The judiciary has no business managing how we fight wars abroad.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Thursday, December 6, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The Supreme Court heard a spirited argument yesterday on whether foreign enemies, captured and held overseas, are entitled to the protections of the United States Constitution. Since the founding of our republic, the answer to that question has always been an unequivocal "No."
If, after hearing Boumedienne v. Bush, the court makes up new rules, it will mark an unprecedented expansion of judicial power into areas--the conduct of foreign affairs and war making--the Constitution reserves to the president and Congress, the elected representatives of the American people. The Boumedienne case is as much about the Supreme Court's willingness to constrain its own power as it is about detainee rights.
This latest challenge to the Bush administration's war policies was brought by enemy combatants held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, who claim the right to a habeas corpus hearing--to determine the legality of their detention--before the federal courts. Congress attempted to foreclose such claims in 2005, when it passed the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), creating an elaborate administrative process through which detainees can contest their classification as "enemy combatants," with an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and the Supreme Court. All other federal court jurisdiction was withdrawn at that time.
Nevertheless, because the Supreme Court wanted to clarify that the new system applied to pending, as well as future, cases, the court permitted these challenges to go forward in its 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Congress responded immediately, passing the Military Commissions Act (MCA) and overruling Hamdan.
The MCA established a system of military tribunals to try the Guantanamo detainees, again with appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and the Supreme Court. The law also stated with remarkable clarity that these procedures excluded all other judicial review for detainee claims, past, present and future. As one judge wrote in dismissing Mr. Boumedienne's case after the MCA was enacted--"it is almost as if the [congressional] proponents of these words were slamming their fists on the table shouting 'When we say 'all,' we mean all--without exception.'"
Last April, the Supreme Court appeared to agree, refusing to revive the appeals. Unfortunately, it changed its mind in June, agreeing to consider whether Congress can constitutionally refuse the Guantanamo detainees--who are not U.S. citizens or held on U.S. territory--access to habeas corpus rights. This is not a close question. When the framers adopted the Constitution to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" they were not talking about enemy aliens overseas engaged in a war against the republic they founded.
That, certainly, was the Supreme Court's conclusion in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), which involved similar claims by Germans arrested by U.S. forces in China, and then imprisoned in occupied Germany. Their habeas claims were rightly rebuffed.
As Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the court, "Such extraterritorial application of organic law [the Constitution] would have been so significant an innovation in the practice of governments that, if intended or apprehended, it could scarcely have failed to excite contemporary comment." Such a rule would, indeed, have been bizarre--handicapping the U.S. in its foreign relations and putting it at a permanent disadvantage compared to every other country on earth.
That was true in 1950, and it remains true today. To grant constitutional rights to the Guantanamo detainees, the Supreme Court must ignore its own settled precedent--on which the president and Congress were entitled to rely--and rewrite the Constitution itself.
The consequences would be disastrous. Such a decision would bring judges to the battlefield. As Justice Jackson warned, permitting foreign enemies to haul American officials into court "would diminish the prestige of our commanders, not only with enemies but with wavering neutrals. It would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home."
Because the Constitution does not apply to foreigners overseas, the procedural rights accorded to the Guantanamo detainees are a matter exclusively for the political branches. Subjecting them to constitutional scrutiny would overstep the judiciary's legitimate power, making it the ultimate arbiter of U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, if the court were to grant constitutionally based habeas rights to aliens overseas, there is no principled means of avoiding extension of the entire Constitution anywhere in the world where U.S. forces (or officials) may go.
For the first time in American history, an entire panoply of the federal government's overseas actions directed at foreigners, including surveillance and even use of deadly force, would become subject to constitutional strictures. This would transform the U.S. into a Gulliver, bound by its own judicial strings, on the international stage.
The Constitution grants the Supreme Court a limited original jurisdiction, and leaves Congress free to define its appellate authority and the judicial power of the lower federal courts. Here, Congress has determined that detainees will have certain administrative means of challenging their detention, and a review by the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court. That is all Congress deemed appropriate here--and, needless to say, this is more than other captured enemy combatants have received in the past.
Even if habeas corpus applied--and there is no precedent for its application (either in British or American practice) to foreigners held overseas--the processes established by Congress in the DTA and MCA would constitute an adequate substitute. The Supreme Court has long recognized that, even with respect to Americans held in the U.S., habeas review is limited in scope. If focuses on questions of law rather than a detailed analysis of the factual record. Many different procedures are sufficient to meet any constitutional habeas requirement.
In these cases, the factual inquiry detainees are accorded under the Pentagon's "combatant status review tribunals" are an adequate substitute for habeas. They are modeled on the review legitimate prisoners of war would receive under the Geneva Conventions in accordance with the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and linked with the right of appeal to the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court on procedural and constitutional standards. This fact alone is more than sufficient for the court to uphold the MCA, without ever reaching the underlying constitutional issues involved. Justice Anthony Kennedy--a potential decisive vote in this case--seemed sympathetic to this argument.
After years of public debate, with many of the key issues playing a prominent role in the presidential and congressional elections, Congress and the president have created a system that allows enemy combatants to challenge their detention, and to achieve a limited judicial review in U.S. courts. This is sufficient. The Supreme Court should not reject the law merely because it might disagree with the policy results adopted by the elected branches of government.
The court has already meddled more in this area in the last several years than in all of prior history. It has no right to demand more.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Resisting the smear of a "tainted legacy"
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
A nation with no pride in its past will feel little confidence in its future.
If citizens look upon the origins of their society with guilt and confusion, they’ll find scant reason to identify with its fate or to repair its shortcomings. The current notion that America’s undeniable power and privilege rest upon shameful foundations poisons our public discourse, embitters the national mood, and paralyzes all efforts for constructive change. We worry over anti-Americanism abroad, but echo its primary charges here at home. While all objective indications identify the residents of the United States as among the most fortunate human beings on the planet, much of the public refuses to acknowledge our blessings because, according the widespread acceptance of politically correct America-bashing lies, we don’t deserve them.
Those who embrace the idea that the USA came into being through vicious genocide against native populations, built its economy through the unique oppression of African slaves, facilitated corporate exploitation of immigrant masses, and damaged countless other nations with its imperialist policies, will naturally assume that we’re paying the price for these crimes and abuses – viewing an allegedly dark present as the inevitable product of a purportedly dark past. Negative assumptions about our guilty forebears allow contemporary Americans to wallow in self-pity without accepting blame of any sort for our much-discussed sorry state. In a typical aside, New York Times book reviewer William Grimes laments that American “success…came at a price….for the descendents of the colonists, who have inherited a tainted legacy.”
This ‘tainted legacy,’ this endlessly analyzed burden of embarrassment and apology, has brought a bittersweet or even decidedly sour flavor to great national celebrations that formerly featured joy and jingoism. For Thanksgiving, 2007, the Seattle City Schools sent out a letter signed by the district’s “Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support” and addressed to all faculty and staff warning that for many students, Turkey Day represented “a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land….As currently celebrated in this country, ‘Thanksgiving’ is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal….”
Columbus Day provokes similar controversy on a yearly basis, with angry demonstrations against the unwelcome encroachments of white interlopers in the pristine New World paradise they polluted with their disease-ridden, gold-hungry presence. Our previous observance of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln has given way to the anodyne and insipid “Presidents Day,” in which we’re supposed to commemorate all inhabitants of the White House – the incompetent as well as the inspiring, the scoundrels along with the secular saints. We’ve added a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., but while sanctifying the memory of a great and courageous advocate of brotherhood we inevitably use the occasion to recall, yet again, our ugly history of racism. That same history now factors into the Fourth of July, with pointed reminders that some of the most prominent figures in the struggle for Independence (Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry) owned slaves. Meanwhile, when it comes to the sparklers, cherry bombs, and other fireworks that comprise the festival’s most hallowed tradition, many (if not most) of today’s celebrants secure such ordnance at Indian reservations – another ironic connection with the most painful elements of the nation’s past.
Even Memorial Day and Veterans Day have lost some of their flag-waving, patriotic fervor and taken on a distinctly mournful, even skeptical edge. We now make a point of recalling dubious as well as heroic wars, and taking note of those members of the military who sacrificed and served in our most controversial recent conflicts. The Vietnam Memorial in the nation’s capital has not only become an improbably popular tourist attraction, but now serves as a major focus for both national holidays honoring the armed forces –an association that takes the mood a great distance from the parades, picnics, brass bands and flapping banners of prior generations.
In fact, the Vietnam experience and the associated dislocations of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s helped to dissolve the patriotic consensus that had endured for two centuries, and promoted poisonous lies about the national character. The United States waged deeply controversial wars long before the conflict in South East Asia, but in all previous cases a sweeping, one-sided victory (as in the War with Mexico) or at least a concluding, climactic battle that gave the illusion of overall triumph (as the Battle of New Orleans provided a stirring coda for the otherwise frustrating War of 1812), allowed divisions to evaporate and wounds to heal. Losing a war, however, does nothing to solve the punishing disputes surrounding it and to some extent the brutal Communist conquest of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos insured that the arguments about the war would resound through succeeding generations. U.S. failure gave credibility, if not confirmation, to those anti-war protestors who had decried our “imperialist” foreign policy, and chose to identify their nation as “Amerika” – the Germanic spelling meant to echo the Nazis, while the inserted “k” recalled our homegrown “KKK.” Once you’ve associated your native soil with genocidal fascists and white supremacist thugs, it’s tough to return to singing the praises of the land of the free and the home of the brave – even after ultimate victory in the Cold War, a new period of American hegemony, and the evanescent surge of unity and defensive pride following the terror attacks of 9/11.
By that time the tribalism of the ‘60’s had become a more or less permanent feature of our national life with identity politics and jostling interest groups taking the place of any homogenizing notion of Americanism. African-Americans, feminists, Latinos, gays, Asians, the disabled, hippies, Native Americans – each aggrieved segment of society demanded justice and redress, competing for recognition as the most victimized and gypped. The competitive victimhood encouraged even privileged people to affiliate with some marginalized cohort or synthetically assembled “community,” and to shun any assimilation into the bland American middle.
With all the suffering subgroups clamoring so colorfully for recognition and sympathy, the once respected mainstream looked suddenly, simultaneously, guilty and boring. “Black is Beautiful” and “Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty” became trendy slogans, while any suggestions that “White is Beautiful” or demands to “Respect Your Elders” drew only derision and hostility. The old national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” – out of many, one – sounded intolerant, disrespectful of difference and diversity, as the ideal of a melting pot gave way to a “gorgeous multicultural mosaic.” The concept of an overarching, unifying, non-ironic definition of American identity looked less and less plausible.
In 1904, Broadway giant George M. Cohan proudly and tunefully identified himself as –
“….a Yankee Doodle Dandy
A Yankee Doodle do or die.
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam
Born on the Fourth of July.”
Eighty years later, Ron Kovic appropriated the phrase “Born on the Fourth of July” for the bestselling memoir and movie about his shattering experience as a paralyzed, abused, deeply disillusioned Vietnam vet. With the Oliver Stone film’s release in 1989, everyone who encountered the title received it with a snicker or smirk, understanding Cohan’s high-stepping glorification of flag and homeland as an embarrassing relic of insular and ignorant nationalism.
In a strange sense, this same isolation and exceptionalism fed the most fashionable of the anti-American lies: the public remained so unsophisticated about all the other palpably imperfect nations of the world that the USA’s shortcomings and failures looked singular, unprecedented. Histories of mass murder, backwardness and barbarity hardly diminish the fierce pride of other nationalities. Oscar winning director Ang Lee recently noted the overwhelming importance of unquestioning patriotism to all those who claim Chinese identity: “Chinese patriotism is not supposed to be negotiable. To us that’s a black-and-white thing. You sacrifice yourself – how can you let China down?” Politicians and pundits in the People’s Republic hardly agonize about thousands of years of conquest and colonialism over “lesser” peoples at the edges of the Middle Kingdom.
Similarly, European states with vastly more destructive and savage histories than the United States feel no need for apologies, hand-wringing or wrenching self-criticism. Guy Sorman, author of 20 books on French politics and public affairs, commented in the Wall Street Journal (December 4, 2007) about the themes in government schools in France: “The very content of education is discriminatory. The history of colonization is taught as if it were a glorious feature of French history. In Senegal, on his first official visit to Africa, Mr. Sarkozy regretted the violence of colonization but insisted on the good intentions of the French colonizers, out there to bring civilization to the ‘African man’ who had ‘not entered history.’”
Compared to other world powers, America deserves guilt less but struggles with it more. Our French cousins celebrate Bastille Day with abandon, joy and unapologetic pride, despite the ugly stains on the Tricolor. For Mexicans and for Mexican immigrants in the United States, Cinco de Mayo doesn’t provide an occasion for brooding meditation on the pain and disappointment and injustice that’s always characterized our turbulent neighbor to the south. Ironically, the one national holiday observed in America with the most unalloyed elation and pugnacious pleasure is St. Patrick’s Day, which seldom, even in the most boozy stupor, gives rise to remorse over the failings and foibles of the children of Eire.
Some might explain this American penchant for harsh self-criticism as a product of our higher ideals and more lofty aspirations. Through most of its long, tortured history, no one ever really expected Russia to serve as a “light to the nations” or a “shining city on a hill.” The United States, on the other hand, has long expected to remake the world in our image, and often succeeded in that endeavor. The fact that we have attempted more shouldn’t obscure the fact that we’ve also achieved more, and stumbled less other nations with significant roles in world affairs. In baseball, even the most fearsome (and well-paid) power hitters will strike out occasionally, or hit into double plays. It’s inevitable to feel special frustration when All Stars fail to deliver, but these high expectations shouldn’t focus attention on failures alone, and obscure all the home-runs and solid hits delivered the rest of the time. The soaring ambitions of the United States didn’t lead to humanity- crushing disasters, but instead helped to inspire more success for more people – Americans as well as others—than logic or experience would have deemed possible.
Acceptance of the bitter lies about America undermines the ongoing aspiration that alone can power the United States in its continued role as the mighty engine of human betterment. Without shared gratitude for the innumerable advantages that hard work and history provided to the present generation, we will suffer the insecurity, unease and self-hate associated with undeserved good fortune.
An American Indian academic and musician named David A. Yeagley (an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation) tells a sobering story about one of his students at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City. A “tall and pretty” girl with amber hair and brown eyes, she spoke out in a class discussion about patriotism. “Look, Dr. Yeagley,” she declared, “I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”
“Look at your culture,” she continued. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”
Concerning this unforgettable interchange, Professor Yeagley observed: “The Cheyenne people have a saying: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.
“Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?
“They say that a warrior is measured by the strength of his enemies. As an Indian, I am proud of the fact that it took the mightiest nation on earth to defeat me.
“But I don’t feel so proud when I listen to Rachel. It gives me no solace to see the white man self-destruct. If Rachel’s people are ‘nothing,’ what does that say about mine?”
And what does it say about each of us if we see ourselves as heirs to “nothing” – to only a tainted legacy and a heritage of shame? To accept and recycle prevalent slanders about our country shows neither courage nor sophistication, while promoting impotence, self-pity and paralysis. An accurate appreciation of the past remains altogether indispensable to the survival of communal connection, individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Science of Gore's Nobel
What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?
By Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet.
The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.
How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.
Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.
Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."
Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?
It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.
Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.
With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.
Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the "world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error." Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible.
Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell's beloved Detroit?
Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: "One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted."
Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.
Now let's suppose a most improbable, rhapsodic lobbying success for Mr. Gore, Mr. Khosla and folks on their side of the table--say, a government mandate to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative. This would represent a monumental, $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. The impact on global carbon emissions? Four percent--less than China's predicted emissions growth over the next three or four years.
Don't doubt that this is precisely the chasm that keeps Mr. Gore from running for president. He could neither win the office nor govern on the basis of imposing the kinds of costs supposedly necessary to deal with an impending "climate crisis." Yet his credibility would become laughable if he failed to insist on such costs. How much more practical, then, to cash in on the crowd-pleasing role of angry prophet, without having to take responsibility for policies that the public will eventually discover to be fraudulent.
Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.
No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources.
Mr. Gore would have to find a new job.
By Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet.
The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.
How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.
Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.
Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."
Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?
It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.
Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.
With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.
Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the "world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error." Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible.
Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell's beloved Detroit?
Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: "One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted."
Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.
Now let's suppose a most improbable, rhapsodic lobbying success for Mr. Gore, Mr. Khosla and folks on their side of the table--say, a government mandate to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative. This would represent a monumental, $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. The impact on global carbon emissions? Four percent--less than China's predicted emissions growth over the next three or four years.
Don't doubt that this is precisely the chasm that keeps Mr. Gore from running for president. He could neither win the office nor govern on the basis of imposing the kinds of costs supposedly necessary to deal with an impending "climate crisis." Yet his credibility would become laughable if he failed to insist on such costs. How much more practical, then, to cash in on the crowd-pleasing role of angry prophet, without having to take responsibility for policies that the public will eventually discover to be fraudulent.
Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.
No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources.
Mr. Gore would have to find a new job.
Climate Changes, but Media Remain the Same
By Dan Gainor
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Once upon a time, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby went off on the road to Bali. Fifty-five years later, politicians are heading to Bali for sun, sand and socialism – and they want us to pay for it to the tune of trillions of dollars.
The Financial Times reported November 28 that the United Nations expects “rich industrialized countries shouldering a cut of 80 percent” of emissions. In effect, eco-extremists want the U.S. to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The U.N. position makes us pay and lets China and India almost off the hook, despite their growing economies and growing pollution.
That view will be center stage as 130 Environment Ministers are joined by other VIPs at the island resort for the December 3-14 conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Counting their families, friends, handlers, aides, assistants and toadies, that will probably equal thousands of people lining up at the public trough for a tropical vacation.
Paying for that little excursion is minor, even though they will more than max out the local airports with plane after plane of smug globalists. The big payday comes at the meeting, when the U.N. tries to determine a replacement for the foolish and futile Kyoto treaty on climate change.
Kyoto never caught on here. In the United States – under both Presidents Clinton and Bush – it never got Senate approval, though the media consistently blame only Bush for having “rejected the Kyoto Treaty.” The treaty is ending its lifespan, but Australia just signed on. That makes ours the last major nation to oppose the pact.
Now the questions are what next and how much that will cost the American taxpayer. The answers to both questions will be bad. The hypocritical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do crowd wants to intrude into every aspect of our lives – from the energy we are allowed to use to the bulbs that light our homes.
Al Gore said as much on Capitol Hill in March. Hillary Clinton joined in that little bit of uber-government early in November. “We will phase out the incandescent light bulb,” she told an Iowa audience.
All that costs money. The latest U.N. report estimates “the world must spend 1.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product each year” to fend off global warming. That’s a subtle way of saying great gobs of money.
According to the CIA World Factbook, global GDP in 2006 was $66 trillion. The U.N. wants $1 trillion per year – at least. The West’s share (much of which the U.N. wants us to pay) is $800 billion every year.
Those numbers are rising – just a few months ago, a previous estimate had put the global total closer to $800 billion, but it has now risen to $1 trillion.
And a bit of bipartisan insanity introduced in the Senate by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) would require companies to scale back greenhouse-gas emissions, costing the United States $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the next 40 years.
While those estimates are billions of dollars higher than many previous predictions of Kyoto’s economic impact, they are only the beginning. Once the U.N. has its claws into the American taxpayer, anything goes. As the famous Washington quote goes: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.”
How are they getting away with it? Partly because of ridiculously one-sided reporting from the American press. From August to November, the big three broadcast networks did 170 stories on climate change. Few stories questioned prophecies of actual danger or pointed out the debate within the scientific community.
NBC was the worst with 94 climate stories – more than one per day. The network also threw its considerable corporate weight behind Al Gore’s Live Earth concert, providing more than 75 hours of air time. Then, to top it off, NBC Universal launched a “Green Is Universal” week filled with eco-propaganda. The highlight, or lack thereof, was the football preview show where they turned out the lights on the set to claim they were saving energy.
It hasn’t stopped since. On November 27, NBC’s Kerry Sanders told a heartwarming tale of the nearly extinct Key Deer population surviving. But disaster was just around the corner for the dear deer. “Wildlife experts say while the Key Deer population has rebounded, there are still long-term threats – like global warming,” said Sanders.
That is precisely the issue the Bali conference will address: the threat posed by an evil mankind to an innocent earth. But where is the other side of the issue? The media bombard us with constant economic concerns, yet ignore the devastation a multibillion- dollar hit to the economy – annually – would cause.
When Crosby went to Bali, at least he had Hope. All we have to watch out for us is the media – and that’s no hope at all.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Once upon a time, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby went off on the road to Bali. Fifty-five years later, politicians are heading to Bali for sun, sand and socialism – and they want us to pay for it to the tune of trillions of dollars.
The Financial Times reported November 28 that the United Nations expects “rich industrialized countries shouldering a cut of 80 percent” of emissions. In effect, eco-extremists want the U.S. to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The U.N. position makes us pay and lets China and India almost off the hook, despite their growing economies and growing pollution.
That view will be center stage as 130 Environment Ministers are joined by other VIPs at the island resort for the December 3-14 conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Counting their families, friends, handlers, aides, assistants and toadies, that will probably equal thousands of people lining up at the public trough for a tropical vacation.
Paying for that little excursion is minor, even though they will more than max out the local airports with plane after plane of smug globalists. The big payday comes at the meeting, when the U.N. tries to determine a replacement for the foolish and futile Kyoto treaty on climate change.
Kyoto never caught on here. In the United States – under both Presidents Clinton and Bush – it never got Senate approval, though the media consistently blame only Bush for having “rejected the Kyoto Treaty.” The treaty is ending its lifespan, but Australia just signed on. That makes ours the last major nation to oppose the pact.
Now the questions are what next and how much that will cost the American taxpayer. The answers to both questions will be bad. The hypocritical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do crowd wants to intrude into every aspect of our lives – from the energy we are allowed to use to the bulbs that light our homes.
Al Gore said as much on Capitol Hill in March. Hillary Clinton joined in that little bit of uber-government early in November. “We will phase out the incandescent light bulb,” she told an Iowa audience.
All that costs money. The latest U.N. report estimates “the world must spend 1.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product each year” to fend off global warming. That’s a subtle way of saying great gobs of money.
According to the CIA World Factbook, global GDP in 2006 was $66 trillion. The U.N. wants $1 trillion per year – at least. The West’s share (much of which the U.N. wants us to pay) is $800 billion every year.
Those numbers are rising – just a few months ago, a previous estimate had put the global total closer to $800 billion, but it has now risen to $1 trillion.
And a bit of bipartisan insanity introduced in the Senate by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) would require companies to scale back greenhouse-gas emissions, costing the United States $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the next 40 years.
While those estimates are billions of dollars higher than many previous predictions of Kyoto’s economic impact, they are only the beginning. Once the U.N. has its claws into the American taxpayer, anything goes. As the famous Washington quote goes: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.”
How are they getting away with it? Partly because of ridiculously one-sided reporting from the American press. From August to November, the big three broadcast networks did 170 stories on climate change. Few stories questioned prophecies of actual danger or pointed out the debate within the scientific community.
NBC was the worst with 94 climate stories – more than one per day. The network also threw its considerable corporate weight behind Al Gore’s Live Earth concert, providing more than 75 hours of air time. Then, to top it off, NBC Universal launched a “Green Is Universal” week filled with eco-propaganda. The highlight, or lack thereof, was the football preview show where they turned out the lights on the set to claim they were saving energy.
It hasn’t stopped since. On November 27, NBC’s Kerry Sanders told a heartwarming tale of the nearly extinct Key Deer population surviving. But disaster was just around the corner for the dear deer. “Wildlife experts say while the Key Deer population has rebounded, there are still long-term threats – like global warming,” said Sanders.
That is precisely the issue the Bali conference will address: the threat posed by an evil mankind to an innocent earth. But where is the other side of the issue? The media bombard us with constant economic concerns, yet ignore the devastation a multibillion- dollar hit to the economy – annually – would cause.
When Crosby went to Bali, at least he had Hope. All we have to watch out for us is the media – and that’s no hope at all.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Baby Boomers Owe America's Young People an Apology
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.
We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well, and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death scares we have inflicted on you.
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.
One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life -- adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love -- parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, "Make love, not war." Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan -- solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as "Give peace a chance," as if that deals in any way with the world's most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.
We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected, even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.
We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such young ages -- certainly our schools never taught us about these things -- but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary, values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents believing that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Superman" -- with the show's motto of "truth, justice, and the American way" -- were good things for young people to be exposed to. So we replaced these shows with MTV's mind-numbing parade of three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry.
We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our generation's almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you. Sorry for that, too.
We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had America spend on education, most of you got an education quite inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make sure you saw Al Gore's film.
And a real apology to those of you hooked on drugs. While your choice to do drugs is your responsibility, it was our generation that romanticized them and made them cool. "Mind expanding" we called them. But it turns out that they don't expand minds, they destroy them. Sorry.
And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of you women who have career success and didn't get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren't as fulfilling as we promised.
So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.
But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.
We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well, and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death scares we have inflicted on you.
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.
One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life -- adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love -- parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, "Make love, not war." Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan -- solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as "Give peace a chance," as if that deals in any way with the world's most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.
We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected, even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.
We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such young ages -- certainly our schools never taught us about these things -- but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary, values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents believing that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Superman" -- with the show's motto of "truth, justice, and the American way" -- were good things for young people to be exposed to. So we replaced these shows with MTV's mind-numbing parade of three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry.
We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our generation's almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you. Sorry for that, too.
We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had America spend on education, most of you got an education quite inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make sure you saw Al Gore's film.
And a real apology to those of you hooked on drugs. While your choice to do drugs is your responsibility, it was our generation that romanticized them and made them cool. "Mind expanding" we called them. But it turns out that they don't expand minds, they destroy them. Sorry.
And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of you women who have career success and didn't get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren't as fulfilling as we promised.
So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.
But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.
The Allure of Tyranny
Russians voted away their freedoms, and Venezuelans almost did. Why?
By Bret Stephens
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.
"It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom," says Leo Naphta, the great character of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" "Its deepest desire is to obey." On Sunday, voters as far apart as Caracas and Vladivostok took to the polls and put Naphta's theory to a practical test.
In Russia, the result of parliamentary elections was a triumph for President Vladimir Putin: His party, United Russia, won 64% of the vote. Add that to the votes taken by the Kremlin's allies and the Putin tally reaches 80%, with the principal "democratic" opposition represented (at 11.5%) by the Communists. The vote sets up Mr. Putin, an exceptionally fit 55, to rule Russia for another four-year term, and perhaps several terms beyond that.
By happy contrast, Hugo Chávez's effort to establish himself as Venezuela's president-for-life via a constitutional referendum seems to have failed by a narrow margin. Even so, an astonishing 49% of voters were prepared, according to the official count, to permanently forgo the opportunity to choose a president other than Mr. Chávez.
The phenomenon in which masses of people enthusiastically sign away their democratic rights is not new: It happened in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. But it's one that Americans especially have a hard time coming to grips with. The freedom agenda may no longer be in vogue, but most Americans implicitly endorse George Bush's view that "eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." When it doesn't--when, in fact, it is consciously and deliberately spurned--we rationalize it in ways that go only so far in offering a persuasive account of the dark allure of tyranny.
Culture is one rationalization. The word is invoked by everyone from self-described Burkean conservatives to left-wing cultural relativists to explain the supposed failure of some benighted corners of the world to adopt and sustain democratic norms. In this view, Africa and the Arab world are too tribal; the Muslim world makes no distinction between the divine and the mundane; Latin America cannot find a stable middle ground between populism and paternalism; the Chinese are too used to emperors and mandarins, the Russians too used to czars and bureaucrats. And so on.
But cultural determinism often runs afoul of reality: The example of China is counterexampled by Taiwan; Zimbabwe by Botswana; Jeddah by Dubai; President Chávez by President Àlvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia. Like baseball statistics, culture has a way of explaining a lot until it suddenly explains nothing.
A second line has it that the Putins and Chávezes of the world owe their popularity to bread-and-circuses tactics: the canny manipulation of the media, their appeal to nationalism and xenophobia, bureaucratic patronage and above all the benefit of having petrodollars to shower on favored constituencies.
Here the argument is that the two men rule by what amounts to an elaborate hoax. Yet that only begs the question of why the hoax is so widely believed. Venezuelans and Russians can travel abroad, and still have considerable (albeit diminishing) access to foreign sources of news and opinion; they can read the anxious op-eds warning of creeping dictatorship. In Venezuela, that might have even tipped the scales in Sunday's vote. Yet in Russia, "outside meddling" has had no measurable effect on Mr. Putin's overwhelming and genuine popularity, which seems only to have been enhanced by the perception that the West increasingly fears and mistrusts him.
Perhaps the most conventional theory is that Messrs. Putin and Chávez, like most autocrats, ultimately rule through a combination of intimidation and dirty tricks. Thus in a weekend op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov asks why Mr. Putin feels compelled to engage in "heavy-handed campaigning if he knows he and United Russia are going to win?" Mr. Kasparov's answer is that the president "is very aware of how brittle his power structure has become."
Plainly the fear factor is central to the politics of both countries. But neither is it the whole story. Russians and Venezuelans alike elected their current leaders with bitter memories of democracy: economic collapse and social chaos under Boris Yeltsin; the incompetent revolving-door governments of Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez. Messrs. Putin and Chávez both came to office promising to reverse the disintegrating trend with what the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden once called "the smack"--he meant the word in its physical sense--"of firm government." Their track records over the past eight years represent, if nothing else, the fulfillment of that promise, and the widespread gratitude that promise-keeping engendered.
That is the crucial context in which Chavismo and Putinism need to be understood. "The totalitarian phenomenon," observed the late French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or--much more mysteriously--to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."
There is a lesson here for President Bush, who in headier moments seems to forget that freedom's goodness must first be demonstrated instrumentally--that is, in terms of what it tangibly delivers--before it can be demonstrated morally or spiritually. There is a broader lesson here, too, that while tyranny may ripen in certain political climates, it springs from sources deep within ourselves: the yearning for a politics without contradictions; the terror inscribed in the act of choice.
Thank goodness there is usually more to human nature than that, as courageous Venezuelans proved Sunday. Other times, that's all there is. Welcome to Mr. Putin's democracy.
By Bret Stephens
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.
"It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom," says Leo Naphta, the great character of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" "Its deepest desire is to obey." On Sunday, voters as far apart as Caracas and Vladivostok took to the polls and put Naphta's theory to a practical test.
In Russia, the result of parliamentary elections was a triumph for President Vladimir Putin: His party, United Russia, won 64% of the vote. Add that to the votes taken by the Kremlin's allies and the Putin tally reaches 80%, with the principal "democratic" opposition represented (at 11.5%) by the Communists. The vote sets up Mr. Putin, an exceptionally fit 55, to rule Russia for another four-year term, and perhaps several terms beyond that.
By happy contrast, Hugo Chávez's effort to establish himself as Venezuela's president-for-life via a constitutional referendum seems to have failed by a narrow margin. Even so, an astonishing 49% of voters were prepared, according to the official count, to permanently forgo the opportunity to choose a president other than Mr. Chávez.
The phenomenon in which masses of people enthusiastically sign away their democratic rights is not new: It happened in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. But it's one that Americans especially have a hard time coming to grips with. The freedom agenda may no longer be in vogue, but most Americans implicitly endorse George Bush's view that "eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." When it doesn't--when, in fact, it is consciously and deliberately spurned--we rationalize it in ways that go only so far in offering a persuasive account of the dark allure of tyranny.
Culture is one rationalization. The word is invoked by everyone from self-described Burkean conservatives to left-wing cultural relativists to explain the supposed failure of some benighted corners of the world to adopt and sustain democratic norms. In this view, Africa and the Arab world are too tribal; the Muslim world makes no distinction between the divine and the mundane; Latin America cannot find a stable middle ground between populism and paternalism; the Chinese are too used to emperors and mandarins, the Russians too used to czars and bureaucrats. And so on.
But cultural determinism often runs afoul of reality: The example of China is counterexampled by Taiwan; Zimbabwe by Botswana; Jeddah by Dubai; President Chávez by President Àlvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia. Like baseball statistics, culture has a way of explaining a lot until it suddenly explains nothing.
A second line has it that the Putins and Chávezes of the world owe their popularity to bread-and-circuses tactics: the canny manipulation of the media, their appeal to nationalism and xenophobia, bureaucratic patronage and above all the benefit of having petrodollars to shower on favored constituencies.
Here the argument is that the two men rule by what amounts to an elaborate hoax. Yet that only begs the question of why the hoax is so widely believed. Venezuelans and Russians can travel abroad, and still have considerable (albeit diminishing) access to foreign sources of news and opinion; they can read the anxious op-eds warning of creeping dictatorship. In Venezuela, that might have even tipped the scales in Sunday's vote. Yet in Russia, "outside meddling" has had no measurable effect on Mr. Putin's overwhelming and genuine popularity, which seems only to have been enhanced by the perception that the West increasingly fears and mistrusts him.
Perhaps the most conventional theory is that Messrs. Putin and Chávez, like most autocrats, ultimately rule through a combination of intimidation and dirty tricks. Thus in a weekend op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov asks why Mr. Putin feels compelled to engage in "heavy-handed campaigning if he knows he and United Russia are going to win?" Mr. Kasparov's answer is that the president "is very aware of how brittle his power structure has become."
Plainly the fear factor is central to the politics of both countries. But neither is it the whole story. Russians and Venezuelans alike elected their current leaders with bitter memories of democracy: economic collapse and social chaos under Boris Yeltsin; the incompetent revolving-door governments of Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez. Messrs. Putin and Chávez both came to office promising to reverse the disintegrating trend with what the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden once called "the smack"--he meant the word in its physical sense--"of firm government." Their track records over the past eight years represent, if nothing else, the fulfillment of that promise, and the widespread gratitude that promise-keeping engendered.
That is the crucial context in which Chavismo and Putinism need to be understood. "The totalitarian phenomenon," observed the late French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or--much more mysteriously--to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."
There is a lesson here for President Bush, who in headier moments seems to forget that freedom's goodness must first be demonstrated instrumentally--that is, in terms of what it tangibly delivers--before it can be demonstrated morally or spiritually. There is a broader lesson here, too, that while tyranny may ripen in certain political climates, it springs from sources deep within ourselves: the yearning for a politics without contradictions; the terror inscribed in the act of choice.
Thank goodness there is usually more to human nature than that, as courageous Venezuelans proved Sunday. Other times, that's all there is. Welcome to Mr. Putin's democracy.
Venezuelans Rain on Hugo
Its voters have earned the U.S.'s attention--and its active support.
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The stunning defeat Sunday of President Hugo Chávez's constitutional reform agenda is more than a setback for Venezuela's messianic strongman. It is a victory for the ideal of liberty across Latin America. What an affirmation of that ideal it would be if the U.S. Congress now did its part to keep it alive by voting to liberalize trade with Venezuela's neighbors. More on that in a moment. The kudos for now go to the people of Venezuela.
Mr. Chávez had at his disposal an almost limitless supply of petro-dollars to support--and to impose--what amounted to a personal coup against that nation's democracy. He tried to bully Venezuelans into voting for one-man rule and a hard model of socialism. They said no. Algimiro Polanco, a 56-year-old bus driver, told the Miami Herald, "I have always voted for Chávez, but he wants a dictatorship like Cuba. I don't want the government to take my small house. It's mine."
There were reports from Caracas as early as 8:30 p.m. Sunday night that the "No" vote against the Chávez proposals was victorious. Intriguingly, it took the Chávez-controlled National Electoral Council until 1:15 a.m. to announce the results. Apparently, Mr. Chávez was reluctant to accept the final count, but the military knew that the opposition students held the tally sheets from all the polling stations. When it became clear that there was no way to fudge the results, Mr. Chávez conceded defeat, though the margin of his loss is still being debated.
The Chávez opposition was celebrating its first electoral triumph in nine years yesterday and it must have tasted good. Venezuela's student opposition deserves special mention for the outcome. The fact that the Chávez program went down in flames is due in no small part to the courage of the country's university students, who persisted with few resources against the Chávez machine. For months they have braved tear gas and riot police in cities across the country and responded only with cries for liberty and the open palms that became the symbol of their movement.
The package of reforms that Mr. Chávez wanted the electorate to approve on Sunday would have eviscerated Venezuela's civil liberties. The reforms were yet another assault on economic rights in a country with few left. Mr. Chávez wanted to officially strip the central bank of its autonomy and to end guarantees of private property. These amendments seem to have most frightened people living at the far end of the spectrum from the country's elite. With inflation on food and non-alcoholic beverages clocking in at 7.1% for November alone, few Venezuelans were ready to hand over to Mr. Chávez the powers he sought over money creation.
So yes, the joy this defeat has produced is warranted. But all democrats in the region should be forewarned that Mr. Chávez isn't likely to stop his efforts at revolution inside or outside the country. The president still has control of all the country's political institutions. Indeed in the early hours Monday morning he warned the nation that his defeat is only "for now." He pledged that he will get his reforms accomplished without changing a single word of what he put before them on Sunday.
Mr. Chávez remains a threat to region. He is in a race against time to impose his will before his star fades, as it already has in Peru, Brazil and Mexico. His expansionist agenda has the potential to undermine Colombia's democracy, and has already destabilized Bolivia and Ecuador.
This brings us to the U.S. role. The Chávezes of the world rise below our border when people there see little hope. The U.S. Senate today is scheduled to vote to ratify a free-trade agreement with Peru. A similar pact to open the economy of Colombia, however, is bogged down in the pettiest politics of Democratic Presidential campaigning and in the House. Such a crabbed view of the Americas has bad consequences.
There is nothing better the U.S. could do to reward Venezuelans for their bravery than to kick-start that region's economy by enacting these agreements. After Sunday's performance, Venezuelans have rightly earned the U.S.'s attention and its support.
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.
The stunning defeat Sunday of President Hugo Chávez's constitutional reform agenda is more than a setback for Venezuela's messianic strongman. It is a victory for the ideal of liberty across Latin America. What an affirmation of that ideal it would be if the U.S. Congress now did its part to keep it alive by voting to liberalize trade with Venezuela's neighbors. More on that in a moment. The kudos for now go to the people of Venezuela.
Mr. Chávez had at his disposal an almost limitless supply of petro-dollars to support--and to impose--what amounted to a personal coup against that nation's democracy. He tried to bully Venezuelans into voting for one-man rule and a hard model of socialism. They said no. Algimiro Polanco, a 56-year-old bus driver, told the Miami Herald, "I have always voted for Chávez, but he wants a dictatorship like Cuba. I don't want the government to take my small house. It's mine."
There were reports from Caracas as early as 8:30 p.m. Sunday night that the "No" vote against the Chávez proposals was victorious. Intriguingly, it took the Chávez-controlled National Electoral Council until 1:15 a.m. to announce the results. Apparently, Mr. Chávez was reluctant to accept the final count, but the military knew that the opposition students held the tally sheets from all the polling stations. When it became clear that there was no way to fudge the results, Mr. Chávez conceded defeat, though the margin of his loss is still being debated.
The Chávez opposition was celebrating its first electoral triumph in nine years yesterday and it must have tasted good. Venezuela's student opposition deserves special mention for the outcome. The fact that the Chávez program went down in flames is due in no small part to the courage of the country's university students, who persisted with few resources against the Chávez machine. For months they have braved tear gas and riot police in cities across the country and responded only with cries for liberty and the open palms that became the symbol of their movement.
The package of reforms that Mr. Chávez wanted the electorate to approve on Sunday would have eviscerated Venezuela's civil liberties. The reforms were yet another assault on economic rights in a country with few left. Mr. Chávez wanted to officially strip the central bank of its autonomy and to end guarantees of private property. These amendments seem to have most frightened people living at the far end of the spectrum from the country's elite. With inflation on food and non-alcoholic beverages clocking in at 7.1% for November alone, few Venezuelans were ready to hand over to Mr. Chávez the powers he sought over money creation.
So yes, the joy this defeat has produced is warranted. But all democrats in the region should be forewarned that Mr. Chávez isn't likely to stop his efforts at revolution inside or outside the country. The president still has control of all the country's political institutions. Indeed in the early hours Monday morning he warned the nation that his defeat is only "for now." He pledged that he will get his reforms accomplished without changing a single word of what he put before them on Sunday.
Mr. Chávez remains a threat to region. He is in a race against time to impose his will before his star fades, as it already has in Peru, Brazil and Mexico. His expansionist agenda has the potential to undermine Colombia's democracy, and has already destabilized Bolivia and Ecuador.
This brings us to the U.S. role. The Chávezes of the world rise below our border when people there see little hope. The U.S. Senate today is scheduled to vote to ratify a free-trade agreement with Peru. A similar pact to open the economy of Colombia, however, is bogged down in the pettiest politics of Democratic Presidential campaigning and in the House. Such a crabbed view of the Americas has bad consequences.
There is nothing better the U.S. could do to reward Venezuelans for their bravery than to kick-start that region's economy by enacting these agreements. After Sunday's performance, Venezuelans have rightly earned the U.S.'s attention and its support.
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