EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week”–a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review–looks like.
#-# Have you heard the news? President Bush’s poll numbers are bad. But you may already know that, because if you are reading this on NRO you might well be a Bush supporter who is having doubts about the president’s performance. In the latest Gallup poll, just 31 percent of those surveyed approve of the job Bush is doing, while 65 percent disapprove. For the approval number to be so low means that Bush is losing some Republicans and conservatives. They’re unhappy about runaway federal spending, and they’re nervous about Iraq. But the big reason is–drum roll–the president’s policy on immigration. In the Gallup survey, immigration is the only issue on which more Republicans disapprove of Bush than approve–by a 52 percent to 40 percent margin. By all accounts, the president is absolutely sure that his lenient immigration policy is right. But a lot of his most loyal supporters aren’t buying it.
#-# This week, Congress voted, by healthy margins (244-185 in the House, 54-44 in the Senate), to extend the tax cuts on dividends and capital gains through the end of 2010. Now all the tax cuts will expire at that time. It was a wise, and overdue, move. Reduced taxes on capital fueled the late-1990s boom, which really took off when Congress cut capital-gains taxes in 1997, and the current one, which began in earnest when Congress enacted further tax cuts on capital in 2003. But Republicans won’t have sealed the deal against higher taxes until they first restrain and then cut spending. Our corporate taxes are high compared with those of most of our trading partners, and our tax code remains excessively complex and inefficient. There is plenty of work still to do.
#-# The judicial-confirmation wars have started again–sort of. This week, employing the kind of tactics they perfected in earlier fights against Bush nominees, Democrats forced Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a second hearing on appeals-court candidate Brett Kavanaugh. But the hearing produced nothing. Democratic senators wanted to know if Kavanaugh had anything to do with administration memos concerning torture. He didn’t. They wanted to know if he knew Jack Abramoff. He didn’t. They even wanted to know whether–horrors!–Karl Rove sometimes sat in on White House meetings about judicial nominees. Turns out Rove has, in fact, done that, although there is nothing at all improper about it and it has nothing to do with the Kavanaugh nomination. By the end of the hearing, it was clear that Democrats had accomplished nothing, and it appears Kavanaugh is headed for confirmation. The real questions will come when other, more controversial nominees–Terrence Boyle, William Myers, and William Haynes–come up. Will Republicans fight for them? A lot of loyal GOP voters are waiting to find out.
#-# The decision by Florida House speaker Allan Bense not to seek the Republican Senate nomination virtually guarantees that it will go to Rep. Katherine Harris in September–and this, in turn, virtually guarantees the reelection of Democratic senator Bill Nelson in November. We’ve already explained our reservations about Harris here, and we’re hardly alone. “I just don’t believe she can win,” said Gov. Jeb Bush this week. “Most of the polls I see show her down by 30.” Nelson is a lackluster incumbent in a state that leans red. He ought to be vulnerable. But the right challenger never emerged–partly because of a political environment that doesn’t favor Republicans at the moment, partly because Harris has been thought to have an insurmountable cash advantage over other GOP contenders. Whatever the case, today is the filing deadline for candidates, and nobody else is expected to jump in. And that means nobody is going to bounce Harris out.
#-# Judicial Watch has uncovered documents showing how aggressively the Clinton administration pushed to bring RU 486, a regimen of drugs to induce abortion, to the United States. Those documents, obtained from the Clinton Presidential Library, reveal an administration eager to pressure a reluctant company to begin marketing the drugs here. It took a lot of time and effort on the Clintonites’ part, but the FDA gave its approval for the drugs in 2000. The Judicial Watch report makes a strong case that the normal procedures and safeguards were set aside. Even today, the FDA seems to be treating RU 486 rather more favorably than other drugs that have been linked to patients’ deaths. Curious, isn’t it? You’d almost suspect that the agency had been politicized.
#-# With so many headlines devoted to Iran this week, you’d think something new had happened. You would be wrong. There was hype aplenty about an “opening of dialogue” when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, sent President Bush a letter; but in reality the missive was full of sound and fury signifying nothing. A long rant against U.S. policy, it made no reference to Iran’s nuclear program, and was surely timed to distract attention from the meeting of the U.N. Security Council powers, plus Germany, to discuss Iran. That meeting didn’t change anything either. France and Britain are still squeamish about the use force. China and Russia are still squeamish about everything, including economic sanctions. And Condoleezza Rice has said that the U.S. will wait for the next European diplomatic overture to Tehran before pushing for another Security Council resolution. A short delay probably won’t cost us much, but the U.S. should be prepared to do what it must–with or without U.N. blessing–to stop Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons.
#-# There was one piece of good news from Iran this week. The New York Sun reports that Amir Abbas Fakhravar–a prominent dissident who has spoken with NRO–has escaped Iran. Fakhravar has been hounded by the mullahs ever since the publication of his book This Place Is Not a Ditch, an attack on Iran’s clerical regime. They imprisoned him and tried to kill him; but they failed, and next week will see him in Washington, D.C., seeking support for Iran’s democratic opposition. We wish him well–and hope that Washington listens.
#-# Recall that the old U.N. Human Rights Commission came under fire for including as members some of the world’s worst human-rights abusers–China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia among them. We’re pleased to report that the new U.N. Human Rights Council’s first members were selected on Tuesday, and the winners include . . . China, Cuba, and Saudia Arabia. Three cheers for progress.
#-# In what may be the beginning of the end of the crisis in Darfur, the Sudanese government and two of the country’s largest rebel groups have made a peace deal. Credit for the deal belongs mostly to the Bush administration, which kept up the pressure in the absence of U.N. leadership. But to ensure that the deal’s signing proves more than a hollow hope, an important task remains: America must insist that a sufficiently powerful peacekeeping force be allowed to enter the affected areas of Sudan. The violence has been too horrific and sustained to dissipate with the flourish of a pen, and the only viable path to peace is through the deterrent firepower of stern neutral enforcement.
#-# Is the Department of Homeland Security providing the Mexican government with intelligence about American citizens, and allowing Mexican officials to dictate the investigative activities of U.S. border-patrol agents? These are among the explosive allegations leveled by California’s Daily Bulletin, based, at least in part, on complaints by current and former agents who have long felt undermined by their bosses in Washington–and in particular by an administration that, when not indifferent toward immigration enforcement, appears openly hostile toward it. Homeland Security denies these allegations. It asserts that, consistent with U.S. obligations under the Vienna Convention of 1963, it is required both to permit arrested aliens to communicate with their consulates and to provide those consulates with basic information about the aliens’ cases (including time and place of arrest, as well as any claims of mistreatment, whether by U.S. officials or civilians, during apprehension and detention). It insists that this does not include intelligence about Minuteman launch sites and patrol areas. That insistence, however, is suspect. It is contradicted by public statements from border-patrol agents and other DHS officials that such information is shared. It is further contradicted by statements on an official Mexican-government website indicating that U.S. Customs and Border Protection routinely notifies Mexico about Minuteman locations. This story bears watching. The growing rift over illegal immigration between Americans and their government, and between the Bush administration and the Republican base, may soon be beyond mending.
#-# When it comes to Middle East scholarship, Yale is headed the way of Columbia University (a.k.a. Birzeit-on-the-Hudson, and home of the late Edward Said). Yale looks a little more like Birzeit-in-the-ghetto after its history department voted to endorse a job offer to University of Michigan professor and professional West-basher Juan Cole. Cole neither seeks evidence nor allows facts to sway his discourse. He poses as an expert on Iraq, but has never traveled there. He claims fluency in Arabic but, given a choice to put up or shut up, well, let’s just say he prefers English. His academic writings–all dated–have failed to impact the field. Indeed, his willingness to blame the West for the region’s ills has been undercut by other books which use a wider range of primary sources. For academe, the stakes of celebrating work like Cole’s are great: Does scholarship require research, or will hypothesis suffice? If Cole receives a lifetime appointment, Yale gives him a free pass to eschew real scholarship while each Yale student subsidizes his blog with a $43,050 tuition check.
#-# Dan Brown’s amazingly successful novel The Da Vinci Code deserves most of the criticisms it has gotten–as history, it is hogwash; as theology, it is garbage; and as a piece of literature, it is at best a readable thriller. The movie version will arrive in theaters next Friday. With Tom Hanks in the leading role and director Ron Howard at the helm, there is every reason to expect that it will enjoy a profitable run. This will cause further consternation, much of it healthy. But it’s hard to believe that the book or the film will sway the opinion of anybody who isn’t already predisposed to believe nonsense or take a hostile attitude toward organized religion. It requires a willful disregard for tradition and truth to believe that Jesus was a husband and a father, and that the Roman Catholic Church is thick with murderous conspirators who mean to cover it up. Yet it’s also possible to hope that the book, for all its flaws, has inspired people to learn more about Mary Magdalene, the Council of Nicea, and Opus Dei. If what they learn is true–the facts aren’t hard to find–then The Da Vinci Code could be a force for good. Some things work in mysterious ways.
#-# The passing of A. M. Rosenthal, the great journalist and former executive editor of the New York Times, has produced an outpouring of heartfelt tributes from his former colleagues. He might best be remembered as a tireless advocate of human rights, and a relentless opponent of “brutal countries and their brutal affairs,” as he described Communist China in 2003. Abe was a tough and brilliant voice of reason, and journalism will miss him. R.I.P.