EVENING UPDATE,  FEBRUARY 13,  2008

•   There are stories in the news that tell us how grim the international situation has become.  We can contrast them with the silliness of the Democratic campaign, where any thoughtful discussion of international threats has become forbidden, lest it upset moveon.org.

But a vote in Washington tells an important story, as The Wall Street Journal reports today. The United States Senate, acting wisely, passed a bill extending warrantless wiretaps of overseas terrorists.  There were liberal attempts to sink the bill with amendments.  This is what happened:

"We lost every single battle we had on this bill," conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing. His own amendment -- to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies that cooperated with the government after 9/11 -- didn't even get a third of the Senate. It lost 67-31, though notably among the 31 was possible Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. (Hillary Clinton was absent, while John McCain voted in favor.)

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had "acted in good faith." Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told "no way" when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

Will someone please wake up and consider that Barack Obama may be a hard leftist, to the left even of George McGovern? 

But, of course, we can take the opposite view - that he voted against the bill to keep the maniac left off his back, and will do better as president.  I guess that's possible.  It's also possible, however, that he meant his vote. 

Do we take a chance?

Oh, but wait.  Isn't that the politics of fear?  I apologize.  I vote for hope, lots of hope.   

•   A few nights ago I attended the Power Line dinner in New York honoring Norman Podhoretz's book, "World War IV."  (There goes that fearmonger again.)  It was a pleasure to hear serious people like Henry Kissinger and Mr. Podhoretz discuss foreign policy.  I felt I was back in the adult world, and not in the world of MSNBC.  Secretary Kissinger's remarks are being played in several parts at Power Line.  Well worth hearing.  And Power Line is always well worth reading.

•   In a thoughtful, well-reported story, The New Republic, carefully and with great fairness, examines Obama's record on Iraq.  The story plainly shows that Obama has wavered in his views, and that political calculation is part of his game plan.  To be sure, there have been moments when he wonders whether he's been right, and gives greater weight to opposite opinion than we may have thought.  For that, he is to be applauded.  But there is this paragraph, which I find alarming:

On the last weekend of September 2002, Marilyn Katz, a p.r. maven and former aide to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, was awoken by a phone call from her old friend BettyLu Saltzman. "We have to do something about Bush's drive to war, " said Saltzman, a wealthy political gadfly in her seventies. Katz agreed. The two women contacted friends on the local liberal-activist circuit--"a bunch of old sixties radicals," says Katz--about staging a demonstration. A slew of local politicians were invited to speak. Few accepted. One of them was Obama.

Yeah, I'm afraid so.  Obama's instinct is to go with the left.  Some of his economic advisers are middle-of-the-road, but his economic stands always veer off to port.  It's that instinct that should worry us, especially as we confront more powerful radical states that are acquiring modern technology.

Thanks to Greg Koster for this last story.

•   Maybe candidate Obama should inform some of his advisers that they report to him, not the other way around.  The New York Sun reveals - you'll notice the silence in the MSM about this - that one of the candidate's chief foreign-policy guys, the execrable Zbig Brzezinski, is visiting Damascus, where all of us want to go to take in the extensive human rights available there:

Mr. Brzezinski's visit to Syria, a country President Bush has accused of arming terrorists and ordering political assassinations in Lebanon, is in many ways in keeping with a theme of the Obama campaign. The Illinois senator in August said during a Democratic debate that he would be willing to meet with foreign adversaries, earning a rebuke from Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York, who said such an approach would be "naïve."

The Obama camp's reaction? 

A spokesman for the senator's presidential campaign, Tommy Vietor, said the campaign did not know Mr. Brzezinski was leading the delegation. "The first we heard of this trip was from you," he said. He added: "Brzezinski is not a day-to-day adviser for the campaign, he is someone whose guidance Senator Obama seeks on Iraq."

A supporter of Mrs. Clinton, Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, said he found it hard to believe that one of the Illinois senator's main advisers would not know that his visit to Syria would appear to have the tacit consent of the Obama campaign.

You know, Barack, now is the time to take the man to the woodshed.  You sit down.  You have a talk.  You inform him that you are running for president.  You ask that he not embarrass you.  You hint at consequences.

That's the grown-up world, Barack.

Congressman Engel concludes, correctly:

Mr. Engel yesterday said he was not a particular admirer of Mr. Brzezinski's, though he praised his intelligence. He said the former Carter administration official addressed Democratic lawmakers last month at a retreat at Williamsburg, Va., on America's policy toward Iran. "I remember thinking, 'Why are we listening to him?' He was the national security adviser for Jimmy Carter 30 years ago. He proceeded to talk to us about Iran, and I said, 'Let me see, didn't the ayatollahs come to power, didn't we have this problem when you were in the White House?'"

Ah yes, I remember it well.

What a bunch.

•   I must refer you to a refreshing, outstanding article by Thomas Sowell, one of the finest writers of our time, in National Review Online.  Sowell discusses Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism," and reviews a part of history that many in the leftist establishment would prefer that you didn't know. 

One of the great myths is that the left fights fascism.  In truth, the left will fight fascism only when it's convenient, when it advances the causes of the left.  Sowell notes:

Moreover, during the 1920s “progressives” in the United States and Britain recognized the kinship of their ideas with those of Mussolini, who was widely lionized by the Left.

Famed British novelist and prominent Fabian socialist H. G. Wells called for “Liberal Fascism,” saying “the world is sick of parliamentary politics.”

Another literary giant and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, also expressed his admiration for Mussolini — as well as for Hitler and Stalin, because they “did things,” instead of just talk.

In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain.

Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the Left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

W. E. B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers.

Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was “absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order.”

As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

Maybe this explains, to some degree, the indifference of much of the left today to modern fascist movements like Islamofascism.  Been there, done that.

•   This morning I reported the intellectually stimulating news of another sex show at Duke University.  Reader Jean Spik alerted me to some campus reaction. The Chronicle, Duke's newspaper, was very mildly critical of the hypocrisy involved in inviting this exhibit after Duke denounced athletes for hiring strippers.  The flabby statement follows:

But on a more policy-driven level, critics are right to point out that no matter how those sex workers performed, the fact of the matter is that Duke organizations did pay for strippers to come to campus-a decision that clearly flies in the face of University policy which states that "strippers may not be invited or paid to perform at events sponsored by individual students, residential living groups or cohesive units."

Take that, Board of Trustees!

An op-ed piece is stronger.  Be aware that it contains graphic descriptions offensive to people with good upbringings.  The key quote:

I'd like to say the audience was as appalled as I was, but they were stunningly "into" the show. They were as compliant as puppets, doing whatever was asked of them, screaming with laughter at every joke and enthusiastically applauding each performer who inserted or removed an object from his or her rectum. Many audience members were dressed as though-and there is no better way to describe it-they were Harry Potter characters attempting to blend in with Muggles. I had a momentary internal evaluation of who I stereotyped to be creepier, the "artists" or the viewers.

Unfortunately, the only criterion for determining whether the show returns next year is ostensibly the feedback from surveys handed out at the show, meaning the only perspective heard will be that of these same audience members, enthusiastically calling for a repeat performance.

The writer concludes:

Apparently, those who suddenly want to "move on" now that the lacrosse tables have turned now have their wish; Duke is welcoming back strippers with open arms and wallets.

I think Duke charges about $42,000 a year.

And I'll be back tomorrow morning.

Posted on February 13, 2009.