The headline is great, the noble politicians forcing the big bad bankers to cough up $26 billion to help the downtrodden. It probably won’t hurt on November 6th either. Of course the money doesn’t come from the big, bad bankers. It comes from their shareholders, for the most part perfectly ordinary citizens saving for their retirement. In other words, it’s an income transfer from the disfavored to the favored for the benefit of politicians claiming to act for the benefit of the people.

To be sure, there were mistakes made and sloppy procedures allowed when the banks were faced with an unprecedented avalanche of defaulting mortgages. And these lapses were dealt with in the usual—and proper—way. Bank regulators moved in, audited the books, required the banks to change their procedures, and fined the banks a total of $394 million.

This settlement is wholly a political, not a regulatory act. Corporations are largely defenseless against such a move, as the mainstream media can be counted on to be pro-government and anti-bank. When Ohio Attorney  General Richard Cordray said that the banks were “a business model based on fraud,” the media reported it straight. All too often, the media’s idea of being fair and balanced is to offer the banks an opportunity to prove that they did not commit fraud—in 30 words or less, please. But how many banks have been indicted for fraud over the mortgage mess? Exactly none.

Of the $26 billion, only $1.5 billion will go to homeowners who actually lost their homes through improper foreclosure procedures. That money will be shared by about 750,000 families, each receiving a less-than-princely $1500 to $2000. Most of the rest will go to people who will have their total mortgage debt reduced or have their mortgages refinanced at lower interest rates. Even the New York Times reporters covering the story, were not much impressed: “Economists do not expect a big boost for the economy, in part because the banks have three years to distribute the aid. Some experts questioned whether the accord would do much to stabilize the housing market and its glut of millions of foreclosed homes.”

And Fannie and Freddie, whose business models were at the heart of the mortgage crisis? Well, they’re now back in the hands of the government. Sticking it to them would cost not stockholders but the government money. So while they hold about half the total number of mortgages outstanding, they get a pass. If your mortgage is held by Citibank, you might get a windfall. If it’s held by Fannie Mae, tough luck.

In short, welcome to a glimpse of the wonderful world President Obama would like to see the United States transformed into. It will be a world where the few will act as self-appointed and largely unaccountable fiduciaries for the many.

( 1) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
( 2) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
( 3) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
( 4) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
( 5) Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
( 6) Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
( 7) Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970)
( 8) Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)
( 9) William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
(10) Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

As one of Kurp’s commentators said, this is a “nifty parlor game.” But it also, I think, points to something serious.

“There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with,” Hugh Kenner wrote years ago. But of course no one believes that any more. It’s telling, don’t you think, that Teachout, Kurp, and I agree on just one writer — Cather — without even agreeing on which of her novels ought to be first read. Even my paradoxical revision of Kenner’s apothegm (“There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with, although no one will ever agree on what they are”) is enough, in today’s English departments, to get me housed with the reactionaries, the racists, or worse.

All that’s left are parlor games, offered (as Teachout says he offered his) “apropos of absolutely nothing.” If literature is no longer part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it.

Aaghh! Santorum! Not Santorum!! Surely not Santorum!!!

From Cambridge to Brooklyn, from Georgetown to Hyde Park, from West L.A. to pretty much the entire Bay Area, you could almost hear the howls of anguish this morning. They even reached across the Pacific. “SANTORUM? Oh, America, how you disappoint me,” Jeremy Tian, a writer and actor from Singapore, tweeted in response to my earlier post.

 Cassidy then goes on to say this:

To educated liberals of almost any description, Santorum is an abomination. It’s not just that he’s a pro-life, anti-gay, anti-contraception Roman Catholic of the most retrogressive and diehard Opus Dei variety. It’s his entire persona. With his seven kids, his Jaycee fashion code, his 1970s colonial MacMansion in northern Virginia, his irony bypass, he seems to delight in outraging self-styled urban sophisticates: the sort of folks who buy organic milk, watch “The Daily Show,” and read the New York Times (and The New Yorker, of course).

Pause for a moment on the paragraph I just cited. Let’s be generous and grant that what Cassidy wrote is supposed to be clever, funny, and even self-effacing. It still reveals a bit too much.

Educated liberals of almost any description actually do consider Santorum to be an abomination because of what they consider to be his retrograde Opus Dei persona, including his seven children. How de classe. For people of  Cassidy’s advanced attitudes, the truth is it would be better, and certainly more sophisticated, if Rick and Karen Santorum had two children. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what Brooklyn/Hyde Park/West L.A./Cambridge/Georgetown liberals think should have been done with the other five, including one of whom is a special needs child.)

There is a brand of liberalism – typified by Cassidy and some of his colleagues – that is sneering, morally arrogant, and condescending toward, among others, people of faith. (You know such people; in economic downturns they cling to their Bibles and guns.) What is coursing through the veins of people like Cassidy, when they aren’t lamenting the decline of civil public discourse in America, is unalloyed hatred toward those with whom they disagree, most especially for those who are traditionalists in their moral views.

Honorable liberals (and non-liberals) can disagree with Santorum on issues ranging from abortion to same-sex marriage and gays in the military to women in combat. My own views on some of these matters aren’t what they were a decade or so ago. But for Santorum’s seven children, his fashion code, and his house to inspire genuine loathing tells you much of what you need to know about Cassidy and his kind.

What he wrote isn’t pretty. It isn’t even clever. But it is revealing.

This will disappoint a liberal base that was delighted at the Democrats’ decision to try to force the church to its knees on a principle where the Vatican’s stand runs counter to the opinions of most people, not to mention the practices of most Catholics. But though it is the height of wisdom to give up on a course that was as foolhardy as this, the president shouldn’t think he will not suffer the consequences of having put forward this ill-considered plan. Even after the initiative is withdrawn or watered down, the damage from this episode cannot be undone. He has not only offended Catholics but in attempting to ram this measure down the throat of the church, he has also reminded the country that his signature health care legislation involves a tyrannical expansion of government power.

The president may have thought this was just a matter of pleasing the left on an issue where few agreed with the church. Indeed, the ban on contraception is one on which the Vatican has few supporters even among the Catholic faithful. But most Americans instinctively understood that no matter what they thought of the merits of contraception bans, government ought not to demand that religious institutions subsidize practices they oppose as a matter of conscience. Government interference in internal church matters in this way is unacceptable, and Obama soon learned his attack on Catholics isolated him just as much as the Pope’s stand on birth control.

But far worse than that is the fact that the whole business is a function of government health care mandates. In a single stroke Obama managed to highlight the least popular measure of his administration and did so in a manner that reinforced all the criticisms that had been made of it. And by giving up so quickly, the president has also confirmed his base’s worst fears about his weak leadership style.

Though he may retract the contraception dictat today, by opening up this can of worms, he has done his administration and his hopes for re-election great harm. His assault on religious freedom has energized social conservatives and Republicans. But it has also given wavering Democrats and independents one more reason to be wary about handing Obama a second term.

According to a report from NBC News, U.S. officials believe Israel has employed members of the People’s Mujahedin in harassing the Iranian government and its minions. While the group denies it is involved with Israel, it is difficult to doubt the truth of the allegation that the Iranian dissidents have been receiving Israeli training and have been used to carry out attacks on Tehran’s nuclear program, in particular the assassination of Iranian scientists. While Jerusalem’s critics will call this hypocritical and illegal, their qualms won’t impress many Israelis.

Israel is, after all, locked in a conflict with an Iranian regime that has made no bones about its intentions. Just last week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeated the standard Iranian line about Israel being a “cancerous tumor” that must be eradicated. Coming from a man who leads a regime based on religious fanaticism and which is dedicating massive amounts of the country’s resources towards achieving its nuclear ambitions, this is no idle threat. Under these circumstances, Israel is entirely justified in using whatever means it has to prevent Khameini’s government from achieving its genocidal ends. The MEK may be an unattractive ally, but with its Iranian members and infrastructure of support inside the country, it is an ideal weapon to use against the ayatollahs.

This is not just the standard and cynical argument about the ends justifying the means but rather an entirely defensible strategy in which a vicious and tyrannical government’s foes become legitimate allies in what is for all intents and purposes a war. Israel’s alliance is no more nor less moral than that of the United States and Great Britain with an even worse set of criminals than the MEK: Stalin’s Soviet Union. To those who say it is immoral to use those who have employed terrorism, the only reply can be that it would be far worse for Israel’s government to allow such scruples to prevent them from carrying out actions that might stop the Iranians from going nuclear. Indeed, those who cry out against the possibility of Israeli or American air strikes on Iran to demolish nuclear facilities cannot at the same time criticize covert actions that could theoretically obviate the need for the use of force on that scale. Moreover, in a conflict in which Iran has served as the chief sponsor and source of funds and munitions for the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist groups, it is ridiculous to expect Israel to unilaterally decide using unsavory friends should be beyond the pale.

The MEK are allies of convenience and, just like many wartime allies in other conflicts, share only a common enemy with Israel. But however nasty they may be, Israel need not blush about using them. For a democracy at war, the only truly immoral thing to do would be to let totalitarian Islamists like those in Tehran triumph.

“That’s not us fighting. (The Syrian opposition is) fighting, they’re dying, and they should be given as much a chance as possible to do it,” Khalilzad told me, after a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which he harshly criticized the Obama administration for what he called a failed strategy to “appease and engage adversaries” in the Middle East.

While it’s critical for the U.S. to do what it can to influence the situation in Syria, the idea of arming the opposition is controversial. Not only is there concern about who the opposition actually is, and whether they’re a group the U.S. would want to help bring to power, there’s also a distinct possibility the weapons could fall into the wrong hands. Khalilzad said this could be addressed by limiting our material support to purely defensive weapons.

“We need to be careful about what kind of weapons we give in terms of our regional interest. And we wouldn’t want to give them things that could be useful against our friends and allies,” he said. “I would think more in defensive weapons would be very helpful. Like anti-tank weapons because (the Assad regime is) using tanks to mow people and bomb.”

Outside of arming the opposition, there are also other–albeit, less effective–steps the U.S. can take. Khalilzad proposed reaching out to Christians and Kurds in the region to persuade them to join up with the opposition. He also suggested working with the Iraqis to block Iran from using Iraq as a corridor to channel supplies and weapons to Assad.

But in the end, Khalilzad said, “The will and decision has to be made that we will give them weapons, because this is important and the outcome will be important.”

A few years ago, I witnessed a debate inside the Israeli Knesset between two former heads of Israeli military intelligence, research and assessment, General Yaakov Amidror and General Danny Rothschild. The veterans disagreed on everything — technology, threats, solutions, defensible borders, control of territory and disengagement. During my service in the military, I saw the same phenomenon among officers at every rank. In robust democracies “listening” to soldiers—or civilians—is almost never a shortcut to obvious or unanimous answers.

With that in mind, Beinart is as guilty as anyone of not listening to Israeli soldiers. Consider all the Israeli generals whose opinions he casts aside because they differ from his. On the matter of Gaza and the West Bank, he rejects the opinion of former Chief of Staff General (ret.) Moshe Ya’alon, who opposes disengagements on security grounds. He disregards the former head of Israel’s General Security Service, Avi Dichter, who warned that “the evacuation [from Gaza] is dangerous, and the retreat will give the Palestinians a sense of victory and encouragement for terrorism.” Beinart dismisses the assessments of withdrawals of former head of Israeli intelligence, General Zeevi Farkash, former Israeli Air Force Chief General Ben Eliyahu, and former military secretary to the prime minister, General Gadi Shamni. He also rejects the advice of current National Security Advisor General Amidror, who believes control of territory is essential to defeating terrorism.

On the Iranian threat, he casts aside the warnings of former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, that a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is the best way to keep Israel safe.

Beinart has every right to favor withdrawals from territories and oppose a strike on Iran, but this has little to do with his listening to Israeli soldiers.

The heart of the Iran question is complex. What to do when a brutal theocracy regularly threatens to destroy a member state of the UN and is on the verge of acquiring the most deadly weapons known to man?

Instead of addressing the issue on that basis, Beinart prefers tendentious guilt-by-association. He writes, “Netanyahu’s taste for the apocalyptic flows less from his Jewishness than from his conservatism—a conservatism learned during his close association with the Republican right while he served as a diplomat in Washington and New York in the 1980s.”

Iran does not stand in violation of the Genocide Convention because Netanyahu was hanging out with Republicans in the 1980s. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani said triumphantly, “an atomic bomb would leave nothing in Israel.” Does his actual “taste for the apocalyptic” flow from his time spent secretly cavorting with Republicans in the 1980s?

Seventy percent of Israel’s population and 80 percent of its industrial capacity resides on a tiny strip of coastal territory, which two nuclear bombs could obliterate. Israeli military officials who work day and night to thwart this scenario aren’t fear-mongering right-wingers. They despise war, but many of them have come to the conclusion after painstaking deliberation that only Israeli jets can stop Iranian nukes. It was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after all, who described his nuclear program as a train without brakes.

Beinart writes that “shifting power balances and increased threat levels” coming from Iran are “a far cry from Netanyahu’s language of existential destruction.” Others believe when a country threatens genocide, it should be taken seriously. Iranian euphemisms for Israel’s destruction such as “erased from the pages of history” don’t placate Israeli fears much. Nor does the Iranian leader’s reference to Israel as a “black and dirty microbe” and the subsequent parading of Shihab-3 missiles covered in banners reading, “Israel must be uprooted and erased from history.”

No one outside of a tiny circle of theocratic, apocalyptic, terrorist fanatics knows if Iran will actually use nuclear bombs. But would you bet the lives of millions of civilians on the guess that the Iranian regime’s stated goal is no more than a rhetorical ruse?

By all means, Americans should listen to Israeli soldiers—those who agree with them and those who don’t. But let no one slander those dedicated to stopping the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism from attaining the most deadly weapons on the planet as right-wing warmongers unwilling to listen to Israeli soldiers.

Of course, after the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine Empire, all churches in the region were turned into mosques, with the most conspicuous example being the majestic Hagia Sophia of Constantinople (now Istanbul). But unlike that more famous site, which was registered as a museum when Turkey became a secular republic, the one in Iznik was never formally named as such, though it served in that function and had not been used as a mosque in well over a century. The ruling AKP party of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken the initiative to reinstitute Muslim-only worship at the place, much to the dismay of the Muslim residents of the town who point out there was no shortage of mosques there. But to the AKP, the ancient surge to plant the flag of Islam over the ruins of other cultures is more important than tourism.

The irony here is the Turkish Ministry of Culture had been hoping to promote the place to increase its share of tourists from Europe and elsewhere, especially those interested in the considerable Christian heritage of the region. But like the abortive effort to entice Americans to go to Turkey to see the place where the original Saint Nicholas lived during their Christmas holidays, the AKP’s intolerance trumps other considerations.

While people in the town are appalled at this turn of events, it appears the decision came straight from the top, with Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc taking credit for the conversion of the site. When the Culture Ministry asked to take over the place, Arinc said, “We told them that it is a mosque and that it cannot be used for any other purpose.”

Need we ask how Muslims would feel if an ancient mosque were converted into a church or a synagogue? The answer to that question is obvious. There would be riots, murders and terrorism, with the blame put on those who offended Islamic sensibilities. But the Muslims who run the Turkish government do not think tolerance or religious sensitivity is a two-way street even when their decisions hurt Muslims who stood to benefit from a policy that honored Turkey’s Christian heritage.

The story of the Hagia Sophia of Iznik is a sad one, but what is truly troubling about this tale is the way it illustrates the triumphalist spirit of Islamism redolent of the era of the Ottoman conquest and the short shrift its advocates have for respect for other faiths. Those optimists who keep telling us Turkey can be an Islamic democracy and a model for the Middle East need to look at what happened at Iznik and realize what is happening there is symbolic of that country’s drift toward Islamist tyranny.

“This idle threat that they’re going to interrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz is not enforceable. We have a carrier there, that will not happen,” McConnell told me. “So this is the time to squeeze the Iranians in every direction possible.”

He added that the Saudis would assist with any fallout in oil production.

“The Saudis have already indicated that whatever reduction in oil production might occur as a result of this, they’ll make up,” said McConnell.

The Senate Minority Leader’s comments put him at odds with many military experts who say the regime’s threats are a real risk. The U.S. Navy has reportedly been training for a potential clash with Iran over the strait.

McConnell also blasted Obama’s leadership on Iran, saying that the president only ordered the latest round of tough Iran bank sanctions because Senate Republicans forced him to do it. Obama was required to institute these sanctions under a bill championed by Sens. Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez.

“We forced it on him. He didn’t want the authority,” said McConnell.

He added that Obama now has “greater tools to use on the Iranians. I hope he uses them all.”

Today’s New York Times dispatch on Iran is an example of both. The takeaway from the story is that American and Israeli officials talk to each other about the Iranian nuclear program, and that they sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, but don’t expect that to result in an Israeli airstrike on Iran anytime this afternoon, certainly not before dinner. The reporters write that a phone call last month between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu left American officials “persuaded that Mr. Netanyahu was willing to give economic sanctions and other steps time to work.” This is a sentence that could have been written anytime over the last fifteen years, and in fact is only relevant now (a full month after this phone call) because it still hasn’t changed.

But the curious aspect of this article is that the writers seem to contradict that point in the next paragraph — or, rather, contradict the relevance of even using that quote. They write:

The difference of opinion over Iran’s nuclear “immunity” is critical because it plays into not just the timing — or bluffing — about a possible military strike, but the calculations about how deeply and quickly sanctions against Iran must bite. If the Israeli argument is right, the question of how fast the Iranians can assemble a weapon becomes less important than whether there is any way to stop them.

“‘Zone of immunity’ is an ill-defined term,” said a senior Obama administration official, expressing frustration that the Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly, given the many kinds of pressure being placed on Tehran and the increasing evidence that far tougher sanctions are having an effect.

The Israelis have zeroed in on Iran’s plan to put much of its uranium enrichment near Qum in an underground facility beneath so many layers of granite that even the Pentagon acknowledges it would be out of the reach of its best bunker-busting bombs. Once enrichment activities are under way at Qum, the Israelis argue, Iran could throw out United Nations inspectors and produce bomb-grade fuel without fear the facility would be destroyed.

Now hang on a minute. That sounds like the opposite of an “ill-defined” term. It sounds like the Israelis have clearly and explicitly defined it, in order to reduce possible confusion on the part of, say, unnamed Obama administration officials or reporters. Additionally, if it is merely a question of when the Iranians finish this underground facility, then sanctions have a built-in clock; at some point, they become irrelevant, and according to the logic of this story that is when Israel (or someone) will strike. The moment Netanyahu believes time has run out, something will be done about it. Until then, it is extraordinarily obvious that Netanyahu will give sanctions “time to work.”

It’s entirely possible, of course, that that Netanyahu must be persuaded by the Americans that this Iranian facility is not at the point of no return, and that American intelligence on this matter is superior to the intelligence available to the Israelis. But that’s not what the article says. In fact, the article is actually making the opposite case. The Obama administration official talking to the Times reporters is presenting the case that the administration believes Netanyahu is using the wrong benchmark.

The article explicitly states this. The reporters write that Netanyahu is concerned about the Iranians’ “impregnable breakout capability,” the term for this point of no return. “The Americans have a very different view,” according to the Times.

The article pulls the rug out from under itself in this matter several times. Perhaps these unnamed administration officials were “not authorized to describe the conversation” in part because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Years ago my wife, children, and I attended a PCUSA church, where we enjoyed a very good relationship with the senior pastor, who baptized two of our children. Our church was fairly orthodox theologically and certainly more conservative theologically than the official positions of the PCUSA. But in a relatively short period of time, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, my wife and I heard a guest speaker from the pulpit and a guest Sunday school teacher make wholly inappropriate statements against Israel. I raised the matter with the minister, who put me in touch with an associate pastor who oversaw such matters. And in the course of my discussions with her, I eventually learned our church was serving as host to a group with deep and troubling biases against Israel.

It is one thing, and a commendable thing, to show concern for the plight of Palestinian Christians. But it is quite another to use that issue as a pre-text to excoriate Israel. And so I raised my objections, including in e-mails which went into excruciating detail to refute the claims that were being made against the Jewish state and to underscore how unwise and offensive it was to allow our church to become a tool in the propaganda war against Israel. I also made personal appeals to leaders in our church to pull back from its stance. It never really did, and eventually, we left the church. We had established close friendships over the years, but I didn’t feel like we could be a part of a church that was not simply political (which as a general matter I find quite troublesome), but which in this case was promoting pernicious falsehoods.

I relay this episode simply to underscore how prevalent the anti-Israeli bias is within certain liberal religious institutions. Those who represent them often speak about “social justice” — and yet they implicitly side with the forces of injustice, of hate, and of violence. One is reminded of the words of Isaiah, who prophesied, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

He is absolutely right, and it is imperative to follow his advice even at the risk of further blowback from Pakistan, because there is no other way to achieve any degree of success in Afghanistan while pulling back as quickly as the Obama administration wants to do—namely a switch from combat to advising in 2013 and a complete pull-out in 2014. Even with stepped up drone strikes, the Obama timeline is probably a prescription for disaster and defeat. But if we at least do more to target the insurgent leadership which enjoys safe havens in Pakistan, our forces can somewhat increase their odds of success notwithstanding the rapid collapse of political will in the White House to prosecute this war to a successful conclusion.

But the problem with this analysis is those demanding Romney to inspire conservative passion are asking him to do the impossible. While such a feat would certainly be desirable — for both him and his party — Romney can still win the Republican nomination without morphing into Ronald Reagan, let alone Mike Huckabee. But if he is to win — and that’s a proposition that looks a bit less inevitable than it did on Monday — it will only be on his own terms. If Republicans are to embrace Romney, it must be the real Mitt Romney–flaws and all–not an artifice designed to please the audience at the CPAC conference. Those who wish for Romney to discover some new approach to Republicans are dreaming. After a campaign that has been going full bore for the last nine months — not to mention his first presidential run four years ago — and 16 debates, we have already seen all that Mitt Romney has to offer Republicans.

Romney’s strengths are obvious and impressive. He is someone with a deep understanding of economic issues and vast executive experience in both the public and private sectors. He can also put forward credible conservative positions on foreign policy and has come to embrace stands that satisfy the right on social issues. Though he is rightly accused of having flip-flopped on some issues, he is also a person who has lived an exemplary life and embodies the values of morality, decency and hard work.

But he is not a man who can fire up the base with his ability to articulate conservative ideas or the resentment that so many on the right feel about the liberal establishment, the media or popular culture. That’s Newt Gingrich’s territory. Nor is he a fervent social conservative in the manner of Santorum. He is a technocratic problem solver who can read the lyrics from the conservative hymnal but is no better at singing its melody than he is at finding the correct tune to “America the Beautiful.”

Romney’s inability to connect with ordinary voters or conservatives can’t be fixed. The only real passion in his political portfolio comes out when he discusses economic ideas or when he tries to articulate his belief in American exceptionalism that is at the heart of his life’s work in politics, business and his church. And it is to those virtues that he must cling. Given his opponents’ liabilities and political weaknesses, this ought to be good enough to win him the GOP nomination, even if it turns out to be less of the cakewalk that seemed likely only a few days ago.

Should Romney try to change his approach in order to keep up with Santorum’s passion or should he allow his advisers to convince him to go negative on the Pennsylvanian the way he took down Gingrich, it will not help him. It may be once the cloak of inevitability is stripped away from Romney, most conservatives will flock to a candidate like Santorum who is better at playing to the conservative crowd. But if Romney is to win it will be as the Mitt Romney we already know. He literally has no more tricks to pull out of his bag, and to expect him to come up with new ones is unrealistic and somewhat unfair.

But Gingrich went beyond that to say, “But I can tell you is that, if you look at my whole career, and Scott you’ve known me for many years, you look at the 24 books we’ve written, you look at the 7 movies we’ve made, you know, I like ideas, I like being a candidate of ideas and that’s far and away what I prefer to do and I think if people go to Newt.org and look at all the positive things we have there — just our 54-page paper on how to rebalance the judiciary and force the judges back within the Constitution. Just that one paper would frankly justify the campaign because it is the boldest statement of the founding fathers, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers I think that any modern political figure has written in my lifetime.”

Not quite.

The paper itself, “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution,” makes some useful and interesting points, as my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Ed Whelan points out. But there are also some problematic recommendations. Whelan and Matthew J. Franck lay out (here, here, here and here what they refer to as Gingrich’s “awful proposal to abolish judgeships.” George Will has written that Gingrich’s proposals make him the “first presidential candidate to propose a thorough assault on the rule of law.” Gingrich’s effort to intimidate the courts qualify as, in Will’s words, a “descent into sinister radicalism.” And former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said that if Gingrich’s plans were put into effect, America would become a “banana republic, in which administrations would become regimes, and each regime would feel it perfectly appropriate to disregard decisions by courts staffed by previous regimes.”

Whelan, Franck, Will, and Mukasey are right, and Gingrich is wrong.

Having read “that one paper” the former speaker refers to, I can say with some degree of confidence that it alone does not “frankly justify the campaign.” And for Gingrich to claim it constitutes “the boldest statement of the founding fathers, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers I think that any modern political figure has written in my lifetime” constitutes one of the sillier statements of any modern political figure in my lifetime.

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan said, “The federal government should do what it’s traditionally done since July 4, 1776, namely back out of intruding into the internal life of a church.” Bishops are writing letters to their congregants saying, “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.” Presidents of Catholic universities insist they will reject “this religious intolerance and will not bow down before government regulations that are manifestly unjust.” The National Association of Evangelicals put out a statement saying, “Freedom of conscience is a sacred gift from God, not a grant from the state. No government has the right to compel its citizens to violate their conscience. The HHS rules trample on our most cherished freedoms and set a dangerous precedent.””

This issue is about to go super-nova. According to Politico, “A handful of high-profile Catholic Democrats are bailing on the president and joining the GOP chorus of critics… They include two swing-state pols on the November ballot… Obama’s former DNC chairman, Tim Kaine, who’s running for Senate in Virginia, and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey — as well as House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson.” Freshman Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who’s up for reelection this year, called the Obama edict “un-American” and a “direct affront to the religious freedoms protected under the First Amendment.””

For the White House to engage in what Michael Gerson of the Washington Post calls “the most aggressive attack on the liberty of religious institutions since the 19th century” is a staggeringly stupid political act. Some people offer a fairly benign interpretation of the Obama administration’s motives, calling them technocrats. Perhaps. But I think a stronger case can be made that this act — which is so aggressive, so indefensible, and so at odds with the American creed — is a window into the mind and soul of America’s 44th president.

Not that many years ago, then-Senator Obama gave a speech in which he said, “Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square.” President Obama has done the secularists one better. He’s asking believers to leave their religion at the door before entering religious hospitals, charities, and universities. Believers across the land are rising up to say to Obama, in the most respectful way possible, “Get lost.”

Journalists have long expressed self-righteous indignation if confronted with the fact that many Arab states and terrorist groups consider them useful idiots, easy to dupe, and tools for propaganda projection. Leaked Syrian e-mails should put a rest to such protests, however.

Here’s the advice Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s media adviser gave him before Assad’s interview with Barbara Walters:

“It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’ It’s worth mentioning also what is happening now in Wall Street and the way the demonstrations are been [sic] suppressed by policemen, police dogs and beatings.”

The Syrian briefing paper is certainly worth reading, as is the Syrian regime’s willingness to use the supposed cultural sensitivity of American progressives to shield Syria against American accusations of Syrian atrocities.

In the course of promoting their anti-Israel policies, church leaders have engaged in rhetoric that seeks not only to delegitimize the state of Israel but also the Jewish community. The actions and statements of the church’s Israel Palestine Mission Network (IPMN-PCUSA) have been so egregious that the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella network of Jewish community relations groups, has been forced to go public with their complaints in hopes that ordinary Presbyterians will do something about the epidemic of hate speech springing from church activists.

Even a partial list of offensive statements made by Presbyterian activists on Israel and the Jews ought to send a chill down the spines of church members who may be unaware of what is going on:

At an opening program of the IPMN-PCUSA annual conference, the Rev. Craig Hunter said “greed and injustice is a cancer at the very core of Zionism.”  In a 2010 letter to church delegates, the IPMN-PCUSA falsely accused the Jewish community of intimidating Presbyterians by sending a letter-bomb to the church’s headquarters and setting fire to a church. IPMN-PCUSA tweeted an article proclaiming “Jewish power + Jewish hubris = moral catastrophe of epic proportions.”   IPMN-PCUSA also has supported virulently anti-Israel resolutions including those equating Israel with apartheid and has been a vocal supporter of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanction movement. …

The IPMN-PCUSA Facebook page includes a cartoon of President Obama wearing weighty Jewish star earrings to suggest Jewish control of the American leaders, a common theme on the site.  The IPMN-PCUSA has posted articles that accuse Jews of controlling Hollywood, the media, and American politics – and blaming Israel for the American housing and economic crisis. IPMN-PCUSA’s communications chair also posted her opposition to a two-state solution and the existence of a Jewish state, something which she terms “anachronistic.”  The same IPMN leader, Noushin Framke, clicked “like” on the Obama cartoon with the Jewish stars and another post that Hamas should keep Israeli Gilad Shalit hostage until Palestinians are granted a right of return.

The idea that a mainstream American church would engage in this sort of abuse of Jews and the Jewish state is shameful. Moreover, this is not about church activists engaging in legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. By participating in a propaganda war against Zionism and the existence of Israel and its right of self-defense, these Presbyterian activists have crossed the line that separates criticism from delegitimization. Anyone who would deny Jews the same rights of self-determination and self-defense they would never think of questioning when it comes to any other country is engaging in bigotry. The church’s activities have nothing to do with the promotion of peace and everything to do with scapegoating Israel and the Jews.

While this has nothing to do with the beliefs, let alone the actions of the overwhelming majority of American Presbyterians, it goes without saying the responsibility for policing these institutions belongs to church members. Because Jewish community relations professionals have failed to get the church hierarchy to act on this question up until now, it is up to the rank-and-file to speak out against this behavior and see that it ends. Those Presbyterians who say they wish to live in fellowship with their Jewish neighbors are obligated to ensure their church does not engage in anti-Semitism or support an economic war on the Jewish state. On this point, there can be no middle ground. The church must repudiate these extremists who have appropriated their good name to promote a hateful cause.

Conn Carroll of the Washington Examiner points out that in both Missouri and Minnesota, a state Romney won in 2008, he did not win a single county. (There are 114 counties in Missouri.)

The odds of winning the nomination are very much in Romney’s favor, in part because Newt Gingrich is doing his nemesis the favor of hanging around, with the result (potentially) of denying Santorum the mano-a-mano contest with Romney he needs. On the other hand, Santorum might well supplant Gingrich as the conservative alternative whether Gingrich stays or leaves the race. Many scales have fallen from many eyes in recent days, and it’s becoming obvious to more and more GOP voters that Rick Santorum is a far stronger (and more reliably conservative) candidate than Newt Gingrich. If Santorum were to knock off Romney in Michigan, then the trajectory of this race could change in a hurry.

Now a word about both Romney and Santorum.

It’s not a state secret that Romney has not yet been able to make the sale with the conservative base of his party. The resistance to him isn’t an intense dislike, at least from most on the right. It’s more of a wariness, a lack of comfort, a sense the former Massachusetts governor isn’t in his heart a true or reliable conservative. Whether that’s fair or not, it’s a real challenge for Mitt Romney to overcome — and as we saw last night, he’s far from overcoming it.

But there appears to be more to it than that. Governor Romney reassures many GOP voters, but he inspires few of them. And as he surely must know, politics is, at least in large part, about winning people’s allegiance and loyalty. They want to believe they are part of more than a campaign; they want to believe they are part of a great cause. And most people right now can’t tell you what great cause the Romney campaign represents.

It’s too easy for commentators to pile on candidates after a bad showing, as Romney experienced last night, and forget their strengths, of which Romney has many. He’s a fine, and at times a first-rate, debater. He’s shown fluency when it comes to the issues. He’s a man of personal decency and moderate temperament. He’s shown the capacity to lift his game when necessary. And he’s disciplined and focused. But right now there’s a weakness at the core of the campaign, and the Romney team would be wise to understand what that is.

It would of course be a huge error to try to turn Romney into someone he’s not. What he needs to do is to build a compelling narrative around his genuine strengths. I’ve written before the great challenge facing America today is reforming public institutions that were designed for the needs of the mid-20th century. Our health care and entitlement system, tax code, schools, infrastructure, immigration policies, and regulatory regime are outdated, worn down, and terribly out of touch with the needs of our time. This has impeded economic growth, impaired the creation of human capital, and put us on the path toward an unprecedented fiscal crisis. Each of these public institutions needs to be improved and modernized, requiring structural reforms on a large scale. It seems to me that Romney, by virtue of his experience and skill sets, can make the case he’s the person best equipped to lead this effort.

Now a word about my former Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Rick Santorum. Rick has shown impressive resilience, having won over voters almost literally one at a time. He’s very intelligent and well-informed; he’s mostly stayed clear of the Romney v. Gingrich fight, focusing on the issues rather than personal foibles of the other candidates; and he’s shown the ability to be an outstanding prosecutor for his case (as when he’s gone after RomneyCare). Santorum can also claim to be a “conviction politician,” including when those convictions were politically costly.

What Santorum has also done, and probably hasn’t received enough credit for doing, is to recalibrate his tone. At points early on during this campaign, he came across as too intense, too cock-sure, too impatient and righteous in his zeal. Those things, it’s important to say, were the result of a man of deep convictions and an admirable fearlessness. But it at times made him unsympathetic and not easy to embrace. But that began to change right around December, and he’s now projected a warmth and human quality that’s quite appealing. Even if Santorum doesn’t win the GOP nomination, he’s reestablished himself as an important and influential figure within conservatism.

For now, though, this primary race – at times fascinating, volatile, engaging and dispiriting –continues. And whoever emerges victorious will have a slightly better than even shot at becoming America’s 45th president.

He writes, “So he recommends an annual tax on unrealized capital gains of 15 percent: For individuals and married couples who earn, say, more than $2.2 million in income, or own $5.7 million or more in publicly traded securities (representing the top 0.1 percent of families), the appreciation in their publicly traded stock and securities would be “marked to market” and taxed annually as if they had sold their positions at year’’s end, regardless of whether the
securities were actually sold. The tax could be imposed at long-term capital gains rates so tax rates would stay as they were.”

Naturally (cue the liberal parrot—“ Arrrwk! Tax the rich!”), it would apply only to the very rich. But only to the very rich whose assets are in the stock of publicly-traded companies, where the capital gains can be easily and exactly calculated. If someone owned a very successful sub-chapter S corporation, however, the
tax would not apply. Nor would it apply to someone who owned, say, the King Ranch in Texas, all 1 million acres of it, or a Greenwich, Connecticut, waterfront mansion.

First, how long do you suppose it would be before the liberal parrot was demanding this tax be applied to the millionaires and billionaires who earn only $250,000 a year, and then to all capital gains in publicly held corporations? Arrrwk! Tax the Rich!

Second, the perverse economic consequences of this would be almost without end. Just for starters, if a stock subject to the tax doubled in a year— by no means unheard of for a successful company in a bull market–the owner would have to sell 7.5 percent of it to pay the tax, or sell other assets, or, as David Miller
suggests with an airy wave of his rhetorical hand, borrow against it. All of these could have very adverse business consequences for the owner.

Moreover, he says that should the stock go down the next year, then the government should pay him 15 percent of the unrealized capital loss. It’ is not unheard of for the stock market to lose 50 percent of its value in a calendar year. (It lost that much between October 2008, and the following March, in the wake of the
financial crisis). In that case, in the teeth of a terrible economy, the government would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reimburse the rich for their paper losses.

It is well established that a tax system dependent on taxing the rich causes government revenues to soar in good times and plunge in bad times. Just ask California, the poster child of this approach to taxation. The Miller plan would be California on steroids.

Naturally, Miller’’s argument for this tax is “fairness.” He writes that Lady Gaga (a singer, I’’m told) has to pay 35 percent on her enormous income, so why shouldn’’t Mark Zuckerberg have to pay 15 percent on his enormous capital gains? Well, for one thing, Lady Gaga’’s income is not subject to a 35 percent
tax at the corporate level.

He writes, “if  Zuckerberg never sells his shares, he can avoid all income tax and then, on his death, pass on his shares to his heirs. When they sell them, they will be taxed only on any appreciation in value since his death.”

Yeah, except that his heirs will have had to pay a 35 percent estate tax first. In 2013, the estate tax is scheduled to rise to 55 percent. Even in 2010 when, for one glorious year, there was no death tax, the heirs acquired the decedent’s cost basis along with the stock. So they have to pay the full capital gains when they sell the stock, not just the capital gains since the date of death.

Is David S. Miller, a tax lawyer, unaware of the revived estate tax? Or is he and the New York Times so intellectually dishonest as to ignore it in pursuit of their agenda? I vote for the latter.

Could anything be more relevatory of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of latter-day liberalism then this  proposal?

While many Americans are obsessing about human rights elsewhere in the Arab world, it appears the American-funded PA is practicing its own brand of tyranny. The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh reports the Palestinian security forces are now monitoring Facebook posts by residents of the West Bank and taking those who make critical remarks about the PA’s leadership in for questioning. Because Palestinians know all too well the armed gunmen who report to Abbas and his underlings are Fatah thugs and not genuine law enforcement officers, the upshot of is only nice things are going to be said there about Abbas.

The idea that the PA respected the human rights of those Palestinians who were placed under its care by the Oslo Accords was always something of a fantasy. But since the death of Yasir Arafat, many here have clung to the notion that Abbas was an improvement. But that was always more a matter of apparel than anything else, because Americans find it hard to believe a man who wears a suit to work like Abbas can be just as much of a despot as one who wore fatigues like Arafat.

Given the low standards set for human rights and governance by Abbas’s predecessor one might think Internet censorship is the least of the problems of ordinary Palestinians. But in the absence of a PA government that respects the rule of law, peace with Israel or even a civil Palestinian society will remain a distant dream.