Entries for November 2005

Let me strongly recommend, as diversionary reading, two recent books on art in Ireland that I happened to pick up at bookstores—they've both got handsome covers—and which I found to be fascinating reading.

The first is The Irish Game, by Matthew Hart. It tells how Vermeer's painting Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid, owned by Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, was stolen by professional art thieves not once but twice from Russborough House, a Georgian mansion in the Wicklow Mountains not far from Dublin. Hart, a London-based writer, describes the Irish gangsters who organized the heists, the Irish detectives who recovered the painting, and the way that great paintings are used as collateral in drug deals by organized criminals. It seems they're too famous to sell to anyone, and owners and insurance companies are not always willing to pay ransom, but as relatively small and portable objects that can easily be kept in hiding, they can be held as security for large payments of money. If the thieves can't recover their value in the legal market for art—which in the case of a Vermeer would be in the tens or even hundreds of millions—they can take advantage of their considerably less but still substantial value in the illegal market for art.

I participated today in a panel at the Hudson Institute on dual citizenship. The subject was Hudson's John Fonte's paper lamenting dual citizenship and urging penalties for U.S. citizens who have foreign citizenship and exercise that citizenship by voting or running for office in foreign elections. Here's Fonte's paper.

Here is Fonte's testimony before the House immigration subcommittee earlier this year. Fonte argues that allowing dual citizenship is a threat to the American tradition of patriotic assimilation.

I think every conservative who knows E. J. Dionne Jr. likes him. He's pleasant, cheerful, just about unfailingly civil and he clearly strives to be intellectually honest. He wants the Democrats to win, but he recognizes that they're often incoherent and disorganized. Sometimes when you read one of his columns you want to say, "E. J., you can't really believe this." But his self-evident goodwill keeps you from getting angry with him. And he often has illuminating insights that are helpful for those who disagree as well as those who agree with him.

Which leads me to his column that appeared today in the Washington Post, headlined "Labor's Lost Story." It's a useful analysis of the issues raised by General Motors' big layoffs and the bankruptcy of the GM offshoot Delphi. As Dionne sees it, conservatives see this as an example of economist Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction," which hurts some firms and employees but makes the overall economy more productive and the bulk of consumers and workers better off. In contrast, writes Dionne, "progressives can't quite agree on a single narrative." They talk about offloading the Big Three auto firm's healthcare costs onto the government, they lament that free trade sends some blue-collar jobs beyond our borders (not "offshore," as Dionne has it; many Big Three jobs are now in Mexico), and the declining numbers of union members. Dionne offers his own narrative, rooted in his version of American history:

House Democrats have been assailing House Republicans for alleged cuts—actually, decreases in spending growth—in Medicaid. The debate was full of the unedifying rhetoric that is the staple of two-minute tirades in the House. But where did the idea for those Medicaid "cuts" come from? Washington Post reporter Jonathan Weisman, in a front-page story, provides the answer. It turns out it's the governors, of both political parties, who want to cut Medicaid spending growth. Medicaid is eating up state budgets and crowding out other spending, and the governors are the ones who are faced with the practical problem of what to do about it. I haven't always been a fan of Weisman's reporting. But here he has done a good job of putting together two related stories—the debate in the House and the governors' initiative—and enabling readers to understand what is at stake here.

Jim Hoagland can certainly not be accused of being a shill for the Bush administration. But his Sunday column in the Washington Post contains important evidence that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has promoted the cause of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. The key quote is from the brave champion of democracy in Egypt, Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

"But it is a Middle East in which those who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors, even though we still face big obstacles," says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt's battle-scarred democratic activist. Ibrahim originally opposed the invasion of Iraq. But it "has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives," Ibrahim told me in Washington.

Last week I linked to Michael Ledeen's latest article on Iran. Ledeen has long argued that we should work to encourage peaceful democratic revolution in Iran, as we did in eastern Europe in the 1980s. Now, from another zone on the political spectrum, come similar arguments from Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford don whose splendid reportage of the peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe is still very much worth reading. Writing in the left-wing Guardian, Garton Ash includes some obligatory putdowns of George W. Bush. But he leaves no doubt about who the really bad guys are. "If you see it at first hand, you will have no doubt that this is a very nasty and dangerous regime."

Here's Garton Ash's bottom line.

For the last couple of years, for reasons I am unaware of, I have been on the e-mail list of the National Wild Turkey Federation, located in Edgefield, S.C. (the home town of Strom Thurmond). The NWTF evidently does a lot of work protecting wild turkey habitat, and it strikes me as an example of the bounteous proliferation of voluntary associations that has been a central feature of American life, as noted long ago by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. But some might argue that the protection of wild turkey habitat has gone too far. A front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) points out that wild turkeys have been attacking people in Norman, Okla.; Cranford, N.J.; Montgomery County, Pa.; and Montauk, N.Y. Jennifer Graham in National Review Online reports on similar developments in Canton, Mass. The spread of major metropolitan areas—urban sprawl, as critics like to call it—has often produced not the destruction of wildlife habitat but the insertion of people into wildlife habitat, with results that are sometimes negative for people and their pets. Many of us like to live in what amount to forests. But the price is that we have to watch out for wild turkeys, deer, and cougars.