The debate over Palin is sort of ossified.

The Left continues to ridicule her accent, family, and middling roots. The Right enjoys such authenticity-but enjoys even more the hysteria it incurs in liberals.

Will it Be Politics or Money?

But lost in all of this is whether she is up to national politics, or simply wishes to capitalize (an Oprah-like talk show?) on her sizable financial potential. On the one hand, Palin is obviously bright. Few could raise a family without capital in Wasilla, and within a decade end up as Governor of a large state-whose protocols hinged on an old-boy network where politicians accommodated oil and mineral interests.

On the other hand, a mother of five, knee-deep in local politics, without money and leisure, is not going to be reading Gibbon for perspective, or spending the afternoon perusing Foreign Affairs. Nor is she going to remember a quip that her Prof at the Kennedy school once offered years ago. Nor is she going to recall clever repartee at a Georgetown dinner party from one grandee to another.

She has natural gifts-stamina, earthy grit, sensitivity to what most Americans go through raising a family on a limited budget, practicality from working with her hands in a natural world. All that is no small beer. Look at Truman’s various experiences in Missouri.

No Way 2012-Maybe 2016, 2020?

But if, a big if, she decides to become a national political figure, Palin should use these next few years (in addition to making some money to support her family) to travel and read widely in the manner that a Reagan did in his wilderness period. She has natural intelligence and is curious. I think most would like to see her do another Couric interview five years from now after she had time to size up DC insiders, meet more politicians, lecture in front of hostile audiences-and just read and reflect. At fifty-five she could become a formidable candidate, given her natural charisma and authentic middle-class persona.

They All Resign-One Way or Another

As far as her resignation, it will be forgotten in two years. Politicians like William Weld, Bob Dole, Fred Thompson, and Bill Bradley have done it (to no real advantage).  John McCain and Barack Obama essentially resigned from the Senate by campaigning nonstop for two years (but while getting paid). In Obama’s case, it is hard to believe whether he was ever really working as a Senator, but instead almost began prepping for the Presidency (after swearing that he would not) as soon as he was elected.

So Why the Hatred?

A Huffington Post satirist offers jokes about her son Trig’s disability, and mental impairment in general.

David Letterman laughs at the notion of her 14-year-old daughter having sex in a dugout with a baseball player.

Andrew Sullivan offered up conspiracy theories about how her daughter, not Palin herself, “really” delivered Trig.

Maureen Dowd declares that “Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy,” and laughs at the names of her children, some geese-honking in the background during her interview, even the Piper Cub tiny plane near the Palin house.

A Vanity Fair author swears that on his trip to Alaska, people came up to him and, quite independently of one another, proclaimed that Palin was a narcissist. According to Todd Purdum,  mirabile dictu, many have consulted the ol’ handy Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (which we all carry in our backpockets) and, presto, discovered that Palin has a ” pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ - and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Only Room for One Obama?

I got a lot of flak the last year for writing two or three columns suggesting the Europeans and other Leftists abroad might be careful about what they wish for in Obama: he might well leap-frog over them, leaving them all with the world they used to fantasize about, while in reality they profited from the world they demonized. (As I wrote, a keen Frenchman whispered to me at a reception “There is room for only one to play Obama-and we are already Obama.”)

Comrade Hugo

Consider: the U.S. reacted quickly and meddled unambiguously in condemning the Honduran arrest of President Zelaya. It mattered little that for the first time in memory we Americans now were on the side of autocrats like Castro, Chavez, Morales, and Ortega in showing revolutionary solidarity with Zelaya ( and of course the UN as well).

We cared little that both the Honduran Supreme Court and Parliament had acted lawfully in ordering their President’s removal on grounds that he had acted unconstitutionally, in bold, unlawful efforts to obtain a third presidential term through a likely rigged plebiscite.

(It would be analogous to an Obama or Bush demanding a third term, illegally acquiring ballots to force a plebiscite, ignoring a Congressional conviction of impeachment, and a Supreme Court edict of unconstitutionality, only to be arrested by the Joint Chiefs and escorted out of the country).

The Real Project for the New American Century

What is our logic? Given the history of imperialism and colonialism, anytime in Latin America anyone in uniform arrests an elected president in a tie, it is a coup and must be condemned, no matter the legality or the ideology involved.

But let us not miss the forest for the trees. The larger fact is that suddenly the United States has become a sort of revolutionary force itself. At the next G-8 summit there will be no more hectoring of Europeans to stop selling sniper rifles to Iran or sophisticated machines tools used to enhance nuclear centrifuge operations.

Instead, the Europeans–”shocked” over the mayhem in the streets of Tehran, and still hurting over the kidnapping of British sailors, the jailing of Western journalists, and the arrest of Western embassy personnel–will be hectoring the Obama administration to please tighten up the old Bush sanctions. (In the new, no-more-anti-ballistic-missile age, Frankfurt and Paris will soon be in range of the planned Iranian nukes.)

And Americans, I think, will resist increased sanctions or embargoes. As a transracial, transnational Gandhi-like figure, Obama believes that he alone understands and empathizes with the previously demonized Third-World revolutionary leaders.

Yes, on our behalf it is his destiny to talk with them, and tame them in a manner of speaking, perhaps to stop their terrorizing, drug-running, arming, and bullying, or more likely the overt manifestation of all that. In other words, he’s our Che, a universal pop star, part Bono, part Mandela, part Michael Jackson, and part Al Gore that deflects criticism that we are all Texas oil men with twangs who talk about Gawd, Eye-Rack, and Jasus.

This metamorphosis is to be accomplished by Obama’s singular charisma and ‘empathy’: as a person of color, on his paternal side from a  Muslim family, and of African heritage, Obama “knows” that he too has been on the butt-end of Western hegemony (forget the subsidized ride to prep school, Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, the mansion, etc.; we are talking of perceptions, not reality), and thus can assure an Ahmadinejad he ‘feels’ what it is like to be an Iranian leader with all sorts of globalized and Western-inspired pressures.  Just as the elite Sotomayor knows what it is to be a Latina in a repressive America, so Obama knows what it is to be a leader of color in a Western-dominated global order.

I think the standard explanation of the trashing accorded the foolish Governor Mark Sanford (who in embarrassing, and by now truly surreal fashion, confessed, and confessed, and confessed to an affair with an Argentinean girlfriend) and the tsk-tsk treatment of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards — who, in grotesque fashion, fathered a child with his mistress, lied about it on several occasions while he tried to gain political mileage from his ill wife, all as he concocted an alibi that his aide, not he, had really impregnated Rielle Hunter — is that Sanford suffered from the addition wage of hypocrisy.

That is, self-proclaimed moralists like the late Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, John Ensign and other conservatives raised the sexual morality bar high on others, and then proved they could not meet it themselves, while libertine Democrats like a Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, or Jesse Jackson never claimed to judge others’ sexual mores. Therefore their behavior is not at odds with their rhetoric. So despite their public status, the “sin” in their case remains more a “private” manner.

Really?

But there are some problems with this facile analysis. While it is true that Americans seem to detest hypocrisy more than sin, there is something more to this strange unevenness in attitudes toward conservative and liberal transgression. Feminists have long argued that serial womanizing is a sort of moral cheapening of their gender. The supposed male power broker uses rank, money, and privilege to sexually exploit the vulnerable, gullible, younger (fill in the blanks) female. A lot of Foucouldian gibberish is thrown in about power and control — as in mandarin males exploiting victimized female subordinates in supposedly consensual relationships.

Womanizing Feminists

So why then do professed feminists largely ignore an Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, who did not suffer an additional wage of hypocrisy? Monicagate, after all, was a classic feminist cause célèbre: Monica was younger, supposedly naïve, a subordinate, without power and a voice, a victim drawn into an asymmetrical relationship with her “boss,” who used his superior position to cajole the younger woman into exploitive sexual services. But, of course, feminists were largely quiet — although not entirely quiet as many prominent commentators trashed Monica, as they had Paula Jones, as they had Clinton’s harem, as a sort of trashy vixen, whose sluttishness (see David Letterman on such usage) endangered the political capital of a feminist supporter of everything from abortion to gay rights.

Another exegesis goes something like this: “Well, you conservatives suffer the additional wage of hypocrisy on matters sexual since you yourselves are so moralistic; while we liberals get hit hard on matters of high living and privilege given our professed egalitarianism. So it evens out.” But is that second half of the equation true?

Taxes for Thee, not Me

I don’t think so. Very few in the media ran with the Timothy Geithner messy story. The problem was not just that he took quite embarrassing unlawful deductions, but actually pocketed the very FICA allowances provided him by the IMF to address his exposure to self-employment payroll taxes.

In addition, Geithner was to oversee, as Treasury Secretary, the Internal Revenue Service, which, given its limited resources, must rely on the goodwill and honest voluntary compliance of the American taxpayer. Furthermore, Geithner was part of a new administration whose trademark theme was that an under-taxed elite, in near unpatriotic and greedy fashion, had made out like bandits in the Bush years. Thus, those over the sinister $250,000 threshold owed the rest of us overdue money as a sort of financial penance. I could ditto the cases of Daschle, Solis, and Richardson as well, but leave you with Charles Rangel and Chris Dodd — champions of the people and enemies of privilege, who in the most tawdry fashion sold influence for things like lower interest on loans and possible gifts to their eponymous centers.

Goristics

But perhaps the most glaring example is the strange case of former Senator and Vice President Al Gore. He was canonized with various awards including, but not limited to the Nobel Prize, on the basis that his disinterested global campaign to raise concern about global warming had given us all an eleventh hour reprieve from ruining the planet.

Remember the Gore themes: we are destroying the planet by gratuitous use of fossil fuels. Each of us must know his own “carbon footprint,” and adjust accordingly. But then we learned, in addition to the movies and books, Gore had created a carbon-exchange company, a modern version of medieval penance, in which for a fee Gore’s people would evaluate one’s environmental sins, and suggest how one could get right with the gods of the environment.

And on and on it went until in just a few years Gore’s net worth went from $2 million to nearly $100 million. But the additional rub was that Gore lived in an energy-gobbling big house, flew in carbon-polluting private jets, and seemed to benefit financially from the very policies he was lobbying governments to embrace. None of these facts had any effect on the media, the Nobel Prize committees, or his general public stature. Today he remains a liberal icon, not a hypocrite who seemed to live the carbon high-life he demonized so publicly.

Such a Prudishly Crass Society

I was watching cable television about 5 PM on a Friday night, channel surfing between commercials on the Western station. Sandwiched between regular cinema programming were about several channels with what could legitimately be called light porn motifs. I then surfed through a confessional about phallic enhancement and a couple talking about herbal remedies for impotence.

Once I got out of that channel cluster, and went into the 200s, here and there came up infomercials on everything from how to buy foreclosures with no money down, how to get out of credit card debt, how to avoid taxes, and how to default on housing payments without hurting your credit. The talking heads looked just like those hawking natural Viagra a few channels earlier, and indeed were hawking the same instant gratification, sober faces advising radical conduct.

By the time I got back three minutes later to the Western channel, the Maverick episode was extolling the virtues of honesty and keeping one’s word. Television, in other words, is a cesspool. To channel surf through it to find an old Western, one has to take an antiseptic shower afterwards.

Are We Victorians or Libertines?

I bring this up because I am somewhat baffled by the reaction to this week’s news. Take poor Governor Sanford. The only excuse for the hysteria over his trip could be possible use of state funds for personal travel, or taking vacation time without logging it in, or unauthorized leave. All are serious breaches of professional conduct.

But “adultery” during a separation? This entire popular culture transcended fornication years ago when it decided that tampons, Viagra, and Extend were fair game for commercial television.  Our children know more about sexuality than our grandparents.

Can one think of very many politicians who were not guilty of some sort of adultery-Ted Kennedy? John Edwards? Bill Clinton? Newt Gringrich? Rudy Giuliani? John McCain? In a California governor’s race or during the Presidential primaries the oddity is always the non-adulterer. I am being descriptive not sermonizing.

Our greatest icons-Jefferson, JFK, FDR-at times conducted private affairs in a manner that this society would have sensationalized, a society that in fact is far more tawdry and without the decorum of the past.

I don’t know the circumstances of the Sanford marriage, but the notion that a culture that has deified sex, only to become  “shocked” in Casablanca- like fashion that an official would reflect contemporary values is surreal. If this were 1910 or even 1950, I too would be shocked; but once our culture chose to elevate sex to Olympian  status, why does it insist on Plymouth Rock reactions to the logic result of its own values and emphases?

How Did Mr. Jackson Live so Long?

I am sorry Michael Jackson passed away, but baffled when sober commentators pontificate about what the “autopsy findings” will bring, and note his sometimes bizarre behavior. Does one think?

Again, with all due respect, it was hard to see clips of Michael Jackson in a normal mode-without the singer grabbing and/or pointing to his genitals or whispering in an infantile voice. (Another strange thing was to see Jackson on mainstream television at an awards ceremony gesticulating in a genital-obsessed fashion that apparently was just “dance” and good fare for senior citizens as if it were Ed Sullivan hour again).

I don’t think many of us have ever invited small boys over for conversation in our bedrooms, or traveled with a small city across town. He seemed in a perpetual drug daze, whether holding a child over a balcony or wearing pajamas to court. That surely took a toll in addition to the travel and performance.

Think of the hope and change of just the last six months that have changed all our lives. It was, I remember, around the beginning of February when the understandable liberal angst about the Bush deficit simply disappeared. Gone. Vanished. No more haranguing about red ink and shorting our grandchildren.

For the last eight years, I had some admiration-albeit along with plenty of bewilderment-at the newly fiscally mature Congressional Democrats and their impassioned attacks on Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility.

But then suddenly their principled opposition paid off. Deficits disappeared-at least the multibillion species. Yes, borrowing was replaced by kinder, gentler multi-trillion dollar “stimuli.” This was our moment, this was our time when a crushing debt of the last eight years was at last alleviated, and with the New Math we can be so stimulated as to grow our way out any shortfall the naysayers claim follows.

The other Bush nightmare immediately went as well-the primitive way of counting joblessness by the percentage of unemployed workers. Gone too was the Neanderthal idea that the silly Congressional Budget Office knows anything about the projected growth in GDP. And who can accurately project the likely size of deficits (and especially the arcane idea that you can’t save money on health care by borrowing another $2 trillion first to get the needed economies in place)?

So who said the government couldn’t run GM, or teach Chrysler a thing or two? All gone, those worries. Now I just read the New York Times columnists or listen to geniuses like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, and have discovered just how light, breezy, sunny things are becoming.

At about the same time we all awoke from our eight-year trance, the energy crisis ended. Flat out was gone. Solar, wind, geo, and bio swept the country. The old anxieties-nuclear this, coal that, ‘drill, baby, drill’, shale, tar sands, and that wolf in sheep’s clothing, natural gas-all went back to Texas with Bush’s  oil cabal. Now in the age of alternative energy, I know you share my relief that we have both plentiful power and a green planet, once Cheney’s old friends also slid back into the shadows and Palin “got over” her fetishes about ANWR.

I once worried that a Civic was too small, and now see that it is far too big. I just drove over the passes of the California coastal range and for the first time realized that I once used to be bored silly with those bleak untouched “natural” landscapes. Instead, in the ‘age of wind’ now I just absorb the manmade beauty of a far better horizon of hundreds of swishing windmills-2-, 3-, 4 propellered varieties, some white, others grey, with beautiful dirt roads carved out from the once ugly natural hillsides to each one-all unobtrusively churning, churning so that I can have air conditioning this summer without a carbon imprint.

I think it was around early spring when we could relax that Bush’s godawful “war on terror” was won. Finally, the Bush/Cheney hysteria ended, and we got instead the much preferable “overseas contingency operations.” These well-planned humanitarian efforts dispensed with any lingering “man-made catastrophes.” I used to shudder when I heard “Guantanamo” and braced for the “Stalag” and “Gulag” invective that followed. But then mysteriously that went away too in late winter. In place of those icky “enemy unlawful combatants,” there were suddenly misunderstood “detainees,” replete with personal stories about like our own.

Better yet, Guantanamo was almost, nearly, about to be closed as well, at least we knew sometime it would be gone and that was just as good as if it already was. Who knows, I thought at the time, maybe the innocent once released may at last turn up on a beach on some Caribbean island, as we make long overdue amends to these framed “terrorists”?

Let Me Count the Ways Why Obama Should at Last Speak Out ( —I write this at around noon on Saturday, and suspect the pressure of public outrage will soon get to Obama, and he soon will recant and start sounding Reaganesque)

(As in something like this:

“Hundreds of thousands of gallant Iranians are now engaged in a non-violent moral struggle against tyranny in Iran-one of the great examples of bravery in our times. All free peoples of the world watch their ordeal, and can only wish them success, while owing them a great deal of gratitude for risking their lives for the innate and shared notion of human freedom and dignity. We in the United States ask the government of Iran—as well as its military and security forces — to recognize the universal appeal of freedom that flourishes among its own remarkable people, to stand down and renounce its serial use of violence and coercion-and to ensure a truly free election where the voices of all can be at last fully heard, so that  Iran can once more properly reenter  the family of law-biding nations”.)

So why speak out louder? (Does not Obama see that the world has been given a rare chance, thanks to brave Iranians—as if the German people had risen up in 1938 in fear of what was on the horizon)

1)   It is the moral and right thing to do to support the brave and idealistic (the Congressional Democrats mostly get this. And, after a week of embarrassment, the “I worship whoever runs the White House” pundits are not far behind and scrambling to retract and revise last week’s obsequious columns.). The dissidents in fact can win in this new age of private instant communications, in which global news is not predicated on elite correspondents and news desks editors, but can flow globally and instantaneously, unfiltered, with unforeseen consequences.)

2)   The theocracy is a fiendish regime that hides behind third-world victimhood while it murders and promotes terror abroad. When it totters, the world sighs relief from Iraq to Lebanon; when it chest-thumps, thousands die at home and abroad.

3)   Of the three ways to stop a nuclear theocracy-(regime change, preemption, embargo), supporting the opponents of the regime is the most logical, peaceful, and cost-effective-and has the best chance of success. (Ask the worried surrounding Arab frontline countries).

4)    There is a long bipartisan American history of supporting dissidents who were fighting for election fairness abroad in Poland, Serbia, Latin America, and South Africa. (Does Obama think Mandela did not wish words of support from America? Why then would he think the Iranians being shot at in the streets would not wish moral clarity from the prophet of Cairo?). The Europeans (and even the Arab world) are way ahead of us.

5)   Obama’s realpolitik is flawed: 1) if the mullahs win, they will have greater contempt for our timidity; 2) if the dissidents win, they will not forget our realistic fence-sitting; 3) you can never believe (ever) anything the mullahs say or do. Negotiating with them is like signing a pact with Hitler. They are afraid of US voiced support for the dissidents, not the dissidents themselves who ask for our solidarity. If anything, the theocrats grasp that their own do not want a nuclear confrontation with Israel in which the people would be sacrificial pawns. Again and again, the dissidents have repeated that they are tired of being hated in the world as Ahmadinejad’s Iranians, not that they wanted Obama’s America to be less critical of Ahmadinejad. 

Abroad

I think the Europeans, who, remember, caught Obamania quite early, thought they were going to get more of the bipartisan American security shield, albeit with a charismatic multicultural veneer that would resonate with their citizens: no more Texas. No more Christianity. No more twang. No more nuclur. No more Iraq. But same old NATO. Same old bad cop to their good cop. Same old wide open Ami economy. Same old chance for triangulation.  And?

As we are seeing in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country.

At no point does he suggest that the fact his father left Kenya for the U.S. and fathered at least one son who would grow up American rather than Kenyan was a great gift, as we see with the ordeal of many of the Obama half-siblings in Africa. Yes, he talks about change in America, but never tells the world exactly how an America of many races and faiths never descends into the hatred and violence we see most elsewhere in diverse societies. How, after all, does one apologize for success? (”I am sorry we are not killing as in the Balkans; so sad we do not follow the Rwandan model; schucks, no Kurd-Shiite-Sunni troubles here.”)

It used to be cute to talk about how “Bush turned off the Europeans.” Perhaps. But beneath all the public demonstrations and burning effigies, the old guard knew that Bush, like Clinton, Bush, and Reagan (but not Carter), would be there should the Russians, Koreans, Chinese, the lunatic regimes in the Middle East, the Al Qaedists and the rest threaten Western interests.

I don’t see how they can assume such a thing any more.

From the trivial like the treatment of the Churchill bust or the DVD gift to Gordon Brown, to the profound like the serial apologies, voting present on Iran, and deer-in-the-headlights stance on Korea, they must assume that the “European Rapid Deployment Force” is now their primary bulwark against the foes of civilization.

Bottom line: “Be careful what you wish for.”

It is neither caricature nor reductionism to suggest that the degree to which a country has expressed past hostility to the United States, the more it wins attention and apology from Barack Obama. In contrast, to the degree a country is constitutional and pro-American, the more likely it will be either ignored by Obama or  its internal affairs “meddled” with. Cf. the case with Iran, Venezuela, the West Bankers, Russia, etc. In contrast, woe to Israel! (And Iraq too).

Weird Iranian Politics

There is a certain difficulty, unease really, that one sees among Leftist and liberal commentators on Iran. The demonstrations in Tehran are ideal topics of liberal anguish: hundreds of thousands in the streets, women, gays, students, all calling for freedom, human rights, and non-violent change — and opposed by religious fundamentalists, the gun-toting army, creepy police. It should be a no-brainer.

But there is often silence. Why and how?

1)   Obama is President. US official policy is now liberal official policy, and there is a certain party line to embrace (we forget how right-wing radio went after Bush for the Dubai ports deal, the steel tariff, open borders, the deficits, No Child Left Behind. Prescription drug, etc.).

That means the President’s heretofore Kissingerian realism — wait until one side wins, and then deal with the winner in terms of our own interest — gets a pass. Suddenly liberals who called for the overthrow of everyone from the odious Pinochet to the even worse Somoza, are well, silent, offering Obama sound enough talking points that we must not play into the hands of this or that side, that both sides have anti-Americanism in common, that the bomb lurks large. Their realism may be clever and in the long run astute for the US, but it is realism nonetheless, and just the sort of realpolitik that they used to decry.

2)   The Iranian fascistic government — theocratic, anti-gay, anti-religious tolerance, anti-feminist — has always disguised its venom with Che-like popular anti-Americanism. Its theocrats don’t wear ties. They mouth Hollywood-like anti-Americanism. They hate Bush as much as the Left does. In other words, the Iranians (cf. again Clinton’s lunatic 2005 Davos remarks praising to the skies Iranian “democracy”) have always been given a sort of exemption given their Third-world fides, and refrain “we are the perpetual victims of a CIA-inspired coup over six decades ago.” (Kermit Roosevelt did not prevent democracy in Iran from 1979 to 2009 any more than Pearl Harbor forced the United States to spend a lot on defense the next 60 plus years).

3) Iraq looms large. The Iraqi elections were far more open, far more inspected than anything in the long history of Iran. Maliki is a more legitimate leader than any in Iraq. And yet we shun Maliki as tainted, while suggesting that Iranian thugs are somehow more authentic (note the large number of essays suddenly appearing arguing Ahmadinejad really won the election and the result should be respected.)

Here at home

We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984).

Then the standard references come to “the mess we inherited”, the “prior administration”, and “what we found.” These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.). Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes.

Then he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.”

No one can quite believe that one has just heard Obama deny that he’s going to do exactly what he then outlines he is going to do — but at least for the last six months this deception sounded good.

1. Conventional wisdom insisted that we had “empowered” Iran by removing Saddam and allowing the Shiites to gain democratic majorities in Iraq. It is at least as possible that we are destabilizing the autocracy in Iran by promoting Iraqi democracy that is no longer just a warning about civil chaos, but a positive view of a Shiite-majority democratic society unknown in Iran. The notion of two large contiguous oil producing democracies in the Middle East is unacceptable to the radical Islamists and most of the Sunni Arab dictatorships as well.

2. When one apologizes to a contemporary terrorist-sponsoring regime for events that occurred 60 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and does so without context of the past, then naturally one is self-censored, and will be reluctant to comment on contemporary events in Iran — relegated to a bystander watching the flow of events, predicating the response on who wins.

3. We are seeing in Washington that the multiculturalism impulse — one does not use Western paradigms to judge others — is far stronger than the supposedly classical liberal idea that human freedom is a universal concept that trumps culture. In other words, multicultural foreign policy is a sophisticated and politically-correct version of the old, far more intellectually honest realist notion that we let the bastards do what they want to their own people, and then deal with the thug that emerges in the real world of mutual self-interest.

4. For the probable majority of Iranians who voted against Ahmadinejad, the idea that the US was reaching out to him, despite his subsidies to terrorist killers in Lebanon and Iraq, and his brutality at home, was not necessarily a sign of American good will. If the prior policy of disengagement with the Iranian theocracy, while appealing to the good will of the Iranian people was so flawed, why was it, then, that despite America’s bad global PR, the Iranian people remained far more pro-American than did the Arab Street, whose autocrats about four years ago we ceased pressuring to liberalize?

For at least a decade, liberal icons like Bill Clinton (”Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority … (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections … There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.)”,  Jimmy Carter and NY Times columnists have tried to make cute points that our worst enemy in the Middle East, Iran, was in fact the most democratic — ridiculing the notion of others that rigged plebiscites, pre-screened candidates, the absence of a truly secret ballot and free press, organized thuggery against dissidents, suppression of women’s rights, etc. were hardly democratic.

Iran, let us now confess, understood the America utopians very well, offering them both the thin veneer of “democracy” and at the same time the notion of revolutionary opposition to “imperialist” and “capitalist” America.  When Clinton in 2005 said that nonsense at Davos he was simply playing to the international politically correct Western bunch, the subtext was “hey, that awful Bush is running things now in the US, and it is a lot worse over here than it is in the Iran that he demonizes (cf. Clinton’s flourish: “…certainly not my own”). That Iran was killing soldiers in Iraq, sponsoring killers in Lebanon and the West Bank, trying to get a nuke to do worse to Israel did not mean all that much to Bill Clinton, at least if he could sound nuanced, neat, and contrarian among the international drones at Davos.

I’ll take axis of evil and evil empire any day to serial apologies to this creepy regime, and “certainly not my own” comparisons.

1)   Why did we reject the Bush policy of non-engagement with a monster like Ahmadinejad, who oppressed his own and threatened nuclear destruction to Israel? Is it all that moral, or all that wise, or all that much in US realpolitik interests to apologize to a thug? Does it show solidarity with the Iranian people to court a nut? What is so smart in making Iran the center of our attention rather than the Maliki democratic government in Iraq? Hamas rather than democratic Israel? Is what we are now seeing in the streets of Iran proof of all the praise once heaped on theocratic “democratic” Iran by the likes of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and the NY Times?

2)   Will someone please tell President Obama that when you send videos to Ahmadinejad, apologize for something that happened over a half-century ago, and ignore serial Iranian killing of Iraqi and American democrats in Iraq, you, well, send a message that implicitly you either approve of him-or are afraid of him? One of two things is happening in Iran: either a boasting, cocky Ahmadinejad rigged the election, without worry that anyone-much less the present US-would care. Or, if the election result is semi-accurate (I doubt it), he energized his base, by showing the rural believers that even much worshipped Barack Hussein Obama was courting their all-wise leader and de facto agreeing to the new Persian Islamic nuclear hegemony.

3)   So what constitutes Obama’s morality? Courting the Islamic street by distorting history? Being more critical of one’s own democratic open society than the autocratic Arab governments you seek to placate? Using your middle name abroad to court favor and separate yourself from America’s past, while insisting that those who invoke it at home are as illiberal as you are liberal in broadcasting it?

4)   Much of Iran wants what they see going on in Iraq. How odd that the ‘experts’ assured us that Bush had empowered Iran by removing his rival Saddam. Perhaps in the short term-but in the long term TV, radio, and osmosis from free Iraq is proving more destabilizing to the theocracy in Iran than are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and shaped charged IEDs to Iraq.

I had a number of exchanges on the Palin-Letterman controversy (see below). Where to start on David Letterman’s attack on Palin on her visit to New York to do charitable work, accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter Willow?

The hypocrisy of the Left that used to monitor slurs about women’s appearances, sick jokes about statuary rape, demonization of women with charges of promiscuity-all this rightly was taboo? But now silence? (But then no one seemed bothered either by the rather shameless instance of plagiarism on the part of Maureen Dowd, the NY Times columnist, who habitually accuses Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld of lying and other moral lapses.)

The metrosexual, hip David Letterman offered an apology I think that essentially was something along the following lines. Here’s my paraphrase: ‘Sorry, I confused the 14-year-old Willow Palin with the 18-year-old Bristol Plain, so I was wrong for suggesting the younger Palin girl would be “knocked up” during a baseball game with Alex Rodriguez, or draw in Eliot Spitzer for sex, when I really meant that Bristol certainly would.” (Note the silence about calling Governor Palin “slutty” looking. So if some right-wing nut says that Michelle Obama is “slutty” looking, are we to expect no consequences?)

Misopalinism

What it is about Sarah Palin that drives the Left insane? Her charisma? Her authentic blue-collar roots? The accent? Todd? The pregnancies? The ability to galvanize crowds. Joe Biden tried to fake his working class origins, but Palin seems to live, not romanticize, the life of the middle strata, so would not the Left appreciate someone from the non-elite?

I suggest two reasons for the fury of the  aristocratic Left. One was Palin’s stance on abortion. In the elite feminist mind, the perfect storm would be for a 40ish career woman, on the upswing of her cursus honorum, getting pregnant and, then, heaven forbid, delivering the child with full fore-knowledge of chromosomal abnormality. Or having her 17-year old come to full term with a child, unmarried, and without money?

The Shadow of Abortion

For most upscale, educated liberals, a daughter’s future career is ruined by pregnancy, and abortion is often the answer. Second, Todd Palin, the Palin accent, the Wasilla connection, the whole notion of Alaska, all this conjured up the elite liberal notion of “trailer trash”-and we all know from Obama’s clingers speech, that the white Christian working class is the last group in America that can be caricatured and slurred with impunity. To the liberal urban elite, poor “whites” are those responsible for racism and other sins associated with the dominant culture, and thus by association taint the white aristocracy unfairly.

Race, again, all the time

I received a lot of angry mail about a recent prediction that the Obama administration would acerbate not diminish racial tensions, by its addiction to identity politics and the constant invocation or racial difference. Nothing since his ascension has disabused me of that observation. Obama himself, in unusual fashion, has given a number of speeches abroad emphasizing his African heritage, his middle name Hussein, and his father’s Muslim’s connection.

We have heard the Attorney General call his countrymen “cowards” for not talking more about racial identity. We have heard our Supreme Court nominee state on repeated occasions that a Latina is intrinsically better at being a judge than a white male counterpart. Now Rev. Wright has reemerged to  suggest that Obama will no longer meet with him because “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me ….”  (a new book about Obama suggests he and Wright met in secret during the campaign after the Wright racist outbursts).

He’s Back

Note as well, that Wright, in his anti-Semitic diatribe, employs the now customary straw men “they”, which we’ve become well accustomed to. (I note here that what was most disturbing about the Letterman Palin jokes and his “apology” was the audience laughing at his crudity-reminiscent of the standing ovations in the Trinity congregation that met Wright’s profanity, racist outburst, and damning of the United States. This country has a long way to go.)

This racialism will continue. Why? Because Obama discovered long ago than racial identification brings as many dividends as does the content of one’s character or achievement. It is a force multiplier and foolishly left untapped. I fear more, not less, of this, as the tab for Obama’s charge-it economy comes due at about the same time dubious players abroad conclude that serial apologies amount to a green light for adventurism. When his popularity dives, I think critics will be seen as biased and prejudicial.

What was ironic about all Wright’s accusations of Obama’s Jewish hypnosis, was that in just the first six months of his administration Obama has proven to be the most anti-Israeli President since the founding of the Jewish state. Wright should be delighted not disappointed; perhaps his unhappiness is the inability to bask publicly in White House visits, rather than ideological discord.