One of the ways that defenders of the mosque near ground zero make their case is curious. They say, "Did we fight the building of Christian churches in Oklahoma City after Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building there?"

There's quite a bit going on in this type of statement. The point is to draw equivalencies between Islam and Christianity, to say that violence committed in the name of a religion should not tar the entire religion, to suggest that people who oppose the mosque project near ground zero are Islamophobic bigots and hypocrites.

Of course, in order for this statement to work, it requires Timothy McVeigh to not just be a fanatical Christian but to claim that he bombed the federal building because of his religious views.

Neither of these things could be further from the truth. McVeigh did have ties to religion -- his parents had raised him as a Catholic, for instance. But he described himself as an agnostic. And he was quite clear about why he bombed the building. It had absolutely nothing to do with religion and everything to do with anger at the federal government over its actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge. His religious views aren't exactly secret. Sam Donaldson interviewed one of the reporters, Dan Herbeck, who knew McVeigh best:

DONALDSON In these letters to you that you're publishing this morning, once again, he talks about his belief or nonbelief in an afterlife. And he said, "I will improvise, adapt and overcome. If I'm going to hell, I'm going to have a lot of company."

What does that mean to you, Dan?

HERBECK Well, he is an agnostic. He doesn't believe in God, but he has told us he doesn't not believe in God.… Death is part of his adventure, as he describes it to us. And hee told us that when he finds out if there is an afterlife, he will improvise, adapt and overcome just like they taught him in the Army.

So why does the belief about McVeigh persist? I don't know. President George W. Bush once alluded to it, as has former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. Last week NPR's Michel Martin said it on CNN.

And yet all facts to the contrary, USA Today has just run another piece perpetuating the myth. Sadly, it's written by a seminary president.

Note to everyone: if you want to claim that Christianity is just as violent as Islam by pointing to one other event in history, pick an example based in reality.

Last week, when Gallup showed Republicans ten points up in the generic poll, the news sounded so good I could hardly stand it. Today? Rasmussen has Republicans up twelve. Rasmussen had the GOP up by 12 once before, three weeks ago. But still. A double digit lead, three times in three weeks.

As Redd Foxx used to say on Sanford & Son, "I'm ready to go now."

You all know that I don't think Sarah Palin's remotely qualified to be president and I surely don't think she's the next Margaret Thatcher. But this Vanity Fair hit job makes me sympathize fulsomely with those who support her simply out of indignation with the snobbery of her critics. Are we really supposed to take seriously the damning indictment that she signs her books with an Autopen? That she jokes about wearing push-up bras to get what she wants? (Find me a woman who hasn't made that joke.) That she makes the same speech over and over? (It's called a stump speech.) That her teenage kids call her a phony? (Whose don't?)

This part, particularly, is preposterous:

Whenever I heard Palin speak on the road, her remarks were scored with code phrases expressing solidarity with fundamentalist Christians. Her talk of leading with “a servant’s heart” is a dog whistle for the born-again. Her dig at health-care reform as an expression of Democratic ambitions to “build a Utopia” in the United States is practically a trumpet call (because the Kingdom of God is not of this earth, and perfection can be achieved only in the life to come).

"Dog whistle for the born-again?" Not only is this obnoxious, it's ignorant. It is indeed a Christian view that the Kingdom of God is not of this earth and that Utopian political schemes are therefore a heresy. But this is hardly a view confined to a conspiracy of sister-marrying snake-handling sub-arctic Pentecostalists who are summoned by means of dog whistles and secret codes. This was, for example, precisely Margaret Thatcher's (non-conformist Methodist) opinion.

Not that I'm saying she's the new Margaret Thatcher. She's not. There are many legitimate grounds to find her a ludicrous candidate for the presidency. But if she were even remotely qualified, I'd vote for her just to spite Vanity Fair, I really would.

Related Conversations

LONG > The Liberal Media Is Angry? Next Step: Bargaining

BERLINSKI > What Could Palin Learn from Thatcher?

CONTINETTI > Palin vs. Gingrich

SAJAK > What's a Rich Liberal to Do?

ELLIS > Would Palin Be an Effective President?

Economist Russell Sobel's provocative suggestion:

Our analysis suggests not that gangs cause violence, but that violence causes gangs. In other words, gangs form in response to government's failure to protect youths against violence. The surprising implication of our insight is that efforts to reduce gang activity could actually increase violent crime.

He provides an easy-to-understand example of how this works -- prison:

This is one of the only places where a 40-year old white man would be a gang member, and for good reason. In prison, inmates are frequently the victims of violence and intimidation that go unreported (or if reported, unpunished). This makes the environment similar to that in government-run schools and on inner-city streets. An inmate who joins a gang receives protection, which lowers the odds that he will be a victim of violent crime. Once again, the underlying demand for gangs stems from the presence of pre-existing violence.

Of course, there's no reason why this must be an either/or choice. Gangs definitely cause violence. That they arise due to violence also stands to reason.

Hat tip: Richard Starr.

Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

What happens when over a hundred billion dollars in borrowed cash gets plunged into infrastructure spending and it fails to kick-start the economy? According to this administration, spend another $50 billion on the same failed policy. Barack Obama will unveil his new economic stimulus plan in Wisconsin today, while Russ Feingold looks for a place to hide [.]

True, the election-season timing here is making the administration look especially foolish, as Politico's Jim VandeHei pointed out on Face the Nation:

Does the White House understand this?” asked guest host Harry Smith. “Do you feel any sense of panic or concern” on the part of the administration? ”They get it. There's panic. There’s concern,” VandeHei said. “The reality for this administration stinks, politically and practically, when it comes to the economy. You’re not going to be able to change that 9.6-percent unemployment figure. You can’t get anything from Congress in the next couple of months.”

Now, Jim VandeHei isn't exactly a White House spokesman. On the other hand, who got Obama into this predicament in the first place? Congressional Democrats scrambling to escape the wrath of November can run all they like from Obama. The President, meanwhile, is stuck with himself -- and the embarrasing contradictions of his economic policy.

A week of doing radio interviews has left me vaguely disgusted with myself. Honestly, if all you knew about Margaret Thatcher was what you'd heard me say in one of these interviews, you wouldn't know much. It's not for want of trying on my part, but there's just no time to make a serious argument this way.

Even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I'm thinking, "That doesn't really make sense if I don't explain the context; there's an obvious counter-argument; that's too simplistic." But I don't have time to elaborate, and the medium itself militates against equivocation and hesitation--you can't say, "Well, the answer is quite complicated, let's look at unemployment rates in various regions of Britain from 1979 to the present, keeping in mind the different government definitions of 'unemployment' and some of the technological changes in various industries ... " because by the time you're done with that sentence, you're breaking for the commercial.

Most of these interviews run about six minutes long, absolute maximum half an hour. And what I end up saying--that unemployment came down under Thatcher--is really not enough to understand the story. It doesn't convey at least two essential points: first, that it skyrocketed before it came down, causing immense misery; second, that in some parts of Britain, it still hasn't come down. People who end up thinking, because of something I've said, "Thatcherism worked!" won't appreciate that it worked at a very high cost. They would not be sufficiently well-informed if they declared, based on what I've argued, that they wanted a good dose of Thatcherism in America, and they wouldn't understand what this will probably entail.

I know, I know--people won't form firm political opinions just because they hear me speak on the radio. I haven't dived off the deep end of the vanity pool here; I know I'm not that influential. But on aggregate, if they're just getting their news from the radio, I don't think they'd be getting a deeper perspective on any political issue, would they? Am I wrong about that?

More from Claire Berlinski

Voting Palin to Spite Vanity Fair: Wrong?

It's the Spending, Stupid

Let's Leave the Echo Chamber

Floods! Nukes! Terrorists! Pakistan on the Brink

Happy Labor Day. For most of our neighbors, election season really begins tomorrow. Republicans, led by conservatives, are poised to do extremely well in November. But what then? The statist project has burrowed into our constitutional republic over a span of 80 years. How do we stage a concerted, long-term effort to reverse the trend, first by reigniting economic growth to ward off immediate calamity, then by slowly and methodically restoring our country?

I offer here my own omnibus American Liberty and Recovery Act of 2011, fully realizing that it is too ambitious in scope -- one of many reasons why I'm not a politician.

Liberty

1. Repeal Obamacare. If repeal is vetoed refuse to fund implementation of the bill.
2. Reform health care (for real this time) by permitting consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines. Also, equalize the tax treatment of employer-provided and individually-purchased health insurance.
3. Deny EPA funding to regulate carbon dioxide, eliminating this backdoor effort at centralized industrial policy via administratively enacted cap and trade.
4. Direct Treasury to unwind and privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
5. Direct Treasury to sell its stakes in US banks and automakers.
6. Reverse the Gulf of Mexico oil-drilling ban.
7. Repeal Obama’s new CAFÉ standards – automaker stimulus we can believe in.
8. Repeal Dodd-Frank financial regulation – avoid the coming nightmare.
9. Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulation – end the nightmare we already know by bringing back small company IPOs.
10. Repeal the ethanol mandate for automobile fuel. Direct EPA to preempt state-by-state custom fuel blends, creating a truly national market.

Recovery

1. Extend the Bush tax cuts – all of them.
2. Reduce the US corporate income tax rate, at 35 percent the second highest on earth, to 15 percent. Get out of the way as corporate dollars and jobs flood back into America.
3. Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. One tax system at a time is enough.
4. Implement an Accelerated Cost Recovery System modeled on the Reagan-era depreciation schedule to spur investment in plant and equipment. Watch American small businesses start growing again.
5. Enact the Ryan plan to place entitlement spending on a more sustainable trajectory
6. Weed TARP and stimulus dollars out of the federal budget baseline. Return overall federal spending to pre-financial crisis levels.

So, fellow Ricochetans, if you were the incoming Speaker in the 112th Congress, what would you do in the first 100 days to save our country from the current crisis and set the stage for 2012 and beyond?

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) fired back Sunday afternoon at a New York Times story that said party leaders were planning a "brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority." Van Hollen released a statement saying that the story "erroneously" said that the DCCC would redirect resources to two dozen viable campaigns if a review in the next two weeks showed that vulnerables weren't gaining ground. -- The Hill

Of the Times story, Jay Cost reminds us that "[t]his kind of "incumbent party makes hard choices" story is inevitable in a year like this, but it is really something to see it come out in early September. Sizeable numbers of incumbent Democrats lack a "path to victory," even this far out?" It's the kind of story that any party leader in Van Hollen's position would instinctively deny. But that's not the kind of denial that's really killing the Dems these days.

As I mentioned in a comment on Claire’s post, Jesse Jackson and Robert Kennedy, Jr. are the most charismatic people I have ever met. I hate to admit this, but I was so mesmerized by Jackson that he probably could have convinced me to cease sports writing and join the Rainbow Coalition right then and there. Although I eventually came back to earth, I was nonetheless thoroughly charmed.

In part because of this experience, I am personally suspicious of charismatic politicians. I admire their confidence, and, when their policy orientation appeals to me, I love to see them succeed. (Go Chris Christie!) But on general principle, I am wary of personal magnetism.

The only time I have ever felt comforted by a politician because of his charisma was on 9/11. Like most everyone in New York City that day, I suppose, I was certain that the world was falling apart. When not checking in on friends and family, I was glued to the television, thankful for the steady confidence and competence of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

I was at sea, emotionally and mentally, but I believed that if anyone could help us, Giuliani could. He answered all questions from the press directly. He didn’t hedge. He strung words together in artful ways despite being deeply exhausted. (For an inside look at his traumatic 9/11, you can learn about it tonight.)

Giuliani has flaws, both political and personal, but on that harrowing day, his charisma buoyed a jittery city.

Charisma helps politicians get elected and, in many cases, helps them “get stuff done” as they cajole and arm-twist for legislation or reform. But bad policies can come in charismatic packages. Freddie Mercury had charisma. I don’t think he was a conservative. FDR was perhaps the most charismatic president in recent history, but do we really want to go through that again?

More troubling, if we prize charisma too greatly, we may miss out on hidden gems. I never thought George W. Bush was a terribly magnetic public speaker, yet he was certainly competent. Like many, I expect that future events will prove him a prescient and brave leader.

My colleague Diane Ellis bristles at people who skewer Sarah Palin for her lack of extemporaneous speaking skill (a key subset of charisma, I would say). I’m not Palin’s biggest fan, but that particular criticism doesn’t resonate with me, either.

Diane wrote recently:

In 2008, I was very sensitive to people writing [Palin] off as "dumb" simply because she's not great at off the cuff responses. I similarly struggle orally articulating quick responses under pressure because I need a few moments to consider the question and gather my thoughts on the matter. I'd hate for people to judge me as stupid simply because I lack the verbal skills of a used car salesman.

So, what do you think? Who are the used car salesmen and who are the bold leaders with the speaking “gift” from God*? Does it matter? If so, how much?

*the word charisma comes from Greek kharisma meaning "favor, divine gift."

Peter's question is a good one. What is obviously different this time?

Four things, I think. First, the Tea-Party Movement. Outside of the two political parties, spontaneously, in response to a single comment made on television by Rick Santelli, ordinary Americans all over the country rallied, and the rally has been sustained now for more than a year. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime -- not, in any case, on the right.

Second, the rapidity of Obama's fall from stratospheric popularity to strong disapproval. According to Rasmussen, the gap between strong approval and strong disapproval is 23%. Something like 47% of the country, nearly half of the people, strongly disapprove of the man's conduct in office.

Third, primary defeats within the Republican Party. The nomination of Sharron Angle in Nevada, of Joe Miller in Alaska, of Marco Rubio in Florida, of Rand Paul in Kentucky, of Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania. The Republican Party is undergoing a transformation as RINOs and putative RINOs are purged. When, in recent times, has anything like this happened?

Finally, the polling data -- on Obamacare, on the generic ballot, on Nancy Pelosi, on the stimulus bill, on the economy more generally. The scale and scope of the shift since January, 2009 is breathtaking.

Of course, it takes two to tango. The Republicans have an opportunity. Do they have the wit to seize it? I wait and worry. But there is one reason why they might have the wit. The fate of those defeated in the Republican primaries is a warning to them all. A public hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.

And if the Republicans do seize the opportunity, I believe that there will be a realignment. The welfare state is bankrupt; Keynesianism has obviously failed; and we do not have the wherewithal to pay for Obamacare. Rome is in the process of burning, and all that the political scientists can do is to fiddle.

When it comes to Mad Men, people on the right of center increasingly grow leery at best. Supposedly the show knowingly yet reflexively relies on lazy liberal tropes, failing to challenge us with characters real enough to be worth caring about. I hope this bad rap has taken a big hit tonight.

In today's corporate world -- a world dominated by the emo-bureaucracy of Human Resources departments -- the relationship that Don and Peggy have forged would be repulsive, cruel, unprofessional, and impossible. Nothing about that intimate relationship, which the show has patiently shown since the outset to be deeply natural, could be officially recognized or even comprehended by the HR culture that has done its best to conquer corporate life. For HR officialdom, the human resources Don and Peggy found in one another -- and, I think, in themselves -- must not exist in the workplace.

But we are stubbornly human and therefore stubbornly resourceful, too. Amid the worst artifices enforced under Communism, people still found a way to smuggle irony and humor back into the world. Few HR departments have the talent for enforcement of a Stalin. The mandatory happiness, the team-building exercises, the sensitivity training, the group retreats -- it all becomes a charade that everyone knows is a charade, except perhaps the few people whose job it is to believe in it. Tonight Mad Men did a public service in doing its part to quietly blow up the fraudulent farce. It didn't attack HR culture. It didn't have to. In its absence, Don and Peggy hurt more at work. But they were also more human. And the relationships that are possible when we're more fully human (even -- perhaps especially -- in the workplace) are things that some of our culture's reigning therapists would like us to forget. But we won't. Because we can't. They can only pay us to pretend.

“Forty years ago,” our own John Taylor noted here earlier this week, “in a famous debate with Keynesian economist Walter Heller, [Milton] Friedman said 

‘The fascinating thing to me is that the widespread faith in the potency of fiscal policy…rests on no evidence whatsoever.  It’s based on pure assumption.  It’s based on a priori reasoning.’”

That got me to thinking.  In the four decades since, have there been any instances in which a Keynesian fiscal stimulus has actually worked?  In Canada or Sweden?  In Belgium or France?  For that matter, in Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein or Monte Carlo?

To put it another way, when Paul Krugman tells us the problem with Obama’s $800 billion stimulus is that it was too small, is there anything other than Krugman’s own theories on which he’s basing that claim?  Not scratchings on Krugman's chalkboard, but actual, demonstrable human experience?  At any time?  In any place?

That strikes me as a darned good question.  I herewith toss it into the Ricochet mosh pit.

Sometimes when you don’t expect it, you cross paths with extraordinary people. They can seem rather ordinary until you get to know them and hear their story. If you will please indulge me, I’ll tell you about an extraordinary gentleman I met this morning over breakfast.

Waiting for my order, I was seated at the food counter catching up on Ricochet, when a gentleman walked in and sat a couple of seats down from mine. “What branch were you in,” he asked, pointing at my hat. “Air Force,” I said, adding, “20 years.” He introduced himself as Larry. He told me that his daughter is in the Air Force over Iraq right now, on the AWACS. She is an air battle manager, a demanding job. I told him about my limited experiences on AWACS aircraft and how much I respect what those folks do.

Then, in a soft spoken voice, he told me that he did 12 years in the Marine Corps. I asked him when he separated, and he answered 1989. Very soft spoken, and unfailingly polite, he ordered his corned beef and eggs, “…and please ask the cook to make the bacon soft,” he asked the waitress. “What did you do in the Corps,” I asked. A very unassuming fellow, Larry looked me in the eye and answered, “Scout Sniper, Recon.” He loves Air Force bases, he said, recalling how posh Udorn Air Base, in Thailand, used to be.

"What did you do at Udorn?" I asked. Getting information out of him wasn’t very easy, but eventually he opened up. I never got the impression he was embellishing, but rather, he seemed to be reliving some things he would really rather not relive. He asked about the steel POW/MIA bracelet I wear, and then explained that after the Vietnam War’s conclusion, he was sent looking for American POWs. Most of the time he went as an observer, but he did manage to bring a few of our guys back. He battled his superiors, who did not always approve his repatriation efforts. This was during the Carter administration, he reminded me, and those people didn’t want to rock the international boat. And sometimes, he said, the POWs were so far gone that they would never have survived the trip back. Gut-wrenching decisions. Agonizing orders.

Larry told me about his training. He was one of the last scout snipers to train under the direction of “Gunny Hathcock,” a legend in the Marine Corps and in the world of snipers in general. With 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam and hundreds more unconfirmed, he was an exacting and incredible teacher. “The guy had unbelievable eyes,” he said. “He could see stuff at 500 meters that I couldn’t find with my scope! And if he saw me while I was maneuvering in the bush, he’d shoot me with a BB gun or pellet gun.”

Years later, he applied for a federal law enforcement position using his sniper skills. He did fine in the physical tests, but believes he was rejected for psychological reasons. Asked if he would have any remorse for taking out a bad guy, Larry quickly answered, “not at all.” “I think they wanted me to have at least some heart,” he said. But, we both agreed that the time spent doing the Hamlet thing can mean the difference between life or death for an innocent or even for the sniper himself. “I don’t have any remorse over what I had to do” he said, “but I can still see them.” Then Larry made a comment that mirrors what I’ve heard other snipers say. “The first one never leaves you.” “I can see it perfectly,” he continued, “I squeezed the trigger, and his face exploded.” He grew quiet, and I just nodded. What is there to say?

Larry was in Tripoli when President Reagan ordered the bombing. After jumping from 24,000 feet, he helped identify the targets for our bombers. In 1989, he was injured when a parachute malfunctioned. The Corps offered to keep him on active duty, but behind a desk. He declined, as we both agreed on the differences between duty stateside and duty at the pointy end. I had to be on my way, so Larry and I shook hands and thanked each other for his service, and said good-bye.

To most folks, this genteel man was just another truck driver, only more quiet, more courteous, and with impeccable manners that set him apart from many in this profession. But listening to him, watching him tell his story, I couldn’t help but notice the emotional scars and the mental toll his service has bequeathed him. Like so many other vets, like my best friend Bob Lee, he did it for you. And he’d do it again, if asked.

The cliché says that Freedom is not Free. But to those who paid a life-altering price, it isn’t a cliché. It just…is.

I am just back from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, which is held every year on the weekend immediately preceding Labor Day, and which I attend with some regularity. Last year, when this august gathering was held in Toronto, I showed up for a panel on Obama's First Year. The participants were an intelligent lot, and they had a great deal of interest to say. But I was amazed at one omission: no one even mentioned the Tea-Party Movement.

I thought this decidedly strange. Early in August, 2009, I had posted a piece on Powerline entitled The Great Awakening, in which I compared the Tea-Party revolt with the emergence in and after 1828 of the movement of resistance to the so-called Tariff of Abominations. That event had greatly impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, and it inspired his ruminations concerning the Americans' mastery of what he called "the art of association." I suggested at that time that with the Tea-Party Movement we might be witnessing the beginning of a political realignment no less significant than the one that had produced the Jacksonian era -- a movement which would permanently transform the character of American politics.

So, with this in mind, I put a question to the political scientists who had just spoken: "Why," I asked, "did no one on the panel even mention the Tea-Party eruption?" No one seemed much interested in my question. One panelist responded that the movement's appearance was indeed, odd. It had, he said, no institutional backing. Then, he and his colleagues moved on.

This year in Washington, D. C. I attended three different panels on the Obama administration and the upcoming midterm elections, and everyone was eager to discuss the Tea-Party Movement. As I listened to their prognostications, however, I could not help thinking of the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, Soviet studies were in vogue, and a considerable community of scholars grew up that devoted its attention to developments within the Soviet bloc. There were those who foresaw the Soviet Union's demise. Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes first to mind. But I cannot think of a single Sovietologist who foresaw the collapse and dissolution of communism within eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was as if all the time that they had spent studying developments was wasted. It was as if their studies made them sensitive to the trees and blind to the forest as a whole. Scholars -- especially those who pretend to be social scientists -- seem to be rendered by their focus on particulars blind to the possibility of systematic change. Even now, the political scientists to whom I listened over the last few days in Washington were struggling to assimilate recent developments to the general oscillation between parties that takes place in American electoral politics. They could not imagine that this time it might be different -- that it might not be appropriate to attempt to assimilate what we were witnessing to the normal political patterns, that the liberal ascendancy might be over, and that the era of the New Deal might be coming to an end.

Please join me in welcoming Paul Rahe, this week’s Ricochet Guest Contributor.  Professor Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and is the author, most recently, of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. 

Two weeks from today, amid the rolling green hillocks of Cofton Park, just outside Birmingham, Benedict XVI will beatify John Henry Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth century scholar, polemicist, and churchman. Conrad Black, writing in the National Post:

Pope Benedict XVI is one of the greatest intellects who has held that office in several centuries, a man of great philosophical scholarship, rigour and originality, as well as an accomplished writer, linguist, practical administrator and musician. His visit to Britain this month is to render homage to a man he regards as an intellectual giant, endowed with a character of comparably exceptional quality, which he believes, on the evidence of ecclesiastical scrutiny, has been recognized and amplified by divine blessings. Those who share that faith are uplifted by Newman’s intelligence and character. Those who do not should at least be aware that in his lifetime and in the 120 years since his death, Newman has carried the British colours in his spheres of endeavour with a brilliance, panache and durability that has put him in, or close to, the company of history’s most distinguished Englishmen, the exalted realm of Shakespeare and Churchill. John Henry Newman is being elevated for a rare fusion of genius and virtue that does great honour to his country, but transcends nationality, denomination and religion itself.

For more on the papal visit to England, click here.

Last week, our own Steve Manacek posed a great question:

How is it that Mr. Obama, after a year and a half of almost uniformly unpopular policies, with unemployment still at levels barely seen in a generation, with economic growth essentially non-existent, and having made a mockery of his “post-partisan” promise in record time, still manages to hold a 46-47% (Real Clear Politics average) job approval rating? I find this utterly baffling.

Well, this isn't an answer, exactly, but take a moment (thanks, Tim Carney) to ponder Rasmussen's latest:

Obama: Strongly Approve 24%... Strongly Disapprove 47%

Approval Index: -23... Total Approval: 42%…

Very nearly half of respondents strongly disapprove of the President? That's an ugly face masked by those decent approval numbers (which do seem to be slipping). Get the gory details from Rasmussen here.

PS. That's my bold above.

Take a break from 2010 prognostication to remember the vital importance of the upcoming battle in 2012. When asked why he thinks he deserves a seventh term in the Senate (itself a scandal), Vermont's Patrick Leahy responded that he really wants to be there to "help" President Obama get 3-to-4 new Supreme Court justices confirmed. Leahy's prediction is optimistic (by his lights) but not impossible.

Yes, if the GOP wins big in 2010, and if they maintain discipline, they might contain some of the worst excesses of the Hope & Change brigade. But presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies, and if Obama gets to install four relatively young justices with typical enthusiasm for the Living Constitution, his work will be done.

Around here school-board levies are a chance for the citizens to show they’re good, caring people: if it’s for kids or education, there can’t be any possible reason why you’d oppose it, unless you want them shivering in underheated rooms with pails on the floor collecting water from the leaky roofs, reading textbooks so outdated the US only has 48 states and the alphabet stops at Y. If you raise a peep about the non-teaching portion of the education budget - the bureaucrats, administrators, the junior undersecretary assistants to the senior oversecretaries - you get rolled eyes and huffed-up retorts about large class sizes and poor grades in certain schools, things which money is always expected to solve. Pour in enough money, and grades will surely rise.

If that’s so, then this school in LA should produce an endless string of Einsteins.

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

At some point they were discussing building benches for students to sit, and someone said: haven’t we had enough benches that do nothing but provide a flat surface? Isn’t it time the benches assumed a pedagogical purpose so long confined to the classroom? And so:

Talking benches—$54,000—play a three-hour audio of the site's history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.

I am a peripatetic sort, so the idea of sitting on a bench for a lecture whose duration exceeds the entire “Longest Day” movie does not appeal, but what’s $54K when the budget is over half a billion dollars?

Last summer when I went home to Fargo I stopped off at my old elementary school, a post-war structure whose construction cost was probably less than the cost of the garrulous benches. Cinderblock, brick, glass-block windows, minimalist architecture, with bright ceramic tiles around the drinking fountains for a splash of color. It was a rational space-age machine, designed for clear modern instruction - no classical details, no motto engraved over the door. Millions of kids across the country in the 50s and 60s moved through schools like these, and learned the basics: math, history, the exports of Peru (Zinc, llama wool) and the names of the oceans.

The high school was a bit more expensive, built in the early 70s, but the city saved money by using the plans twice: one on the North Side, one on the South Side. (North Dakotans being practical people, they were named North High and South High.) (They replaced Central High.) The quality of instruction was tremendous, and if you were inclined to listen, a good education could be had. Looking back, though, I see I was deprived:

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

Mr. Rubin admits that the Roybal Center project was "a tremendous screw-up" that "should have been studied closer beforehand." The project was abandoned for several years, only to be recommenced when community activists demanded that the school be built at whatever cost necessary in order to show respect for the neighborhood's Latino children, many of whom were attending an overcrowded Belmont High School.

The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. But even though many Roybal kids can't read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.

Well, that won’t last long, I’m sure; all that money will bring up test scores eventually. It has to, right? That’s the only thing that matters. Perhaps if they just took raw cash and rubbed it directly on the students’ foreheads, it would work even faster.

Top of the news on This Week was Tony Blair—who Christopher Hitchens has called the most courageous politician of his time. Blair released his memoir this week, A Journey, and Christianne Amanpour hosted him for his first North American interview for that occasion.

Though Blair spoke of his affinity for George W Bush—and even, at one point, for Dick Cheney—he called Bill Clinton his “political soul mate,” hopefully not looking to Clinton’s place in the afterlife. Clinton was the “smartest” political mind Blair ever met (At one point, Amanpour asked Blair: how did Clinton get through the worst parts of his presidency, including the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Blair quipped: “By the most extraordinary strength of character.”)

Blair had seemingly no regrets on his intrepid support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, praising Bush as a courageous decision maker.

To Blair, the fight against radical Islam is far from over. “This is more like the phenomenon of revolutionary communism…stretching far further than you think.” If we were facing Communism, we wouldn’t ask when the war would end or when troops would withdraw—we would say that we would continue fighting until Communism fell.

Meanwhile, on the panel, in a curious effort to drive down their abysmal ratings even further, This Week hosted the insufferable Paul Krugman and the unbearable Thomas Friedman—if there are two more irritating people in American punditry, they have yet to be recognized by the networks.

Friedman kept harrumphing about “structural problems,” whatever that might mean to him, while Krugman sounded his high-pitched and now familiar Keynesian blue-note. George Will also sat on the panel, but his erudite references to the founders and political philosophers were invariably lost upon his peers, one of whom, being from the Washington Post, had, much like the host herself, nothing interesting to add as a conversationalist.

On this slow Sunday news show day, John McCain was the lead story this morning on Fox News Sunday. He had some advice for the Republican Senate leadership as the election season officially begins with Labor Day Weekend.

“When you look at the approval ratings of Republicans, they’re just as bad as Democrats.” You got to give people a reason “to vote for Republicans rather than to vote against Democrats.” He thinks a positive agenda—a contract or commitment to America, like the one House Republicans have already put forward, but not Senate Republicans—should be something that, if it rallies House and Senate Republicans, might rally the American voter in the midterm election. On the panel later on, Juan Williams agreed with McCain in a backhanded way, saying “it’s time for Republican to put up or shut up…where are the ideas?”

Then Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic Party, spoke to Chris Wallace about the ironically named “Recovery Summer,” which has turned out to be an “economic and political bust,” as Wallace said. Last week Obama himself, seeing the bucket half-full, remarked “jobs are being created, they’re just not being created as fast as they need to.” In other words, we’re bailing out the ship—just not quick enough to keep our heads above water.

On Fox News Sunday, Kaine was more enthusiastic, noting that the Obama administration is about to announce “a series of steps” to get the economy growing: extended lending and tax cuts for small businesses. McCain called this a “death bed conversion.” With November around the corner, Democrats are using buckshot hoping to hit a bulls-eye. Grasping at anything to forestall what many experts are predicting to be an ignominious and major defeat. Their new economic plan, it was said, is the unintended consequence of bad polling.

Kaine’s response? “People ought to be proud to be Democrats right now,” and he added, with what can only be called frivolity, “we’re a happy warrior party.”

But on the one substantive issue that Democrats have to be “proud of”—namely, Obamacare—the public has swung 7/8 points against it. Political analyst Chris Stirewalt, speaking on the panel, made a fresh point when he said that this is the number that we should be watching as we approach the elections because it indicates how the public feels about what Democrats have actually done.

That's the polite, more interesting version of the question Fareed Zakaria has raised in controversy-baiting Newsweek -- did we overreact to 9/11? Spoiler alert: "It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11.” With that, Zakaria has chosen a poor way of arguing that, in hindsight, al Qaeda wasn't the dire, existential threat we took it to be. But, as James Joyner points out, his argument's not so hot either:

surely, part of the reason al Qaeda went from being able to pull off a string of epic terror attacks to a shell of its former self precisely because of our actions after the 9/11 attacks? We’ve killed or captured hundreds of their leaders and killed thousands of their operatives. We’ve made obtaining materiel and financing much more difficult. We’ve driven their planners underground, making it much harder for them to coordinate.

Joyner goes on to agree with Zakaria that the "expansion of the national security state has cost us some precious freedom."

And quite likely the trade-off has been too dear. But let’s not pretend that we got nothing in return. The fact that al Qaeda is in the sorry state Zakaria describes in his opening paragraph is testament to that.

It's almost as if some commentators simply cannot believe that, in the midst of a struggle this long, this expensive, and this uncertain, we're actually getting closer to victory.

On August 19th, Justice Kennedy gave an address that included an interesting passing remark about the role of blogs. Justice Kennedy was talking about how law review case comments generally come out too late to be of use to the Court (especially in the context of deciding whether to grant certiorari in a case). As a result, when Justice Kennedy asks his clerks to look to see what the law reviews have said about a particular case, there isn’t any commentary yet. Justice Kennedy adds: “I’ve found, what my clerks do now, when they have interesting cases — They read blogs.” -- Orin Kerr

Ann Althouse reacts:

This means that the lawprofs who keep up high-profile blogs have disproportionate influence. You have traditional lawprofs laboring over law review articles, but these articles come out too late to discuss a case that's pending in the Supreme Court. One answer — I'm not the first to say this* — is that law review articles should properly be about something other than the latest pending or just-decided cases, something more timeless and profound. But I think that most law professors would like to be involved in the legal developments of the day. It must be irritating to see that the lawprof bloggers have a special line to the Court.

Justice Kennedy has said what a lot of people think. Blogs are a form of instant publication. They can offer a well-turned paragraph that indicates the value of a case without going through the entire scholarly apparatus. For appellate decisions that are possible Supreme Court cases the law professors, and others, who pick out important cases about which they say intelligent things are performing a real public service. But it is by no means unique. The law reviews in part have sought to combat this loss of influence by publishing shorter versions on line of articles that appear in print. People put their articles on SSRN or the Berkeley Electronic Press for just that reason. The real question may be not, why do we write and read blogs, but why do we bother with the law review articles at all. And to that there is an answer. Many systematic legal questions involve a form of synthesis that is timely no matter when it comes out. Other articles involve empirical issues that require detailed analysis. What we are seeing in effect is a perfectly sensible system of market segmentation, where each outlet receives through voluntary sorting. That said, it is back to an article on the role of proximate causation in tort cases, which will, in all its ornate complexity, appear in the Journal of Tort Law, an exclusively on-line publication.

Gallup sends out a helpful warning:

The Republicans' lead in the congressional generic ballot over the past month may be due as much to voters' rejecting the Democrats as embracing the Republicans. Among voters backing Republican candidates, 44% say their preference is "more a vote against the Democratic candidate," while 48% say it is "more a vote for the Republican candidate."

How to earn the support of that 44%? It's about more, I think, than simply flogging incumbent Democrats for pushing through the wrong policies and the wrong agenda. It's about more than the arrogance of power. The arrogance of the powerful comes in two flavors -- a willingness to rule in disregard of considered popular opinion, yes, but also an inclination not to lift a finger if the fancy to do so doesn't strike. In addition to doing what they shouldn't, bad incumbents don't do what they should.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can't vote on the final passage of any bill, may not provide the best example of this bad-government double-whammy, but the new profile of her primary challenger (that's right -- there is one) in CQ Politics includes a passage that helps make the point:

The anti-incumbency mood swirling around districts across the country doesn’t seem to have reached D.C.’s streets. Still, Sloan keeps trying. In fact, he wears the fact that he’s only the second candidate ever to challenge Norton in a Democratic primary as a badge of courage. “I meet people on the street, and they say, ‘Oh, I love Eleanor. She’s doing a great job.’ And I’ll ask them what she’s done, and I’ll get blank stares,” he says.

Republicans shouldn't leave that line of attack to Democrats willing to take on their own incumbents -- certainly not out of any fear that you can't advocate a proactive Congress and oppose big government at the same time. I'm reminded again of Lippmann's quip: "It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly." But instead of "neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life," as Lippmann put it, for the next decade, the task before Republicans is to undo the activity of much of the past decade while, at the same time, actively recreating a new approach to our persistent challenges. I know this is easier said than done, but it had better be said now. Those incumbent Dems deserve to go not simply for what they've accomplished, but for what they haven't.

Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman just tore a strip off Ahmadinejad, and all kinds of gears in my head starting turning. (Politics makes my metaphors mix.)

Iran recently weighed in on the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, accusing all those supporting the negotiations of "betraying their nations." Abbas's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, responded by saying that Ahmadinejad "does not represent the Iranian people, forged elections, suppresses the Iranian people and stole the authority. [He] is not entitled to talk about Palestine, or the president of Palestine...We did not repress our people, as did Iran led by Ahmadinejad."

Tell me that isn't exhilarating.

Ahmadinejad is arming and bankrolling Hamas and is therefore the enemy of the Palestinian Authority. It's encouraging that Abbas is taking him on so directly, not just for the satisfaction of it but for what it could imply. I see peace here coming in stages: the Palestinian Authority making peace with Israel, joining forces with her to confront the common enemy of Hamas, and then -- eventually -- joint victory over Hamas and a subsequent peace with Gaza. This could effectively amount to a three-state solution, which is hilarious when you think about the dimensions of the territory we're talking about here, but it could work. The key is the wresting free by all parties from the idea that the Palestinians are a single unit. They are not. Conventional wisdom states that it's inconceivable for Abbas to sign an agreement that leaves Gaza out, but I'm not convinced. It might not be a play the Western powers feel they can support, but it might be the play that actually breaks the deadlock.

From an Israeli standpoint, I can easily imagine public support for a deal with Abbas that sorts out the West Bank, establishes us as nations and friends, and clarifies what we all already know: that Hamastan is the problem, not the Palestinian people as a whole. The question is whether such an idea can seriously be mooted. It's surely superior to the one-state solution, which doesn't work for anybody over the long term.

What say you? Am I whistling into the wind here, or is this an idea?

Anyone who pays really close attention to what I say and write will note that the things I say about Turkey are often contradictory. This is not because I can't make up my mind. It's because Turkey has to be the most contradictory place on the planet.

Case in point. Last week I published an article--and I stand by every word--about the dangerous contraction of press freedom in Turkey under the AKP. I mentioned the concentration of news outlets in the hands of Fethullah Gülen's media empire, and I described the variety of opinions on offer in the Turkish press as increasingly monolithic.

Predictably, Bülent Kenes, the editor of Today's Zaman, one of the newspapers in Gülen's media group, denounced me as a slobbering racist. No surprise there, you might think. What else are they going to say?

But today, Andrew Finkel, a columnist for the same paper, came out on the pages of that very paper to defend me--mildly--and to agree--mildly--with my criticism of Turkish foreign policy.

Let's be honest: That just couldn't happen in a country where the press was under Soviet-style control. Kenes not only gave space to an opposing point of view, he gave space to someone criticizing him, in particular. That's fair and that's commendable. It's also the most effective rebuttal he could have made to my argument. And let me just irritate Mr. Kenes further with my pathological Orientalism by adding that man, that is subtle, too. Chapeau!

The weird thing is that everything I wrote is still also true. That's Turkey. And it's one of the reasons I love the place, no matter how crazy it makes me.

Anyone who thinks he has the place figured out completely just hasn't lived there long enough.

Bashar al-Assad, the secular President of Syria,

has flirted with Islamic fundamentalists when it suited him in the past, but those days appear to be over. A crackdown that began two years ago after a car bombing in Damascus is rapidly picking up speed. According to the NY Times,

The government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and started to strictly monitor religious schools. Members of an influential Muslim women’s group have now been told to scale back activities like preaching or teaching Islamic law. And this summer, more than 1,000 teachers who wear the niqab, or the face veil, were transferred to administrative duties.

There's a dissonance worth noting here. Assad is still busy proclaiming his heartfelt support for Islamic fundamentalists abroad, particularly Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But at home, Islamists are better seen and not heard. Preferably not seen, either.

There is speculation that the move to downplay the expression of fundamentalist Islam in Syria and to strengthen the country's secular character is a play for Western approval. That may be the case, but it's hardly inconsistent with Assad's own beliefs or interests. He is a member of the Baathist party and is therefore by definition a secularist whose national goals are diametrically opposed to those of the fundamentalists. His father Hafez responded to a threat by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood by slaughtering tens of thousands of people in Hama in 1982, effectively crushing the movement for a generation. Bashar is not Hafez, and he has not yet been directly provoked in the way that Hafez was, but he seems at least to have remembered which side he's on.

I've always felt a pang of sympathy for Bashar. He was never supposed to be president. His father groomed his elder brother, Basil, for the succession; Bashar became an ophthamologist and was destined for a quiet life. He was thrust into the role of heir apparent when Basil was killed in a car crash in 1994. He's always looked a little out of his depth up there, and his cozying up to fundamentalists over the past few years -- jarring as it is in view of his father's history with them -- has seemed as much a reflection of his susceptibility to strong winds as cool political calculation. The car bombing in 2008 apparently woke him up to the danger of a flourishing Islamist movement at home.

One interesting element of Bashar's crackdown is the barring this past summer of women wearing the niqab from registration at university, a move that echoes the French ban of the headscarf. A Syrian official, apparently behind a little in his diplomatic studies program, stated baldly that the niqab is "alien" to Syrian society. The Times notes that on Charlie Rose, Bashar was asked to name his biggest challenge. "How we can keep our society as secular as it is today,” he said. “The challenge is the extremism in this region.”

I love Craigslist. I've found roommates, apartments, concert tickets and furniture through it. I recently posted an ad for the site and got a flurry of responses, including the perfect one. But in the meantime, I also received emails from people intimating that I might be interested in various other services, if you know what I mean. Considering that my ad was related to children, it was a bit disconcerting to realize that I was working the classifieds in the midst of pervs.

Here comes news that Craigslist has stopped providing its explicit sexual services forum:

On its famously bare-bones Web sites, the blue-lettered link for adult services was gone. It had been replaced with a black box, containing one word: "censored."

Craigslist's usually outspoken leaders gave no explanation for their move and no signal as to whether it would be permanent. Last year, the site increased the screening of these ads after authorities in New England said a man had killed one woman and attacked two others he'd contacted through Craigslist.

Prosecutors had been complaining about the criminal traffic being run through the site. The question is whether Craigslist decided on its own that it didn't want to support that enterprise anymore or whether it felt government pressure to cease. Sounds like the latter.

I was rereading Jonathan Rauch's excellent essay on the importance of Hidden Law in governing moral affairs. He suggests that there are gains to be made by keeping it difficult to engage in immoral behavior, without going so far as to make it illegal. It's downright shocking how much has changed in the decade since he wrote that. Many in our culture are reticent to even make the case that anonymous sex, much less prostitution, might have a serious downside.

If Craigslist did make this change only in response to government pressure -- rather than a more reasonable public outcry -- it indicates that the state increases its power when the people lose their moral voice.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. -- Groucho Marx

These pearls of wisdom from Groucho Marx have been the modus operandi of politicians the world over. Some do a respectable job at it, while others are, shall we say, less graceful. Consider the plight of hapless Harry Reid. Speaking of the war in Iraq in 2007, Senator Reid said, “I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything,…" Judging from the course of the war since 2007 it would seem that poor Harry suffers from an aggravated case of premature capitulation. So, when the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked the Reid campaign about his 2007 statement, the reply came back:

…He was simply pointing out what our military leaders, including Gen. Petraeus, had been saying for months: that we could not win by staying the course; the war needed to be won diplomatically, politically, and economically…

Ah! So that’s it! By saying that the surge was a failure, Reid was actually helping the surge succeed, and helping General Petraeus to boot! Get it? What a clever guy! We just didn’t understand it back then, ignorant boobs that we are. It was good of the Senator to clarify the issue some three years after the fact.

I wonder if General Petraeus was in on it too? Prior to the General’s senate testimony, CNN asked Senator Reid if he would believe General Petraeus were he to testify that progress was being made in Iraq. Reid’s answer? "No, I don't believe him, because it's not happening." No doubt, Reid was lending a hand to the General yet again, in some clever fashion that he will explain to us when he surmises that our dulled intellects can handle it.

In the meantime, Reid might consider the words of Ambrose Bierce: “The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.”

I'm so pleased that Peggy Noonan has emerged from her gloom to remind us why she's a great columnist. She just managed to sum up something I was groping to say to the Elder of Ricochet who kindly gave me a lift to the airport yesterday. (I might have come up with it myself, but I was too busy making him pull over because I was sure I'd located Jimmy Hoffa's body. It's a long story and a bit embarrassing--all I found was the strap of my computer bag, which was hanging out of the car, but it sounded like Jimmy Hoffa's body.)

The argument I was too distracted to make, but which Noonan makes perfectly clear, is that this is no time for anyone to get distracted. She uses Grover Norquist as her vehicle to make this point:

Republicans, he argues, must determine to stay focused, and not become distracted by issues that are not central to the campaign. "There's the danger of getting sidetracked by shiny things," he says, citing Arizona's immigration law, or "the mosque in Manhattan." These issues do not win new votes, "they only please voters you already have."

I don't think either of these issues are trivial--obviously, I don't. But I'm certain she's right that they're not the place to focus, electorally.

What should Republicans focus on? "Spending per se is a palpable issue. The central question is not only taxes or the deficit, it's spending, and you can see this in polls. . . . There is not a Democrat who can say, 'I was not part of the spending explosion that threatens you and your country.' It's the one thing they can't defend themselves against. They don't want to stop spending."

Focusing on anything else, including Jimmy Hoffa's body, is a diffusion of resources and a waste of time right now. The spending issue is a uniter, not a divider. As well it should be.