I conducted my first meeting as president of the local Republican organization last night. Our agenda was packed solid: four candidates for Dennis Kucinich's seat, two for our state senate seat; an advocate speaking in support for the county library's levy renewal and a nearby city's mayor trying to cull volunteers for the Bush-Cheney campaign. A guest speaker addressing prescription drug coverage followed, sparking off a brief but heated debate. Then - finally - the group barreled through our business items. Three hours after I made a call to order, I banged the gavel for dismissal. Tiring, but gratifying. I almost feel solidarity with marathon runners.
What's in the news? A flurry of stories, but far too many of them inflated by the press for the sake of longevity. Reading these splendid remarks by Oliver Kamm, I miraculously found a prescient quote of mine from June of last year: "Making weapons the major argument is Bush and Blair's own trap out of which to wriggle; but that by no means diminishes the power of the true argument." That's relevant even more so today, with the focus having been temporarily stuck on weapons, not the polity of Iraq. As I've always maintained, authoritarianism is what endangers the free world; weapons - the worst of them being WMDs - are simply means to an end, that end being domination. Democracies don't seek those ends; dictatorships always will. President Bush is certainly strengthening his hand by organizing cooperatives and issuing warnings against weapons proliferation; but while the diplomatic gestures made by Libya, and to a far lesser extent Iran and North Korea, are better than silence or open conflict, the only reliable and permanent solution is the one the Allies meted out to the Taliban and the Ba'athists.
Incidentally, the quote is part of an entry criticizing the largely baseless questions and doubt that had cropped up even at that early point; I'm proud to say that before the insurgency's destructiveness and American second thoughts had reached their high points, I kept my optimism while making no underestimation of the difficulty and frustration of the coming months and years.
And speaking of the president's initiative, I caught Brit Hume's interview with Condoleezza Rice during a quick dinner last night. She passed the Executive Test: I distracted myself with forkfuls and glanced back at the television, suggesting to myself, "Oh, there's President Rice." Poise, confidence, class; I've tried the experiment with many pols, and very few fit the part. President Giuliani? Biden? Hagel? Kerry? Nah.