The Washington Times

Well, we have crossed the Rubicon of campaign-finance reform at last. And now that we have reformed, are we going to be happy at last about cutting down to size the role of money in politics? No, we are not.

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The Washington Times

The news last week that Tipper Gore contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee is yet another illustration of the dynastic character of American politics nowadays. Whether this situation is all that new is an open question. But it does seem safe to say that one of the most common ways people get into politics is by being born into it or marrying into it.

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Unlike the simplistic Europeans.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

AT THE END OF THE DAY, the truest picture of the European response to the war on terror may emerge from, for example, the fact that Germany has dispatched elite special forces troops to fight alongside Americans in Gardez, Afghanistan. That a Social Democratic-Green coalition would send German soldiers abroad to participate in an exercise in “regime change” marks a historic change, one befitting the stakes to which al Qaeda raised international terror on September 11. But it’s a long way to the end of the day, and we must therefore be prepared in the meantime to run a gauntlet of other, far more distasteful European responses.

Leaving aside the hard-core anti-American left, whose musings have become the more feral in inverse proportion to their consequence, the central tenet of mainstream obnoxiousness is the proposition that Americans are “simplistic” (French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine) in their approach to the problem of terror, and that what underlies European sophistication is greater European experience of terror. We were hit on our soil only now for the first time, and we are lashing out in response to this sudden sense of our own vulnerability. Europeans, having long known the scourge of terror, are more realistic both in their expectations about managing it and in their ability to live their daily lives despite the ultimately unavoidable threat of it.

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The Washington Times

It’s impossible to read the transcript of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick’s March 5 press briefing on the 30 percent tariff the Bush administration decided to slap on imported steel without coming away with the impression of a man who would rather be somewhere else.

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The Washington Times

We are only now coming to grips, I think, with the symbolism and the substance of Hamid Karzai, the interim leader of Afghanistan, sitting in the president’s box for Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address. At one level, the easiest to grasp, Mr. Karzai’s appearance was simple triumphalism – a celebration of the prowess of American arms and the tenacity of the anti-Taliban forces. Mr. Karzai was “regime change” in flesh and blood, and wearing that cape, rather a dashing figure he was. Both he and Mr. Bush deserved the ovation they received when the American president introduced him.

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Valor and victimhood after September 11.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

THERE ARE no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then–can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”?–the yellow ribbon has been pressed into service as a symbol of hope amid adversity, an expression of longing for the return of those who are not home. In accordance with past practice, the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers could surely have been an occasion for yellow ribbons: thousands lost and feared dead, the uncertainty of the families of the missing, the conclusion growing inevitable that even the bodies might never be recovered. And in fact, in the first day or two, one did see a few yellow ribbons, usually in a collage with a photograph of someone missing, held desperately by a loved one still in shock. But then, without comment, the yellow ribbons were gone. All the ribbons now are red, white, and blue.

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