The excellent New Yorker piece on the Republican Party, "Party Unfaithful," reveals two interesting truths about politics. First: politicians of the same party pretend to like each other when they're in office even if they don't. The three-way catfight between Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay--formerly the leadership of the House GOP--exemplifies this truth. Second: Politicians find purity to principles easier to adhere to after leaving office than while in office. The complaints of Gingrich, Armey, and DeLay over the leftward drift of the GOP would carry more weight with me had the trio done more to advance conservative principles while in office. Rather than be doers then they chose to be critics now. It's interesting that the worst offender on this score, Tom DeLay, takes the hardest line now that he's out of office. The article is a must read, particularly if you want a better understanding of what you just read.

Judges decide cases, not the laws upon which those cases are decided. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is mad that she can no longer do the latter so easily. Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at Goodyear Tire, sued the company after she claimed it paid her less than her male peers. She based her suit on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which clearly states that such claims must be filed within 180 days of the offense. Ledbetter waited years instead. Thus, five members of the Supreme Court reversed lower-court decisions that would have made her a millionaire. On Tuesday, Ginsburg read a dissent from the bench for the second time this year. "Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices," Justice Ginsburg explained, "and that world is what the court today ignores." Does it? The court merely read the law as it was written. It didn't rewrite it for the benefit of Goodyear, as Ginsburg proposed to do for Ledbetter. Ginsburg tramples on the law when it conflicts with her political prejudices. That's the injustice. Just imagine me reading this dissent to Ginsburg's dissent from my bench.

"Soviet Communism was disintegrating from within, Gorbachev merely speeded up its death, until his rival, Yeltsin, liquidated it. Born of a revolution, it would die of an involution. But its last leader, despised in Russia, was adored by the West right up to the end. Westerners had a hard time accepting his fall, since it necessarily spelled the end of an illusion that had filled the twentieth century. The Soviet Union left the scene of history before exhausting the patience of its foreign partisans. It left many orphans throughout the world."
--Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 1995

Disrespectors of the dead, and their country, in Washington state burned more than six dozen American flags that had adorned the graves of veterans. In the place of more than a dozen of them, the vandals placed hand-drawn swastikas. How many of these veterans, whose graves were desecrated by this hate symbol, fought the Nazis? Outside Boston, a number of flags were stolen from a Memorial Day display, thrown in the trash, and then burned. Happy Memorial Day!

Used book stoes have been disappearing. I wrote a post about this three years ago this week, blaming the Internet for the decline. This, I think, is the better part of it. Another factor is that people just don't read like the used to. They read online. They passively receive information from the television gods. They listen to talk radio. But they don't read books.

This is bad news for an author. It's perhaps worse news for a used bookstore owner. Tom Wayne, the owner of Prospero's Books in Kansas City, has taken out his frustrations on the wrong target: books. On Sunday, he burned a pile of books to illustrate how bad it's gotten. Wayne says that he can't even give his books away. "There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books," Will Leathem, the co-owner of Prospero's Books, noted.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne said of his conflagration of books. He plans monthly book burnings until he gets rid of 20,000 books. I cringe at Wayne's form of protest. I've had my writings torched by political opponents, and have ugly visions of swastikas, or burning crosses, or Berkeley Mumia supporters whenever the subject of book burnings come up. But as a marketing gimmick, Wayne's stunt is genius. People who love books will spend money to save them. People who love cheap books know that they won't have to spend much for books that would, alternatively, end up in a bonfire.

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, which brings, along with sunshine and barbeques, good music. Wilco, Velvet Revolver, Paul McCartney, Smashing Pumpkins, and Fountains of Wayne are among those with fresh offerings. Enjoy their new singles:

Wilco--What Light
Velvet Revolver--She Builds Quick Machines
Paul McCartney--Ever Present Past
Smashing Pumpkins--Tarantula
Fountains of Wayne--Someone to Love

Have you seen the polls? Ignore them, lest you encourage. Polls discourage the examination of candidates and issues in favor of bandwagoning. There are some good men running for president (Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, Ron Paul, and Tom Tancredo are four who come to mind), but if you obsess over polls you won't even consider voting for them. Polls are often self-fulfilling prophecies. But they shouldn't and needn't be. In January of 1972, George McGovern stood at 3 percent in opinion polls of Democratic voters. Seven months later, he was his party's nominee. It's May 2007. The election isn't for a year and a half. Examine the candidates, not the percentages next to their names.

"I am an aristocrat; I love liberty, I hate equality."
--John Randolph of Roanoke

Jimmy Carter, a candidate for worst president ever, ranked George W. Bush the worst president over the weekend. Now, he says that Bush is just worse than all the presidents since Nixon (Note to Jimma: You are describing you!). Reasons for ranking a president poorly include scandal, poor domestic performance, and ineptness in foreign policy. Nixon has the first two categories covered; Carter, the latter two. Bush, methinks, fits merely the latter category. His domestic policy rates criticism, but it doesn't stand out too much from other recent presidents.

Some of the good ones, I think, include George Washington, Calvin Coolidge, and Ronald Reagan. The bias among historians, I think, is to label "great" the presidents who pass an ambitious domestic agenda (ignoring the effects of that agenda) and the presidents who wage wars. I guess, in a sense, they are "great"--as in "big" and not "excellent." There is another historians' "greatness" bias. It involves the obsession with the presidency itself. There are congressmen and Supreme Court justices, not to mention inventors, businessmen, philanthropists, and religious leaders, who get ignored in the history books because of the presidential obsession.

When I was six or seven, I had this obsession. I could, quite proudly, name the 39 presidents in order. I probably could have told you each president's home state and said something noteworthy about each man. But what's so noteworthy about Millard Filmore, or James Garfield, or Gerald Ford? They were presidents. That's what was mainly noteworthy to me in learning about them as a child. That's also what drives the childish obsession to rank them, name a holiday for all of them, and put them on most of the currency.

There's something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the presidential obsession. Because large segments of the public have treated presidents like kings, presidents have become like kings in their power. The misuse of the executive order and the usurpation of congressional war powers are two abuses that the president gets away with, in small part at least, because we mistakenly view presidents as if they were elected kings. The "great" presidents, in fact, are the ones who are most Caesar-like in assuming powers not delegated to them--Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson. They were "great," but were they really great?

Anyhow, rather than rank the best presidents, I thought it would be interesting if the knowledgeable readership could provide instruction in America's worst presidents. Give reasons (or not). Explain the criteria (or not). Rank them (or not).

The Senate has delayed a vote on the controversial bill rewarding illegal immigrants with "legal" status for breaking U.S. law. The outrage over this bill is reminiscent of the outrage that greeted the president's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In that instance, a combination of Bush pushing the base beyond the boiling point and liberals wanting the president to fail even though it harmed their interests, sunk that nomination and gave the high court Sam Alito. Who knows what will happen here? The same forces seemed willing to sink this bill. When the public shouts their elected officials listen if it is loud enought. The shouting is pretty loud.

George W. Bush's blunder in Iraq is certainly one of the worst foreign policy disasters in the history of the United States. Does that make him the worst president ever? I doubt it, but time will provide a more enlightened perspective. I applaud his tax cuts and judicial appointments, but those aren't the type of measures that enthuse historians. And historians, plus bloggers, the occupiers of bar stools, etc. are the types of people, traditionally, who engage in debates over past presidents. Presidents themselves don't, unless named Jimmy Carter. The 39th president's remark that the Bush presidency is "the worst in history" is one that leaves me with two competing thoughts: "consider the source" and "takes one to know one." The former lets Bush of the hook, the latter puts him on it. Neither questions the calamity that was the Carter presidency.

President Bush, Senators Kennedy and McCain, and the others pushing for liberalization of immigration policies decry attempts to label their doings "amnesty." Tom Tancredo, the presidential candidate with the most credibility on this issue, calls the agreement "instant amnesty." But amnesty, as the controversial compromise reached on immigration reform is dubbed, is to weak a word to describe the legislation. Amnesty merely forgives someone for a past crime. This bill does that, and then rewards the lawbreaker with a visa. Thus, "amnesty" doesn't give the complete picture. "Reward" does. Newt Gingrich calls the deal "a sellout of every conservative principle." It's not. I'm not ready to say someone is not a conservative because they disagree with me on immigration. I am ready to say that they are wrong. (Immigration really isn't a good barometer of where politicians stand on other issues.) There really isn't a crying need for more immigration laws. There is a crying need to enforce the laws that already exist.

"I warned them," the Little Green Footballs website explains. "I'm going to be removing Ron Paul’s name from any further LGF straw polls, because his supporters are deliberately spamming our polls to make it appear as if Paul has more support than he does." How does the writer know this? Because Paul wins in his poll, therefore, it's not fair. Waaaaaaa! Waaaaaaa! "They aren't 'cheating,' as in voting multiple times, but they have sent out emails and posted the link to our poll at several spots on the web, urging people to go vote for Paul. The end result is the same--the poll results are skewed, and it's not an accurate measure." But doesn't every other campaign do the same thing? They do, but the Ron Paul rule only applies to Ron Paul. Thus, he's been airbrushed out of the Little Green Footballs poll as if his candidacy does not exist. Alas, his candidacy, the bane of the Republican establishment, not only exists, it's thriving.

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party is circulating a petition to broadcasters and sponsors seeking to ban Ron Paul from the Republican debates. Saul Anuzis explained, "I think that he is a distraction in the Republican primary and he does not represent the base and he does not represent the party." So much for the big tent!

Hugh Hewitt wants Paul out of the debates too. Sean Hannity threw a brat fit when Dr. Paul appeared on his FoxNews program. John Hawkins of RightWingNews wants Paul out of the Republican Party. Some Republican hack named Eric Dondero declared a primary challenge against Congressman Paul, promising to run "a balls-to-the-wall campaign for Congress in Texas CD 14."

There's safety in numbers. When you say the same thing as the other nine men on the stage, no one will threaten to ban you from debates for being boring. No one will primary you for following the pack. No one will call for your expulsion from your party. But say that the emperor has no clothes--that serial interventionism has unintended consequences, the George W. Bush is a big-government liberal who has been a disaster for conservatives, that whole departments of the federal government and not just "waste, fraud, and abuse" should be abolished, that launching a war on Iraq has been horrible for America--and the weight of the GOP's biggest elephants comes crashing down on you.

This is the most appealing thing to me about the candidacy of Ron Paul. He is a leader. When nine guys on a stage make salaams to a failed policy, Ron Paul dissents. When 434 colleagues seek to honor Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks (and, in effect, to cynically honor themselves) with taxdollars and without Constitutional mandate, Dr. Paul votes the other way. His compass is not party shibboleths or opinion polls, but principle. This makes him a dangerous man. Ron Paul will actually do the things the GOP says it will do at election time but refuses to do once elected.

Is it any wonder GOP hacks fear Ron Paul's presence in the debate and exclude him from candidate polls?

Paul McCartney has rebounded from his nasty divorce to release his best song in twenty-five years. Like Beatle George's All Those Years Ago from '81, Paul draws on his days in the Fab Four to create a great pop song in Ever Present Past. Enjoy! BTW: Beatles are about the only musicians in the world who can write songs about their careers and come off as indulging their fans and not themselves.

I haven't seen the second Republican debate, but I'm amazed at the sneering comments directed at Ron Paul. Perhaps watching the candidates debate, rather than just reading the text, will change my mind but I doubt it. The congressman's remark that Islamic terrorists attack Americans not because of our freedom but because of our government's intrusion (in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya, etc.) into Islamic countries with bombs or troops seems a reasonable if simplified explanation. "They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free," Paul explained. "They come and they attack us because we're over there."

By "over there" I would add (and perhaps the congressman would not) that it's not just our military that infuriates the Islamic world, but our pornography, our obnoxious music, our racy movies--in a word--our culture. It's not our fault that they buy our culture and hate it at the same time. Americans simultaneously buy their oil and curse it. Their hypocrisy is not so hard to understand when we confront our own.

The argument that "They hate us because we're free" has always struck me as obtuse and self-serving. It's a way of avoiding the question of why many Muslims hate us and at the same time giving ourselves a pat on the back. The more important point is to understand that they do hate us. But it shouldn't be forbidden to ask why. Support for Israel, wars with Islamic nations, our ubiquitous culture, government leaders using the U.S. as a scapegoat for domestic problems, and resentment over our success are a few of the causes for Islamic hatred of the United States. The most cogent and concise answer to the why-do-they-hate-us question comes from Samuel Huntington. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the Harvard professor writes: "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West."

Just because we identify what motivates our enemies doesn't mean that we should automatically change our behavior. Should we really seek the affirmation of people who practice female cliterectomy, partake in honor killings, force women to wear masks over there faces, and engage in other forms of barbarism? When in doubt, do the opposite of what they want. But if changing a policy is just and in the national interest, why not switch course? Why should we have policed conflicts in Bosnia, Lebanon, and Somalia? How did bombing an aspirin factory in the Sudan bolster American interests? Was invading Iraq on the whole a beneficial decision for America? Questioning our bellicose policies in the Middle East shouldn't be off limits, particularly in a political debate. This is especially true for a Republican presidential debate. The recent GOP drubbing at the ballot box had much to do with the unpopularity of those bellicose policies and the greatest obstacle to success for the candidate who wins the nomination will be the unpopularity of those bellicose policies.

Why not talk about serial interventionism now rather than lose because of it in November of '08? Browbeating the guy who puts his finger on the GOP's biggest problem doesn't speak well for the other nine GOP candidates who hope to be president. America sent the Republicans a message in November '06. Republicans didn't listen. Ron Paul repeated that message Tuesday night. Ignore such warnings at your own peril.

I wrote a whole book in response to the ugly, irrational response to 9/11 that blamed America for the attacks. The first chapter of Why the Left Hates America exhaustively examines the knee-jerk, blame-America response to 9/11. Ron Paul's debate comments may be provocative, but they bear no resemblance to the reflexive anti-Americanism that greeted 9/11, particularly among intellectual morons and their campus camp followers. Had he said anything like that, I would withdraw my support for him. I just don't see how any honest and intelligent person can say that Dr. Paul blames 9/11 on America based on his words in Tuesday's debate. Nevertheless, that's what people are saying. This is because questioning the president's idiotic explanation that we are hated because we are free has become the third rail of Republican politics.

Call for an unpoliced border, for tax funding of infanticide, for an unconstitutional repeal of the Second Amendment, or for limits on political speech through reforms of campaign finance laws, and you will remain in the good graces of GOP insiders. Dare to suggest that invading Iraq was a mistake, or that decades of military interventions in Islamic lands has catalyzed Islamic hatred of America, and you become anathema. This myopia in large part explains why the GOP became anathema to voters last fall.

Juxtapose Paul's position, that what we do rather than who we are incites anti-Americanism, with the president's explanation for why Islamic terrorists hate us: "They hate us, because we're free. They hate the thought that Americans welcome all religions. They can't stand that thought. They hate the thought that we educate everybody. They hate our freedoms. They hate the fact that we hold each individual--we dignify each individual. We believe in the dignity of every person. They can't stand that." That sounds nice. It makes you feel good. But it's not true. Did Muhammed Atta fly the jet into the World Trade Center screaming, "This is for educating everybody!" Your brain is on "off" if you believe this.

There are a multitude of reasons why Islamic terrorists seek to kill Americans. Foremost among them is the one the Texas congressman highlights: our longstanding and heavy military presence in the Middle East. A quarter-century of military actions, even justified military actions, takes its toll. The many, many military interventions weren't all good. They weren't all bad. Rational people can judge their worth to America's just interests on a case-by-case basis. But that's not the way enraged nationalists/religious fundamentalists in that part of the world analyze the bombings, the invasions, and the peacekeeping missions.

The extraordinary response to Paul's remarks is not from ordinary viewers, who voted Paul second place in the ten-man field in a FoxNews.com poll, the winner in WorldNetDaily's poll on the debate, and the clear winner in the MSNBC internet poll. It's from Rudy fans and GOP insiders. A New York Post news piece dubbed Paul "a fringe Republican White House hopeful with little support" and shamefully claimed that Paul tried "to blame the United States for 9/11." RightWingNews labels Paul part "nutty, America hating, conspiracy loving crank." "Furthermore, after he bent over backwards to justify Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack last night, I don't even want him in the Republican Party, much less as a Presidential candidate," fumed John Hawkins, the site's proprietor, who has issued no similar excommunication orders that I'm aware of based on Giuliani's support for abortion funding or McCain's enthusiasm for open borders. Byron York sniffed that the spotlight Paul enjoyed was "not the sort of name recognition Republican presidential candidates want."

Why, then, are so many people saying Ron Paul won the debate?

"Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status. The spread of literacy in an illiterate society is, therefore, a critical process, and it has probably been an element in many turning points in history. Perhaps in retrospect the present convulsions in the under-developed countries will be seen mainly as the by-product of a sudden increase in the number of literate persons. One hears a lot about the revolt of the masses but, aside from the rise of the United States, it would be difficult to point to a single historical development in which the masses were a prime mover and chief protagonist."
--Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, 1976

The Left hated Jerry Falwell. They also created him, at least the political animal that Falwell became. Abortion, gay rights ordnances, and the removal of prayer and the Bible from schools compelled Falwell, an atheist's son, to launch the Moral Majority in 1979. The organization mobilized evangelical Christians, who have been a force in politics ever since. But Falwell was much more than a political animal. He was, first and foremost, a preacher. Of all the ministers in politics--Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Pat Robertson, Barry Lynn--Falwell is the only one I know who presided every Sunday over an actual church, the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was am early televangelist, speading the word of God through radio and television. Unlike many of his peers in that field, scandals of finance or sex never tainted him. He was an educator, who launched Liberty University in 1971. Falwell's enemies remember him for peddling the far-fetched Clinton Chronicles videotape and foolishly remarking that gays and feminists brought 9/11 upon America. To his discredit he did those things. But he also conducted himself more intelligently and honorably as a public figure than did most of his peers or antagonists. Once one of his own got into the White House, I thought that Falwell played lapdog too well. You've got to dance with the horse that brung ya, I guess. Falwell did more to politically energize fellow evangelicals than perhaps any other person. Considering the dynamics of American politics since the late 1970s, that is a major achievement. That legacy of ushering parishioners into the ballot box outlives him. Jerry Falwell, rest in peace.

Politics is more about style than substance. An example of this is the enthusiasm among religious conservatives for former senator Fred Thompson. "He's right on the issues," an anonymous Catholic conservative tells The Washington Times. "He's better than all of the above." But is he? Thompson supported the dreaded McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform and took a middling position on abortion when he first ran for the senate in 1994. John McCain has had a solid pro-life record, but the love affair that once burned between him and the media, his attacks upon Southern evangelicals, and the fact that he ran so hard against George W. Bush in 2000 makes him unpopular with religious conservatives who hate the media, love the president, and respect the televangelists the Arizona senator went after. Thompson, on the other hand, has a Southern accent and plays stodgy, crusty politicians on television and in the movies. Thompson's backers may indeed be right that he would be better for the Right if elected president than Rudy McRomney, but many of his past transgressions against conservative holy writ are not so different from the current frontrunners. Add that Thompson is from Tennessee, and not Massachusetts or New York, and his past liberal stances seem more a matter of the heart than of political calculation.

Style over substance affects both parties. The Ivy-League glitz of John F. Kennedy proved more appealing to liberals than the Southwestern drawl of the crude Lyndon Johnson. When it came to substance, Johnson delivered exponentially more to liberals than his northeastern predecessor. But he didn't bring the right style, so liberals never loved the man the way they loved Kennedy. The style of enemies also affects mass judgment of them. Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act, enacted price controls, opened up dialogue with China, ended the Vietnam war, and launched the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But something about him (His 5 o'clock shadow? His meager upbringing? His membership on the House Committee on Un-American Activities?) rubbed liberals raw. The liberals hatred of President Bush, whose background presents the perfect storm of symbols--rich kid, oil company executive, Texas drawl, evangelical Christian--to override any substantive assessment of his policies. Even if he hadn't have launched the Iraq war, Bush never had a chance with the Left no matter how many prescription drugs he gave away or No Child Left Behind Acts he signed.

Voting for style over substance on Election Day means getting a president of style over substance the suceeding four years. Is it really better for liberals to get a president with an affected intellectual accent than it is to get, say, national health insurance? Is it really better for conservatives to get a president that chews tobacco and likes NASCAR than it is to get, say, conservative jurists? It's not, but style makes people feel better.

"Vandal damages China's iconic Mao portrait," reads the Reuters headline. But a vandal didn't deface a massive, cult-of-personality painting of Mao Tse-tung near Tiananmen Square. A hero did. Vandals painted it. They hung it to humiliate the Chinese populace. They are now trying to clean it up. But there's no cleaning up the murderous record of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists.

The Vandals sacked Rome in the fifth century. Fifteen centuries later, the Chinese Communist Party sacked China. They killed tens of millions of people, aided and abetted such lunatics as Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung, and wiped Tibet off the map. Ever since the Vandals destroyed Rome (which, in truth, had done much to destroy itself in the previous 500 years), their name has been synonymous with senseless destruction. But defacing a portrait of a mass murderer in a society that stomps on freedom of speech is anything but senseless. It's a brave and intelligent act of political expression. It's the necessary consequence of a society that denies the masses a say in its government.

If the Chinese had political expression, not only would nobody louse-up pictures of Chairman Mao, they would neither hang pictures of Chairman Mao nor choose such a person as a leader. It's the gigantic portrait of a murderer that is uncivilized. That someone would besmirch it is civilized. Passivity in the face of oppression isn't civilization.

We think of vandals as outside the system. Indeed, the term "barbarian," in some instances used interchangably with "vandal," simply meant "outsider" to the Greeks. But vandals and barbarians have run governments. Our association of government with justice and order makes it hard for some to accept the idea of vandals on the throne. But vandals ran Germany for a dozen years, China for the last 58, and Russia for much of its history. Government may mean justice and order in the West, but in other places and in other times it means (meant) a more effective manner of looting, killing, and manipulation.

Chinese police arrested a 35-year-old man in connection with the case. If he defaced the oversized billboard (and, perhaps, even if he did not), he will likely spend the next decade under state supervision. The penalty for such transgressions against state-sponsored iconography in sister-state North Korea is death. Who, really, are the vandals?

In March of 1968, the Wise Men--a group of trusted advisors to President Lyndon Johnson--informed the president that American forces could no longer accomplish the mission he had hoped they could in Vietnam. A few days later, Johnson announced he would not seek another presidential term. In August 1974, Barry Goldwater and several Republican stalwarts told President Richard Nixon that they could no longer support him because of the Watergate scandal. The president resigned a few days later. Who in the GOP has the clout to shake George W. Bush from his stubborn refusal to end the American nation-building experiment in Iraq?

Democrats certainly aren't going to force Bush to end the war. Their votes don't match their rhetoric. They could defund the war if they chose to. Alas, it doesn't serve their political interests to stick their necks out so they won't. They didn't do so when they "authorized" the war (a cop out if there ever was one) and they won't do it now to defund the war. A group of Republican House moderates held a candid meeting with the president earlier this week. Rather than read him the riot act, they just told him what he already knew: things need to improve in Iraq or else. Or else what? People have been saying that for years. The situation hasn't improved. Bush's popularity has dived, but he doesn't seem too bothered by it. "Stay the course" is the unstated mantra.

Staying the course in an unpopular but winnable and just venture is laudable. But staying the course in a war that never should have been launched in the first place merely takes us further in the wrong direction. The reasons given for the Iraq war--WMD, an advanced nuclear weapons program seeking enriched uranium from Niger, complicity in 9/11--have proved to be false. And other war aims, including ridding the nation of a tyrant and ridding the region of a menace, have been accomplished. If we leave, will the killing continue? Yes, if we leave now, or two years from now, or ten years from now. It will continue no matter when we leave. What about saving face? That argument rationalizes the continuation of any war, no matter how wrongheaded. There is no national interest served by continuing to occupy Iraq. Insuring the domestic tranquility of Iraq is neither our fight nor an ideal we have done much to attain.

Who are the GOP wisemen who could shake Bush from his delusions? The best candidates for the job are also named Bush. A united front of congressional leaders telling Bush that America must bring the troops home could do the trick. But the Republican leadership seems to have drunk as much of the Iraq Kool-Aid as the president. Ditto for the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. In trolling for primary votes, they trip over themselves in support of the president.

Iraq is not serving America's just interests. America is not a means to other nations' ends. America is an end in itself. Let America's example, not its guns, persuade others that the republican form of government is the best.

"One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is--beware intellectuals. Not only should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice. Beware committees, conferences and leagues of intellectuals. Distrust public statements issued from their serried ranks. Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events. For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behaviour. Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas."
--Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, 1988

Diego Corrales won the greatest boxing match I have ever seen. Now he's dead. The highlight-reel fighter died in a high-speed motorcycle accident last night. I feel ill upon seeing this terrible news. At just 29, he leaves behind a wife and six children (one yet to be born), and millions of awed fans. Anybody who saw Chico rise from two tenth-round knockdowns to knock Jose Luis Castillo senseless on his feet (not to mention the incredible nine rounds that preceeded it) will never forget it. I yelled at the television and jumped out of my chair in response to Corrales-Castillo in a way that I have never done to a sporting event before or since. Corrales notched other great victories over Acelino Frietas and Joel Cassamayor. Money problems, a fallout with his trainer, the cancellation of his rubber match with Castillo, and three successive defeats marked Corrales's last year or so in boxing. Having taken too many big shots, Corrales's story, like so many other boxers, seemed headed for an unhappy ending. None of us who saw it that way knew how unhappily, or how quickly, that ending would come. Diego Corrales, rest in peace.

We are a government of laws and not of men. Some people who work for the government think otherwise. This video of a policeman and a public health inspector trespassing on an Indiana man's property is an example of this arrogance. "You can't come in" in bureaucratese means "Kick my door in."

FlynnFiles has been running with some technical difficulties the last few weeks. Specifically, if you use Internet Explorer to access the site, it comes up slow. Other browsers, apparently, have no such trouble, which I'm told means that there is something within the site, rather than with its external host, that is the problem. I suspected the Googleads as the culprit. I removed the bottom advertising banner. The site still comes up slow. I will be trouble shooting to find the problem. The advice of any Internet geek is welcome in the comments section. Please bear with me as I restore FlynnFiles to its healthy self.

I caught Saturday night's fight between Oscar De la Hoya and Floyd Mayweather. Two of the three judges found Mayweather the victor. I thought De la Hoya won. It was a close, exciting fight. It could have gone either way, but I'm disappointed in the way that it went.

One reason for boxing's downfall that I did not touch upon in an earlier post involves judging. I am not speaking of corrupt judging. There is certainly a tendency for fans to yell "fix" whenever their favored fighter loses on points. But rare are the cases, I think, when judges actually engage in shenanigans. What I am referring to is the growing tendency to score professional boxing the way amateur boxing is scored. The misnamed CompuBox statistics, which only require a human-operated click counter to tabulate punches thrown and landed, are an example of this. It places primacy upon how many times a boxer touches another boxer's face with his gloves. He needn't punch hard to impress the statistic junkies. He only need to connect.

This, it seemed, is what Mayweather did a lot of Saturday night. He played patty-cake with De La Hoya's face. De La Hoya landed less punches, but the ones he did land were actual punches. Mayweather's body moved when De La Hoya hit it. De La Hoya didn't seem to even flinch when Mayweather's gloves touched him.

There are a number of big-name fighters who fall into the patty-cake punch problem. These include Winky Wright, Chris Byrd, and Corey Spinks. They can elude punches. But they sure can't throw one--at least a good knockout punch. They pile up wins, but not fans. Diego Coralles, Arturo Gatti, Ricardo Mayorga and other fighters of lesser skills win fans because they fight. I think this should be rewarded by the judges. Boxing isn't a track meet. Boxing isn't tag.

The guidelines of judging actually vindicate my prejudices, and the prejudices of most fight fans, who--surprise!--want to see a fight. Fights are judged based on four categories: effective aggression, ring generalship, defense, and clean and hard punching. In the fight I watched, De la Hoya did everything better than Mayweather with the exception of defense. He clearly landed the cleaner and harder punches. Mayweather fought a passive fight, so by default De la Hoya won on effective aggression. I could see a Mayweather partisan arguing about ring generalship, but the fact is the reason the fight lived up to the hype is that De la Hoya fought his fight. The Golden Boy did a good job blocking the Pretty Boy's non-combination, exploratory punches, but clearly the quicker Mayweather bested De la Hoya in that category. Unfortunately, it is that category--one that I can appreciate as a fight fan but at the same time recognize as one of four criteria to judge a fight--that overrides all the others.

The result of this bias in judging are boring fights. Boxing nerds, like baseball nerds who vomit at 10-8 games or hockey nerds who wish to Europeanize the North American game, believe themselves cultivated in their method of judging such an uncultivated sport. They sniff at people who like knockouts, or toe-to-toe exchanges. But those people outnumber boxing nerds. They fill the seats and order pay per views. The boxers who reward them should be rewarded not necessarily because it makes for a more popular sport, but because the rules say that they should.

Boxing is called the sweet science. Proponents of the sweet science should keep in mind, for the sport's sake, that "sweet science" is just a euphemism for a fight.

This Saturday night's fight between Oscar De la Hoya and Floyd Mayweather is the biggest fight in at least a decade. A decade from now, it will certainly be the biggest fight in the previous decade. This is because boxing is getting cancelled as a major sport after Saturday night.

It's not like it's the last episode of Friends or a Kiss farewell tour. It's just that boxing is done as a major sport after De la Hoya, even if the sport's partisans don't know it. De la Hoya may be the most marketable fighter since Sugar Ray Leonard. Floyd Mayweather is undefeated. It's the biggest fighter of today versus the best fighter of today. Olympic gold medalist De la Hoya captured the popular imagination in a way that no boxer has done in the fifteen years he has been a known commodity. He has female admirers and hit records. He smiles and doesn't engage in poseur machismo. He's intelligent. When he says he's never been in a fight outside the ring you believe him. Boxing is slipping and no boxer, perhaps ever, will be as marketable as De la Hoya. He's the last of the throwbacks to an era when elite boxers were as well known as all-star shortstops and MVP quarterbacks. With De la Hoya gone, there will still be great boxing matches. There just won't be another superfight, that long-anticipated scrap that the public demands, that provokes $5-at-the-door house parties, that draws the casual sports fan to boxing, that gets talked about Monday morning at the water cooler.

Do you remember superfights? In the '80s, when I grew up, there were superfights between Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Tommie Hearns. They all fought each other and usually it was a huge, pay-per-view event. The Aaron Pryor-Alexis Arguello fights, Tyson-Spinks, and Holmes-Cooney are fights from those years that I remember as must-see TV--so much so that people were willing to fork over cash to watch what they normally got for free. The '70s, a time when my memories are faint, had even more superfights, and in the weight-class, heavyweight, that screams superfight. Muhammad Ali was once the most popular athlete in the world. There isn't a boxer in America today who is the most popular athlete in the city he lives in.

How did it get so bad? An alphabet-soup of "champions" in each weight division muddy the waters. Elite fighters taking whole years off destroys the concept of the "fighting champion." The relative absence of boxing on free television and the inflated ticket-prices of live boxing (which leads to half-empty arenas) hurt the sport. Mixed-martial arts drawing away an audience is also a factor, but my sense is that they have exploited boxing's problems, not caused them. Corruption is always been a problem for boxing, but especially so today.This is not because corruption in boxing is worse (It certainly isn't.). But because the public's tolerance for corruption is so much lower now.

Perhaps more harmful than all of this is the failure of American audiences to identify with the foreign fighters who currently dominate the sport. White ethnic fighters, with names like Marciano, Cooney, and Baer, are long gone. So, too, in a more deracinated America, is that ethnic pull that put Italians in the seats to watch Italians, Irish to watch Irish, and Jewish to watch Jewish. Blacks aren't far behind in their exodus from boxing. The best African American athletes now play football and basketball. There are excellent Hispanic Americans fighting, but that's about it. American fighters rule just three of sixteen weight classes. Boxing has become a foreign sport. We're too rich and too passive-agressive for a sport tailored for the poor and agressive-agressive. And we're to self-centered to get into guys named Wladimir Klitschko, Manny Pacquio, or Ricky Hatton, especially when they don't speak English, or speak it with an accent different from ours (that would be an English accent in Hatton's case).

But for one night only, you can pretend that boxing is atop the world again, the sport of kings. It's the Golden Boy versus the Pretty Boy. Enjoy it while you can, because after Saturday night it will never be that way again.

We have a strange economy. The stock market, we are informed, boasts its longest winning streak since 1955. Gas prices, a commodity that virtually everyone relies upon, are poised to hit an all-time high. Is the economy roaring? Sputtering? The answer may depend on whether you're asking someone with a long commute or a large stock portfolio. My advice? Take the bus and buy.

I was heartened to hear of Nikki Giovanni, creative writing teacher to mass-murderer Cho Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech, being alert enough to pull him from her class for his disturbing behavior and disturbing writings. I was disheartened to read that she has penned the same type of sanguinary, hateful passages that her student submitted to fulfill class assignments. Steve Sailer details. What's creative about that kind of writing?

I'm tempted to call George W. Bush's 28 percent approval rating political no-man's land. But four men have been there before. The president's father once posted an anemic 29 percent approval rating. Jimmy Carter, an exceptionally bad president, saw his popularity dip to 28 percent, the same number staring at the current commander in chief. Richard Nixon, on the eve of his ignominious helicopter departure from the White House, won the approval of just 24 percent of Americans. The all-time low in presidential approval ratings, which began, like most bad ideas, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, belongs to Harry Truman at 23 percent. What is stunning about Bush's 28 percent approval rating is that it is 62 percent lower than what it was days after 9/11. That's right, Bush once enjoyed a 90 percent approval rating. I know. I know. It was 9/11. But the point is that he was once quite popular. Then Iraq happened. Political good will has been squandered.

"The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue," William F. Buckley writes in his latest column. "The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question." I'm afraid that rather than no WMD, no connection to 9/11, no nukes, or no more Saddam, rather than thousands of Americans killed or maimed for a delusion, hundreds of billions of dollars down a rathole, or tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in an unnecessary war, the argument that is going to sway the party hacks who have stood by President Bush is the "savagely decisive" opinion polls. Hell hath no fury like a partisan threatened with the loss of billet.