Blanchard in the Argus Leader

One of the advantages of practicing my trade in South Dakota is that I can be a relatively large fish in a pretty small pond.  I frequently get called by reporters and journalists, who ask me to comment on state politics.  On such occasions I put on my political scientist hat and try to answer the questions as objectively as possible.  Here is an example from a recent story by Dave Kranz in the Argus Leader.  It concerns the attack ads against Representative Herseth-Sandlin about which I posted recently. 

Ken Blanchard, political science professor at Northern State University, says the content in the ads is a fairly common complaint with members of Congress.

"They have schedules, have to be all over the place on fact-finding missions, making them vulnerable to this kind of attack," Blanchard said. "But when disaster strikes, any reasonable congressman is going to come back home and show they care."

In the end, Blanchard says he doesn't think the attack offers much substance in the criticism of Herseth Sandlin. But there may come a time when the stakes are higher and she may be vulnerable.

"A good issue to compare it to is the issue of Tom Daschle and his house in Virginia. The ad the Thune people ran on that issue had more to do with his defeat than anything else," Blanchard said. "There is a pattern in South Dakota of throwing legislators out if they get too big for their britches - when they are no longer one of us."

Her vulnerability to such messages would become greater if Herseth Sandlin shifts her focus to a U.S. Senate race, Blanchard said. She is mentioned as a possible Democratic Party candidate if Sen. Tim Johnson decides not to seek re-election.

I should note that Dave Kranz got a lot of grief from this blog before I  joined it, and it is a sign of his fairness that he doesn't hold it against me that I participate here.  I flatter myself that the comments above reflect an unbiased analysis of the issue.  As I wrote in my post, I do not think that the attack ads contain anything of substance, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they won't be effective. 

Reason for Hope

Via Power Line comes this story out of Iraq about the willingness of Sunnis in Iraq to confront al Qaeda without U.S. assistance:

A battle raged in west Baghdad on Thursday after residents rose up against al-Qaida and called for U.S. military help to end random gunfire that forced people to huddle indoors and threats that kept students from final exams, a member of the district council said. ...

U.S. forces backed by helicopter gunships clashed with suspected al- Qaida gunmen in western Baghdad's primarily Sunni Muslim Amariyah neighborhood in an engagement that lasted several hours, said the district councilman, who would not allow use of his name for fear of al-Qaida retribution.

Casualty figures were not immediately available and there was not immediate word from the U.S. military on the engagement.

But the councilman said the al-Qaida leader in the Amariyah district, known as Haji Hameed, was killed and 45 other fighters were detained.

Members of al-Qaida, who consider the district part of their so-called Islamic State of Iraq, were preventing students from attending final exams, shooting randomly and forcing residents to stay in their homes, the councilman said.

Throughout human history, the uprising of people against tyrants and oppressors have toppled several dictators.  The last century has several examples, with the toppling of regimes in the Philippines, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, and Lebanon, to name a few.  Even groups, like the Mafia in Palermo, have been crippled by popular uprisings.  All a popular uprising against terror needs is a single spark to start a brush fire, though it will probably take much more than this singular incident to drive al Qaeda from Iraq.  Whether they like it or not, the Sunnis understand their lives will never be the same until al Qaeda leaves, and growing discontent with them is a powerful weapon against the terrorist group.

The conflict between these two is nothing new if you read beyond the New York Times.  Fighting in western Baghdad between Sunni groups and al Qaeda-linked groups has been ongoing for several years now.  See for instance the rejection of al Qaeda and jihadist ideology among tribal leaders in the Anbar Province.  Another important lesson here is that al Qaeda and factions of the terror group are unable to build and maintain long-term coalitions, which is probably their greatest weakness.  The indiscriminate killing by suicide bombs and IEDs has taken its toll on the population.  When one kills too many of its own, it tends to alienate potential allies, which only works in our favor.  It won't matter how well they may operate, the jihadists need local support or, at a minimum, passivity of the population. 

In another big development out of Iraq, U.S. military commanders and insurgencies in Iraq not linked to al Qaeda are arranging ceasefires:

“We are talking about cease-fires, and maybe signing some things that say they won’t conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces,” Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said from Camp Victory in Baghdad. “We believe a large majority of groups within Iraq are reconcilable and are now interested in engaging with us. But more importantly, they want to engage and become a part of the government of Iraq.”

If it's true that eighty percent of the insurgent groups want to negotiate, as Odierno says, and a significant percentage of the population is turning on al Qaeda, there's certainly a basis for the lessening of violence.  Whether a ceasefire can be brokered remains to be seen, not to mention the several groups who would hope to upset such a process.  But it appears people are tired of the endless killing and are looking for a way out. 

I remain cautiously optimistic about Iraq.  There are certainly major problems, and the process is far from over, but these are small steps forward that seem to be taking Iraq in the right direction.  When fear and hatred of the jihadists reach the point where locals raise arms against them and kill them, a serious tipping point has been reached.

Iowa a Sumbling Block for Clinton

See this Associated Press story about a memo leaked from the Clinton campaign:

Memo to Hillary Rodham Clinton: Your deputy campaign manager was right. An internal campaign memo late last month urged the Democratic front-runner to bypass first-up and momentum-generating Iowa because of Clinton's lackluster showing despite drawing large crowds _ a memo she immediately disavowed.    

Yet, the reality from Des Moines to Dubuque lends credence to deputy campaign manager Mike Henry's assessment that for Clinton, Iowa is "our consistently weakest state."

Presidential rival John Edwards has capitalized on the remnants of his 2004 presidential operation in the state, the freedom to visit in the absence of a day job and a fresh populist appeal to grab the lead in recent polls.

Clinton's other top rival, Barack Obama, has drawn large crowds and hired a team of experienced organizers with a deep knowledge of Iowa's arcane caucus system. Even lesser-known candidates Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd have gained some traction with ads on Iowa television.

"If the caucuses were held today, it's fair to say she would probably not win," former state Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fischer said. "It's going to take a tremendous amount of work to catch up _ it's doable, but it's going to be difficult."

The notion of the Democratic front-runner losing Iowa would jolt the presidential race. The state's last three winners captured the Democratic nomination as Al Gore beat back Bill Bradley's strong challenge in 2000 and John Kerry saw his moribund candidacy revived after his victory in 2004.

Here's the whole story.

Senator Brownback on Evolution

Sam Brownback, U.S. Senator from Kansas and long-shot presidential contender, recently created some difficulties for himself when he answered a simple question on evolution.  In an essay published by the New York Times, he takes another stab at the question. 

IN our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.

What follows is a thoughtful attempt to reconcile the demands of rational science and Biblical faith. 

I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

The task of reconciling these two claims to wisdom goes back at least to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas in the early thirteenth century.  Leo Strauss argued that this debate was one of the sources of vitality in Western Civilization, a gadfly that kept the mind of Christendom from ever going to sleep.  Here is the core of Brownback's personal neo-Thomism. 

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

That is a shrewd answer because leaves a very important question unanswered.  Brownback accepts micro-evolution, the view that species change gradually over time in order to adapt to new or changed environments.  He rejects materialism and determinism, the view that the world consists of nothing but material particles and the view that each moment in time is rigidly determined by the position and momentum of particles in the preceding moment.  But what about macro-evolution?  That is the view that new species emerge from existing species.  What about common descent, the view that human beings and chimpanzees, and indeed any two organisms on earth today, share a common ancestor at some point in the past?  The most reasonable inference is that Brownback is unwilling to agree to that view, but he has in fact left the matter open for debate.

I am quite certain that macro-evolution is the right account of the history of the various species.  When you look at a chimpanzee in the zoo, you are looking at a very distant cousin.  I do not believe that this view commits one to materialism or determinism.  In Darwinian theory, information trumps material.  Only the form of a horse, or two horses to be precise, can give rise to a third.  The material alone cannot generate the form.  Moreover, the theory is probabilistic rather than deterministic.  Evolution works by trial and error.  The organisms in any environment are only more or less likely to flourish; their flourishing or decline is never determined by the theory.

While Brownback leaves room for the possibility of macro-evolution, his faith clearly places some limits on what he will accept. 

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Now I am a man of science.  What reason and evidence tell me I will believe, whether I like it or not.  Senator Brownback is a man of faith, and if science contradicts faith he will regard that science as illegitimate.  I have no quarrel with this.  Science needs an honorable opposition.  I think that Senator Brownback has shown that he is friendly toward science, and that his reservations are both reasonable and honorable.  That is all that it is reasonable to ask. 

Pelosi's Polar Posse

Jason Folkerts:

I drew this for Greg Belfrage as a give away gift. I was on his show yesterday and thought he might get a kick out of this toon. Pelosi and her posse are jetting to the polar ice caps on her plush plane. Just so happens our own Stephanie Herseth Sandlin is with her. Then they are off to Belgium to meet with Dr. Bunson Honeydew and his sidekick Beeker to get the skivvy on how to stop global warming. Yup, them's your tax dollars at work South Dakotans. Talk about a goat rodeo.

Anti-Herseth Ads II

The ads discussed in my recent post are sponsored by http://www.commonsensesouthdakota.com/.  It says that the ad is paid for by Common Sense for the 21st Century, Susan Carson, Treasurer.  I have not been able to track down either the organization or the person.  The Web Site does not seem designed to make much information available. 

Vandalism

Washington Post:

Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans' graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas, authorities said Monday.

Forty-six flag standards were found empty, and 33 more were in charred tatters Sunday in the cemetery, authorities said. Swastikas drawn on paper appeared where 14 of the flags had been.

Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington's northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday.

The vandals struck again on Memorial Day after a guard left at dawn, the San Juan County Sheriff's Office said. This time, the vandals left 33 of the hand-drawn swastikas.

The No Bleedin' Pill II

Anna at Dakota Women has a reply to my recent post on the pill approved to end menstrual bleeding. 

Herseth-Sandlin as a Brand Name

I had the pleasure of meeting Representative Herseth-Sandlin at the Northern State University spring commencement.  We didn't have much time to talk, and we spent a lot of that talking about one of my students who went to High School with her.  I found her very easy to like. 

I didn't mention this in the conversation, but as someone interested in political strategy, I think it was a big mistake for her to change her public name.  I have no objections to a woman taking her husband's name, or taking a hyphenated name if she chooses. In point of fact I rather like the Spanish tradition where everyone takes a double name.  Thus from Mario Vargas Llosa, the name of my favorite Peruvian novelist, you can identify both his mother and his father's families. 

But in American politics a hyphenated name is rather unwieldy, as evidenced by the fact that the Democratic front-runner has long since ceased calling herself Rodham-Clinton.  In fact, to judge by her website, she has chosen to drop her last name altogether.  At HillaryClinton.com she is referred to only as Hillary.  I can't think of any male politician who does this. 

Stephanie Herseth was a fine political name, and a politician's name is a brand name.  It should roll off the tongue quite easily.  Herseth-Sandlin is a lot more trouble to say, and it pushes the first name off the other end of the banner for most purposes.  Would I like a transcript of the war room discussion when she informed her staff of this change.  Though I notice that at Re-elect Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, she is almost always referred to as "Stephanie."  Blanchard spots a trend!   

Herseth-Sandlin Roasted in Two Commercials

I had not yet bothered to look at the two anti-Herseth-Sandlin commercials that South Dakota War College posted links to until I noticed that the Pied Piper of Peevish Malevolence at the NVB got his knickers in a twist over them.  Here is the SDWC post with the links, so you can view them yourself.

If you think I'm tough on her, 2 commercials began running today in South Dakota markets regarding Congresswoman Herseth Sandlin's trip to the ice caps:

60 Second Glacier Commercial

30 Second "Come Home" commercial

Ouch.

Having viewed them both, I conclude that neither add contained anything of substance.  Senators and Representatives have a lot of demands on their time and they can't be everywhere at once.  It's always a good idea for them to jet back home when disaster strikes, but what we pay them for is what they do in Washington.  The attack ads make a lot out of the fact that Greenland is far from Brown County, but whatever you think about the issue of Global Warming, it is clearly a very important one for South Dakota, the United States, and the world.  Representative H-S owes us no apology for wanting to see for herself what is going on. 

On the other hand, residents of our state and this county have a right to feel neglected, and do not need Professor David Newquist's permission.  Those who produced the ads clearly think such folks are out there, and if they are right, then these ads serve to express the opinions of that group. Professor Newquist complains yet again about and issue of the Thune/Daschle campaign. 

We strongly suspect this is the work of the Thune camp. It sounds like the dishonest, peevish malevolence that is the established character of that man and his minions. After all, the stuff about Tom Daschle's "palatial" residence in South Dakota got the churls stirred up, so why shouldn't this kind of petty dishonesty work on Stephanie?

I have written in my American News column and in this blog that Daschle's big house in Virginia was the single most important cause of his defeat.  I have also said that, in my opinion, that house did not justify voting against Tom Daschle.  That Senator Daschle rose to a position of national power, and moved his center of gravity eastward from the Dakotas, is something that South Dakotas ought to take some pride in, regardless of how they voted.  But contrary to what Professor Newquist says, the ads on Daschle's house were not dishonest.  They were dead spot on. Those who felt that the house did matter had a right to feel that way, and a right to cast their vote accordingly. 

Finally, the attack ads above were funny, and poking fun at politicians is one of the great traditions, especially in English speaking democracies.  Political ads, like political cartoons, are not supposed to be balanced or fair.  They are supposed to sting. Pat Powers was right to say "ouch."

No Worker Left Behind: Good News for Bottom Fifth

The Ron Haskins at the Washington Post reports on a piece of economic news so literally uplifting, it's a wonder the messengers weren't shot and buried behind the barn. 

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from 1991 to 2005 than all other groups except the top fifth. Despite the recession of 2001, the bottom fifth had a 35 percent increase in income (adjusted for inflation), compared with around 20 percent for the second, third and fourth fifths. (The top fifth had about a 50 percent increase.)

Even more impressive, the CBO found that households in the bottom fifth increased their incomes so much because they worked longer and earned more money in 2005 than in 1991 -- not because they received higher welfare payments. In fact, their earnings increased more in percentage terms than incomes of any of the other groups: The bottom fifth increased its earnings by 80 percent, compared with around 50 percent for the highest-income group and around 20 percent for each of the other three groups.

It's not easy to imagine a better piece of economic news: the worse off families improve their lot by a process of integration into the productive economy.  In France that would be against the law.  Haskins points out that both ends of the political spectrum can find some joy in this story. 

My rendition of the CBO findings to this point should make Republicans happy: Low-income families with children increased their work effort, many of them in response to the 1996 welfare reform law that was designed to produce exactly this effect. These families not only increased their earnings but also slashed their dependency on cash welfare. In 1991, more than 30 percent of their income was from cash welfare payments; by 2005, it was 4 percent. Earnings up, welfare down -- that's the definition of reducing welfare dependency in America.

But now consider that the next-biggest increase in income for the bottom group was from the earned-income tax credit (EITC), a program that, in effect, supplements the wages of parents with low incomes. In addition, most of the children in these families had Medicaid coverage and received free school lunches and other traditional social benefits. In other words, this success story is one of greater efforts to work more and earn more backed by government benefits to improve living standards and, as President Bill Clinton used to say, "make work pay."

I find it interesting that, when the poor make advances through their own energy and genius, this is presumed to make Republicans happy.  Haskins does not quite say, but quite clearly means, that when the poor advance through gifts from government, this makes Democrats happy. 

This does support my long-standing contention that President Clinton's welfare reform  was one of the most successful pieces of social legislation in the history of welfare policy.

No More Menstrual Bleeding. Period.

Slate's excellent column "Human Nature," by William Saletan, has a piece on the new drug approved to end monthly bleeding. 

We've been tampering with periods for years. But on Tuesday, we made it official. The Food and Drug Administration approved Lybrel, the first birth-control pill explicitly designed to abolish monthly bleeding.

Since the dawn of hormonal contraception, women have debated the wisdom of suppressing their periods. Crunchy feminists think it's unnatural. Techno-feminists think it's liberating. I'm a guy, so I'll stay out of the fight over womanhood. But I'll say one thing about nature and liberation: Pharmacology is dissolving them. Menstruation as we know it isn't exactly natural. And for some women, abolishing it isn't exactly liberating.

Now I have a hard time imagining what is wrong with this therapy.  But Saletan directs our attention to one crunchy feminist who warns woman that

The daily, nonstop use of the potent estrogen in the birth control pills designed to do away with menstrual periods results in a woman’s having LESS AVAILABLE NATURAL TESTOSTERONE in her body. The consequences of this state of testosterone deficiency can be subtle to severe. One thing that women taking pills to do away with their periods notice is that they have significantly less interest in making love, and experience less pleasure in sex.

Well, there is an issue that those of us with a stunted Y Chromosome can care about.  Still, Dr. Susan Rako's piece reminds me of those guys who think they were abused by circumcision, and who go around with weights on their penees hoping to grow their foreskin back. 

But Saletan makes a fascinating and unexpected point: that there is nothing natural about menstrual bleeding. 

Primitive women seldom menstruated, since they were pregnant or breastfeeding. For them, menstrual suppression was natural. What we call natural, the monthly period, was largely a byproduct of early contraceptive methods, which blocked pregnancy but not ovulation.

Then, about 50 years ago, we invented the pill. It prevented ovulation by mimicking the hormones that told a woman's body she was already gestating a baby. In short, it faked pregnancy. But that didn't bother people. What bothered them was the idea of disrupting the monthly cycle, particularly "natural" menstruation every fourth week. So drug makers replicated the cycle. They sold pills in packs of 28, the last seven of which were dummy pills. The dummy pills allowed hormone levels to sink, causing the uterine lining to decay and bleed as though the woman were losing an egg. In fact, there was no egg. That was the whole point of the previous 21 pills. Fake pregnancy, fake period.

The point here, it seems to me, is that when we ask what is natural, we can't look to the past.  Modern society and technology have changed the context beyond recognition.  Instead we should ask what promotes human flourishing, given our best guess about how nature operates in this brave new world.  I can't wait to see what Dakota Women make of this. 

Schaff on Vacation Day 2: Price Gouging by Oil Companies

With Professor Schaff frolicking abroad, the regional blogosphere has suddenly become a rather hollow space.  Not much lately from CCK, Dakota Women, or the Northern Valley Beacon.  It's like Puff the Magic Dragon after Jackie Paper went off to law school. 

But I can be Jon Schaff.  Here is the Wall Street Journal on gas price gouging. 

It's Memorial Day weekend and the start of the summer driving season, so naturally it's time for Congress to grandstand against $3-a-gallon gasoline. And right on cue, the House passed legislation last week to criminalize gasoline "price gouging," whatever that is. Perhaps this is all designed to distract the public from Congress's own role in raising gas prices.

Under the anti-gouging law, service station owners could face up to 10 years in prison if they dare to raise their prices too much when supplies are low. Representative Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who sponsored this scheme, said the vote would determine whether Members "side with Big Oil" or "side with consumers who are being ripped off at the gas pump." Who elects these guys?

The inconvenient fact is that there's no evidence of price rigging by Big Oil or the tens of thousands of independent service station owners across America. The causes of higher gas prices include $65-a-barrel oil caused by rising global demand and geopolitical tensions, a record high U.S. gasoline consumption of 380 million gallons a day, and refined gasoline shortages caused by Congressional rules and mandates. Far from withholding production to raise prices, U.S. gasoline production of 8.8 million barrels a day is higher than any time in history and refineries are getting more gas per barrel of oil than ever before.

This kind of legislation is empty of thought or seriousness.  Its only purpose is to squeeze a little more political advantage by encouraging popular prejudice. 

Memorial Day

Via Power Line comes this thoughtful OpinionJournal piece penned by Peter Collier.  Here it is in full:

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

Former football star Pat Tillman and Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham were killed on the same day: April 22, 2004. But as details of his death fitfully emerged from Afghanistan, Tillman has become a metaphor for the current conflict--a victim of fratricide, disillusionment, coverup and possibly conspiracy. By comparison, Dunham, who saved several of his comrades in Iraq by falling on an insurgent's grenade, is the unknown soldier. The New York Times, which featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for 32 consecutive days, put the story of Dunham's Medal of Honor on the third page of section B.

Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers--honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless--in our midst.

***

In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There's something wrong with that.
What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn't stop until all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his comrades time to establish a defensive line.

Yet their stories were not only about killing. Several Medal of Honor recipients told me that the first thing they did after the battle was to find a church or some other secluded spot where they could pray, not only for those comrades they'd lost but also the enemy they'd killed.

Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold.

Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety. Each time he succeeded, he prayed, "Dear God, please let me get just one more man." By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75 GIs.

Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow-motion invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They couldn't let their buddies down.

Big for his age at 14, Jack Lucas begged his mother to help him enlist after Pearl Harbor. She collaborated in lying about his age in return for his promise to someday finish school. After training at Parris Island, he was sent to Honolulu. When his unit boarded a troop ship for Iwo Jima, Mr. Lucas was ordered to remain behind for guard duty. He stowed away to be with his friends and, discovered two days out at sea, convinced his commanding officer to put him in a combat unit rather than the brig. He had just turned 17 when he hit the beach, and a day later he was fighting in a Japanese trench when he saw two grenades land near his comrades.

He threw himself onto the grenades and absorbed the explosion. Later a medic, assuming he was dead, was about to take his dog tag when he saw Mr. Lucas's finger twitch. After months of treatment and recovery, he returned to school as he'd promised his mother, a ninth-grader wearing a Medal of Honor around his neck.

***

The men in World War II always knew, although news coverage was sometimes scant, that they were in some sense performing for the people at home. The audience dwindled during Korea. By the Vietnam War, the journalists were omnipresent, but the men were performing primarily for each other. One story that expresses this isolation and comradeship involves a SEAL team ambushed on a beach after an aborted mission near North Vietnam's Cua Viet river base.
After a five-hour gunfight, Cmdr. Tom Norris, already a legend thanks to his part in a harrowing rescue mission for a downed pilot (later dramatized in the film BAT-21), stayed behind to provide covering fire while the three others headed to rendezvous with the boat sent to extract them. At the water's edge, one of the men, Mike Thornton, looked back and saw Tom Norris get hit. As the enemy moved in, he ran back through heavy fire and killed two North Vietnamese standing over Norris's body. He lifted the officer, barely alive with a shattered skull, and carried him to the water and then swam out to sea where they were picked up two hours later.

The two men have been inseparable in the 30 years since.

The POWs of Vietnam configured a mini-America in prison that upheld the values beginning to wilt at home as a result of protest and dissension. John McCain tells of Lance Sijan, an airman who ejected over North Vietnam and survived for six weeks crawling (because of his wounds) through the jungle before being captured.

Close to death when he reached Hanoi, Sijan told his captors that he would give them no information because it was against the code of conduct. When not delirious, he quizzed his cellmates about camp security and made plans to escape. The North Vietnamese were obsessed with breaking him, but never did. When he died after long sessions of torture Sijan was, in Sen. McCain's words, "a free man from a free country."

Leo Thorsness was also at the Hanoi Hilton. The Air Force pilot had taken on four MiGs trying to strafe his wingman who had parachuted out of his damaged aircraft; Mr. Thorsness destroyed two and drove off the other two. He was shot down himself soon after this engagement and found out by tap code that his name had been submitted for the Medal.

One of Mr. Thorsness's most vivid memories from seven years of imprisonment involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found a grimy piece of cloth, perhaps a former handkerchief, during a visit to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it.

Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile which he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread unraveled from the cell's one blanket, Christian stitched little stars on the blue field.

"It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn't see him," Mr. Thorsness told me. "Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it coming to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad off that even his voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks he immediately started looking for another piece of cloth."

***

We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys' adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we've heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we're uncertain about what we celebrate. We're the land of the free for one reason only: We're also the home of the brave.

Antiwar Hillary in Sioux Center

The Washington Post blog reports that Hillary Clinton is trying to rework her image, glossing over her support of the war and presenting herself as a Midwesterner rather than a New York liberal:

On the campaign trail, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has stepped up her anti-Iraq war rhetoric. In stops in northwest Iowa on Friday and Saturday, she consistently raised a series of points: She has for two years pushed President Bush to change his Iraq policy, supports a proposal sponsored by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to deauthorize the war and voted against an emergency supplemental spending bill on Thursday to register her opposition to President Bush's war policy.

"I think it's important for someone like me who has been a strong supporter of the military and has worked hard to try to get our troops everything they need to start saying the best thing we can do is to get them out of the middle of this sectarian civil war in Iraq," Clinton said. Asked in Sioux Center about the first thing she would do as president, Clinton said, "if President Bush, hasn't ended the war in Iraq, I will. That is the first thing I'm going to do."

Clinton's remarks on the campaign trail, of course, leave out a few elements of her record on the war. She voted for the original 2002 authorization. She often opposed efforts in the Senate during 2005 and 2006 to set the kind of timelines for ending the war that she now backs, particularly bills by her fellow Democrats Russ Feingold (Wisc.) and John Kerry (Mass.) that would have set up such deadlines last year. And Clinton, like another 2008 Democratic hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), has in the past voted for supplemental funding bills for the war in Iraq before casting her "no" vote on Thursday.

...

As Clinton campaigns through, Iowa, she's trying to do a complicated thing: Introduce herself to voters while reminding them of the good parts of her past. This introduction -- or reintroduction -- is at times blatant.

A woman most known for her work in Arkansas, Washington and New York, she begins every speech with a reference to her upbringing in a "middle-class family in the middle of the country, Chicago." She notes her father's service in the Navy, and the fact that while her family paid her college tuition, she paid for her books in college and then borrowed to go to law school. (The words "Yale Law" are not used in this pitch).

Read the whole thing.

Strange Bedfellows: Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus

Here is a story, from The New York Times:

Four years ago, the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus began looking for a television outlet to co-sponsor and broadcast a presidential debate to address the concerns of minority voters.

Only one news channel made an acceptable proposal, and an unlikely channel at that: Fox News, in what some Democrats viewed as an effort to associate itself with a group that could help it make good on its claim of presenting “fair and balanced” news coverage.

But now that relationship is being shaken by the decision of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina to shun the debate, a move that has exposed fault lines among two major constituencies of the Democratic Party. While the withdrawal by the candidates frustrated members of the black caucus, it mollified liberals who had objected to the involvement of Fox News, whose programming includes some of the most conservative and pro-Republican commentary on the air.

Fox News has a conservative bias, to be sure.  The other major networks have long had a liberal bias.  The only difference is that Fox's slant is taken for granted by liberals and conservatives alike, whereas the bias of the networks, and the associate press, and Time and Newsweek (I could go on), is recognized only by the right. 

Another thing the left takes for granted is Black voters.  They are so reliable, the major Democratic candidates can afford to be contemptuous of Black Congressional leadership.  It is far more important at this stage of the campaign to please the White intellectuals at the Daily KOS and Moveon.org. 

Happy Birthday to Powerline! And to Me!

The folks at Powerline celebrated the fifth birthday of their blog the day after my birthday.  Powerline is probably the best conservative blog in the business.  They achieved national fame when they exposed the fabrication on which the infamous Sixty Minutes story about George W. Bush's national guard service was based.  Since then Powerline has more than deserved its national status.  It is a very responsible and very thoughtful blog, and anyone on the left or right who wants to keep track of the best conservative take on any political issue would do well to consult it regularly. 

Powerline has connections with the Claremont Institute, for which I once worked.  A couple years ago I had the pleasure of listening to Powerline's Scott Johnson at an American Political Science Association panel.  When I rose to ask a question, I identified myself as a representative of South Dakota Politics, "we're the blog," I said, "that brought down Tom Daschle."  That was a joke, of course, but it got a laugh. 

Professor Schaff's favorite blog is No Left Turns, and it's a good one to be sure.  Mine is Powerline.  Happy Birthday, John, Scott, and Paul.  Keep up the good work.   

Herseth Sandlin

As reported yesterday, Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of House Democrats are touring Europe to discuss the climate:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on an overseas trip to embrace an audience and a topic for which President Bush has shown scant affection: "Old Europe" and global warming.

Pelosi, D-Calif., and seven other House members left Saturday for meetings with scientists and politicians in Greenland, Germany and Belgium on ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The trip comes shortly before a climate change summit next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin is with Speaker Pelosi on this trip.  In a related item, Mount Blogmore is asking where Sandlin's political future might take her.

SDP Jazz Note: Sonny Rollins Podcast

My first CD player was tiny Sony unit the size of a Walkman, only as square as Professor Schaff's wardrobe.  It was designed to be portable, but I just kept it plugged into my old stereo system.  One of the first CDs I purchased was Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 2, which I found in the discount bin of a local music store.  It has the little chunk cut out of the plastic case.  Rollins' tenor is supported only by a base and drums, leaving a cavern that his big, saxy sound fills with a very personal brilliance.  I only recently got around to purchasing his most influential album: Saxophone Colossus, featuring a more common quartet, with Tommy Flanagan on piano.  Put the two together to get an idea of Rollins' incredible poetic range. 

Sonny Rollins is still cookin', as is evident from his website, sonnyrollins.com (what else?). Today I discovered his podcast, which is now filling more space on my iPod.  If you want to hear some of what I am talking about right now, hit this link from Daily Motion. You can listen and watch Rollins play with just a bass and drums behind him.  The setting is the Netherlands, in 1959.  Warning!  The sound system in your PC may refuse to play anything else ever again.   

Schaff v. Blanchard on the Hate Crimes Veto Question

As he dashes out the door with swim trunks sticking out of his suitcase lid, Professor Schaff fires off a reply to me concerning a possible veto of Congressional hate crimes legislation.  In case this should reach him before he arrives at Fantasy Island, where Mr. Roarke will no doubt arrange for him to single-handedly nip the Protestant Reformation in the bud, I post my counter-reply. 

Professor Schaff and I agree that hate crimes legislation is a matter of state, not national law; and we agree that the veto exists above all to allow the President to prevent constitutional abuses by Congress.  We differ on this: Professor Schaff seems to think that the Congressional legislation is an unconstitutional usurpation of state prerogative; I think it is merely bad policy and may reduce the efficiency of the federal system in some modest way.  If Schaff is right, the President is obligated to use his veto.  If I am right, it is a judgment call. 

For most purposes, the Constitution does not neatly sort out the respective jurisdictions of the state and Federal governments.  What belongs to each is largely a matter of practice and precedent, which are themselves the results of a long process of sedimentation.  Judgment calls provide the sediment.  An act of Congress that interferes with the traditional prerogatives of the states will stir things up without doing any real good.  A veto, on the other hand, would be perceived not in these terms, but in terms of the President's opposition to the idea of hate crimes legislation; and that, together with his opposition to gay marriage, would be seen as evidence of an anti-homosexual agenda.  I think that this would weaken his stand on constitutional principles.  Hence I would argue against the veto. 

Have a nice vacation, Perfesser.