Iraq Election: Handing Out Medals

After the spectacular turnout in Sunday’s Iraq election, it’s time to name names, as they say. And
Stephen Schwartz says
there aren’t too many names that deserve any credit. Most of us lolled lazily in
the “coalition of the wrong.”

Turner: The Iraq Election in Verse

Frederick Turner thinks that the Iraq election should be
celebrated in verse
that rhymes and scans. Now
that’s a concept! Verse that rhymes!

Steyn: Four More Wars

While many ’conservatives are tiring of the War on Terror, Mark Steyn rings down Full Speed
Ahead to the engine room. And he understands why people are a little leery of President Bush’s
inaugural speech compared to their continuing praise for President Kennedy’s call to “pay any
price, bear any burden” 44 years ago. When Bush says “It is the policy of the United States
to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions
in every nation and culture”
they think he means it.
And they are probably right.

More on the New England Vapors

While Larry Summers completes his re-education course somewhere in New England, George Will has a few things to say
about Victorian maidens suffering from the vapors
and modern feminists that use Victorian methods
to attack ideas with which they disagree. What it comes down to, writes Will, is that the left cannot
abide “the thought that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material,” that there
are physical limits to the left’s program of human improvement.

Spengler: Americans Can't Do Tragedy

You can’t put one over on Spengler. He’s right there in the front rank complaining that it
just isn’t on to save Charlotte Simmons
from a necessary martyrdom. But, he’s sanguine about it.
Americans have an ideal of middlebrow competence—represented by heroes like Chuck
Yeager and George W, Bush—that shields from them the real awfulness of life.
But not Spengler. He has drunk deep from the German experience, and has seen the face of the Dionysian,
the truth of a universe filled to the brim with wanton death and destruction.

Forming and Breaking Relationships Easily

No, this is not about divorce. It is about the nature of social relationships generally. Some
relationships can be formed and dissolved easily, like a temporary business partnership, writes
Arnold Kling, and others are
more permanent, with higher costs of entry and exit.
“Societies that place individuals under the permanent discipline of inherited or assigned
collectivities, and permanently bind them into such.” remain bogged down
in family favoritism, ethnic, racial, or religious factionalism.”
But the Anglsphere is peculiar in that its “civil society” tolerates, and even encourages
a much more flexible, voluntary approach to relationship and obligation. Read the whole thing
here.

Ken Mehlman Lays Down a Marker

You can’t make it any clearer than this. Ken Mehlman
announces
that he’s going to use the
1.4 million volunteers he mobilized to re-elect President Bush in moving the president’s agenda for
Social Security reform, tax simplification, and grow the Republican Party.

Ankle Biters Get Teeth into Inaugural Speech

Loyal liberal E.J. Dionne gets to work
on knee-capping the president’s inaugural speech. Apparently
there was much less than met the eye; Bush isn’t going to march out and
conquer the world tomorrow, according to White House staffers.
This is a problem “and a terrible mistake for Bush,
because the greatest barrier to Bush’s success in his second term
is the intense cynicism he has inspired about his motives.” Well
that’s a possibility.
Or is Bush’s big problem the intense cynicism his political opponents have
inspired about his motives? There is a difference, Mr. Dionne.

Brit Bobbies Lost Key to Gun Cupboard

Don’t cancel your British vacation, it was nearly a century ago when London bobbies chasing some Latvian armed robbery suspects
in London had to borrow pistols from bystanders, because the
gun cupboard
at the police station was
locked and nobody could find the key. Don’t be too hard on those Keystone Kops, though;
In 1909 there were only about 12 armed robberies a year in London, and the public had a right to carry
a gun without a license. But don’t worry. Today things are much more civilized. Now there are 12 armed robberies every couple of weeks in London, the police and
the criminals are armed to the teeth, and the average citizen is forbidden to carry a gun.

Bush Supporters Wonder What It Means

Reagan/Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan worries that the President has
overpromised
a perfect world that can never be. Uber-pundit Fred Barnes writes that the President has
integrated the
two wings of American foreign policy into a single crusade,
combining the idealist vision of worldwide democracy and the realist vision
of a safe and secure world into a grand strategic vision of using American power to realize the American
vision.

Brit Pundit Says Don't Count US Out

A writer from the London Times observes
that America is not as supremely confident as it once
was, but it is still a force to be reckoned with and will be for a while.

Inaugural Sour Grapes

For the last couple of weeks Democrats have been complaining about the cost of the Bush inauguration while tsunami victims go unrelieved. The indispensible Ann Coulter reminds them that back in 1993 while thousand were dying in disasters world-wide, Democrats talked of nothing but partying on forever at the Clinton inaugural. And what about George Soros? Couldn’t he manage to get by on $1 billion of his $7 billion fortune and give the rest to tsunami victims?

Brits on Bush: It ain't over yet

A Brit at the London Times does a think piece on the Bush inauguration. The U.S. may not be
as optimistic as it was, he opines, but don’t count it out yet.

Spengler: Two Cheers for Hypocrisy

Spengler’s been taking the odd week off over the holiday season, enraging his world-wide fans,
but he’s back with a
characteristic piece on the virtue of hypocrisy in a
lighthearted romp through Goethe, Ibsen, and Strindberg.

Scorched Earth Won't Work For Democrats

David Brooks advises Democrats not to emulate Newt Gingrich
and execute an oppositional
strategy in Congress over issues like Social Security. It’s the wrong strategy and will further marginalize Democrats.

President Bush: "I Assume I'm Right"

When will the Democrats stop misunderestimating President Bush? Here is the president
talking about his policy of extending democracy
across the globe. “It’s exciting to be part of stimulating a debate of such significance.
It really is the philosophical argument of the age.” Some people say his policy is wrong, he admits. But he says: “I assume
I’m right.” Well, you’d hope so. But I suspect that many people are scandalized by
such a statement. Whose side are you on?

Uncle Ted, The Face of the Democrats

Boston columnist Don Feder takes apart Ted Kennedy and the Democrats. This is a good read for
liberals, because it surfaces the issues on which
mainstream America differs
from the Democratic coalition of victims and rescuers.

The Political Math for Social Security Reform

Fred Barnes discards the conventional wisdom and tries to figure out how President Bush can get to
51 percent on
Social Security reform this year.

Sshh! The Deficit is Shrinking!

While we are all attentively watching Dan Rather’s rather outré retirement party, the deficit
is shrinking rapidly
from a big increase in corporate tax collections and individual income tax collections. And
the Bush administration is planning a couple of hold-the-line budgets. Expect the pips to start
squeaking any moment now.

Peggy Noonan at Her Finest

Peggy Noonan—who used to write Dan Rather’s radio commentaries—weighs in on the Rathergate Report.

Don’t worry that the report doesn’t mention liberal bias, she writes. It didn’t need to. But the
important thing is that the world has changed. The old MSM monopoly is dead. Back in the old days, if
your ox was gored by the media you could write a letter. Maybe they would read it; maybe they
wouldn’t. Maybe they would publish it; maybe they wouldn’t. But they always had the last word. Not
any longer. One thing more. CBS has been wanting to get rid of Dan Rather for years, Peggy writes.
Low ratings, don’t you know. Now they’ve got rid of him.

Steyn: Brits are to Blame for Black Homophobia?

No, Mark Steyn hasn’t gone bonkers. But the earnest Decca Aitkenhead in
The Guardian thinks that the rampant homophobia among Jamaican blacks
in Britain is a legacy of slavery. It all goes to show, writes the long suffering
Steyn, that multiculturalism is a suicide cult,
a way of blaming yourself (or at least your
right-wing compatriots) for all the ills of the world.

Steyn: Last Week's Boxer Rebellion Means Dems are Losers

Speaking as a Canadian and resumably entitled to vote in California,
Mark Steyn isn’t buying
the flim-flam from last week’s Democratic
media show on Stolen Ohio. All it means is that Democrats are losers.

NYT Trendspotters: Religion is Reviving Worldwide!

All the Upper West Side is agog this week after the New York Times’s Laurie Goodstein
announced that
religion is on the rise, worldwide. But not to worry, “fundamentalism” seems to be mostly declining
and progressive politics is still the only thing that matters.

What Happened to the Reasonable Man?

This is a muddy article about balancing by the muddy Jonah Goldberg.
How much weight should society give to the average and how much
to the outlier? What is the place of morality in the law, and what happens when we strip it out
and replace it with utility? How pragmatic is the pragmatist? It’s actually worth reading.

What Should Democrats Do?

Now Peggy Noonan is giving them advice. “The Bush administration has stood for cutting taxes, allowing high spending,
and being tough in the world. The Democrats stand for raising taxes, high spending,
and being weak in the world,” she writes.
So what should they do? Become more like Republicans? Er, yes. Sorry about that, Democrats.

Steyn: Message from Col. Shrapnell

The men of Battery M send up a barrage of shot and shell against the
Blame America First on tsunamis
crowd, from that Norwegian “stingy” chappie to Brit Claire Short to anyone else who feels
like cocking a snook at our brave boys now helping victims in South Asia.

Spengler: Neocon Gelernter Writes "Utter and Complete Rubbish"

David Gelernter in Commentary thinks the Puritanism of the founders shaded into modern Americanism,
but Spengler is having none of it.
Puritanism dissolved into Unitarianism and Boston
Brahminism after the revolution, he writes. It was replaced on the moral-cultural stage
by the Methodists and Baptists of the Second Great Awakening
who swore to end slavery and did so in the Civil War.
Now, Spengler says, we have a Fourth Great Awakening of people who
“have risen up against a soulless secular culture.”
This is not quite utter and complete rubbish
but it is not the whole story. The fundamentalists in James M. Ault’s Spirit and Flesh were
not born again because the secular culture is soulless, but their lives were wrecked, and they needed
to be born again in Christ through His sacrifice on the Cross to get off the rocks.

CEO Deepthink from Drucker

What is the job of a CEO,
corporate, government, or non-profit? It’s a question that management science
hasn’t really answered yet, says management guru Peter Drucker. The answer? Well, it’s buried in layers of
deepthink!

Steyn: Americans Are Different

Americans are different; they work more than kindler, gentler Euros. For instance, Mark Steyn’s assistant wanted to come in for a couple of hours
on Christmas Day. But what are the Euros doing with all their extra spare time? They certainly aren’t using it to raise children.