"La gripa puerca"

* De ese gracioso modo la llaman algunos. Y es una pandemia. Poco a poco, a pesar de nuestro excepticismo y de las críticas que le dirigimos en su momento a la OMS, lo cierto es que lenta pero insidiosamente la gripa porcina, hoy llamada H1N1 se ha ido extendiendo por el mundo, y está matando gente en todas partes. Pero la gente parece haber bajado la guardia cuando la situación empeora. Ello es probablemente porque en nuestro país no ha tenido, hasta ahora la virulencia que ha alcanzado en Argentina y México.

Pero es sintomático, y simbólico que atacara al propio Presidente reduciéndolo muy brevemente a la impotencia. Ago que ni siquiera la oposición había logrado hasta ahora.

Japon: Nuevo Gobierno

El Partido Democrático de Yukio Hatoyama venció al Partido Liberal, del primer ministro Taro Aso, tras más de medio siglo de hegemonía.

Hatoyama, de 62 años, se convertirá en el nuevo jefe del gobierno japonés, tras más de medio siglo de hegemonía casi ininterrumpida del PDL. "Creo que los resultados electorales reflejan el enfado de los votantes sobre la coalición gobernante", dijo Hatoyama, eufórico tras conocer los resultados

Por su parte, el primer ministro japonés, Taro Aso, admitió el triunfo de la oposición, calificó a los resultados como "muy graves", y reconoció que los mismos evidencian "un descontento profundo hacia nuestro partido".

La cadena de noticias CNN informó que Aso presentará su renuncia al PDL a la brevedad, como también lo harán otros líderes de la misma organización política, pese a que los resultados oficiales no serán divulgados hasta mañana por la mañana.

La histórica victoria reconfigurará el nuevo Parlamento en el que el PJD de Hatoyama tendrá 308 de los 480 escaños, frente a los 112 que esta fuerza tenía en el anterior periodo. En tanto que el PDL de Aso obtendrá 119 asientos, casi un tercio de los 303 que tenía en la anterior legislatura.

Los comicios, tuvieron una participación récord del 70 por ciento de los 110 millones de votantes.

El gran ganador

* Con cierta reticencia en el país, y con más franqueza en el exterior, la prensa ha aceptado que el Presidente Alvaro Uribe fué el gran ganador de la Cumbre de Bariloche: y lo fué porque nadie p[odía apostar que se libraría de una categórica condena.

No fué así, y en cambio ni Chávez ni Correa o incluso Evo lograron que los otros países se unieran en una descalificación total de la autorización a los americanos para usar las bases colombianas.

Pero eso no evitará que algunos, por pura antipatía con Uribe o posando de analistas sofisticados, señalen que Colombia perdió porque ha quedado aislada del resto del sub-continente. Y la pregunta inmediata es, aislada de qué exactamente ? En materia cultural, los escasos vínculos que se tienen con los otros países no podrían sufrir mucho; en efecto, cual es realmente nuestro intercambio universitario, digamos con Chile ? Y no creo que Chile desconozca los acuerdos que existan en esa materia.

El intercambio económico importante no es con Chile (pero debería serlo), ni con Perú, y menos con Bolivia, que bien pudiera estar situada en Oceanía, sino con Venezuela: y ese comercio ya está en crisis, de todos modos; lo que no evitará que continúe, como en el pasado, de contrabando

Ignorantes irremediables

* El diario El País de España, trae este titular inverosímil: Brasil impide choque entre Caracas y Bogotá.

Los españoles, esos ignorantes presumidos como pobres con plata ya resolvieron que Brasil es la potencia dominante en suramérica. Pero nosotros no creemos que eso sea cierto. Y la prueba son los escasos resultados de UNASUR, la organización por ellos inventada. Si la reunión de Bariloche no acabó en un fiasco total, fué porque Brasil lo impidió, asustado de la muerte prematura de su, por otra parte también prematura de nacimiento, criatura.

Venir a decir que Brasil ys es la potencia dominante en sramérica solo se les puede ocurrir a los españoles.

La muerte del Conservatismo americano III

This, one may assume, will turn out to be the broad story line of the authorized biography of Buckley that Tanenhaus has long planned to write, though there are some obvious problems with it. For one thing, Buckley never took back anything he said or wrote during the 1950s about McCarthy, Communism, liberalism, or higher education, nor is it evident from anything he said or wrote that he regretted taking those positions. It is perhaps true that Buckley became somewhat less polemical in style with the passing decades, but it is difficult to discern any change in principles that would justify the conclusion that the Buckley of 1968 and thereafter was a different kind of man from the one who launched National Review.

Tanenhaus uses the terms revanche or revanchism promiscuously throughout his book, plainly as instruments for tarring conservatives as destructive reactionaries, but its use in this context is exaggerated and inflammatory to the point of irresponsibility. “Revanchism,” drawn from the French word for “revenge,” originated as a term to describe European nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that sought to restore lost territory or prestige through new wars of conquest and occupation. Though originally applied to movements in France that aimed to recapture territory seized by Germany in the Franco-Prussian war, the term more accurately applies to the nationalist parties that arose in Germany in the 1920s dedicated to the overthrow both of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Revanchists reject liberalism and democracy in favor of nationalism and strong-man rule, and surely cannot be said to endorse the ideals of liberty, limited government, and the rule of law that form the core of conservative thought. The repeated use of this term in the American context is thus hard to justify, as much so as McCarthy’s charge that American liberals of the 1950s were “crypto-Communists.” Tanenhaus condemns conservative writers who draw parallels between the New Deal and fascism, but carelessly suggests parallels between American conservatives and European fascists—one of the more unsavory aspects of a book filled with unsavory allusions and implications.

The argument that contemporary conservatives are reactionaries or revanchists is wrong on its face. The market school of economics cannot be dismissed because it is critical of the New Deal or of Keynesian policies, nor are free-market thinkers reactionary in any sense of that term. Tanenhaus does not inquire seriously into the reasons why conservatives are uneasy with the welfare state, why some see in it a threat to liberty and others an encouragement to the breakdown of the family and self-government. The market revolution of the last thirty years, moreover, contributed greatly to world prosperity over that period, to the fall of Communism, and to much else that was beneficial besides. It may be true that the current economic crisis presents a challenge to market thinking, but it certainly does not vindicate central planning or the welfare state, and there is nothing about that challenge that justifies the conclusion that market economics is dead. As we shall shortly learn, the path back to prosperity will lead through free and flexible markets.

Nor does the intervention in Iraq, whatever its ultimate outcome, support Tanenhaus’s case. That intervention, after all, was endorsed not only by conservatives and neo-conservatives, but also by every Democratic candidate for president in last year’s election, save for Barack Obama (who was a member of the Illinois legislature when the war began). President Bush, in addition, justified the war on liberal or Wilsonian grounds, so that if the war discredited anything, it was the liberal ideal of achieving collective security through the promotion of democracy. One may argue that such an approach is misguided or impractical, or even that it is inconsistent with conservative principles, but it is not possible to say that it is revanchist. As for the culture war—well, most conservatives would be glad to have it over with, if only cultural liberals and radicals would call a halt to their provocations. The historical record is clear that the first shots fired in every engagement of the culture war came from the left in the form of school busing, the abortion decision of the Supreme Court, the Mapplethorpe exhibition, political correctness on the campus, and (now) gay marriage. Indeed, what many call the “religious right” came into existence in the late 1970s in response to the Carter administration’s effort to deny tax exemption to religious schools on the grounds that they were segregated. Absent liberal provocations, there would have been no culture war and probably no “religious right” to wage it.

Tanenhaus, taking no prisoners on any side, even rebukes his own editors at the New York Times for signing up William Kristol to write a weekly column for the paper during the 2008 election campaign. The editors were no doubt trying to demonstrate an element of fairness and balance in an election year, an obviously impossible task in view of the overflowing stable of writers at the paper who dislike conservatives and Republicans as much as Tanenhaus does. Kristol, however, at least according to Tanenhaus, “cheapened this valued space [sic] into a shabby storefront for the Republican presidential campaign.” That charge is false as it applies to Kristol, who wrote about many subjects besides the election during his brief tenure at the paper, and even criticized Senator McCain at more than one point during the campaign. If we reverse the party labels, however, the judgment is accurate when applied to the work of other Times columnists, such as Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and Frank Rich, who even outdid the paper’s news pages in propagandizing on behalf of the Democratic ticket.

Like the liberal writers of the 1950s, Tanenhaus wants to see a conservative movement that accommodates rather than opposes liberalism, and thus one that will accept its role as subordinate to the dominant liberal tradition in American life. He acknowledges that there is an important role for conservatism, but it must be a “genuine” conservatism that preserves but does not seek to overturn liberal gains. In any event, he says, conservatives will have little choice but to accommodate to liberal leadership because the election of 2008 has effectively ended the era of conservative dominance in American politics. Much as liberals had to accommodate to conservatives after Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives will now have to accept the newly dominant status of reform liberalism, or else accept the consequences of being turned into “the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight.”

Tanenhaus first laid out his theme in a long article in The New Republic published in the breathless aftermath of Obama’s inauguration when it was all too easy to imagine that liberals had scored a permanent knockout over their conservative adversaries and when many entertained hopes that the new president might bring about a wholesale transformation in the conduct of public affairs—a “revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as Norman Mailer put it in 1960 in describing the hoped-for consequences of John F. Kennedy’s victory. The excitement generated by Tanenhaus’s message (Conservatism is dead!) justified a rapidly written expansion of the essay.

The book now appears months later as these extravagant hopes have given way to more sober assessments of what it is truly possible to achieve within the American system, and as President Obama’s poll numbers have come back to earth in response to the public’s wariness about his ambitious proposals. Various opinion polls point to a resurgence in the popularity of conservative principles and policies, while pundits are now forecasting a Republican comeback in the forthcoming elections in 2009 and 2010. The polls offer no support for the claim that conservatism is dead among American voters or that the 2008 election represented a long-running realignment in the fortunes of the two major parties. One may confidently assume, if the past is any guide, that a conservative Republican will succeed President Obama in 2012 or 2016, and that Republicans will recapture one or both houses of Congress before Obama completes his tenure in office. Three of the books currently topping the Times best-seller list (as yet unreviewed by the Times) are conservative titles. It thus appears that Tanenhaus, in pronouncing the death of conservatism, has made the mistake of forecasting a trend on the basis of a single event. His obituary seems less compelling—and ever more exaggerated—with every passing month.

It is certainly true, as Tanenhaus says, that conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses, which are magnified when it is judged in the immediate aftermath of a lost election or in isolation from alternative approaches to public life. When judged in relation to liberalism, however, modern conservatism takes on a more favorable outlook. Many of the sins Tanenhaus attributes to conservatives—overly zealous attachment to principle or ideology, unwillingness to adapt to change, impatience with popular opinion—are on display as much or more among liberals. If Tanenhaus or anyone else wishes to see liberalism in action, he might venture on to an elite college campus where only liberal and leftist views are permitted peaceful expression, or out to Sacramento or up to Albany where liberal Democrats, long in control, have spent their states into near bankruptcy. The liberal faculty and public employee unions that control those institutions and jurisdictions have not exactly distinguished themselves for their far-sighted and open-minded leadership. As for New York and California, the public employee unions that control the Democratic party, and thereby the state governments, have exploited the prosperity of recent decades to build up huge government establishments that will no longer be affordable in the forthcoming era of austerity, especially as taxpayers and businesses flee to other states like Texas and Florida that have followed more conservative paths. As California and New York unravel, voters will undoubtedly turn to conservatives to restore levels of growth and prosperity sufficient to fund their social programs and educational systems. Liberals will come to understand that in order to fund their programs, they will have to tolerate conservatives and conservative policies. That will be a hard and painful lesson for liberals to learn. If conservatism is dead, in short, then so is liberalism, and much else besides.

Conservatism, moreover, is now a permanent and enduring aspect of American political life, supported by millions of Americans and defended by a large network of writers, journals, and think tanks. There is, however, a more important reason for its enduring appeal among Americans. Conservatism in America deploys the principles of tradition, reason, and orderly change in defense of liberal institutions—the Constitution, representative government, liberty and equal rights, the rule of law. It is generally the conservative, not the modern liberal, who emphasizes the inspired example of the founding fathers, the words of the Constitution, and the sacrifices made to build free institutions. If it is true that liberals want to overcome the past, or apologize for it, then conservatives want us to remember, to learn, and to build constructively upon it. That may be a challenging task in a culture of short memory, but it is far from a thankless one.

Viva Chávez

* Ojalá que Chavez logre aplicar sus doctrinas socialistas del siglo XXI, cualquier cosa que eso sea. Y que reconstruya el estado Venezolano como hizo Fidel con Cuba. O sea que gobierne hasta los 80 años y se retire con diverticulitis dejando a un hermano en el poder; y que mantenga a sus compatriotas encerrados en las fronteras de Venezuela durante 50 años con la salida de algunos ocasionales "gusanos" (mis amigos) hacia acá.

Porque si Chávez fracasa, como han fracasado todas las revoluciones y todos los sistemas socialistas, dejará a su país completamente destrozado y arruinado. Y entonces los venezolanos, -que no están en una isla como Cuba- tendrán que salir desesperados y miserables hacia este país. Y nosotros no tendremos cómo recibirlos, y nos arrepentiremos de haber deseado que mico-mandante fracasara.

La muerte del Conservatismo americano II

Rossiter published the first edition of his book in 1955, barely a year after William F. Buckley Jr. launched National Review, thereby launching as well the modern conservative movement. A supporter of Senator McCarthy, ardent foe of the New Deal, and critic of Ivy League colleges, Buckley did not meet the requirements for conservatism as had been laid down by the liberal historians. In their eyes, Buckley was an extremist, as were most of the writers (like James Burnham, Max Eastman, and Frank Meyer) whom he recruited to his new fortnightly magazine. Buckley’s quixotic project to build a conservative intellectual movement was not supposed to succeed and even less was it expected to grow to a point where conservatives might be in a position to challenge liberals for intellectual and political influence. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the most far-reaching political development in the United States over the past half-century has been the rise of conservatism from its designated role as “the thankless persuasion” to its status by the turn of the millennium as the nation’s most influential public doctrine. This did not happen by accident, but rather because conservatives succeeded where liberals had failed in ending the Cold War, rejuvenating the American economy from the “stagflation” of the 1970s, and restoring order and fiscal health to the nation’s cities. Such achievements should have discredited all those claims that there is something “un-American” about conservatism, that it is forever doomed to minority status, and that it must always play second fiddle to liberalism. Nevertheless, despite everything that has happened since 1954 when Buckley announced his new magazine or since 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president, there are many who still hold fast to the old myths about American conservatism.

Sam Tanenhaus has now reprised the old arguments about conservatism and tried to bring them up to date in his newly published jeremiad, The Death of Conservatism.[1] Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a justly acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, argues that the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime. All of this is nonsense, of course, and given some of the author’s previous writings, particularly his biography of Chambers, one had reason to hope that he would have produced something more elevated than the partisan assault against conservatives that he has packaged in this book.

Tanenhaus argues that conservatives failed because—well, because they did not act like conservatives at all but rather as extremists and radicals out to destroy everything associated with modern liberalism. The paradox of the modern right, he says, is that “Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative.” According to Tanenhaus, conservatives have been divided since the 1950s between their Burkean inclinations to preserve the constitutional order and their reactionary or “revanchist” impulses to tear up and destroy every liberal compromise with modern life. “On the one side,” he writes, “are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, whether the restoration of America’s pre-New Deal ancient regime, a return to Cold War-style Manichaeanism, or the revival of pre-modern family values.” In recent years, he concludes, the “revanchists” have gotten the upper hand over the Burkeans, and have thereby run the conservative juggernaut over a cliff and into irrelevance. In an entry that gives the reader a flavor of some of the exaggerated rhetoric contained in the book, Tanenhaus writes that, “Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”

These “exhumed figures” are presumably free-market economists and conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Amity Shlaes, whose books have been critical of the New Deal, neo-conservatives who supported the war in Iraq, and social conservatives who have opposed abortion, easy divorce, and gay marriage. In Tanenhaus’s view, genuine conservatives would accept the New Deal and the welfare state as “Burkean corrections” that served to adjust the American economy to modern conditions. Nor would “real” conservatives have supported a war in Iraq that was based upon a utopian ideal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. He also thinks that conservatives should accept gay marriage as an extension of family values to a new area. The reason conservatives have not followed such advice, he says, is that their attachment to orthodox doctrine trumps the practical advantages of finding areas of accommodation with adversaries. In a most un-Burkean way, he says, they have allowed ideology to prevail over experience and common sense. Thus, as he suggests, the right is the main source of disorder and dissension in contemporary society and the instigators of the long-running culture war that has divided the country.

Employing this framework, Tanenhaus arrives at surprising judgments about some prominent conservatives—for example, that Ronald Reagan was a “real” conservative because, despite his rhetoric, he made no effort to repeal popular social programs but accepted them as an integral aspect of the American consensus. This is gracious on the author’s part, though it is a judgment that few liberals will accept simply because they are certain that the only reason President Reagan did not repeal many of those programs is because Congress would not permit it. After all, one of Reagan’s favorite sayings was that “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Reagan, like every other major Republican office-holder of recent decades, including George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich, was constrained in this area by a mix of congressional politics, interest groups, and public opinion. Tanenhaus also says that Buckley, while starting out as a “revanchist” in the 1950s, turned into a Burkean in the 1960s by his acceptance of liberal reforms, especially in civil rights.

Chorros de retórica y babas

Si la intención de Uribe al pedir que se transmitiera la cumbre, fué la de mostrar la mediocridad mental y cultural de algunos de los presidentes suramericanos, lo logró clamorosamente. Chávez fué el peor; que tal la chabacanería de su lenguaje ? Y la insigne mediocridad de sus razonamientos !! mostrar un documento bajado de internet como prueba de la conspiración norteamericana en Colombia ?

Y que tal Evo ? Casi necesita traducción simultánea al castellano. En cuanto a Correa, es el típico matoncito de barrio latinoamericano: truculento y procaz.

En cuanto a Cristina, Argentina, un país culto, no se merece semejante medianía: torpe y atrabiliaria.

Francamente, si la izquierda está destinada a apoyarse en esos analfabetos, triste futuro le espera.

La muerte del Conservatismo americano I

When in 1962 Clinton Rossiter published a revised edition of Conservatism in America, he gave it the subtitle The Thankless Persuasion. A decade earlier, Raymond English had touched upon a similar theme in an article in The American Scholar titled “Conservatism: The Forbidden Faith.” Their point was that conservatism as a political philosophy runs against the American grain and thus will always play something of an incongruous and subordinate role in a revolutionary nation dedicated to equality, democracy, and restless change. While the conservative case for order, tradition, and authority may be useful as a corrective for the excesses of democracy, it can never hope to supplant liberalism as the nation’s official governing philosophy. As Rossiter put it, “Our commitment to democracy means that Liberalism will maintain its historic dominance over our minds, and that conservative thinkers will continue as well-kept but increasingly restless hostages to the American tradition.” Liberals will always set the tone for public life, he argued, leaving conservatives with the thankless task of fighting liberal reforms and then adjusting to them after they have been adopted.

Rossiter, like other liberal observers of the post-war scene, such as Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Bell, lamented the fact that an authentic conservative movement was difficult to locate in the United States. To be sure, there were some thoughtful conservatives to be found, such as the author Russell Kirk and Senator Robert Taft, but they were eccentrics, who had little in the way of a popular following, and whose views on policy were hardly distinguishable from those of the business community. On the other hand, the new American right that arose in the 1950s to challenge the New Deal and the Cold War policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did not seem to fit into the conservative tradition at all. Populist in tone and suspicious of leaders from both parties, the new right seemed to have more in common with extremist movements than with conservative parties that traditionally distrusted democracy and defended elites. The radical right, as the liberals called it, was especially frightening because it mobilized huge popular followings behind figures like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the various fundamentalist ministers who spread their messages through the radio waves. The very idea of a President McCarthy or, more realistically, a President Nixon, was enough to send chills down the spine of any right-thinking liberal. Naturally, those liberals preferred to deal with “real” conservatives like Sen. Taft than with populist figures like McCarthy and Nixon who, because of their popular appeal, actually threatened to topple them from power.

The liberal analysis of conservatism that was passed down from the 1950s and 1960s has caused endless confusion about what conservatism in America is and is not. It is never a good thing for any philosophical movement to permit itself to be defined by its adversaries, but this is more or less what happened to conservatism in the post-war period, as liberals sought to define it in such a way as to guarantee its failure or ineffectiveness. For one thing, they created a combination of traps and paradoxes for conservatives that gave added meaning to Rossiter’s concept of “the thankless persuasion.” On the one hand, conservatives, if they wished to maintain that designation (at least in the eyes of liberals), were obliged to endorse all manner of liberal reforms once they were established as part of the new status quo. Thus, self-styled conservatives who attacked the New Deal were not acting like conservatives because they were in effect attacking the established order—and, of course, “real” conservatives would never do that. So it was that conservatives who wished to reverse liberal victories became radicals or extremists. Conservatives, moreover, could have no program of their own or, at any rate, any program that had any reasonable chance of succeeding, because any successful appeal to the wider public would turn them into populists and, through that process, into extremists and radicals. Not surprisingly, they viewed a popular conservatism as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives, in short, could only win power and influence by betraying their principles, and could only maintain those principles by accepting their subordinate status. Thus, in the eyes of the liberal historians, conservatism could never prosper in America because, if it did, it could no longer be called conservatism.

Edward Kennedy

The death of a public figure, especially a polarizing one, always makes things a bit dicey in opinionland. Do the detractors speak ill of the dead? Do the defenders pre-empt such criticisms, or does that just inspire the critics? In the case of Ted Kennedy, whose many accomplishments got due recognition everywhere, most chose to duck the fight on anything more problematic. There was comparatively little talk about a Harvard scandal, a very sad end to a first marriage or a controversial rape trial. Even among the pundits and partisans, the name Mary Jo Kopechne was for the most part mentioned only in passing; those on the right who tried to make much of it seemed more petulant than aggrieved — perhaps even shrill — while those on the left who tried to make the best of it sounded patently absurd.

Can today’s political acrimony be traced back to a 1987 speech before the Senate Judiciary Committee?

No, when it came to Ted Kennedy’s less-than-admirable qualities, most accounts ran along the lines of this, from the obituary in the Times: “He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly.” What “large flaws”? Well, you know …

But if this isn’t the occasion to dwell on the senator’s personal shortcomings, it should be one to examine his words. And in terms of both dramatic and lasting effect, nothing in his 46-year tenure in the Senate comes close to this:

In case you missed any nuance, here is the transcript including a bit more of the speech:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy… President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

First, a fact-check, courtesy of my Times colleague Ethan Bronner, who covered the hearings for The Boston Globe.

Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…

Not good, but surely not the first time a senator stood before his colleagues and decided that the ends justified the means.

More troubling to Bronner, and to many other Americans any time a seat opens on the Supreme Court bench, was the precedent being set.

The speech was a landmark for judicial nominations. Kennedy was saying that no longer should the Senate content itself with examining a nominee’s personal integrity and legal qualifications…. From now on the Senate and the nation should examine a nominee’s vision for society … the upper house should take politics and ideology fully into account.

Kennedy did distort Bork’s record, but his statement was not the act of a desperate man. This was a confident and seasoned politician, who knew how to combine passion and pragmatism in the Senate. Unlike the vast majority of those who were to oppose Bork, Kennedy believed from the beginning that the nomination would be defeated and that the loss would prove decisive in judicial politics.

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, for one, thinks it was a precedent well worth setting. “It was crude and exaggerated, but it galvanized the opposition as nothing else, and no one else, could,” he writes. “Four months later, Bork was defeated by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two, and Reagan nominated Anthony M. Kennedy in his place. Justice Kennedy has been no liberal, to be sure, but he has been the single vote that kept Roe v. Wade on the books, was the first Justice to recognize the rights of gay people, and imposed a restraining hand on President Bush’s excesses when it came to the treatment of detainees. For that, and for his presence on the Court, the nation can look to Ted Kennedy.”

And A. Serwer at The American Prospect seems to think that some claims become truer over time:

In hindsight though, Kennedy’s statement wasn’t so much wrong as it was expressed in the kind of intemperate manner that ruffles feathers in Washington. The fact is, Bork believed only “political” speech was protected by the First Amendment; he, like many other conservatives, didn’t believe that women have the right to make choices about whether to carry pregnancies to term; he was critical of the idea that illegally obtained evidence shouldn’t be used in court; and while nominally agreeing that the 14th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination — as opposed to discrimination based on gender, which he thought it didn’t — in practice, he opposed every single piece of legislation ever passed in order to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans. Searching through old news reports, I can’t speak to Kennedy’s allegations on Bork’s views on evolution in schools, but it’s fairly clear that Bork’s personal beliefs are anti-evolution.

Tristero at Hullaballoo knows that it can be proved that Kennedy relied totally on the facts, if only somebody else would actually go and find them.

By speaking this forcefully, and - equally important - reacting so quickly to Reagan’s awful appointment, Kennedy helped prevent Bork’s for elevation to the highest court in the land, for which this country owes the Senator its gratitude.

I have no doubt that Kennedy was 100% right about Bork. However, without backup, Kennedy seems over the top, beyond the pale, shrill, unstatesmanlike, etc. While [Serwer's post] tried, its links barely support Kennedy’s assertions. And as of this writing, no one in the Democratic party and no progressive organization has thought to compile easily accessible and truly comprehensive support for Kennedy’s charges.

No wonder we lose so often. No wonder we can’t make use of our victories.

One who has no use for Tristero’s victories is Doctor Zero at Hot Air. “Politicians have been spreading scurrilous lies about their opponents since the early days of the republic, but Kennedy used scurrilous lies to destroy a man who wasn’t a politician: Judge Robert Bork,” writes the Doctor,

Thus began the modern era of below-the-belt, win-at-any-cost politics, played for the highest of stakes…. Kennedy was a prince in the Aristocracy of Intent, absolved of every crime by the soaring nobility of his intentions. His constituents were delighted to watch him emerge from a warm bath of incredible wealth, to rail against men who were crass and selfish enough to accumulate their fortunes by creating jobs and meeting consumer needs… Kennedy is praised for his “passion” by the same people who recoil in horror from the passion of town-hall protesters and pro-life advocates. Awarding political power, and respect, on the basis of “passion” is another road to totalitarianism.

I’m not sure that Scott Johnson of Powerline thinks despotism is around the corner, but he agrees that, in some ways, the Bork debate has never really ended.

The tone set by Senator Kennedy in connection with the Bork nomination lives on in the Senate. It also lives on in the mainstream media — see, for example, John Hinderaker’s “A conspiracy so lunatic” — and on the left-wing side of the Internet. Indeed, we have seen it on display this month in the White House/Reid/Pelosi attack on the opponents of Obamacare.

We live in Edward Kennedy’s America not only in the consequential legislation that he sponsored and saw through the Senate, but also in the afterlife of the vulgar political sham on which Senator Kennedy relied to defeat the nomination of Judge Bork.

For Pejman Yousefzadeh of the New Ledger, Kennedy’s speech “was not only nonsense, it was nonsense-on-stilts.”

To be sure, there was a tactical advantage to the inflammatory rhetoric; it shocked the Reagan Administration and helped rally liberals to work against the Bork nomination with a sense of mission, urgency, and organization not often found on the liberal side. But Kennedy’s statements were patently untrue, and what’s more, the Senator had to know that they were untrue. It is nice and good that Kennedy was able to restore a sense of decorum and gentlemanly behavior when it came to a whole host of other legislative battles, but when it came to the Bork nomination, his sense of propriety, decorum, and fair play were sorely lacking. Those who wonder how American political debate became so coarse, so unrefined, and so demagogic, ought to look at Kennedy’s speech on Bork as a catalyst for the national descent into a prolonged political shouting match.

And in the eyes of the editors at National Review, the most infamous aspect of the Bork speech is less the personal attack than how it encapsulated a shift the senator had made on another issue entirely:

Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own. Consider this: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.” Like many of the most powerful Democrats — Jesse Jackson and Al Gore come to mind — Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably.

So, you’ve watched the senator at work and read his words: Was it slander or did it achieve a higher sort of truthiness? Did it spare the nation a grave mistake on the bench or was it responsible for two decades of partisan rancor?

Few, it seems, are willing to split the difference on such questions. Somewhat surprisingly, the person who made the strongest effort at it was David Frum, the Bush speechwriter of “axis-of-evil” fame who now runs the site New Majority.

I know exactly the hour when my opinion of Sen. Ted Kennedy permanently changed. I had remained very angry at the Massachusetts liberal for many years since his 1987 speech so unjustly vilifying the great conservative jurist Robert Bork …

For 15 years thereafter I could hardly bear to hear his name spoken. Nor was my temper much improved by his rough handling of another great conservative legalist, Theodore Olson, at Olson’s confirmation hearings as solicitor general. I was always ready to laugh at the harsh jokes conservatives told about the senator’s legendarily self-indulgent personal laugh. It seemed a fair judgment on an unfair man.

Then came 9/11. Among the murdered was the brave and brilliant Barbara Olson. Ted asked some friends to help with the deluge of messages of condolence, and my wife Danielle volunteered for the job. Among the letters: a lengthy handwritten note by the senator so elegant and decent, so eloquent and (fascinatingly) written in so beautiful a hand as to revolutionize one’s opinion of the man who wrote it. It did not dishonor by ignoring or denying the political differences between the two families. It fully acknowledged them - and through them expressed a deeper human awareness of shared mortality, pain, and grief. Not all chapters of his life revealed it equally, but the senator was a big soul, and in his last years, he lived his bigness fully … Rest in peace, leader of the liberals.

And that, I think, is a pretty good place to end.

Suspenso

Sigue el suspenso en el asunto de la reelección. Ahora dicen que la decisión final quedará para el martes, ya que los señores representantes están asegurándose de que se les rechacen sus impedimentos con el fin de asegurarse contra la Corte Suprema.

Pero todo indica que por lo menos los votos del Presidente están asegurados. El problema que queda es saber si hay tiempo para que Uribe logre sus propósitos.

Y una observación: el Presidente va a Bariloche a frentear los ataques por las bases americanas. De como le vaya, depende que su cota de popularidad aumente o disminuya.

Sostiene Fidel

El líder cubano Fidel Castro afirmó en una editorial publicada hoy en su país que la "derecha racista" de Estados Unidos busca "sacar del juego" al presidente Barack Obama, a quien odia "por ser negro".

"No albergo la menor duda de que la derecha racista hará todo lo posible por desgastarlo, obstaculizando su programa para sacarlo del juego por una u otra vía, al menor costo político posible", aseguró Castro.

Con el título "Ojalá me equivoque", el líder cubano destacó que "la poderosa extrema derecha odia a Obama por ser negro" y "no se resigna a medida alguna que en grado mínimo disminuya sus prerrogativas".

"Nació, se educó, hizo política y tuvo éxito dentro del sistema capitalista imperial de Estados Unidos. No deseaba ni podía cambiar el sistema. Lo curioso es que, a pesar de eso, la extrema derecha lo odia por ser afroamericano y combate lo que hace para mejorar la imagen deteriorada de ese país", opina Fidel en la editorial.

Castro afirma que la crisis económica, la guerra de Irak y otros errores del anterior presidente norteamericano, George W. Bush, hicieron posible que Obama fuera elegido "en una sociedad tradicionalmente racista".

"Muchos se entusiasmaron con la idea de que habría cambios en la política exterior de Estados Unidos", aseguró Castro, pero enseguida afirmó que "bastaba un elemental conocimiento de la realidad para no caer en ilusiones".

Efecto contrario

= Es posible que el acuerdo para la presencia de militares y naves norteamericanas en Colombia sea inconveniente. Pero las continuas amenazas de Chávez para intimidar al país están produciendo en la opinión pública un efecto competamente inverso al querido por él: cada vez los colombianos se convencen más, con razón o sin ella, de que el acuerdo no solo es conveniente, sino necesario.

La creencia, progresivamente extendida, es que Venezuela es muy superior en armamento, y por lo tanto no queda otro remedio que apoyarse en los americanos para defendernos. Y existe, además, la certeza, probablemente equivocada, de que los Estados Unidos considerarían un ataque a Colombia, como una agresión contra ellos.

Mientras tanto el coronel sigue lanzando amenazas y pronunciando arengas, a cual más estrepitosa para ver si por esa vía Obama y su gente retroceden en el propósito de llegar al acuerdo.Algo que al menos hasta el momento no parece que vaya a ocurrir, como lo demuestra el poco interés mostrado por el presidente americano frente a la desaforada convocatoria de Lula para que le explicara a los países de UNASUR los términos del convenio con Colombia. Es más, Obama se cuidó de recordarles al presidente brasileño y a los demás gobernantes suramericanos, que EE. UU. no pertenece a UNASUR por decisión de ellos mismos, y nada tiene que ir a hacer allá.

Chomski

* Es una vieja gloria de los estudios lingüísticos. Pero quizás su tiempo ya pasó. Ahora hay otras corrientes, y el viejo investigador ya tenga menos vigencia académica. Pero desde hace rato escogió, como tantos otros, el sistema de hacer política para mantener su vigencia como conciencia moral. Valerosas fueron sin duda sus denuncias contra el intervencionismo imperial de su país por todos los rincones del mundo, lo que le valió el odio de los sectores más reaccionarios de la derecho americana, sin que esa reacción detuviera su agresiva militancia.

Por eso resulta tan melancólico verlo reducirse a apoyar los delirantes proyectos de Chávez, y aún proclamar que constituyen la expresión de un "nuevo mundo posible".

Esel mismo síndrome de la izquierda que tan terribles resultados ha producido, y tantos dolores ha sembrado, y que se concreta en el principio de que todo gobierno que persiga a la derecha es bueno, no importa qué tan brutales sean sus métodos.

Triste final para Don Noah: hacer de caja de resonancia de un proyecto delirante.

Semenya

Baja del avión en el aeropuerto de Johannesburgo, donde la esperan multitudes eufóricas para celebrar sus logros en el Mundial de Atletismo. No sonríe, no celebra. Se ve triste, confundida.

Y no es para menos. Caster Semenya es una muchacha de 18 años a la que le ha ocurrido lo peor que le puede pasar a una adolescente: ver cuestionada su identidad sexual públicamente y, en este caso, a nivel mundial y a gritos:

"¿Es hombre o mujer?", "Dudan que atleta sudafricana sea mujer", "La ambigua sexualidad de Semenya" "¿Caster Semenya es él o ella?"

No sé a ustedes, pero a mí el manejo mediático de la polémica en torno a la identidad sexual de la atleta sudafricana me ha parecido de una crueldad apabullante, aunque, francamente, no es tan difícil de comprender.

Porque lo cierto es que en la ya diversa historia de los juegos deportivos, siempre ha existido la sospecha de que algunas de las atletas ganadoras fueron en realidad seres de sexualidad ambigua o equívoca. Esa fué sospecha que recayó sobre todo en las atletas de los países comunistas. Pero también otros países han caído esporádicamente en la tentación de hacer trampa llevados por la alta rentabilidad política que produce el prestigio deportivo.

Tal es el sino que ha perseguido a Semenya, cuyas marcas han sido tan gruesas como la voz, y sus indudables rasgos musculares.

La maroma del Polo

%.- A la intención de Chávez de propagar sus ideas en Colombia, el Polo ha contestado diciendo que no se dejará utilizar por un gobierno extranjero. Pero que, claro, tiene coincidencias ideológicas con Chávez. En ese caso, - para qué Chavez ?

Cinturón de Seguridad

* Uno de los entes más corruptos e inútiles del país es la entidad encargada de la circulación y el tránsito en Bogotá. todas las veces que se inventa una medida de control, lo hace con la certeza de que la gente tendrá dificultades para cumplirla, al menos durante un tiempo. En ese lapso podrá cobrar las correspondientes sanciones y cumplir sus propósitos: recaudar la plata necesaria para pagar su nómina y todo lo que se propone. Es una política perversa que, con el argumento del beneficio social, esquilma sin misericordia a la gente.

Del predio vecino; armamentismo

Uno de los principales factores que permitieron la reconstrucción de Europa Occidental tras la II Guerra Mundial fue su bajo nivel de gasto bélico, gracias a la protección del paraguas militar de los Estados Unidos.

¿Cómo ocurrieron los hechos? Terminada la guerra, el presidente Franklin D. Roosevelt, el subsecretario de Estado Dean Achenson y el vicepresidente Harry Truman se imaginaban un mundo tripolar en el cual países como Inglaterra y Francia se echarían en sus hombros la protección de Europa frente al expansionismo soviético y, de esta manera, Estados Unidos podría regresar a su aislacionismo tradicional.

No fue así. Europa Occidental prefirió destinar sus escasos recursos en un continente desvastado por la guerra a la reconstrucción de su infraestructura física, el crecimiento económico y la formación del capital humano. Las bases militares de los Estados Unidos se constituyeron en el principal factor disuasivo frente a una eventual agresión proveniente de Moscú, dando origen a un mundo no tripolar, como hubiera deseado Roosevelt, sino bipolar. Es decir, la confrontación este-oeste, girando en torno a Washington y Moscú. Este es uno de los argumentos centrales de la obra de Robert Kagan (Poder y debilidad. Estados Unidos y Europa en el nuevo orden mundial, Taurus, 2003), que ha desatado una honda polémica mundial.

Desde mi punto de vista, Colombia debe replicar la experiencia de Europa Occidental. En vez de entrar en una escalada armamentista con Venezuela, debe aprovechar la presencia de un número muy limitado de tropas americanas en bases colombianas (600 hombres) bajo la soberanía y el control del Gobierno colombiano, para disuadir al megalómano dictador venezolano de cualquier aventura contra nuestro país. De esta manera, tal como hicieron los europeos tras el Plan Marshall (European Recovery Program), podríamos destinar los recursos escasos para los requerimientos del crecimiento económico y la justicia social. No en la compra de costosísimos e inútiles juguetes de guerra, como está haciendo el teniente coronel.

Venezuela ha entrado en una irresponsable carrera armamentista que ha generado preocupación continental. En especial, debido a sus alianzas non sanctas con dos de los regímenes más autoritarios del mundo: Rusia e Irán.

Antes, mucho antes, del anuncio de Colombia del traslado de la base militar de Manta (Ecuador) hacia bases colombianas, ya el teniente coronel había disparado la compra de armamento: solamente en el año 2006 contrató más de 4.000 millones de dólares en armas a su principal proveedor: Rusia. Se trató, en aquel momento, de de 24 cazas multifuncionales SU-30MKV, 38 helicópteros de distintos tipos, 100.000 fusiles de asalto AK-103 y plantas de producción de fusiles y de cartuchos. Ese desaforado gasto militar continuó e incluso se ahondó en los años siguientes (tanques, misiles tierra-aire, submarinos, etc.).

Colombia no puede ni debe entrar en una carrera armamentista similar a la venezolana. Ya el gasto militar en nuestro país es muy alto debido a los requerimientos de la seguridad interna: actualmente, estamos destinando a este rubro el 3,34 por ciento del PIB, es decir, alrededor de 6.500 millones de dólares al año. Una suma enorme para un país con tantas necesidades. ¿Qué tal que pudiéramos destinar esa suma para enfrentar la pobreza, el desplazamiento o la reparación de las víctimas? Ojalá que algún día las Farc y el Eln entiendan que su guerra no es solamente inútil, sino que está agravando los índices de pobreza que afectan al país.

Sin duda, es importante que Colombia y los Estados Unidos reafirmen que esas tropas solamente buscan actuar contra los factores de violencia interna y el tráfico de drogas ilícitas y no para agredir a los vecinos. Pero, no es despreciable esa presencia -así sea limitada- como un factor de disuasión defensiva frente a los delirios militaristas de nuestro vecino.

Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez

Una embarrada muy british, muy gorda.....

The release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has left a diplomatic mess that will take a lot of time and effort to clear up.

It is also not obvious that the British government has yet started to carry out this task on a systematic basis.

It has simply denied that it sought to influence the Scottish justice secretary or that commercial considerations were brought into play.

It has also argued that since it did not take the decision, it is up to the government that did to justify it.

The government that took the decision was the Scottish government, which has control over judicial affairs in Scotland.

But the problem with this approach is that the Scottish decision has ramifications for wider British interests.

Not everybody, especially the Americans or indeed the Libyans, quite understand, or want to understand, the constitutional arrangements in the United Kingdom.

The Libyans find it convenient to thank the British government as a whole because they want to improve relations with Britain as whole, and with the West in general.

Colonel Gaddafi even thanked the Queen.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, declared that this was a "obviously a political decision". That is a quite an accusation.

Senator Joe Lieberman picked up the claim by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan leader's son, that the release was connected to pending British trade deals with Libya.

"I don't want to believe that [the reports] are true, but they are hanging so heavily in the air that I hope that our friends in Britain will convene an independent investigation of this action by the Scottish justice minister to release a mass murderer," Senator Lieberman told CNN.

Quite how "our friends in Britain" - and presumably he means the government of the UK - could "convene an independent investigation" into the actions of a separate government entity remained unexplained by the senator.

One might think that US senators, with their knowledge of the separation of powers between state and federal governments in their own country, would understand the separation of powers within the UK.

The director of the FBI Robert Mueller certainly does - he fired his broadside directly at the Scottish government.

Another problem the British government needs to address is why it wanted Megrahi transferred to Libya anyway, not as a free man but as a prisoner who could continue his sentence there under an exchange agreement.

We know the importance the British government attached to this prisoner agreement, because Justice Secretary Jack Straw told a House of Commons committee in March: "Both the foreign secretary and I believe, in the interests of our judicial and wider bilateral relations with Libya, it is important to ratify [the agreement]."

Kenny MacAskill has been forced to defend his decision

The agreement was ratified in April without the committee having time to issue its own report and the chairman said it had been rushed through to pave the way for Megrahi's transfer.

British wishes have been confirmed in a letter that a Foreign Office minister, Ivan Lewis, wrote to the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.

Mr Lewis was clarifying that there was no legal impediment to the use of the prisoner transfer agreement in the Megrahi case.

"I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application in accordance with the provisions of the prisoner transfer agreement," he said.

In the event, Mr MacAskill did not activate the transfer procedure but granted clemency instead, on the compassionate grounds that the prisoner is dying of cancer.

But the fact remains that the British government was using the transfer of Megrahi as part of its diplomatic effort to improve trade and relations with Libya, a country it regards as having come in from the cold.

British ministers and diplomats have a lot of explaining to do yet.