Israeli electoral reform much needed - oh well!

Israel may be one of America's staunchest allies but Israel is its own worst enemy and will remain so unless and until it adopts electoral reform. At the present there is no single party capable of governing so leaders of the major parties must seek alliances with smaller parties thus, giving the latter disproportionate power and influence. In other words should Netanyahu get the nod he will probably turn to Shas etc.. President Peres addressed the Knesset in October and posed these questions:

How can we ensure Israel's security in light of the various threats we are faced with? How will we end the Israeli-Arab conflict and bring peace to our people?

How will we lead Israel to economic prosperity while maintaining social justice?

How will we sustain internal solidarity and the fortitude of Israeli society: the rule of law, the inclusion of minorities and just governance?

How will we cultivate the younger generation - Israel's future?

The answer to all of the above is not without electoral reform!

Perhaps what Peres has posed is something our own nation should ponder. Our elections are obscenely costly, take too long and have become a money grubbing exercise. The media and press control the agenda and discussion so substantive debate is ignored because style becomes the focus. In the last election we really never learned much about whom we eventually elected and yet know everything about a plumber. Oh well!

Frank Gaffney continues to pose questions regarding Treasury's institutionalizing financial jihad, as he calls it. He has a point because money talks! (See 1 below.)

GW your Democrat friends, who attacked you, mocked you, hate you, now want your signature so you can take more blame.

As government bureaucrats take over more of America's industry and employment and strangle them with regulations and their non-competitive mentality it is going to be fascinating to watch, down the road, whether they ever let go. If they ever do, it will be virtually impossible to get these companies back on track because the government never lets go even when they do. Bureaucrats infect every thing they touch with a continuing virus - called stiflement.

P.J. O'Rourke , in his inimical style of writing looks back and writes about the squandered opportunity and says much of what I have been writing myself.

Clever Sign of The Times: "The Bank helped me get on my feet - they repossessed my car!" (See 2 and 3 below.)

Tolerance has supplanted courage as both become interchangeable. (See 4 below.)


Dick




1)Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.


Senator Barack Obama became President-elect on the uplifting, if inexact, slogan, "Yes, we can." This week, there is growing evidence that people who have in mind doing away with the presidency of the United States — and all other aspects of our secular, democratic and constitutional form of government — are similarly convinced of their inevitable success. Judging by the sheer audacity of their agenda, "Yes, they can" would appear an apt description of the prospects for the Saudis and other champions of the totalitarian program they call Shariah.


In the run-up to an emergency summit outgoing President George Bush has called to address the now-global financial crisis, the oil-rich Islamists of the Persian Gulf led by Saudi Arabia have not only established that their petrodollars are indispensable to any solution. They also seem to have secured the Bush Administration's acquiescence to the sinister strings attached to any bail-out of the West in which they might participate.


Specifically, the Saudis and their friends want the United States to join those, particularly in Europe, who have accommodated themselves to Shariah. No, we are assured, they aren't taking about the brutal theo-political-legal code that features such barbaric practices as beheadings, floggings, stonings, amputations, female genital mutilation and misogyny more generally.


All they want, those in the know insist, is for Washington to encourage Wall Street — more and more of which is owned by the U.S. government — to embrace Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). A Treasury Department seminar convened last week depicted SCF as nothing more than a kind of socially responsible investing vehicle that respects Muslim religious beliefs by eschewing interest-bearing transactions and those involving pork and "sin" stocks. So, what's the big deal? The Catholics, Methodists and Jews have their funds, why not the Muslims?


What makes the Shariah-Compliant Finance gambit both a big and troublesome "deal" is that, unlike these other religious traditions, Shariah's adherents are pursuing a global theocracy. They believe they must impose their agenda on everybody else, religious and secular alike, using violence if necessary. And SCF is explicitly described by leading practitioners as a complement to violent holy war: "financial jihad" and "jihad with money."


In other words, there is no such thing as free-standing Shariah-Compliant Finance. According to all of the recognized authorities and institutions of Islam, Shariah is a unified, indivisible program to which all faithful Muslims must adhere comprehensively.


Not surprisingly, therefore, the Saudis & Co. are not simply seeking to insinuate Shariah-Compliant Finance into our capital markets. They are also advancing the creation of a parallel Shariah-governed society through various other means.


One of these techniques will be in evidence when the Saudi monarch himself convenes a meeting in New York City in the hope of imposing Shariah blasphemy laws worldwide. In light of the stated, and seemingly benign, purpose of the so-called "Culture of Peace" event hosted by King Abdullah at the United Nations — namely, promoting interfaith understanding and tolerance, numerous world leaders, including President Bush, will be present. Never mind that Saudi Arabia is arguably the most intolerant nation on earth, a fact even some in the Bush administration have acknowledged.


The real reason attendance at the King's s�ance is going to be impressive, of course, has more to do with the hope that petro-largesse will flow to those who ingratiate themselves to the House of Saud. Abdullah appears confidently to have signaled that, if the West plays ball on the "Culture of Peace" agenda, the Saudis and their fellow Islamists will be constructive at what might be called the subsequent "Culture of Money" meeting in Washington.


What will the answer be when the Islamists insist that free speech must not allow the slander, libel or defamation of Shariah, or other aspects of their faith? If the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council have already accommodated themselves to this demand, why should we object? So what if, by so doing, we would effectively thereby be precluded from talking about — or even understanding — the Islamist threat we face, to say nothing of eviscerating the First Amendment? As the Treasury Department can attest, we need the money.


Unfortunately, this is no time for us to be diminishing awareness throughout the Free World of the various, grave dangers we face from adherents to Shariah's seditious program. London's Sunday Telegraph reported this weekend that a classified British government assessment has concluded that there are "some thousands of extremists in the U.K. committed to supporting Jihadi activities, either in the U.K. or abroad."


Such extremists are said to be engaged in attack planning in the United Kingdom "either under the direction of al-Qaeda, or inspired by al-Qaeda's ideology of global Jihad" (read, Shariah). They may inflict "mass casualties" and constitute a "severe" threat to the Government Security Zone (including the Houses of Parliament and key executive offices) in the heart of London.


At such a moment, a federal judge in Oregon has held the law criminalizing material support for terror is unconstitutionally "vague." Taken together with the other manifestations of our capitulation, is it any wonder the champions of Shariah are convinced that "yes, they can" have their way with us? Who will disabuse them of this terrifying notion? We can, but will President-elect Obama lead the way?

2) Obama Prods Bush to Aid Detroit: White House Talk Is Cordial, but Troubled Auto Makers Worry President's Successor
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JOHN D. MCKINNON


President-elect Barack Obama met at the White House Monday with the man he will succeed in January, and pressed President George W. Bush to take immediate action to help stave off the collapse of the U.S. auto industry and to aid the economy more broadly.

Mr. Obama's focus on the auto industry came as fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill started moving on their own to help Detroit gain access to federal rescue funds allocated for the financial sector. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said Monday that he is drafting legislation, aimed for quick passage, that would free up money from the $700 billion Wall Street rescue for Detroit auto makers careening toward seeking bankruptcy protection.

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, pulled up to the White House's diplomatic entrance in an armored black limousine, a more formal transport than his usual sport-utility vehicle. They were greeted by the president and first lady Laura Bush. The current and future first couples shook hands and smiled for the cameras. Messrs. Bush and Obama walked together through the West Colonnade flanking the Rose Garden, then into the Oval Office.


President Bush and first lady Laura Bush greeted President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, at the South Portico of the White House.

Mr. Obama's transition chief, John Podesta, held a separate meeting with White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten.

Obama aides spoke with congressional leadership aides ahead of the meeting to discuss the two most pressing questions: How quickly could Washington move to assist the U.S. auto sector, and whether a lame-duck session of Congress next week could pass an economic stimulus plan, which would then be in place before Mr. Obama's inauguration.

Both White House and Obama aides said the meeting between Mr. Obama and President Bush was both cordial and substantive.

"Upon arriving, President-elect Obama and President Bush proceeded to the Oval Office, where they had a productive and friendly meeting that lasted for over an hour," transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said in a statement. "They had a broad discussion about the importance of working together throughout the transition of government, in light of the nation's many critical economic and security challenges."

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president described the meeting "as good, constructive, relaxed and friendly," touching on domestic and international issues.

Two Democratic leadership aides on Capitol Hill said they were told by Obama aides that the meetings were longer on pleasantries than substance.

Meanwhile, it was the sharp drop in General Motors Corp.'s stock Monday that raised new pressure on Washington for quick action to help domestic auto makers.

The Bush administration continues to be reluctant to intervene. While the president-elect has called for immediate action, transition aides say he is hesitant to assert himself too boldly in the process before being sworn in as president. What Mr. Obama does not want, they say, is to be saddled with responsibility for the crisis in Detroit before he has the authority to do anything about it.

In a phone conversation overheard by reporters aboard his plane, Mr. Obama told an unidentified person on the other end: "I am not going to be spending too much time in Washington over the next several weeks."

On Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) asked the administration to study whether it has the authority under current law to tap the $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund to aid Detroit, and if not, to tell Congress what action is needed.

Ms. Perino signaled on Monday that the White House doesn't believe it has the authority, and won't act without further legislation.

"We have moved forward with what we can do with the statutes that Congress has authorized," she said, referring to an Energy Department loan program to help Detroit make the transition to a more fuel-efficient fleet. "Congress will have a chance to meet next week, and if they decide to move forward with something additional, we will be able to listen to their ideas," Ms. Perino added.

Sen. Levin has started working to address those White House concerns. "If the Treasury Department rejects the suggestion of Pelosi and Reid, and says the language is not flexible enough, a bipartisan amendment to clarify the existing language is being prepared for consideration during the lame-duck session of Congress," the senator said in a statement.

The White House meeting came after nearly two years of harsh words about Mr. Bush from candidate Obama, who decried "Bush policies" and "Bush politics" at nearly every campaign stop. His most reliable applause line was his statement that "George Bush's name won't be on the ballot in November."

For his part, the president once said during Mr. Obama's hard-fought nominating contest that his rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, was the more experienced candidate in the Democratic race.

3) We Blew It: A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
By P.J. O'Rourke
Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal

and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'  .  .  .  "

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.

It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to

move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' " Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."

Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

4) 'Tolerance' Is Not the Lesson of Kristallnacht
By BRET STEPHENS


Sunday was the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. With some notable exceptions, Europe has opted to mark the occasion by missing its point.

"We must not be silent," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a memorial ceremony in Berlin's renovated Rykestrasse synagogue, one of the few that was not burned down that night by the Nazis -- though 2,200 others were, as crowds of German or Austrian citizens looked on. "There can be no tolerance, for example, if the safety of the state of Israel is threatened by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran." Well said. Maybe the chancellor will turn next to the issue of the 2,000 German companies that still do business with Tehran, whose exports are up more than 14% this year.

Less well said is a "white paper on tolerance," which, along with a draft of a "European Framework Convention on Promoting Tolerance and Combating Intolerance," was presented yesterday at a conference at the European Parliament in Brussels. The meeting is generating interest in part because of the participation of representatives from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Muslim states -- none of which are especially known for their solicitude toward Jews.

Maybe they've had a change of heart. Alternatively, they might have figured out that the banner of "tolerance" -- a word that means nothing -- can serve their purposes as well as the "peace" movement once served the Soviet Union.

To be sure, neither the white paper nor the framework convention is short on references to anti-Semitism and its "current increase . . . in many European countries." But the drafters of the convention also claim to be "profoundly convinced that combating anti-Semitism, while requiring a specific type of action, is an integral and intrinsic component of the fight against racism."

With this premise, the convention proposes various legal penalties for the "dissemination of any ideas based upon racial superiority or hatred," as well as policies to promote "special positive measures to further equal social development and ensure the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of all victims" of discrimination.

But if that sounds relatively anodyne, consider the ways in which radical Islamists in Europe have been using hate-speech codes to their advantage. In 2005, the Times of London reported that the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir -- proscribed in Germany for distributing anti-Semitic literature -- had launched a recruiting drive on college campuses under the aegis of a "Stop Islamophobia" campaign. In Belgium, the leader for several years of the Arab European League, which claimed to defend Antwerp's Muslim immigrant Moroccan community against police harassment, was Dyab Abou Jahjah, himself a Lebanese member of Hezbollah.

Then there is the instructive, albeit complex, case of the Cologne mosque project. An enormous structure designed to accommodate 4,000 worshippers, it was approved by city hall and sponsored by the Turkish-Islamic Union (or DITIB), an umbrella group considered to be relatively moderate. Given that 12% of Cologne's population is Muslim, it seems a reasonable accommodation.

Yet the sheer scale of the project aroused widespread unease. In September, a group called "pro-Cologne" -- some, though by no means all, of whose members had ties to anti-immigrant parties such as the Flemish Vlaams Belang -- attempted to hold an anti-Islamification Congress. They were thwarted by an estimated 40,000 protestors throwing paint bombs and chanting "No Kölsch [beer] for Nazis."

Superficially, at least, the protestors seemed to have achieved a worthy objective against some unsavory characters. Yet as John Rosenthal of the invaluable WorldPoliticsReview Web site points out, Germany's actual Nazis took a different view.

"Inasmuch as it is a determined opponent of the western-plutocratic one-world policy, we regard Islam, globally considered, as an ally against the mammonistic dominance of the American east coast" went a statement published by the neo-Nazi North German Action Office, using the words "American east coast" as a euphemism for Jews. "'Pro-Cologne's' superficial populism against Islam sends a completely wrong signal, about which only pro-Israel circles could be happy."

This isn't to say that the Cologne protestors are closet neo-Nazis. Nor is DITIB a radical group, at least compared to Hizb ut-Tahrir. Yet DITIB refuses to distinguish between Islam (a religion) and Islamism (a political idea) and accuses anyone who has an unkind word to say about the latter of being a "racist."

Much the same goes for other "mainstream" Islamic groups in Europe, who would find in the proposed "framework convention" a useful tool through which to shut down serious and legitimate concerns about the rise of Islamism -- along with its usual cargo of Israel- and Jew-hatred -- in Europe. One perverse result is that these groups will now be in a position to dictate the terms of what constitutes acceptable speech. Also perverse, and a process that's already in train, is that European moderates will increasingly find themselves marching into the arms of parties like the Vlaams Belang.

So here we are, 70 years after Kristallnacht, as good an example as any of what happens when the evil of the few (or, perhaps, not-so-few) takes advantage of the cowardice of the many. If there's a lesson here, it's in the need not for "tolerance," but for moral courage. Now as before, Europe finds it in short supply.