Is Dubai the "impossible city"? "On the one hand, it’s more cosmopolitan than eastern Germany and southern Italy, more tolerant than Poland or Louisiana, and consumers spend more here than in Munich or Madrid. But on the other hand it’s a dictatorship, almost a rogue state, a desert regime without a parliament or a political opposition, without trade unions, political parties or associations. All books and newspapers are subject to censorship. Sharia law is observed, including corporal punishment, and all Jews are strictly banned from entering the country." (via Arts and Letters Daily).

La Shawn Barber has a big thought about the Virginia Senate race, and a race word. (via Instapundit). 

Fascinating article in the latest issue of The Nation, analyzing the attempt of left-wing philanthropists to mimic the legendary infrastructure of the right through an effort called the Democracy Alliance. I recommend it as a pick-me-up for anyone down about Republican chances in the election: if this is what the left is up to, they can count on resuming their long-term decline after a brief blip in this election. It bears all the hallmarks of stupid liberal policy: excessive centralization and an obsession with process.

Samples:

A secondary problem is the struggle these well-meaning wealthy Democrats have had in getting their own house in order. Since its inception, the Alliance has been unabashedly elitist, while also poorly run. The criteria for choosing winners have been maddeningly opaque and the grants themselves contradictory. Far from speeding up the funding of progressive organizations, the Alliance has slowed certain things down.

Meanwhile, for would-be recipients, the process of applying for money was bewildering: completely secret and seemingly changing all the time. . . The small number of groups chosen, some of whom were already well funded, and the secrecy of the process infuriated organizations excluded from the club. No one knew exactly why the nine groups had been picked. Funding progressive infrastructure was all well and good, but no one bothered defining precisely what "progressive" meant. The partners themselves, with their business backgrounds, focused on the process by which groups were funded, not what they would do with the money. "There was an almost complete lack of actual substance," one adviser to a major donor said of the Atlanta meeting. The groups were selected to mirror the right but were far less anti-establishment than their conservative counterparts.

In the second round of funding, however, the Alliance fell into the common liberal trap of needing to be all things to all people. After two grant cycles the Alliance is overextended. . . To date the Alliance hasn’t been deeply involved in idea creation in the same way conservatives have been. . . A funding shortfall only partially accounts for the Alliance’s inattention. There are philosophical reasons as well. Idea creation takes time, media development is expensive and both are risky. And the Alliance is highly risk-averse.

Clearly they have their work cut out for them, especially since this (scroll down a bit for the chart) is how so many of their target audience conceive the right. Looks to me like LSD is making a comeback.   

Liberal law prof (almost a redundancy, I know) Erwin Chemerinsky argues that by denying plaintiffs’ attorneys (from the ACLU and Americans United, for example) the ability to collect their fees if they win a case under the Establishment Clause, the Public Expression of Religion Act would deprive Americans of the opportunity to vindicate their rights:

Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Since they cannot change the law of the Establishment Clause by statute, they have turned their attention to trying to prevent its enforcement by eliminating the possibility for recovery of attorneys’ fees.

Those who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees. Few people can afford to do so. Without the possibility of attorneys’ fees, individuals who suffer unconstitutional religious persecution often will be unable to sue. The bill applies even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions.

Aren’t there generous secularists and separationists who are willing to bankroll such challenges? There are plenty of good things, like school choice, which could be funded by government, but often aren’t. In some cases, the philanthropic sector has picked up the ball. Why not let Establishment Clause challenges be another arena in which we rely on the generosity (to use the word generously) of those who wish to pursue that particular agenda?

Chemerinsky assumes that the sorts of challenges he wants to encourage are always meritorious, but Congress--entitled, as it is, to its own assessment of the judiciary’s record in these matters--begs to differ. The legislative branch is certainly free to decide whether or not encouraging such suits, and implicitly approving of the string of decisions that inspired, and will be extended by, them, is a desirable goal of public policy. To my mind, little or no harm would come from reining in the separationist litigators and, in effect, compelling them to choose their cases more carefully, since they’re spending their own--or rather their donors’--money.

A last thought: if Chemerinsky is so interested in defending the litany of rights currently upheld by the courts, would he be willing to support an analogous mechanism for discouraging frivolous lawsuits? Suppose the plaintiffs lost. Could it be possible under law for the defendants to recover their court costs? Turnabout would seem to be fair play. (Perhaps this is already possible. If so, I ’m hoping that one of our attorney readers will set me straight.)

So says this piece from Down Under. A snippet:

The NIE states: "We assess that the Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists." Well, let’s assume that’s correct. My question is: And? What follows from that assessment? Israel is also a cause celebre for jihadists. Does that mean we should abandon it? If the answer is: "No, that’s a ridiculous proposition", then it is logically equally ridiculous in the case of Iraq.

Of course, there are people who think we should abandon Israel, who would probably also argue that to respond in any way to jihadist provocations or to offend their sensibilities is to pour fuel on the fire, to which there is this response:

Non-action has its own consequences. There is a strong case to be made, and certainly one I support, that non-action is exactly what caused the original growth and strength of jihadism in the lead-up to 9/11. Would the world have been safer if we had continued to avoid retaliatory action? I don’t think so.

Couldn’t help that headline, as I read this terrific Gerard Baker column on the "Americanization of British politics" under Tony Blair.

Sample:

Mr Blair’s speech this week too was suffused with American echoes and cadences. A friend commented to me in the middle of the peroration that it sounded increasingly like Martin Luther King’s dramatic final declamation to the startled crowd in Atlanta.

“I may not get there with you,” Mr Blair, the soon-to-be martyred leader seemed to be telling his people. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land” — of city academies and foundation hospitals. If he had told us that he had a dream that one day all the little Brownites and all the little Blairites would hold hands together like sisters and brothers there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house.

Remember when Nixon said something like, "If the president does it, it’s not illegal"? Well, I fully expect my green friends to say something like "If nature pollutes, it’s not pollution" in response to this story in this morning’s Washington Post.

I was on the road yesterday in Chicago, where, because the in-house ethernet service was down at the Drake Hotel, I wasn’t able to file "Thursday Thoughts." The Drake’s internet server was down for the entire 24 hours I was there, which is simply astounding these days. I left a scortching note for the manager.

I will speaking tomorrow to the staff of the Harvard SALIENT and other conservative student organizations tomorrow at 530pm in Sever 103. You are invited and feel free to contact me for more details.

On Saturday, I will be speaking briefly with Paul Cantor, Bill Kristol, Michael Sandel, and others at the Memorial for Delba Wintrhop at the Mansfield home on Raymond Street in Cambridge at 1130am.

Cong Thanh Do is back in the U.S.A. after spending 38 in jail in Vietnam.

"Do’s arrest exposed a double life he had led for seven years. By day, he was an engineer at Applied Materials. By night, he was an online freedom fighter who wrote political essays under a pen name, Tran Nam, who pushed for an end to Vietnam’s one-party communist system.

He and his wife had fled Vietnam by boat, arriving in the United States as political refugees in 1982. Even as he settled into the routines of family life, fathering three children and starting a bakery on the side, Do never gave up on hopes of helping reform his native country.

’I have a very nice, comfortable life here in the United States. But a part of me is always in Vietnam,’ said Do, 47. ’I’ve always wanted to do something for Vietnam, so the people can enjoy what I do: democracy.’"

Fouad Ajami offers a complex and unwieldy take on an unwieldy and complex region.

Here’s an article by the courageous Stanley Kurtz on the causes and possible cures for grade inflation. In honor of Harvey C-minus Mansfield, we have to give his analysis some thought. But we also have to remember that Harvey ended up having to give both real grades and ironic grades. The ironic (or typically high Harvard) grade is the one actually recorded, the other is a more accurate evaluation of the student’s work. Harvey ddesn’t want students penalized for taking his class. And Kurtz reminds us that a B at Harvard is a genuinely subpar grade. An unironic Harvard C-minus is vritually inconceivable, although very old people tell me it once was what a B is now.

Harvard and the other elite schools put professors at more ordinary colleges in an awkward situation. Nobody is going to think a B at my college is anywhere near as good as a B at Harvard, but a B at Harvard is not so good. So wouldn’t my ironic position have to be to give someone who would have earned a B at Harvard an A? A fair number of my majors right now could, I think, scrape by with Bs at Harvard. Some could do better still, but I’m left with no grade for them.

Another pressure comes at colleges with schools of education, which often give lots and lots of As based on the principle of mastery grading. If you perform each of the sundry tasks of the course competently, you get an A. So A doesn’t mean excellent, but adequate across the board. Education schools, of course, are all about "the culture of assessment," but that really means detailed quantitative proof of adequate achievement of all the "learning outocomes."

The great injustice of grade inflation is to the admirable, overachieving student who can’t be properly rewarded for his or her outstanding work. The result is an overemphasis on standardized national tests, such as the GRE and LSAT, which should properly be viewed as supplementary, not primary, information concerning a student’s achievement and promise.

I don’t share Mr. Kurtz’s optimism that a war against grade inflation could be won, but I urge him to join us in the trenches any try.

I posted a note on yesterday’s parental notification vote over at Knippenblog.

There was also a roll call on the Public Expression of Religion Act, which would prohibit plaintiffs’ attorneys from collecting legal fees for cases in which they successfully challenged a publicly-sponsored religious display. I think the bill has merit--given the cost and unpredictability of litigation, the very threat of a suit might be sufficient to cause some defendants to surrender--but I’m not at all confident that it will pass the Senate in the waning days of the term.

According to the astute Democratic analyst Mickey Kaus, the odds are now that the Repubicans will retain the House and lose the Senate. There are enough Senate races now that are even or leaning Democratic according to the actual poll numbers to produce a Democratic takeover. And the historical tendency has been for all the close Senate races to break one way or the other in the final days. Right now, most of the close races show a slight to rather pronounced Democratic trend. But don’t despair. The trend on House races is reassuring. And the Senate races really could break either way, if the break theory really does hold up.

I had a brief conversation about the elections with Andy Busch a few hours ago.

Too much testosterone can kill brain cells! Does this explain Clinton’s explosion? O.k., that was too easy. But just to prove that I’m really not anti-science, take a look. Interesting and, perhaps, relevant. What say you Prof. Lawler?

Tony Blankley reflects on some sobering news about a "separate peace" between Pakistan and Waziristan:

Whatever is going on in Pakistan (and we must hope that the men who replace Musharraf sooner or later will not be more sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and will be at least as careful in controlling their nuclear weapons), our effort to stand up Afghanistan and suppress the Taliban and al Qaeda in the region has suddenly taken on an even more formidable dimension.

There are no ready solutions to the dilemma. With Pakistan now hors de combat, our already undermanned forces in Afghanistan will soon have to engage the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan -- fighting some of the world’s most resourceful and cruel fighters in the most unforgiving lands on earth.

Read the whole thing, as well as this.

Update: And then read this for a somewhat more hopeful analysis of the events. I’d love to think that RC2 is right that this actually frees our hands somewhat in Waziristan.

Update #2: This WaPo article offers some more information, but doesn’t settle anything. This AP story offers evidence that Taliban activity has increased since the Pakistanis signed the accord.

Tom Cerber calls our attention to this study, which details the way in which legal definitions of parenthood are moving futher and further away from our our most natural experiences.

I like Kathleen Parker’s take on the Clinton interview, his narcissism and "his inner Gollum."  

Is art "falling on its knees before the terrorists" in
Germany?

I talked with Steve Hayward for fifteen minutes yesterday on Bill Clinton’s interview and the elections. Although I am going to be talking with others, I will make a point of talking with both Hayward and Busch every week through the elections. 

This morning, as I was consulting with my daughter (8 going on 14) about what she would wear to track, she announced that she had seen on the news that current temperatures were in the mid-40s. I didn’t think that could be right (high 50s is more like it, going up to the upper 70s), so she gave some ground. "You know, Daddy," she whispered, "the news lies." My response:
"Not about the weather, honey, not about the weather."

Too easy to fact-check.

Forget immigration as a hot-button issue. Sooner or later flyers are going to say "enough!" if the government doesn’t stop idiocy like this.

Get married, preferably before November, but certainly before 2008. and have children as quickly as possible. I live, by the way, in the Congressional district with the third highest marriage rate. The number one district is right next door.

Pete Du Pont calls attention to this report showing an astonishingly low level of civic literacy among American college students. I haven’t been able to download the whole report yet, but Du Pont summarizes the results:

As for the 50 colleges that participated in the program, the best-scoring students were not from the institutions one might expect. Rhodes College, Colorado State University and Calvin College were the top three, with senior students averaging between 9.5 and 11.6 percentage points higher than freshmen.

At the other end of the scale were 16 schools that showed "negative learning"--that is, seniors scored lower than freshmen. Cornell, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins were the worst three, their seniors scoring between 3.3 and 7.3 percentage points worse than their freshmen. And on the negative list were some other very prestigious universities: Williams, Georgetown, Yale, Duke and Brown.

How did these educational failures come to pass? ISI concludes that "students don’t learn what colleges don’t teach." In other words, in colleges where students must take more courses in American history they do better on the test, outperforming schools where fewer courses were completed. Seniors at the top test-scoring colleges "took an average of 4.2 history and political science courses, while seniors at the two lowest-ranked colleges . . . took an average of 2.9 history and political science courses." Similarly, higher ranked colleges spent more time on homework, 20 hours a week at fourth-ranked Grove City College and 14 or 15 at low-ranked Georgetown and Berkeley.

Here are the full rankings, for those of you who care about such things. Kudos to our friends at Rhodes, whose students registered the greatest increase over their college careers. There are other interesting tables here, which enable you, among other things, to see the absolute scores of the students at various institutions, and to take a look at which questions students seemed to do best adn worst on.

I can’t wait to see whether and how defenders of the status quo in higher education try to spin these results, which seem quite striking. Inside Higher Ed shows the way, offering this banal truth:

The report also found that some of the most prestigious colleges in the United State had lower rankings on the survey questions than did less prestigious institutions.

That seems right, but they’re squandering an opportunity to do so much more with such promising prospects, who know a lot coming in, and often less coming out.

Update: Here’s the one story I could find about the press conference describing the study.

From an unlikely blog, this reminder from The Beverly Hillbillies that politics ain’t beanbag:

Granny: "Remember what William Jennings Bryan said, ’fight hard but fight clean’?"
Jethro: "But you ain’t fightin’ clean Granny"
Granny: "Course I ain’t, William Jennings Bryan was a loser!"

Happy Wednesday.

Democrats are having gas pains: the pump price keeps falling! Heavens: there goes a talking point. Here’s Rich Lowry and Rick Newman on the amusing spectacle.

Here’s Michael Barone’s incisive and detailed analysis of the congressional races. He attempts to explain why Republican support has declined in rural areas but has held steady or even picked up in metropolitan ones. One theory: Rural Americans bear most of the burden of fighting the war in Iraq, while urbanites have the most to fear from terrorists. It could be, though, that Republican metro-success may depend on the peculiarities of particular races--in MD the Republicans have an attractive African American candidate who is doing comparatively well among black voters, in NJ the Democrats are stuck with a crook. It’s also the case the NJ is one of the few states that the Republicans recruited the challenger they wanted most.

Bill McClay has a nice little piece in the new issue of Touchstone. A snippet:

Not so long ago, the quest for liberation from social convention carried certain perils. But now we have made that quest into a new social convention in its own right, with its own canons of respectability, such as the routine celebration of books and movies and other works of art solely on the grounds that they are “troubling” or “transgressive,” qualities now deemed to be peculiarly meritorious in and of themselves, quite apart from their specific content.

Of course, one of the many dirty little secrets of this dirty little ethos is that it rests upon a veiled form of class snobbery. There must always be certain unnamed “others,” the gaping suburbanites and mindless rubes who are thought to sustain and uphold the philistine conventions from which “we” perpetually need to be liberated. But those “others” seem increasingly shadowy and hard to locate. The specter of a monolithic “red state” America is an easy way of positing the continued pernicious existence of such benighted “others.”

But as a resident of a certifiably red state, I can authoritatively testify that we are all Bobos on this bus—or at least most of us. The new convention has been triumphant beyond its wildest dreams, and now suffuses our popular culture and our advertising, assimilated into the mainstream in the most remarkable and incongruous ways.

Read the whole short thing.

Here’s an analysis of the connection, or lack thereof, between the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and our current foreign policy. It features fascinating analyses of little-known texts of Strauss. Among Nathan Tarcov’s conclusions is that Strauss taught moderation when it came to the universalistic aspirations of the West. If Strauss erred, it was on the side of underestimating prospects for the spread of liberal democracy, an error (if error it is) that President Bush certainly has not made. But in the end "Strauss can remind us of the permanent problems, but we have only ourselves to blame for faulty solutions to the problems of today." That also means we should praise ourselves and not Strauss if we’ve gotten anything right in addressing those problems. By posting this article I’m not endorsing it all, but it is well worth a close read.

There’s going to be a sort of one-day conference at Berry on November 9 on Democracy in Athens, America, and Rick’s, or on Plato, Tocqueville, and CASABLANCA.

The featured speaker will be James Pontuso of Hampden-Sydney College, editor of POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY GOES TO RICK’S and fine books on the dissidents Solzhenitsyn and Havel.

Much of the conference will showcase the good work Berry students are doing on Plato, Tocqueville, and films this semester.

But we also are soliciting a few presentations from scholars on the above topics. Better still would be accounts of ways they are connected--Plato and Tocqueville, Tocqueville and CASABLANCA etc.

The date is November 9. Unfortunately, litte to no funding is available for travel or honoraria. (Let me know your situation and I may be able to work with you.) Contact me very soon if you want to [email protected]. (I hope posting that address doesn’t flood me with blog groupies.)

In honor of this conference, I’m soliciting your opinions on 1.The relevance of Tocqueville for understanding America today and 2. CASABLANCA as political commentary.

As I noted yesterday, I had a full plate of state-level political leaders on campus today.

Governor Sonny Perdue addressed an auditorium full of students, faculty, staff, and guests this morning, focusing on the themes of trust and leadership. Without explicitly referring to Aristotle, he offered a concrete example of why the optimal size of a political order is one in which everyone is a friend of a friend. For Perdue, trustworthiness has to be established personally, and hence all politics must ultimately be personal. Hard to manage in a state with over 8 million inhabitants and in a reelection campaign whose budget is approaching $15 million, but worth holding up as a touchstone. Stated another way: character matters, and you can tell a lot about a person by looking at his (or her) family.

As you can tell, this wasn’t a political speech, but was meant rather to reach a college-age audience, who have likely given more thought to family and friendship than they have to political life. It worked as a civic lesson, and it worked as a way of conveying the dignity and decency of public life. I couldn’t have asked for a better or more appropriate message to counter the premature cynicism of so many of my students.

Perdue connects well with his audience and impressed the unscientific sample of students with whom I spoke afterward. The student introducer and questioners also acquitted themselves well, the former managing to convey something of the Governor’s personality and the latter posing questions that were well-formulated and respectful, focusing on the Governor’s promotion of Georgia’s international profile and on public support for private higher education.

A short while later, I hosted Mary Margaret Oliver, a long-time Georgia state legislator who has focused much of her career on child and family issues. As she is unopposed for reelection, she could be very forthright and pointed in the issues and questions she raises. A slightly left-of-center Democrat (who once had statewide political aspirations), Rep. Oliver argued that state government spends too much time and effort on economic development and not enough on education and health care. We worry too much, she argued, about jobs, and not enough about the 40% of those who enter high school in Georgia, but do not graduate.

While she tried to cast this contrast in terms of class (with governors--including her old State Senate suitemate Sonny Perdue, once a Democrat--spending too much time associating with the "super-rich" who bring capital and jobs to the state), I think that there’s a more plausible explanation. Rep. Oliver spoke movingly about the plight of a "permanent underclass," of toddlers who, without state intervention, would be at the mercy of their drug-addicted mothers. It’s extremely hard, she said, to know what to do. How do you intervene? How many chances at rehabilitation do you give the mother? (If I’d been anything other than the good host, I might have asked her here what she thought of state funding for faith-based drug rehabilitation, but I held my tongue.) In short, there are limits to what the state can do in dealing with problems that she came very close to conceding were intractable. And surely there are even greater limits to what a state can do in the relatively short terms allotted to political leaders who have to be able to point to successes in the face of an adversarial environment if they’re to win reelection. It’s much easier to point to the billions of dollars of new investment and the thousands (or tens of thousands) of jobs that have been created on your watch. Those are metrics everyone can understand and about which it’s relatively easy to boast. And, of course, jobs are, for the most part, uncontroversial (unless they’re held by illegal immigrants).

After listening to Rep. Oliver, I’m reminded of something that Rousseau said (which I’ll have to paraphrase badly, since I don’t have the text in front of me): today’s politicians talk incessantly about commerce and money; their predecessors spoke about morals. Rep. Oliver doesn’t want them to talk about money so much, but I’m not sure that she wants them to talk about morals and character in a way that might--just might--begin meaningfully to address some of her very real concerns regarding the least among us.

All in all, a busy and interesting day. The more I listen to these state-level political figures, the more I’m convinced that Georgia has an impressive stock of genuine public servants. Sounds corny and pollyannaish, I know, but I haven’t encountered a stinker yet. (People assure me that there are some, but they seem to be allergic to speaking at Oglethorpe.)

Here are some excellent tips from the outstanding libertarian scholar Tyler Cowen on dining well in American restaurants. They’re very simple and clear. Two I’ve embraced: 1. Especially in expensive restaurants, you get more bang and taste for your buck if you stick with appetizers and side dishes. 2. Don’t waste money and calories on desserts--they’re almost always a disappointment, comparatively speaking.

Reaction--pro and con--still pouring forth about Clinton’s performance on Fox News, from Dick Morris, Andrew Klavan in the LA Times (is he related to Cliff from Cheers?), and John Dickerson on Slate.com. Consensus seems to be that it was a calculated outburst.

And don’t miss Time magazine today on Why the Democratic Wave Could Be a Washout. Happy Tuesday.

Another straw in the wind.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 26th, at 10:45 a.m., Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue will be speaking in Oglethorpe University’s Lupton Auditorium.

I’m hosting other speakers as well--State Representative Mary Margaret Oliver at noon on the same day; State Rep. Karla Drenner at noon on Thursday, September 28th; and Alan Essig, Executive Director of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, on Tuesday, October 3rd, at noon.

I’m speaking down at Mercer University in Macon on Thursday, November 16th.

Last but not least, I’m looking forward to attending this conference.

A few days ago we had some discussion about the meaning of "dhimmi." Well, this about epitomizes it. Apparently the British police have agreed to consult with a panel of Muslim authorities before authorizing further raids on suspected terror cells.

Hat tip: Tammy Bruce.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a front page story on Rumsfeld and how he plays squash:
"Mr. Rumsfeld took up squash more than 20 years ago when he was a business executive. Rather than tricky bank shots off the walls, a move that better-skilled players favor, Mr. Rumsfeld plays with power, hitting the ball hard and ending points quickly. And he relentlessly attacks his opponent’s confidence." Surprise.

Jay Nordlinger has a good interview with him on NRO (and it is essentially reprinted in the dead tree version of the current issues of National Review). "It’s a tough picture. It’s difficult."

Several faithful NLT readers took issue with my remonstrance yesterday of Bill Clinton’s blown gasket on Fox News. Well, courtesy of the indispensible Patterco, we know that Chris Wallace asked Don Rumsfeld exactly the same question two years ago, and somehow Dandy Don didn’t lose his cool:

Wallace (to Rumsfeld):I understand this is 20/20 hindsight, it’s more than an individual manhunt. I mean — what you ended up doing in the end was going after al Qaeda where it lived. . . . pre-9/11 should you have been thinking more about that?

. . . .

What do you make of his [Richard Clarke’s] basic charge that pre-9/11 that this government, the Bush administration largely ignored the threat from al Qaeda?

. . . .

Mr. Secretary, it sure sounds like fighting terrorism was not a top priority.

Also, I missed this terrific piece in the LA Times last week on "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals," written by a liberal who gets it.

Sample:

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I’d like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.