Last night, the televangelist Rick Warren asked Barack Obama and John McCain at what point a baby gets human rights. Whatever your position on abortion–whether you think it comes under the category of “reproductive rights” or regard it as a moral enormity–I think you’ll find their respective answers indicative of their character.

Obama: “. . . whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity . . . is above my pay grade.”

McCain: a baby’s human rights began “at the moment of conception . . . I have a 25-year pro-life record.”

I can understand that people who favor “abortion rights” would not like John McCain’s answer. I find it difficult to believe that any candid person could regard Obama’s response as anything but an insulting and mendacious equivocation. It is insulting because it ostentatiously evades the question while giving a little wink to his home team: “Oh, these religious morons and their obsession with abortion! Of course, I could care less about it, but I also know it’s impolitic to say so, so I’ll emit a brief rhetoric fog and hope no one will notice.” And it’s mendacious because when it comes to “pay grades,” no one’s is higher than the President’s. If a man who aspires to the highest office in the land cannot respond to a pointed question about an important moral issue without taking refuge in empty sophistries, how will he deal with the myriad difficult issues with which the President is confronted daily? It seems to me that in claiming that it is “above his pay grade” to answer this question forthrightly, Obama essentially admits that he is unfit for the office he covets.

Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear. Jerome Corsi, author of the bestselling Unfit for Command in 2004, a book that turned the phrase “swift boat” into a verb and helped defeat John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry, has written a new book about Barack Hussein Obama (yes, I know I am not supposed to mention his middle name, but I am going to anyway) called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. It’s officially published only today (you can order it from Amazon here), but already it is # 1 on The New York Times bestseller list with 475,000 copies in print so far. The Times, naturally, is in a swivet lest Corsi’s book undermine The Messiah’s planned advent in November and they have wheeled into print with a longish dismissal masquerading as a review today. “Significant parts of the book,” the authors write (the Times requires two reviewers when a serious demolition job is commissioned), “have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1.”

“Challenged”? Who would doubt it? Anything can be challenged: “Who goes there?” But have those “significant parts” been shown to be false? And more to the point, notwithstanding any local errors–when exactly did Obama stop taking cocaine? When exactly did he repudiate the loathsome views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright?–the real question is whether the book’s overall thesis is correct. And that thesis is? The Times puts it well: that Obama is “a stealth radical liberal” who would be a disaster as president. Whether Mr. Corsi is also right that Obama maintains but has “tried to cover up ‘extensive connections to Islam’ ” is an interesting question very much worth looking into–Mr. Corsi has begun but certainly has not finished with that task–but Barack Hussein Obama’s possible connections with Islam is only one of the mysteries that the public deserves to learn more about. Hillary Clinton, asked whether Obama was a Muslim, said “not that I know of.” That’s the right answer: the fact is, there is a tremendous amount we do not know about Obama. He “lost” his college thesis, and so, mirabile dictu, has Columbia. Obama has apparently also lost his birth certificate: what embarrassing fact does that document chronicle, I wonder? Stanley Kurtz, as I mentioned a few days ago, has been doing yeoman’s service piecing together a picture of what Obama said, wrote, and in did in his early years as a political activist in Chicago. Thanks to Andrew McCarthy, we know that Obama is pals with Bill Ayres (”an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past”) and Bernadine Dohrn, with Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian sympathizer and professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. As McCarthy notes, the question naturally arises: “Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies?”

That’s one of many questions the public should be asking about Barack Hussein Obama. Today’s piece in the Times veritably weeps with anxiety. Corsi’s book has dwarfed a similar effort to discredit John McCain (35,000 in print): is there no justice in the world? The Times was in a tough spot with this book. The paper’s usual procedure with books it dislikes is to ignore them. Someone must have made the calculation that it was better to try to head off Corsi’s book at the pass, to strangle it in the crib as it were. I think they will rue the decision. Most people who read the Times would probably have been only dimly aware of The Obama Nation had the Times not brought it to their attention. Now they have had it rubbed in their faces. The paper did its best to dismiss the book, but questions and doubts will linger–not so much about Jerome Corsi but about Barack Hussein Obama. Who is he? Who are his friends? What does he believe? Is he the sort of person the American public wants leading the country? Is he a “stealth radical liberal”?

One of my favorite items at Instapundit recently is the series called “Dude, Where’s my recession?” (for example, here, here, here and here: I may have missed some).

For those dedicated to presenting all the bad economic news all the time, those columns make for painful reading. Economic Armageddon was supposed to be upon us, but the facts keep forgetting to toe the line. “Consumers boosted their spending at a 1.5 percent pace in the second quarter. That was up from a 0.9 percent growth rate in the first quarter and marked the best. . .” Oh, dear.  “Retail sales jump by largest amount in 6 months. . . . Analysts were surprised by the solid increase in retail sales and noted that sales in April were also revised to show a. . .” Why, it is enough to make an hysterical pessimist lose heart.

Of course, it’s axiomatic that the guys out of power believe–or at any rate say–they can handle the economy better than the chaps in power. But that understandable bit of partisan stump-talk has leached into the reporting of the news. No one disputes that there has been an economic slow down; no one disputes that credit has dried up faster than a temperance party of new-minted teetotalers in the Sahara. Exactly why the so-called “sub-prime” crisis should have popped up so suddenly and so virulently is a matter of dispute. Doubtless greedy bankers had something to do with it. But how about the politicians (and guess which ones?) who were insisting that credit be loosened, that “red-lining” certain neighborhoods be outlawed in the name of “equal access” (how to you spell “default risk”?): don’t they also share the blame?

In any event, the novelty of recent years is the barely concealed, and obviously partisan, delight in bad news on the part of those reporting the news. We saw something similar in the reporting on Iraq. Every time a roadside bomb took out an American Humvee, the story was splashed over the front-page of The New York Times and other adjuncts of the Democratic Party before being handed over to the editorialists for moralizing later on in the paper. Somehow, the success stories, when reported at all (which isn’t often) are relegated to a snippet on page B17. The bottom line? They crave failure.

So it is with the economy: how happy falling home prices makes The New York Times. How delighted they are to report that growth has slowed and unemployment risen (not by much, it is true, but they do they best they can with what they have to work with). How thin-lipped about good news they are. You probably have to spend more time than I am willing to do reading The New York Times and kindred organs to appreciate fully the inadvertent humor, not to say hypocrisy, of their reporting. Fortunately, other stalwart souls are there in the trenches wrestling out the delicious nuggets for the rest of us. The excellent web site web Classical Values, for example,  offers an illuminating comparison. In a business story about the situation in Europe, a Times reporter described the German economy as “blazing ahead”–blazing, mind you– by 1.5 percent in one quarter even as Forbes (for example: you see similar stories in the Times) found an analyst who assures us that the 1.9 percent growth in the US is evidence of recession: “The fact that there was technical growth in GDP,” he sniffed, “in no way alters our view that the economy has fallen into recession.” Well, that analyst was from Bear-Stearns, so perhaps he should be forgiven for taking a gloomy view of things.

Along the same lines, Matt Welch over at Reason has a splendid analysis of a recent Washington Post story about the economy. Quoth Sebastian Mallaby in the Post:

The upshot is that things are desperate. The unemployment rate in the headlines (which understates the real number) is heading toward 6 percent; home prices are falling hard; and the two forces that have averted outright recession – a timely fiscal stimulus and strong growth abroad – are fading. The Fed has cut interest rates as much as possible given the worry about inflation. Foreign central banks are similarly boxed in. With the world’s inability to agree on anything, there’s no prospect of a coordinated global response – witness the breakdown in trade talks. And so the United States must act using the only tool it has: It is time for a second stimulus.

And Welch comments:

I’m old enough to remember when “unemployment heading toward 6 percent” was a scare phrase when said rate was heading downward, because the Phillips Curve-quoting consensus was that anything lower than 6 percent would trigger automatic inflation. Yet for the past 167 months, unemployment has indeed been lower than 6 percent for all but a seven-month stretch in 2003, during a time when total nonfarm employment increased from 115.2 million to 137.6 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Things are desperate!

But wait, home prices are falling hard, right? Yes! All the way down to … 2004 levels. Which were still nearly double 1997 levels in real terms.

As for “outright recession,” yes indeedy that has been averted, to the tune of 1.9% GDP growth in the second quarter. And much as I hate to see global trade talks break down, a “coordinated global response” to allegedly “desperate” economic situations worldwide (think: the 1997-98 Asian flu, or the peso crisis not long before that), are about the collective actions of central bankers, not trade negotiators. And fer cryin’ out loud, how come it’s only spending more guvmint money that indicates “courage,” rather than performing the much-rarer feat of spending less?

More “guvmint money.” More regulation. Bigger bureaucracy. Less free trade. In other words, bring on the socialist interventions. Here we are sitting on the most productive economy in the world. The stock market closed yesterday at nearly 11,800. The dollar has been strengthening significantly against the Euro. But, yes, we have some bad news. Mallaby tips his hand even more in succeeding paragraphs where we discover that 1) “Barack Obama, to his credit, has called for a modest stimulus,” and that 2) the Bush administration’s tax cuts were “crazy” and, by implication, the cause of the budget deficit. Mallaby also likes the idea of the government confiscating and redistributing private assets, so he cheers Obama’s plan to tax (i.e., usurp, expropriate, steal) the “windfall profits” big oil companies have recently enjoyed.

Have you noticed that by prefixing the adjective “windfall” to the noun “profits” you convert a good thing into something deserving of government pillage? Why adding a good thing (windfall: “a sudden and unexpected piece of good fortune”) to another good thing (a profit) should result in a bad thing is part of the mysterious alchemy of socialist intervention. No one understands it, but socialistically-inclined politicians have lost no time in exploiting it. Depressing, isn’t it?

Ponder, if you will, the crisis in the far-off country of Georgia, where as I write Russian troops have occupied and taken control of the break-away province of South Ossetia and Russian planes have reportedly bombed civilian as well as military targets in several other locations throughout the country.

Now take a moment to think back to September 21 or thereabouts in 2001. The dust from the Twin Towers, destroyed a week earlier by al Qaeda, had most certainly not settled. Still, the initial shock of the attacks was evolving. I do not know that there have been any polls on the subject, but I would be willing to wager that most Americans, even many Democrats, were glad that George W. Bush, not Al Gore, was the Commander in Chief in the weeks and months that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war in Iraq had not yet provided a new rallying point for anti-Bush sentiment; the virulence of the attacks showed what we were up against; and although Al Gore, poor thing, had not yet entered the tertiary stage of Green Mania, his association with an administration that had stood by for 8 years and done nothing while al Qaeda mounted ever more deadly attacks against American interests had not been lost on most adults. In the autumn of 2001, your common or garden variety liberal might not advertise the fact–he might, indeed, have been ashamed of his feelings–but in his heart of hearts he thanked his lucky stars that the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was George W. Bush, not Al Gore. (Perhaps I should add that I am not talking about special-needs liberals: you know, college professors, reporters for The New York Times, Reuters news chiefs who could not distinguish between terrorists and freedom fighters, et al. Such people, early sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome, believed, in the words of the classicist Mary Beard, that “the United States had it coming,” and they would have preferred Humpty Dumpty to George W. Bush.)

There is a contemporary lesson in that widely shared feeling of gratitude, a lesson about leadership. Observers differ widely on the international significance of Russia’s latest imperialist adventure. I regard it as a dangerous–well, “precedent” isn’t quite right, since we have been down this road before with the Soviet Union and Georgia. I find the fact that the chief Russian spokesman (not to say master choreographer) has been former President Vladimir Putin, not his hand-picked successor Dimtry Medvedev, almost as disturbing as the brutal military incursion that has left (so far) hundreds of civilians dead. Other observers seem to believe that the crisis is overstated. Time will tell. But think back to the reaction to 9/11 and then contemplate how the two major candidates for the U.S. Presidency have so far reacted to the situation in Georgia. According to a Reuters report, John McCain said that “Tensions and hostilities between Georgians and Ossetians are in no way justification for Russian troops crossing an internationally recognized border.” McCain also called on “Russia to immediately and unconditionally withdraw its forces from the territory of Georgia.” A sober statement about the crisis (”The consequences for Euro-Atlantic stability and security are grave”) occupies a prominent spot on the McCain campaign’s home page.

For his part, Barack Obama called for “talks among all sides and said the United States, the U.N. Security Council and other parties should try to help bring about a peaceful resolution.” Obama looked forward to “an international peacekeeping force” under “an appropriate UN mandate.” As of this writing, there is nothing about the Georgian crisis on the Obma campaign’s home page.

To recap: John McCain forthrightly condemns Russia’s behavior and demands that Russia withdraw unconditionally. Obama wants to turn the mess over to the UN.

Meanwhile, the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have issued a joint statement condemning the Russian incursion in Georgia.

McCain endorsed the statement:

I strongly support the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and their commitment that ‘aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.’

I am not sure that Obama has responded directly to the joint declaration, but John Hinderaker at Powerline notes the difference between McCain and Obama, quoting this statement about the crisis from the Obama campaign: “It’s both sides’ fault–both have been somewhat provocative with each other.”

On 9/11 we were grateful to have a leader who could distinguish between friends and enemies and who was not so crippled by moral relativism that he believed that victims should be equated with their victimizers. In 2008, we have a choice between 1) a man who knows evil and repudiates it and 2) a man who believes that there is “fault on both sides” and that discredited “progressive” institutions like the United Nations are better equipped to deal with disputes among sovereign nations than the nations themselves.

Which would you choose?

Update: Powerline reports on a “pathetic” new statement from the Obama campaign. “Obama,” Powerline’s Scott Johnson notes, “has made a big decision. Obama has decided that it’s better to sound like John McCain.” [Thanks to "Zero" below for pointing out the broken link.]

Yesterday, 8/8/08, will be remembered not because it was the date that the so-called “Mainstream Media” were finally forced by the National Inquirer’s scoop to deal with the sordid news of John Edwards’s mendacious implosion. That story will soon be relegated to the oblivious archive that contains footage of his “I feel pretty” hair-combing routine. (Oblivious? Well, maybe not: the referenced YouTube clip reports more than 1,200,000 views.) No, future historians will not pause long over the squalid Mr. Edwards. Some may draw comparisons between the spectacle laid on by China at the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing yesterday and an earlier Olympic spectacle that convened in Berlin in 1936. Repressive regimes with dismal human-rights records and untidy international ambitions may nevertheless excel at histrionic displays of self-obliterating pomp. Just ask Leni Riefenstahl.

But I suspect that in the years to come what most historians–and perhaps the rest of us, too–will think of when we hear the date August 8, 2008 is not China, and certainly not old what’s-his-name with the hair, the mistress, and pathetic claims of being “99 percent honest“. What we’ll think of is the country of Georgia and we’ll realize that August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest.

When Russian tanks and troops poured into the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia yesterday, it was not, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, part of a “peacekeeping mission.” It was part of an imperialist mission whose undeclared goal is to reabsorb the whole of Georgia–West-leaning Georgia with its critical oil pipeline supplying energy to an increasingly thirsty Europe–into mother Russia.

Indeed, that pipeline is the unacknowledged key to the drama–unacknowledged, anyway, by the belligerents. As an AP story notes, the “U.S.-backed oil pipeline runs through Georgia, allowing the West to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil while bypassing Russia and Iran.” A good thing for the West; but is such autonomy something Russia (or, for that matter, Iran) wants to encourage? Indeed, as I write, Reuters has issued an unconfirmed report  that earlier today Russia attacked not only targets in South Ossetia but also targeted “the major Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline.”

The whole drama as the eerie sense of history repeating itself. The London Times today carries an article about “The Revolt in Georgia”–not the one unfolding before our eyes, but the revolt against Soviet occupation in September 1924. The Soviets had initially recognized Georgia’s independence in the wake of the First World War, but occipied the country in 1921 and brutally put down the revolt that erupted three years later. At the time, the president of Georgia made an appeal to the League of Nations. The Times reports that although “sympathetic reference” to Georgia was made in the assembly, “it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid and the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to to make an impression upon Soviet Russia.”

That was in 1924. What sort of impression do you suppose the “moral influence” of the successor institution to the League of Nations, the U.N., is likely to have on the uncivilized successor to the U.S.S.R.?

It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper. But an article by Oliver Kamm on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima last year won my wholehearted endorsement and it is worth reprising. Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of that fearsome event, and, as Mr. Kamm points out, that action, together with its successor at Nagasaki on August 9, ended World War II. It saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives. Were those bombings terrible? You betcha. But as Mr. Kamm notes, if they caused suffering, they saved much greater suffering that would have ensued had the United States invaded Japan. This was understood at the time. But in recent years a revisionist view has grown up, especially on the Left, which faults President Truman for his decision to drop the bombs. “This alternative history,” Mr. Kamm argues. “is devoid of merit.”

New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

It will be interesting to see what sort of response Mr. Kamm’s article elicits. I predict howls of rage and vituperation. But he is right:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

What is the essence, the core, of conservative wisdom? One part is that when it comes to the real-world, the choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse. This is particularly true in times of war. A difficult lesson. But crucial for those who wish to do good as well emit good-sounding slogans.

I do not wish to belabor the issue of whether saving millions of lives is a good thing. But since my colleague Andrew Cusack, responding to this line of reasoning, weighed in weighed in on the morality–or was it the theology?–of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought I would add a word or two from Paul Fussell, whose classic essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” really says all that needs to be said about the subject of whether using those fearsome engines of war was justified.

The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot. him in the chest ( or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?

It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population}, who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among craziness’s. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. ” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tem a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experiential dubiousness of the concept of “just wars. ” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed. ” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.

Andrew was deeply impressed by Elizabeth Anscombe’s contention that America’s insistence on unconditional surrender was “the root of all evil.” In fact, it was our failure to insist on this in 1918 that was the root not perhaps of all evil but that particularly toxic node that paved the way for World War II and the untold suffering it caused. Do the ends really justify the means? Alas, like so much about the real world, the melancholy–but also the moral–answer is, “Often, yes.”

My friend Andrew McCarthy has alerted me to the latest outrage perpetrated by the European Court of Human Rights. What is it about institutions with the phrase “Human Rights” in their title? Why are they reliably the enemy of freedom and human rights? (Take, for example, the case of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions.) While you ponder that, consider the career of Abu Hamza, the Egyptian-born “terrorist facilitator with a global reach” who made such a nuisance of himself in London’s Finsbury Mosque.

I have always fondly thought of Hamza as Cap’n Hook.

Exactly how he lost his hands and the use of one eye is a matter of dispute. Some say it was while clearing mines left by the Soviets in Afghanistan, others that it was in nitroglycerin accident in an al-Qaeda training camp. (There is even the contention that the Saudis amputated them as punishment for theft.) In any event, Hamza not the sort of chap you want running about. In Britain, he’s been convicted of various things, including 6 counts of soliciting to murder, and is currently serving 7 years in prison.

The United States has been trying to extradite him for years. Last week, the British government finally agreed to hand him over. But then the European Court of Human Rights got into the act. As the London Telegraph reports, the transnational body of unelected bureaucrats has just decided against allowing Britain to extradite Abu Hamza to the United States to face trial for aiding and abetting al-Qaeda and the Taliban and for his role in the kidnapping of 16 tourists in the Yemen in 1998, an incident in which two Americans and three Britons were killed. The European Court is worried, you see, that poor old Abu Hamza will be sent to prison at the Supermax ADX Florence, a super-secure facility in Colorado that hosts a number very bad folks, including Theodore Kaczynski (the “unabomber”) and Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Soviet Union, delivering up a host vital military secrets and complete lists of American double agents. Actually, Abu Hamza should feel right at home at the prison, because among its guests are a number of his friends and co-religionists, e.g., Zacarias Moussaoui, a conspirator in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Question: Why should Britain–still a sovereign nation, I believe–pay any heed to the European Court of Human Rights? What would happen if Mr. Brown’s government told the court to take a long walk off a short pier? What then? Fear and trembling in Strasbourg? Who cares?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died yesterday at 89, was one of our greatest chroniclers of Soviet tyranny. Beginning in 1962 with his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and continuing with The Cancer Ward and the multi-volume Gulag Archipelago, he unforgettably anatomized the inner workings of that hideous, soul-destroying engine of totalitarianism.

Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s life and work are appearing everywhere. For example, the London Telegraph and the London Times carry characteristically excellent obituaries.

There is one point, however, that deserves special emphasis, namely that the evil of Communism was, is, every bit as murderous, fanatical, and life-blighting as Nazism. A brief but illuminating editorial in The New York Sun observes that “once Solzhenitsyn had written, no one could any longer doubt that the evil of Stalinism was comparable to the evil of Nazism.”

I agree with the Sun’s editorialist that no right-thinking person should any longer be able to doubt that Communism and Nazism were but two faces of the same evil coin. But the myth of Communist “idealism” was, and perhaps still is, a hardly perennial. George Steiner, reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in The New Yorker in 1974, typified the attitude of the left-wing Western intellectual: “To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism,” Steiner lectured, “is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.”

The real moral indecency is Steiner’s, and it is worth noting just how persistent is the temptation to excuse tyranny providing only that it comes from the left. There are few, perhaps, who would go as far as the odious Eric Hobsbawm. In 1994, Hobsbawm discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm’s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, “is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

Probably there aren’t many who would express themselves as baldly as Eric Hobsbawm. But the specter of statism–what Hayek, hearkening back to Tocqueville, called “the road to serfdom”–is a continuing threat, all the more insinuating today because less obviously brutal. How easy it is to forget, to neglect, to ignore that threat. Solzhenitsyn did an immense amount to bolster our memory, but creeping socialism is like the “sweet oblivious antidote” Macbeth craves for his wife. I recall the story Kingsley Amis tells in his Memoirs about the reception of Robert Conquest’s classic indictment of Stalin’s tyranny, The Great Terror. “For many years,” Amis notes, the book was “ignored where possible or dismissed as propaganda.

Then, in 1988, favourable references to it began to appear in the Soviet media. . . . [A]n American publisher suggested a new edition of the book. “What about a new title Bob? We won’t pretend it’s a new book , but a new title would be good. . . .

Bob answered in terms that get a lot of his character into small compass. “Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. How’s that?”

Solzhenitsyn, like Conquest, did tell us. Let’s hope we have the wit to listen.

Update: Over at Armavirumque, my colleague Stefan Beck links to an interview–the first to appear in an American paper–that Solzhenitsyn gave to Hilton Kramer in 1980. Here’s the link.

Reviewing the forty-plus columns that Barack Obama wrote for the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender between 1995, when he entered politics, and 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, Stanley Kurtz provides a revealing and disturbing glimpse into the formative opinions and associations of the presumptive Democratic candidate for President.

Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama’s early political career–the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004–can fairly be called the “lost years,” the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama’s heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

Read the whole eye-opening column in The Weekly Standard here.

As of July 29, Barack Obama had raised some $340 million for his campaign to be President of the United States. (John McCain, by contrast, had raised something less than $150 million.)

Even today, $340 million is a lot of dough. What do you suppose Obama does with all that cash? One expense was having his chartered Boeing 757 made over for the general election. He made many changes. For example, there’s a new private section with first class seating for Obama and his staff while the press gets the standard 3-seats-to a side cattle-class accommodation.

But the most noticeable alterations are on the outside. When the plane was repainted, not only was “Change We Can Believe” and the address of Obama’s website emblazoned on the sides of the place, but the American flag on the tail was replaced with Obama’s campaign logo: you know, the circle with the Yellow Brick Road or whatever it is supposed to be in the center.

Maybe this is Obama’s little rebellion over his capitulation to pressure to start wearing a flag pin on his lapel again.

In any event, it is no wonder the plane has been dubbed “O-Force One” by observers. Personally, I am glad that Obama and his campaign managers are so liberal in dropping hints about what really matters to them. For voters who are paying attention, it provides a vivid sense of Obama’s priorities.

Air Force One proudly displays the American flag on its tail, just as Obama’s plane did before its make over.

Were he to become President, of course, that might be one of the first cosmetic changes he made: replacing the American flag wherever it appeared with the Obama O–or is it the Obama zero? Experts have yet to render a judgment about that.