Germany’s Merkel stands firm

The Washington Times

A star is born. Angela Merkel made her debut appearance as German chancellor at this weekend’s Munich Conference on Security Policy, a gathering of NATO defense ministers, ambassadors and current and former policy-makers. The annual meeting is the leading venue for taking the indoor temperature of trans-Atlantic relations, by which I mean the prevailing attitude among those who have responsibility for actually deciding questions like what NATO will or won’t do in Afghanistan, Iraq or Darfur. Mrs. Merkel’s speech, and even more so her unscripted responses to questions from the floor, dazzled the crowd.

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The Washington Times

On the day of the state of the union message, we might summarize the state of political play as follows: President Bush has fought his way back – from a catastrophic collapse of job approval all the way up to historic lows of job approval. And at this writing Monday morning, I can’t really tell if Democrats are filibustering the confirmation vote for Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court or not.

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The Washington Times

What to do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a problem whose complexity we are all busy admiring. It is already clear that no approach to the problem comes without significant costs, and besides which, offers no guarantee of success. And if there are any optimists out there, as there were prior to the Iraq war, I haven’t run into them.

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The Washington Times

Why don’t we let Jack Burden, the narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” have the first word this week? It’s the famous passage in which his boss, Willie Stark, the ambitious and corrupt governor of Louisiana modeled on the legendary Huey Long, makes a bid to have the last word on politics and the soul of man: “It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) ‘There is always something.’ “And I said, ‘Maybe not on the Judge.’ And he said, ‘Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.’ ”

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Where K Street and Capitol Hill meet

The Washington Times

For those who are interested in political ideas and public policy-making, the role of K Street in the process is a source of considerable confusion. So perhaps the downfall of crooked Jack Abramoff will open a window through which the light at last shines on the whole multi-zillion-dollar lobbying industry. Unfortunately, I think it’s just as likely that the Abramoff scandal will obscure more than it reveals.

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The Washington Times

Oh dear, it happened again: By late fall, Democrats had talked themselves into the proposition that the Bush administration was, for all practical purposes, over and done with. A few scant weeks later, in fact just in time for Christmas, Mr. Bush was back, with a respectable and rising job-approval rating and momentum in the news cycle.

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The Washington Times

Ignoring the law by engaging in domestic spying? Flouting the law? Willfully violating the law? No, on the contrary. The Bush administration’s record is quite clear and consistent: Somewhere inside the locked filing cabinets of this administration’s top lawyers are perfectly clear and cogent legal arguments on behalf of, dare one say, every single official action the administration has ever taken.

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The Washington Times

Was that a hallucination we suffered last week at the quagmire? All those millions of, what were they, happy Iraqis, joyous Iraqis, turning out to vote? Well, not just to vote, but to elect a government in accordance with the constitution they approved two months ago, the first truly democratic government in the history of the Arab Middle East? And not just the Shi’ites and Kurds, whose suffering under the regime of Saddam Hussein was especially harsh, but also Sunnis, who dominated the old Ba’athist government and have been trying to figure out where they fit into the new constitutional order.

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The Washington Times

I have come to the capital of elegant pessimism in order to address the question “When should the U.S. leave Iraq?” at the French Center on the United States’ estimable annual conference on what’s going on in America.

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The Washington Times

A year after the Orange Revolution saw millions of Ukrainians take to the frozen streets of Kiev to protest a rigged election, ultimately leading to the nullification of its results and the election of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency, I found myself in a seminar room at Donetsk National University in eastern Ukraine, answering questions students posed in generally excellent English on the future of their country and its place in the Western world.

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