And it ain’t over yet. A week, said the British politician Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics. It was just last week, on December 22, that Conrad Black, though describing Newt Gingrich as “a completely unfeasible president,” could also note that he is “now the leading contender for the Republican nomination.” Newt thought so, too.  Less than a month ago, he blithely assured ABC’s Jake Tapper that “I’m going to be the nominee.” And just why did he think so? “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”

Ignore the tangled negatives: it’s clear what he meant: “I’m riding high and still rising in the polls; therefore it is very likely that I will be the nominee.”

Bad argument, Newt. You spoke 11 months before the election. Remember what Harold Wilson said: a week is a long time in politics. According to the Public Policy Polling folks, his balloon has deflated from 27% to 22% to 14% to 13% over the course of four successive Iowa polls.

As I write, Mitt Romney, the Establishment candidate, seems to be consolidating the presumption that has followed him for months: that when the dust settles, he, the well-coiffed successful businessman, is the most serious, i.e., the most plausible, i.e., the candidate that best fulfills the Buckley (as in William F.) Rule: that political prudence dictates that we (i.e., “we” conservatives) support the most conservative candidate who can win.  Never mind that Bill Buckley himself did not consistently follow the Buckley Rule — he was, for example, an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater.  No matter: it is a sound rule. When, that is, it can be plausibly applied, which is much less frequently than the conventional wisdom would have you think.

As I’ve said before in this space, if it turns out that Mitt Romney is the nominee, then I will support him. But at this juncture, I believe, it is by no means clear that he will be the nominee.  I say this with some hesitation, since most of the smart money on my side of the aisle is solidifying around Mitt. The shooting star (at least, I think it was a shooting star) that was Newt Gingrich seems to have startled many conservative bystanders into eloquence: Newt, No! Romney, Yes!

I do not, however, discern a great deal of enthusiasm in their endorsement.  Some of the holdouts explain why. Over at Townhall.com, frequent PJM contributor John Hawkins, for example, summarizes some of Romney’s signal vulnerabilities in a post titled “7 Reasons Why Mitt Romney’s Electability Is A Myth.” When I tell you that Bain Capital, the company that made Romney rich, received a $10 million federal bailout, of which he and some of his partners pocketed $4 million, while laying off hundreds, you’ll understand that the idea that he is the candidate, conservative or not, who can win is open to doubt.

As I say, most of the smart conservatives, especially those who are politically engaged, favor Romney (just as the they are alternately terrified and contemptuous of Gingrich). But the gratification gap is palpable. “People,” Hawkins observes, “just don’t like Mitt. The entire GOP primary process so far has consisted of Republican voters desperately trying to find an alternative to Mitt Romney.”

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“Energy,” said the poet William Blake, “is eternal delight.” Barack Obama  disagrees.

Quick test: When it comes to energy, what is America’s number one priority?

If you said “a cheap and abundant supply of the stuff,” go to the head of the class.

If you uttered the phrase “environmentally sustainable” or some such other piece of politically correct nonsense, you should turn off all the lights in your house, sell your car, and apply to the Obama administration or one of its enablers for a job.

As Glenn Reynolds has frequently pointed out, the one campaign promise Barack Obama has indisputably kept is to make energy more expensive. He has done this chiefly through regulatory intimidation.  And he has had powerful allies in the media. The New York Times, for example, never saw an oil or natural gas well it really liked. In fact, the former paper of record has devoted an entire series to fan the environmental hysteria over producing natural gas.

 * “Learning Too Late of Perils in Gas Well Leases”

* “Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas”

* “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush”

* “Chemicals and Toxic Materials That Come With Hydrofracking”

*  “Natural Gas and Polluted Air”

And on and on. The Times has thoughtfully assembled the whole series for you under the rubric “Drilling Down.”

It’s a pretty nauseating series, just as the Obama administration’s efforts to impoverish America are alarming.  It is heartening, then, to discover signs of rebellion, for example this bracing sign  which a friend sent me:

“Clearly,” he noted, “the people of North East Fairfield Ohio either don’t read The New York Times or don’t care much for what it says about drilling for oil and gas.”

God bless ’em!

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Last month, late on the Saturday night of homecoming weekend at elite Williams College, some unknown person scrawled a highly unpleasant and ugly graffito on the wall of an upper floor of a student dormitory. The dreaded “N-word” figured prominently in the message, so written to generate the maximum incendiary impact.

Adam Falk, president of the College, was instantly on the case: “A great deal of harm has been done by this vile act,” he said in a public letter to the grieving Williams Community, which was wracked by this horrible, horrible incident. “Since there is no excuse for behavior so offensive, hateful, and harmful — anywhere, but especially at Williams — we will continue to do all that we can to hold the perpetrator(s) accountable.”

He cancelled classes and athletic practice for the following Monday, using the day as an opportunity for “healing” and to teach about the evils of racism and how such attitudes would not be tolerated on his campus. The Counseling Center, Chaplain’s Office, and Multicultural Center advertised psychological help for students who might feel traumatized by this “shock.” A group of students marched to the local police station to demand that the police aid campus security in investigating this “hate crime.” Eventually, even the FBI — the FBI! — was enlisted to investigate this “horrifying,” “vile,” “hateful,” “offensive,” “harmful” act.

A bit of an overreaction? I think so, which is why I wrote a note about the incident for the December The New Criterion. The hysteria continues unabated in bucolic Williamstown. One student who posted several comments  on a student website dilating on the “hypocrisy” of race relations at Williams earned the attention of the Dean’s Office: “The posts that I put up on this thread,” he wrote,

 got me noticed by the Dean’s office as a suspicious person and I was brought in for an interrogation by the FBI and Sergeant McGowan explicitly because of them the Sunday before reading period. “You seem to be a fairly vocal poster on the online message boards.” They asked for a polygraph test, DNA test, the works.

Think about it: A student expresses his opinion about something. The administration doesn’t like his opinion. Ergo, the administration turns him over to the FBI for interrogation.

That was the way they did things in Stalin’s Russia, but many of us thought a different tradition regarding freedom of expression prevailed in American colleges.

When the “vile,” “offensive,” “hateful” graffito was discovered, two hypotheses crystalized to account for it. The first hypothesis, quickly embraced by President Falk (a physicist) and the more vocal parts of the administration, was that there exists a racist sub-culture at Williams. The idea was that the message was written by a bigot to intimidate minority students on campus. Indeed, many students claimed that the message amounted to a “death threat” against minority students.

What do you think? Is elite Williams College (all in, it will cost you — or whoever’s paying — more than $55,000 per annum to attend) a seething cauldron of racist, sexist attitudes? Or do you reckon it is, like most elite educational institutions, a farm specializing in coddling a herd of well-fed, complacent, eminently politically correct sheep — that “herd of independent minds” the art critic Harold Rosenberg spoke of, lo, these many years ago?

I incline to the latter option. I think you’d have to look far and wide at Williams to discover anyone harboring or espousing anything so outré as a racist opinion. Which is why, when the story of this vile, harmful, terrible, offensive, violent example of hate speech was first announced and President Adam Falk publicly promised to discover and hold accountable the “perpetrator(s),” I had to wonder whether he was being entirely prudent.

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David Cameron just batted another century. I think I’ve got that right: On this side of the pond we say “hit a home run.” In Blighty, I believe one says “bat a century.” (English and other members and former members of the Empire will feel free to correct me.) [UPDATE: As many have. The correct equivalent is "hit a six." And, I am reliably informed, one "scores a century."] Just a week or so back, Mr. Cameron demonstrated that he was not, as many of us believed, a sort of blancmange with legs. In vetoing the proposed revisions to the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, he showed that he actually possessed a back bone and that he was willing and able to stand up for Britain. “It has to be in Britain’s interests” was his constant, and correct, refrain. When he went to Brussels for the Merkozy all-nighter, he had reportedly intended to go along to get along. But when he absorbed what the Treaty revisions would mean for the city of London (billions of pounds in new fees), he told Angela and Nicolas that they would be sailing to Eutopia without Britannia.

Mr. Cameron must enjoy standing tall. For just yesterday in a speech about religion in the public square, he told Rowan Williams, the self-described “hairy lefty” and “Druid,” who also happens to be Archbishop of Canterbury, where he could get off. He has made a pastime of criticizing the Cameron government’s spending cuts, the legitimacy of its coalition, and has recently demanded increased taxes on banks.

“I certainly don’t object to the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing his views on politics,” Mr. Cameron responded, but “he shouldn’t be surprised when I respond.”  The Telegraph reported that “Downing street aides” were “concerned” about Mr. Cameron’s speech. But that’s what God made aides for: to  oppose plain speaking. Reagan’s aides repeatedly struck the line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” from his famous Berlin speech in 1987. They kept removing it, he kept putting it back in. It stayed in.

Mr. Cameron said all sorts of things calculated to give the Sir Humphreys of the world dyspepsia:

Put simply, for too long we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong. “Live and let live” has too often become “do what you please.”

Bad choices have too often been defended as just different lifestyles. To be confident in saying something is wrong, is not a sign of weakness, it’s a strength.

One of the biggest lessons of the riots last summer is that we’ve got to stand up for our values if we are to confront the slow–motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations.

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This post is for two sets of people:  1) those who knew or knew the work of the English critic John Gross (who died earlier this year aetat 75) and 2) all other literate people who care about books and culture.

John was a dear friend and frequent contributor to the magazine I edit, The New Criterion. We first met in the mid 1980s when I was a newcomer to New York and John was enduring an alternately amusing and irritating patch as a critic for The New York Times (someday I’ll set down some of the stories he told).   He was extremely generous with his time and advice to an unknown friend of a friend. I vividly recall the many times we met at Bemelman’s Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York.  John was a conspicuous representative of the nearly extinct breed, the Man of Letters, a species he brilliantly celebrated in his magnum opus The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.  Although he suffered from ill health in his last years, John was an effervescent personality, the fizz in the existential champagne of any gathering.  As I noted in my brief memorial piece about John for The Wall Street Journal, he was an endless fund of anecdotes, of both the literary and social variety (the latter often described, with often unwarranted opprobrium, as gossip).

John is one of those figures about whom those who him knew generally feel that he never quite got his due.  His career was distinguished (editor of the TLS, widely published author and critic, esteemed anthologist for Oxford University Press, etc.) but somehow not part of that magic circle that many lesser, but more politically correct,  figures occupy.

It is delightful, then, that John’s son Tom Gross, himself an astute political commentator, has unearthed a small cache of BBC book and cultures shows in which John participates.  The quality of the clips is uneven — the first, which dates from 1964, cuts out after about 20 minutes — but they display a seriousness and civilized playfulness that is utterly lacking from the BBC (and, as far as I know, any other television outlet) these days.

Here they are, an edifying glimpse into the recent past:

(1) “Take it or leave it” — November 22, 1964, BBC TV, which features John Betjeman, John Gross, and others. John was still in his 20s.

(2) “Take it or leave it” — November 29, 1964, BBC TV, which features Anthony Burgess, John Gross, and others.

(3) “Who’s reading what and with whom” — October 21, 1982, BBC TV, which features  Antonia Fraser, Salman Rushdie, John Gross, and others.

These clips are fascinating sociological documents as well as reminders of what was once possible on television.

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Attentive readers may recall that, some three years ago, a book on eminent domain called Bulldozed: “Kelo,” Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land  was the subject of a defamation suit brought by the wealthy Texas developer H. Walker Royall. Royall must have really disliked the book. He sued:

1. Encounter Books (of which I am the publisher);

2. The author, Carla Main;

3. The law professor Richard Epstein, whose tort was to have provided a blurb for the book (yes, you read that correctly: Epstein wrote a blurb: Royall sued him);

4. A Texas newspaper, whose sin was to have run a positive review of the book;

5. And the hapless author of that review.

 

The newspaper and the author of the review settled. The absurd case against Richard Epstein was dismissed.  Carla and Encounter were able to fight on, thanks to the support of the Institute for Justice, which represented us.

There was a fair amount of commentary when the suit began, lo these many years ago.   Carla Main and I published an op-ed on RealClearPolitics called “Trying to Bulldoze Free Speech.”  Reason magazine had several illuminating pieces including this column by Jacob Sullum.

This summer a Texas Court determined that everything in the book was non-defamatory; ditto with all the associated charges against Carla, me, Richard Epstein, etc. etc.  Now, at long last, the Court has entered an order of non-suit and the case has been dismissed with prejudice.  I have an op-ed in the The Houston Chronicle about the history and implications of the case. “You would think by now,” I begin,

 that Americans would understand that authors and publishers are free under the First Amendment to write and publish books on nearly any topic they want, especially topics of public importance. Evidently, however, that message never quite made it to an overly sensitive developer nor to a Texas trial court that refused to summarily dismiss the developer’s groundless libel claim against my publishing house and one of our authors — a lawsuit designed to silence our free speech.

Thankfully — after three long years of litigation and a unanimous appeals court decision that can only be called a legal smack-down — the developer at last quietly dropped his suit, thus ending a dark and dangerous legal fight. Authors, publishers and anyone else who cares about fostering public debate, free speech and freedom of the press should stand up a cheer.

Read the whole thing here.

I am delighted that this case came to such an agreeable conclusion and want to thank the Institute for Justice for helping us stand up against bullies and champion free speech and  responsible investigative journalism.

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Every other day, it seems, there’s a new story about some fresh outrage perpetrated by the TSA, the “Transportation Security Administration,” i.e., the government busybodies who get their kicks patting down grandma while pretending to keep the skies safe from terrorists. Just today, Instapundit reports that a teenager was stopped at the security gate in Norfolk because her purse sported the design of a gun on its side.  “By the time security wrapped up the inspection,” we read, “the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead, worrying her mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at JIA.”  The I. Pundit maestro Glenn Reynolds spoke for many, I suspect, when he concluded: “Really, that’s just pathetic.”

It is pathetic. And it is worth noting that we do not have to behave like Eeyore (“What color was it when it was an AK47?”). [UPDATE: and this just in: 85-year-old woman may sue TSA after being strip searched at JFK Airport]  Andy McCarthy and I were lunching yesterday with some friends from Effingham, Illinois, a little oasis of political maturity in the vast sewer that is Illinois.  At some point the folly of the TSA came up and several constructive ideas were put forth.  I thought I would share a few of the most pertinent with readers.

Shortly after the terrorist assaults of 9/11, Mark Steyn had the proposal, which I strongly support, of allowing passengers to bring loaded guns with them on airplanes. Just imagine: Mohammed jumps up yelling “Allahu Akbar” and brandishing a box cutter. Four or five public-spirited passengers instantly stand up and plug the fellow with the appropriate airborne ordnance  and everybody settles back to enjoy a double scotch and take in a Wyatt Earp flick while the stewardess tidies up the mess oozing about the box cutter. The general point, which I made when the loony tune Cho Seung-Hui went on his murderous rampage at Virginia Tech a few years ago, is that if “more people had guns and knew how to use them, fewer people would get shot.” That contravenes liberal dogma, I know, but I really do believe it to be true.

I suspect it’s going to take a while before we get there, however, so in the meantime here’s a proposal from my Effingham friend Dr. Rick Workman.  Right now, we spend billions of dollars on a new government institution (the TSA) which invades people’s privacy, clogs our airports, and doesn’t really do anything to make flying safer. Why not dismantle the whole thing and hire a couple thousand sharp shooters?  We place one or two on every flight up by the cockpit behind some bullet-proof plexiglass. Ahmed gets restless, bang! He gets his 72 virgins. When I asked about reading him his Miranda rights, Andy suggested the perfect abridgment: “You have the right to remain silent,” which, in the circs., he was certain to do  anyway.

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So, a crowd of  “occupy Wall Street” cry-babies surged past my office in New York late yesterday afternoon, shouting, banging on drums, blowing whistles, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The police, which had lined the sidewalks with parade gates, looked bored. My colleagues at The New Criterion  and Encounter, peering out of the windows as the menagerie passed, seem to regard the spectacle with a combination of bemusement and contempt.  One of my New Criterion  colleagues sent along this message:

“Guess it wasn’t a green crowd”: Occupy Los Angeles protestors leave tons of trash.

Yesterday’s tantrum was heavily, indeed ostentatiously, union-fed, which explains the odor of thuggishness which accompanied the crowd as it marched down Broadway. What do they want? More money. When do they want it? Now? Where will it come from? You!

Repeat as necessary.

The funniest aspect of this macabre puppet show is the “anti-capitalist” trope that is so prominent a feature of the OWS rhetoric. Just where do these children think that money, and the astonishing affluence it has brought in its wake, comes from? I sometimes suspect they are innocent of the facts of life, that they think the stork brings money into the world. The fact that capitalism is far and away the mightiest engine for the production of wealth that the world has ever seen hasn’t penetrated the adipose folds of their ideology. The pleasures of preening self-righteousness all but guarantee that such home truths never will be taken on board.

For a vivid taste of the humor, savor this delicious tidbit from The New York Times‘s  daily report on OWS:

The composer Philip Glass will make a statement at a General Assembly at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, where his opera, Satyagraha, on the life of Gandhi, is closing.

Occupy Wall Street. Philip Glass. Gandhi.  It really is droll.  There is a reason that George Orwell began his devastating essay on that Indian fraud with the observation that saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent. (It cost a lot of money, the historian Paul Johnson observed in his tart assessment of Gandhi in Modern Times, to keep Gandhi living in poverty.)

In any event, for anyone who wishes to understand the inherent futility of the whole OWS movement, I’d like to recommend Richard Epstein’s new Encounter Broadside, “Why Progressive Institutions are Unsustainable” (Kindle edition here.)  And for a taste of what’s at stake, take a look at this short video summary of Epstein’s argument, “The Tea Party vs. occupy Wall Street”:

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According to National Geographic, Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University “successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs.” The story also reports that in Minnesota, researchers at the Mayo Clinic “created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies,” while at Stanford University an experiment is being contemplated “to create mice with human brains.”

These are the sorts of developments that make many people worry about the ethical implications of genetic engineering. They read about cloning or “harvesting” embryos for genetic material, about fusing human with rabbit cells, and they wonder whether we have not started firmly down the path described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Today we cull certain biological material from so-called “dispensable” embryos; tomorrow might we not have factories for the production of children carefully segregated according to genetic endowment?

But if many people worry about what genetic engineering portends, others worry primarily about what misplaced public anxiety about such scientific research will mean for the progress of science. Such people are not necessarily insensitive to ethical issues; but for them the search for scientific truth is ineluctable. Public opinion might delay the march of progress. It will never entirely derail it. So (they argue) it behooves us to pursue science wherever it leads. If we don’t, someone else will, and we in the West are better equipped than anyone to deploy new technologies wisely and humanely. To oppose the application of genetic engineering (the argument goes) is to be a latter-day Luddite, railing impotently against a technology whose effects might be painful at first but are ultimately liberating.

It is a mistake to dismiss out of hand either side of the argument: those who worry about genetic engineering, or those who worry about the worriers. Consider the plus side. The therapeutic promise of genetic engineering is more than enormous: it is staggering. No one who has seen somebody suffer from cancer or Parkinson’s disease or any of the many other horrific ills that the flesh is heir to can be deaf to that promise. Of course, any powerful technology can be put to evil purposes as well as good ones. In this sense, one might say that technology is like fire. It is neither good nor bad in itself. It is good when used appropriately for good purposes, bad when used inappropriately or for evil purposes.

It would be pleasing to think that we could apply some such calculus to determine the moral complexion of a particular application of genetic engineering. It is not at all clear, however, that the moral quandaries with which genetic engineering confronts us can be solved by such a calculus.

Part of the problem is that the creed — familiar to us from Marxism — that “the end justifies the means” seems particularly barbarous when applied directly to human reality, as it is in genetic engineering. True, the end often does justify the means.  But not always. Knowing when it does and when it does involves not moral formulas but sound judgment, a much subtler commodity.  Are all embryos potential candidates for “harvesting,” or only certain embryos? And what about newborns, another good source of genetic material? Are certain infants to be regarded as potential “raw material” for genetic experimentation? Which infants?

It is easy to conjure up a nightmare world in which some human beings are raised for spare parts. Already in certain parts of the world, the bodies of executed criminals are raided for kidneys, corneas and other body parts. Why not extend the practice?

My own belief is that humanity is on the threshold of an awesome moral divide. Recent advances in the technologies of genetic engineering — cloning, stem-cell research, and the like — confront us with moral problems for which we have no solution. Perhaps the biggest problem concerns the nature of the technologies involved.

When we look back over the course of technological development, especially in the last couple hundred years, it is easy to be a technological optimist. Science and technology have brought us so many extraordinary advances that one is tempted to close one’s eyes take a leap of faith when it comes to technology. No doubt science and technology have brought us many destructive things, but who except the hermits among us would willing do without the conveniences — including life-saving conveniences — they have bequeathed us? It is impossible, I think, for any rational person to say “No” to science and technology. The benefits are simply too compelling.

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On a trip to London a few years ago, my wife and I were having dinner at the Garrick Club with an eminent political philosopher and his wife. We had walked out on some horrible West End play after the first act and, having quickly gotten outside a bottle of wine, were finally beginning to enjoy the evening. Our hosts felt badly about the awfulness of the play — it was their suggestion to us out-of-towners — and to make up for the lack of drama on the stage my friend posed the following dramatic thought experiment: Let’s pretend, he said, that some mad scientist has figured out a way to bring peace, prosperity, and general happiness to the whole world.

There was just one catch: this brave new world required the yearly sacrifice of one innocent person, chosen at random. Supposing this scheme were perfected: would it be moral to close with the offer and subscribe universal happiness at the cost of one innocent life per annum?

Well, why not?

Think of all the billions of people there are in the world. Scads of innocent people die all the time. Why not spread happiness and reduce the death toll at the same time? Hard cheese on the appointed victim, of course. But he (or she) would at least have the consolation of dying for the good of society.

This is the sort of argument you might get from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the father of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism defines the good as the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Utilitarianism, especially in its undoctrinaire forms, has a lot of appeal. Most of us are at least intermittent utilitarians. At least, we expect those running society to act on broadly utilitarian principles, to “maximize” goods and services (read “happiness”) for as many people as possible.

It is interesting, then, that everyone to whom I have presented my friend’s thought-experiment has recoiled. Some people say, “That’s just silly,” and change the subject. Some say, “What a horrible idea,” and change the subject. Hardly anyone says, “That would be wrong because . . .” and then supplies a reason.

I think that the uneasiness that most people feel about this utilitarian fantasy is a good thing. I also think that the reluctance on the part of most people to provide a reason for their uneasiness is troubling. For one thing, it suggests that for many people, moral intuitions are unsupported by articulate moral principles. It also suggests that, acting more or less like utilitarians in our daily lives, we are poorly equipped to challenge utilitarian proposals when they go too far.

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