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.

Obama’s new tailfin

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.

In The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti has some illuminating reminders about the recent history of our involvement in Iraq, The Surge, and who was saying what when about our best course of action. “In January 2007,” Continetti writes,

with Iraq in flames and Democrats set to take over Congress, President Bush had two options. He could side with Senator Barack Obama and begin a gradual drawdown of American troops in Iraq, leaving the Iraqis to a grim fate and dealing a serious and consequential blow to American interests in the Middle East and beyond. Or he could side with Senator John McCain and change strategies, sending additional troops to Iraq in an effort to secure the population and assist the Iraqis in their fight against al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias–the so-called “surge” policy. This latter option was the one Bush eventually adopted, of course. And for that, he deserves the thanks of Americans, of Iraqis, and indeed the world.

The surge is over. The last of the reinforcements sent to Iraq have returned home. The Iraq those troops leave behind is an utterly transformed place. Since their first offensive operations began in July 2007, overall attacks have been cut by 80 percent. The sectarian bloodshed staining Iraq in 2006 and 2007 has almost entirely abated. American casualties have fallen dramatically, with U.S. combat deaths in Iraq in July 2008 the lowest monthly total since the war began more than five years ago. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been routed, and the global al Qaeda organization faces what CIA director Michael Hayden calls a “near-strategic defeat” in Iraq. Shiite radical Moktada al-Sadr remains “studying” in Iran, while his militia has been cut to pieces by U.S. and Iraqi troops. The Iraqi army is progressing admirably; more than two-thirds of Iraqi combat battalions now take the lead in operations in their areas.

But wait, didn’t Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid loudly repudiate the Surge? Did they not write to scold President Bush, telling him that “As many had foreseen [and who do you suppose those sages were?], the escalation has failed to produce the intended results. The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation”? And did not Obama first oppose the Surge and then repeatedly announce that it wasn’t working: “My assessment is that the surge has not worked,”etc. etc. (For a recap of Obama on Iraq see this excellent roundup at Powerline.)

Now suppose the President had listen to Pelosi/Reid/Obama. Suppose he had said, “OK, I give up. You guys win. We’ll pack up and go.” Continetti lays out a plausible result:

Had Bush listened to Obama and decided to retreat last year, not only would the progress we see today not have occurred, but it is quite likely that the situation in Iraq would be much worse than it was at the end of 2006. Bereft of U.S. security, Iraqis would have turned to the nearest sectarian militia for protection from the widening civil war. An empowered and belligerent Iran would have moved to fill the vacuum America left behind, thus allowing the mullahs in Tehran to pursue unchecked their policy of “Lebanonization” in Iraq. And Al Qaeda in Iraq would have continued its barbaric killing spree, using the departing American soldiers as a recruitment tool, evidence of American weakness and unreliability. It would not be al Qaeda but the United States facing a “near strategic defeat” on Osama bin Laden’s chosen front. And a defeated America would have led to a more dangerous world.

Fortunately, none of this came to pass. Bush sided with McCain, who had been calling for additional troops and a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq since late summer 2003.

In other words, on Iraq McCain offered policies that resulted in a Change We Can Believe In, a “Yes, We Can” attitude, and pointed the way to genuine Progress. And Obama?

Look through some notes, I stumbled upon an excellent little piece by the British journalist William Rees-Mogg regarding the wisdom of John Locke on the subject of tolerance: “As usual, the great John Locke got it right,” Rees-Mogg wrote in the London Times. “The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain intolerable.” Rees-Mogg is thinking in particular of the contemporary pertinence of Locke’s brief but immensely influential tract, A Letter Concerning Toleration.

In that work, Locke directly addresses a subject that is at the center of debate today: “how can people with different beliefs live with one another in peace?” How indeed? Locke’s short book is a bible of liberalism, all the more valuable because it sketches not only the desirability of tolerance, but also its limits. Locke was full of incautious phrases praising “absolute liberty” and condemning “narrowness” of spirit. But he also understood that liberty, if it is to be genuine, must be defended, which means that it must on essential issues be circumscribed. As Rees-Mogg notes, Locke is is “careful to specify when toleration becomes impossible.” And it is here, perhaps, that Locke is most pertinent to our current situation. “In recent years,” Rees-Mogg writes,

governments have repeatedly come up against these limits. Locke did not believe that governments could always tolerate “opinions contrary to human society, such as manifestly undermine the foundations of society”. It is not clear what Locke had specifically in mind, but terrorism would surely be covered. In the 20th century both Nazism and Leninism were “opinions contrary to human society” in this sense — they were simply intolerable.

He also warned against trying to tolerate certain doctrines that 17th-century Protestants attributed to the Jesuits. These included the teaching that “faith is not to be kept with heretics”, and that “kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms”. Locke thought that “a Church has no right to be tolerated” whose members have to obey a foreign prince because that would mean that the ruler allowed “his own people to be listed, as it were, as soldiers against his own Government”.

Seventeenth-century Islam was included in the criticism. “It is ridiculous for anyone to profess himself to be a Mohametan (sic) only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, while at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor.” Fortunately, the Papacy no longer claims the right to excommunicate and depose monarchs, there is no Ottoman Emperor, and if there still is a Mufti of Constantinople he certainly has no universal authority in Islam. But Osama bin Laden really is a dangerous man who does claim obedience of his followers.

Read the entire essay here.

Like most conservatives, I applauded when Boris Johnson, former editor of The Spectator, beat mad, bad “Red Ken” Livingston in the race to become Mayor of London. Livingston was a thuggish, left-leaning politician of the old school–a sort of neutered British Brezhnev whose orbit was a single city instead of a crumbling empire–whereas Boris brought a pixieish Toryism to bear upon his ever-so-slightly farcical public performance.

Boris is an amusing man. Also a slyly intelligent one. His talent for public for bemusement is, I feel sure, a finely calculated construction. So is his reputation as a disheveled, blond-haired Bertie Wooster, an expensively educated but essentially clueless fop who somehow stumbled into public life. So when Boris Johnson, Tory politician, publicly endorses Barack Obama, I am not only disappointed, I wonder what behind-the-scenes calculation he made. This morning, the London Telegraph reports his public reasoning: “If Barack Obama can do it, it will be the most fantastic boost, I think, for black people everywhere around the world.”

That, of course, is precisely what Barack Obama keeps suggesting, hinting, adumbrating, even as he (officially) presents himself as the candidate who will finally move us “beyond” race.

In fact, Obama has subtly but unmistakably insinuated race into the center of his campaign, and his fans have eagerly conspired to reinforce the racialist overtones of his campaign. The basic line was articulated with admirable clarity by The New York Times a day or two ago when a reporter said that Obama’s candidacy confronted the American electorate with “what may be the ultimate test of racial equality–whether Americans will elect a black president.” But as I pointed out in a comment on that article, the reporter’s “ultimate test” is really a racist examination, for it assumes that if Obama loses it will because of his skin color, not because of his policies.

Boris Johnson’s announced rationale for supporting Obama is cut from the same bolt of cloth. What would be “the most fantastic boost . . . for black people everywhere” is the same thing that would be fantastic for white and yellow and red people everywhere: a President who promulgates policies that conduce to economic growth, the rule of law, and social maturity. The color of his skin is irrelevant, and to pretend otherwise is to perpetuate a paternalist, quota-based racialist thinking.

I referred to Boris’s “announced rationale” for supporting Obama. Is it also his real rationale? I doubt it. The Telegraph says that the endorsement of a Democratic candidate “would usually be considered unusual for a Conservative.” But that is not wholly true. I’ve noticed two sorts of Tories who are eager for the victory of Obama. One is the bitter, old-school anti-American Tory who resents American power and influence and who look forwards to whatever will circumscribe it. An Obama presidency can be counted on to do precisely that, and so it is not surprising that that such chaps have clustered round him.

The second sort is the “worse-therefore-better” brand of Tory who is a true conservative and therefore regards the prospect of a McCain presidency with dismay. McCain, the imperfect conservative, has disappointed conservatives on campaign finance reform, on immigration, on environmental policy, even, at least intermittently, on taxes and judicial policy. Therefore, reason these clever chaps, he would be a poor steward of the Republic. Of course, Obama would be much, much worse, but (so they reason), let him have a spin at the helm for four years: he’ll bollocks up things so badly that a grateful electorate will welcome us true conservatives back with open arms.

I suspect that Boris Johnson inclines more to the former than the latter, though item four in Victor Davis Hanson’s answers to the question “Why Do Europeans Love Obama?” probably also plays a part:

4) Style, style, style. Remember socialist Europe is where we get our designer eyeglass frames, Gucci bags, and French fashions. Instead of a strutting, Bible-quoting Texan, replete with southern accent and ‘smoke-em’ out lingo, they get an athletic, young, JFK-ish metrosexual, whose rhetoric is as empty as it is soothing. The English-only Obama lectures America on its need to emulate polyglot Europe; while a Spanish-speaking George Bush is hopelessly cast as a Texas yokel.

Victor makes the “modest prediction,” were Obama to be elected, “in 5 years, Europeans will prefer George Bush to a “We are right behind you” Obama.” I do not believe Obama will be elected. That will become clearer, I believe, as we approach the first week of November. And by then, I modestly predict, folks like Boris Johnson will discover that, upon mature consideration, they have always really supported John McCain after all.

There is probably a lot one could say about the piece The New York Times ran yesterday about Barack Obama’s 12-year tenure teaching law at the University of Chicago. That Obama “never completed a single work of legal scholarship” may seem surprising given that he was teaching at a major research university where, as the Times notes, “most colleagues published by the pound.” Unsurprising is that, even back then, Obama exuded an aura of “self-absorption” and was surrounded by “groupies.” Also unsurprising is that fact that much of his teaching concerned issues of race and that, as the Times puts it, he “was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say.” Just this past Sunday, at a Chicago fundraiser, he lectured his audience about the “sad,” even “tragic” nature of America’s past. “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” he said.

Glenn Reynolds asks two pertinent questions:

(1) Does Barack Obama think that American history is unusually “tragic” as compared to the history of other great nations? And (2), what does it tell us that journalists were cheering him when he said that?

Regarding the first, how does American history stack up against other countries you know about when it comes to sadness and tragedy. Take Germany–no, that’s too easy. Take France and start in the time of Julius Caesar or, if that is too long ago, in the time of the Cathars and move forward noting the sadnesses and tragedy. Remember Arnaud-Amaury, the papal legate who over saw the siege of Béziers in 1209? Asked by one of his soldiers how they should distinguish the innocents from the Cathars, Arnaud-Amaury memorably replied, “Tuez-les tous. Dieu reconnaîtra les siens,” “Kill ‘em all. God will know his own.” Or take a look a French life under Louis XIV, or under Robespierre and his fellow virtucrats, or under Napoleon. Ask Alfred Dreyfus about sadness and tragedy. The Dreyfus affair is also convenient for those who thrill, as do many readers of the Times, at the prospect of an orgy of national guilt. And speaking of national guilt, let’s not forget Vichy France: there are lots of opportunities there to indulge in a bit of moral masturbation.

Not that France has a monopoly or even a majority interest in such sadness and tragedy, as a look at the history of the Balkans, or Russia, or India, or China, or Japan, or the entire continent of Africa demonstrates. Indeed, when it comes to the sort of sadness and tragedy that Obama dilated on in Chicago, America has been conspicuously on the mild end of such things. I don’t deny the sordidness of slavery, the horrors of the Civil War, and all the other blemishes one might exhibit to show that America has not been perfect and has suffered its share of historical unpleasantness. But in the scheme of things, does it not seem to be an unusually blessed society, one that has been unusually spared the sorts of sadness and tragedy that form such a grim recitative in many, maybe most other countries?

Obama mentions slavery early and often, but what is more significant: the fact that slavery existed in America in the 18th and half of the 19th centuries (as it did in many other parts of the world) or that Americans took it upon themselves to end it and that today Barack Obama is a millionaire and the presumptive Democratic candidate for President?

And as for “acknowledging” the bad things from the past, what else have we been doing for the last three decades. How much expiation does Barack Obama, or Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson want? Just a few days ago, the U.S. Congress formally “apologized” for slavery: I employ scare quotes, because the apology is as meaningless as it is hypocritical. Really, I suspect, what is wanted is not “acknowledgment” but perpetual obeisance to an ever receding, impossible ideal of political rectitude.

Which brings me back to the Times’s story on Obama’s career at the University of Chicago. In the course of that story, the reporter confronts the reader with “what may be the ultimate test of racial equality–whether Americans will elect a black president.”

I stopped short reading that because I think it gets the issue 100% wrong. The implication is that if Obama is not elected, then Americans fail the test. But that, I submit, is a racist idea. How many liberals do you know who plan to vote for Barack Obama because he is black, that is to say, for a racist reason? Sure, they also like the fact that he plans to institute a European-style confiscatory tax plan. They approve of his socialistic plans to increase the size and intrusiveness of the government. They share his skepticism about our presence in Iraq and contemplate his call for “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military with equanimity, even pleasure. Really, though, all that is icing on the cake. They have closed ranks around Obama on account of the very thing that Obama pretends he wishes to transcend: the color of his skin.