The Washington Times

It was surprising that Tom DeLay got to write his own narrative for his exit from Congress. One might have expected a greater degree of media and partisan skepticism directed at his self-portrait of his exit as a man seizing a political opportunity to extract maximum benefit for his party. At least, if my former deputy chief of staff had copped a plea to corruption charges the very same week, with more to come, I would expect skepticism.

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The Washington Times

You are perhaps wondering what it is like to be in Paris at the time of a nationwide strike, in which demonstrators gather in an attempt to be deemed expressing the “general will” in opposition to their government’s betrayal of the principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity”? For there I found myself a week ago today, when – but let’s let Reuters catch us up, with reference to the repeat performance scheduled for today: “Tuesday’s demonstrations and strikes will be keenly watched for signs that two months of sometimes violent protests peaked last week with the three million demonstrators that unions say joined a nationwide day of action on March 28.” Where to begin? Maybe with the 3 million figure. That’s the figure the unions are giving, and it bears about as much relation to the actual size of the demonstrations as one might expect from those who have every incentive to vastly overstate their influence.

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The Washington Times 

That’s some feud between the White House and Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Here’s Mr. Fukuyama writing in or quoted in the New York Times sniping at the Bush administration, and there’s the White House firing back by e-mail quoting Mr. Fukuyama’s past statements in contrast to his current ones.

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Questions for Ukrainians and Georgians

The Washington Times

Six years ago, the government of Lithuania invited me to Vilnius for a summit meeting of Central and Eastern European states geographically dispersed from Estonia in the north to Bulgaria on the Black Sea. The audacious purpose of that meeting was to announce that they had decided to work cooperatively on their common goal of integration into Western institutions, especially NATO. Rather than compete with one another to see which, in the post-communist period, deserved to be first to cross the line into full membership in the West, they would form a mutual support structure in pursuit of the quickest integration of all.

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…But Iraqis embrace the democratic process

The Washington Times

What makes a civil war worthy of that designation? Or rather, when is violent conflict sufficiently widespread to warrant the label “civil war”? That would seem to be the question Iraq posed in the aftermath of the bombing of the Shi’ite mosque on Feb. 22.

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Bush flat-footed while Congress falls for knee-jerk reaction

The Washington Times

Plenty of blame to go around this week on the topic of the ports deal. So let’s get busy.

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Deteriorating conditions require Bush’s leadership

The Washington Times

President Bush seems to have surprised some of the officials in his own administration with his forward-leaning comments on a decision in the works to support a substantial increase in the peacekeeping force trying to do something about genocidal conditions in Darfur. Good. It will take no less than the sustained personal engagement of the president of the United States to get something effective done there.

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Cartoon imbroglio not about religion

The Washington Times

In the Danish cartoon imbroglio, does the issue at hand have anything to do with the poor taste of the cartoons themselves? Does free expression always trump taste? My initial inclination was to think that poor taste was an issue. I’ve changed my mind.

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