Lawless Frontier

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JAY NORDLINGER: Felix Rodriguez, the Anti-Che
RAMESH PONNUR U
AVIK ROY: Our Enemy the Hospitals
THE EDITORS
ON THE 2016 RACE

ON ZIMMERMAN
LAWLESS FRONTIER
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A crisis in the rule of law
31
Kevin D. Williamson w John R. Bolton & John Yoo

0
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Direct from Locked Vaults to U.S. Citizens!
Original U.S. Govt

Morgan Silver Dollars
A MESSAGE FROM THE
37TH TREASURER OF THE

UNITED STATES
Hello, Im Angela Marie
Buchanan. You might know
me as Bay Buchanan. I
was
appointed
by
Ronald Reagan to be the
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Sincerely,
Angela Marie (Bay) Buchanan

37th Treasurer of the United States of America
Co-Director, NCM Board of Advisors
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2013 NCM, Inc. R7-RR8
TOC:QXP-1127940144.qxp 7/17/2013 3:32 PM Page 1
Contents
AUGUST 5, 2013
ON THE COVER
V O L U M E L X V, N O . 1 4
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 24
The Front Man

Barack Obama has spent the past
Jay Nordlinger on Felix Rodriguez
p. 29
five years methodically testing the

limits of what he can get away
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
with. The real import of his political career will be felt long after
he leaves office, in the form of a
39
more assertive of its own interests

and more ruthless in punishing
40
its enemies. Kevin D. Williamson
ARTICLES
16 PRESIDENTIAL HOPES AND HOPEFULS
by Ramesh Ponnuru
42
A look at the 2016 Republican field.

S
by Arthur Herman
by Andrew C. McCarthy
44
Egypt revolted against inept governance, not Islamic supremacism.
22 SALON AND BREAKFAST
QUEEN OF HYANNIS
Florence King reviews Rose

Kennedy: The Life and Times
of a Political Matriarch,
by Barbara A. Perry.
by John OSullivan
Kenneth Minogue, R.I.P.
47
FILM: THE BARD IN SOCAL
Ross Douthat reviews Joss Whedons

film Much Ado About Nothing.
FEATURES
24 THE FRONT MAN
LAW, NATURALLY
Edward Feser reviews Conscience

and Its Enemies: Confronting
the Dogmas of Liberal
Secularism, by Robert P. George.
Feminist ideology has engaged the Special Forces.
20 SHARIA AFTER MORSI
PRUDENCE AND PRINCIPLE
Daniel Foster reviews The

Founding Conservatives: How
a Group of Unsung Heroes
Saved the American Revolution,
by David Lefer.
COVER: ROMAN GENN
17 SENSITIVE SEAL
THE IRON LADY RISES
Charles Crawford reviews Margaret

Thatcher: The Authorized
Biography: From Grantham to
the Falklands, by Charles Moore.
permanently expanded state that is
by Kevin D. Williamson
Face of the lawless bureaucracy.
27 TREATY BY DECREE
SECTIONS
by John R. Bolton and John Yoo
Obamas end-run around the Senate, and the Constitution.
29 THE ANTI-CHE
by Jay Nordlinger
Felix Rodriguez, freedom fighter and patriot.
33 AN ARM AND A LEG
by Avik S. A. Roy
Hospitals are to blame for obscene health-care costs.
2
4
37
38
43
48
Letters to the Editor

The Week
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . William W. Runyeon
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
NAtIONAl REvIEw (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NAtIONAl REvIEw, Inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. National Review, Inc., 2013. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., NAtIONAl REvIEw, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NAtIONAl REvIEw, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, MondayFriday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. Eastern
time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NAtIONAl REvIEw, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-6797330. POStMAStER: Send address changes to NAtIONAl REvIEw, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RAtES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other
foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) the editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions
expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors.
letters:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/17/2013 2:36 PM Page 2
Letters
AUGUST 5 ISSUE; PRINTED JULY 18
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Washington Editor Robert Costa
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz
Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Editorial Associate Katherine Connell
Research Associate Scott Reitmeier
Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat
Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty
Jonah Goldberg / Florence King
Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin
Yuval Levin / Rob Long
Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy
Kate OBeirne / Reihan Salam
Robert VerBruggen
Wind Powers Spotty Record

Rupert Darwalls excellent article Free Markets Mean Cheaper Energy (June 17)
had a minor, but salient, error. He correctly noted that Danish electricity spot prices
sometimes go negative because of the imbalance in the supply/demand equation
introduced by windmills (or, in Mark Steyns parlance, condor Cuisinarts), but
stated that it could happen in the United States. It happens now! As Illinois continues
to shed manufacturing plants, and as those remaining generally operate less than 24
hours per day, peak electrical demand in the early morning hours has dropped dramatically. Illinois also happens to be the fourth-largest wind-generation state, and
the spot prices of ComEd (which supplies the northern portion of the state) routinely
go negative on windy nights. Proponents of wind power often calculate the payback
of their bird blenders using the average price of electricity, ignoring the blenders
effect of pushing prices down precisely when theyre at maximum output!
Terry Smith
Energy consultant
Northwest Illinois Automation
Lanark, Ill.
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez

Managing Editor Edward John Craig
National Affairs Columnist John Fund
Media Editor Eliana Johnson
Political Reporters Andrew Stiles / Jonathan Strong
Reporter Katrina Trinko
Staff Writer Charles C. W. Cooke
Editorial Associate Molly Powell
Technical Services Russell Jenkins
Web Developer Wendy Weihs
Web Producer Scott McKim
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Linda Bridges / John OSullivan
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W I N S T I T U T E
B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M
Patrick Brennan / Betsy Woodruff

Contributors
Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman
Eliot A. Cohen / Dinesh DSouza
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Art of War
As an (NRA) card-carrying gun nut and NR subscriber, I was surprised and delighted
to read Remington, U.S.A. in the July 15 issue. But perhaps author Charles C. W.
Cooke should have shared his newfound knowledge of this great company and its history with the illustrator. Even conceding that the rifle pictured above the title was
offered as a generic representation, it nonetheless misses the mark badly enough to
require correction. For the last hundred or so years of its existence (and leaving aside
its recent foray into AR-type weapons), Remington has been known for two iconic
products: pump-action shotguns and bolt-action rifles. The illustration (ignoring the
Monte Carlo butt stock, which would never be found on such a firearm) is the
equally iconic lever-action product of the Marlin Firearms Company of North Haven,
Conn., and since 2007 a subsidiary of Remington with principal operations in
Madison, N.C. Indeed, the pieces unique lever pivot and ejection port identify it as
the Model 336, a gun that to shooters virtually defines Marlin and which has never,
ever been manufactured by Remington, notwithstanding its corporate parentage.
Otherwise a fine and inspiring story.
Thomas M. Sullivan
Lake George, N.Y.
You probably dont need another letter telling you about the graphics accompanying
the excellent article Remington, U.S.A., but please add this one to your stack. The
cover graphic is, of course, the iconic Colt model 1911A1, and the story graphic is
an artists rendition of a Marlin 336, both fine firearms, by the way. Remington does
manufacture its own version of the 1911, but it has never produced a lever-action rifle
similar to the Marlin 336.
Kenneth Scheel
Green Bay, Wis.
PUBLISHER
Jack Fowler
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.

2
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com.

AUGUST 5, 2013
Nicholas J. Bruyer
Founder, First Federal Coin
ANA Life Member Since 1974
Perfect
Gold MS70
THE INSIDERS VIEW
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Leading Source for Trends in the Coin Market
Be it $250 or $2.5 Million, 70 is the

One Magic Number that Drives Prices
In the Gold Coin Market Insane!
If there is one little secret that is not so secret about todays gold
coin market, it is the obsessive, compulsive focus on quality.
Even after 38 years in this business I am still awe-struck by
the stratospheric prices that tip-top quality, Best of the Best
Gem gold coins command.
$33,000 For A Single Grade Point

As collectors furiously compete with one another, the differences in price between merely nice gold coins and Best of
the Best can be breathtaking. Consider a recent coin auction
I attended in January: Two 1857 $20 gold pieces from the San
Francisco Mint were on the block. One was graded Gem Mint
State 65 (MS65), while the other was Gem MS66. One sold for
$14,100, while the other coin graded just a single point higher
(a difference in quality that takes an expert to discern) brought
$47,000a $33,000 difference for a single point of quality!
Of course the higher priced coin was also one of only a few
example of that coin, but I think you get the picture: The gold
coin market is quality-obsessed. And it will pay big money for
coins that achieve the Magic Number of perfection: Mint State
70 (or MS70 for short).
Just Released: A New Batch of Perfect

MS70 Gold
I get very excited when a new year dawns, because thats when
the government releases its newest gold coins. Now the hunt
begins for those few perfect Gemsthe MS70s!
Somewhere in the proverbial haystack of hundreds of thousands of new 2013 Gold Eagles minted by the U.S. government,
a fraction somehow escape miraculously untouched by even the
faintest scrapes, scratches and knocks that befall coins that run
the production, packaging, storage and shipping gauntlet. They
are the proverbial needles in the haystackthe miracle gold
coins that represent perfection in an imperfect world. Even the
tiniest, most superfluous sign of contact, visible only under
magnification, immediately disqualifies the coin from
further consideration.
Of course, nobody is going to accept another persons word
that a coin meets the perfect MS70 standard. First the coin
must be sent to an independent third party grading service such
as Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), who will certify
the grade and seal the coin in high-security slab. Dealers and
collectors alike send in thousands of newly minted Gold Eagles
to find those few that achieve the MS70 grade.
Market is Moving for

Top Rarity in the $5
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The market for perfect
MS70 $5 Gold Eagles
is young and still
developing. Consider
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MS70. Its price held
steady for years at
just above $2,800.
But in the fall of 2011
it jumped to $3,310
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Nicholas Bruyer is an award-winning professional numismatist with more than 30 years of coin market experience. His firm was a distributor for the London 2012 Olympic Games Coin Program. Since
1985, hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers have acquired coins from First Federal Coin and
its affiliated companies.
Prices and availability subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a predictor of future performance.
Prices and availability subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a predictor of future performance. NOTE: First Federal is a private distributor of worldwide government coin and
currency issues and privately issued licensed collectibles and is not affiliated with the United States government. Facts and figures deemed accurate as of June 2013. 2013 First Federal Coin.
American Numismatic Association

Nicholas Bruyer
Life Member 4489
1-800-222-4106
14101 Southcross Drive W., Burnsville, Minnesota 55337
week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/17/2013 2:35 PM Page 4
The Week
n Mike Bloomberg may want to sit down with Bob Filner and
explain what stop and frisk means.
n According to conventional wisdom, the Gang of Eight immigration bill went from inevitable to dead in all of 60 seconds. Its prospects were exaggerated, though, as are current
reports of its demise. While Speaker Boehner says the House
wont take the bill up, his caucus is divided on immigration
and has yet to settle on a tack. We believe it should pass incremental reformsenforcement measures, perhaps packaged
with a carefully crafted version of the DREAM Actbut
worry about what would happen in a conference committee
with the Senate. The pressure to adopt a version of the Gang of
Eight bill and then send it to the House to pass with the support
of Democrats and some Republicans would be enormous.
Boehner should make an ironclad assurance to his caucus
never to go to conference. This pledge will enhance Boehners
ability to pass incremental measures, since House conservatives wont feel compelled to try to block them for fear of an
eventual conference. More important, it will truly kill the Gang
of Eight bill, which deserves a place in the congressional dustbin.
ROMAN GENN
n Edward Snowden, the worlds most famous fugitive interruptus, was still, as of this writing, bargaining for his future
from the Moscow airport. Snowden is seeking asylum from
that paragon of transparency, Vladimir Putin. Various Chavezite
countries in Latin America have offered to take him in.
Meanwhile the United States has revoked his passport and
wants him returned to be prosecuted. His journalistic collaborator Glenn Greenwald says Snowden has a trove of documents describing exactly how the NSA does what it does.
True, or bluff? Besides which, two more questions: How did a
flighty creep like Snowden get to have access to such info?
And do we conceal too much? Every war, including the war on
terror, requires secret ops. How wide-ranging are our secrets?
When we spy, when must it be secret that we do spy? A responsible Congress and a responsible executive should weigh these
matters. In the meantime, keep him on the run.
n Texas state senator Wendy Davis became a media star and a
national hero to the Left for filibustering a bill to protect unborn children. Many states have been passing such laws. But
her filibuster, combined with disorder created by a large group
of her supporters, kept the legislature from passing the bill during its special session. It also got her in front of the likes of Anderson Cooper of CNN, who asked her such tough questions
as, What was it like standing for that long? Governor Rick
Perry promptly called another special session, which passed
the bill. Abortion will now generally be banned after 20 weeks,
and clinics will have to adhere to new safety standards. Daviss
allies say that the standards will close down all but five clinics
4
See page 10.
in the statewell believe that when we see itand were designed solely for that purpose. Actually, the standards follow
the recommendations of the Philadelphia grand jury that indicted Kermit Gosnell. During the special session, protesters
on Daviss side brought tampons and jars of excrement to
make some sort of point. As though by instinct, they chose tactics perfectly suited to the ugliness of their cause.
n For years he has been a lightning rod for liberal criticism:

the archconservative governor of a deep red state, an evangelistic free marketeer, a man of vocal faith, a tea partier. But
when his term ends in 2014, Rick Perry will step down as governor of Texas, leaving behind him a state that is the envy, at
least economically, of most others in the union. Over his 13
years in office (the longest tenure of any Texas governor), Perrys
conservative policies have helped make Texas the nations
second-fastest-growing economy (behind only North Dakota,
which is in the midst of an unprecedented oil boom), with eight
of the countrys 15 fastest-growing cities. Perry likes to point
out that Texas has been responsible for a full third of the net
jobs created in the entire country over the past ten years. Perrys
tort-reform victories, his pro-life advocacy, and his devotion to
the Tenth Amendment will be part of a strong legacy, one that
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THE WEEK
will overshadow memories of his disastrous presidential run.

And his policies are not likely to fade if he is succeeded by his
attorney general, Greg Abbott, as many expect.
AP PHOTO/JACQUELYN MARTIN
n As secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet

Napolitano has been the paradigmatic Obama appointee: a
lawyer long on partisan politics, short on subject-matter expertise, and even shorter on effectiveness. After assuming control
of the sprawling, largely redundant behemoth created in Washingtons post-9/11 frenzy to do something, she exhibited
stunning ignorance about the law governing her departments
principal task, falsely claiming that it was not a crime to enter
the U.S. illegally. Napolitano also consulted with Islamists in
crafting a counterterrorism policy that denies the nexus between Islamic-supremacist ideology and violent jihad. Concurrently, DHS issued guidance instructing agents that terrorist
radicalization and recruitment were likely products of
rightwing extremism on the part of Christian sects, military
veterans, proSecond Amendment activists, and those opposed to illegal immigration or abortion. She departs to take
over the University of California. Sadly, it seems an ideal
match.
n So determined are House Democrats to derail the investigation into the Internal Revenue Services targeting of teaparty groups that they are now calling for an investigation of
the investigator. Mary land representative Elijah
Cummings is leading the
charge, accusing the Treasury Department inspector general, whose May
report found that the IRS
had been inappropriately
targeting conservative organizations, of concealing
evidence that progressive
groups were targeted and
of misleading Congress
on the matter. The congressman, who has called
his committees investigation a Republican witch hunt,
pointed to Be On the Lookout lists containing the terms
Progressive and Occupy. It is Cummings, however, who
is on a partisan expedition. Elizabeth Hofacre is the Cincinnati agent who led the group that Cummings claims pored
over the applications of liberal groups. Yet she told congressional investigators that when she received them, I just sent
those back to the specialists or the general inventory. I was
tasked with tea parties and overwhelmed with those, she
said, adding that she never processed an application from a
left-leaning organization. House Republicans have acceded
to Cummingss demand and called the in spector general
before the Oversight Committee to answer questions. If an
investigation into his investigation ensues, it will be a scandal of a different kind.
n Farm subsidies have long been packaged together with food
stamps to form a bill that urban and rural legislators could all
support. But after failing to pass such a bill in June, the House
6
separated farming from food stamps, and now, for the first time
since 1973, the House has the opportunity to consider food
stamps on their own merits. A record 47 million Americans
one in sevenreceive food stamps, at a cost to the federal government of $85 billion a year. House Republicans are trying to
introduce a modest work requirement (like that added by the
1996 welfare-reform law to the Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families program). They also want to change the rule
that lets people qualify for food stamps when they have merely
received a brochure from a welfare office. And they want more
efforts to fight fraud. Outraged Democrats are accusing
Republicans of snatching food from the hungry. Actually,
theyre trying to help struggling Americans get back on their
feet.
n After Senate Democrats threatened to abolish the filibuster

for executive-branch nominees, the parties reached a deal
over the nominees Republicans had been blocking. Obama
had made recess appointments to the National Labor Rela tions Board even though the Senate was not, in fact, in recess.
An appeals court ruled that the move was unconstitutional,
which is why Republicans were refusing to confirm the nominees to full terms. As part of the deal, the administration will
submit new nominees, as Senate Republicans have been urging. Other nomineesto the Consumer Financial Protection
Board, the Labor Department, and the EPAwill go through
without filibusters. We dont know how much of a Republican concession their confirmations represent, since it is not
clear that Republicans had the votes to filibuster them successfully. Harry Reid may try again to weaken the filibuster,
and Republicans have not yet agreed on any credible retaliation they can threaten. Reid will be less of a nuisance if
Republicans take the Senate in the next election.
n Senators Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) and Mark Warner (D.,
Va.) have introduced a bill that would make the two-headed
monster that is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into a one-headed
monster, on the theory that this will render it easier to decapitate. Senator Corker, to his credit, introduced a bill in the last
Congress that would have ended these agencies public guarantee; to his colleagues discredit, it attracted very little support. Corker-Warner has been put forward as a second-best
measure. Eight years into the one-headed monsters life,
Congress would be able to decide whether the corporation
should be maintained as is or dissolved. This reform would
make some progress, but not enough, in ensuring that government support of homeownership doesnt encourage risky
lending and financial instability. The problem with reforming
Fannie and Freddie is that when the economy is down, politicians are rightly reluctant to undermine the housing industry,
but when the outlook is improving, the agencies generate
substantial federal revenue, as they are doing right now.
Given that Congress has failed to make any serious move
toward reforming Fannie and Freddie, and given that Senator
Corkers earlier efforts to simply end the public guarantee
went nowhere, this plan may be the best of the politically
plausible options at hand. Properly understood as a transition
to a fully private system of mortgage insurance, CorkerWarner represents a step in the right direction. But it is not
and cannot be the last step.
AUGUST 5, 2013
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THE WEEK
n Four years ago, when the Obamans were ascendant and

Democrats ruled both congressional chambers, Republicans
were weary and searching for champions. In November 2009,
they found two: Bob McDonnell won a gubernatorial race in
Virginia and Chris Christie did the same in New Jerseyboth
states Obama had carried. McDonnell quickly became one of
the most popular governors in the country. He had sky-high
approval ratings, a booming state economy, and the respect of
Beltway insiders, who touted him as a future presidential contender. But McDonnell is now embroiled in a troubling scandal,
and there is talk in Richmond that he may resign. According to
the Washington Post, McDonnell and his wife, Maureen,
accepted more than $120,000 in unreported gifts from Johnnie
Williams, an executive at a dietary-supplement company.
Williams even helped pay for McDonnells daughters wedding. McDonnell later paid back his friends generosity by
opening the governors mansion to him to tout his products,
which have debatable medical benefits; Mrs. McDonnell flew
to Florida to serve as a saleswoman of sorts for Williamss
naturally occurring alkaloids. McDonnell has denied any

wrongdoing, but a federal grand jury is investigating the relationship. Behind the scenes, Virginia Republicans, who hope
to keep the governorship in Novembers election, say he may
step down. Regardless, his national political career is finished. These days, the square-jawed McDonnell, who not so
long ago lifted the spirits of his party, is hiring lawyers, not
strategists.
n We struggle not to choke on the words Michael Bloomberg

is right, but right is what the New York mayor is in the kerfuffle over the citys stop-and-frisk program. The police tactic
is controversial because most of those stopped (87 percent) are
black or Latino. That is less surprising than it may sound: Most
New Yorkers are black or Latino. Moreover, it is unsurprising
that these minorities are stopped at rates higher than would be
expected if the program were random; it is administered most
robustly in high-crime areas, which are disproportionately
black and Latino. Noting this, Bloomberg argued that the cops
The Mean Reaction

you ask the average person what the most deservedly maligned attitude is, hate would almost certainly come out on top of the list. The funny thing is,
people dont really hate hate. In fact, if they did hate
hate, wouldnt that make them hypocrites? We use
hate as a deliberate misnomer for bigotry, be it real,
imagined, or contrived. If I were to declare, I hate racism, few of the usual suspects would say to me: Dont
be a hater.
Besides, hatred is really popular in America, because
Americans love passion. And hatred is an essential part
of the anatomy of passion. The sincere lover of the poor
hates poverty. The committed lover of animals no doubt
hates animal cruelty. Hatred is particularly popular
among young people, which should not surprise anyone,
since the principal currency of youth is passion and
commitment.
I have seen young people, and older people too, who
are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals
threatening or using the most terrible violence for the
slightest and tawdriest reasons, Allan Bloom wrote in
The Closing of the American Mind. Why? Because,
according to Bloom, they have a sneaking suspicion
that they are face to face with men of real commitment,
which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth,
is believed to be what counts.
Which brings me to my contender for the most unfairly
maligned emotional state: apathy. It gets all the grief
hate does, but none of the respect. No one says of the
apathetic, At least he caresbecause the whole point
of being apathetic is that you dont, in fact, care. Worse,
more often than not, the people raging against apathy

are actually enraged by disagreement with their position.
Not one college president, provost, or professor in a
thousand who routinely rages against apathy would be
delighted to discover his students had, en masse, been
converted into passionate Republicans. The real agenda
behind jeremiads against hate and apathy alike is conformity. Most of the kids who are labeled apathetic are
actually quite passionate, just about the wrong things.
If I dont care about global warming, my true transgression isnt apathy, its failure to lend support to one
side of the argument. As I say in Liberal Fascism, the
most fascistic thing said every day on college campuses
is If youre not part of the solution, youre part of the
problem.
What brings all this to mind is that I never much cared
about the George Zimmerman trial. I felt real and sincere
sympathy for Trayvon Martins parents. I disapproved of
Zimmermans decisions, but didnt think they were murderous, and certainly didnt think they were provably so.
Racism never seemed like a relevant issue to me, and the
effort to coin a new label, white Hispanic, in order to
make it one seemed truly pathetic. And so I didnt care
about this story any more than I care about the countless
other tragedies that dash across the headlines and the
screens in a given day. Moreover, I resented efforts by the
media to make me care more than the facts warranted.
Does that make me apathetic? Hardly. Does it make
me a hater? I dont think so. It makes me noncompliant,
which is the only true sin under liberalism.
JONAH GOLDBERG
AUGUST 5, 2013
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THE WEEK
might be stopping those races too infrequently: More than 90

percent of those sought in NYPD murder cases are described
as black or Latino. Democrats vying to succeed the mayor have
variously described his remarks as outrageous (Bill de Blasio) and incredibly insulting (Bill Thompson). Yet there is
little or no evidence that the police have been unprofessional
or ill intentioned in their execution of stop-and-frisk, and there
is ample evidence that it has made a real impact on crime. If the
last testament of Bloombergism is a Central Park that you may
not smoke in but can walk through safely, that is not the worst
possible outcome. Within living memory, New York City had
over 2,200 murders a year, and vast stretches of the city were
unlivable. If the mayors critics have their way, Big Gulps may
be the smallest of New Yorks worries.
n Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace as governor of New

York when it was revealed that he regularly used prostitutes, is
running for comptroller of New York City. How many ways is
this wrong? Prostitution is a debasing traffic that stunts its
clients and degrades its purveyors. Spitzer was a hypocrite
since, as attorney general of New York, he had prosecuted
prostitution rings. He makes a fool of his wife, Silda, who, like
Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, stands by her man. He
makes a travesty of the concept of regret: Spitzer did penance
for his misdeeds by hosting TV talk shows. Like Anthony
Weiner, Spitzer is a damaged being, a Brobdingnagian ego
attached to a fetal personality without conscience, emotion, or
depth. Spitzers fall was so precipitous because none of his
fellow politicians would stick up for him: Even they could not
stand his ill-tempered arrogance. Just the man we should want
in government.
n Bob Filner is mayor of San Diego. A Democrat, and a former congressman, he is what the Associated Press describes as
a feisty liberal. One of the things he has been doing feistily
is harassing women. At this writing, his job is in jeopardy. In
order to save that job, he made a statement that is a classic of
the genre. He was humbled to admit that I need help. He had
begun to work with professionals to make changes in my
behavior and approach. Moreover, my staff and I will participate in sexual-harassment training provided by the city.
Why should the staff be dragged into this? In a crowning sentence, Filner said, If my behavior doesnt change, I cannot
succeed in leading our city. First, San Diegans should be a
self-governing people, going about their lives without need of
a Dear Leader. Second, is there no one else in San Diego who
can be mayor? Bob Filner is not indispensable. By all appearances, hes just creepy.
n Hundreds of thousands of people, in their homes and in all
sorts of health-care facilities, across the country and across the
globe, are surviving on nasogastric feeding tubes. But that fact
seems to have escaped Capitol Hill legislators, myriad humanrights organizations, and celebrities who are calling on the
Obama administration to stop force-feeding 45 Guantanamo
Bay detainees who are conducting a hunger strike. The fivemonth strike, reportedly a response to guards allegedly mishandling detainees Korans during a routine cell search, has
garnered international attention, particularly in the wake of
President Obamas recent promise to shut down the facility.
10
Were sure the activists would be quite pleased if we just let the
detainees starve to death.
n For many years now, Walmart has been a bogeyman of the

Left. The company employs millions, and offers good products at low prices to many millions morebut the very
name Walmart
is still anathema
to some. There are
people who would
rather there were no jobs, and no products, than that Walmart
existed. Take the District of Columbia. Its city council has
essentially voted to keep Walmart out of D.C. The company
had wanted to open six storesincluding in underserved
areas. It promised to fund transportation projects, create a
job-training program, and so on. But the city council said,
Your minimum wage must be $12.5050 percent higher
than the Districts regular minimum wage. In the District,
unemployment among blacks is 20.3 percent. Among black
teenagers it is 37.8 percent. Among black male teenagers it
is 43.3 percent. At least they wont have to suffer the ignominy
of working at Walmart. Nor will the underserved have to
suffer the ignominy of shopping there. Mona Charen pointed
out the worst part of this whole anti-Walmart effort: Its leading group calls itself Respect DC.
n The Egyptian militarys overthrow of the elected but lawless
Muslim Brotherhood government in early July seems to have
been a marginal improvement, and the Obama administration
has recognized it as such, providing the strongest support by its
reticence: It hasnt called the coup a coup. By law the U.S. is
not supposed to provide foreign assistance to a country where
the military has seized power; aid to Egypt would have to be
frozen and cooperative military programs and equipment sales
ceased. Our support for the military is a lever we would temporarily lose and permanently weaken if we cut off all support
until elections occurred and aid could legally resume. The military is crucial to maintaining free passage through the Suez
Canal and, via the Camp David accords, the safety of Israel
and the security of Sinai. Further, it stepped in at a crucial
point, when the despotism and abject mismanagement of the
Muslim Brotherhood had driven millions of Egyptians into the
streets to demand a new government. The right course is for
the State Department to take some time to make its decision,
monitoring the military governments deportment. Eventually,
Congress should grant a waiver to the pertinent law and provide aid even after the coup, contingent on the militarys progress toward establishing a constitution that protects minority
rights and freedom of speech and conscience.
n Christianity in the Middle East is under threat as never
before. The fate of Franois Murad is a sinister omen. A Syrian
Franciscan aged 49, he was in the monastery of St. Anthony of
Padua in Ghassanieh, a Christian village in northern Syria.
Islamists thought to be from the extremist group Jabhat alNusra broke into the monastery to loot it, and shot Father
Murad dead. A memorial Mass was held for him in Rome, and
another Syrian Franciscan, Father Ibrahim Alsabagh, spoke
there about his colleague and friend, singling out that he had
been gentle and docile. Franciscans of the Holy Land, he said,
AUGUST 5, 2013
Actual size 19 mm
The ONLY Confederate Cent Ever Struck

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THE WEEK
are always called to testify to their faith: The death of Father

Murad made me realize how close martyrdom is. This has not
stopped him from returning to a Franciscan monastery in
Damascus in order, as this moving witness of his faith puts it, to
be with my brothers and to live the testimony.
n There are no words adequate to the horrific attack on a group

of schoolchildren in Nigeria carried out by the jihadist Boko
Haram outfita partner to the Algeria-based al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghrebwhich claimed the lives of about 40 children and teachers in early July. The jihadists set fire to the
school and then shot children as they tried to escape; many
were burned alive. It was the third attack by the group, whose
name means Western education is forbidden, on a school this
summer. Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, released a
video after the attacks promising that they would continue.
We are going to burn down the schools if they are not Islamic
religious schools for Allah, he warned. The Koran teaches
that we must shun democracy, we must shun Western education, we must shun the constitution. President Bush was relentlessly mocked for saying, of al-Qaeda et al., They hate our
freedoms. But he was right.
AP PHOTO/FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
n Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber of the Boston

Marathon, appeared in court to be charged, and he was
greeted by supporters and fans. They may be classified as
dumb, mad, and besotted. The dumb ones assert there is no
evidence of his guilt (except video footage of Dzhokhar and
his brother, backpacked at the scene of the crime; except
Dzhokhars message in the boat that was his last hiding
place, When you attack one Muslim you attack all Muslims). The mad go even further, arguing in the manner of
9/11 truthers that the bombing
was an inside job. The besotted are hot for the little terrorist (Dzhokhar does look
like the young Bob Dylan,
if the young Bob Dylan
had been good-looking). In
a country of 300 million
there will be many thousands who are self-hating or
incapable of rational thought.
High-profile crimes bring them
out like worms after a thunderstorm.
n While nobody much was looking, there was a coup in
Qatar, one of the tiny sheikhdoms in the Gulf, population just
250,000. Its the property of the al-Thani family, and they
want to keep it that way. The 33-year-old Tamim al-Thani
replaces his father, Hamad al-Thani, who 18 years ago had
replaced his father. Thats how they do things there these
days: behind the palace doors and no violence. It matters
because Qatar is the worlds largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and uses its money to gain disproportionate influence, or (as some of the neighbors think) make inter-Arab
mischief. Sunnis themselves, the al-Thanis are nonetheless
12
stepping on Saudi toes by subsidizing the wrong sort of

Islamists in Syria, and upsetting secular or liberal elements
by subsidizing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. The alThani family exclusively owns Al Jazeera, banned in some
Arab countries, popular and opinion-forming in others. The
U.S. maintains a huge military base in the sheikhdom, so
some anti-Americanism is obligatory, pro forma. In common
with new absolute rulers elsewhere, the new Sheikh Tamim
has been greeted as a reformer with an interest in constitutionalism. More likely is that hell try to emulate his fathers
craftiness in playing both sides of every street.
n While Europe suffers a harsh demographic winter bearing

down on the economies of nations with aging populations, the
United States merely copes with an autumn chillbut its not
getting any warmer here either, according to a new report
released by the Centers for Disease Control. The U.S. birth rate
in 2011, 1.89 lifetime births per female, was the lowest since
reliable records began to be kept in 1920. One reason for the
decline is that people are less likely to have children during
periods of economic downturn and uncertainty such as weve
lived through for the past five years. But U.S. birth rates have
been below replacement level since 1971. Our failure to supply,
in adequate numbers, a generation to support us in old age and to
continue to be productive when were gone greatly darkens longterm economic forecasts and our general outlook on the future.
Raising the child tax credit might not raise the birth rate much,
but it would be helpful if only for its symbolic value. Government
can do little to encourage people to have children. It can do a lot,
though, to stop discouraging them.
n A magician who uses a rabbit in his act got an eight-page letter from the USDA (with the folksy salutation Dear Members of
Our Regulated Community) demanding, as the magician told
blogger Bob McCarty, a written disaster plan, detailing all the
steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such
as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. . . . [and] what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly. It turns out
the USDA has a full-time rabbit police division, with licenses
and inspectors and rules governing work hours for animal performers. Theres no insurance mandate yet, but theyre probably
working on one.
n We mentioned here previously Jared Marcum, the West
Virginia eighth-grader facing a $500 fine or up to a year in jail for
obstructing a police officer after refusing to take off a T-shirt
bearing the NRAs logo and a hunting rifle. Late last month, the
judge dropped the charges against Jared, in what the young mans
attorney, Ben White, called a victory for common sense.
Indeed. But while Jared is free to enjoy his summer, Justin Carter,
the 19-year-old Texan jailed since March for joking in an online
video game about shooting up a school, still faces charges of
making terroristic threats. In a bit of good news, though, he is
finally out from behind bars: In mid July an anonymous good
Samaritan paid Justins staggering $500,000 bail. Taking these
two cases together, thats a victory and a half for common sense.
n Doris Kearns Goodwin has had a checkered careermarred
by plagiarism, brightened by an insightful book on the Lincoln
administration, Team of Rivals. Her address at Gettysburg, comAUGUST 5, 2013
memorating the 150th anniversary of the battle, fell on the minus

side of the ledger. She rambled about presidents she had known,
and made a pitch for gay marriage, linking Selma with Stonewall,
and both with the Civil War. Selma, yes; Stonewall, huh?
Abraham Lincolns call for a new birth of freedom in the
Gettysburg Address has been used by liberals to justify every project du jour. Lincoln was a radical in the lengths to which he
would go to defend his principles; a conservative in the care with
which he chose them. They were, he argued, the principles of
the American Revolution (the definitions and axioms of free
society, as he put it on another occasion). If Americans wish to
change the institution of marriage, that is because they wish to do
it, not because the Founders, or Lincolnor the men who died at
Gettysburgwould have it.
n Orson Scott Cards 1985 science-fiction novel Enders Game

depicts a young earthling, Andrew Ender Wiggin, battling a race
of aliens known as the Formics. This fall Lionsgate will release a
movie version, with Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford, which is
battling a boycott campaign by gay groups. Card, it turns out, has
been critical of same-sex marriage. Lionsgate is sticking by its
movie, but has declared that it is a proud longtime supporter . . .
of the LGBT community (if they hadnt already finished the picture, they would have dropped Card like a hot rock). Its a free
country, and anyone can boycott anyone he likes. But observe the
vectors: Gays and their allies will not rest until opponents of gay
marriage are treated like Mennonitestolerated oddball fanatics.
Coming soon, to a life near yours.
SIPA VIA AP IMAGES
n Since 1979, Henry Doctor, also known as the Phantom Planter,

has secretly planted over 40,000 unauthorized flowers in public
places worldwide, and until recently he had never run into problems. Doctor thought the Dupont Circle metro station in Wash ington, D.C., which had 176 empty flower boxes lining the
escalators, could use some flowers. Last October, he planted 150
daffodils and tulips in the flower boxes, while removing cigarette
butts, trash, and weeds, without Metros even noticing. In June,
Doctor covertly planted 1,000 morning glories and several other
plants, which would bloom from August to October in beautiful,
patriotic colors of red, white, and blue. Fearing that Metro would
think the flowers were weeds and pull them out, Doctor sent a
letter to Metro confessing his crime and offered to work for $1
per year so he could continue to care for the plants. That was the
wrong move. Metro immediately issued a cease and desist
order with a threat of imprisonment and fines if he came anywhere near the flowers. It sent workers to the station and tore up
all the flowers. Even Mao said to let 100 flowers bloom.
n I know theres a lot of controversy about whether guys over
13 years old should bring a mitt to the game, Gregory Van
Niel said afterward, but he and every baseball fan capable of
enjoying his feat vicariously would say he made the right decision. With the glove he carried to Progressive Field in
Cleveland on a Sunday afternoon in mid July, he caught four
foul balls, which may be a record. He questions reports that the
odds were one in a trillion, noting that the attendance, 15,432,
was fairly light, reducing his competition, and that section 160,
where he sat, on the third-base side of home plate, is a sweet
spot for foul balls off right-handed hitters. He gave one ball
each to his daughter and his two nephews, who were with him,
and the fourth ball he tossed to his neighbors in the stands, balancing his boyish exploits at the ballpark with those fine
fatherly gestures. The Indians won, 64.
n Soledad OBrien recently left

her post at CNN to join Al Jazeera
America, a new English-language
affiliate of the Qatari-owned
broadcaster that will focus on the
United States. OBrien made her
name at CNN by sparring with
politicians and their surrogates,
especially those of the McCain
and Romney campaigns. She enjoyed doing so under the mantle
of keeping them honest, despite
her obvious penchant for relying
on dubious Democratic talking
points. John Sununu suggested
during the 2012 campaign that
she ought to put an Obama
bumper sticker on her forehead to reveal that her work was an
aggressive defense of the campaign. Perhaps her move to a selfconsciously progressive, Global Southoriented (read: antiAmerican) network will mean she admits her biases a bit more
openly. Though Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa alThani probably wouldnt fit on a bumper sticker.
n The history of the Founding period has been well taught and
well studied in American universities for the last four decades,
thanks in great part to Edmund S. Morgan. Morgan began as a
student of the Puritans but shifted his attention to the American
Revolution. He and his peersDouglass Adair, Bernard Bai lynoverturned the debunking economic determinism of
Charles Beard (which survives in the pop history of Howard
Zinn) and turned their attention to what 18th-century Americans were saying and thinking. In his nineties, Morgan summarized his credo thus: The American Revolution was really
what the revolutionaries said it wasa struggle for and about
liberty. Thus a generation of scholars was spared the storms of
Marxism and cultural studies that flattened so much of the
humanities. Morgan has died, age 97. The academy and the
nation are in his debt. R.I.P.
JUSTICE
Duty and Spectacle

George Zimmerman case was a wretched spectacle
from the beginning, but for this we are glad: People in
America are still tried in the courts rather than by leftwing protesters or by the media. To their credit, the jurors
appear to have decided the case strictly on the facts, which
gave them no choice other than to acquit Zimmerman, despite
the long campaign of defamation against him outside the
courtroom.
You dont have to endorse Zimmermans poor judgment that
night to realize that he didnt commit a crime and isnt a bullying
white racist circa 1955. He isnt even white, so the media had to
resort to the white Hispanic label to save their racial storyline.
If Zimmerman had set out to assassinate Trayvon Martin, he
HE
13
THE WEEK
that law and instead made a strict self-defense argument.

We wish the purveyors of perpetual outrage would pause from
saying stupid and inflammatory things about the Zimmerman
case long enough to consider how wrong they were about it all
along. But we are realists.
OBAMACARE
Delay and Dismantle

of Obamacare have taken to complaining
about Republican sabotage of the program, and of
good governance generally. The programs apparent
flaws are, they would have you believe, the result of Republican
obstruction. It would be working just fine if only all of us had
unified behind its greatness.
This excuse-making has intensified since the Obama administration announced, first, that it would delay the laws employer
mandatethe fine on companies that do not provide health
insurancefor a year, and second, that it would take applicants say-so on whether they qualify to get insurance from the
laws subsidized exchanges. Yet these delays were plainly the
result of the administrations own difficulty in implementing
the law and its fear that doing so would yield disappointing
results. The only subversion of the law has been undertaken by
the administration itself, which does not at first glance have the
authority to get rid of the inconvenient portions of its favorite
legislation.
The delay of the employer mandate gives Republicans an
opportunity to advance the day that Obamacare is repealed.
House Republicans should, as they are considering, call two
successive votes, to put the employer-mandate delay into law
and then to delay the individual mandate as well. democrats
will be unlikely to break with the administration on the first
vote, and, having voted to delay a mandate on businesses, they
will find themselves hard-pressed to explain why they did not
support one for individuals and families. If, on the other hand,
they vote to delay the individual mandate, they will be showing that there is substantial bipartisan opposition to major features of Obamacare. From there, House Republicans can move
on to voting for a delay of the entire law. For Republicans, its
all upsideso long as they make it clear that these votes are a
way of pursuing the replacement of Obamacare and not a substitute for it.
Some Republicans may be tempted to think that instead the
entire law should be implemented on schedule, on the theory
that voters will feel the pain and move right. But Obamacare is
not going to be implemented on schedule: It is going to be implemented however the administration believes will be most advantageous to its goals, regardless of the letter of the law. And
Republicans goal should be to keep the country from suffering
through Obamacare, not to exploit the suffering.
House Republicans have rightly voted on multiple occasions
to register their opposition to Obamacare and their support for its
repeal, but votes for repeal cannot be the only tactic they employ
in pursuit of the goal. The administrations move shows that the
law is running into serious difficulties, that its difficulties are not
the result of Republican obstruction, and that even democrats
do not treat it as a fait accompli. Republicans have a chance to
weaken the political coalition behind Obamacare while highlighting some of its most obnoxious provisions.
AP PHOTO/JOE BURBANK, POOL
George Zimmerman, July 13, 2013
never would have called the police to alert them to Martins

whereabouts.
This call is the act of so-called profiling that is supposed to
prove Zimmermans dark, racist motivation. But he may have
singled out Martin for his youth, his dress, or his behavior; he
might have been just as suspicious of a white teenager dressed
and acting the same way. (Zimmerman told the police on the call
that Martin seemed like he was up to no good.) He didnt
volunteer Martins race, but in response to the operators question said that he looks black.
What ensued was a tragedy that would have been avoided had
Zimmerman never fastened on Martin and never gotten out of his
car to trail him. What Zimmermans haters never acknowledge is
that it also would have been avoided had Martin never, as the evidence indicates, hit Zimmerman. It was a prosecution eyewitness
who said that he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman beating him
ground-and-pound style.
This made the case a simple matter of self-defense, which is
what police initially concluded when they declined to arrest Zim merman. After an enormous firestorm and campaign of racehustling political intimidationloosely joined by President
Obama when he said that if he had a son, hed look like
Trayvonauthorities charged Zimmerman with second-degree
murder. With this, they lashed themselves to the most malign
interpretation of Zimmermans intent from MSNBC and the leftwing blogs. They never came close to proving their case and, in
desperation at the end of the trial, tried to get the judge to allow
the jury to consider a child-abuse charge (the jury was allowed to
consider manslaughter).
Now that the jury has rendered the only verdict it reasonably
could, the same characters who have spent more than a year
smearing Zimmerman are indicting the American justice system.
The NAACP and Al Sharpton want the feds to pursue Zimmer man on civil-rights charges; Eric Holder says he is considering it.
Jesse Jackson wants the U.N. Human Rights Council to take up
the matter. A focus of particular ire is Floridas stand your
ground law, even though Zimmermans lawyers didnt invoke
14
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Presidential Hopes
and Hopefuls
A look at the 2016 Republican field
BY RAMESH PONNURU
next Republican presidential nominee is already planning his campaign. If it is not

too early for him to think about
2016, why should it be for the rest of us?
We dont know, of course, what issues
will be uppermost in the public mind
that year, or what the economy will be
like. Republicans can take comfort,
though, in the fact that only twice in the
last century has a two-term president
been succeeded by someone else from
the same party. They should also be
encouraged that the leading Democratic
contenders for 2016, at the moment,
appear to be Hillary Clinton and Joe
Biden. Only four times in american history has the public chosen a president
more than five years older than his predecessor (Clinton is 14 years older than
Obama, Biden 19). Since the Cold War
ended, the younger candidate has won
all four races that featured a contrast in
age.
Conservatives who disdain the Republican establishment and want an ideological hero to topple it in the primaries
should be less encouraged. Since 1984,
the party nomination has always gone to
16
He
someone in the center of the party or

even to the left of its center, and never to
someone on its right.
There are always several candidates
vying to be the conservative insurgent,
and they split the available vote. Sometimes that split pits social conservatives
against economic conservatives, as in
1988, 1996, to a small extent 2000, and
2008. Sometimes the division is also
religious, as in 1988 and 2008, when
evangelical candidates tried to base
their campaigns on their appeal to their
coreligionists. The party establishment,
meanwhile, typically picks its man
early.
Some of the insurgent candidates, es pecially in recent seasons, have been
novice politicians whom primary voters
in the middle of the partyopen in principle to either insurgents or the party
establishmentcannot see as plausible
presidents. The establishment-oriented
candidates always pass that test. Those
candidates are also willing to do whatever it takes to co-opt enough conservative activists to win. The establishment
candidates thus win the partys presidential nominations while the activists
set its direction.

Many conservatives would be excited
to see Rand Paul, Ted Cruz (an old
friend of mine), Rick Santorum, or Rick
Perry run next time, and other conservative favorites such as former congressman allen West have expressed interest
in running. It is easier to see several such
candidates getting in one anothers way
than it is to see any of them unifying the
right end of the party and carrying the
nomination. even if they lose, however,
these campaigns could have an impact
on the nominees platform and message.
Rand Paul might move the party further
in his anti-interventionist direction in
foreign policy; Santorum might affect
how it handles same-sex marriage now
that public opinion has turned in its
favor.
Paul Ryan might in theory have appeal
throughout the party. Conservative scribblers, including this one, hold him in
high regard. Yet it seems implausible that
Republicans will nominate someone who
has never held executive office nor won
a statewide election. Nor has he shown
as much visible interest in running as
other potential candidates. It may be
that he is looking forward to passing a
conservative tax reform as chairman of
the House Ways and Means Committee
rather than being the person to sign that
reform into law.
Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, is another candidate who could
have wide appeal. He has been a successful reformer in a state that badly
needed one. His competence and intelligence are unquestioned, as is his conservatism. His Indian ancestry should be a
plus in a party that wants to shake off a
whites-only image. But a Republican legislature forced Jindal to abandon his taxreform plan earlier this year, and his poll
numbers inside his state are quite weak.
He will have to recover fast to make a
credible run.
If Marco Rubio is planning to seek the
presidency in 2016, he is doing it in an
unusual way. In office he has allied with
the most conservative elements of the
party on almost every issuebut has
split with the base on one important issue,
immigration. His boosters say that this
issue will not doom his campaign, noting
that John McCain won the nomination in
2008 even though conservative activists
had vocally opposed him on immigration
in 2006 and 2007. The difference is that
AUGUST 5, 2013
ROMAN GENN
3col:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/16/2013 8:58 PM Page 16
McCains overall record was well to

the left of Rubios, giving him a base of
support among moderate Republicans.
Rubio couldrepeat: couldend up in a
no-mans-land, too far right to win those
voters who identify as moderately conservative but too heterodox to win those
who consider themselves very conservative.
Another interesting question a possible Rubio candidacy raises is whether
there is enough room in the primaries
for both him and Jeb Bush. The answer,
given their overlapping bases of support
and positions, is probably no. My guess
is that Rubio is the more likely to run,
but Bushgiven his built-in advantages
in the race to become the establishment
candidatemight be the more formidable contender.
Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is being mentioned as a dark horse
so frequently that he is rapidly ceasing to
be one. The case for Walker bears some
resemblance to the case for Tim Pawlenty,
then the governor of Minnesota, four
years ago. Like Pawlenty, Walker is a
northern evangelical and a successful
governor of a blue state in a region of the
country Republicans lust after. He has a
great advantage over Pawlenty, though, in
that the political battles in his state
attracted national attention.
Opinions differ on why Pawlenty fizzled out early, with a popular explanation
being the catch-all of lack of charisma.
It may also be, though, that there was no
room in the primaries for a candidate just
one notch to the front-runners right.
Pawlenty couldnt compete with Mitt
Romney for establishment support and
couldnt compete with Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and the rest for the
hearts of conservatives. Walker may suffer a similar problem. Support for taxing
Internet sales is not the type of position
that would sink a front-runner, but it is
the type of position that could make it
harder for a would-be challenger to the
front-runner.
If Walker were to become a leading
contender, the man he would presumably
be trying to beat is Chris Christie. By
2016, Republicans might be as desperate
to win the White House as Republicans
were in 2000 or Democrats in 1992, and
thus be willing to put up with ideological
deviations. Christies deviations have
been numerous enough to win him a reputation as a moderate. Yet neither indi-
vidually nor in aggregate do they seem

likely to be as troublesome in the primaries as those of the last two nominees
were. McCain had tangled with conservatives on taxes, global warming, immigration, and many other issues. Romney
was out of step with the party on health
care, the top domestic-policy issue of the
Obama years, and also had a moderate
history on abortion, guns, and other
issues. Nothing Christie has done seems
comparable, and he has a draw those two
men lacked, namely his rhetorical combativeness toward liberals. (This is also
something that sets him apart from other
would-be establishment candidates, such
as Ohio governor John Kasich.)
He may also look like a winner. Unlike
Romney, he did not just get elected in a
deep-blue state; he is running for reelection, and appears very likely to win. If he
racks up a convincing margin in one of the
two big races of 2013and even more if
Republicans lose the other race, that for
governor of Virginiahe will seem like
the answer to many Republicans prayers.
And he will end the year in a stronger
position than McCain ended 2005 or
Romney ended 2009.
Sensitive
SEALs
Feminist ideology has
engaged the Special Forces
BY ARTHUR HERMAN
MERICANS know theres something special about the SEALs.
Arguably the most skilled
and motivated military unit
ever created trains to be ready for any
possible challenge on land, at sea, or in
the air. Youd think the Obama administration, after the stunning success of
SEAL Team Six in killing Osama bin
Laden, would want to avoid monkeying
with this 2,500-man elite force.
Youd be wrong. Last month Secretary
of Defense Chuck Hagel approved a
Mr. Herman is the author of Freedoms Forge:

How American Business Produced Victory in
World War II, which will appear in paperback in July.
17
plan to introduce training for women to

become SEALs. If Congress goes along,
the plan will go into effect by March
2016. (The elite Army Rangers will go
gender-neutral in 2015.) Its all part of
the administrations campaign to get
women into combat, no matter the cost
or consequencesand for very much
the wrong reasons.
The argument is that letting women fly
F/A-18 fighter missions or lead an infantry platoonor train to be SEALs
simply acknowledges the fact that theyve
been serving and dying in action anyway
(more than 150 were killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan) but have been denied the
in the Services, or DACOWITS, has

become the Pentagons PC police, where
consultants push a gender-neutral agenda
that has a lot to do with the feminist
thesis that mens and womens traditional roles are entirely cultural constructs and the result of patriarchy, and
very little to do with whats good for the
services.
Indeed, the goal from the start was to
transform the military from an instrument of American imperialism into a
force that would be, in Betty Friedans
words, sensitive and tender to the
evolving needs and values of human
life. Madeline Morris, a law professor
weeks of SEAL Qualification Training

in parachuting, weaponry, and demolitionnot to mention training in how
to resist enhanced-interrogation techniques (among them waterboarding)
before they finally get to wear the coveted
Trident pin of a Navy SEAL.
Concede that its possible to find
women who meet all these standards. The
real question is, How many will really
want to?
The SEALs are a fixed part of American male folklorethe same folklore the
feminists are trying to eradicate. How
many teenage girls lie awake at night
wondering whether they have the right
The SEALs are a fixed part of American male folklore

the same folklore the feminists are trying to eradicate.
opportunity for professional advancement and the respect that comes from
serving in a formal combat role (we have
yet to have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff who hasnt).
Counterarguments that admitting women might force the services to lower
qualifying standards rouse the ire of
women-in-combat advocates, and the
order thensecretary of defense Leon
Panetta and Joint Chiefs chairman General Martin Dempsey signed admitting
women to combat roles specifically prohibits lowering standards just to get women closer to the battlefront.
But the sad fact is that lowering standards has been the long-term goal of
women-in-combat advocates such as former National Organization for Women
president Patricia Ireland and former
congresswoman Patricia Schroeder all
along. Getting women into the SEALs
only completes a radical-feminist agenda
that our military has swallowed hook,
line, and footlocker.
The radical-feminist war on our military started back in 1991 after the Tailhook scandal, when former and current
Navy aviators were accused of committing sexual assault at a drunken party in
Las Vegas. The resulting public outcry
forced the Army, Navy, and Air Force to
respond to demands by activists both on
Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the services clean up their attitudes about women, and fast.
So over the past two decades the De fense Advisory Committee on Women
18
at Duke and consultant to thensecretary

of the Army Togo West, put it this way:
A thoroughgoing integration of women
into the service would do much to undermine group norms such as hypermasculinity and unalloyed aggressivity,
including on the battlefield. In 1998 feminist historian Erin Solarno was even
more succinct on the goal of getting
more women in uniform: I think it is
harder to kill when you might give
birthforgetting that killing is part of
what militaries are supposed to do. Yet
for two decades Pentagon bureaucrats
and service chiefs have gone along with
this agenda for fear of arousing ire, both
inside Congress and out, that might
adversely affect their budgets.
Certainly one of those bastions of
hypermasculinity is the Navy SEALs.
Indeed, its been one of the keys to their
success.
Set aside the question of whether
women have the upper-body strength or
bone density to endure the grinding, grueling training known as Basic Under water Demolitions/SEALs, or BUD/S,
that candidates undergo at Coronado
Island outside San Diego, which often
results in physical injuries and culminates in the non-stop mental and physical
pandemonium known as Hell Week.
And set aside the fact that those who
survive Hell Week still have to pass Pool
Competency (in which instructors tear
off candidates masks and tie knots in
their air hoses while holding them down
at the bottom of the pool), and 26
stuff to endure weeks of constant pain,

sleeplessness, hunger, hypothermia, and
near-drowning in order to wear that
Trident pin? Certainly enough males do
to keep Coronado Island crammed with
recruits year after year, even though they
know only two in ten of them will make
the grade.
Getting women to volunteer for such
training in similar numbers can be difficult, as the Marines found out when
they opened their basic Infantry Officer
Course at Quantico, Va., to women last
year. Only two female Marines volunteered for the two-month course, which
requires marching all day with a 100pound backpack under a broiling sun
and being subjected to a mock ambush
or an emergency medical evacuation
under simulated fire at 2 A.M. One failed
the initial combat endurance test along
with 26 of the 107 male trainees, and
one passedonly to suffer an injury
two weeks later that forced her to drop
out.
Whether the same thing will happen if
BUD/S is opened up to women is anybodys guess. But the SEAL class to
which Navy hero Marcus Lone Survivor Luttrell belonged began with 180
male recruits. By the time it was over,
there were 30 left. If the women who do
show up at Coronado experience a similar, or even higher, drop-out rate, how
long will it be before pressure on the
SEALs from the Pentagon and Congress
to show progress by not only recruiting women into the program but also
AUGUST 5, 2013
STEYN CLASSICS August 5 2013 issue:all books 1 page april 2004.qxd 7/16/2013 7:29 PM Page 1
STEYN CLASSICS
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passing them becomes unbearablethe

alternative being to stand accused of
sexism?
In short, the stage is being set for some
complicated bureaucratic cheatingand
while lowering standards to get women
in is specifically prohibited under Panetta
and Dempseys order, the services are
required to review and revise those standards on a periodic basis with the goal of
finding one standard for both men and
women. Presumably, that would include
BUD/S.
BUD/S is not the result of whim or
macho tradition. It has constantly evolved
in order to reflect whats needed to get
maximum performance from every SEAL
on the battlefield. Unquestionably it does
feed on a male mystique that to be a
SEAL is to be part of the best.
As Dick Couch, ex-SEAL and a leading authority on Special Ops training,
points out, change the standard and you
will change the battlefield performance.
You will also drain away the mystique
on which both recruitment and the
SEALs group cohesion depends. Whats
likely to result is a two-tier SEAL service: one that includes SEALettes for
public-relations purposes, and the other
made of pre-2016 veterans whom you
call when you really, really need to get
the job done.
According to the AP, Pentagon officials want to install senior women
from the officer and enlisted ranks
directly into Special Forces units such
as the SEALs now, so that women they
recruit will have a support system to
help them get through the transition
presumably by adding to their numbers
and making sure evil males dont flunk
them out.
Its the kind of gender war the radical
feminists have wanted all along. Why the
men in uniform have supported them in
that goal remains a mystery. Everybody
knows its a system built on a thousand
little lies, exArmy officer and former
State Department official John Hillen
told journalist Stephanie Gutmann, but
everybodys waiting for someone thats
high-ranking whos not a complete moral
coward to come out and say so.
That was in 2000. Thirteen years later
were still waiting for a senior general or
admiral with that kind of courage. So now
its up to Congress to finally call a halt to
this absurdity and order an about-face in
Obamas war on the SEALs.
20
Sharia after
Morsi
Egypt revolted against inept
governance, not Islamic supremacism
BY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
seven months ago, by a

landslide two-to-one margin
in a free and fair election,
Egyptians approved a new
sharia constitution proposed by their
president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. In assessing Egypts
prospects now that Morsi has been driven from office, that is the fact to remember. Much as wed like to believe
otherwise, the armys startling July 3
coup, appeasing the millions who poured
into the streets for days of protests, was
an indictment of Morsis sheer incompetence and of Egypts impending economic
collapse. It is neither a countrywide re jection of Islamic supremacism nor the
dawn of a true Arab Spring.
In announcing that the armed forces
had deposed Morsi, General Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi gathered by his side a congeries of
national leaders. Included were not only
such natural Brotherhood opponents as
Mohamed ElBaradei of the secular national Salvation Front, who had made
himself the face of Morsis opposition,
and Pope Tawadros II of the beleaguered
Coptic Christian church; also signing on
to General Sisis post-Morsi roadmap
were significant Islamist figures: Grand
Mufti Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar University, Sunni Islams academic center
since the tenth century, and representatives of the al-nour party, Salafists even
more zealous for sharia transformation
than the Brotherhood. The need to present
visible support from Islamic supremacists, even if it proves to be exaggerated
and fleeting, is the tribute the illusion of
democratic Egypt must pay to the
Egypt that actually exists.
The goals of the armed forces in deposing Morsi did not include ruling the
country day to day. The coup was more a
matter of saving the country from financial ruin and rampant social strife. In the
aftermath, Sisi set about the business of
assembling a technocratic government to
nLY
manage affairs in what is meant to be a

transition, of uncertain duration, to a new
elected government based on a new constitutionone reflective not only of
Egypts dominant Sunni population but
also of its various minority sectors. The
hope of secular Muslims and other minor ities is for a constitution that enshrines the
protection of minority rights and equal
protection under the law, with participants in future elections forced to accept
this framework.
It probably will not work. It may never
have been able to work in Egypt. But
establishing any semblance of real democracy will be much harder now. Euphoria
over Morsis ejection has already given
way to raging dissent and violence from
the Islamist millions, who have had power
ripped away from them after playing by
what Western governments and transnational progressives certified as the rules
of democracy.
Something like Sisis roadmap should
have been followed in early 2011, when
it was the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak
that had been toppled after Egyptians
swarmed the revolutions epicenter,
Cairos Tahrir Square. That did not happen because the West, very much including the Obama administration and the
bipartisan Beltway clerisy, is seized by
the fantasy that elections equal democracythat there need be no preexisting
liberty culture. Hillary Clintons State
Department pressured the Egyptian military to hold elections rapidly in order to
claim a hollow victory: the purported
rise of a real Islamic democracy.
In reality, moving instantly to popular
elections in Egypt inevitably meant the
instant empowerment of anti-democratic
Islamic supremacists. They, not the chic
young secularists of media lore, are the
pulse of the people. As night follows day,
the Islamists crushed the secularists in the
elections. So todays attempt at a do-over
does not start with a clean slate. Tens of
millions of Islamists are embittered and
perhaps irreconcilable.
During Mubaraks reign, pollsters
found that upwards of two-thirds of
Egypts 80 million people wanted to be
governed by sharia, Islams repressive,
discriminatory societal framework and
legal code. If Mubaraks Egypt was proAmerican and pro-Western, if it was
committed to peace with Israel, these
were reflections of the regimes preferences, not the peoples. Between the preAUGUST 5, 2013
Opponents of Mohamed Morsi in Tahrir Square, July 3, 2013
Morsis victory in the June 2012 election was not a landslide, although given
that he got a slightly higher percentage
of the vote than Barack Obama did in
the 2012 U.S. presidential election, it is
amusing to hear hopeful commentators
portray his thin three-point winover
a Mubarak-regime relic, not a democratas a sign of Islamist decline. (Yes,
its dizzying to hear both that Islamists
are moderate democrats and that their
occasional setbacks are boons for democracy.) Still, it is worth emphasizing that
Islamic supremacism is far more popular
in Egypt than is the Brotherhood. The
Western media conflate the two, but they
are saliently different. The Brothers have
successfully marketed themselves globally as the Islamist vanguard. Yet in
Egypt, while they have their legions of
loyalists, they are widely regarded with
contempt, not just by secularists but even
by other Islamists.
Coverage of the latest upheaval missed
this phenomenon. In the main, the revolt
was against Morsis governance and the
Brotherhoods aggressive duplicity.
Secularists and progressivesprobably
less than 20 percent of the electo rateagitate against sharia implementation, but their passions are not the
countrys passions. Most Egyptians fear
a failed state, which is what Egypt is well
on the way to becoming: a net importer
of food and fuel, with much of its starving population subsisting on two dollars
a day, and the tourism industryEgypts
major drawmade a shambles by ji hadists.
Morsi was incompetent. Worse, the
ambitious Brothers are viewed as a threat
by the Gulf monarchies, whose largesse
is badly needed by a government with a
structural deficit that now exceeds $20
billion annually. The Saudis and the
United Arab Emiratesmajor supporters of the Egyptian army and, not coincidentally, the al-Nour partywere sitting
on their wallets when the Brothers ran
the show. As soon as Morsi was shown
the door, they injected $8 billion in aid,
with promises of more to follow.
The media vastly exaggerate the importance of Morsis usurpation of neardictatorial powers as a cause of his fall.
He claimed legislative authority and the
insulation of his sovereign acts from
judicial review because the military and
the courtsstaffed with Mubarak holdoversvoided parliament after Islamists
won control of it, then threatened to
vacate the constituent assembly before it
could finish the sharia constitution. But
the Brotherhoods overarching goal was
not dictatorship by Morsi but by sharia.
Given the Wests obsession with elections, it made perfect sense for Morsi, as
the only elected official left standing, to
AP PHOTO/AMR NABIL
dominant Islamist culture and the Muslim Brotherhoods entrenched network,

Egyptians, given the chance, were sure
to vote for sharia and for the Islamists
certain to implement it.
The handwriting was on the wall after
the first popular referendum on amendments to the Mubarak-era constitution.
Secularists and progressives wanted what
the military is trying to achieve now: no
elections in the near term, and a stabilizing transitional period in which all elements of society would collaborate on an
inclusive constitutionand in which proponents of real democracy would have
the time to develop political organizations
that could credibly compete with the
Brotherhood and other Islamists. The
Brothers and their Western enablers countered by demanding quick elections. The
Islamists won the referendum in a rout.
The parliamentary elections that
soon followed mirrored that result. The
Brotherhood won nearly 50 percent of
the seats, while al-Nour and the other
Sal a fist parties added another 25 percentdemonstrating that, for all the street
noise and media hype, the constituency
for Western democracy in Egypt is paltry.
This gave the Islamists a hammerlock on
the constituent assembly tasked with writing the new constitution. It also prompted
the Brothers to renege on their promise
not to field a presidential candidate.
21
assert that only he had democratic legitimacy, and that the public, not the court,
should decide whether to adopt the sharia
constitution. This angered the secularists, who blasted Morsi as a dictator in
an effort to prod the judges and the military to block the sharia constitution.
But it did not upset the vast majority of
the population. When Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the constitution
last December, Morsis approval rating
was 60 percent.
It nosedived in the following months
because Egypt slipped deeper into
chaos: food shortages, starvation, rising crime, andemblematic of sharia
culturesincreasing repression of religious minorities and women. Nevertheless, Egypt as a whole has not shed its
Islamic-supremacist character.
Thus, the Islamist flank of General
Sisis ad hoc support network vanished
within days. The army killed scores of
riotersIslamists and their jihadist
shock troops demanding Morsis restoration. The al-Nour party quickly bolted,
though not before blocking the secularist effort to appoint Mohamed ElBaradei
as prime minister (he was later appointed vice president for foreign affairs).
Meanwhile, for green-lighting Morsis
ouster, Grand Mufti Tayeb was scalded
by Islamist scholars. Sheikh Yusuf alQaradawi, the globally renowned sharia
jurist and Brotherhood totem, an nounced that most of the al-Azhar faculty found the coup to be a profound
affront to Islam.
Struggling to defuse the tension, the
new interim president, Adly Mansour
(plucked by Sisi from the High Constitutional Court), issued a constitutional
declaration under which Egypt will be
governed in the post-Morsi transition. Its
opening articles reaffirm that Islam is the
religion of the state and that sharia, de rived from ancient Sunni canons, is the
main source of legislation.
Naturally, the secularists, progressives,
and religious minorities professed shock.
We did not take to the streets to give
legitimacy to religious-based political
parties that were about to erase Egypts
identity, thundered the Maspero Youth
Union, one of the savvy progressive
groups spotlighted by the media as Morsi
fell. But these groups are actually trying
to create a new Egyptian identity. The
current one, Islamic supremacism, will
not be easily erased.
22
Salon and
Breakfast
Kenneth Minogue, R.I.P.
BY JOHN OSULLIVAN
f you were a distinguished philoso-
pher, economist, political theorist,

or literary critic arriving at Heathrow from the U.S., Australia, or
New Zealand between, say, 1990 and
2010, there was a fair chance that you
were heading for 43 Perrymead Street
in fulham. That was where Kenneth
Minogue, professor of politics at the
London School of Economics and Britains leading public intellectual of the
Right, and his second wife, Beverly,
lived and over the years maintained a
high-class B&B for visiting conservatives (English breakfast and metaphysical
debates included). Its guest rooms were
almost never empty. The Robert Conquests, the Tim fullers, the Roger Kimballs, and (I have to add) the John
OSullivans were among the more frequent guests. And the prices were
unbeatable.
Suppose, however, you were unlucky
enough to be visiting London when all
the rooms were booked or, worse, you
were living in the city? No worries. You
would still be welcome at No. 43. In
addition to keeping house for non-paying
guests, Ken and Bev gave an apparently
limitless series of lunch and dinner parties at which the current boarders, other
visiting firemen, local Tory intellectuals,
sporting left-wingers fond of debate,
next-door neighbors, and the couples
extended familiesincluding Kens first
wife, Valwould gather at a long table in
the conservatory to be fed delicious food,
more-than-drinkable wines, and provocative argument. Ken was a generous host,
champagne bottle always at the ready,
Bev a superb cook in the school of Elizabeth David, a mistress of both french
and English cuisine. (I share with Roger
Kimball fond recollections of both her
steak-and-kidney pie and her steak-andkidney pudding.)
If all those present had been dumb, the
evenings would still have been memorable. In fact the guests included some of
the best talkers from three continents.

Most of Londons cleverest minds attended at one time or othernot only
academics, politicians, and journalists
(Kens professional contacts, so to speak)
but also novelists, sculptors, dancers,
actors, chefs, and composers. The conversations ranged widely and playfully.
And those evenings, rich in friendship
and debate, were stimulated, guided, and
occasionally calmed by a host who could
match his sharpest interlocutors in logic
or epigram over a vast range of topics.
Kens genius was, among other qualities, conversational. He was stimulated
by error, contradiction, folly, and even
intelligent correction. One can see that
in his Firing Line debate with Bill Buckley, where, though they are in essential
agreement, they tussle over secondary
pointswith Ken rarely coming off
worse. He would test seemingly reasonable propositions by pointing out the
odious or absurd consequences of applying them in practice. He would do so with
fanciful, comic, or homely examples.
And he would delight in having his arguments caught, turned around, and sent
whirling back by an opponent. Hearing
this mix of logic and wit was rather like
listening to a Platonic dialogue rewritten
by Nol Coward or Tom Stoppard. Indeed, the nearest thing in art to Kens
conversation may be Stoppards 1972
play about modern philosophy, Jumpers.
Not incidentally, Ken was a great
admirer of Stoppard, to whose trilogy of
plays on the Russian intelligentsia, The
Coast of Utopia, he gave a rave review. It
is sometimes difficult to see in that
review exactly where Stoppard ends and
Ken begins; but this is unmistakably
Ken: When an influential set of people
lose their wits to some grand abstractionNazism and Communism are the
obvious examplesthen whole nations
go mad. . . . A nation of clever artists,
such as the Italians, should never have
fallen for [Mussolinis] idea that they
were all warriors with a mission to
restore the greatness of Rome.
Precisely because Ken was a good conversationalist, some of his liveliest work
took place in the lecture room or in political and cultural journals such as NR, The
New Criterion, and Australias Quadrant,
where he was responding to immediate
crises or topical criticisms. Here he is in
the British journal Standpoint, illustrating how the ideology of niceness, by
AUGUST 5, 2013
I only once had occasion to call for the

cane, which was sent (with the caning
record book) straight up from the headmasters office. As I raised the cane
over the offenders hand, a chorus came
from the class: Mustnt raise the cane
above your shoulder, Sir, LCC [London
County Council] regulation. These
were children who had not yet been
accorded the absurdity of rights, but
they understood very well that they
lived under a rule of law.
Kens conversational style of argument

was also marked by coolness, urbanity,
skepticism, and the making of fine distinctions (that last very evident in the
quotation immediately above). It is these
qualities that permeate his major books:
The Liberal Mind (1963), which depicts
modern liberalism as an elderly Saint
George, hooked on idealism and selfapplause, desperately searching for eversmaller dragons to slay; Alien Powers
(1985), which attempts to discover the
distilled essence of ideology by boiling a
number of particular ideologies in skepticism; Politics: A Very Short Introduction
(2000); and The Servile Mind (2010),
which wittily examines how modern
governments infantilize their citizens by
dictating moral judgments to them. All
these books are in print today, their frequent republication around the world testifying to the growing appeal of Kens
style of conservatism, whose admirers
range from R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. to
Andrew Sullivan.
What was that style? Obituaries have
generally summarized it as the familiar
conservative theme that the attempts to
create a heaven on earth generally produce a hell instead. That judgment is not
falseKen believed it devoutlybut it
is inadequate. I hesitate myself to summarize a set of ideas that are both subtle
and scattered across works of theory and
daily journalism, but I think they go
something like this.
A free society is composed of people
who, seeking to better themselves, gradually cast off the constricting customs of
earlier times and develop various skills
and abilities to navigate a changing
world. In doing so, they change their
identities from whatever their social status had previously dictated to whatever
their economic and social interests now
require. They can do these things (in
different times and places) because
human beings are self-conscious: They
reflect upon themselves and their circumstances and act in accordance with
their reflections. They can be influenced,
of course, but they cannot be conditioned.
They have to cope with reality.
That is why ideologies from Marxism
to feminism that claim to liberate people
from false consciousness are not only
false, and condescendingly so, but are
also attempts (fortunately doomed in the

end) to impose a false consciousness on
others. That is also why governments
that attempt to regiment people, whether
economically or psychologically, in pursuit of some collective aim generally
prove both mistaken and accident-prone.
They impose a single aspiration where
there are many and draw on limited
bureaucratic skills rather than on countless social ones. And as Ken pointed out
in The Servile Mind, this ambition to
control is spreading:
The evident problem with democracy
today is that the state is preempting
or crowding out, as the economists
sayour moral judgments. Rulers are
adding moral judgments to the expanding schedule of powers they exercise.

Nor does the state deal merely with
principles. It is actually telling its subjects to do very specific things. Yet
decisions about how we live are what
we mean by freedom, and freedom is
incompatible with a moralizing state.
One can trace in this set of ideas certain echoes and influences from the
philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the
economist F. A. Hayek, and the political
and literary critic Shirley Robin Letwin.
Ken, within a decade of arriving in
Britain from New Zealand and Aus tralia, where he was respectively born
and educated, was appointed a junior
lecturer in the LSE politics department
headed by Oakeshott. (Ken remained
there 50 years and, in due course, became head of the department.) Not long
afterward, he became a close friend of
two Americans prominent in Londons
social-cum-political life: Bill Letwin,
professor of government at LSE, and his
wife, Shirley. Shirley ran one of Londons few intellectual salons, and Ken
was a regular participant at the Letwins
tennis and dinner parties, which Hayek
also frequented when in London.
Ken absorbed all these influences but,
mixing them with his own experience
and insights, he turned them into something distinctive. Not for nothing was he
an individualist. By the early 1970s he
was a central figure in a group of writers,
academics, politicians, and journalists
who exerted intellectual influence on
the Torieswho were then reeling from
two election defeatsthrough outlets
such as the Daily Telegraph editorial
page, the magazines Encounter and The
Spectator, and the conservative think
tanks then beginning to sprout: the Centre
for Policy Studies, the Salisbury Group,
and the Conservative Philosophy Group.
Margaret Thatcher was derided by the
Tory Wets as Daily Telegraph Woman. She was a founder of the CPS; a
friend to the Salisbury Group; and a
scholarship girl, ever eager to learn, at
the CPG, where Ken was an equally regular pundit. As he might have put it himself, he risks the guilt of being a founder
of Thatcherism.
And somewhere along the way he got
a taste for salons, which, fortunately,
Beverly shared, and from which all his
friends benefitedand maybe the wider
world too.
LIBRARY OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
ignoring such realities as the need for

social discipline, has destroyed the peace
of the classroom, still solid but threatened
when he was a young substitute teacher
in the tough inner-London district of
Brixton:
23
The Front Man

Face of the lawless bureaucracy
have for years attempted to put our

finger upon precisely why Barack obama strikes us
as queer in precisely the way he does. there is an
alienness about him, which in the fever swamps is
expressed in all that ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his
citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore yearthe
great globalist does not even speak a foreign language. obama
has been called many thingsradical, socialistlabels that
may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down
at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming
number of authentic radicals, but the presidents politics are
utterly conventional managerial liberalism. His manner is
aloof, but he is too plainly a child of the middle class to succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys suffered from,
even if his household entourage does resemble the ringling
Bros. Circus as reimagined by imelda Marcos when it moves
about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm. not a dictator
under the red flag, not a would-be king, President obama is
nonetheless something new to the american experience, and
troubling.
it is not simply the content of his political agenda, which,
though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was
24
onservatives
Woodrow Wilsons or richard nixons. Barack obama did not

invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new
ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike
ronald reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President
obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big
thinkers or big ideas. President reagans guiding lights were
theorists such as F. a. Hayek and thomas Paine; obamas most
important influences have been tacticians such as abner Mikva,
bush-league propagandists like the reverend Jeremiah Wright,
and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the
intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President obama
does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest
their ideas, much less to implement them. this is not to say that
he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact
whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more
impressive than his intellect.
the result of this is his utterly predictable approach to
domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His
faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently
absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the affordable
Care act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a comAUGUST 5, 2013
AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
mittee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the

mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare
without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be
achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers
who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But
they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching
IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve
the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary
of health and human services. IPABs powers are nearly
plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a
supermajority of Congress to be overridden.
IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obamas
approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest
of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financialreform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar.
In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of
American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the
transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws
passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile
nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obamas political career
will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests
and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has
advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as
with the health-care laws investiture of extraordinary powers
in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistanceand, more troubling still, in plain
violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose
to call this pragmatism, but what it is is a mild expression of
totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the presidents administration and his party.
Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John
Adams warned us about.
eMOCRACy never lasts long, Adams famously said.
It
soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was
never a democracy that did not commit suicide. For
liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to
serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the
executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly
by good luck and Charles de Gaulles patriotism. Long before
she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi
had been centralizing power in the prime ministers office, and
India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political
miscalculation and her dynasty-minded sons having gotten
himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria
under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not
going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a
bureaucracy-without-death. you do not need to install a dictator when youve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear
by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the
bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy.
elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you
expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of

the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack
Obamas view of the world. Barack Obama isnt the leader of
the free world; hes the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of
total politics.
In an important sense, the American people have no political
say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did
not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead,
Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration,
through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to
create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of
the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the
thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his
many panels of experts. There are several problems with that
model of business, one of which is that President Obama, and
more than a few of his beloved experts, have political interests.
The partisans of pragmatism present themselves as disinterested
servants of the public weal, simply collecting the best information and the best advice from the top experts and putting that
into practice. Their only political interest, they would have us
believe, is in helping the public understand what a great job is
being done for them. Consider President Obamas observation
that his worst mistake in his first term was thinking that this
job was just about getting the policy right. . . . The nature of this
office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives
them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially
during tough times. (It never seems to have entered into the
presidents head that he might have got the policy wrong.) But
of course there is a good deal more to politics than that. For
example, the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014
congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to
happen with employers struggling under an expensive healthcare mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And
so he has decidedempowered to do so by precisely nothing
that the law will not be enforced until after the elections.
Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law,
but he has done that too.
This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the
executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and
make judgments, but it does not give the executive the power to
decide which aspects of the law will be enforced and which will
not, or to establish a different timeline from the one found in the
law itself. For all of the power that Congress legally has given
the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more
illegally.
The president and his admirers dismiss concern over this as
so much chum for the talk-radio ravers, but it is no such thing.
The job of the president is to execute the lawthat is what the
executive branch is there to do. If Barack Obama had wanted to
keep pursuing his career as a lawmaker, then the people of
Illinois probably would have been content to preserve him in
the Senate for half a century or so. As president, he has no more
power to decide not to enforce the provisions of a duly enacted
federal law than does John Boehner, Anthony Weiner, or
Whoopi Goldberg. And unlike them, he has a constitutional
duty to enforce the law. Representative Tom Cotton says that
the presidents health-care delay makes a deal on immigration
25
less likelyif the president can simply decline to enforce the

provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise? representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the fact that
after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of
immigration reform, the so-called DreAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though
he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then
did away with criminal-background checks for those to be
amnestied, also on his own authority. strangely, the order to halt
background checks came down on november 9, 2012, the same
day that John Boehner said republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform.
In a similar vein, President obama has refused to cut off
foreign-aid funds to the egyptian government, though he is
required by law to do so in the event of a coup dtat, which is
precisely what happened in July in egypt. It might be embarrassing for the president to punish the egyptian military and the
ongresss
supine ceding of its powers, and the obama

administrations usurpation of both legal and extralegal
powers, is worrisome. But what is particularly disturbing is the quiet, polite, workaday manner with which the administration goes about its businessand with which the American
public accepts it. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, The
essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law. Barack
obama makes a virtue out of that caprice, having articulated for
his judicial nominees not a legal standard but a political standard
requiring sympathy for politically favored groups: African
American, gay, disabled, old, in his words.
We have to some extent been here before. It is a testament to
the success of free-market ideas that it is impossible to imagine President obama making the announcement that President
richard nixon did on August 15, 1971: I am today ordering a
freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United states.
President nixon created not one but two IPABs, the Pay Board
and the Price Commission, which were to be entrusted with
The president not only ignores the law but in some cases
goes out of his way to subvert it.
grand mufti of al-Azhar for their overthrow of the unpopular
Mohamed Morsi, but the law does not make exceptions for
presidential embarrassment. The president is not legally em powered to assassinate American citizens, but he has done so,
after going through the charade of drawing up a legal argument
under which he judged himself entitled to do what the
Constitution plainly prohibits. The law also prohibits the president and his allies from using the instruments of government to
persecute their rivals, but that is precisely what the Irs has
been up to for several years, as it turns out. And not just the Irs:
Tea-party activist Catherine engelbrecht was subject to an Irs
audit, two FBI visits, an osHA investigation, and an ATF
inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or F).
And although the Irs has no statutory power to collect
Affordable Care Actrelated fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, obamas managers there
have announced that they will do so anyway.
The president not only ignores the law but in some cases goes
out of his way to subvert it. The U.s. military carried out the
killing of osama bin Laden, but the records of that event have
been removed from military custody, where they are subject to
inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act, and moved to
the CIA, where they can be kept in secrecy. He has attempted to
make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess and
has been stopped from doing so by the federal courts, which
rightly identified the maneuver as patently unconstitutional.
There exists a federal law called the religious Freedom
restoration Act, which restricts the federal governments
power to force Americans to violate their consciences. The
obama administration is forcing an abortifacient mandate upon
practically all U.s. employers, in violation of that law. Kathleen
sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who is
responsible for drafting those regulations, received a number of
letters from lawmakers arguing that the mandate she was contemplating violated the law; she proceeded anywaywithout
so much as getting an opinion from her departmental lawyer.
26
managing the day-to-day operations of the U.s. economy.

President nixon, too, was empowered by a Congress that
invested him with that remarkable authority, through the
economic stabilization Act of 1970, whose provisions were to
be invoked during times of economic emergency. There was no
economic emergency in 1971, but it is a nearly iron-clad rule
of the presidency that powers vested will be powers used. That
President obama has adopted President nixons approach but
limited himself to health care might be considered progress if
he had not adopted as a general principle one of nixons
unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isnt illegal. President nixons lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the
decency to be ashamed of it. President obamas lawlessness is
as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly,
as though it were a virtue. President nixon privately kept an enemies list; President obama publicly promises that were
gonna punish our enemies, and were gonna reward our
friends.
Barack obamas administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the
American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the presidents army of faceless regulators, but it is in
no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of
the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of
those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic
Park. Barack obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows
that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not
in recess. He knows that his HHs is promulgating regulations
that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be
enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack
obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory,
he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being
limited by something so trivial as the law.
AUGUST 5, 2013
Treaty
By Decree
Obamas end-run around the
Senate, and the Constitution
B Y J O H N R . B O LT O N
& JOHN YOO
ITh the exception of the SALT I agreement,
every significant arms control agreement during the past three decades has been transmitted
to the Senate pursuant to the Treaty Clause of
the Constitution, veteran senators wrote the president. We see
no reason whatsoever to alter this practice.
These words did not flow from the pen of Senator Ted Cruz
(R., Texas) or Mike Lee (R., Utah) in a quest to block presidential power. Instead, the authors were the unlikely duo of thensenators Joe Biden (D., Del.) and Jesse helms (R., N.C.). Biden
and helms did not see eye to eye on much, but they agreed that
President George W. Bush had to submit his 2002 nucleararms-reduction pact with Russia as a treaty: No constitutional
alternative exists to transmittal of the concluded agreement to the
Senate for its advice and consent.
After announcing last month that he would seek deep cuts in
American and Russian nuclear stockpiles, President Barack
Obama should consider those words from the man who is now
his vice president. Obama has not been shy about his goal of a
nuclear-free world, despite the continuing quest of North Korea
and Iran for nuclear weapons, Russias extensive modernization
of both its warhead arsenal and its ballistic-missile force, and
Chinas ongoing expansion of its nuclear capabilities. As Obama
said at Berlins Brandenburg Gate, Peace with justice means
pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weaponsno
matter how distant that dream may be.
The policy arguments against bilateral negotiations with
Russia in a multipolar nuclear world would seem obvious,
especially to a president who barely knew the Cold War. The
capacity and technology build-ups by China, the appearance
of India and Pakistan as nuclear powers in the late 1990s, and
the continuing proliferation efforts by North Korea, Iran, and
others all demonstrate that the Cold War paradigm is no
longer an adequate basis for determining strategic-weapons
levels or deployments. Obamas massive cuts in Americas
already tattered nuclear umbrella, with more to come, are far
more compelling proof of a failed strategy than is his airy and
diaphanous notion of nuclear zero.
Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He is the author of Surrender Is
Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and
Abroad. Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an
AEI visiting scholar. He is the author, most recently, of Taming Globalization:
International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order.
In fact, the entire theory of nuclear zero adherents is that

reductions by nuclear powers such as the United States will
induce others to follow suit and will dissuade non-nuclear states
from seeking that capacity in the first instance. There is, of
course, absolutely no evidence that the rulers in Tehran and
Pyongyang will do anything other than ramp up their own
efforts in the face of American decline.
Ironically, the United States may be saved from Obamas policies by Vladimir Putin, who has rejected any further bilateral
negotiations, arguing instead that China and perhaps others must
be included. No doubt having China on Russias border has sharpened Putins awareness of living in a multipolar nuclear world,
complementing his real objective against the United States: further gutting our efforts, already gravely slackened under Obama,
to create a limited national missile-defense capability. Putin
fears that any further reductions in Russian strategic weapons,
combined with even limited increases in U.S. anti-missile capabilities over time, would protect America from Russian retaliation
after a U.S. first strike. Paranoid as it is, this scenario has motivated Moscows animus against our missile-defense efforts since
Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Constitution, however, still stands athwart Obamas

rush to a nuclear-free utopia. Article II, Section 2 declares
that the president shall have Power, by and with the
Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, but only if
two thirds of the Senators present concur. President Obamas
last nuclear-reduction pact, the 2011 New START Treaty with
Russia, cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal to dangerously low levels,
750 strategic delivery systems and 1,550 warheads. It passed the
Senate by a vote of 7126, but only after breaking a filibuster
with 67 votes, not one to spare.
Uncertain it can persuade a dozen Republicans to err again, the
administration is considering a Russian deal without Senate
approval. According to his spokesman, Secretary of State Kerry
told senators that they would be consulted as we moved forward
into discussions with the Russian Federation, but did not indicate
that the administration had decided to codify any results in a
treaty. Unnamed administration officials say Washington and
Moscow could engage in reciprocal weapons cuts without a written agreement.
Senators of both parties should stop this assault on the separation of powers. As advisers to George W. Bush, we supported
vigorous executive authority to protect our national security after
9/11 through measures that included withdrawal from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. When Bush proposed
negotiating nuclear cuts with Russia and prompted the Bidenhelms convergence, however, he wanted the agreement to undergo the Constitutions treaty process. even though Bush was
urged to resort to a scheme of reciprocal reductions, he wisely
placed constitutional text and historical practice first.
Bushs logic remains valid today. It is for a reason that the
Constitution requires that treaties win supermajorities: to ensure
that treaties represent the highest levels of political consensus and
that (in the words of Federalist No. 1) we have good government
from reflection and choice rather than bad government from
accident and force. Article II, Section 2s difficult ratification
process checks presidents who may bargain away national sovereignty for political advantage or short-term gain. Playing with
he
27
the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Obama is bargaining away sovereigntys

most fundamental attribute, the right of self-defense.
The administration, however, bears allegiance to what it
considers a higher authority. President Obama and his intellectual supporters would rather replace sovereignty with
global governance: the idea of constraining political authority at the national level and transferring it to international
organizations such as the United Nations or the International
Criminal Court. They take as their model the European Union,
where once-great nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain have steadily ceded authority
over their domestic and foreign policies to unaccountable
bureaucrats in Brussels. No state is superior to any other; all
nationsincluding the United Statesare equally exceptional, as President Obama notoriously claimed, and therefore
not exceptional at all. All nations must submerge their national
interests in an amorphous international community.
President Obama made clear his worldview in his first address
to the U.N. General Assembly:
It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009more than at any
point in human historythe interests of nations and peoples are
shared. . . . In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no
longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to
dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation
or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of
power among nations will hold.
Global governance promises a peace that has so far eluded

mankind. For true believers, the prime instrument is the treaty, but
one that is a wholly different kind of agreement from those that
ended the First and Second World Wars. Rather than seek discrete
political, military, or trade agreements between individual nations,
global governance aims to replicate the administrative state at the

international level. Proponents of global governance urge vast
delegations of authority to regulate domestic and world affairs to
unaccountable international institutions; thus, the U.N. is responsible for international peace and security; the Law of the Sea
Treaty sets rules, to be administered by international bodies, for
resolving disputes about the oceans; and the International
Criminal Court can prosecute anyone in the world for war crimes.
These institutions will constrain U.S. freedom of action by imposing international norms derived from consensus rather than
respecting the decisions of constitutional democracy.
is in the U.S. Constitution that Obama finds the greatest

obstacle to the pursuit of his international utopia. Article II,
Section 2s requirement of a Senate supermajority puts a
brake on efforts to transfer U.S. sovereignty to international organizations. Thus, as with the proposed Russian nuclear-arms deal,
the administration has tried to advance global governance by an
end run around the Constitution. In 2012, for example, the
Obama administration declared that America would follow,
though not sign, a European Union code of conduct for outer
space. Drafted by nations that do not bear Americas global
responsibilities, the code restricts military activities in space as
well as some peaceful dual-use technologies, such as the multistage rockets that can launch commercial satellites.
The Obama administration has even gone so far as to attempt
to override Senate opposition to global-governance treaties. In
1986, President Reagan wisely decided to block the U.N.
Convention on the Law of the Sea because it creates an international authority with the right to tax private undersea mining.
Even though the Obama administrations efforts to convince the
T

nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe
28
AUGUST 5, 2013
Senate to approve the agreement have proven unavailing, it has

ordered the u.S. Navy to follow the treatys rules, in the hope that
they might become binding customary international law. despite
the Senates clear rejection of any climate-change agreements
(it rejected the Kyoto accords 990), the administration sought
to cooperate with the Copenhagen global-warming enterprise,
which considered pollution quotas and carbon taxes for developed nations. This year, the obama administration signed the
u.N. Arms Trade Treaty to impose a national control system on
small arms and light weapons, even while its gun-control proposals floundered in Congress.
The attempt to advance gun control through the Arms Trade
Treaty might surprise average Americans, but not liberals, who
have long been frustrated by the Constitutions limits on government. gun-control statutes, like any others, have to survive both
the House and the Senate and then win presidential approval. it is
far easier to advance an agenda through treaties, unwritten international law, and even norms delivered by the international
community.
opponents of capital punishment have used treaties to press
the Supreme Court to stop the death penalty in Texas. Womensrights groups advocate an international convention that would
achieve the goals of the failed equal Rights Amendment. And
supporters of bans on hate speech invoke international norms
to defeat First Amendment objections. There also is an international legal doctrine (embodied in a treaty the Senate has never
adopted) that during the period when a country has signed but
not yet ratified a treaty, it must take no measures that defeat the
treatys object and purposes. under some liberal theories, this
would allow the president to put some measures of the Arms
Trade Treaty into effect by executive order. Fortunately the
Constitutions treaty power, properly understood, prevents these
absurd schemes absent the support of a Senate supermajority.
Constitutional principle here makes for good politics.
Scandals over executive power increasingly beset the White
House. Resorting to unilateral executive initiatives to reduce
nuclear stockpiles can only further undermine trust in the
obama presidency. if obama believes that a 33 percent reduction in our deployed nuclear forces advances our best interests,
the treaty process provides him an advantageous forum to persuade others of his vision.
if obama instead insists on acting alone, Congress can respond
with its own constitutional powers. As commander-in-chief, the
president dictates nuclear strategy and tactics, but only the legislatures power of the purse can set the size of the armed forces.
The Framers designed Congresss power over the military to
frustrate presidential policies. in the 1990s, for example,
Congress supported the research and development of national
missile defense even while the Clinton administration wrongly
believed that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treatyit prohibited
all strategic missile-defense systemsreinforced strategic
stability between the superpowers. Congress can defeat
obamas policy simply by funding the expansion of u.S. nuclear
forces.
unlike a mere executive promise, which the next president
can undo at little cost, a constitutional treaty would signal a
long-term commitment by both branches to nuclear-arms control. if the president expects his dream of a nuclear-free world
to outlive his term in office, only a Senate-ratified treaty can
provide the lasting legacy he wants so badly.
The
Anti-Che
Felix Rodriguez, freedom fighter and patriot
BY JAY NORDLINGER
Miami, Fla.
elix RodRiguez seems fated to be linked to Che
guevara. This is not entirely just. Rodriguez loves
freedom, and has worked tirelessly for it; guevara
loved tyranny, and worked tirelessly for it. Two sides
of the same coin, some people say. Maybebut only in the
way that light and dark are two sides of the same coin.
Rodriguez had a role in stopping guevara. He was there, in the
Bolivian mountains, in 1967. He was the last person to talk with
guevaraa man who did so much to tyrannize the country
where Rodriguez was born, Cuba.
The story of guevaras last day has been told many times, in
many ways. Rodriguez told it in his 1989 memoir, Shadow
Warrior. it is told in a book published earlier this year, Daybreak
at La Higuera, by Rafael Cerrato, a Spaniard. la Higuera is the
village where guevara met his end. Cerratos main sources for
the book are Rodriguez, who was working for the Central
intelligence Agency, and dariel Alarcn Ramrez, whose nom
de guerre was Benigno. A Cuban, Benigno was guevaras
lieutenant in Bolivia. He was also a member of Fidel Castros
inner circle. He defected in 1996and now he and Rodriguez
are friends.
Just a week ago, Rodriguez made a donation to the CiA
Museum: ashes from guevaras last pipe. But he has a few more
of those ashes here, in his Miami home. His den is chock-ablock with mementos. on the wall, for example, is a bond signed
by Jos Mart, Cubas national hero. in this den, we talk about
events past, present, and future. Rodriguez is an excellent talker
(as well as doer). He is large, sharp, and commanding.
He was born in 1941. His hometown is Sancti Spritus, in
central Cuba. His father was a storeowner; his mother helped
out in the store and tended the house. Rodriguezs earliest
memory is of being with his mom while she talked about
what Hitler was doing in europe. The little boy was scared
that the Nazis would come to Cuba. Among his forebears are
notable figures from Cubas wars of independence. one of
these figures is Alejandro Rodrguez Velasco, who would
become the first popularly elected mayor of Havana. in
1895, Mximo gmez sent a letter to this mans wifewho
had asked whether her husband might come home from the
field. gmez wrote her a tender letter about the value of
fighting for freedom. This letter is one of Felix Rodriguezs
treasures.
And who was Mximo gmez? Cubans know: He was an
officer from the dominican Republic, who went to Cuba to help
that country win its independence from Spain. For Cubans, he
29
is a Lafayette. In the 1980s, Felix Rodriguez went to El

Salvador, as a private citizen, to help that country defeat a
Castro-backed Communist insurgency. The alias he adopted:
Max Gomez. Here in his den, he reads out the letter from the
original Gmezand chokes up.
When he was about twelve, an uncle offered him the chance
to study in the United States. Felix was reluctant at first,
because he loved his life in Cuba. But another uncle, who had
studied in Paris, said, Think hard about this. This is a rare
opportunity, and if you pass it up, youll regret it. Felix heeded
this advice. And he chose a school in Pennsylvania, because he
wanted to see snow. The school was called Perkiomen, in
Pennsburg, not far from Philadelphia. When he was a junior in
high school, his country experienced its cataclysmic event: the
takeover by Castro and his fellow revolutionaries. Felixs parents were on vacation in Mexico. (It turned out to be a long
vacation.) Felix, just 17, determined to fight the Communists,
as soon as possible.
was possible through something called the AntiCommunist Legion of the Caribbean, being formed in the
Dominican Republicwhich itself was ruled by a dictator, Trujillo. Felix joined up against his parents will. He
arrived in Santo Domingoor Ciudad Trujillo, as it was
thenon July 4, 1959. He hoped that this date, the Fourth of
July, would be as auspicious for Cubans as it had been for
Americans. The Anti-Communist Legion staged just one
mission into Cuba, a disaster: Castro was waiting for them,
and all the troops were killed or captured. Rodriguez had been
excluded from the mission at the last second. A friend of his,
Roberto Martn Prez, was captured and spent the next 28
years in Castros prisons. Rodriguez vowed to keep doing what
he could.
One of the themes of his life is that too few people know
what it is to have your country seized by totalitarians. In a 60
Minutes piece, aired in 1989, Mike Wallace asked Rodriguez
why he was helping the Salvadorans. What is it, are you a
war-lover? Is that it? Are you constantly in search of adventure? Rodriguez replied, in short, that people in general are
clueless. You can read about Communism, but until you have
experienced it for yourself, you have no idea. Also, there is the
experience of exile: to be ripped from your country and family
and friends, and not be able to return.
Many people think of Castro and his brother as Northern
Europeanstyle socialists who occasionally get a little rough
or as traditional caudillos who flavor their speech with
Marxism-Leninism. In reality, they are in the mold of Hoxha
or Ceausescu, monsters. And the Castros grip on Cuba is monstrous. Like many Cubans and Cuban Americans, Rodriguez
often refers to Fidel Castro simply as he or him. Equally
often, he refers to him as the son-of-a-bitch.
At the beginning of 1961, he had an idea: He would assassinate the son-of-a-bitch. It would avoid or shorten the coming
war, he reasoned. He and a friend volunteered their services
and the CIA accepted. The Agency equipped Rodriguez with a
German rifle, which had a telescopic sight. The Agency also
added a radio operator to the team. Three times, this team
headed to Cuba on a luxurious yacht, whose captain was
American and whose crew was made up of tough, hardened
30
Ukrainians and Romanians, bearing East Bloc weapons.

Rodriguez later heard that the yacht belonged to Sargent
Shriver, President Kennedys brother-in-law. All three times,
something went awry, and the Agency changed its mind about
the assassination mission. In late February of 61, Rodriguez
was sent into Cuba as part of an infiltration team, whose mission was to help the Cuban resistance in advance of the invasion: an invasion that would be known as the Bay of Pigs.
Rodriguezs mission was, of course, harrowing, with many
close calls. But it was not without its amusing elements. One
day, Rodriguez and a companion approached a beach. Not
thinking, Rodriguez said to a militiaman, Is it okay to use this
beach or is it private? The militiaman said, Compaero,
where you been? There arent any private beaches anymore.
They all belong to the people! Oh, right, said Rodriguez.
Thanks, compaero. Power to the Revolution! But Rodriguez was soon warned away from a particular stretch of beach:
which was marked off for Fidel Castro himself.
In his Miami den, Rodriguez gives a detailed account of the
Bay of Pigs, an operation that earned the name fiasco. The
blunders of the American planners are almost unbelievable.
The Cubans had confidence until the end, says Rodriguez:
America was John Wayne. And John Wayne never loses. Until
he did. After the Bay of Pigs, Cuban hopes sank, and Castro
cemented his power. Fear gripped the island. People shrank
from resistance, understandably. Rodriguez managed to get to
the Venezuelan embassy in Havana, where he was sheltered for
five months: He left Cuba in September 1961. He would not be
sheltered in the Venezuelan embassy today: The government in
Caracas regards the Castro dictatorship as a model. Venezuelan
oil helps sustain the Castro dictatorship. As Rodriguez sees it,
Venezuelas president, Nicols Maduro, is loyal to the Castros,
like a son to a father (two of them). Maduros predecessor,
Hugo Chvez, was the same way.
Rodriguez married a Cuban girl he met when he was 14It
was love at first sight. He and Rosa had two children,
Rosemarie and Felix Jr. The family settled into American
lifebut not entirely. They were between countries, in a sense,
as so many others in South Florida were. Then, in 1967, came
Felixs rendezvous with Guevara.
HE old Argentinean guerrilla was in Bolivia to lead a

revolution, to impose on that country what he had
already helped impose on Cuba. The old guerrilla
was 39; Rodriguez was 26. He was assigned by the CIA to
assist Bolivian forces in tracking Guevara down. What was his
role in ultimate success? We can say the following: Rodriguezs skillfully gentle interrogation of a young guerrilla prisoner helped the Bolivians home in on the guerrilla leader. On
October 9, Rodriguez met this leader face to face, in the mudbrick schoolhouse in La Higuera. You can imagine some of the
emotion. Guevara had killed many people, personally, back in
Cubamainly at La Cabaa, his fortress headquarters. Before
they died, the Cubans shouted, Viva Cuba libre! (Long live
free Cuba!) and Viva Cristo Rey! (Long live Christ the
King!). And now Rodriguez had him at his feet.
Guevara was a cocky killer, but he was not so cocky at this
moment. Still, he had an air of command. Said Rodriguez,
Che Guevara, I want to talk to you. Said Guevara, No one
AUGUST 5, 2013
The last picture taken of Che Guevara alive, October 9, 1967. Felix Rodriguez is on the left.
had done Rodriguezs country so much harm, Zenteno said. It

was only right that he have the opportunity. But he declined.
It was left to a Bolivian sergeant. Rodriguez has always maintained that Guevara died with courage and dignity. He
admired him for it, and still does. But thats as far as his admiration goes.
He remembers meeting a woman some 30 years ago, whose
son had been executed at La Cabaa. He was 15 years old. She
went to the fortress to beg for his life. Guevara received her.
This was on a Monday. He called an assistant and said, When
is this prisoner scheduled to be executed? On Friday, he was
told. The prisoners mother thought Guevara was going to
grant a reprieve. Instead, he said, Get him and execute him
now, so his mother doesnt have to wait until Friday. She
fainted. Says Rodriguez, He was a very, very cruel man.
What does he think when he sees Guevaras face on all those
T-shirts? What does he think of the people who wear those
T-shirts? Mainly that they are ignorant, having no idea who
Guevara was or what he did or what he stood for. One day,
Benigno and his wife saw a young Frenchman in a Che shirt.
His wife asked him, Who is that fellow on your shirt? The
young man answered, A rock singer.
OdRIGueZ became an American citizen in 1969. And he

volunteered for Vietnam. From 1970 to 1972, he was in
special operations. He told the Vietnamese with whom
he worked, Ive already lost my country, meaning his original country, but its not too late for you: You can fight for your
country. One Christmas, after he was back home in Miami, he
received a card from a Vietnamese comrade named Hoa. do
31
AP PHOTO/COURTESY OF FELIX RODRIGUEZ
interrogates me. But talk they didabout philosophy, life,

and death. Rodriguez asked him about the people he killed at
La Cabaa. Guevara said they were all foreigners. He himself had been a foreigner in Cuba, of course. And as Rodriguez
pointed out to him, he was a foreigner in Bolivia. Guevara
answered, These are matters of the proletariat that are beyond
your comprehension. Rodriguez asked how he, an Argentinean physician, could have become president of the Cuban
national bank. Guevara told him a funny story: One day, Castro
said to his top cadres, Who here is a dedicated economist, or
economista? Guevara thought he had said comunistaand
raised his hand. Thats how he became president of the national
bank. Rodriguez thought he might be kiddingbut later,
Benigno, the Cuban defector, confirmed the story. He had been
present, sitting right next to Guevara.
Rodriguezs orders from Washington were to do everything
he could to keep Guevara alive. Then, the prisoner would be
transported to Panama, to be interrogated by the Americans.
But the Bolivians had the authority in this matter. It was their
war, their countryand they wanted him dead. Rodriguez
gave the prisoner the news. Its better this way, Felix, said
Guevara. I should never have been captured alive. Rodriguez said to him, Comandante, do you want me to say anything to your family if I ever have the opportunity? After an
interval, Guevara said, Yes. Tell Fidel that he will soon see a
triumphant revolution in America (i.e., South America). And
tell my wife to get remarried and try to be happy. The two men
embraced. Then Rodriguez walked out of the schoolhouse. (He
was never to meet Guevaras family.)
The Bolivian officer in charge, Joaqun Zenteno Anaya, had
offered Rodriguez the chance to finish Guevara off. Guevara
you think the United States will ever

the Castro-backed, and Sovietabandon us? asked Hoa. Rodriguez
backed, junta in Managua. Rodwrote back and said no. In his view,
riguez agreedbut fairly rapidly
the U.S. did in fact abandon the
became disillusioned with the whole
Vietnamese, in 1975. He is of the
Enterprise (as North called it).
school that says the U.S. won the
Equipment for the Contras was
war militarily but lost it politically,
shoddy and unsafe. Operational seand shamefully. After their triumph,
curity was shaky. What really stuck
the Vietnamese Communists killed
in Rodriguezs craw was warabout a million.
profiteering. In 1987, he testified
In 1976, Rodriguez left the CIA,
at the Iran-Contra hearings, withfor several reasons. One had to do
out a lawyer, and without holding
with security. In May of that year,
back. That was the end of his inZenteno, the Bolivian, was gunned
volvement in scandal, he thought.
down in Paris. He had been servBut a month later, there was an
ing as his countrys ambassador to
eye-popping story in the Miami
France. Claiming responsibility was
Herald: A convicted money launa group that called itself the Interderer for the Medelln cartel had
national Che Guevara Brigade. Not
accused Rodriguez of soliciting
long after, Rodriguez received a call
drug money for the Contras. This
at home. In Spanish, a man asked
was a leak supplied by unnamed
for Felix Ramos. Then he said,
congressional sources. And who
Youre next. That name, Felix
might they be? It was no mystery.
Ramos, had been Rodriguezs alias
In the Senate, John Kerry was
in Bolivia. (Unlike Max Gomez,
chairing a subcommittee known to
it had no political or historical sigone and all as the Kerry ComRodriguez in 2011
nificance.) The Agency offered to
mittee. He was keen to establish a
give Rodriguez and his family new identities and move them to
link between the Contras and drug-running. He was especially
a different state. But Rodriguez decided against: too disruptive.
keen to link the vice president, George Bush, to any such drugSo, the Agency added security enhancements to his house, bulletrunning. Rodriguez had a tie to Bush, because the vice presiproofed his car, and took some other measures. They also gave
dents national-security adviser was Donald Gregg, who had
him a very high award: the Intelligence Star, for valor.
been Rodriguezs superior in Vietnam. Rodriguez wanted to
For some years, the Cuban dictatorship had a price on
testify before Kerrys committee in an open hearing, so he
Rodriguezs head. From Benigno, Rodriguez learned that
could clear his name. But Kerry insisted on a closed hearing.
Ral Castro had a special interest in him. There were at least
Toward the end of that hearing, Rodriguez said to Kerry,
three plots against Rodriguez. Is there still a price on his
Senator, this has been the hardest testimony I ever gave in
head? He thinks not: The Cuban government has enough
my life. Kerry asked why. Because, said Rodriguez, it is
problems without worrying about me. But its always possible
extremely difficult to have to answer questions from somethat some crazy guy will try to do something to congratulate
one you do not respect, and I do not respect you and what you
himself.
are doing here. The senator was not pleased. Boy, did he
Rodriguez has a lot to say about the Carter yearsnone of it
blow his top, Rodriguez says. But after almost a yearand
goodbut we will skip ahead to the Reagan years. In 1985,
considerable Republican pressureKerry apologized to
Rodriguez went to El Salvador, as a private citizen, and as Max
Rodriguez and acknowledged that the money launderers
Gomez. He flew hundreds of combat missions with Salvaaccusation was false. Fine, says Rodriguez. But if you Google
doran forces, applying what he had learned about counterhis name, you will find plenty of references to the Medelln
insurgency. He told the Salvadorans exactly what he had told
drug cartel. The endurance, the permanence, of the 1987 lie
the Vietnamese: It may be too late for Cuba, but its not too
rankles Rodriguez.
late for you. El Salvador remained out of Communist hands
While Kerry had Rodriguez before him, he took the opporand took a democratic path (however stony). Like all astute
tunity to question him about Che Guevara and Bolivia. For one
observers, Rodriguez sees a general threat to Latin America
thing, had he really done all he could to save the guerrillas
today: The threat is from little Castros who are elected demolife? Kerry was sarcastic in this questioning. It seems to
craticallyonce. Then they go about Castroization. Rodriguez
Rodriguez that Kerry, at that time, had sympathy for Guevara,
cites Evo Morales, among others: He will rule Bolivia for a
and the Sandinistas, and Castro. In 2004, when the senator was
very long time, presumably.
the presidential nominee of the Democratic party, Rodriguez
spoke against him at a rally on Capitol Hill organized by
Vietnam Veterans for Truth. Today, of course, Kerry is secreHILE in El Salvador, Rodriguez received a request
tary of statewhich pains and disgusts Rodriguez. I despise
from a White House staffer, a man soon to become
that guy. He is a phony. He was a phony during the Vietnam
famous: Oliver North. Would Rodriguez help with
War. Hes a self-promoter. His voice trails off: I dont like
the resupply of the Contras in Nicaragua? They were fighting
the guy at all . . .
W
32
AUGUST 5, 2013
uBAnS such as Felix Rodriguez expected the Castro

dictatorship to last a year, two years, maybe three. He
was 17 when Castro took over; Castro, with his brother,
still rules the island, and Rodriguez is 72. Communism in
Cuba has lasted longer than Communism in Eastern Europe,
by ten years and counting. Obviously, this is more painful
and disgusting to Rodriguez than John Kerrys current status
as u.S. secretary of state. Cuba was no Jeffersonian democracy when Castro took over. But it was nothing like the totalitarian hell he and his partners made it. And it has had no
chance to evolve in a democratic direction, as the Dominican
Republic and lots of other places did. When will it end?
When will the Communists fall? Cubans are weary of answering this question, after almost 55 years. Rodriguez,
though, points to the Castros friends in Venezuela: If the oil
ever stopped coming, the brothers would be in trouble.
needless to say, Rodriguez is unsure whether he will see
Cuba again.
Twenty-five years ago, he wrote in his memoir, Sometimes I feel a little bit like ulysses. . . . like him, I am from
an island nation. like him, I went to war. And like him, I am
having a hard time getting home. How about today? Does
he still feel that way? Is he still trying to get home? Wheres
home? Its complicated, Rodriguez says. Yes, it is. It is complicated for virtually all Cuban Americans of his generation.
Rodriguez is a patriotic Cuban. He is also a patriotic American.
under normal circumstances, this would be a bald contradiction, but the circumstances of the Cuban exile are peculiar,
not normal. Rodriguez says that the Cuba he knew has been
destroyed, over these 50-plus years. He doesnt know anyone
over there anymore. The Communists long ago expropriated
his family home in Sancti Spritus. If the regime fell, he
wouldnt claim it. But he might like to negotiate to buy it,
for sentimental reasons.
The 60 Minutes piece done on him in 1989 is an exercise in
soft-left condescension. It portrays anti-Communism as
some kind of mental disorder, or at least a sign of immaturity.
Of Rodriguez, Mike Wallace says, He has never lost his love
of war nor his anti-Communist ideals. Rodriguez doesnt
love war: But he is willing to fight in order to keep or gain
freedom and peace. At the end of the segment, Wallace wonders, What does the future hold for this 48-year-old foot
soldier in a fading Cold War? Arthur liman, who was chief
counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee, says, I think that
Felix Rodriguez will probably end upand I hate to say
thisin an unmarked grave in some faraway place, fighting
the remnants of Communism. Wallace responds, A little bit
like Che Guevara.
William F. Buckley Jr. once came up with a formulation:
Say that Smith pushes an old lady out of the way of an onrushing bus. Then Jones pushes an old lady into the way of an
onrushing bus. It would be absurd to say that these are two
men who push old ladies around. Felix Rodriguez will always
be linked to Che Guevara, and they both fought. But they are
not alike. Rodriguezs face will probably not grace a T-shirt.
He is what they call a right-wing Cuban exile. Guevara is a
romantic revolutionary and idealist. His face sits on a
billion T-shirts. Pilgrims flock to la Higuera, to worship at
his shrine there. But of the two men, Rodriguez and Guevara,
only one deserves honor.
An Arm
And a Leg
Hospitals are to blame
for obscene health-care costs
BY AVIK S. A. ROY
n 1994, two eminent Boston hospitals, Massachusetts
General Hospital and Brigham and Womens Hospital,
merged. Officials hailed it as a new era for integrated, highquality care. The states secretary of health and human services signed off on the merger without a public hearing, with
the blessing of Republican governor William Weld.
The merged hospital entity, called Partners HealthCare,
immediately went about raising rates for insurers. Blue Cross
Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the states largest private insurer,
wanted to fightin 2000, at a gathering of the companys executives, some suggested refusing to pay the higher fees. But executive Peter Meade delivered a cold slap of reality: Excuse me, did
anyone here save anyones life today? We are a successful business up against people that save peoples lives. Its not a fair fight.
For 50 years it hasnt been a fair fight. And understanding that
is the key to solving a mystery that has puzzled conservatives for
decades: Why is it that no matter what, the largest component of
government spendinghealth carekeeps rising?
In debates about health care, we spend a lot of time arguing
over how we buy it: whether through government payers, private
insurers, or health savings accounts. But theres an equally
important story, one that nearly everyone in the political class has
neglected: how we sell health care. Hospitals are at the center of
this story. And they are using their economic and political power
to drive up the price of their product.
If the Congressional Budget Offices projections are right,
health care will account for almost all increases in government
spending for the foreseeable future, excluding interest on the debt.
And increasing spending on hospital care is the biggest driver
of rising health-insurance premiums, which are in turn the main
cause of wage stagnation for middle-income Americans. Put
simply, we cannot confront the growth of government, nor of
middle-class economic insecurity, without first confronting the
central role that hospitals play in causing both.
OSPITAlS have quite cleverly avoided blame for these

problems. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats attacked private
insurance companies for rising premiums. There have
been reports just over the last couple of days of insurance companies making record profits, right now, said President Obama
during a 2009 news conference. At a time when everybodys
Mr. Roy is a columnist for NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE and a senior fellow
at the Manhattan Institute.
33
getting hammered, theyre making record profits, and premiums

are going up. Whats the constraint on that?
The presidents comments were disingenuous. As a proportion
of revenues, profits for health-insurance companies have stayed
relatively constant for decades at about 5 percent. What has happened is that hospitals have charged more and more for the same
services and treatments, and insurers have passed these costs on
to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Insurers are a convenient scapegoat, both for the real culpritshospitalsand for
a political movement that is hostile to the concept of private health
insurance. But blaming insurers is like shooting the messenger.
The average hospital stay in the developed world costs $6,222.
In the United States, the average hospital stay costs $18,142.
Thats true even though the average hospital stay in
the U.S. is only five days long, two days shorter than
the OECD average. You might guess that the extra
$12,000 pays for whiz-bang technology or extra
services that Europeans dont use, but studies have
shown that most of the difference cannot be explained by such factors. American hospitals simply
charge higher prices.
These higher prices are responsible for the growth
in the cost of health insurance. And as insurance
becomes less affordable, hospitals dont try to make
their services cheaper, as a normal business would.
Instead, they lobby the government for more subsidies, often pointing to the fact that they are required
by law to provide free emergency-room care to the
uninsured. In 2009, President Obama was happy to
adopt this as a talking point for his health-care law:
Those of us with health insurance are also paying
a hidden and growing tax for those without it
about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody elses
emergency-room and charitable care.
It will not surprise you that the American Hospital Association
eagerly supported Obamacare; hospitals will be the single
biggest beneficiary of the trillions in new spending that the law
will authorize. Currently approximately one-third of government
health spending ends up in the pockets of hospitals. This year,
before the implementation of Obamacare, U.S.-government
entities will send $500 billion to American hospitals, a figure that
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects to grow
to $800 billion a year by 2021. And the more money hospitals get,
the more powerful they become, giving politicians even greater
incentive to cater to their interests.
T was Lyndon Johnsons Great Society that turned American

hospitals into a political and economic juggernaut. Before
the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, progressive efforts to pass single-payer health care had been stymied
by two powerful forces: conservative southern Democrats (who
resisted centralization in general and feared integration mandates) and the American Medical Association.
However, the 1964 elections resulted not only in Johnsons
reelection, but also in large Democratic congressional majorities.
The Democrats gained 37 seats in the House, giving them a
295140 majority, and two seats in the Senate, for a total of 68.
(By comparison, after the 2008 elections, Democrats enjoyed a
257178 House majority and controlled 59 seats in the Senate.)
34
Since Johnsons agenda was likely to pass with or without

southern support, a number of congressional conservatives
switched sides and, as had happened with the New Deal, decided
to ride the Big Government gravy train for all it was worth,
sponsoring an even more expansive version of Medicare than
Johnson had originally intended.
The only opposition left was the AMA, which had, up to that
point, been a resolute opponent of socialized medicine. In 1961,
during a previous battle over nationalized health care, the AMA
had organized a successful cross-country campaign in which
women organized coffee klatches and played a record, narrated
by Ronald Reagan, inveighing against the proposed single-payer
plan.
Johnson, recognizing the AMAs pull, softened doctors

resistance by assuring them that Medicare would contain no
cost controls. The Medicare bill promised to pay doctors and
hospitals according to usual, customary, and reasonable rates.
The result was that doctors and hospitals could charge whatever they wanted to.
And they did. In the first year of Medicares existence, hospital spending increased by 22 percent. For the next five years,
hospital spending grew by an average of 14 percent a year. In
the decades since, growth in hospital spending has continued to
exceed that of the rest of the economy. In 1965 Congress projected that by 1990, accounting for inflation, the government
would spend $12 billion on Medicare. In actuality, the government spent $110 billion on Medicare that year, and another
$74 billion on Medicaid. Eight years from now, the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services projects, U.S. public spending
on health care will approach $2.4 trillion. One-third of that, as
noted above, will flow to hospitals.
Every president since Nixon has made a half-hearted attempt
to rein in government health spending. It was the Reagan administration, in 1983, that introduced price controls into Medicare.
But price controls only incentivized doctors to provide more
kinds of services at a higher volume, to make up for lower prices.
And hospitals have responded to Medicares price controls by
cost-shiftingi.e., charging higher prices to people with private insurance, and astronomical prices to the uninsured.
AUGUST 5, 2013
Private insurers dont have the same leverage as the government. If a private insurer refuses to play ball with the major hospital in town, the insurer will lose customers to a competitor who
is willing to pay the hospital more. And, as the Blue Cross executives in Massachusetts understood, politicians demonize insurers and lionize hospitals, so insurers look like the bad guys if they
deny their customers access to famous but costly local hospitals.
This problem, in turn, is caused by the fact that most consumers of private insurance dont buy it directly, but instead
receive it through their employers, making them less sensitive to
its price. Workers want access to the top hospitals and get upset
when their plan denies that access, because they dont directly see
how much they would save by choosing a cheaper hospital.
He Partners case is just one example of a tactic that hospitals all over the country have used to gain leverage over
private insurers: consolidation. In most sectors of the
economy, the government uses antitrust laws to prevent the formation of monopolies. But federal agencies and courts have been
uniquely passive in the face of hospital monopolies.
economists and regulators measure market concentration
using a tool called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI. The
HHI is calculated by taking all the players in a given market,
calculating their market shares, squaring each market-share
percentage, and adding up the total. For example, a market consisting of four airlines, two with 30 percent each and two with 20
percent each, would yield an HHI of 2,600 (twice 900 plus twice
400); a duopoly that split a market 5050 would yield an HHI of
5,000; and a perfect monopoly would have an HHI of 10,000.
According to guidelines published by the U.S. Department of
Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, a market with an
HHI between 1,500 and 2,500 is considered moderately concentrated, and one with an HHI above 2,500 is considered
highly concentrated and subject to regulatory scrutiny.
In 1992, hospital markets in the U.S. had an average HHI of
2,440. Nearly half of all localities in America already had a
highly concentrated hospital market. Based on antitrust guidelines for the rest of the economy, the U.S. government ought to
have blocked the vast majority of hospital mergers that took
place thereafter.
Instead, however, the DOJ and the FTC challenged only a
handful of deals. The agencies determined that they would
bother to address hospital mergers only if those mergers drove
the HHI to near 5,000. Hospitals, defending their mergers
against the governments opposition, played up their traditional
image to sympathetic judges: as instruments of charity, as nonprofit pillars of their communities.
The tactic worked. From 1993 to 2008, the DOJ and the FTC
failed to block a single hospital merger in the United States. By
2006, the average hospital-market HHI had increased from 2,440
to 3,261.
Hospital monopolies and oligopolies use their market power
just as other monopolies do: to raise prices. James Robinson of
the University of California looked at six common categories of
hospital procedures, such as pacemaker insertions and knee
replacements, and compared what hospitals charged for those
procedures. He found that hospitals in markets with aboveaverage HHI scoresthe highly consolidated onescharged
44 percent more than their brethren in markets with below-
average HHI scores. And nearly all of that extra revenue from
higher prices went straight to hospitals bottom lines, where it
could be used to pay higher salaries, build new wings, and swallow smaller competitors.
Most hospitals are nonprofit entities for tax purposes, which
gives the public the impression that hospitals focus on healing the
sick instead of making money. But thats not true. Nonprofit
status simply prevents hospitals from distributing earnings to
owners or shareholders; it does not prevent them from paying
large salaries to their executives and piling up cash for their proprietors. A McKinsey study found that the nations 2,900 nonprofit hospitals have higher profit margins, on average, than our
1,000 for-profit hospitals do; they just retain the profits and use
them for expansion, improvements, and so forth.
YaleNew Haven Hospital (YNHH), as the name implies, is
the academic hospital associated with the Yale School of
Medicine, in New Haven, Conn. In 2011 New Haven had a population of 129,585, making it Americas 192nd-largest city. But
YaleNew Haven is the fourth-largest hospital in the country. The
YaleNew Haven Health System, of which YNHH is the flagship, has gradually acquired many of the major hospitals in
Connecticutmost recently its major crosstown competitor, St.
Raphaels, for $160 million. Rest assured that hospital prices in
New Haven will not be going down.
And hospitals arent just buying up rival hospitals. Theyre
also acquiring physicians in private practice. According to an
analysis by Aetna, in 2002, two-thirds of medical practices were
owned by physicians, compared with one-quarter by hospitals.
By 2011, these numbers had reversed.
Hospitals acquire private practices because it lets them control
the patients whom private physicians see. Independent physicians can refer their patients to any hospital that accepts their
insurance; hospital-affiliated doctors are required to refer patients
to the hospitals they work for.
Hospital-affiliated physicians, in turn, can take advantage of
hospitals market leverage to charge higher prices to patients with
private insurance, an important counterbalance (for them) to the
increasing number of people on government-sponsored health
insurance, which pays much less.
ATHeR than address this problem, Obamacare, at the hospital lobbys behest, actively suppresses the ability of
physicians to compete with hospitals. Section 6001 of
the Affordable Care Act bars the construction of new physicianowned hospitals if those hospitals will accept Medicare patients.
While a few such hospitals have dropped plans to accept
Medicare patients in order to evade the laws restrictions, in
other cases investors have lost fortunes shuttering halfwaycompleted projects.
Physicians are trying to persuade Congress to reverse the ban.
But that effort faces an uphill battle with Democrats, reports
Alicia Mundy of the Wall Street Journal, because the ban was a
crucial tool they used to gain the hospital industrys support to
begin with.
Democrats learned an important lesson from the failure of
national health-care reform in the Clinton years: Dont anger
powerful special interests. So Obamas team took great care to
buy off the pharmaceutical industry and the AARP, to cow the
insurers into silence, and to cater to the interests of hospitals.
35
In most congressional districts, a hospital is the largest or

second-largest employer. Combine this fact with hospitals prestige as nonprofit pillars of their communities, and they receive
enormous deference from members of Congress. Put simply,
Obamacare would not have passed if it harmed hospitals.
This is why Democrats adopted an explicit strategy of coverage first, cost later: They knew their primary goal of achieving
near-universal coverage would go nowhere if they tried to crack
down on hospitals high prices. Even raising taxes was politically easier than taking on the American Hospital Association.
Indeed, as noted above, President Obama explicitly framed his
health-care law as a way to send more money to the hospital
industry. But his reason for increasing these subsidiesthat
charity emergency-room care by hospitals is a hidden tax on
the insuredwas a mere pretext. Hospitals claim that they spend
$50 billion a year on uncompensated care, but Obamacare will
replace this hidden tax with more than $200 billion a year in
spending on the uninsuredspending that is funded mostly by
explicit taxes.
And $50 billion is an entirely fictitious number. In March, for
Time, Steven Brill documented the degree to which hospitals
massively overcharge the uninsured. Hospitals do not expect to
collect payment on these huge bills, but they can claim any
unpaid balance as uncompensated care for public-relations and
tax purposes.
For example, Sean Recchi, an uninsured lymphoma patient,
went to MD Anderson Cancer Center, a world-renowned facility
in Houston. The hospital charged him $283 for a chest X-ray for
which it would have charged Medicare $20. It charged him more
than $15,000 for blood tests that normally cost a few hundred
dollars. It charged him $13,702 for a dose of Rituxan, a lymphoma drug for which the average U.S. hospital price is around
$4,000. All told, Recchis course of treatment cost $83,900.
Whatever he couldnt pay was called uncompensated care.
(MD Anderson is not struggling under the weight of bills unpaid
by the uninsured. In 2010, it recorded revenue of $2.05 billion
and operating profits of $531 million.)
In May, for the first time, the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services released data on the prices that hospitals
charge for common medical procedures. They found wide discrepancies. Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, for example,
listed an average price of $66,030 for implanting a pacemaker.
The University of Miami Hospital, across the street, listed an
average price of $127,038. In some cases, the costliest hospital
charged five or six times what the cheapest hospital did. Hospital
prices are usually set almost arbitrarily. They have no relationship
to what the services cost to provide, or to what insurance companies and the uninsured actually pay, let alone to any sort of
classical notion of supply and demand.
HE biggest domestic-policy problem facing America today is our fiscal crisis. The biggest driver of our fiscal crisis is the growth and scale of our health-care entitlements:
Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and related programs. And the
growth and scale of our health-care entitlements is, in turn, driven by the enormous political and economic power wielded by
hospitals.
Furthermore, as hospitals charge ever-higher prices to a shrinking cohort of privately insured and uninsured individuals, more
36
and more Americans will demand that the government further

subsidize the cost of health insurance, a measure that would only
make the problem worse.
So what can be done? Simply put, we must reduce the economicand thereby the politicalpower of hospitals by countering the effects of hospital consolidation.
There are two ways to do so: one, increasing the market
power of the people who pay for health care: consumers, private
insurers, and/or the government; and two, decreasing the market
power of hospitals by loosening the restrictions on hospital
competition.
The progressive approach is to impose price controls on hospitals. Price controls, as a rule, make a market less efficient, not
more. However, in extreme cases, they might serve as an effective regulatory threat, given the difficulties of antitrust litigation.
For example, the federal government could require that all hospitals accept Medicare prices from private payers, including the
uninsured, if the market concentration in a given area exceeded
a specified HHI threshold, say 4,000. This might, in the future,
deter hospitals from merging for the sole purpose of gaining a
pricing advantage.
Its an unattractive solutionbut the status quo is worse. If we
do nothing, hospital monopolies and duopolies will become
increasingly difficult to dislodge. Building new hospitals is a
costly and capital-intensive business. Its a bit like the airline and
automobile industries: Hospital entrepreneurs do come along
from time to time, but only rarely, and they frequently fail.
Fortunately, there are other solutions more friendly to the free
market. Federal and state agencies can more aggressively pursue
antitrust action against hospital mergers. Congress can repeal
Obamacares restrictions on new hospital construction. States
can harmonize their medical-licensing regulations so that doctors
can send patients to health-care providers in other states. And
states can loosen their certificate of need laws, which allow
bureaucrats friendly with incumbent hospitals to prevent entrepreneurs from building new facilities.
In addition, we can do more to place Americans in charge of
their own health dollars. Today, the vast majority of Americans
dont pay for care directly; instead, it is paid for on their behalf
by their public or private insurer. Most economists agree that
third-party payment for any service will tend to drive up its cost;
just ask anyone whos paid for an open bar at a wedding.
But on top of that, the vast majority of Americans dont pay for
their own insurance directly either. We have a third-party system
for purchasing third-party health insurance: in effect, a ninthparty health-care system. Is it any wonder that the prices hospitals charge bear no relationship to the value of their services to
consumers?
Ultimately, we have to realize that hospitalsand the government policies that empower themare the principal driver of
rising health-care spending. Americas hospitals form a trilliondollar, taxpayer-subsidized behemoth that will do everything it
can to grow larger and larger at the expense of the remainder of
the economy.
If Republicans are serious about returning their focus to the
economic problems of the middle class, they must make the
affordability of health care a central plank of their agenda. To do
that, certainly, we must reform the way we pay for health care.
But we must never lose sight of the corrupt and inefficient ways
that hospitals sell it.
AUGUST 5, 2013
lileks--ready:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/16/2013 9:39 PM Page 37
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
A Sinecure for Your Thoughts

N the future, I would like to see every sentence that
begins The public official declined comment end
with the following words: and was promptly terminated under the Mandatory Comment Act of 2013.
The spur for this idea came from a Wall Street Journal
article on an innocuous subject: An Iowa museum had
removed a puppet from the lobby. Not just any puppet:
Floppy, a mascot from an old childrens TV show that
entertained corn-fed tots in the days before cable. Every
town had one. Some fellow in a costume with an avuncular name would amble out, tell tales, talk to a jabbering piece of cloth with googly eyes, then run a cartoon.
The shows gone but the puppet was enshrined in the
museum, delighting aging boomers for whom it was an
object of veneration, like seeing Captain Kangaroos Mr.
Bunny Rabbit.
The museum moved it out. The puppet was replaced with
antique bicycles from an exhibit about Iowas cycling history, which sounds great! because its green and sustainable,
and will no doubt set the stage for an exhibit about the struggle of 19th-century transgendered cyclists to choose a boys
or girls bike regardless of biological identity.
The WSJ asked the executive director of Iowas Department of Cultural Affairs for a comment: Ms. Cownie
declined an interview request. The museum declined a
request to examine Floppy and the other puppets.
Thats what set me off. Unless the puppet is a material
witness in an ongoing sexual-harassment investigation
prompted by reports that it flew out of its case and pressed
its musty, mite-infested felt against unwilling victims, let
the paper see the puppetand if youre paid by the state to
manage Cultural Affairs, talk to the press, for heavens
sake.
How hard can it be? You could lie: Oh, Floppys just
being restored by a team of puppet historians. We look forward to bringing him back better than ever! And then
replace the bikes with an exhibition of Buddy Holly planewreck fragments gleaned from the Iowa field where he died,
put out a press release that has a picture of black glasses with
the lens shattered, and people will unclench. It might not be
Floppy, but at least its Iowa.
Or, speak frankly: You know, wed planned to put
Floppy in storage, because its embarrassing when youre
at a convention of museum people and everyones talking
about what they have in the lobbya Roman bust, a Hopi
rug, a Sumerian phallus amuletand youre thinking, I
have a sad dog head thats like the Shroud of Turin for
boomers. But the outcry has really made me rethink my
elitist preconceptions and reconnect with the essential
nature of Iowa culture.
But no. Hence my proposal for the Mandatory Comment
Act: Public officials may not turn down interviews. Tell
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
me if youve seen this story in some variant in the last few

years:
The parents of five-year-old Dylan Czerobik say he was
placed in handcuffs and put in the backseat of a police car
for an hour after day-care officials said he bent a Barbie
doll in half and pointed it at another student. The teacher
said he was using the doll as a gun, said Mrs. Czerobik,
but Barbie doesnt conform to the profile of any known
handgun ever made, and while Ill admit hes an imaginative boy, the idea of shooting high-velocity projectiles out
of the tips of her toes is ridiculous.
The case mirrors another incident several states away,
where an eleven-year-old was tased for wearing a shirt
that said NRAin this case, a vintage graphic of the
Depression-era National Recovery Administrationand a
case in Montana where a middle-school boy was expelled
for an online remark about painting the school red, which
his parents insist was a reference to his Scout troop volunteering to paint several classrooms for a merit badge in
public service.
Reached for comment, the school declined to speak to
a reporter.
Of course. Probably wise, since theyd have to admit that
policy requires that any child who draws a picture of a soldier with a gun be treated as if hed yanked a Luger from his
lunch pail and shouted COLUMBINE SATAN HITLER.
But under the Mandatory Comment Act, public employees
would be free to speak their mind without fear of reprisal.
Oh, you might get the rote gargle of bureaucratic lingo:
We here at Sanger School strive for an inclusive, safe
environment that includes a policy of zero tolerance and
inclusiveness towards all diversity that moves us forward
towards fostering a values-based, individually motivated
structural change that respects and acknowledges our challenges, which is why we are encouraging reusable lunch
trays that can be composted for a sustainable approach.
Does that answer your question? No? Good day.
This would help the public understand that administrators
regard parents as idiots.
Or you might get an honest teacher.
A kid pointing a Barbie Doll like a gun is a threat to the
other students? Only little Milton over there, whos so nervous he wets himself when the class hamster sneezes.
Otherwise, cmon. But hey, its policy to regard little boys
as feral maniacs and replace their high spirits with a sense of
shame, and thatll work out so well theyll be spending their
teen years online shooting peers in the groin with rocket
launchers.
In the absence of comments, youre free to draw your
own conclusions. Infer guilt and shame all you want.
Private citizens, of course, are exempt from the Mandatory
Comment Act, but if youve rolled the public teat around in
your mouth, one simple request.
Humor us.
37
longview:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/16/2013 11:07 PM Page 38
The Long View

MEMORANDUM
TO:
V. Jarrett
FROM: Staff
IN RE: Your request for upcoming state and local criminal/civil
cases that might be of interest
Following Mondays status meeting, staff researchers and others spent
four days searching state, local-court,
and police databases for interesting
cases to bring to the attention of
POTUS during the next six to ten
months as we gear up for the midterms and follow-on legislativeagenda items.
Thanks to the good work of staff
shout-out to the interns!!weve
come up with four cases of interest
that POTUS might find useful to
helicopter into in the event he/we
feel the need to raise additional subjects in the national media during a
period when they seem to be focusing
only on uncomfortable subjects.
Please note that, in order to achieve
maximum effectiveness, POTUS
will have to casually drop references to each of these locally based
proceedings well in advance of our
projected agenda timeline. As weve
learned with the recent case in
Florida, criminal and civil trials rare ly conform to our schedule. We were
lucky this time.
Our recommendations are as follows:
1. In Michigan, a young Asian
male recently had his car booted
after several unpaid parking tickets.
At the payment center in the local
city hall, he apparently became
angry and entered into a verbal
debate with a police officer who
38
has one white parent and one parent

from the Solomon Islands, which
qualifies under DOJ guidelines as
Caucasian. After a heated backand-forth with the White Policeman,
the young Asian male paid his back
fines but lodged a blistering critique
of the experience on the Yelp page
for the local municipality. We suggest POTUS use this case as a
teaching moment and an illustration of why we so desperately need
immigration reform, and call the
young Asian male on the telephone
in the event that the Syrian situation
deteriorates. Timeline: autumn
2. In California, a gay couple
were ejected from a local Crate &
Barrel retail location for rearranging the furniture displays for more
flow and a more chic grouping.
When asked to leave the premises,
they refused until they had successfully switched all of the sofa cushions in a random and haphazard
fashion because the original displays were too matchy matchy.
Police were called by the manager
of the store (possible complication:
he seems gay as well; as yet
unclear) and charges for disorderly
conduct were filed. We suggest
POTUS use this event when the
third- and fourth-quarter economicgrowth numbers are released, and in
the likely event that further evidence of global warming is impossible to verify. Timeline: autumn into
spring
3. In Chicago, Ill., a five-yearold African-American boy was
shot and killed, along with his
African-American mother, following a botched robbery attempt. An
African-American male has been
arrested for the crime. We suggest
that POTUS ignore this event. In
fact, we suggest that, if possible,
further documentation of the IRS
and/or DOJ scandals involving the
improper violation of privacy and
BY ROB LONG
the falsification of warrant documents be prepared for release in

conjunction with news about the
Chicago murder rate. As it ticks
up, we suggest POTUS prepare a
series of press conferences to discuss these scandals head on.
Should the Chi cago murder rate
accelerate, POTUS should invade
Iran. Timeline: NEVER
4. In Texas, an elderly Caucasian
male was pushed down the stairs by
his elderly Caucasian wife. (Check ing: newspaper photo unclear; wifes
skin tone seems vaguely Hispanic.)
The reasons were, apparently, something that happened in 1973 but that
both of them had been arguing about
since. Suggest POTUS refer to this
case for any number of points, especially: a) immigration (depending
on status of wife); b) abortion (Roe
was decided in 1973. Was this what
they were arguing about? Isnt it
time to heal the nation?); c)
upcoming legislative challenges to
the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act, as the elderly female now
has the sole responsibility and financial burden of caring for her wheelchair-bound spouse; and d) the need
for tax reform, as the couple are
small-business owners (millionaires/billionaires) and have taken
advantage of estate-planning tax
loopholes. This event has a lower
intensity factor, so can be held in
reserve for a task that requires a
smaller-bore distraction. This is a
perfect card to play in the event of a
Biden mouth accident or a Kerry
brain freeze. It can also be played
out gradually, as the midterm numbers start to take shape. Timeline:
2014
Researchers and interns are continuing to comb the wires for interesting
local cases for POTUS to shine his
special light on. We feel, in 100 percent agreement with you and the
political operation, that the local
crime blotter is a political goldmine!
AUGUST 5, 2013
books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/16/2013 8:00 PM Page 39
Books, Arts & Manners

The Iron
Lady Rises
CHARLES CRAWFORD
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: From

Grantham to the Falklands, by Charles Moore
(Knopf, 896 pp., $35)
ts March 31, 1982. Prime Minister Margaret thatcher and a few

top advisers are grappling with the
grim news that Argentina has
invaded the Falkland Islands. First sea
Lord sir Henry Leach, in naval uniform,
joins the meeting and asks for permission
to assemble a naval task force. Charles
Moore records the exchange:
Can we do it? asked Mrs. thatcher

with piercing urgency.
We can, Prime Minister, said
Leach, and, though it is not my place
to say this, we must. . . . Because if we
dont do it, if we pussyfoot . . . well be
living in a totally different country
whose word will count for little.
At this, Leach remembered, Mrs. thatcher

gave a sort of half-smile, as if this was
what she had wanted to hear.
Different people will take different
things from this weighty, meticulous,
and powerful biography of Margaret
thatcher. For me, the most striking
aspect of the book is the way it describes
the ebb and flow of rival political positions amidst competing uncertainties,
Mr. Crawford served with the U.K. Foreign and
Commonwealth Office throughout Mrs. Thatchers
period as prime minister and was subsequently
British ambassador to Sarajevo, Belgrade, and
Warsaw. He is on Twitter (@CharlesCrawford)
and his website is www.charlescrawford.biz.
and above all how difficult it is in the heat

of events to attach even the strongest
political convictions to specific policy
choices. Many episodes in this book show
that when faced with a complex decision
Mrs. thatcher often wavered, unsure how
to proceed: a limpet in a stormy sea of
events searching for some rock to which
she could stick fast, once and for all.
Margaret thatcher came to symbolize
an almost unique style of leadership based
on unwavering convictions and basic
moral beliefs (work hard, live within your
means, tell the truth). John Hoskyns, one
of her closest advisers, called her quite
limited intellectually . . . and philosophically. But as future chancellor Nigel
Lawson said soon after the 1979 election
that brought her into Downing street, a
key to understanding Mrs. thatcher was
that she actually said what she believed.
Her supporters saw this as her huge
advantagean ability to be clear, firm,
and practical. Her detractors found her
simplicity banal, uncaring, dangerous.
How did a clever but unimaginative
English girl, described by an Oxford
University contemporary as a rather
humourless mouse, and born above her
fathers provincial grocery shop (a
house with no hot water or inside toilet),
become one of the most influential leaders in world history?
Charles Moores biography tells this
story. It draws on his access to Baroness
thatchers private papers and unpublished family letters, many featuring the
young Margarets excitement at scraping
together money for new clothes. Without
much exploring the sexism issue, it
recalls problems she had as a woman rising through the political ranks (on BBCs
Any Questions program, she was asked a
question about judging a womans intelligence by her legs) and how she enjoyed
being one of very few women among
powerful men.
Its hard now to recall the awful way
the United Kingdom was run after World
War II. the dominating idea was fussy
collectivism. Wartime controls had taken
on a life of their own. the state owned
huge areas of industry, and tightly rationed the money you took overseas on
holiday. the state imposed wage and
price controls and, as things declined,
resorted to exotically stupid maneuvers,

such as the selective Employment tax, to
force investment in supposedly more
productive sectors. trade unions exerted
a ghastly grip over much of the economy:
We sat in candlelight when strikes turned
off the nations power.
All this created inexorable intellectual
pessimism. the book quotes John Kenneth Galbraith telling the Observer in
1975 that the wage and price controls
will be a permanent feature, both in
Britain and in every other industrial
nation. As a student at the Fletcher
school of Law and Diplomacy in 1977, I
was assigned academic articles insisting
that the Western capitalist and soviet
Communist economic models were converging. Many people within the British
Conservative party and across the wider
Western establishment had internalized this way of looking at things. In
confronting such orthodoxy, Margaret
thatcher came across as annoying, nave,
and immoderate. It was not only that her
ideas were trivially extreme and doomed
to fail; she was downright vulgar in
asserting them so enthusiastically.
the book describes how she searched
on both sides of the Atlantic for the heavy
policy ammunition to support her freemarket instincts. Visiting Washington as
Conservative leader, she startled Alan
Greenspan over dinner by opening on
technical monetarism: Why is it that in
Britain we dont have M3? Henry Kissinger liked her style but thought that she
would never get elected if she stuck to her
belief in articulating her position boldly
and trying to get the political center to
move in her direction.
the book reminds us just how long it
took for thatcherism to work out what
it wanted to do. Even sir Keith Joseph,
her favorite Conservative thinker, had
written in 1975 that presumably we do
not think that denationalization is practicable. (the more positive word privatization, which would change the planet,
was still to be born.)
Her first government had to find a way
to get the U.K. moving again after the
ignominy of the International Monetary
Funds demand for harsh reforms. A first
powerful move in 1979 was the abrupt
abolition of exchange controls: People
39
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
once again were free to move money into

and out of the U.K. Sir Geoffrey Howe
(Thatchers first chancellor of the ex chequer) later told me how he had been
sleepless with anxiety at the audacity of
this reform: It seemed to take the country
into totally uncharted waters. Thatcher
showed no doubts. She told a financial
audience that the prison doors have
been thrown open.
Other reforms were painful. By the end
of 1979, British interest rates had been
raised to a giddy 17 percent, the highest
nominal level in British history. Liberal
U.S. chatterati warned Ronald Reagan not
to follow her monetarist path. Her 1981
budget prompted mutterings of discontent at senior levels within her party.
The Times of London published a letter
signed by 364 economists arguing that
Thatchers policies would deepen the
depression, erode the industrial base of
our economy, and threaten social and
political stability. But Thatchers toughlove reforms and monetarist discipline
succeeded. The next eight years saw inflation tumble and real GDP growth average
3.2 percent, a stunning turnaround.
For Charles Moores inside story of
how Thatcher and Reagan worked to gether to end Communism, well have to
wait for Volume Two. For now American
readers can enjoy the many frank descriptions of Thatchers various early meetings
with Presidents Carter and Reagan, and of
the fierce row over U.S. laws designed to
stop Western companies from supporting
the USSRs new energy pipeline to
Western Europe. On the latter, two convictions collided: Reagan wanted to
squeeze the USSR economically, when
it suited the U.S. to do so (he had lifted the
U.S. grain embargo to help Midwestern
farmers); Thatcher saw U.K. jobs being
lost and would not accept the extraterritorial reach of the U.S. measures. In highend patronizing British style, British
official Clive Whitmore drew on his extensive familiarity with Winnie the Pooh
to record their difficult exchanges:
She began to take the view that maybe
[Reagan] wasnt quite as intelligent as she
had always held him out to be. . . . He was
a bear of very little brain.
The highlight of the book for connoisseurs of Western politics is the extended
account of the Falklands conflict, and
how London saw the frantic moves by
U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig to
find a diplomatic solution. One of the best
40
accounts of a fast-moving complex international negotiation ever written, it brings

out the human angle and the role of raw
emotion in top-level politics. Given
what in fact happened as British troops
forced total Argentine surrender, it is
remarkable to read now just how far
Thatcher wentunder pressure from her
own advisers and from Washingtonto
offer Buenos Aires substantive concessions. Was General Galtieri too drunk to
grasp what was available?
The book shows Thatchers confidence
and ruthlessness growing as the conflict
unfolded. In the margin of a Foreign
Office memo recording that the Argentine claim is not just a matter of law but of
national honour and machismo, she
wrote: According to the Foreign Office
our national honour does not seem to matter!? Ronald Reagans team found her
success impressive but also irritating.
When she visited Washington in June
1982, they briefed Reagan to urge her to
be magnanimous in victory. Reagans
draft speaking notes have a U.S. official
noting that she had already blasted this
position to smithereens on two U.S. networks before the two leaders met to talk
about it. Here, as on many other occasions, Thatcher used her friendship with
Reagan flatly to disagree with him.
The book is also worth buying for its
many superb quotes. Thatcher heatedly
exclaims that we must defend Christian
values with the ATOM BOMB! And the
Queen deftly tells the archbishop of Canterbury what was wrong with the controversial service at St. Pauls Cathedral
after the Falklands were recaptured: I
dont think that you should ever leave a
Christian service feeling sad.
I met Lady Thatcher several times after
she left office. In 2009 John and Melissa
OSullivan kindly included my wife and
me in a small, private dinner with her in
London. She was frail but in lively form,
frequently going back to her oldest Meth odist pieties. There was a cheering consensus that Jesus had been sound in his
conservative principles. She wistfully
said that she was so grateful to have
friends who appreciated her work: no
one ever says thank you to politicians.
Well, some of us do. Thank you, Lady
Thatcher, for your grasp of moral and
political principle. Thank you for being
one of very few leaders in our lifetime
who truly stood athwart history, yelling
Stop!
Prudence
And Principle
DANIEL FOSTER
The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of

Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution,
by David Lefer (Sentinel, 416 pp., $29.95)
HEn I received my copy of
The Founding Conservatives and saw that it was

published by Sentinel, the
conservative imprint at Penguin responsible for such titles as 48 Liberal Lies
About American History, I started to
expect a certain kind of book: one that
reassured the contemporary American
conservative movement that it hosts the
Spirit of 76, by, say, tracing a philosophical through-line from Thomas
Jefferson to Ronald Reagan, or spending
pages and chapters arguing that Madison
would have opposed Obamacare. There
is nothing wrong with that kind of book,
per se, but what Leferwho is not a particularly well-known popular historian,
but who now deserves to behas done is
quite different. His argument is not that
the titans of the American Revolution
the men with their faces on our marbles
and mountains and moneywere conservative in the sense in which we today
employ that term but rather that those
men were radicals, often dangerous radicals, and might even have smothered
America in its cradle, if not for another,
little-noted and not-long-remembered
batch of patriots who tempered their zeal
with prudence and healthy respect for
tradition.
There is a bit of terminological slipMr. Foster is the former news editor of NATIONAL
REVIEW ONLINE.
AUGUST 5, 2013
periness in Lefers characterization of

these patriots. In the world right before
the Declaration of Independence, he
calls them moderates, as opposed to
the radicals who had been beating the
drum of independence in the streets of
Boston for years before it became the
colonial consensus. But in the world of
July 5, 1776, he calls the same men
conservatives, a shift that also suggests the precariousness of the Founding
Conservatives position, since, in a matter of days, the previous bearers of that
appellationTories loyal to the British
Crownhad transmogrified from political enemies of independence to traitors
to the Revolution.
Its true that, like the classical Tory,
Lefers Founding Conservatives were
mostly upper-class, mostly of New York
and Pennsylvania and the Deep South
(while the radicals had their base in
New England and their island outpost in
Virginia), and mostly beneficiaries of
the status quo (and thus uniformly cautious). But they were decidedly not Tory
loyalists, and many became heroes of
the war for independence.
John Dickinson, the gifted son of an
aristocratic Delaware plantation owner,
was their unofficial leader, and perhaps
is the central figure in Lefers story.
Educated in the law at Londons prestigious Middle Templeat the same
time young Edmund Burke was there
he returned to America with a classical
erudition tempered by a Country Whigs
romanticized notion of republican virtue, and with his formidable intellect
became a respected lawyer and a gadfly
in Pennsylvania politics. Though in
contemporary casual histories Dickin sons name is mostly relegated to dependent clauses, throughout the crises
and provocations of the 1760sthe
Stamp Act, the Declaratory Acts, the
Townshend Dutieshe was the colonies
most effective advocate for American
self-rule (though, decidedly, not for
American independence). His Letters
from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, al though unsigned, briefly made him the
most famous political pamphleteer on
the continentVoltaire declared him
the American Cicerountil a disgruntled British bureaucrat migr
penned Common Sense.
Dickinson would figure in virtually
every significant event of the Founding,
but he had something of an annus mir -
abilis between the First and Second

Continental Congresses. We tend to forget
how different the former was from the latter. At the first, nervous loyalists wrote
one another secret, sworn affidavits
attesting to the fact that they had voted
against resolutions they believed treasonous. A proposal to create an American
union with Britain, governed by a Crownappointed president-general, was seriously considered before news of the
siege of Boston tabled it. The banquet
marking the end of the session finished
with a toast to His Majesty George III.
Dickinsons critical role at this delicate juncture cannot be overstated. When
he arrived at the Congress, The Farmer
was revered by radicals and moderates
alike, and it took every bit of his intellect
to temper the former even as he stiffened
the instinctual obsequiousness of the
more Loyalist-leaning elements among
the latter. It is fair to say that he was
Henry Clay two years before Henry Clay
was bornthe Great American Statesman of the years before there was an
American state.
Even at the Second Continental Congress, convened against the backdrop of
the outrages at Lexington and Concord,
Dickinson shrewdly split the difference
between revolution and rapprochement,
arguing that the aggressive provision
for war must go pari passu with measures of reconciliation. Dickinson may
have been privately convinced that both
independence and all-out war were now
inevitable, but publicly he was instrumental in securing one final petition to
the Crown for the redress of grievances,
against the huffing of the Adamses and
their bloc of New England and Virginia
radicals. What Adams and the radicals
didnt understand was that Dickinsons
Olive Branch Petition was really
about buying time for war preparations,
and giving the colonies something to
rally around when Britain inevitably
rejected it.
In the fateful summer of 1776, Dickinsons conservatives were instrumental in securing a one-month delay in
voting for independence that John
Adams, at the time virulently opposed
to delay, would admit in 1813 was critical to readying the continent for war.
It was Dickinson, subsequently, who
rose to make the final case against the
Declaration, well aware that in doing
so he was expending every ounce of
goodwill and esteem he had accrued.

Dickinson thought the Declaration not
unjust, but imprudent, and wanted to
secure both foreign allies against Britain
and a new government for America
before declaring open war on the greatest empire in the world. When his counsels didnt prevail, Dickinson and his
ally Robert Morris (the Liverpool-born
financier who became Americas first
financial wizard) decided of their own
accord to stand behind the bar during
the July 2 vote, and were officially
marked absent. This tipped Pennsyl vania toward independence, and, along
with the New York delegations abstention, allowed posterity to record the vote
as unanimous.
Dickinson drew scorn from every corner of Pennsylvania society as a suspected Loyalist, but although he never
signed the Declaration, he proclaimed
himself resolved by every impulse of
my soul to share, and to stand or fall
with [America] in that scheme of freedom she had chosen. And that he did.
In the same week he stood athwart history, Dickinson made it, drafting the
Articles of Confederation, legally christening the days-old republic The United States of America. Then, as a
colonel in the Pennsylvania militia, he
led a battalion to join General Wash ingtons army in the battle for New
York. If a tapestry were made to commemorate the founding of American
conservatism, these events would be as
good a subject matter as any.
Dickinson had allies. There was
Morris, the Presbyterian sea merchant
who singlehandedly oversaw a smuggling operation that outfitted the Revolution with matriel and supplies, who
bankrolled the Battle of Yorktown and
paid disgruntled Continental regulars
from his own deep pockets, and who
represented the dynamic capitalism
(some would say war profiteering) of
young America. Morris, a signer of the
trifecta of founding documentsthe
Declaration, the Articles, and the Constitutionput both a conservative and an
entrepreneurial stamp on Americas birth
certificates.
In Tory-leaning New York, there was
Gouverneur Morris (no relation): tall,
young, and handsome, a foppish womanizer from a family of rich Loyalists.
Morris came to the revolutionary cause
cautiously, having seen the violent
41
demonstrations of the radical laborers,

stevedores, and merchants in Manhattan
and come to believe that, as Lefer puts it,
it was crucial for elites like him to join
the fight for colonial rights in order to
keep it under control. Joining Morris in
New Yorks moderate circle were John
Jay (later a co-author of The Federalist
Papers and first chief justice of the
Supreme Court); Robert Livingston (later
a jurist who administered the oath of
office to George Washington and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase), and James
Duane (later mayor of New York and a
federal judge).
Each would become a loyal servant of
the United States, some at great personal
cost. (Gouverneur Morriss mother remained a Loyalist to the end, giving the
familys Bronx estate to the redcoats for
use after the Battle of Long Island.) But
in the early 1770s, the cabal was concerned primarily with keeping the rabble
in line and exerted great control over the
formal instruments of anti-British protest in New York, stacking the states
correspondence committee with cautious aristocrats to balance the landless
disciples of Thomas Paine.
What all had in common was a certain
ambivalence. There were shades and
gradations, but all shared a suspicion
about what they saw as the less praiseworthy elements of the Revolution: its
leveling effect, its mobbishness, and its
villainization of the moneyed and the
aristocratic in favor of what would become the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian republic.
This may appear unseemly, even unAmerican, to modern eyes, but Lefer
expertly puts their concerns in context
and shows that they were frequently
justified. He compares the Founding
Conservatives political philosophy to
that of Edmund Burke, their greatest
friend in Britain, and suggests that the
conservative critique of revolution was
vindicated in the subsequent French
upheaval, which Burke got right and
Jefferson got wrong. And he does an
excellent job of showing that what we
might call the radical moment that
gave the American Revolution its ardor
and zeal, and secured the buy-in of the
ordinary Americans who would actually
fight the war, was in fact late-developing
and fleeting. As late as 1773, the Boston
Tea Party divided even the tier-1
Founders: John Adams called it the
42
grandest event, Ben Franklin an act of

violent Injustice. And it was, in contrast to more orderly protests in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York
(where a tea-bearing ship was kindly
asked to turn back for England as a band
played God Save the King), more an
example of New England radicalism
than a reflection of the colonies as a
whole.
Nor was the domination of the Continental Congress by radicals in the early
days of the war a uniformly good thing for
the American cause. Through legally
dubious means, the Adams faction passed
through the Congress a measure that
effectively dissolved Pennsylvanias
royal charter before independence from
Britain was declared. This was unprecedented, and emboldened Pennsylvanias
radicals to create a new constitution
hostile to property, free speech, and the
right to bear arms, and governed by a
headless, unicameral body that wouldnt
have looked out of place after the Bastille.
Worse, the form was copied by other
colonies, many of which would experiment with decidedly European forms of
government until self-evident disaster
compelled them to adopt constitutional
regimes like those weve come to love.
The upshot of Lefers survey is that
even if the conservatives remained unloved and suspect, their ideason the
conduct of the war, on diplomacy, and
even on the crafting of the Constitution
and the early American orderprevailed
at critical moments, or at least prevailed
enough to save the radicals from their
own excesses.
Richard Hofstadter called the 20thcentury effort by historians to downplay
the internal disagreements of the
Founders and the political messiness of
the Revolution the consensus school of
American history, and Lefer fixes his
bayonet against it, to great result. His volume is a work of revisionism in the best
sense of that word, and I suspect that
even if you consider yourself a buff, The
Founding Conservatives will change
your understanding of the political and
philosophical dynamics of the American
Revolution and the early days of the
Union. It capably demonstrates that,
though the Adamses and Jeffersons of
76 would write the glorious Revo lutions history, the Dickinsons and
Morrises did a great deal to ensure that
there were glories of which to write.
Law,
Naturally
EDWARD FESER
Conscience and Its Enemies:

Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism,
by Robert P. George (ISI, 290 pp., $29.95)
ATURAL-LAW theory provides

the principal philosophical
justification of traditional
sexual morality, opposition
to abortion, and other paradigmatically
conservative views in ethics. Princeton
law professor Robert P. George is the
most prominent American advocate of
natural-law theory. He has made influential contributions both to the working
out of the theorys philosophical foundations and to its application to a critique of contemporary liberalism. The
essays contained in Conscience and Its
Enemies provide an engaging introduction to his work.
As a critic of liberalism, George is
devastating. Generally attributing honest
motives to his opponents, he nevertheless ruthlessly exposes the sophistries
put forward by defenders of abortion,
embryo-destructive research, same-sex
marriage, and other progressive causes. For instance, George notes that prochoice Catholics such as Mario Cuomo
never explain why it would be wrong
to impose on others their personal
opposition to abortion, but not wrong to
impose on others their personal opposition to slavery, the exploitation of workers, or capital punishment. Libertarian
Ronald Bailey fallaciously ignores the
Mr. Feser is the author of several books and, most

recently, the editor of Aristotle on Method and
Metaphysics.
AUGUST 5, 2013
distinction between something that is

merely potentially a human being (a
somatic cell from which a clone might be
made) and something that is a human
being but hasnt yet actualized all its
potentials (an embryo). Andrew Sullivan
assures us at one moment that same-sex
marriage will provide an antidote to
male homosexual promiscuitybut at
another, he notes approvingly that samesex unions might lead to a more flexible
attitude toward sexual exclusivity among
married heterosexuals.
As the title of Georges book indicates, today it is in fact liberals themselves who are often keen to impose
their personal moral views on those who
disagree with them. Catholic foster-care
and adoption agencies face the prospect
of being forced either to place children
in same-sex households or to go out of
business. The Obama administration
wants to require religious employers to
pay for contraceptives, sterilizations,
and abortion-inducing drugs. The Committee on Ethics of the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has favored policies that would
require doctors to refer patients for abortions and sometimes even to perform
abortions themselves.
As George argues, the attack on the
rights of conscience of those who endorse the traditional understanding of
marriage was inevitable given existing
antidiscrimination policy and the logic
of the arguments for same-sex marriage, in which opposition to it could be
rooted only in bigotry. The hope for a
grand bargain, in which traditionalists
would accept same-sex marriage in
exchange for freedom to act in accordance with their religious convictions,
was and remains an illusion. George
also argues convincingly that the standard liberal view that the courts are the
ultimate check on tyranny is in fact a
recipe for judicial despotisma despotism Jefferson and Lincoln warned us
about.
The only effective antidotes to tyranny, George maintains, are the doctrine
of enumerated powers, a sovereignty
divided between the states and the federal government, and a citizenry that
understands these institutions and is
willing to uphold them. Yet a people
given to license, and afflicted by the
breakdown of the family that is its
inevitable sequel, is not of a mind to
see through the immediate benefits of

big government to the dangers it poses
to their freedom. On the contrary,
where the family is weak, government
is bound to become the great provider.
In Georges estimation, the libertarian
tendency to try to combine limited
government with relaxed morals is
delusional. The sexual libertinism that
underlies most of the support for abortion and same-sex marriage is in fact
the enemy of liberty, not its friend.
Though a powerful critic of liberal
theory and policy, George is on less firm
ground when engaged in the positive
task of expounding and defending natural law. While the natural law label
might seem to put him in the company of
such thinkers as Aristotle and Aquinas,
George is in fact a proponent of the new
natural-law theory invented by theologian Germain Grisez in the 1960s and
further developed by Georges teacher,
Oxford legal theorist John Finnis. George
downplays the differences between the
approaches, but they are significant, and
have made the work of the new natural
WEAVE OF THE DARK

To conceive of the weave of the dark
is to lift forward the cloth
with a texture of silk, or wool, or nothing,
melting into the air, where the mind
is forever pulling for the edge, finding none,
or by the feel of the cloth, melting
away, like water from the ice
that was never cold, from a form
the mind could never hold:
it slipped away too fast.
And this edge, vanishing like a dream
of time, finds a place to hold fast
for a while, a gravity close
to the forgotten balance of the waters
of the womb, neither warm, nor cold;
the horror of drowning, suspended;
the ebbing ghost of nothingness,
formless in the world of darkness,
that can, for its time, offer
a drink, sheltered, cool and centering,
shield against the loss of the dark,
and the shapes, and landscapes,
like time, soon to slip forward
from it.
WILLIAM W. RUNYEON
lawyers highly controversial among

natural-law theorists who stick more
closely to the approach of Aristotle and
Aquinas. I am one of these old school
natural-law theorists, and one with whom
George expresses polite disagreement in
his book.
Old and new natural-law theorists
occasionally come to different conclusions. (For instance, traditional naturallaw theory holds that capital punishment
is permissible in principle even if not
always in practice, while Grisez, Finnis,
and George maintain that it is always and
in principle wrong.) But the differences
in method are profound even where the
theories agree in their conclusions, as
they do on matters of sexual morality. In
my view, the weakest parts of Conscience and Its Enemiesindeed, the
parts least likely to convince readers who
are neutral in the debate over same-sex
marriageare those in which George
deploys new natural law arguments
concerning sexuality.
For the old or traditional naturallaw theorist, what is good for human
beings, as for other living things, is
defined in terms of the ends or goals
they must realize in order to flourish as
the kinds of creatures they are. A squirrel needs to gather seeds, nuts, and the
like if it is to feed itself. This end or
goal (what followers of Aristotle would
call a final cause) is partially definitive of what is good for squirrels, and
remains so even if the occasional squirrel has for whatever reason (genetic
defect, say) no desire to gather seeds or
nuts. Human beings too need to realize
the ends or final causes of their natural
capacities if they are to flourish, and
this includes the ends of their sexual
capacities. These ends are both procreative and unitive; that is to say, our sexual faculties are by nature aimed at
getting us to mate, and to bond emotionally, with a person of the opposite
sex. That some peoples sexual organs
are damaged or worn out and some
peoples sexual desires are distorted in
various ways doesnt change their natural end, any more than a squirrel that
is missing a leg due to an accident or
birth defect fails to be the sort of creature that bynature is four-legged.
These Aristotelian final causes are of
course extremely controversial today, and
the new natural-law theory is defined in
part by its eschewal of such notions. It
43
endorses David Humes famous thesis

that values cannot be derived from
facts (ironically enough, given that
George allows that Humes influence on
modern moral philosophy has been
baneful). But if this makes the new
natural law less philosophically oldfashioned, it also makes it more opaque.
Rather than appealing to the natural ends
of our sexual faculties, George rests his
case for traditional sexual morality on a
set of sometimes odd, and I think unconvincing, metaphors.
Hence George tells us that homo sexual acts involve making the body an
instrument rather than a part of the
self. Yet homosexuals who claim their
orientation is genetically based hardly
seem to be treating their bodies as something external to them. George maintains that only heterosexual intercourse
can realize a one-flesh union. But the
partners fleshy bits can be as snugly
fitted together in homosexual acts as in
heterosexual ones, and with as much
romantic passion. George maintains that
a copulating heterosexual pair make up
a single organism, since both are
needed for procreation. This is like saying that people engaged in conversation
or competitive games make up a single
organism, since as individuals they cannot carry out these essentially social
activities.
I would argue that such metaphors
have whatever plausibility they do have
only insofar as they are less direct ways
of stating what traditional natural-law
theorists would put in the language of
Aristotelian final causes. The new natural lawyers would in my view be well
advised to concede this. Otherwise, in
putting aside these final causes, they
will have succeeded only in replacing
highly controversial but clear arguments with highly controversial and
obscure ones. And for all their concessions to modern philosophy, they are
still widely regarded as reactionaries:
They might as well go the whole hog.
(Their real trouble, for us old-school
natural-law types, is that theyre not
reactionary.)
But that is not to say that the arguments of liberal sexual moralists are better than those of the new natural law
theorists. In deftly exposing the fallacies in liberal arguments, George has
done an invaluable service to the conservative cause.
44
Queen of
Hyannis
FLORENCE KING
Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political

Matriarch, by Barbara A. Perry (Norton,
416 pp., $27.95)
KENNEDY was so often

asked for advice on raising
children that she risked running out of material. For years,
she had held forth about the mealtime
quizzes on current events, the catechism
recitations, and her knack for drafting
the older children to keep the younger
ones in line, but by 1956, all the surviving
children were grown up and she needed
something fresh, because Jack was being
considered for the vice-presidential spot
on the Democratic ticket. People were
saying that a Catholic could never become president, so Rose came up with a
way to teach children about religious bigotry that would stick in young minds.
Show them the lions at the zoo, she
wrote in an article intended for Readers
Digest, and explain how they consumed
the early Christiansand so interest children.
The Digest rejected the piece. It was the
only time she ever put a foot wrong,
according to Barbara A. Perry, who based
this biography on the letters and diaries
of Rose that were released to the public
by the Kennedy Library in 2011. Perry,
author of Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady
of the New Frontier, is a Kennedy partisan, but not a groupie like Doris Kearns
Goodwin, nor a sycophant like Theodore
Sorensen, who is pretty much assumed
to be the real author of JFKs Pulitzer
OSE
Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113,

Fredericksburg, VA 22404.
Prizewinning Profiles in Courage.

Perry does not make the real Rose
Kennedy stand up, because the real one
was Roses own meticulously calibrated
invention, and it was already standing up.
Rather, Perry finds the minuscule pinpoints and fissures that admit slivers of
light past even the sturdiest mask.
She has a good eye for the kind of
casual remarks that give us all away. In
Roses diary of her time in London as
the wife of the American ambassador,
she confesses that she wore the wrong
kind of hat to the funeral of a member of
Parliament, adding, No other ambassadors wives [were] there or one of them
might have erred as I did. Perry is quick
to catch the small-minded insecurity
couched in the throwaway line: Rose
didnt wish for someone to have alerted
her to proper attire, but, rather, for someone to commit a faux pas with her.
She had a way of working herself into
her flattery of others, as when she said of
a certain Mrs. Fitzgerald: No wonder I
look young and beauteous with such a
mother! Lady Bird Johnson got scooped
up in a gilded cage when she said that
being in the company of Rose was tall
cotton. This southern expression for
good times was unknown to Rose, but
she had no difficulty defining it: Lady
Bird must have felt that being with her
was elevating and was admitting, in
effect, that she was not quite up to me.
She put on airs even in her personal letters, archly confessing that she always
said Phalaenopsis to the press because
orchids would sound too nouveau
riche. Either she was poking fun at herselfhardly a habit of hersor else she
did not realize that the Kennedys themselves were nouveau riche. Proof that they
were is the P.S. in her letter to her daughter written from Windsor Castle, on what
surely was crested writing paper: Pat,
please keep this note, dear.
In several of her family letters, she
seemed to harbor a genial contempt for
her younger children. The cutoff child
was her fifth, Eunice; those below were
fair game, though she expressed her opinions of them with dry wit. She advised
Bobby and Ethel to make better publicrelations use of the fact that they now had
seven children and to take a serious role in
the promotion of worthy causes. I do not
think it is necessary to emphasize the fact
that you are both tone-deaf or that cultural things do not play such a large part
AUGUST 5, 2013
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 5/28/2013 11:42 AM Page 1
in your life, she wrote. As for touchfootball games: Mention of them could
be eliminated for awhile.
She gave Teddy even blunter advice
when he was recovering from a broken
back sustained in a private-plane crash:
When you are lying in bed, you can read
a paragraph and then try to rewrite it or
resay it. Then notice the difference between the succinct, dramatic impressions
of the author and your verbose, discursive, dull recital of the same events.
She never let up on Teddy. When he was
preparing to challenge Jimmy Carter for
the 1980 nomination, she watched his
interview and promptly told him: You
said If I was president. . . . You should
have said If I were president.
The high point of her maternal devo-
who lacked control over big issues, she

was driven to control minutiae wherever
she found them, including the parking lot
at Hyannisport. The spaces had gotten
hopelessly confused, so she rearranged
them via detailed letters, with carbon
copies sent to every member of the family. She micromanaged a similar upheaval
over bath towels. Announcingneedlesslythat she and Bobby had the same
initials, she broke the news that some
RFK towels had gotten mixed up with
other RFK towels and asked Bobby and
Ethel to go through theirs and separate one
identical set from another. When they
couldnt tell the difference, she developed
a case of towels on the brain. Seeing
towels, towels everywhere, she asked the
whole family to search for RFK towels
BACHRACH/GETTY IMAGES
The Kennedy family: seated from left are Patricia, Robert, Rose, John F., and Joseph P. Sr. with Edward on his lap;
standing from left are Joseph P. Jr., Kathleen, Rosemary, Eunice, and Jean
tion, lovingly described and breathlessly

extolled in countless articles, was the
exhaustive records she kept on every
aspect of each childs health. Illnesses,
inoculations, height, weight, cavities,
teeth cleanings were all duly noted on
index cards, catalogued, and filed. There
was another file for spiritual health in
which Rose recorded baptisms with all
the who-where-when trimmings, First
Communions, acolyte services, and First
Fridays. Her records were heralded as
meticulous, a favorite Rose word, but
Barbara Perry suggests that compulsive might be closer to the mark.
She liked to say, I never had a phobia,
I never had a lover, and I never had a
fight, but in fact she was a bundle of phobias. A perfectionist and a control freak
46
she believed to be missing. When no one

could find them, she announced that she
was sending the housekeeper to search
all their linen closets. She was Captain
Queeg, overturning the entire ship to find
out who ate the strawberries. Her compulsive chiding never stopped and she clung
to minutiae as her power base. Her note
to BobbyI think you should work
hard and become president after Jackit
will be good for the country and for
youreduces the presidency to flossing.
Roses perfectionist standards and controlling instincts may have influenced her
biographer as well. It must be said that
while this book is easy to read for its fascinating content, it can be very hard to
read visually owing to Perrys rigid adherence to the editorial rules for citing quot-
ed material. You must use lots of ellipses

and brackets depending on whether you
are copying a whole quotation, half a quotation, or bits of several widely spaced
quotations; and there are rules on when
you need to change an upper-case letter to
a lower-case one, and vice versa. Thus we
get passages like this quotation of a
remark by Eunice: [W]hen [Jack] was
president he would say his prayers morning . . . and night. Now that doesnt mean
he was terribly religious . . . but the point
is that [Roses] influence . . .
I gave up on that one. Be prepared to
see dots and brackets swimming before
your eyes. Rules are important, but the
world is not going to end if a writer plays
a little hopscotch for claritys sake. This
problem does, however, raise the interesting question of how nervous the Kennedy
Library might be about the material they
choose to release, and why.
Perrys book could not be more timely
in view of the hysterical controversy in
full swing as I write this review. Shortly
before the outbreak of World War II, Rose
toured South America with Eunice. In
Barbados they were surprised, said Rose,
to see colored and white children sitting
together at a convent school. The nun
said the sisters took them because one
could not discriminate and they seemed
to get on quite happily together, the children making their own friends as they
chose. . . . I have seldom been so moved;
to see that group of dark-skinned little
faces, with those immense, trustful, gentle brown eyes raised in prayer, convinced me for all time that there must be
angels with dark faces as well as light
ones, although I have never thought of
them before.
Perry says that Rose was Eurocentric,
to be sure. Understandably, she was, yet
no one could miss the difference between
the cut-glass snobbery of so many of her
diary entries and her heartfelt description
of the mixed-race convent school. She
obviously examined her conscience, as
Catholicism required of her, and found
the answer therein. Maybe this is what
lies behind our instinctive certainty that
she really meant it.
In any event, the incident makes a comparison with Paula Deen unavoidable. If
Deen could speak with such grace, clarity,
and grammarand if she shared Roses
Eurocentric birth year of 1890she
would not now be suffering death by a
thousand tweets.
AUGUST 5, 2013
Film
The Bard
In SoCal
R O S S D O U T H AT
LIONSGATE
iscussions of movies like

Joss Whedons new version
of Much Ado About Nothingfilmed in his own wellappointed california home, remarkably
enough, during a lull in the making of the
ever-so-slightly-more-expensive film The
Avengersoften revolve around how
successfully shakespeare can be adapted
to non-Elizabethan periods of history,
contemporary or otherwise.
But that framing misleads a bit. if the
question is whether the Bards plays can
be successfully picked up and dropped
intact into the new York of 1950 or the
America of 2013, the answer is mostly no,
and the would-be adapter is usually better
off keeping the story but writing his own
lines la West Side Story or even 10
Things I Hate about You. The trick to
pulling off a non-16th-century shakespeare, rather, is to eschew historical
exactitude and create a setting that can
partake of both the original and some
other, half-invented time and place.
or at least thats been true of recent
shakespeare screen adaptations. The best
of them have created settings that feel
suitably unmoored from actual recorded
history: the savage Verona Beach of
Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet, part
modern Rio and part Renaissance italy;
the fascism-infused alt-1930s of the ian
McKellen Richard III; the ancientmodern hybrids that worked for Julie
Taymor in Titus and for Ralph Fiennes in
his recent Coriolanus. The disappointments have let their settings distract, in
their uneasy fit with the material, from
the matter of the story: The version of
Hamlet that cast Ethan Hawke as a prince
of corporate America, and Denmarks
succession as a boardroom struggle, was a
notable example of what such failure
looks like.
Whedons Much Ado, which is
drenched in socal ambiencea wedding
spot overlooks a golf course, couples
bicker in a custom kitchen and flirt beside
a glassy swimming poolfalls some-
Amy Acker as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing
where in between: its an almost-success

whose quasi-contemporary location sometimes fits the play but sometimes feels a
little too contemporary.
There are aspects of the setting that
work brilliantly with the material. The
drunken weekend party, where everyone
is constantly pouring someone else a
drink, is ideally suited to shakespeares
comedic mix of passion, folly, misinterpretation, and reconciliation. The military
and political background to the story
doesnt quite work with the southern
california backdrop, but its not actually
that relevant to the plot, so its easy to set
aside those incongruities. And some of
the scenes that Whedon stagesparticularly an extended masked-party scene,
with acrobats swinging from the darkened
treeshit the precise this could be any
eras revels sweet spot that the film is
aiming for.
But theres also a little too much thats
on-the-nose contemporary in the way
Whedon tells the story. The film opens
with a shot of Beatrice (Amy Acker) and
Benedick (Alex Denisof) waking up in
bed together, in a brief fling thats supposed to be a prelude to their subsequent
warlike courtship, and this choice and
others locate the story a bit too firmly in
the post-sexual-revolution present. While
a sexy, earthy vibe is entirely appropriate
to shakespeares material, a world of
relatively casual sex simply doesnt fit
with the plays crucial, unalterable plot
twist, in which not merely chastity but
actual virginity is treated as something
worth prizing, worth disowning someone over, and even worth dying for.
The maidenhood issue is not a small
incongruity, and at times it threatens to
undo the impressive work of Whedons

casthighlighted by Ackers brilliant
embodiment of Beatrice (she rather overshadows Denisofs Benedick), clark
Gregg as her uncle, sean Maher as the
sinister Don John, and nathan Fillions
put-upon, recessive, and entirely hilarious
Dogberry. The actors are mostly Whedons
favorites from other projects (Acker from
televisions Angel, Gregg from The
Avengers), and they combine the necessary
candlepower with an effective where
have i seen him? obscurity. (only Fillionthe hero of the canceled Firefly,
and now the star of the crime show
Castleis anything close to a real celebrity, though after this performance i
would happily sign a petition to get Acker
more A-list work.)
What ultimately saves their efforts
from the reverse-anachronism problem is
the fact that Whedon chose to shoot in
black and white. That choice balances the
post-1960s bed-hopping vibe with a
screwball 1930s quality, and effectively
decontemporizes the movie just enough
to make it entertain more than it distracts.
A screwball quality, and a hint of noir
as well. Part of the thrill of Much Ado
About Nothing, as with shakespeares
later romances, comes from the way it
employs the plot devices of his tragediesparticularly Romeo and Juliet and
Othellobut turns them, after a period of
turmoil, to happy, resurrective ends. its
to Whedons great credit that his sundrenched black-and-white, with its echoes
of Raymond chandlers Los Angeles,
helps bring that element of darkness
outeven if, as always in such adaptations, the ultimate credit goes to the genius
who included it in the first place.
47
backpage--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/17/2013 2:37 PM Page 48
Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Cinema ex Machina
F my two local-ish movie theaters in New
Hampshire, one has an irksome habit of always
showing the film just a little larger than the
screen, so that anything happening out on the
borders of the frame remains a mystery: If memory serves, it
was the most recent Die Hard sequel that had all the dateline
stuff in the lower left-hand corner, so that the two-line
MOSCOW. AUGUST. appeared intriguingly as COW.
GUST. My second local theaters even worse, a dingy
box that always reminds me of being a young cadet at my
boys school, and the dispiriting huts the
sergeants used to muster us in to show us
ancient public-service films on how not to
catch venereal diseases.
So, when Im in the big town, I like to
catch up on the big movies and see them on
the big screen. The other day, the big town
wasnt that bigBurlington, Vt.but it
had a multiplex or two, so I scanned the
listings: Monsters University, the prequel
to Monsters Inc.; Man of Steel, the rereboot of Superman; Pacific Rim, something to do with
robots vs. aliens; Despicable Me 2, a sequel to a computeranimated cartoon about a reformed supervillain; Grown Ups
2, an Adam Sandler sequel with all the urine and feces gags
they cut from the first film; Grown Ups 2 in 3D, the same
urine and feces gags but viewed through cardboard spectacles . . . And, for the first time that I can recall, there wasnt
a single movie I could face the thought of sitting through.
I see that conservative critics are blaming Hollywoods
listless summer on its blockbusters off-putting politics: In
the new Lone Ranger, the sidekick is the star and the bland
pretty boy playing the Ranger is just (in Tontos words) a
stupid white man; in White House Down, an Obama-esque
hopeychangey president comes under siege in the peoples
house from Tea Partytype terrorists.
Granted, its all terribly tedious, but its not really political in any meaningful sense. In The Lone Ranger, the baddies are top-hatted mustachioed railroad barons because the
formula dictates someone has to be the villain and, for a
multinational conglomerate like Disney, big business is the
easiest to hand. In Olympus Has Fallen, last months blockbuster about terrorists attacking the White House, the baddies were North Koreans, which superficially has some
connection to reality but in the end is no more grounded than
the right-wing Palin worshipers. Theres a scene in which
the president demands to know why traitorous Secret
Service agent Dylan McDermott has gone over to the Norks,
and he mumbles something about banks . . . bailouts . . .
whatever . . . Are we done yet? Can we get back to the explosions now? Rehearsing Damn Yankees 60 years back, the
great Broadway director George Abbott was famously asked
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).
48
by one actor what his motivation was: Your paycheck,

snapped Abbott. Dylan McDermotts motivation is apparently Lehman Brothers paychecks, which is even less persuasive. The Russian villain in A Good Day to Die Hard
dispenses with the same perfunctory pretext more adroitly:
Do you vont to know vot I hate about America? Stage
pause. Everything!
Everythingand nothing. Which is a bit of a problem if
youre looking for a film about . . . something. The producer
Lynda Obst has a new book out purporting to explain the age
of globalized tentpole franchise movies
selling on pre-awareness. Its called, after
her best-known romantic comedy, Sleepless
in Hollywood, which isnt quite as boffo a hit
title as her previous tome, Hello, He Lied.
Everyone loved that onesuch a perfect distillation of the industrys flattering self-image
as a shark tank of ruthless cynics that you
didnt need to read the book. Hollywood is
now approaching the condition of Broadway in the abominable showman David
Merricks dotage: The shows are boring but the backstage
machinations preserve the glamour a while longer.
What did I call those 3D glasses? Cardboard spectacles?
As Ms. Obst explains in her book, they love 3D overseas. So
Hollywood now makes cardboard spectacles for the youth of
developing countries, a half-billion-dollar summer stock
for the barns of Asia. In Guangdong, the Chinese make
Americas Walmart filler; in Hollywood, America makes
Chinas multiplex filler. The Chinese were the co-producers
of the recent futuristic dystopian time-travel shoot-em-up
Looper, which I dimly recollect as a film so disciplined about
its nothingness that, when the old Bruce Willis materializes
from the future and meets his younger self and the young
Bruce asks old Bruce if hell remember meeting young
Bruce upon his return to the future, old Bruce advises him
not to get hung up on details. Dont even think about it.
And so it goes on: Iron Man 4, Cardboard Man 6,
Franchise Man 12. Im half-ashamed I even know that word,
but thats Hollywoodfrom Franchot Tone to franchise
drone. What happens to a culture whose economic incentives
drive it ever further from telling its own stories? Say, maybe
thats why the Chinese are so keen to annex the movie industryto so neuter us that, by the time we need to make
another Casablanca, well no longer know how, or why . . .
Hey, perhaps that would make a good conspiracy thriller:
Alan Rickman as the sinister studio chief bought by Beijing,
Scarlett Johansson as the plucky vice president of development who figures out whats really going on, Liam Neeson
as her ex-CIA dad who rappels into the backlot and kills all
the extras . . . Oh, dont worry. When they option the script,
theyll change the villains from the Chinese politburo to a
Tea Party 501(c)(4) owned by a subsidiary of the Koch
brothers.
AUGUST 5, 2013
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14. Cicero
15. Augustus
16. Vergil
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JAY NORDLINGER: Felix Rodriguez, the Anti-Che

AVIK ROY: Our Enemy the Hospitals

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16 PRESIDENTIAL HOPES AND HOPEFULS

A look at the 2016 Republican field.

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22 SALON AND BREAKFAST

Florence King reviews Rose

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Ross Douthat reviews Joss Whedons

24 THE FRONT MAN

Edward Feser reviews Conscience

Feminist ideology has engaged the Special Forces.

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