Mark Steyn writes that the world should be thankful for America:

…Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas

Look at the support that Thompson is getting from some very notable lawyers (and law professors). He definitely seems to be the candidate of the Volokh Conspiracy, with the support of at least three of the conspirators (Eugene himself, Jonathan Adler, and Orrin Kerr). Interesting, considering the libertarian bent of the site.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve never been to Thompson’s web site before. I was just looking over his policy positions. A lot of it is motherhood (the devil’s always in the details) but I find very little there with which I disagree. I have to say that I particularly liked this one: “I am committed to…dissolution of the IRS as we know it.”

I was hoping that he would outright advocate eliminating the Department of Education as well, but that might be seen as too extreme a position in a general election campaign.

No space policy, though, or even a general science and technology policy, other than energy. Wonder if he’d like some suggestions?

Look at the support that Thompson is getting from some very notable lawyers (and law professors). He definitely seems to be the candidate of the Volokh Conspiracy, with the support of at least three of the conspirators (Eugene himself, Jonathan Adler, and Orrin Kerr). Interesting, considering the libertarian bent of the site.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve never been to Thompson’s web site before. I was just looking over his policy positions. A lot of it is motherhood (the devil’s always in the details) but I find very little there with which I disagree. I have to say that I particularly liked this one: “I am committed to…dissolution of the IRS as we know it.”

I was hoping that he would outright advocate eliminating the Department of Education as well, but that might be seen as too extreme a position in a general election campaign.

No space policy, though, or even a general science and technology policy, other than energy. Wonder if he’d like some suggestions?

Look at the support that Thompson is getting from some very notable lawyers (and law professors). He definitely seems to be the candidate of the Volokh Conspiracy, with the support of at least three of the conspirators (Eugene himself, Jonathan Adler, and Orrin Kerr). Interesting, considering the libertarian bent of the site.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve never been to Thompson’s web site before. I was just looking over his policy positions. A lot of it is motherhood (the devil’s always in the details) but I find very little there with which I disagree. I have to say that I particularly liked this one: “I am committed to…dissolution of the IRS as we know it.”

I was hoping that he would outright advocate eliminating the Department of Education as well, but that might be seen as too extreme a position in a general election campaign.

No space policy, though, or even a general science and technology policy, other than energy. Wonder if he’d like some suggestions?

Walter Russell Meade, on the Jews and the WASPs.

Larry Kudlow apparently interviewed Fred Thompson today for his CNBC show. I didn’t see it, but he has provided what he thinks is a summary of the results.

If it is an accurate assessment of his positions, there is absolutely nothing on which I disagree with him related there. Which is pretty amazing to me, because that’s unusual, if not a first, for a major party politician with me.

I think that Megan McArdle (and Tyler Cowen) has a good explanation for one of the reasons that space policy, and NASA is such a mess. It has too much money:

In an altogether excellent piece on medical innovation, Tyler Cowen notes:

The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected from Congress. It is not a success which can easily be replicated. The more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence allocation. We should guard this feature of the system jealously and try to learn from it. If we can.

This is a seriously, seriously underrated factor in public policy analysis, and I include the libertarian variety. The fact that you can do something awesome with $15 million does not mean that you could do something super-awesome with $150 million. It may simply not be possible to broaden what you are doing very much before countervailing forces–such as congressional interference (Exhibit A: the goddamn Acela)–kick in.

This is a fundamental problem of bureaucracies, and one that won’t be fixed with regard to space until private activities are much larger than government ones. Or actual space accomplishments become politically important. They certainly aren’t currently, and haven’t been since the sixties.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of Megan, she’s spending some time in Hanoi, and has a lot of interesting posts about Vietnam. Check out this one, on the state of the economy and human productivity:

The sight of people carrying goods in traditional ways, selling produce off the backs of bicycles, looks terribly romantic. I walked past two tourists today who were agreeably chatting about how beautiful and sustainable it all is. But it’s hard to find anything romantic about human beings using themselves as mules.

As one commenter notes, wealth doesn’t just happen on its own (or rather, it does if not prevented by poor governance), and unfortunately, collectivist economic theories tend to destroy, rather than create it.

This is depressing.

So, Kathleen Willey writes a book about how she was attacked by the Clinton machine when she was forced to testify about his sexual predatory behavior. I put up a post about it, with (what I thought was) a link to an interview of her.

A commenter (anonymous, other than a first name) shows up and implies that she’s lying about her book manuscript being stolen (i.e., slandering her and besmirching her character). I challenged the commenter to go actually follow the link, and read the interview. (S)he said that (s)he had done both.

Funny thing, though. It turns out that when I initially put up the post, I pasted in the wrong link, linking to this instead, a piece by Stuart Taylor on the academic rot of political correctness.

In other words, the commenter lied–if (s)he had actually followed the link and read it, as (s)he claimed, (s)he would have complained about it not being the Willey interview, as Tom (who was apparently the first person to actually follow the link) did.

In other words, a Clinton defender shows up, slanders a Clinton accuser, and prevaricates in the process (while ironically complaining about my lack of “courteous discourse”). Just like the book says. Maybe she can add a new chapter in the next printing.

[Update at 4 PM EST]

This seems pertinent. Brent Bozell talks about the media’s whitewash of Hillary.

[Update about 5 PM EST]

Camille Paglia:

If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I will certainly vote for her. But I continue to find it hard to believe that my party truly craves that long nightmare of d

Peter Berkowitz writes about Bush hatred, and so-called progressives stated pride in it:

Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims–who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance–to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.

Some people, based on posts like the previous one, have mindlessly called me a “Clinton hater.” Not just me, but anyone who points out that they are both corrupt liars. But there’s no passion in such a statement–it’s just a clinical factual description. If I state that Ted Bundy, or Charles Manson, or (for that matter) OJ Simpson are murderers, does it mean that I hate them? I don’t. I’m simply making a factual statement.

I’ve noted in the past that I’m often foolishly accused by people of being a Bush lover, simply because I’m not a Bush hater. And I’m also often accused of being a Clinton hater, simply because I (unlike, generally, the accusers) am not someone who loves him beyond all reason. From my perspective, I’m simply rationally evaluating both men based on the record. George W. Bush has many flaws, but doesn’t deserve the vituperation that is heaped on him. Bill Clinton isn’t evil, but he is a profoundly corrupt, narcissistic man.

I don’t hate the Clintons–I just don’t want them to regain political power. Of course, I’m just not that into hate, period, for the reasons that Berkowitz describes–it’s an emotion that clouds reason and judgment. I don’t even hate Osama bin Laden. I wish him dead, but not because I hate him. I simply, dispassionately think the world better off without him, and those like him.

But of course, the word “hate,” like “racist,” has lost most of its intellectual currency as a result of overuse and abuse by the left. So it’s all the more interesting that the same people take such pride in their admitted (and irrational) hatred of George Bush.