Entries for February 2007

Rudy Giuliani spoke to the Hoover Institution's overseers and trustees in Washington on Monday and presented a vision that suggests he's preparing to respond to the complaint in my U.S. News column this week. It suggests that he's thinking in broad conceptual terms and that he's going to be providing some details as well. I think he's going to make school choice a big issue, going beyond George W. Bush's accountability law.

Take a step back from pondering the latest news from Iraq and ponder some long-term questions. Like the long-term course of China and India.

In my U.S. News column this week, I took a look at presidential candidates' websites and analyzed their treatment of issues. It didn't take too long to read through the websites; what I found was, as I wrote in the column, "pretty thin gruel." In the online version of my column, we have provided a link to a list of the candidates' websites, so you can easily read what they have to say and make your own judgments on whether I've fairly reflected their offerings. It's hard to do justice to the statements of 18 candidates in a 750-word column, and I think it's a good thing that those reading the Web edition can easily judge for themselves.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that in a recent presidential pairing, Hillary Rodham Clinton would beat Newt Gingrich by a 50-to-43 percent margin. That sounds fairly plausible, although it's a little better showing for Gingrich than I would have expected. But take a look at the favorable/unfavorable ratings. Rasmussen's numbers have Clinton's fav/unfav at 50 and 48 percent and Gingrich's fav/unfav at 43 and 48 percent. You're tempted to think that Clinton and Gingrich both got the votes of every respondent who had favorable feelings toward her or him–and not a single vote more.

The Washington Times is running on the front page of its print edition, above the fold, two pictures of Amillia Taylor, the baby born after a gestation period of 21 weeks. They are striking pictures. The one on the bottom shows the newborn is only slightly longer than a fountain pen. The one on the top shows the baby's two feet between the hands of an adult; the baby's feet are not much longer than the adult's knuckle.

Here's the first political ad of the 2007-08 presidential cycle, from Mitt Romney, who promises "STRONG. NEW. LEADERSHIP." More to come, from Romney and many others, in the days ahead. The two videos YouTube has to follow the Romney ad are "College Saga–Episode 1" and "Citizen Hero." On the "related video" sidebar is, among others, "ROMNEY HONORS VETERANS AT STATE HOUSE CEREMONY," submitted by one "KenMehlman." That person identifies himself as Chip and gives his age as 15. "I'm not really former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. I am still a conservative Republican."

Well, you don't have to read them now. Because Michael Rubin has. Rubin is the editor of Middle East Quarterly and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Fluent in Arabic and Farsi, he spent 22 months in Iraq, most of it outside the Green Zone. In this review he gives his own magisterial take on no less than 33 books. He gives big pluses to Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers, Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's Cobra II, Bing West's No True Glory, Fouad Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift, Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, and Eric Davis's Memories of State. Minuses in varying degrees go to James Fallows's Blind into Baghdad, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory. He also gives a less than totally positive view of Gen. David Petraeus. But Rubin's verdicts are much more nuanced than a thumbs up or thumbs down. There's lots of insight here into what has happened in Iraq. I'm waiting for Rubin's book. In the meantime, read the whole thing.