Weekly Standard

Since there is so little of it, let’s start with the good news about the release from prison and triumphant return to Libya of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the terrorist who was supposedly serving a life sentence in a Scottish prison for his role in blowing Pan Am 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people.

The good news is that many Scots, including members of parliament, were genuinely outraged by the decision of Scotland’s cabinet secretary for justice, Kenny MacAskill, to grant “compassionate release” to Megrahi, who has cancer. The same is true of Brits in general. The local press in Edinburgh and London has been chock-full of denunciation of the move and speculation about who knew and said what and when, as well as what the real motive might have been. It looks like there’s an excellent chance MacAskill’s political career is over, and if Gordon Brown needed another nail in the coffin of his effort to remain Britain’s prime minister past next June, this was one. Two cheers for righteous indignation. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Warsaw

The Obama administration has hit more than a few reset buttons since taking office. In the case of the Islamic world, resetting has meant respectful outreach exemplified in Obama’s Cairo speech. With China, resetting means minimizing the American hectoring on human rights and conspicuous displays of antagonism toward Beijing such as a meeting for the Dalai Lama with the American president. The effort to reset Israel-Palestine, now itself reset, entailed early pressure on Israel to halt all settlement construction in the West Bank. In Iran, the reset was an offer of carrots–up to normalization of relations in exchange for an end to Iran’s ambition to acquire a nuclear weapon. And, of course, the biggest reset of all has been with Russia, where the administration has sought to de-ideologize relations for the sake of arms-control agreements and future help with Iran. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Historians looking back on these tumultuous times will no doubt argue over the precise date on which the Age of Palin began. Her speech at the Republican National Convention on September 3 certainly catapulted her to national renown. But there is a good case to be made for her introductory appearance in Dayton, Ohio, five days before.

It’s all there: You have the same poise and panache Palin exhibited at the convention. You have the self-assurance of a champion high-school athlete who went on to bigger and better things (unlike in the gloomy Democratic, Bruce Springsteen version of life, in which it’s all downhill after your Glory Days). There’s the ability to deliver a barb with a smile. And above all, that day inaugurated arguably the most incoherent and blubbering partisan response to a candidate in the history of American politics–against which the charms of the candidate stood out even more clearly. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” Think about it: Could there be a pithier way of making the point that if you don’t own something and have no stake in its long-term future, you’re not going to take care of it the same way you would if it was yours? It’s suitable both for New York Times columns by Tom Friedman (he’s quoted it many times, usually attributing it to Harvard’s Larry Summers) and for toastmasters the world around (you can find it on the “Stories for Speakers and Writers” blog, where it’s sourced to former Microsoft executive John Wood, quoting Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter).

I got to thinking about it the other day when I got back from the carwash with my rented car. Continue reading →

The sequence of events leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, per media reports, goes like this: White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten sends out a directive to senior Bush officials telling them that if they are not planning to stay until the end of the administration, January 2009, then they need to depart by September of this year. Gonzales, under siege from Democrats in Congress over his handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys and his role in wiretapping and other national security hot-button issues, decides he can’t promise to go the distance and announces he is leaving. His friend and patron the president seizes the occasion to denounce the AG’s critics, railing against “months of unfair treatment” of Gonzales, his “good name . . . dragged through the mud for political reasons.” Continue reading →

There’s no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you’d have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats. The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are united in the view that George W. Bush is public enemy No. 1, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove alternating in the No. 2 slot, what really pumps up the volume is any sign of deviationism on their own side.

This is an especially acute problem for the Democratic foreign policy establishment–the people who will actually be staffing a Clinton or Obama administration at the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Whether you agree with them on policy or not, they are serious people who recognize they’re going to have to deal with the world as it is. Unfortunately, this sensibility often runs afoul of the netroots view that the world flowed with milk and honey until Bush ruined everything. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Prague

In January 2005, George W. Bush delivered what will surely go down as one of the most ambitious inaugural addresses in presidential history. He pledged the United States to “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny” in the world through the promotion of “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.” In other words, he proposed the eradication of the most consistently recurring character in politics since its misty origins in prehistory, the dictator or ruler or strongman. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Three weeks ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Bush administration’s firing of several U.S. attorneys and did so to bad reviews even from conservatives, most of official Washington figured he was a goner. When President Bush stepped out at the end of the day to say a good word for his embattled AG, the general reaction was that Bush had demonstrated yet again how out of touch he is. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

The singular advantage of being in the opposition is that the majority has to make the first move, and unlike chess, going first conveys no advantage the majority doesn’t already enjoy. What was striking last week about the House’s consideration of the stimulus package was the glimpse it offered of a potentially valuable political strategy for Republicans. Call it “Triangulation II”–the GOP effort to gain advantage by dividing Democrats in Congress from President Obama. Continue reading →

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For years now, the political science literature has been exploring the phenomenon of the “democratic peace,” according to which, to state it in its bluntest form, democracies do not go to war with one another. It’s not that democracies are pacifist by nature. Democratic countries, acting alone or in concert, do go to war with nondemocratic countries from time to time, for example the United States and others against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and NATO against former Yugoslavia over the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Continue reading →