EdCone.com

Brooks spends the bulk of his column discussing Bush's confidence and optimism and belief in the power of the presidency and the rightness of his plans. Then (picking up on this week's emerging theme of truthful fiction) he concludes:

Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

War and Peace has a daunting reputation, but it's a very readable and entertaining book.  I've been planning to revisit the Russian novelists soon, leaning toward stuff I haven't read before, but maybe I'll pull W&P off the shelf and read it again.

Atul Gawande:

As a surgeon, I’ve worked with the veterans’ health system, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies. I’ve seen health care in Canada, Britain, Switzerland and the Netherlands...there is not a place in this world that is not struggling to control health costs while providing high-quality, easily accessible care. No one — no one — has a great solution.

But...whether as a doctor or as a citizen, I would take almost any system — from Medicare-for-all to a private insurance voucher system — over the one we now have. Job-based insurance is bleeding away the viability of American businesses — even doctors complain about the cost of insuring employees. And it has left large numbers of patients without adequate coverage when they need it. In the last two years, for example, 51 percent of Americans surveyed did not fill a prescription or visit a doctor for a known medical issue because of cost.

My worry is less about what happens if we change than what happens if we don’t...we should not even consider a [presidential] candidate without a plan capable of producing agreement.

      

Krugman: "The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years...The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to ;dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.' And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge."

More: "Regent isn’t a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It’s run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God’s punishment for America’s sins...Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent’s Executive Leadership Series."

Previously.

Krugman reads the McKinsey report: "[W]e spend $98 billion a year in excess administrative costs, with more than half of the total accounted for by marketing and underwriting — costs that don’t exist in single-payer systems...the United States pays $66 billion a year in excess drug costs, and overpays for medical devices like knee and hip implants, too.

"To put these numbers in perspective: McKinsey estimates the cost of providing full medical care to all of America’s uninsured at $77 billion a year. Either eliminating the excess administrative costs of private health insurers, or paying what the rest of the world pays for drugs and medical devices, would by itself more or less pay the cost of covering all the uninsured. And that doesn’t count the many other costs imposed by the fragmentation of our health care system."

Krugman: "At first glance, the Edwards health care plan looks similar to several other proposals out there, including one recently unveiled by Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But a closer look reveals extra features in the Edwards plan that take it a lot closer to what the country really needs...this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable."

Kristof addresses some questions to Dick Cheney, saying the Libby trial is "raising doubts about your own integrity" and concluding, "If you continue to stonewall, then you don’t belong in office and you should resign."

Brooks: "The question is, what exactly did President Bush propose last night?"

His recap of recent events: On Nov. 30, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented Bush with a new security plan for Baghdad. It called for U.S. troops to move out of Baghdad to the periphery, where they would chase down Sunni terrorists...His government didn’t want any restraints on Shiite might.

Over the next weeks, Bush rejected the plan and opted for the opposite approach. Instead of handing counterinsurgency over to the Iraqis/Shiites, he decided to throw roughly 20,000 U.S. troops — everything he had available — into Baghdad...

...Then came the job of selling the plan. The administration could not go before the world and say that the president had decided to overrule the sovereign nation of Iraq. Officials could not tell wavering Republicans that the president was proposing a heavy, U.S.-led approach.

Thus, administration officials are saying that they have adopted the Maliki plan, just with a few minor tweaks...All of this is designed to soothe the wounded pride of the Maliki government, and to make the U.S. offensive seem less arduous at home. It’s the opposite of the truth.

...The enemy in Iraq is not some discrete group of killers. It’s the maelstrom of violence and hatred that infects every institution, including the government and the military. Instead of facing up to this core reality, the Bush administration has papered it over with salesmanship and spin.

Joe Nocera eviscerates Malcolm Gladwell's semi-defense of Enron. What a shame this important piece is behind the NYT paywall, although the commenters at Gladwell's blog (including Brad DeLong, who also weighs in here) do a good job, too.

Nocera: Mr. Gladwell’s argument falls apart. His view is that more disclosure, which is what the Securities and Exchange Commission tends to strive for, would not have made any difference. But what Mr. Skilling (and others, including Enron’s founder, the late Kenneth L. Lay) were charged with was not hiding things in plain sight — but hiding things out of sight that would have exposed the fraud. That is, they lied to the investing public about the true condition of the company. And no matter how you slice it, that’s against the law...

...The point is not the sheer volume of disclosure; it’s whether disclosure illuminates or obfuscates. Enron usually did the latter. In effect, Mr. Gladwell has conflated fraud with overvaluation.

Krugman: Americans spend more on health care per person than anyone else — almost twice as much as the French, whose medical care is among the best in the world. Yet we have the highest infant mortality and close to the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation...

If it were up to me, we’d have a Medicare-like system for everyone, paid for by a dedicated tax that for most people would be less than they or their employers currently pay in insurance premiums. This would, at a stroke, cover the uninsured, greatly reduce administrative costs and make it much easier to work on preventive care.

Such a system would leave people with the right to choose their own doctors, and with other choices as well...we have another chance for fundamental health care reform. Let’s not blow that chance with a pre-emptive surrender to the special interests.

Related: NYT charts healthcare spending. Note that the US government already spends more per capita than other countries; a big problem here is inefficiency in the system, as discussed in this article. The article does not discuss tort reform as a method of cost mitigation.

Maureen Dowd on Donald Rumsfeld's going-away party:

Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday’s tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19-gun salute, an Old Guard performance with marching musicians — including piccolo players — in Revolutionary War costumes, John Philip Sousa music and the chuckleheaded neocons and ex-Rummy deputies who helped screw up the occupation, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, cheering in the audience.

It was surreal: the septuagenarian who arrogantly dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq, being praised as “the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had” by his pal, the vice president, even as a desperate White House drafted ways to reinvade Iraq by sending more troops in a grasping-at-straws effort to reverse the chaos caused by Rummy’s mistakes.

Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who hadn’t sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military confidence.

Friedman challenges his eponymous metric: [W]e need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

He also corrects his own jaunty pre-war certainty: On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my "pottery store" rule for Iraq: "You break it, you own it"...But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

Friedman says a defining issue for Democrats will be dealing with the rising economies of China and India.

The Dems bring "protectionist leanings" and focus on the reality that "Technology and globalization are flattening the global economic playing field today, enabling many more developing nations to compete for white-collar and blue-collar jobs once reserved for the developed world. This is one reason why growth in wages for the average U.S. worker has not been keeping pace with our growth in productivity and G.D.P."

Kicker: "The big question for me is, how will President Bush and the Democratic Congress use China: as a scapegoat or a Sputnik?

"Will they use it as an excuse to avoid doing the hard things, because it’s all just China’s fault, or as an excuse to rally the country — as we did after the Soviets leapt ahead of us in the space race and launched Sputnik — to make the kind of comprehensive changes in health care, portability of pensions, entitlements and lifelong learning to give America’s middle class the best tools possible to thrive? A lot of history is going to turn on that answer, because if people don’t feel they have the tools or skills to thrive in a world without walls, the pressure to put up walls, especially against China, will steadily mount."

Tierney says libertarian discontent over Republican policies on things like gambling and pot spells trouble for the GOP. "Why did Republicans assume there was a Moral Majority? Where in the Bible does it say that the virtuous outnumber the wicked? When you define wickedness the way Republicans do, the numbers are daunting."

Westerners especially dislike having morality dicated by DC, he says. I would add the Schiavo case as evidence that this sentiment is nationwide.

Electoral implications: "Libertarian voters tend to get ignored by political strategists because they’re not easy to categorize or organize...Many don’t even call themselves libertarians...They distrust moral busybodies of both parties, and they may well be the most important bloc of swing voters this election, as David Boaz and David Kirby conclude in a new study for the Cato Institute. Analyzing a variety of voter surveys, they estimate that libertarians make up about 15 percent of voters — a bloc roughly comparable in size to liberals and to conservative Christians, and far bigger than blocs like Nascar dads or soccer moms."

Brooks: "We’re about to enter another of those periods without a dominant ideology. It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance. This election is a period, not a comma in political history."

As GSO punches itself in the face, Friedman says that Iraq is undergoing "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive."

And he wrote that before this morning's body count, which lists ten more US dead.

More Friedman: "When Saddam is urging calm, you know things have hit a new low."

Noting the deliberate campaign to influence US politics, Friedman says: "It would be depressing to see the jihadists influence our politics with a Tet-like media/war frenzy. But there are only two reasons now for the U.S. to remain in Iraq: because it thinks that staying will make things better or that leaving will make things drastically worse. Alas, it is increasingly hard to see how our presence is making things better. Iraq, under our nose, is breaking apart into so many little pieces that no political solution seems to be in the offing, because no Iraqi leader can deliver his faction anymore — and there does not seem to be an Iraqi center capable of coming together. While leaving would no doubt exacerbate the civil war, staying in Iraq indefinitely to prevent even more Shiites and Sunnis from killing one another is not going to fly with the U.S. public much longer."

Friedman talks to Carville:

[F]or Democratic Party candidates...it's no longer enough to have "energy security" as part of a 12-step plan for American renewal. No, it needs to become a defining issue of what Democrats are all about.

It should "not be part of an expanding litany, but rather a contracting narrative," explained Mr. Carville. "It can't just be that we are for a woman's right to choose, and education and energy independence. This is the thing we need to get done above and beyond everything else." People should associate "energy security" with Democrats the way they associate "tax cuts" with Republicans, he argued. "This is not something to add to the stew — this is the stock."

The best way for a party that is often viewed as weak on national security to overcome that deficit is to be for energy independence, he noted. Indeed, nothing would be more potent for Democrats now than to capture energy security and all the issues that surround it — from improving our trade deficit by not importing more oil to improving the climate to improving U.S. competitiveness by making us leaders in alternative fuels.

Kristof: "[I]t’s time to face the grim reality and announce that all our troops will leave Iraq by October 2007."

The Iraqis want us to go, and they fear we plan to keep long-term military bases on their soil, he says. "Iraqis are crystal clear about what the U.S. should do: announce a timetable for withdrawal of our troops within one year. They’re right. Our failure to declare a timetable and, above all, our coveting long-term military bases in Iraq feed the insurgency and end up killing more young Americans."

More: "Renouncing bases should be a no-brainer, and it would be the simplest way to save American lives. Seventy-seven percent of Iraqis say the U.S. plans permanent bases in Iraq. (They’re right, although we hem and haw about it.)"

Atrios has been banging on this basing question for a while, but he's just a craaaaazy netroots guy, maybe a behind-the-paywall NYT columnist can get it some traction...

Tierney:

The most enlightening speech at the United Nations this week, I’m sorry to say, was the one by Evo Morales of Bolivia...he held up a small green coca leaf, and when he talked about international drug policies, he made more sense than anyone in the United States government.

...Drug prohibition in Bolivia and Afghanistan has done exactly what alcohol prohibition did in America: it has financed organized crime.

The only workable solution is to repeal prohibition.

Friedman says our energy policy is really stupid:

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

Tierney writes about John Mueller's forthcoming book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Tierney: "Mueller’s conclusion is that there just aren’t that many terrorists out there with the zeal and the competence to attack the United States."

Mueller, in Foreign Affairs: "[I]f it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it?...

"...One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad...

"...If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest."

Friedman says Iraq's woes aren't caused by the political fringes, here or there, but by the political center of both countries.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, and let’s have an unprecedented wartime tax cut and shrink our armed forces....let’s send just enough troops to topple Saddam — and never control Iraq’s borders, its ammo dumps or its looters...let’s use the war as a wedge issue to embarrass Democrats, frighten voters and win elections...let’s not do one serious thing about ending our oil addiction...

....It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama.

But there is not only a problem at the center of U.S. policy. We are also failing in Iraq because of what the Shiite and Sunni mainstreams — not the fringes — are tolerating...

...The short history of the Iraq war is that the Sunnis in Iraq, and in the nearby Arab states, refused to accept one man, one vote, because it meant bringing the Shiite majority to power in Iraq for the first time...For two years, the Shiite center in Iraq put up with the barbaric Sunni violence directed against its mosques and markets — violence the U.S. couldn’t stop because it didn’t have enough troops, and because the Sunni center inside and outside Iraq tacitly supported it.

But eventually the Shiites snapped, formed their own death squads, turned to Iran for military aid, and focused more on communal survival than on making Iraq’s democracy work...where the Iraqi center stops and the violent fringes start is no longer clear.

The dominant struggle in Iraq today, writes the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr in his provocative new book, “The Shia Revival,” is not “the battle of liberty against oppression, but rather the age-old battle of the two halves of Islam, Shias and Sunnis. This is the conflict that Iraq has rekindled, and this is the conflict that will shape its future.”

Tierney says American drug-warriors who proclaim Dutch drug policy (taxation and regulation instead of prohibition) a failure are flat-out wrong. "The Dutch generally use drugs less than Americans do, according to national surveys in both countries (and these surveys might understate Americans’ drug usage, since respondents are less likely to admit illegal behavior)."

Friedman: On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:

“What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in ‘Arab honor?’ So that Iran could distract the world’s attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?”

Krugman: Many of those lamenting Mr. Lieberman’s defeat claim that they fear a takeover of our political parties by extremists. But if political polarization were really their main concern, they’d be as exercised about the primary challenge from the right facing Lincoln Chafee as they are about Mr. Lieberman’s woes. In fact, however, the sound of national commentary on the Rhode Island race is that of crickets chirping.

So what’s really behind claims that Mr. Lieberman is sensible — and that those who voted against him aren’t? It’s the fact that many Washington insiders suffer from the same character flaw that caused Mr. Lieberman to lose Tuesday’s primary: an inability to admit mistakes.

Imagine yourself as a politician or pundit who was gung-ho about invading Iraq, and who ridiculed those who warned that the case for war was weak and that the invasion’s aftermath could easily turn ugly. Worse yet, imagine yourself as someone who remained in denial long after it all went wrong, disparaging critics as defeatists. Now denial is no longer an option; the neocon fantasy has turned into a nightmare of fire and blood. What do you do?

You could admit your error and move on — and some have. But all too many Iraq hawks have chosen, instead, to cover their tracks by trashing the war’s critics.

They say: Pay no attention to the fact that I was wrong and the critics have been completely vindicated by events — I’m “sensible,” while those people are crazy extremists. And besides, criticizing any aspect of the war encourages the terrorists.

Friedman: "Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World. Israel spent the last six years preparing for Warren Buffett, while Hezbollah spent the last six years preparing for this war."

Thomas Frank (behind the NYT paywall) says the defeat of anti-science activists in Kansas is important, but does not mark the end of the culture wars or the "war against 'elites.'"

True enough (more discussion here of anti-professional bias), but Frank glosses over some possible peace terms in the ongoing culture wars.

When he says of the culture warriors that "their public appeal may have dissipated thanks to the preposterous issues (evolution, stem-cell research) against which their leaders have lately been hurling themselves," well, right, exactly, those issues are a big part of the problem. Americans don't reject conservative values -- hell, I'm a walking advertisement for "conservative" values --  but they do reject the imposition of particular religious belief on public policy.

There's a middle ground out there somewhere, and maybe Kansas (how geographically appropriate) is showing us where to look for it.

MoDo: The enunciation of a clear sentence about the war in Iraq by Hillary Clinton means that there must be an election coming up...

...She tartly summed up: “Because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”

...When Hillary and Rummy square off, it is a gladiatorial contest of two masters at hauteur, self-righteousness, scriptedness, infighting and belief in their own manifest destiny.

Hillary wants to avoid Joe Lieberman’s fate by arguing that how the administration went about this war has caused all the problems, not that  it went to a needless war she supported.

It's not quite Cronkite on Vietnam, but Tom Friedman says it's time for us to get out of Iraq.

As senior military leaders tell Congress that the situation in Iraq is very bad, Friedman says "the administration now has to admit what anyone — including myself — who believed in the importance of getting Iraq right has to admit: Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives."

His proposed "Plan B" includes "a  last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors...For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave."

 

Friedman: "One wonders what planet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed from, thinking she can build an international force to take charge in south Lebanon without going to Damascus and trying to bring the Syrians on board."

More: "We need to get real on Lebanon...Hezbollah’s militia, which represents 40 percent of Lebanon, the Shiites, can’t be wiped out at a price that Israel, or America’s Arab allies, can sustain — if at all.

"You can’t go into an office in the Arab world today without finding an Arab TV station featuring the daily carnage in Lebanon. It’s now the Muzak of the Arab world, and it is toxic for us and our Arab friends."

Syria, he notes, "is a largely secular country, with a Sunni majority. Its leadership is not comfortable with Iranian Shiite ayatollahs...One top Syrian official said the door with the U.S. was 'not closed from Damascus. [But] when you have only one friend, you stay with him all the time.'"

Frank Rich is gloating:

The president's politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right's former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can't beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we're at least starting to rout them here.

That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls...

...Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry — older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America...The beauty of Mr. Reed's unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president's men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.

Tierney says the GOP has turned into "the Church Lady...the scold who makes even fellow congregants roll their eyes."

"They’re the party whose leader defends the sanctity of embyronic stem cells against scientists trying to cure diseases. They’re the killjoy who stands up to object when a gay couple wants to marry. They’re so shocked by gambling — imagine, Americans betting money! — that the House has just passed a bill outlawing most online wagering, and federal agents have arrested a visiting British executive of a sports-betting operation that is perfectly legal in his country."

He thinks the stem cell decision is not necessarily bad public policy, because the necessary research will still get funded by private sources, but says it's terrible politics. "Bush...even used that old campaign ploy, posing with babies — but he couldn’t compete with the images of paralyzed adults asking for help."

Friedman: "I find a gnawing sense of anxiety that Israel is facing in Hezbollah an enemy that is unabashedly determined to transform this conflict into a religious war — from a war over territory — and wants to do it in a way that threatens not only Israel but the foundations of global stability...this is not just another Arab-Israeli war. It is about some of the most basic foundations of the international order — borders and sovereignty — and the erosion of those foundations would spell disaster for the quality of life all across the globe."

Koppel: "The United States is already at war with Iran; but for the time being the battle is being fought through surrogates."

More: "Washington’s greatest gift to the Iranians lies next door in Iraq. By removing Saddam Hussein, the United States endowed the majority Shiites with real power, while simultaneously tearing down the wall that had kept Iran in check."

Tom Friedman says Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah "will be remembered as the most foolhardy Arab leader since Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser miscalculated his way into the Six-Day War...He launched a war on behalf of Iran that ruined his people, and the best outcome he can expect is a cease-fire that requires Hezbollah to move away from the Israeli border."

"...Can America capitalize on Nasrallah’s foolishness? To me, the big strategic chess move is to try to split Syria off from Iran, and bring Damascus back into the Sunni Arab fold. That is the game-changer."

Meanwhile, Richard Cohen says "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now."

Krugman: "In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport."

Data from 2004, he reports, show that "Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere."

Kristof: "[T]he hardest job in the world is devising a North Korea policy; the easiest is to criticize one. Nonetheless, our present policy is failing so wretchedly that it’s time to start afresh."

More: "Mr. Bush’s approach has bolstered the cowboys in North Korea while undermining moderates...President Clinton’s approach to North Korea wasn’t pretty but it did eventually stop both plutonium production and missile testing.

"The real missiles to worry about, by the way, aren’t the intercontinental ones, which are unreliable and probably not capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The most threatening are medium-range Nodong missiles, which probably could deliver nuclear warheads to Japanese cities."

I guess the traditional opinion-brokers really are feeling threatened these days -- how else to explain this hit piece ("Respect Must Be Paid") by David Brooks?

"The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow."

Brooks greatly overstates the influence Kos wields over other bloggers. He's not totally off base when he writes that Kos "has his relationships and his understandings and his networks and his compromises," as do we all, but I think he's wrong that Kos has "achieved a level of self-importance it took those in the pre-blog political class decades to acquire." As this column shows, the old pros are still very much in that game.

Krugman: "So what's our bitter partisan divide really about? In two words: class warfare. That's the lesson of an important new book, 'Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches.'"

The book analyzes statistical data to show that "for the past century, political polarization and economic inequality have moved hand in hand."

More: "[A] party whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless.

"Thus in 2004, President Bush basically ran as America's defender against gay married terrorists. He waited until after the election to reveal that what he really wanted to do was privatize Social Security."

Kicker: "[T]here isn't any center in modern American politics. And the center won't return until we have a new New Deal, and rebuild our middle class.

Bob Herbert says the spotlight shone on Smithfield Packing brought results, with a raise in starting salaries and an end to the appeals process that stalled union organizing activity. Union officials remain wary "that plans to move ahead with another election could be derailed yet again by illegal tactics from the company, and that yet another court fight and then a lengthy appeals process could stretch many years into the future."

Tom Friedman discusses life behind the NYT paywall (he hates it, but...)

Bob Herbert ("Where the Hogs Come First") visits the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, NC. "This is a place where progress has slowed to a crawl," he says. His description of the brutal workplace might have come via Upton Sinclair.

Herbert: "It was depressing inside there," said Edward Morrison, who spent hour after hour flipping bloody hog carcasses on the kill floor, until he was injured last fall after just a few months on the job. "You have to work fast because that machine is shooting those hogs out at you constantly. You can end up with all this blood dripping down on you, all these feces and stuff just hanging off of you. It's a terrible environment."

More: Company officials will tell you everything is fine, but serious injuries abound, and the company has used illegal and, at times, violent tactics over the course of a dozen years to keep the workers from joining a union that would give them a modicum of protection and dignity...

...Workers at Smithfield and their families are suffering while the government dithers, refusing to require a mighty corporation like Smithfield to obey the nation's labor laws in a timely manner.

A century ago, Sinclair wrote: This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death...This inspector wore a blue uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the things which were done in Durham's.

Krugman ("Some of All Fears") riffs on a classic Russell Baker column about nameless foes to whom almost any position can be ascribed: "The Some."

The Some take anti-American positions on a variety of issues. For example, they want to hurt the economy: "Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper," said President Bush in 2003. "That bothers me when people say that."

Mainly, however, the Some are weak on national security. "There's Some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,' " said Mr. Bush during a visit to the National Security Agency.

Frank Rich (How Hispanics became the New Gays) says Bush's gay-marriage rhetoric showed "a desperate president at rock bottom in the polls [who] went through the motions of a cynical and transparent charade to rally his base in an election year" and laments "the rise of a juicier target: Hispanics. They are the new gays, the foremost political piñata in the election year of 2006."

More: "Bush has taken a humane view of immigration reform throughout his political career. Some of this is self-interest; he wants to cater to his business backers' hunger for cheap labor and Karl Rove's hunger for Hispanic voters...Now Congress has acted without him, turning immigration reform into a deadlocked culture war not unlike the marriage amendment. A draconian federal law is unlikely, but the damage has been done: the ugly debate has in itself generated a backlash against a vulnerable minority."

And: "Most Americans who are in favor of stricter border enforcement are not bigots. Far from it. But some politicians and other public figures see an opportunity to foment hate and hysteria for their own profit." Among those Rich singles out for demonizing both gays and immigrants: Vernon Robinson.

Maureen Dowd goes to YearlyKos and misses the forest for the trees: "Even as Old Media is cowed by New Media, New Media is trying to become, rather than upend, Old Media. [Ana Marie] Cox has left her Wonkette gig to be a novelist and Time essayist. Mr. Moulitsas and Mr. Armstrong wrote a book called 'Crashing the Gate,' and hit 'Meet the Press' and the book tour circuit. Mr. Armstrong left his liberal blog to become a senior adviser to Mr. Warner. What could be more mainstream than that?"

Yeah, that's the real point of having thousands of activist bloggers. Not.

In Time, Ana Marie Cox quotes a Wes Clark aide: "Ten days  ago, he had a street named after him in Kosovo, today he’s on a  science panel with a man named 'Darksyde' and a woman in a bonnet.  That is democracy."

Tierney ("Securing the Border (Again)": As the number of legal workers entering from Mexico dropped during the 1960's, the number of illegal immigrants shot back up, and kept increasing after new limits were placed on other visas available to Mexicans in 1968.

The border has been out of control ever since, even though the number of agents has grown to 11,000. "Tough enforcement alone can't work unless you allow more people in legally," says Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy, who has studied the impact of the bracero program.

Today President Bush and the Senate are trying to apply that lesson by expanding the number of legal immigrants and temporary workers...But Republicans in the House are resisting. They say they won't expand legal opportunities until the border is first secured — which will never happen if they have their way.

Tierney ("Delusions of the Rich and Rent-Controlled") to some of his better-heeled New York readers: "No matter how much you love your rent-stabilized apartment, no matter how smug you feel bragging to your friends about your deal, in your heart you know it's not fair you're paying so little. It's like buying stolen goods: you can revel in the low price, but you know it comes at someone else's expense."

Krugman says that in hiring Paulson for Treasury the Bush admin showed itself to be "so desperate they're scraping the top of the barrel."

Friedman: "You see, the insurgency in Iraq is in its 'last throes' — just like Dick Cheney said. Unfortunately, it's being replaced by anarchy in many neighborhoods — not democracy."

Behind the NYT paywall, Harvey Araton writes about Coach K and the Duke lacrosse case.

Typically a ubiquitous sermonizer on the choices young people make...He has been conspicuously absent from the national discourse and noticeably scarce around campus, according to a Duke professor I know. Nor, apparently, has Krzyzewski provided his 2006 recruiting class his take, on what, if anything, he believes has gone wrong at Duke.

More: Krzyzewski knows that the university has had a reduction in student acceptances for next fall's incoming freshman class. He no doubt recognizes that in a case fraught with class and racial implications, the last thing he needs — despite some calls from within the Duke and Durham, N.C., communities for him to be heard — is to risk being misinterpreted as a cheerleader for either side, most notably for a lacrosse program that was described by a Duke official in 2005 as "building toward a train wreck."

In staying quiet, the erudite Coach K has proved, like a great point guard dribbling out of the backcourt, to have the intuitive capacity to recognize and avoid a trap...That is the only position a basketball coach who has achieved fame for himself and a fortune for his family in large part by luring black talent can take if he intends to keep his program on its figurative pedestal.

Kicker: Good for him for lowering his profile, for letting the system work, but isn't it interesting how self-interest is the greatest motivation for being a silent voice of reason?

Krugman ("Swift Boating the Planet") says global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels of UVA committed "fraud pure and simple" against NASA climatologist James Hansen, and that the phony charge "has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak."

Krugman says Michaels "presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place...The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being 'on the high side of reality.'"

Frank Rich ("The Cannes Landslide for Al Gore") says "[T]he unexpected rebirth of Al Gore says more about the desperation of the Democrats than it does about him."

Gore was right early about Iraq, and ahead of the curve on global warming, but "Gore the uninhibited private citizen is not the same as Gore the timid candidate." One of his cardinal virtues, says Rich, is that he's not Hillary Clinton, a sentiment shared by many.

Kicker: "Even so, let's hope Mr. Gore runs...he could at the very least play the role of an Adlai Stevenson or Wendell Willkie, patriotically goading the national debate onto higher ground.... While a Gore candidacy could not single-handedly save the Democrats from themselves any more than his movie can vanquish 'X-Men' at the multiplex, it might at least force the party powers that be to start facing some inconvenient but necessary truths."

The Wall Street Journal says Ned Lamont's "remarkable showing" against Joe Lieberman at the Connecticut Democratic convention is due to "the left is targeting Mr. Lieberman for political extinction because of his pro-war views."

Krugman says there's more to it, including Lieberman's role in the Social Security debate ("providing cover for an administration lie") and his support for "Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair." Also, "let's not forget that Mr. Lieberman showed far more outrage over Bill Clinton's personal life than he has ever shown over Mr. Bush's catastrophic failures as commander in chief."