of Republicans engineered a 3:40 a.m. house vote, refusing to answer any questions about the controversial measure. The legislation was rushed through the state senate and is now on the governor’s desk.

Brewer’s unprecedented power play outraged the conservative leadership along with the grassroots.

[Conservatives] complained the process shut out the public and most members of the GOP, which hold majorities in both chambers. They said the bills were not fully vetted in committees and caucuses, and they were forced to make important policy decisions on more than 600 pages of amendments in a matter of hours.

To make matters worse, they said, the coalition members refused to answer questions from the conservatives.

“How are you not embarrassed for yourselves?” said Rep. Javan Mesnard, R-Chandler. “Is anyone going to stand up and give a defense?”

But time after time, in both the House and Senate, no one did.

Much like Pelosi with Obamacare, Brewer effectively told members to pass the bill to find out what's in it. This disappointing turn of events has conservatives from coast to coast asking, “what happened?”

The likely explanation is all-too-familiar: cronyism. Brewer’s right-hand man is lobbyist and political consultant Chuck Coughlin — a man insiders refer to as “the real governor of Arizona.”

Last year, Coughlin created a massive coalition of hospitals, insurance companies and other health care insiders to push for Obamacare-approved Medicaid and the billions of dollars that come with it. By forcing through this vote, the well-connected get a huge payday on the taxpayer’s dime.

Far-left outlets like ThinkProgress have praised the governor’s sweetheart deal as “sticking by her convictions.” Meanwhile, conservative publications like National Review have excoriated Brewer for betraying her party, her state and basic economics.

Arizona conservatives have vowed to launch a referendum effort to stop the Medicaid expansion. But, at least for today, Jan Brewer and her Democrat allies are celebrating an unexpected victory for Obamacare.