EVENING UPDATE,  MARCH 9,  2008

MIDEAST TRAGEDY

Michael Goodwin, in The New York Daily News, has an excellent column on the reaction of some Palestinians to the massacre of Israeli students in Jerusalem - the dancing in the streets, the celebrations:

We have gotten so numbed to the endless violence in the Mideast that we often close our minds as well as our eyes. If we have any response at all, it is something like, "Why can't those people just get along?"

The answer lies in the sickening contrast of Thursday's massacre and celebration. They can't get along because too many Palestinians embrace a culture of death. It is a culture stuck in the Dark Ages of ancient hatreds and unspeakable violence.

The evidence lies in missing pictures. Why no photos of Palestinians marching to condemn the massacre? Where are the Palestinian young people sympathizing with dead and maimed students their own age? Where are the Palestinian parents grieving for the Israeli parents who lost their children?

Unfortunately, those are the easiest questions to answer: There were no pictures of sad Palestinians because there were no marches or wide expressions of sympathy.

Apart from the obligatory disapproval mumbled by the government, there was no condemnation. More typical was a message from Hamas, the terror group: "We bless the operation. It will not be the last."

Every society has its madmen, its gangsters and killers. But in functioning societies, they are shunned and punished as an example of how not to behave.

Not so in Palestinian society or in too much of the Muslim world. Celebrations of death, as they did Thursday, soon become odes to martyrs. In less than a day, pictures of the lone gunman in the massacre appeared on posters glorifying his death. Behind his clean-shaven, ordinary face were a mosque and messages of heroic defiance.

Excellent points.  But how often did you hear them made after the massacre?  America, as a now-famous poster found in a Marine Corps area of Iraq said, isn't at war.  America is at the mall.  We forget that the very mentality behind the massacre of the Israeli students is aimed at us.  But you wouldn't think so listening to the Democratic candidates.

You'll hear it from John McCain.  But will America listen?  In the years before World War II, Winston Churchill was despised by the elites of British society for his warnings about the Nazi military buildup.  The BBC loathed him.  Many journalists loathed him.  Winston Churchill was voted out of office in 1945 by a Britain that thought they could get back to building their nanny state.  The loathers continued on, training a new generation of elitists.

Will we resist?  Or will we be the new Europe and Britain, accommodating other "cultures" to the point where we disappear?

McCAIN TO ISRAEL

There used to be a standard foreign tour that New York politicians took. It was called the Three-I tour - Ireland, Italy and Israel.  I don't know if John McCain is familiar with that tradition, but he'll be in Israel next week, according to an Israel newspaper.  This is good.  He should travel to a number of foreign countries, exhibiting his stature, showing his familiarity with foreign affairs.  He will look presidential.  The Dems will look like minor squabblers, fighting over domestic programs:

US presidential candidate John McCain is expected to visit Israel next week, Ma'ariv reported Sunday.

According the paper, the Republican candidate is set to meet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on his trip.

Will McCain's trip do him any good?  I don't know.  Again, we have the question of how focused Americans are about national security.  Right now, McCain trails both Clinton and Obama in polls, but by a razor-thin margin.  As I've written here before, in a Democratic year the Dem presidential candidates should be much further ahead.  Maybe enough Americans are listening to send McCain over the top.  As Sinatra might have put it, leave us we should pray.

HEAVY HITTERS FOR McCAIN

McCain will get active help from two of the most creative political figures on the Bush team - Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman:

Ken Mehlman, who ran Bush’s 2004 campaign, is now serving as an unpaid, outside adviser to the Arizona Republican. Karl Rove, the president’s top political hand since his Texas days, recently gave money to McCain and soon after had a private conversation with the senator. A top McCain adviser said both Mehlman and Rove are now informally advising the campaign. Rove refused to detail his conversation with McCain.

The list could grow longer. Dan Bartlett, formerly a top aide in the Bush White House, and Sara Taylor, the erstwhile Bush political adviser, said they are eager to provide any assistance and advice possible to McCain.

But there is dissent among the troops.  Some Republicans feel there's danger in McCain relying too much on the Bush brain trust:

One of those making that argument is Matt Dowd, Bush’s chief strategist in 2004.

“[McCain] has sided himself so closely to the administration, especially on Iraq, now having various Bush advisers — that doesn’t sit well with the public,” said Dowd, who has recently broken with the Bush inner circle. “The public wants the non-Bush candidate.”

Dowd also argued that he believes that the proximity of Bush’s advisers could lead McCain to a strategic mistake: refighting the 2004 campaign. “There is a real danger of that,” Dowd added. “And I think some of the things John McCain has done, and how he’s done it, has been a fight or a battle that’s gone. I don’t think this is going to be a terrorism election or a national security election.”

The McCain adviser said Dowd's concern is unwarranted, pointing to the campaign’s belief that the economy will play a far greater role in the 2008 race than it did in 2004.

I think the McCain adviser is probably right.  Get the advice from those who were there.  Then, independently, decide what to do with it.

VIEW OF HILLARY - FROM THE UK

We've noted here that some of the best reporting on our campaign is coming from foreign reporters.  Here, Sarah Baxter of The Times of London, outlines Hillary Clinton's strategy for winning the nomination:

FRESH from her victories in three out of four states last week and surging back in the national polls, Hillary Clinton has crafted a new strategy for winning the Democratic nomination which she believes will legitimise her claim to be president.

Clinton thinks she can win a majority of the popular vote in primaries and caucuses, even if she cannot overtake Barack Obama, her rival, in the number of “pledged” delegates who will vote to choose the candidate at the Democratic national convention in August.

The New York senator has unnerved Obama, who has been left reeling by a series of errors from senior policy advisers. The two opponents face an ugly six-week battle in the run-up to a potentially pivotal primary in Pennsylvania next month.

Baxter writes of Hillary's three-pronged approach, and gives the best summary of the Dem dilemma that I've read.

SPAIN DISAPPOINTS US AGAIN

Spain has apparently returned the socialists to power.  They are led by José Zapatero, the childish prime minister, whose antagonism to the United States is well known.  Spaniards seem to want more of the non-judgmental nanny state that other Europeans have.  One voter:

“Zapatero has given us more rights than any leader to the people of Spain: the old, the young, gays, men, women,” said Santiago Cruz, 69, a retired plumber who lives in the working-class Madrid suburb of Vallecas, which has a large immigrant population. “I grew up under Franco with no rights. I grew up having to sing Franco’s anthem so that his fascist supporters would throw me scraps of cabbage.”

But another voter:

“Zapatero is breaking with the traditional Christian values that we have espoused our whole lives,” said Miguel María Santos de Quevedo, a 76-year old retired notary in Tomares, a town in Andalucía, who voted for the Popular Party. “He wants to impose his relativist values on everyone, to claim that there is no such thing as good and bad.”

Classic split.  But the first voter is wrong.  Socialism doesn't add to rights.  It eventually takes them away, sometimes slowly, sometimes in subtle ways.  And socialist societies tend to lose their vitality and ingenuity.  But some don't care.  I wonder if we will.

WHAT EXCITEMENT, WHAT GOOD NEWS

Finally, some good news for the young.  The declining number of high-school students will make it easier to get into college in coming years.  Isn't that wonderful? Can't you just wait for junior to be packed up and sent off to the lovely campus, there to be indoctrinated by droopy leftovers from the nineteen-sixties, and their willing disciples?  Oh, the joy.  Here it is:

High school seniors nationwide are anxiously awaiting the verdicts from the colleges of their choice later this month. But though it may not be of much solace to them, in just a few years the admissions frenzy is likely to ease. It’s simply a matter of demographics.

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students probably finding it easier to get into college.

“For the high school graduate, this becomes a buyers’ market,” said Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Read the rest of the piece.  It turns into the same old story, the striving for political correctness.  Which "groups" do we want?  Some are not necessarily on that list.

And, wanted or unwanted, I'll be back tomorrow.

Posted on March 9, 2008.