Yesterday my friend David Brooks wrote a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger op-ed for The New York Times explaining why, in his view, Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice-President. It comes down, he said, to “experience,” which he says she lacks.

As it happens, though, I chanced to stumble upon the uncensored version of David’s column. The beginning was garbled. But the ending was legible. This is what I found:

Barack Obama has many virtues. If you wanted someone to be a community organizer, he’d be your man. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. He has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, he seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Obama nomination in the first place.

I know that David’s copy got changed before it actually appeared in the Times. I have to say I prefer his original version. Why? Partly because I agree with him that experience matters–it’s not the only important thing, but it is one important thing. Leave aside for a moment the most serious questions about Obama: 1) the question of who he really and where his true allegiance lies, and 2) what he and his team would do to the country’s economy, civil liberties, and standing in the world–leave aside those momentous issues for a moment and just consider his stunning lack of experience. It’s not only that he is a first term Senator, it is also that he is a first-term Senator who has been ostentatiously hors de combat when it came to voting.

Joe Biden was correct when he said that the Presidency no place for “on-the-job training.” I for one am glad that John McCain brings a wealth of experience to the top of his ticket and that Sarah Palin brings her experience running a town and a state to her place on the ticket. Of course, character and talent are also important, and I am also glad that McCain and Palin exhibit such conspicuous probity and political talent. (Even Maureen Dowd, deep down, would have to admit that Sarah Palin is a talented politician: anyone who watched her convention speech would have to admit that.) Add to that the McCain platform on issues from taxes to foreign policy and you can see why David’s unexpurgated column was so skeptical about Barack Obama.

And people say that it is almost impossible for someone of conservative principles to work for the Times and emerge with his principle intact. Pshaw!

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What went wrong? “I had Greek columns and glitter and a damn stadium . . .”  And now this.

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Professor John Frary, who is running for Congress in Maine, has isolated and formulated a preliminary typology of a new pathogen that is circulating through the body politic,

Palinosis, n. pl. palinoses. Any of several poorly differentiated disorders among Left-lurchers that involve demented social, political, and rhetorical behaviors. They are distinguished individually by special manifestations (as paralysis of the cognitive functions, frothing at the mouth, rotating eye-balls, hyperventilation, semantical seizures).

Working together with researchers in the field (that dedicated group Médecins Sans Illusions), I have been able to piece together an incomplete epidemiological portrait of the malady.

Suddenness of Onset

As Professor Frary notes, one of the signal presenting features of this malady is the suddenness of its onset. Witnesses report that victims of this cruel disease generally appear completely normal until they encounter the name “Sarah Palin.” Within minutes, susceptible patients suffer a dangerous rise in blood pressure followed by acute cognitive paralysis, often accompanied by logorrheic expostulation, in some ways similar to Tourette’s Syndrome. This is the acute phase, which can last for several hours. It is generally followed by a chronic phase, which can last several weeks, and is characterized by feelings of listlessness, melancholy, and a still poorly-understood inability to distinguish fact from fiction. It is not yet known whether damage to the victim’s sense of  humor is permanent or transitory.

Other symptoms

Many patients complain of feelings of panic, a vague but persistent sense of paranoia, compounded by alternating emotions of rage and depression. The public is urged to employ caution when approaching sufferers of Palinoisis, especially in its acute phase. Their behavior is typically incomprehensible and can be violent. THOSE WHO HAVE NOT PASSED A LEVEL TWO PALIN REMEDIATION AND ACCLIMATIZATION TEST ARE URGED TO DIAL 911.

Susceptibility

A large part of the population appears to be resistant if not entirely immune to the precipitating allergen, and scientists are still working to isolate predisposing factors. A demonstrated predilection towards utopian thinking appears to be one predisposing factor, as does difficulty in distinguishing between the property of your neighbor and that which belongs to the federal government. It has also been noticed that patients experience a tingling feeling running up their legs (Matthewsitisosis) when the hear the words “Barack Obama” are seriously at risk.

Treatment

There is no known cure for Palinosis. But some studies indicate that a course of treatment in which patients are slowly acclimatized to the real world can help. Behavioral modification programs, including intensive study of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom , the chapters devoted to “Democratic Despotism” in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and a thorough examination of the United States tax system have been shown to be effective in some cases. Also promising is the model offered Alcoholics Anonymous: patients who are able publicly to acknowledge their malady–”Hello, I am John, and I suffer from Palinosis”–have been shown to do better in the long term than those who refuse to acknowledge the disease.

See also: Palin Hysteria Syndrome.

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We’ve all heard about the army of reporters and flotilla of lawyers that Obama’s campaign and its supporters in the media have rounded up and sent to Alaska to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin and her family. So far the pickings have been pretty slim. Todd Palin, now Sarah’s husband, was cited for DUI in 1986. (As a friend wrote me: “What, only once? What a wimp.”)  Sarah herself made sure that her former brother-in-law, a state trooper who tasered her 10-year-old nephew and threatened to kill her father, was fired, and she performed the same courtesy for Alaska’s public safety commissioner when he refused to cashier the rogue trooper.  What,  pray tell, would you have done?

But now we have the spectacle of the mighty New York Times in full investigative mode. Maureen Dowd is tramping around in Alaska, animadverting in situ about “our new Napoleon in bunny boots” who, according to Ms. Dowd, “had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing” as a New York Times columnist—no, wait, as George W. Bush: that’s what Maureen Dowd wrote. The last day or so has also seen hostile pieces about Palin, McCain, or both by Bob Herbert (“She’s Not Ready”), Frank Rich (“The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket”), Frank Rich [Oops: I meant Paul Krugman] (“Blizzard of Lies”), among others. This is a full-court press. An editorial that ran on September 12 (“Gov. Palin’s Worldview”) began by taking Sen. John McCain to task for having the temerity to pick Palin as his running mate in the first place:

If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

What sort of game is the Times playing at here? I mean, what makes a first term Senator with no executive experience better prepared for the office of the Presidency than a first term Governor with substantial executive experience for the Vice-Presidency? (Free advice to Team Obama: retire the response “Oh, but he’s running a presidential campaign: That’s executive exeprience!”) That Palin is a woman? That the state of which she is governor has only as many electoral votes as Deleware (represented in the Senate by another Vice-Presidental candidate)? That she didn’t go to Harvard? That she likes to shoot moose? That she is a Christian and proud of it? That she chose not to end the life of her last child when she discovered it had Down Syndrome? What is it? And why for heaven’s sake does McCain’s choice raise “profound questions about his judgment”? Presumably, McCain picked Palin for the same reason that Obama picked Joe Biden: because he thought she would help him win the election. And McCain seems to have been right about that. Sure, that is a “tactical” (or shall we say, “canny”?) move: so what? Isn’t that what getting elected is all about? McCain has plenty of ideas about  how to help the country: none of them will matter unless he gets elected. Would the Times have preferred it if McCain had picked some who wouldn’t help the ticket (as, I suspect, Obama has done)? (OK, they probably would have preferred  it, at least probably, but they wouldn’t say that.)

So I find that editorial tendentious but also incomprehensible.  Still, it is an editorial, and I expect the Times editorial page to be a swamp of left-liberal, redistributionist, politically correct boiler plate. That’s fine. I don’t agree with it, but that’s what editorial pages are for: the expression of opinion.

It’s when it turns to reporting the news that the Times really gets irritating. Consider “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes,” the profile (aka, attempted character assassination) the paper ran yesterday, September 14, of Sarah Palin. Front-page, above-the-fold of the Politics section. Three authors. More than 3000 words. What did it amount to? As Jennifer Rubin put it, “minutiae thrown against the wall by the Times” (“Is this It? Really?”).  Quoth Rubin:

[D]espite the testimony that she was ”accessible,” others find her “secretive” and inclined to put a premium on “loyalty.” The evidence? The Governor’s office declined a request for emails that would have cost over $400,000. Proof positive. Oh, and the records sought (about Polar Bears and such) were in fact obtained.

Then there is the ” she blurs personal and public behavior” charge. The evidence? A phone call from Todd Palin to a state legislator about the latter’s chief of staff, which Palin denies was mentioned. Pretty thin gruel.

Next we have her tenure as mayor, where again all heck breaks loose because — are ya sitting down? — she brought in her own team. No! Unheard of. Jeeez. Next she’ll be firing the town museum director. Oh no– it’s true! Palin says (”Oh yeah, she says,” you can hear the Times reporters hrrumphing) she was cutting the budget.

This is pathetic, really. Is there something illegal here? Is there something nefarious? What is the point?

I can answer that one: the point is to discredit Sarah Palin, by evidence of actual wrongdoing, if possible, but if not then by diffusing a rhetorical atmosphere of shadiness, collusion, and self-dealing. Journalists have been poring over her per diem expenses and every other aspect of her performance with a comb fit for an anorectic gerbil with sensitive skin and the bottom line finding is that she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars less in expenses than her predecessor.

Let’s bury that one, lads, and lead with the story that she charged the state for expenses when she was at home and for ferrying her husband and children from their home in Wasllia to Juneau. Don’t sweat the details too much, though, because the closer you look the more obvious it is that 1) Palin’s expenses were entirely legit  under Alaskan rules and 2) The Washington Post’s reporting   was disingenuous, malevolent, or both.

But back to the Times’s profile. It is a curious document—“thin gruel,” as Rubin says, but lots of empty rhetorical calories. The piece opens with a picture of Sarah Palin standing with the The Wasilla City Council in 1998.

“Throughout her career,” the caption informs readers, “Ms. Palin has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and blurred the line between government and personal grievance.” Doesn’t sound too good does it? Then what? Let’s take it from the top,omitting some of the extraneous watercress:

WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal. [REALLY? WHERE DOES SHE SAY THAT?]

So [“SO” AS IN “THEREFORE”?  HOW DO YOU FIGURE THAT?] when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. [SO WHAT? WHY SHOULDN’T SHE?]A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency. [SNARK ALERT #1, LOVE OF ANIMALS DIVISION.]

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. [GOOD FOR HER, WHAT? I MEAN, SHE KNEW THESE FOLKS AND HAD PRESUMABLY CONFIDENCE IN THEIR ABILITIES. AS FOR THE SALARIES, AGAIN, SO WHAT?]

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects. [YES, AND THE POINT IS? SNARK ALERT #2, OFFICE OF BLUE COLLAR SNOBBERY.]

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!” [AGAIN, THE POINT IS?]

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything. [YES, THAT IS ABOUT RIGHT . . . ]

But [“BUT”? WE EXPECT SOME NEWS THAT WOULD CONTRADICT OR QUALIFY WHAT CAME IN THE PARAGRAPH BEFORE . . . ] an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image. [WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN? THAT SARAH PALIN IS AGGRESIVE AND DOESN’T SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY? AGAIN—IT’S MY CONSTANT REFRAIN—SO WHAT?]

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials. [REALLY? AND THE EVIDENCE OF THE MALFEASANCE IS?]

Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. [DIGRESSION TIME: THE TIMES BRIEFLY ENTERS THE ON-THE-ONE-HAND, ON-THE-OTHER-HAND PSEUDO-OBJECTIVITY MODE.] As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink [SNARK ALERT #3, DEPARTMENT OF SMALL-BEER REJOINDERS: SO SHE PAVED ROADS AND BUILT AN ICE RINK: BIG DEAL, RIGHT?]], and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.

“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”

“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.” [AND THOSE QUESTIONS ARE?]

Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. [WE ALREADY KNEW SHE WAS SMART. I AM GLAD TO SHE SHE IS AVAILING HERSELF OF THE KIMBALL CONSENSUS FOR CONSERVATIVES DEALING WITH THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.] The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond. [SEE ABOVE.]

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” he said.

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing. [SO, HO-HUM. WHAT?]

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. [OOO—“LOYALTY”—THAT’S A GEORGE W. BUSH WORD, ISN’T IT? AND “SECRECY”: I GUESS THAT MEANS THE NEW YORK TIMES HAD TROUBLE FINDING MUCH WORTH REPORTING: IMAGINE THAT!] The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; [AND THE POINT IS?]  dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records. [WHERE IS THIS ONE GOING?]

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears.[NO, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.] (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) [GOOD THINKING, SARAH.]An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process. [I DON’T  DOUBT IT, DO YOU?]

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show. [WELL, I’D LIKE TO SEE THE DATA.]

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said. [GOSH, WHAT A PUT DOWN]

State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. [OH, THE ALASKS TROPPERGATE STORY! NO JOY THERE FOR THE TIMES: TURNS OUT THAT CHAP WAS A BAD HAT WHO WAS FOND OF TASERING 10-YEAR-OLDS. SEE ABOVE FOR SOME DETAILS.] But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political. [GEE WHIZ!]

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend. [THAT METALIC  NOISE YOU HEAR IS THE SOUND OF THE REPORTER’S PEN SCRAPING THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL.]

There follows a bit of more or less neutral biographical material, and then the Times gets back to attack mode. When Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the Times reports,

[C]areers were turned upside down. [THAT HAPPENS. SO WHAT?] The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one. [SO LONG, FAREWELL, SAYONARA . . . ]

Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said. [AND WHO CAN BLAME THEM?]

Let me save you the tedium: when she was mayor, Palin fired some people. The Times endeavored mightily to make something of that, but new brooms do have a way of sweeping things clean . . .

Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. [SMART THINKING, IF THE PRESS IS REPRESENTED BY ORGANS LIKE THE NEW YORK TIMES.] And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile. [GUTSY MOVE ON THE PART OF THE TIMES: PALIN’S TRAVEL EXPENSES AS GOVERNOR LAST YEAR WERE $93,000; HER PREDECESOR’S EXPENSES FOR 2006 WERE $463,000.]

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. [AGAIN, GOOD FOR HER. GLAD TO SEE SHE HAS THE EYE ON THE BALL.] She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. [YES, AND SO???] And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral. [AH, THE BOOK-BANNING-BURNING-CENSORSHIP RUMOR. NICE TRY, FOLKS, BUT IT’S BEEN SHOWN TO BE A RED-HERRING.]

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.” [I’D BE WILLING TO BET THAT SARAH PALIN OBJECTS TO PEOPLE DEFACING LIBRARY BOOKS AS MUCH AS I OR ANY REPORTER FROM THE TIMES:  IS THE TIMES SAYING, OR IMPLYING, OR HINTING, OR JUST SORT OF GETTING IT ON TO THE TABLE THAT PALIN WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEFACEMENT?]

Etc., etc. Other high crimes and misdemeanors: “ Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business.” Call in the cavalry! What a scandal.  “Many lawmakers”—no names or numbers provided—“contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated.” Guess what, Palin as some political enemies. So what?

In the course of this seemingly interminable  article, the Times frequently mentions the high regard Palin enjoys among here constituents. Indeed, most polls show her with a general approval rating of about 85 percent and an approval rating among Democrats of 75 percent. As Glenn Reynolds observes, “Gosh, if you read the New York Times reporting on Palin, that’s hard to believe.” Of course, what’s really “hard to believe” is The New York Times. I suppose there is some satisfaction in having one’s prejudices so flagrantly corroborated.

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We all know that Barack Obama believes he is “the One we’ve been waiting for.” He told us that in Chicago in February 2008.

We know, too, that, according to Obama, we can look back on June 3, 2008–the date he wrested the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton–as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

A new age needs a new hero, and Obama was not shy about putting himself forward for the job. But who is Obama? Is he Moses, commanding the oceans to recede that his people may escape from, and then obliterate, their oppressors? Or is that all prolegomena for the advent of “the One we’ve been waiting for,” namely . . . Who? A sort of Messiah? Maybe. Or maybe the actor and comedian J.D. Walsh comes closer in this glimpse of Obama Headquarters on November 3, 2008. Maybe Obama is not the Messiah, precisely, but a suffering martyr for liberty–Jean Valjean, in fact, Victor Hugo’s hero in Les Miserables signing “One Day More” with the rest of the cast: “One more day to revolution,” etc. etc.

[Update: As Faust's Blog points out, "if you have seen Les Miz on Broadway you’d know that the eager revolutionaries got wiped out right after that song. NOT a good metaphor for any electoral campaign." Indeed.]

Here’s a question. Is Mr. Walsh’s skit about life at Obama’s HQ just before the election a spoof, as it some people have described it? Or is an homage?

I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. It seems like a parody to me–but then so does much of the Obama campaign. It is silly, no doubt about that: all those fresh-faced campaign workers bursting into tuneful revolutionary solidarity in the midst of their PCs and xerox copiers. But is it, really, any sillier than Obama’s “we’re-the-ones-we’ve-been-waiting-for” riff? Is it any sillier than his faux-Presidential seal, his follow-the-yellow-brick-road, somewhere-over-the-rainbow-bama logo, his vacuous invocation of Change, his school-boy, Bob-the-Builder Latin motto? The brief answer is, No, it isn’t any sillier or more extreme. And the fact that Mr. Walsh ends his little entertainment by flashing across the screen the English translation of the Bob-the-Builder motto–”Yes We Can”–tempts me to conclude that, sadly, his creation was meant in earnest. An English friend sent me the link to the performance and included this comment: “Obama. Or there’ll be blood.” That, mutatis mutandis, is approximately the message of Les Miz. It is the message, heard with increasing virulence, of the far-Left blogosphere. Perhaps it is also the message Mr. Walsh has endeavored to convey?

Maybe, And yet, and yet: J.D. Walsh, as I said,  is an actor and a comedian. Could he, just possibly, be a comedian with a sense of humor? Stranger things have happened.

A final question: what does it tell us that we cannot say with any confidence whether the performance is a spoof? Nothing good, of that you can be sure.

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Thus the London Telegraph‘s Charles Moore on Barack Obama. It’s a thoughtful and largely sympathetic piece. But it articulates a powerful . . . what to call it? Reservation? Misgiving? Uneasiness? Everyone knows that “The Audacity of Hope” is the title of one of Obama’s memoirs (he’s written two). Mr. Moore reminds that the phrase comes from a sermon by Obama’s close clerical friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Once it emerged that Rev. Wright also preached that black people should sing not “God Bless America!” but “God Damn America!” Obama quietly distanced himself from his pastor.

But as Mr. Moore saw, the Jeremiah Wright episode did raise an important question:

are black politics in America still defined by their hatred of white domination? If Obama’s politics are “black” in that sense, he does not stand a chance.

Mr. Moore continues:

What is so fascinating in this contest is that no one has thought more about this than Barack Obama himself. It is the subject matter of Dreams From My Father [Obama's earlier memoir]. Half white American liberal puritan, half feckless, clever, disappointed Kenyan, he searches for his roots.

And what has he found? And what, more to the point, have Obama’s supporters found? What does it mean, for example, to suggest that if you are not a supporter of Obama then, ipso facto, you must be racist? That popular scenario–what we might call the Wright Protocol–is the real racist alternative, for it would have us believe that we should support Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, not because of his policies, promise, or accomplishments.

There is an undeniable romance about Barack Obama’s story. It’s an important part of his appeal. But the question that haunts his campaign–a question that has been asked with increasing urgency as the campaign unfolds–revolves around the issue of identity: Who is Barack Obama? What, deep down, does he stand for? To what has he plighted his highest allegiance?

These are not questions that are easily answered. “In a remote area of Kenya,” Mr. Moore continues,

where his grandfather lived when not working as a cook for the British Army, he learns the family history. In this cradle of the human race, he longs for “that first common step, that first common word – that time before Babel”.

Yet the history of his parents – he met his father only once after he left home when he was tiny – is of fracture. It is all the story of “the puzzle of being a black man”. Barack falls on the ground and cries out to his father’s ghost: “There was no shame in your confusion.”

The implication of the book is that Obama, by understanding the unrealised dreams from his father properly, can somehow fulfil them in and for the United States of America. The intoxicating thought that it might be true is what makes so many of us want Mr Obama to win.

Indeed. As Hemingway said at the end of The Sun Also Rises, It would be pretty to think so. “But what,” Charles Moore asks, “if it isn’t true?”

In the book, Obama introduces the Kenyan phrase “home squared”. It means the place – in the Kenyan case, your tribal village – which you think of as your real home, though you live in the big city.

For Obama, it is “home cubed” – from America to Nairobi to the village. It sounds like the great dream of “from log cabin to White House”. The trouble is that its direction is the reverse; it seems to take him away from America.

So Americans, who actually have to decide what all this means, have a much more serious task than we do. It will not prove that they are bigots if they decide that Barack Obama is too big a risk.

I somehow doubt that the folks from MoveOn.org will be quite so understanding.

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Well, who is it? I am surprised that the brave, independent-thinking members of the Fourth Estate haven’t given full rein to the terrier instinct on this question. Obviously, someone inside the Obama campaign is out to sabotage The Chosen One’s credibility and, just as obviously, the journalistic profession speaks with a single voice when it comes to favoring The Obama over every other candidate. So where are the investigative reporters when we–or, rather, when they–need ‘em? Wouldn’t the cause of electing Obama come hell or high water be better served by suspending inquiries in to Todd Palin’s 1986 DUI citations and trying to ferret out the person or persons responsible for the disaster the Obama campaign has become?

Somebody has it in for Obama. What makes me say so? Well, there’s the matter of the gloves. Every few weeks now, Obama comes out and says “I’ve had enough of these nasty Republican smear tactics, the outrageous inquiries into my relationship with the admitted (and unrepentent) terrorist Bill Ayers or my 20-years as a congregant in the church of the anti-American wack-job Jeremiah Wright. From now on , I’m taking off the gloves and am going to run a tough (but high-minded) campaign.”

Is there a budget category for gloves over at Obama Central? 

Jake Tapper [oops: I had written "Jack"] at ABC reckoned Obama’s latest announcement about “taking off the gloves” was his 3rd or 4th and wondered whether we should henceforth think of this as The Isotoner Campaign.

This does not–not quite, not yet–qualify as a Dukakis Moment, but it is hovering in the neighborhood.

Evidence of Obama’s bare-knuckles blunders? The lipstick-on-a-pig gambit, for one: bad move, Mr. O! It doesn’t matter what you meant to say. Your acolytes took it as a reference to Governor Palin and you spent the next several days trying to explain your way out of a mess of pork.

The knuckles got barked that time. And then, just a day or two ago, you go and run a TV ad designed to show how out of touch John McCain is because he doesn’t use email. “Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious  national security threats,” sniffed Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama spokesman. “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

Another bloomer! Leave aside the fact that Presidents, like other high-ranking government officials, don’t use email. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, one reason McCain doesn’t use email is that he can’t. Jonah points to a Boston Globe story from 2000 which explains that “McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan–Ted Williams is his hero–but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.” (That story also quotes John Kerry on McCain: “I enjoy his company, John’s a funny guy. Most of the bad things you hear come from people he’s put on the spot.”) Criticizing McCain for not using a computer, Jonah notes, would be like criticizing “the blind governor of New York David Paterson [who] doesn’t know how to drive a car. After all, transportation issues are pretty important. How dare he serve as governor while being ignorant of what it’s like to navigate New York’s highways.”

Those knuckles are looking pretty torn up Mr. O. Another pair of gloves?

Besides, if it is actual technical savvy you’re interested in, McCain does pretty well. Jonah also points to a July 2008 interview The New York Times published on McCain. The relevant bit:

Q: What websites if any do you look at regularly?

Mr. McCain: Brooke and Mark [a McCain advisor and his Press Secretary] show me Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes.

(Mrs. McCain and Ms. Buchanan both interject: “Meagan’s blog!”)

Mr. McCain: Excuse me, Meagan’s blog. And we also look at the blogs from Michael and from you that may not be in the newspaper, that are just part of your blog.

Q: But do you go on line for yourself?

Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need – including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.

Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?

Mr. McCain: No

Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.

Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone. I have the luxury of being in contact with them literally all the time. We now have a phone on the plane that is usable on the plane, so I just never really felt a need to do it. But I do – could I just say, really – I understand the impact of blogs on American politics today and political campaigns. I understand that. And I understand that something appears on one blog, can ricochet all around and get into the evening news, the front page of The New York Times. So, I do pay attention to the blogs. And I am not in any way unappreciative of the impact that they have on entire campaigns and world opinion.

Oh dear, O dear, O dear. The old septuagenarian’s not that out of touch, is he? And yet the Obama campaign lurches forward, foot placed firmly in its collective mouth. The damage, still being calculated, with be substantial. As Glenn Reynolds notes,

In a single not-very-compelling ad calling McCain a clueless geezer who can’t even send email, the Obama campaign managed to draw attention to his war injuries again, to show that it doesn’t even know that the 2000 McCain campaign actually pioneered the insurgent Web tactics that Obama used in the 2008 primary, and to produce an ad that seems tailor-made to alienate voters more than a few years older than Obama, all without providing any actual reason to, you know, vote for Obama. That’s a combination of cluelessness, sloppiness, and narcissism . . .

And that, mon brave, is only for starters.

Personally, I wonder if one or more operatives from the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy haven’t insinuated themselves into the Obama campaign. Maybe, just maybe, they have even taken over Obama’s brain. That would explain why, for example, he goes on national television and refers to his “Muslim faith.” Oops! A slip, to be sure, but is it a slip that a politically mature candidate would make on such an important occasion? The knuckles are really bleeding now. Whose fault is that?

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I ask because the madness she has inspired in the Left is extraordinary and apparently unstoppable. Already, a week or so into the Sarah Saga, we have been treated to all manner of extravagant ravings about the Governor of Alaska. But level of vituperation, not to say insanity, just keeps going up. The worst to date? Difficult to say, but Glenn Reynolds points to a particularly alarming outburst posted at Salon. When John McCain announced that his pick for Vice-President was Sarah Palin, writes Salonista Cintra Wilson ,

I thought, “Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a ‘sexy librarian’ costume — as a vice president? That’s a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right. Karl Rove must be behind it.”

Nice stuff, eh? The sad thing is, I suspect Ms. Wilson really does believe Karl Rove is behind it all. Pathetic, really.

Ms. Wilson’s effusion is worth reading–not, I hasten to note, for its substance, which is nugatory, but rather as a specimen in the archive of political hysteria. The combination of crudity, paranoia, and delusion is breathtaking. My favorite line: “She is not just pro-life, she’s anti-life.” Parse that one, Virginia, and let me know when the patient emerges from the ether.

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Seven years is a long time. In the seven years between 1994 and 2001, U.S. interests were the target of numerous Islamic terrorist attacks culminating in the near destruction of the USS Cole in 2000. Seventeen US sailors died in that attack.

Since September 11, 2001, there have been no successful Islamic terrorists attacks against U.S. interests–unless, as is not unreasonable, you count the manner in which every airline passenger is in effect held hostage by security precautions as a species of time-released attack.

This summer, The Economist‘s “Bagehot” rightly warned Britons against complacency: There are at least 2000 committed jihadists in 200 separate cells in Britain, he noted. “Al-Qaeda proper is patient as well as urgently apocalyptic: it habitually waits years between big operations. There is no reason to think it has forgotten Britain.”

We can be confident they haven’t forgotten the United States, either. The first World Trade Center Bombing took place in February 1993. (See Andy McCarthy’s great book, Willful Blindness, on the bombing and its aftermath; UPDATE: and see also Andy’s commemorative essay posted today here.). The carnage, measured against the expectations of the terrorists, was disappointing: it killed “only” six people and injured more than 1000. But the towers stood. Quoth one of the bombers: “Next time, we’ll do it right.”

And so they did, seven and a half years later. The lesson? That “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”? In part. Today, I believe, there is a widely shared understanding that our culture–not just the political system of democracy but our entire western way of life–is at a crossroads. That perception is not always on the surface. Absent the unignorable importunity of attack, absorption in the tasks of everyday life tends to blunt the perception of the threats facing us. But we all know that the future of the West, seemingly so assured even a decade ago, is suddenly negotiable in the most fundamental way.

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, we saw plenty of deplorable outbursts of anti-Americanism: the dancing “Death to America” multitudes in the Middle East as well as the predictable responses of the Chomsky-Sontag-Pinter brigade. But we also witnessed a vast outpouring of sympathy. Some of the sympathy no doubt was genuine; much of it was oleaginous and depended on the novel spectacle of America appearing as a victim. The trouble was that America was not content to remain a victim. And when a victim fights back, he may earn respect but he forfeits sympathy and kindred sentimentalizing emotions.

When Susan Sontag said that the terrorist assaults on the United States were “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions,” she offered that observation as a partial justification or extenuation of the attacks, which it most certainly was not. But there is, I believe, another sense in which growing anti-Americanism, together with a growing climate of terrorism, can be seen as a predictable result of American actions or, more to the point, of American inaction.

I am not offering a candidate for the “cause”–much less the “root cause”–of terrorism. Determining the cause of terrorism is not a difficult hermeneutical problem. Jonathan Rauch had it essentially right when he argued that the cause of terrorism is terrorists. Nevertheless, when we ask what nurtures terrorists, what may be counted on to allow them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

In the course of a 1975 essay on anti-Americanism, Henry Fairlie observed that “Anti-Americanism abroad tends to be strongest when America itself seems to have lost confidence in its own idea.” Some such loss of confidence has repeatedly afflicted the American spirit at least since the end of the Vietnam conflict. It is by now a familiar litany, but is nonetheless worth reviewing. From the mid-1970s, the United States has vacillated in discharging its responsibilities to power. Whatever the wisdom of our involvement in Vietnam, our way of extricating ourselves was ignominious and an incitement to further violence. The image of that U.S. helicopter evacuating people from our embassy in Saigon is a badge of failure, not so much of military strategy as of nerve.

Even worse was our response to the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 and 1980. Our hesitation to act decisively was duly noted and found contemptible by our enemies. And the fiasco of President Carter’s botched rescue attempt, when a transport vehicle and one of our helicopters collided on the sands of the Iranian desert, was a national humiliation. President Reagan did effectively face down the Soviet Union, but his halfhearted response to the terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 contributed to the tattered reputation of America as (in Mao’s phrase) “a paper tiger.”

The Clinton administration sharply exacerbated the problem. From 1993 through 2000, the United States again and again demonstrated its lack of resolve even as it let its military infrastructure decay. In Somalia at the end of 1992, two U.S. helicopters were shot down, several Americans were killed, the body of one was dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu. We did nothing–an action, or lack of action, that prompted Osama bin Laden way back then to reflect that his followers were “surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.”

It was the same in 1993, when terrorists bombed the World Trade Center. It was the same in June 1996, when a truck bomb exploded outside a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans. There were some anguished words but we did–nothing. It was the same in 1998 when our embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds. The response was to rearrange some rocks in the Afghan desert with a few cruise missiles.

It was the same in October 2000, when suicide terrorists blew a gigantic hole in USS Cole, almost sinking one of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced ships. Like Hamlet, we responded with “words, words, words,” and only token military gestures. The harvest was an increase in contempt and a corresponding increase in terrorist outrage, culminating–that time around–in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

The observation that the triumph of evil requires only that good men stand by and do nothing has special relevance at a time, like now, that is inflected by terrorism. I have several friends-thoughtful, well-intentioned people-who believe the United States should never have intervened in Afghanistan, who believe even more staunchly that the United States should never have intervened in Iraq, and, moreover, that we should get out forthwith, Surge or no Surge. “We should,” they believe, “keep to ourselves. We have no business meddling with the rest of the world. We cannot be the world’s constabulary, nor should we aspire to be. It is not in our interest–for it breeds resentment–and it is not in the interest of those we profess to help, since they should be allowed to govern themselves–or not, as the case may be.”

Whatever the wisdom of the position in the abstract, the resurgence of international terrorism, fueled by hate and devoted to death, renders it otiose. The bombings in London a few summers ago were, as these things go, relatively low in casualties. But they were high in indiscriminateness. The people on those buses and subway cars were as innocent as innocent can be: just folks, moms and dads and children on their way to work or school or play, as uninterested, most of them, in politics or Islam as it is possible to be. And yet those home-grown Islamicists were happy to blow them to bits.

Here is the novelty: Our new enemies are not political enemies in any traditional sense, belligerent in the service of certain interests of their own. Their belligerence is focused rather on the very existence of an alternative to their vision of beatitude, namely on Western democracy and its commitment to individual freedom and economic prosperity. I return to Hussein Massawi: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

In fact, the situation is even grimmer than Mr. Massawi suggests. For our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction: they are pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.

The late, great James Burnham made a similar point about facing down the juggernaut of Communism: “just possibly,” he wrote during the Cold War, ” we shall not have to die in large numbers to stop them: but we shall certainly have to be willing to die.” The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern liberalism has equipped us with an ethic too abstract and empty to inspire real commitment. Modern liberalism, he wrote,

does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions–pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.

The Islamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them suicide is a gateway to paradise. For us suicide is just that: suicide, but what values, what substantive commitments do we have to pit against their invigorating faith?

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Stefan Beck has a piece on the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson at Amravirumque, The New Criterion‘s web site, today. In response, I posted a review I wrote about her book The Death of Adam in 1999. “One of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist,” I note, “is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity.”

The subtitle tells us the book contains “essays on modern thought.” “Against modern thought” would be more accurate. In particular, Robinson is against that aspect of modern thought — a large and immensely influential aspect — that inculcates cynicism. We often take the extent of one’s disillusionment as an index of one’s wisdom. Robinson’s deeper purpose is to remind us of the culpable folly of such a view. For some time now, she notes, we “have been launched on a great campaign to deromanticize everything, even while we are eager to insist that more or less everything that matters is a romance.” Thus it is that “when a good man or woman stumbles, we say, ‘I knew it all along,’ and when a bad one has a gracious moment, we sneer at the hypocrisy. It is as if there is nothing to mourn or to admire, only a hidden narrative now and then apparent through the false, surface narrative. And the hidden narrative, because it is ugly and sinister, is therefore true.”

Puppet theories of human nature are always popular, partly because they are so simple, partly because they endow their proponents with the illusion of elite knowledge. How thrilling to know that human culture is really only a reflection of economic forces (Marx), that love is merely an alibi for lust (Freud), that altruism is a blind for genetic propagation (some followers of Darwin). Robinson is at her best when she sets out to expose the arrogance and reductive wrongheadedness of such scientistic versions of science. “The modern fable,” she writes in her longest essay, “Darwinism,” “is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.”

You can read the whole review here.

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