Free Republic

<p>An appalled friend sent in the quick solution to what happened at half-time during the Super Bowl: "The entire Jackson family should be launched into outer space." Since we can't do that (can we?), it falls to we earthlings to discern just what came to pass on Super Bowl Sunday. Another friend -- also young, urban and sophisticated -- found cause to be perplexed: "One feels like a bluenose complaining, but that's part of the problem. How did things reach this point, with strip-club sleaze part of mainstream youth culture?"</p>

<p>For politics, it was a most excellent week. Not because dour John Kerry rose from his crypt to win the Iowa caucuses. Not because George Bush said, "Our greatest responsibility is the active defense of the American people" in his State of the Union speech. The political week was excellent because it was that rare thing in our politics: It was real, totally, gloriously real. Much of the rest of the time it has become something not quite real.</p>

<p>O'Neill Says Book Bashing Bush 'Isn't My Book'</p> <p>"The Price of Loyalty" -- which everyone thinks Paul O'Neill wrote but didn't write -- is about how no one in the sealed-off cloisters of the Bush White House would listen to him or take his ideas seriously. In the past week, however, the whole world has been able to discover what was on Mr. O'Neill's mind. The BBC's Portuguese-language edition conveyed Mr. O'Neill's opinion of the President to the people of Brazil: "o presidente era como 'um cego em uma sala cheia de surdos.'" That's the part in which the former Treasury secretary/Alcoa CEO calls Mr. Bush "a blind person in a roomful of deaf people."</p>

<p>Looking out my office window in lower Manhattan, across the 16 acres that have become an excavation site, I can see a steel mesh fence on the far side, and from one end to the other people are standing at the fence, looking into the September 11 space. This is Christmas week, and you could say these are just holiday tourists who've come to gawk at "Ground Zero." But these people are always at the fence, and have been at all hours for more than two years, looking in.</p>

<p>Let me count the things Saddam Hussein is not. Saddam is not Michael Jackson. Saddam is not Scott Peterson. Saddam is not Kobe or Robert Blake. He isn't Strom Thurmond's illegitimate daughter. He isn't Dennis Kozlowski's birthday party, and he didn't win "Survivor."</p>

<p>When Edith Bartley called the Journal last Wednesday morning to say that her husband had finally lost his long and courageous battle against cancer, my thoughts went back to my first meeting with Robert L. Bartley. That was a long time ago. In the late 1960s, Bob had dropped into the Journal's London bureau, where I was based. He was then an editorial writer in New York, barely 30 years old, but didn't seem especially thrilled in the presence of glamorous foreign correspondents.</p>

<p>Don Corleone would fit right in as Democratic Party boss.</p> <p>Maybe Saddam's capture changes the dynamics of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But I doubt it. Change of direction is not something that comes easily to this party anymore. Al Gore's grandly public endorsement of Howard Dean last week confirms my view that the easiest way to understand the Democratic Party today is by watching "The Godfather."</p>

<p>Over the years a certain legend has grown up around Bob Bartley that he was a writer of forbidding, dazzling and sometimes distant intellect -- aloof, shy and given to turning conversations into becalmed seas of silence. Whatever the truth in the legend, it only partly explained the man. There is more.</p>

<p>President Bush delivered an historically important speech in London this week. It was dense with big ideas deserving reflection, more than can be explored in the space of a column. Suffice to say that Mr. Bush's ideas were met with a swift, one-idea retort in Istanbul the next day.</p>

<p>On the other hand, part of me is disappointed that I won't be able to see CBS's movie, "The Reagans," in about a week. I wanted to invite my pals over to watch James Brolin acting his heart out to be the Gipper. You don't get that many chances to see the first screening of a movie that was headed straight for that rare, wonderful ranking in the paperback movie guides -- BOMB.</p>

<p>Television is an electronic faucet, always on, always dripping images, and sometimes it floods the brain. This week the flood came. It began Sunday with images of blown apart buildings in Baghdad and continued with the sight of California fiercely burning.</p>

<p>If there is one remark that a tourist through the political life of the United States hears constantly -- from political professionals to amateur enthusiasts -- it is that our politics has never seemed more polarized. How did that happen? Perhaps a culture that could devise Xtreme Sports deserves an Xtreme Politics in which "issues" such as abortion, gay marriage and judicial nominations become not just politics, but death-struggles. It wasn't meant to be this way.</p>

<p>Unlike the rest of us, Californians have to pass through life perched over the San Andreas Fault. As such, their survival depends on being able to pick up vibrations faster than most people, whether it's glasses of water shifting on a tabletop or politics rippling across the vast and diverse terrain of the Golden State. On Tuesday, more than seven million restless Californians voted to replace their governor, and once the tectonic plates of this recall-cum-gubernatorial election stopped shifting, the one political monument that I saw lying in pieces was the traditional notion of just who and what constitutes a "moderate." As of Tuesday's reordering in California, I think the definition of political "moderate" has shifted seismically to the right.</p>

<p>Some 64% of Americans stand firm in support of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll just out. That makes sense. But 51% now oppose Mr. Bush's request for $87 billion to rebuild Iraq. That makes sense, too. What evidence of progress in Iraq have the American people been given to sign another check?</p>

<p>It's been a long time since Americans diverted much time from their day to pay heed to the United Nations. One recalls how years back the eloquence of the first Israeli ambassador to the U.N., the late Abba Eban, transfixed even schoolchildren in the U.S. Pat Moynihan attracted some attention to the free-parking palace on the East River while he was U.S. ambassador, but of late the American heartland hasn't given much notice.</p>

<p>September 11, 2003, in the morning in lower Manhattan, was like September 11, 2001. A beautiful morning. As good as a day in September ever gets. And it was just like this, then and yesterday, on the banks of the Potomac flowing past the Pentagon and in a breezy field in southeastern Pennsylvania.</p>

<p>The biggest problem with the U.S. economy right now is that it is so utterly boring.</p> <p>Animal spirits? Yeah, if the animal is a tree sloth. Nothing out there moves. The stock market is said to be in its "trading range." So are the New York Mets. You begin to feel like the fat, sweaty guy that Orson Welles played in some desolate border town, suit soaked through, mopping off the intense heat in a day going nowhere. We gotta get out of this place.</p>

<p>There is a debate under way--an ethical debate, apparently--over whether it would be proper for NBC to make a movie about the life of the former POW, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, without her permission. When a news person shouted a question about this matter at her father, Mr. Lynch said it was "on the back burner." But simmering.</p>

<p>"Today our nation saw evil."</p> <p>The air fills with prayer this weekend as worshipers, or at least church-goers, attend the rites of Holy Week and Passover. These rituals call forth traditions and ideas born centuries ago, not least the idea that mankind is redeemable. It seems, however, that one other idea that for centuries had been a constant through these few days has declined and is out of favor. That is the idea of evil. There is something about evil today -- the word, its implications -- that discomfits up-to-date sensibilities. I think modern discomfort with evil explains, in part, the opposition to making war against Saddam Hussein.</p>

<p>It was really only with the astonishing televised events from China's Tiananmen Square, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Eastern Europe, that the world's people began to see that they were no longer operating as political and economic islands. Politics, currencies, trade, and yes, basic political values are all being drawn together into an evolving consensus of what constitutes a world order. The Saddam Husseins of the world would wreck this. Their piracy would constantly shatter and retard the aspirations of workers at all levels of the world's economic system."</p>