To the third tier of the Jewish Press' list of "Favorite Websites." Next step: "Honorable Mention!"

Thanks for the tip, Mom! You and Grandma always knew I'd amount to something, someday. And thanks to author and reader Jason Maoz for the kind words; please keep coming back.

The virtues of procrastination have been revealed again: I was about to write a post about how I thought the lack of activity with the Valerie Plame story since its revelation, along with certain other revelations, had persuaded me that there was probably less to the story than the Bush-haters would have liked.

Maybe not.

I still find it hard to believe that the administration would combine such high levels of illegality and incompetence. But if everything in the Washington Post story is true (and that still is a big "if"), then I agree with every word of this Daniel Drezner post. In fact, I might take some precautions and make a donation to the Lieberman campaign (not that it will make a difference), just in case.

For more, follow the links in the Drezner post.

I still have a lot of trouble believing that the worst-case (or best-case, depending on your orientation) is true; wouldn't it have been easier, and less traceable, to hire a plane to sky-write Plame's status above Capitol Hill? But a year ago, it would've seemed even less likely that Saddam Hussein would've destroyed his chemical or biological weapons without telling anyone about it. So who knows?

A Shana Tova to all. Thank you so much for reading. I will do my best to make this year more worth your while.

Edward Said passed away today.

I'm not qualified to judge his scholarship, though the fact that two of his biggest targets were Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami doesn't inspire confidence. And I'm not going to dwell on his complicated relationship with his past , his unique variety of "political protest", or even his general Palestinian activism.

In a 1999 profile, A.O. Scott wrote :

More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail.
(Emphasis added.)

I'd argue that few if any intellectuals of his generation can truly be said to have been more devoted to "gods that fail." Said spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating for a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. But when faced with the possibility that such a solution might actually be possible, Said became a fierce enemy of the concept and the means of its realization. Rather than agitating for a way to make the Oslo Accords better, he denounced Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a sellout. (The "dictator" part was certainly true, but Said's sudden discovery of those tendencies after a long history as an Arafat adviser does not speak well of his powers of observance.) Rather than trying to work against Arafat to build a better Palestinian society during the Oslo years, he became a leader of the intellectual resistance to the whole two-state enterprise. His proposal was a "secular, binational state" - an idea that only makes sense in the ivory tower. It is well known that the Palestinians supported Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the Palestinian state offered at Camp David, believing they could get all of Israel. They were encouraged in this hope by intellectuals such as Said:

The intellectual guardians of Arab nationalist orthodoxy--Said, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, Egyptian cultural leader Saad Eddin Wahbe, Egyptian editor and pundit Mohamed Heikal--have never accepted the fact of Israel; they cannot envision a world without the rallying cause of anti-Zionism. Nothing could have been more infuriating to them than the sight of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian nationalism, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's late prime minister. They never forgave Arafat for bowing to what Ajami calls "the logic of brute, irreversible facts." To them, the 1993 Oslo accords meant settling for a sadly truncated form of Palestinian self-rule without extracting an Israeli admission of wrongdoing. Indeed, Said and other rejectionists showed a perverse glee when Israel's dovish Labor Party was defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. Here, again, was a world they could understand. "Men love the troubles they know," Ajami witheringly observes.

The terror war waged against Israel over the last three years is a direct result of such fantasies - the refusal to engage reality based on enthrallment to "gods that fail." And nobody embodied that peculiar type of "intellectual" better than Edward Said.
Fortunately, he can no longer avoid accountability for the consequences of his actions.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn does it better, quoting something he wrote not long after 9/11:

Take away all the infidel products and you’d be left with a loser in yak-wool boxers standing in a cave shouting to himself. Osama had an infidel watch (Timex Ironman Triathlon), infidel fatigues (army-surplus US battle dress), infidel hand-mike, infidel camera. This is presumably an example of what Professor Edward Said, the distinguished New York-based America-disparager, calls the “interconnectedness” of the west and Islam. The Prof deplores the tendency, in the wake of September 11th, to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities”, when in reality western civilisation and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it’s impossible to “draw the line” between them.

This pitch isn’t getting a lot of respect. “The line seems pretty clear,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

The Jewish Week has a short profile of Rena Sofer, one of the stars of NBC's new series "Coupling" - a show which supposedly "follows the mating habits of six friends who stop having sex only long enough to talk about it."

Rena Sofer will have come a long way since her days as a yeshiva girl in New Jersey.

It’s not a likely career path for a former student of Achei Temimim, a Lubavitch grade school in Massachusetts, or the Frisch High School in Paramus. Sofer’s father, Martin, is an Orthodox rabbi, as anyone who peruses her online biography or recent media interviews will learn.

I wonder if Frisch will be publicizing Sofer as one of its alumni - probably not, unless she wants to make a large donation.

Sofer’s character, Susan, is “a beautiful and sexy go-getter with an uninhibited attitude toward life and the world of romance,” according to network publicity.

I don't think that was on Frisch's curriculum.

A while ago, I was writing a long post about Social Security and the payroll tax that funds it, and why a) the Republicans had success pushing for giving individuals the power to direct their Social Security contriubtions and b) why the intermittent calls to remove the cap on SS payroll taxes are invariably a confession of ignorance as to how SS works. But my computer crashed midway through the post and I never got back to it.

Well, Megan McArdle cites an outstanding piece by Jacob Levy that discusses the subject in passing, more concisely than my would-be-efforts. He touches on all the important points:

If the payroll tax is just a tax, not something special like an insurance premium or forced savings-- that is, if it ought to be counted in a way that is detached from Social Security payouts at the other end-- then the tax system is barely progressive, and could be tipped into being regressive overall. If the payroll tax is not just a tax but something special that should be counted alongside the ostensible benefits it ostensibly purchases, then this is not true. The payroll tax is the largest share of the tax burden for (I believe this is right) most Americans. It is proportional-- but only on earned income, and only up to a certain income cap. So it makes a big difference in the overall calculations-- and how we count it makes a big difference.

I think that the payroll tax is just a tax, and that Social Security is just a spending program. But that's not the official position; and it's not ordinarily the position of those who support a continued state system of Social Security. Hence the desire to take Social Security off-budget, to treat its surplus as different from other state funds, and so on. Hence the unwillingness to means-test Social Security-- in order to preserve the illusion of social insurance "bought" with one's "premiums." Hence the unwillingness to lift the income cap on the payroll tax-- because then we'd either have to allow benefits paid to the richest retirees to skyrocket, or we'd have to admit that one's taxes don't really purchase one's own benefits. In other words, I want to concede that the payroll tax is just a tax, making the tax system as a whole borderline-regressive-- and then to insist on the consequences that follow from that. But I dislike any attempt to have it both ways-- to treat the payroll tax as just a tax for purposes of calculating regressivity, but to treat it as something quite different when it comes to discussing Social Security as a program.

(Emphases added.)

I can't count the number of editorials and opinion pieces over the years bemoaning the regressivity of SS taxes and advocating either cuts in the taxes paid or doing away with the income caps. Those pieces never (as far as I've seen) even address the ostensible relationship between tax contributions and future benefits that is at the heart of the way Social Security is sold to the population. The problem is exactly as Levy discusses: assuming the caps are raised or abolished, what "return" should the taxpayers get on contributions made into the system at the new income levels? If it is anything above zero, then a) you haven't helped the long-term sustainability of the system at all and b) eventual SS payouts will then be accordingly tilted in favor fo those who have made such large contributions - i.e., in favor of the "rich." Currently, the distribution of SS payouts is pretty progressive, and that is due to the income caps on contributions; abolishing those caps will make the distribution of SS payouts track the distribution of income and taxes paid in the country - i.e., not progressive at all.

On the other hand, if the "return" on such elevated contributions is zero, then you've just officially abandoned the "illusion of social insurance 'bought' with one's 'premiums.'", in Levy's words. In that case, SS is nothing but a (very effective) redistributive program - why not go about it more efficiently and means-test? Most liberals are horrified at the thought, as it goes counter to one of the main tenents of what Jonathan Cohn and Ed Haislmaier recently called the "Unreformed Church of Social Insurance of the Strict Observance." As Cohn described the rationale for that stricture in connection with a proposed prescription drug benefit:

In the real world, universal programs thrive while means-tested programs barely survive, if at all. As a case study, simply look at Medicare and Medicaid, enacted at the same time. Because Medicaid benefits only the poor, it lacks a constituency with sufficient political clout to protect it from cuts whenever Washington or the states start trimming budgets. Those cuts inevitably leave people on Medicaid without medical access, either because it doesn't cover particular populations--leaving them uninsured--or pays such atrociously low fees that many medical providers refuse it--leaving those with coverage without doctors to see.

So I guess you can count me as a member of the Church. I indeed think a Medicare drug benefit should be universal, because I fear anything else won't survive long politically.

The argument is professed with even greater devotion with respect to Social Security.

So if you're wondering why you read so many pieces bemoaning the inequality of capping the income subject to Social Security taxes and never hear of anything done about it, it's because - not for the first time! - there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular description of the problem and the underlying facts of the matter.

David Edelstein, , in reviewing the new vampire movie Underworld::

As we Christopher Lee fans can attest, there's something hugely satisfying about seeing regal English snobs with perfect enunciation hiss through bared fangs while drooling blood. It clarifies so much about Great Britain's role in world history.

Glenn Reynolds, by way of Clayton Cramer, cites a curious statement by Gray Davis:

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth," he said.
(Emphasis added.)

Now, this may be a simple slip of the tongue or confirmation of California's... unique characteristics. I think it's something entirely different - the answer to a difficult problem with our economic statistics.

In its current survey of the world economy, the Economist describes America's burgeoning current-account deficit, but also notes a problem with its calculation (subscription required):

Some of the recent rise may be a statistical quirk. According to official numbers, the world as a whole runs a current-account deficit with itself, and one that has risen sharply since 1997. Since the world does not, as yet, trade with Mars, the numbers must be wrong, so some of America's current-account deficit may be more apparent than real. But not all of the recent rise, or even most of it, can be explained this way.
(Emphasis added.)

Are they really sure that there is no extraterrestrial trade? Perhaps the Economist's correspondent should've stopped in Sacramento while researching the survey. And the hopefully-soon-to-be-former Governor Davis may be bucking for a job as Commerce Secretary in a Dean Administration (though the extraterrestrial trade expertise may be more relevant for a Kucinich Administration).

It belongs to Dahlia Lithwick:

There's really only one way to read the panel's decision from Monday. It's a sauce-for-the-gander exercise in payback. Pure and simple. The panel not only refused to accept the Supremes' admonition that the nation would not be fooled again; it refused even to address it. Applying Bush v. Gore again and again in the unanimous opinion, the judges told the high court that it has no power to declare a case a one-ride ticket and defied the court to step in again to tell them otherwise. (The court isn't likely to step in, as many have now noted, because they cannot win if they do. By getting involved, they risk either looking corrupt and partisan if they reverse the decision or permitting the courts to legislate things like the distances between polling places and the pant-length for elections workers for all eternity.)

Reading the opinion, you can almost hear the panel saying: "Hey, let's not just halt this recall, let's have a little fun with the thing!" The opinion includes a fond historical nod to voting with fava beans and the wry observation that punch cards are "intractably afflicted with technologic dyscalculia." It's tough to count the number of times the judges gleefully point out that the secretary of state is barred from defending the punch-card machines because he is already subject to a consent decree holding that they suck.

For more substantive commentary, check out law professor Rick Hansen, whose amicus brief helped inspire the 9th Circuit's decision, and his nemesis (on this subject) Mickey Kaus. Each has a myriad of links on the subject.

...as a member of the Neocon Conspiracy to Conquer the World (TM), that is.

How else do you explain a column that begins with the following?

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs.

The column is titled, of course, "Our War with France."

Aside from the concluding paragraph, there is nothing in the column that couldn't have come from the Weekly Standard, Opinion Journal or any of the other usual conspirators.

Interestingly, Friedman notes the following:

Yes, the Bush team's arrogance has sharpened French hostility. Had President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld not been so full of themselves right after America's military victory in Iraq — and instead used that moment, when the French were feeling that maybe they should have taken part, to magnanimously reach out to Paris to join in reconstruction — it might have softened French attitudes. But even that I have doubts about.
(Emphasis added.)

I guess he doesn't agree with Fred Kaplan about how US-European disagreements over Iraq are all President Bush's fault.

...in its contest with the Blair government for "Bigger Liar," that is. As Andrew Sullivan notes, the reporter in question is toast. Click here for an assessment of the BBC's claims and how they stand up. (Some of them do.)

Via Robert Musil, the Econopundit has some fascinating guesstimates of the impact of the effort to rebuild Iraq on the US economy.
Good stuff.

James Lileks' Bleat for today takes on an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the mindset behind it. (Click here and scroll down for links to the editorial's sources). I cannot disagree with or excerpt from a single part of Lileks' rant; go read it.

Here's the wedding invitation of Chanan Sand and Nava Applebaum:

(Thanks to Ephraim Shapiro for the image.)

Apparently the Jerusalem Post is in great disarray and has been for a while, with matters seemingly reaching a crisis point following its recent editorial advocating the killing of Yasser Arafat. Allison Kaplan Sommer, a former reporter for the JPost, has the scoop (and click here for more). We look forward to reading her tell-all memoirs of her time at the JPost - sounds like she has a lot of dirt to dish.

Here's a great NYT piece on the connections between Saudi Arabia and Hamas, among other terrorist organizations:

At least 50 percent of Hamas's current operating budget of about $10 million a year comes from people in Saudi Arabia, according to estimates by American law enforcement officials, American diplomats in the Middle East and Israeli officials. After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Saudi portion of Hamas financing grew larger as donations from the United States, Europe and other Persian Gulf countries dried up, American officials and analysts said.

Four senior American law enforcement and diplomatic officials who reviewed the document did not dispute its authenticity, but declined to discuss its contents.

(Emphasis added.)

The following is part of an e-mail dedication from the head of Otzmah Project of Emergency Medical Volunteers that involves physicians being on call for Israel. Of course, the late Dr. Applebaum was instrumental in this project as well.
The complete e-mail can be found in the first comment here.

The anguish and anger expressed by a number of, you following the murder Dr. David Appelbaum z" l and the recent acts of terror of these last 48 hours remind us of the task at hand. Dr. David Applebaum z"l, Director of the Emergency Department at Jerusalem's Shaarei Tsedek's Hospital, was well known to us. This event dramatically reemphasized that terrorists don't discriminate. They want "only" to exterminate the State and the People of Israel, no matter who you are, - it's enough of an excuse for them that you're Israeli - or rather quite bluntly: that you're a Jew or are friendly to the Jews thus becoming a "legitimate" target.
For over fifty years the State and the People of Israel have struggled for survival. In the last two years an increasing number of people have begun to understand that we don't fight only here for own physical survival. We fight against is Barbarism, Darkness, Evil and for Civilization. The difference between Civilization and civilizations/cultures is very simple: in a Civilized Society every single human life is valuable. So long as the mothers of Palestinian terrorists will express their joy at the news that their son has committed a homicidal bombing, killing indiscriminately, as seen on the media, our fight will go on. We will keep fighting for ourselves, our families and our people, but also for all civilized people who hope that the future of mankind will be a "human future", not a barbarian one.
Today is September 11th. For the last two years we are no longer alone in this fight.
As it has been the case for the past three years, the medical services of the state of Israel are coping quite adequately with waves after waves of terror attacks. We are probably once again at the beginning of one of these murderous waves. The coming days are going to be uneasy ones. The State of Israel is once again on full alert. But things are somehow different that in the past. The American intervention in Iraq and the continuous presence of the American and coalition forces there has shuffled dramatically the cards in the Middle East. The threat on the existence of the State of Israel has been considerably diminished, and the eventuality of a generalization of the conflict with the Palestinian terrorists to a global Arab-Israeli war is currently very low. What remains is the threat of daily terror and the threat of a "mega-terror" event.
What is the task of the Emergency Medical Volunteers? The current assessment is that there is no real probability of a general call-up in the coming weeks/months. However these events must remind us that we have to maintain our efforts to widen the pool of EMV volunteers, to screen and train more and more volunteers, and to check that our new operational procedures will run smoothly. By doing so we will also demonstrate to the Israeli people that we care, and are concerned, by our active involvement by what is happening. It may be a small thing to you but it sends a strong message. From now on, each of the upcoming EMV training courses will be given the name of a member of the Israeli medical services who became a victim to the terror of the last years; sadly the list is not a short one. Therefore the next course, due to begin on October 26, will be dedicated to the memory of Dr. David Appelbaum z"l.

Here's a story about plans for a new emergency alert system in the American Jewish community:

It is believed to be the first crisis alert system serving a specific community in the United States.
The project, called Secure Community Alert Network, or SCAN, includes the leading Jewish organizations in the nation, as well as hundreds of Jewish community centers, federations and educational institutions.
...Hoenlein said in an emergency, SCAN will immediately notify about 150 contacts across the country via e-mail, pager, telephone and fax. SCAN will not stop signaling until the message is received. The contacts can then alert their memberships.
“We will activate this in a crisis, as circumstance demands,” Hoenlein said, stressing that the network “will be used on rare occasions” and not for general information.
An advisory team of law enforcement and Jewish officials will determine when SCAN will be activated.
Hoenlein noted that Jewish communities in South Africa, England and Australia have such alert systems, saying “it’s a good question” why American Jewry has lagged behind.

The network is apparently contracting to use certain communications technology that has previously only been used by the government and military.
This looks to be a fascinating experiment in creating small-scale information networks, and I'd expect it to be replicated if it works well. The story doesn't say, but it doesn't seem like the information flows from the bottom up. But a network on this scale should be able to accomodate such information flow.
This network could make the job of government easier in an emergency. Congratulations to the Jewish Week for picking the story up; it should attract more attention.

A while ago, William Kristol caught hell from many liberals for his twisting a phrase used to defend Joseph McCarthy into an attack on the Democrats:

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration's foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

I'd prefer to push different buttons - ones that will enrage certain liberals even more than a McCarthyite phrase. Remember the war-cry of Anita Hill's supporters in the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, when the insensitivity of the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee somehow proved that Republicans "just don't get it?"
Well, most of the Democratic presidential candidates just don't get it.
I could be convinced that the policies of George W. Bush have been counterproductive in the war on terror. I could be convinced that the war on Iraq was a bad idea. I could be convinced that we're not doing the right things on homeland security.
But convincing me intellectually is only part of the battle. You (addressing the 9 Democratic candidates) have to convince me that you'd actually do better. And before I'll be convinced of that, I need to be convinced that you actually get it.
"Getting it" means that you understand that the most important question facing America today, and probably for the forseeable future, is whether untold thousands of people - like me - will go to work in places like Manhattan and never go home to their families, because a nuclear weapon was detonated by genocidal maniacs whose entire raison d'etre is to kill us for who we are.
Howard Dean's entire campaign is built on a rejection of that premise. For other candidates like John Kerry, basing a campaign on criticizing everything President Bush has done -including those things that Kerry voted for - is also a symptom of "not getting it." As I said, I could be convinced that Bush's policies may be wrong and counterproductive. But given a choice between someone who actually understands the threat we face and someone who does not, it's pretty reasonable to go with the one who actually "gets it." And I think many others will come to the same conclusion.
Andrew Sullivan says it well:

No democracy wants to believe it is under dire threat; no one wants the abnormality to endure; no one wants to absorb the truth that the war is still in its infancy and that greater atrocities lie ahead, unless we act forcefully to pre-empt them and build the kind of societies in the Middle East that are alone guarantees of our and their future peace and stability. I have made plenty of criticisms of this president; and will do so again. But he's currently the only leader in this country who actually gets the depth of our predicament and the need for innovative, enterprising and ruthless action to improve it. The paradox is that the more he succeeds and the more the threat of terror recedes, the more his opponents will take the calm as evidence that nothing much has to be done, that nothing much has been done, that America, by acting, is the real source of world conflict, and that retreat and amnesia are the cure-alls.

I was going to write up the sermon-style thoughts I'd had ever since 9/11 occurred. I tried to do so last year and couldn't. No better luck this year. So here's a link to what I wrote last year; it's still pretty relevant. (Sorry, Rabbi Josh - you're on your own for the sermon you're delivering this Shabbat.)

Buried in this human-interest piece about Nava Applebaum's grieving fiancee is the following shocking tidbit:

When he heard from his sister that people feared Nava had been hurt in the bombing, he went to Shaare Zedek Hospital, where some of the victims had gone and where her father was the head of the emergency room.
He and many family members waited there for news of Nava, already knowing that her father, David Applebaum, was dead. The two had gone together to the caf for coffee.
In response to how he felt about the news that the man responsible for the attack was among the 343 Palestinian prisoners released this summer, Sand said, "I never believed in peace. I knew it was a mistake, I didn't believe the lack of peace could impact me so much."
(Emphasis added.)
Has anyone else seen this information about the bomber's identity as a just-released prisoner? And if it's true, can anyone in good conscience criticize Israel for not releasing more prisoners over the summer as a "confidence-building measure" (that was, of course, not even included in the "road map")?

I'm having a lot of trouble getting over the killings of Dr. Applebaum and his not-to-be-married daughter. (Apparently Dr. Applebaum went to high school with my father-in-law.) In this day, has civilization advanced farther than the case of Dr. Applebaum? And when you consider that the Palestinians have consistently refused the benefits the rest of the world has tried to give them in favor of killing people like Dr. Applebaum, aren't those who support the Palestinians over Israel supporting the negation of civilization? Keep in mind, Dr. Applebaum and his daughter weren't just killed by a Palestinian terrorist. Their deaths were celebrated by Palestinains in Gaza.
Try this one, NY Times. One side in the "encounter" devoted his life to healing the victims of illness and terorrism, and was about to marry off a daughter raised in the same tradition. The other aimed to destroy the life so devoted, and was widely applauded by his own side for doing so.
Civilization, and its negation.

UPDATE: Apparently the terrorist in question may have been released before the summer's hudna-inspired release. It still doesn't exactly support the argument for future "confidence-building measures." (Thanks to commenters on Protocols for the link.)
ANOTHER UPDATE: Protocols has done some additional research (i.e., contacting the author of the JPost story) and the results don't engender great confidence in the Post story.

Check out this piece on the Upper West Side community of 20-something single Modern Orthodox - the "Metrodox:"

"No matter where one grew up -- their background, their religiosity -- the Upper West Side has become the hub for the post-college single Jew," says Isaac Galena who, along with his twin brother Seth, run the Metrodox Web portal, bangitout.com. "Most Jewish communities, if not all, have a tendency to make Orthodox single people in their 20's feel like freaks. As if there is something seriously wrong with them since they aren't married by the age of 23. The Upper West Side serves as a community that embraces people in singlehood. It makes them feel as though they belong and serves almost as a fun support group and a stepping stone during this interim period."
As Galena will tell you, an interim period implies that eventually the Metrodox will find a mate, get married, and graduate to greener, probably more suburban, pastures.
So, what's the dating scene like? Picture a Jewish Melrose Place. With thousands of young Jews packed into the same neighborhood, Metrodox dating has become a phenomenon all to itself. Consider this: Jewish singles from all across America travel to the Upper West Side just to go on dates.
One out-of-state 28-year-old male who, for obvious reasons, wished to remain anonymous, told Jewsweek he traveled to New York 13 times in one year alone, and has gone out on more than 100 dates with Metrodox girls. Asked why he didn't just move there, he had this to say: "If I lived in the Upper West Side and saw hundred of available Modern Orthodox women at synagogue, I wouldn't even know where to begin. It would literally be overwhelming and I'm afraid, like many who live there, I would just get jaded."
If desired, a typical Metrodox male could go out with a different girl every night of the week -- for an entire year. There's an entire cottage industry around Web sites that cater to the Metrodox's dating needs including jewishcafe.com and frumster.com. And once somebody gets engaged, they can post pictures and mazal tovs online at Onlysimchas.com. Some Metrodox check the site twice a day.

I've always looked at the Upper West Side community as an ideal place for a short visit, but I'm very thankful to have not had to live there for an undetermined length of time. It is indeed a fascinating place - many people really do navigate the dating scene while following the halakhic rules, while many others invent rationalizations that even Bill Clinton would have been ashamed of. For details on the latter, check out this entry by Allison Kaplan Sommer. For examples of the former and latter, see this story by an old friend.

Here is a small sample of thoughts on the day.

Reuven Weiser:

A few days ago, a New York Times article reported that "nearly one-third of those questioned [in a recent poll] said that their lives have still not returned to normal." "It is as if the populace has stalled in its march toward fully being itself again." I think the pollsters, and authors, are missing the point.
True, it's not normal (as anyone who knows me can tell you) for me to stand on a street corner, staring at the sky, holding back tears. But then neither is it normal for two 110-story towers to crumble to the ground, killing the thousands inside.
It is not normal for people to fear travel on bridges and in tunnels, as the article reports many still do, but neither is it normal for those bridges and tunnels to be the target of terrorist plots.
I was not "being myself" when the snowflakes falling in downtown Manhattan last winter chilled my heart as well as my bones, reminding me of the day when little pieces of white ash fell in my hair and down my shirt. But to try to "march on" and wipe such thoughts from my mind would be an affront to the memory of those whose ashes were falling on me, and that isn't me either.
So I think that, since 9/11, we need to change our definition of "normal" and our conception of what it means to be ourselves. At least until (though probably even after) we have sufficiently dealt with those, here and around the world, who would deprive us of our sense of security and dignity. Only then can we hope to truly begin our return to normalcy.

James Lileks:

The picture at the top of this page is a sliver taken from a 9/11 camera feed. It’s the cloud that rolled through lower Manhatttan when the towers fell. Paper, steel, furniture, plastic, people. The man who took the picture inhaled the dust of the dead. Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she’ll have to insist that she’s okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn’t remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes.
Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.

Stephen Green:

"The purpose of terrorism," wrote the 20th Century's first terrorist, "is terror." By that measure, our enemies have failed. And failed badly.
Are you, two years later, still unable to comprehend? Be honest now. Unless you've dived head first into the bloodiest part of the heart of darkness, then, no, you don't understand. You and I here in the West, or even that vast majority in the Muslim world, can never really know what makes an educated person do what those 19 men did two Septembers ago.
But are you terrorized?
Do you live in constant, unalterable fear?
For me, the answer is: "Hell, no!"
Dread is for the weak; defiance is, perhaps, the American virtue.
I'm saddened for 10,000 children who lost a mommy or a daddy that day. I'm angered every time I see a picture of the altered New York skyline. I know a wearied irritation that this instinctively isolationist nation has been dragged into yet another world war. There is real, physical pain in my belly when that sound comes back, unbidden. You know the sound I mean – the thunk-splat of meat hitting pavement, of living people who chose to jump rather than be burned alive.
Americans are defiant, even regarding the manner of death chosen for us by others.
Now go on and let yourself relive that day, just a little.
Remember the first reports that "a small plane" had crashed into the World Trade Center. Firemen who didn't just run into a burning building, they ran up into collapsing skyscrapers. Grounded planes. The stock exchanges, closed. The doubt, the fear, the "what will they do next?" And the realization: Oh my God, we're at war. War in the Old Testament sense, when the barbarians came to rape and to slaughter.
Relive, too, the days after.
The wall of inkjet "have you seen. . .?" photos. You, me, your friends, crying over obituaries in The New York Times. Widows grieving at Ground Zero, who breathed – breathed in – their husbands' ashes.
Remember, too, our just vengeance.
Our president told us, "I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." And they do hear us, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They hear us, not because we used our weapons to murder their civilians, but to bring down their tyrants. From our loss, we gave them hope. The loss felt in Baghdad and Kabul is that of Sisyphus without his stone. The sound they hear is the ring of freedom. And they hear us, even if only a whisper, in Syria, in Iran, and – yes – they hear us in Saudi Arabia, too.
Maybe defiance will prove as irresistible an export as Levi's, Coke, and MTV.
Two years later, I'm still angry – and I hope you are, too. But are we terrorized?
Hell, no.

Josh Marshall:

Two years ago today I rolled out of bed in the morning, still semi-conscious and half asleep. As I walked into my living room --- the TV was still on from the night before --- I saw the second plane slam into the World Trade Center and explode in an orange and black fireball.
I'll never know whether that was a live shot or a replay of the images from a few minutes before. It was just after nine. Still groggy, I had a hard time processing what I had seen. I knew it was a big deal. But I didn't at first grasp just how big a deal.
When I sat down at my desk my girlfriend was already typing out messages on IM from her office at work. Had I seen? Where was I? They (she worked on Capitol Hill) were next, she said.
Beside watching the plane crash into the building, what stands out in my mind about those few minutes was that I asked her why she was so sure it was terrorism.
Partly --- mainly, I think --- this was because I was still only half awake and still trying to process what I had seen. I'm not sure in those first moments I was quite clear on how large the planes were. But certainly part of what was happening was that I was still for a moment living in a pre 9/11 world, where something like this was still hard to comprehend, hard to imagine.
Then she said something like: Two planes one after another in to both buildings? What do you think it is?
With that, suddenly everything snapped into place. The sleep fell from my eyes. My mind cleared. Everything was obvious.

Finally, if you have a high-speed connection, I highly recommend you watch this.
(Thanks to Will Carroll for the link.)

Last week, Megan McArdle had some intriguing thoughts on the working mother/ child-care conundrum.
I have some not-particularly-related points on the matter. There is some argument that the tax and regulatory regime re: child care favors institutional arragements (i.e. day care) over individual ones (i.e. in-home care) - and not just in requiring a social security number to ward off illegal immigrants.
Speaking from personal experience, if you want to have a nanny and do everything above-board, you have to do an awful lot of things that most individuals aren't used to doing. The SS tax withholding is the famous (Zoe Baird) one, and one of the easier ones to do (though you have to remember to file parallel forms with the Social Security Administration, not just the IRS - and the IRS' current publication on the matter mentions if you look hard enough).
Actually, even that isn't as easy as it sounds, because you have a choice of (a) persuading the nanny to take less up-front than she would get in cash (because you're withholding at least your half of Social Security, and let's say that many prospectivee nannies aren't always interested in taking less upfront for the sake of a future Social Security benefit) or (b) paying her that much more to make up the difference.
And less publicized but more difficult are the things you have to do on the state level - aside from whatever tax requirements there are, you need (in NY State at least) to register as an employer, pay into workman's comp, take out disability insurance and some other things I'm forgetting. And in doing those things, you have to puzzle through forms not really drafted for individuals and deal with the occasional bureaucrat who can't understand why an individual is actually bothering to comply with these requirements.
With day care, all you need to do is write a check.
You see why a massively high percentage of people who hire nannies end up paying them in cash.
It's not as if I have a good answer for the issue - I'm not interested in arguing that household employees should have no protections or rights, and I wouldn't believe it even if I felt like arguing the point. But some simplification is probably in order.

Check out JPost correspondent Douglas Davis, writing in the Spectator on the "right of return," the Israeli fence/wall and why each is so important:

Offered an independent Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza, a share in Jerusalem and a limited return of refugees to Israel, Yasser Arafat’s response has been the violence that has convulsed Israel for more than three years. The frequent complaint of the West’s political and media classes, that Palestinian violence is a function of ‘frustration and rage’ over the lack of progress to peace, is ill-founded. On the contrary, the most intense spasms of violence have accompanied the most positive movements on the diplomatic front.
The reason is that a large body of Palestinians have still not reconciled themselves to the two-state solution. More specifically, they have not, despite the Oslo accords, come to terms with the existence of a Jewish state on what they call holy Muslim soil. The Palestinians remain as opposed to the existence of Israel today as they were when the Peel Commission recommended partition in 1936 and when the UN voted for it in 1947.
In Israel, by contrast, successive leaders, including the much-demonised Ariel Sharon, have warned Israeli voters to prepare for ‘painful concessions’ if a real opportunity for peace presents itself. No Israeli doubts that such ‘painful concessions’ would involve Israel’s evacuation from most, if not all, of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to make way for the birth of Palestine.
The reason the Palestinians have not run with the ball is that they are convinced that they have far more to gain by playing for time. On present trends, say the demographers, Palestinians will outnumber Jews in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — by 2020. At that point, Israel will cease to exist as a democratic and Jewish state.
Why accept a truncated two-state solution in the West Bank and Gaza when the one-state solution down the road will deliver Israel, too? Not by suicide bombers or conventional military means, but by the simple expedient of eroding Israel’s Jewish majority. All the Palestinians have to do is breed for victory: make love, not war, and transform their womenfolk into what Arafat calls his ‘biological bombs’.
...When I raised the one-state idea this week with a senior Palestinian academic who has been in active contact with Israelis for years, he responded with a curious question: ‘Do we really need another state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan?’ He went on, ‘It would be much easier for the Palestinians to fight for equal rights rather than for another state.’ If he accepted a two-state solution now, he said, it was simply to ‘accommodate the Zionist desire for a Jewish state, not because I believe it is just’. As if Jewish national aspirations were uniquely illegitimate.
Few events have so galvanised Palestinian anger as Sharon’s decision, supported by an overwhelming majority of Israelis, to construct a fence roughly along the Israel–West Bank divide. From Israel’s perspective, the fence is designed simply to separate the populations and keep Palestinian terrorists away from Israeli throats. But while Israel insists it is an interim security measure that does not prejudge the outcome of negotiations, the Palestinians are convinced that the fence represents a unilateral Israeli attempt to impose a border, seal the two-state solution and destroy the goal of achieving a demographically driven one-state solution.
...The problem for Israelis, even those who might otherwise have been inclined to accept the Cook/Hain concept of a binational state, is that there is no precedent for secular democracy among any of the existing 21 Arab states. Nor does the Palestinian Authority give cause for hope that its own future state will deliver a democratic, pluralistic utopia. Rather, it stresses ‘the Arabness of Palestine’ and the intrinsic place of Palestine within ‘the Arab nation’ (it is difficult to understand, in light of such language, persistent Palestinian complaints of Israeli ‘racism’ when it seeks to safeguard its existence as a Jewish national home).
If the Palestinians today pay lip service to the notion of the two-state model, it is as a tactic, a matter of appeasing international supporters. The ‘phased plan’, explicitly enunciated by Palestinian leaders in the past and spoken of in more nuanced terms since Oslo, stipulates that whatever territory Israel surrenders will be used as a platform for further territorial gains until the ‘complete liberation of Palestine’ is achieved.
The Palestinians remain wedded to Arafat’s notion of a ‘biological bomb’ and committed to the ‘right of return’ for the refugees (along with unlimited generations of their progeny) not only to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but also to Israel itself. They know, as Israelis know, that it is a recipe for Israel’s destruction.

Also, check out Steven Den Beste's expert deconstruction of Hamas' latest threats. It's too long to excerpt, but worth the read.

This Sunday will be the 10th anniversary of the ill-fated Oslo accords. The Jerusalem Post has two good reflections on its ramifications. First is the appropriately titled "One Cheer for Oslo," by Calev Ben-David:

I can be counted among the Israeli majority that once supported Oslo with cautious hopes, but now has no choice but to ultimately regard it as a failure, at the very least for having failed in its primary goal of attaining a "final-status agreement" between Israel and the Palestinians at anywhere near its original five-year timetable.
Having said all that, there is still at least one positive aspect of Oslo worth noting, and not just in the negative-lesson sense of having learned that Arafat is no "partner for peace."
...Protecting Jewish settlements and keeping the roads open were one thing; but increasingly fewer of us understood the need to keep a presence in the heart of Palestinian population areas, or to maintain control over the minutia of their daily lives. How was this helping to stop the rising tide of terrorist attacks? Not the massive suicide bombings of today, but broad-daylight individual assaults in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that were still shocking at the time.
Why was it necessary to keep a firm grip on every inch of the territories, when doing so still hadn't stopped an unprecedented wave of soldier kidnappings/slayings by Hamas? (I vividly recall taking part in the massive army sweep around Gaza in 1989 to search for the bodies of the ill-fated Ilan Sa'adon and Avi Sasportas.)
...But despite all of Oslo's declared intentions, for most Israelis it was never really about giving the Palestinians a state or even arriving at a peaceful final settlement. It was about Israel beating a tactical retreat out of a no-win situation in the Palestinian-populated areas of the territories, under what it thought the best-possible terms at the time - sort of an Israeli equivalent of the Paris Accords that enabled the US to end its disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
Although our hopes for working out a real peace agreement with the current Palestinian leadership have been dashed, the crucial underlying assumption behind Oslo - that Israel cannot rule over the Palestinians, not for their sake, but for ours - still holds no less true today. That's why even as we now search for other ways to move ahead - be it finding alternative negotiating partners to Arafat, building the security fence, or eliminating Hamas and Islamic Jihad on our own - no one outside the extreme right and settlement movement seriously suggests returning to a pre-Oslo position in the territories.
So on September 13 I'm prepared to give only one cheer to Oslo: It was at least the first step, even if not in quite the right direction, toward an Israeli disengagement from the territories.
Where do we go from here? I'm not so sure. But it doesn't take a road map to know it can't be backwards.

The second piece is Daniel Pipes' postmortem:

WHAT WENT wrong? Many things, but most important was that the deal rested on a faulty Israeli premise that the Palestinians had given up their hope of destroying the Jewish state.
This led to the expectation that if Israel offered sufficient financial and political incentives, the Palestinians would formally recognize the Jewish state and close down the conflict.
The Israelis therefore pushed themselves to make an array of concessions, in the futile hope that flexibility, restraint, and generosity would win Palestinian good will. In fact, these steps made matters worse by sending signals of apparent demoralization and weakness.
Each concession further reduced Palestinian awe of Israeli might, made Israel seem more vulnerable, and incited irredentist dreams of annihilating it.
The result was a radicalized and mobilized Palestinian body politic. In speech and actions, via claims to the entire land of Israel and the murder of Israelis, the hope of destroying Israelis acquired ever more traction.
Thus did the muted Palestinian mood at Oslo's start in 1993 turn into the enraged ambition evident today.
When intermittent Palestinian violence turned in September 2000 into all-out war, Israelis finally awoke from seven years of wishful thinking and acknowledged Oslo's disastrous handiwork. But they have not yet figured with what to replace it. Likewise, the US government, with the collapse of its Mahmoud Abbas gambit last week, finds its road map diplomacy in disarray. It now too needs new thinking.
In the spirit of Oslo's 10 anniversary, I propose a radically different approach for the next decade:
Acknowledge the faulty presumption that underlay both Oslo and the road map (Palestinian acceptance of Israel's existence).
Resolve not to repeat the same mistake.
Understand that diplomacy aiming to close down the Arab-Israeli conflict is premature until Palestinians give up their anti-Zionist fantasy.
Make Palestinian acceptance of Israel's existence the primary goal.
Impress on Palestinians that the sooner they accept Israel, the better off they will be. Conversely, so long they pursue their horrid goal of extermination, diplomacy will remain moribund and they will receive no financial aid, arms, or recognition as a state.
Give Israel license not just to defend itself but to impress on the Palestinians the hopelessness of their cause.

Both Pipes and Ben-David are right.

It is almost impossible to comment upon this story:

Dr. David and Debra Applebaum and Zvi and Tamara Sand were to accompany their 20-year-old children Nava and Chanan to the bridal canopy in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, with hundreds of guests celebrating the event.
Instead, on Wednesday morning, thousands of mourners friends, doctors, nurses, patients, classmates, and admirers stood stunned at the Shamgar Funeral Home and said good-bye to David and his daughter Nava, two victims of Tuesday night's suicide bombing at Caf Hillel, which killed seven and wounded at least 30.
If Dr. Applebaum had not been at the Germany Colony cafe to have a heart-to-heart talk with his beloved daughter, he would undoubtedly have received a beeper message about the attack. He would have dropped everything, even on the eve of her wedding, and rushed to Shaare Zedek Hospital.
As director of the emergency department for more than a year, he had treated hundreds of terror victims and saved many lives. But the 50-year-old, American-born physician and his daughter died on the spot. He was identified by an Arab physician who worked at Jerusalem's Terem Urgent Care Clinic that Applebaum had founded in 1988. They never made it to Shaare Zedek's emergency room.
The staff had just finished treating a severely wounded victim, who died, when they first heard about the Applebaums. The stress of dealing with their own grief was helped by the fact that the number of wounded 11 or 12 was lower than in other attacks, director-general Jonathan Halevy said.
When Applebaum's death was confirmed, there was a gasp in the emergency room. People hugged each other and shook their heads in disbelief. Nava's intended, Chanan, fainted upon hearing of the deaths and had to receive medical attention.
"It was clear to me from very early on that when David Applebaum didn't show up, and I knew he was in Jerusalem and he hadn't called, that a terrible tragedy had occurred," Halevy said.
"Confirmation of my suspicions came shortly. Thousands of Jerusalemites owe Dr. Applebaum their lives. This is a terrible loss."
It was Halevy who managed to persuade Applebaum to return to the hospital, where the emergency physician had spent his initial years in Israel before establishing the Terem clinics, which pioneered community-based urgent care here and reduced the burden of less severe cases on hospital emergency wards.
Applebaum, born in Detroit, raised and educated in Cleveland, came on aliya with his wife, a Bible scholar and teacher, along with the eldest of their six children, in 1981. He had received rabbinical ordination at Yeshiva University, and was a student of the late Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik.
Nava, a graduate of the Horev girls high school, was doing her National Service with Zichron Menahem, a voluntary organization devoted to children with cancer. From morning until late in the day, she spent time with the youngsters, and only a few weeks ago she accompanied a group of them on a trip to Holland.
"She had an incredible smile, and she was an incredible girl," said one of her Horev classmates. "She studied biology because she wanted to help find a cure for cancer."
When Debra and her five remaining children, Natan, 24; Yitzhak, 22; Shira, 18; Shayna, 15; and Tovi Belle, 12, learned of the deaths, they tore their clothes as required by Jewish tradition and hugged each other, said Rabbi Shubert (Eliezer) Spero, Debra's father.
In his eulogy, Spero said: "God gave man the ability to cry, sob, and shriek. But sometimes the tragedy is so painful that the mind shuts down."
...As he spoke, former Horev Yeshiva head Rabbi Mordechai Elon hugged Nava's never-to-be bridegroom, Chanan, who had met Nava two years ago. A Horev graduate and a student at Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva before doing his army service, he gently placed the wedding ring he had bought for the ceremony on the blue velvet cloth covering her shroud.

Click here for a more in-depth profile of Dr. Applebaum. And what was this doctor doing before his daughter's wedding?

Earlier this week, Dr. David Applebaum, director of ER at Shaare Zedek Hospital, flew to the US along with director-general Jonathan Halevy.
Applebaum decided not to turn down an invitation from New York University; hundreds of doctors and potential donors wanted to hear how Shaare Zedek has coped with mass medical catastrophe during the bloody years of the current wave of Palestinian violence.
Applebaum felt it was his duty to go, even though his daughter Nava was getting married on Wednesday night, some 30 hours after his return. It was important to him to show people abroad how Israeli medical professionals had learned to save the lives of the critically wounded, he said, and to raise funds for expanding and improving the hospital's overburdened emergency facilities.
While in New York, Applebaum turned on a computer and went into the internal Web site that gave him a real-time view of the goings on in the Jerusalem emergency room.
"You see, even without me, the emergency department is functioning like clockwork," he told Halevy. "The average wait to see a doctor is 16 minutes."
His staff in Jerusalem those who knew him from his tenure in the 1980s and those who worked under him in only the last 15 months will have to learn permanently to continue meeting his strict standards without him.

Keep in mind that the terrorist intended to kill these people. Their lives were the opposite of everything represented by Palestinian terror. I'm not going into the topic at length now, but it is worth noting that Palestinian nationalism followed a history of Jew-killing, not the other way around.

And here's one comment, by the Jerusalem Post editors:

The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative.
No one seriously argues with the fact that Arafat was preventing Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister he appointed, from combating terrorism, to the extent that was willing to do so. Almost no one seriously disputes that Abbas on whom Israel, the US, and Europe had placed all their bets failed primarily because Arafat retained control of much of the security apparatus, and that Arafat wanted him to fail.
The new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, clearly will fare no better, since he, if anything, has been trying to garner more power for Arafat, not less.
Under these circumstances, the idea of exiling Arafat is gaining currency, but the standard objection is that he will be as much or more of a problem when free to travel the world than he is locked up in Ramallah.
If only three countries Britain, France, and Germany joined the US in a total boycott of Arafat this would not be the case. If these countries did not speak with Arafat, it would not matter much who did, and however much a local Palestinian leader would claim to consult with Arafat, his power would be gone.
But such a boycott will not happen. Only now, after more than 800 Israelis have died in three years of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, has Europe finally decided that Hamas is a terrorist organization. How much longer will it take before it cuts off Arafat? Yet Israel cannot accept a situation in which Arafat blocks any Palestinian break with terrorism, whether from here or in exile. Therefore, we are at another point in our history at which the diplomatic risks of defending ourselves are exceeded by the risks of not doing so.
Such was the case in the Six Day War, when Israel was forced to launch a preemptive attack or accept destruction. And when Menachem Begin decided to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. And when Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in Palestinian cities after the Passover Massacre of 2002.
In each case, Israel tried every fashion of restraint, every plea to the international community to take action that would avoid the need for "extreme" measures, all to no avail.
When the breaking point arrives, there is no point in taking half-measures. If we are going to be condemned in any case, we might as well do it right.

UPDATE: Here's the New York Times' profile of Dr. Applebaum.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's another profile of the family.

Fred Kaplan is one of the better critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy, but it is barely believable how wrong-headed this piece is. Kaplan argues that in the wake of 9/11, America was the beneficiary of unprecedented international goodwill that could have been converted into permanent diplomatic benefits, but it was all blown by the evil unilateral neoconservatives. I was so stung by the piece's historical revisionism and simplisme that I...didn't write anything about it yesterday.
Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan rose to the occasion as only he can:

Does Kaplan believe that Chirac and Schroder were just desperate to help America win the war on terror in Iraq and that if we'd been so much nicer they would have come around? Puh-lease. They cared more about their own petty prestige than about supporting the U.S. after the atrocities of two years ago.
...Does Kaplan mean that the administration didn't bend over backwards to win the support of, say, Pakistan? That it rejected peace-keepers and troops from many nations to help police Afghanistan? That it spurned British, Australian, Polish, Spanish, Italian support - militarily and diplomatically - in order to go it alone?
...To put it bluntly, Kaplan's piece amounts to a series of wild stretches and utter fabrications. The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight. And militarily speaking, there wasn't much the Big Europeans could have done anyway. Kaplan claims the Prague NATO summit wasn't deferent enough to the allies; and the U.S. should not have been so determined to go to war against Iraq. But he surely knows that deference to Germany and France would have meant one thing: no war. He surely knows that it was the French who scuttled any chance for a compromise on Iraq in the last days at the U.N. He knows that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to bring the U.N. around.
...Almost a year ago this week, the president extended his hand to the U.N. Or doesn't that count?

Sullivan also cites a great Fouad Ajami piece on the famous example of supposed French pro-American sentiment:

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.
Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization."
In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity.
To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was Védrine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, Védrine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets.

As Sullivan notes, Kaplan is simply assuming his preferred conclusion; that inability to convince France and Germany to endorse the war should have been a fatal objection - i.e., that those countries should have had a veto power over the decision. That is a respectable and arguable position. But it is disingenuous to avoid the ramifications of that position by blaming Bush's "unilateralism" for the lack of an agreement; by the time the war began, it was clear that those countries would never agree to it.
The most shocking part of the piece is its utter unsophistication as to the depth, or lack of it, in the post-9/11 sympathy for America (as Ajami acidly describes). We evil "Likudniks" easliy recognize the phenomenon (when we take a break from running US foreign policy, that is) as a larger-scale version of the international sympathy accorded to Israel in the wake of each horrific terrorist attack - where such sympathy is deeply felt but somehow never extends to cover anything Israel might do in response.
( And remember, the time described by Kaplan was the same time when a never-ending diet of news items regarding international distaste for the US nourished many, many warblogs.)

Congratulations to David Brooks on his first day as a columnist for the New York Times.
This occasion deserves a toast. So I'm heading out to meet someone at Brooks' beloved Starbucks for a few minutes (really) while mulling over these words a wise author wrote some time ago:

If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery - compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds. They know what they think and they have immense confidence in their own judgments. This is not as simple as it sounds, for most people don't become aware of their own opinions until someone else has put them into words. But a columnist can read an article on brain surgery for 20 minutes and then go off and give a lecture to a conference of brain surgeons on what is wrong with their profession.

Let's wish Brooks all the self-confidence he needs. (And can you imagine a group therapy session with all the NYT columnists complaining about their "wretched slavery?" I'd love to hear Paul Krugman's complaints; imagine what he'd be like when he really gets upset...)

During the run-up to the war in Iraq, many columns were written purporting to explain the links between the "neoconservatives" allegedly responsible for forcing the country into war. Some of those pieces seemed to be entries in a contest for "Most Uses of the Word 'Strauss' in a Piece on Current Events, No Matter How Tenuous the Connection May Be."
It can now be revealed: the "neoconservative" conspiracy was merely disinformation for the real Jewish conspiracy at work. Operating semi-publicly on the internet, four former bochurim from a certain yeshiva in the West Bank (a settlement! The first indicator of evil...) have started blogs. Can the presence of four bloggers who attended the same West Bank yeshiva at the same time indicate anything other than a deep, dark conspiracy? Obviously not.
The title "Four Horseman of the Ablogalypse" may be taken, and it's not a Jewish concept anyway. I accordingly have named this conspiracy the "Four Questions" (if that doesn't sound ominous enough, think Steve Ditko).
I was sent out by our master, the mysterious HRA"L, to test the murky waters of the blogosphere. Having found them welcoming, I gave the all-clear for my former study partner, a newly minted rabbi and a programmer with a gift for detailed recreations of the ancient Temple.
(Cool graphics for our conspiracy along the lines of these are welcome.)
The four agents are in place, and the next stage of the conspiracy is about to unfold. Stay tuned...

You should have known not to believe my promises of widespread blogging. The culprit this time? A renewed attack of assorted worms on my antivirus-neglected home computer. An infected computer plus a dial-up connection is not a good combination. I'm counting the minutes till we can get DSL.
Also, I've been on vacation this week. Blogging will pick up at its "regular" schedule later in the week.