The video gaming market is as partitioned as any other entertainment medium — strategy, action, sports, adventure. Leading the action genre is the "first-person shooter," a literal description of the game type. Players wield weapons as if incarnate in the game.

My introduction to first-person shooters was one of the first, Castle Wolfenstein [as known colloquially; the retail title was Wolfenstein 3D]. The concept was simple, the game's thin narrative propped up by decades of historical fiction about the Second World War: you played an American soldier deep in the Third Reich, captured and held captive in an old fortification crawling with Nazis. A sapped guard, an unlocked cell door — what else could possibly come next?

Wolfenstein was simple fun. There is not a soul who couldn't be satisfied and edified fighting Nazis except for Nazis themselves, who a) Should not be playing video games but instead in prostrate supplication before the Israeli government; though if time is spent trying to escape from an imaginary, clandestine German fortress, b) Might let fly a few virtual bullets at the SS in token penance before reserving that one-way ticket to Jerusalem.

Wolfenstein bore imitations and successors alike. There was Doom. I have written of Doom before, and not flatteringly: picture Wolfenstein but on Mars and slightly more graphically complex, a repellent amalgam of sci-fi B-movie horror supplanting the charm of melodramatic Allied intrigue. Was it Aliens with fell creatures and zombies? No — Aliens was comparatively poetic. Doom's gameplay was dark, violent, gory and not at all rewarding.

In the wane of the Nineties I discovered a game called Marathon 2: Durandal. It resembled Doom — a first-person shooter set in a characteristically unlikely future — but I downloaded a trial version of the game to play anyway. Bungie Studios may have been the trend-seizing name of its designer but Marathon stood apart from any action game I had played previously — elegantly realized from a vivid imagination, sui generis in its otherworldliness. The main character, your part, was a cyborg in fetching armor. Your adversaries were totally alien in appearance, pale, lanky and sleekly armored; the name of their race was rightfully unpronounceable. Instead of bellowing or screeching, these creatures uttered martial clucks. The motivation? Novel: a computer program, an artificial intelligence, slipped from its tether and impressed you into service. This electric Moriarty offered help along the way — information, hints and small teams of wisecracking, frightened humans hastily equipped with weapons and royal blue uniforms. I played the demo, enjoying it, before my attention turned elsewhere.

Several years later, visiting a friend, I walked into the family room to find the friend and another who had accompanied me on the trip in front of the television, Xbox controllers in hand, working their way through a first-person shooter care of Bungie Studios. It was Halo. Some architects are prolific and varied; others will devote an entire profession to the refinement of a single, beloved concept. Bungie, it seems, is led by artists of devotion: Halo stars a cyborg in fetching armor, pitted against an original cast of aliens, working in concert with — slight deviation there — a friendly and womanish artificial intelligence.

For those unfamiliar, the game is too rich to be vicarious; it is better experienced. But I can describe my first moments of dumbstruck fascination. Two players move about in a swift cat-and-mouse among boulders on a hill, firing and ducking; darting. The enemy, the Covenant, is a jackbooted menagerie: spindly, hirundine beasts with translucent yellow shields; tall, muscular, grunting figures in glossy plate; squat, squealing, blue-skinned whelps in bulky, orange armor. The last group catches my attention — comical but dangerous, the juxtaposition almost laughable yet it succeeds in gameplay, striking one as ironic or even invitingly unsettling, like a shark's face painted on the business end of a warplane.

Halo was the reason I traded for an Xbox. Halo 2, released one year ago, is the reason I devote a weekend evening or two sitting in front of the television, fingers driving combinations of buttons and levers on a handheld controller; a headset hung on my left ear, through which I plot and banter with teammates, and occasionally mutter indiscretions.

Now: it is well-known that Halo 3 is under development. Halo 2 received mixed reviews, if for no other reason than the difficulty of standing against the game before it. Nothing is known of the third Halo beyond its inevitability — lacking information but not anticipation, a fan's instinct is to speculate and advise, one to which I have decided to submit.

There are two problems with this sort of thing. The first is the fact that this subject matter may be totally foreign to readers — then again, some prefer my personal anecdotes to my political writings. I resolved in advance to make the topic as accessible as possible. The second is that offering advice from a few thousand miles away based on absolutely no intimate knowledge is a long shot of long shots. Interviewed last week, lead Bungie designer Mat Noguchi responded to the matter of criticism, however constructive, with a wry understatement. "Making video games is hard," he said. He said it three times.

Creation for the purpose of invention is never a formulary undertaking. Convention serves as the trained artist's or engineer's scaffolding, and it is only through clarity of vision and technical capacity — with a pinch of luck — that a unique and successful work emerges from underneath. A painting professor of mine, Jerome Witkin, told classes that on the face of every completed painting was evidence of "1,000 decisions."

One thousand? Oh, very nearly. After the gestural sketch or the cartoon of a subject has been laid down on canvas, there comes the underpainting; then successive applications of paint, refinements, additions and obliterations; then for the traditionalist wet glazing, or else dry scumbling. With every brushstroke or appraisal from five or ten feet away a painter contends with form, shadow, color, tone, line — and only those if he has no concern for fidelity, anatomy, geography or biology (rarely does he not). The piece might careen away from the muse and out of control, or it can slow into uninspired drudgery, or it can proceed steadily and manifest a dream.

Jerome was known for two more axioms. His second was "The excitement of a fresh work fades as the doubt inevitably creeps in." Doubt could begin with a capital letter, so unmistakable once personified. When struggling with pictoral contentions come the questions: Have I done this right? What have I lost? Gained? Jerome's third was "You are done only when you have painted yourself out of the picture." To paint a way out means answering those questions in the definitive, for better or worse; to know that another try would only detract from what is. That is painting, for both novice and master: X-radiology and infrared reflectology reveal dubiety behind triumph, from the lapidary Hans Holbein the Younger to the capricious Leonardo da Vinci.

It is most often the case, however, that none of this will occur to a passerby or non-artist who may look the painting up and down, and with a shoulder-shrug, announce "I don't like it." Worse, the viewer zeroes in on a patch of color or some minor undulation that, while inapt, is the product of three dozen good-faith attempts and hours of contemplation — and does not, alone, cause the piece to fail. A poor finish can't excuse the ignorance of process and a good finish enjoins it. Several articles and a pair of brief documentaries comprise my knowledge of Bungie's labors — that is ignorance enough. And I am about to offer seven suggestions for a better Halo 3 that the game designer may have already implemented or even considered, attempted and abandoned. Mindful of Mr. Noguchi's annoyance at the judgment of his work through a single element in isolation, I ask my list taken as a compliment, and not effrontery.

Will I be pleased to find one of these propositions as part of Halo 3? Of course. But I will mostly be pleased to play Halo 3.

A letter of renunciation, an acceptance made "reluctantly" in the interest of protecting executive privilege, and the most relentless opponents of George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court won their demand: Harriet the Proletariat returns to the White House to serve as counsel, where they have told us she belongs.

The petition against Miers was more litany than thesis, effective not in dialectical potency but narrowness of purpose — the White House counsel had to go, and in lieu of a judicial record the attorney's writings, speeches and biography would be the rejones and banderillas thrust at and stuck in her. Miers, bristling, must finally have been persuaded that she was crippled and, paradoxically, had become the presidential liability her critics insisted she would be.

Left particularly unanswered by Miers' opponents were rebuttals to claims of her under-qualification. Not a single prominent detractor acknowledged President Bush's summer agreement with senators to seek an attorney. If a woman to lead the practice of law in an unpropitious place and time, carrying a professional resumé bedecked with honors and tenures, is unfit for the Supreme Court — where does one locate the failure? The standards of Texas? The lack of constitutional law as a prime avocation? Decade-old policy statements that may or may not reflect judicial philosophy? Not once was it articulated how any nominee without a single judgeship can be found acceptable unless their personal politics indicate otherwise — the very provision rightists are supposed to abhor.

For those who did not dismiss the nominee as incompetent the evaluation was between an OK justice and a better justice. Why did the president choose his counsel? We would have found out in the hearings, perhaps? — another reason to have waited.

Disappointment with Miers was sincere but it started out tendentious and the bid for the preferential became emotional, in the last days turning ugly. William F. Buckley's column on the subject was written last Friday and ended with a presupposition of the nominee's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Why the founder of National Review signified that he was content to wait and hear Harriet Miers herself speak, when six days later his magazine's current staff and contributors grabbed what was, inferably, notes for a speech and ran it up a flagpole is unclear; but one might suspect the divergence had something to do with longanimity that comes from longevity.

That sense of proportion is invaluable. For justices of a certain stripe looking to emigrate from appeals and district courts, the Senate may remain an impassable frontier, barring the way to black robes with a sign that reads "No Originalist Need Apply." In chorus would the right rejoice at the induction of someone as reverential to the spirit of 1787 as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. What the president's critical supporters expect of him may be, however, a practical and political impossibility.

Neither the president's motivation nor his reading of Capitol Hill were closely examined over the last few weeks. The White House choice this time, against previous choices, seemed more canny than faulty. The finest candidate, ensnared by Senate politics, will do federal jurisprudence and executive appointment power as much good as did Miguel Estrada. Still, the president has lost neither his power nor his party's congressional majority, and it appears that those quick to anger are eager to be pleased. President Bush could move the Supreme Court rightward by Christmas, capital enough to fill the seat of the first leftist justice to abdicate. One only wonders if it all might have been done without boxing the ears of poor Harriet Miers.

A lot of talk goes on these days about whether the Republican Party is complicit in a defalcation of intellectual coffers filled by great ideational entrepreneurs like Messrs. William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh. Claims are made from accountants of that investment, the American right. "Conservatism" is in some trouble, they begin — and immediately trip over imprecise language.

"Conservatism" is an anachronism for moral self-determination, federalist liberty and national interest when those who prefer the last century's ponderous, statist flying buttresses are uniformly close to or a part of the ideological left. Patrick Buchanan, leftward, just because his populism and isolationism resembles Howard Dean's? Now, I believe that a consistent differentiation follows the belief or denial of absolute values independent of, but congruous with, human knowledge and tradition. Take to that or not, "liberal" and "conservative" are indeed misnomers. There is something progressive about, say, inviting all working citizens to become investors when technology has made it possible; and something regressive about denouncing stock markets with the demagogic form and economic comprehension of William Jennings Bryan. Is that acceptable? For the sake of clarity, that which the right considers its own is rightism.

Rightism, then, is said to be dead, dying, wounded, infirm, lost, remiss or folded over in half to fit the back pocket of Washington interests — a slightly different misfortune depending on how bereaved a dissatisfied rightist considers himself. The right is content for now with foreign affairs but, by denomination, agitated with Republican policies on immigration, education, budgeting, trade or jurisprudence. There is rhetorical excess — some are contrasting George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as one might place Sir Isaac Newton and Chuck Yeager side-by-side — and there are unrealistic expectations for political attainment. OK, the right can hope to win it all at once; it can daydream.

How about perspective? I recently read an opinion put forward with a modesty belying the enormity of its implication. It was the answer to a question about the state of "conservatism," submitted during an interview of one of the four men listed above — you can guess which. In the 1950s, this man said, the highest marginal tax rate was 90 percent; today, no leftist with national standing would dare suggest so much as 45 percent. What he meant was that distilled socialism had been decisively rejected by the American body politic. So the matter turns to what is yet to be achieved — and if frustrated rightists will acknowledge that while ascending one still contends with an incline.

And, too, that others have been watching. Rightism's appeal is broadening, no more evident than in Japan. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has succeeded in pushing law to privatize the nation's rotund state postal service through a receptive Diet won, in special election, with his own political risk. Koizumi, recall, saw the cardinal policy of postal reform defeated in August by his own Liberal Democratic Party; drawing on another cardinal policy, the prime minister dropped the LDP into a mid-September electoral sieve. Within a month of winning a lower house supermajority, Koizumi sent his reform bills back to legislators. Not only did supporters approve the bill but nearly two dozen of those in the upper house, responsible for its earlier demise and likely still opposed, genuflected and voted Yes. Voila, the Japan Post methuselah will now be on "equal footing with the private sector."

This has raised Junichiro Koizumi to a stature momentarily, if not yet for posterity, brushing heights of the archetypical Shigeru Yoshida and Yasuhiro Nakasone. LDP politicians have entered a kind of triathlon with events party loyalty, reform and patriotism — Koizumi as judge. Commentators deride the competing politicos as jobseeking buffoons but these are the same people who did not expect the prime minister to survive. Minority coalition leaders in the Democratic Party of Japan, meanwhile, are in knots trying to look and sound like Koizumi without actually adopting the principles of free-market and individualist reform. The "flag of reform" remains Koizumi's, and the recent announcement of the prime minister's favored successors suggests the LDP will continue to fly it.

What have fortunes half a world away to do with Washington? Look to the axioms of flattering imitation and strength in numbers.

The question of beneficial video games was raised in a forum to which I belong. The electronic hobby is now to American culture what film was half a century ago, having doubled and doubled and doubled again in reach and influence: from lab-constructed dedicated curiosities and pizza parlor arcades video games moved to the home, first to the cartridge- or tape-fed television attachments and then to the ever-affordable family computer, to high-powered consoles and the internet. Video gaming produces and invites excess, seen most clearly in the unwisely distributed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and a collection of news reports on addiction, theft, avarice or — bizarrely but rarely — foul play. My generation is the first to have been in part defined by video gaming, so what have I to show for the diversion of my formative years? Lost time?

Not from Electronic Arts' and Binary System's Starflight. Starflight was one of four programs wrapped alongside the Tandy 1000 EX that sat under my family's 1986 Christmas tree. Eight years old at the time, I played the game as soon as my father copied a pair of "play disks" for me and, despite the learning curve, became acquainted with the game, enjoying it for years.

Never before or after have designers attempted to simulate the open-ended exploration of space. Through inventive use of fractal generation, players could travel to and explore over 800 planets revolving around 250 star systems — a swath of the galaxy that spanned 62,500 sectors on an X/Y-coordinate map, each corner claimed by one of seven space-faring races. Players assumed the role of captains for Interstel, a commercial exploration organization in the far-flung future. Success was dependent upon efficacy, practicality and enterprise: a starship was outfitted and crewmembers were hired and trained with available funds.

Every ship's maiden voyage was made by an inexperienced crew piloting a defenseless, underpowered craft. In the spirit of Adam Smith, players could advance only by generating capital: planetside mining, lifeform and artifact collection; and colony recommendation. One could resort to piracy — at the expense of winning the game, of course, but the marvel of Starflight was its breadth.

Each planet was unique. Rock, molten, frozen, gas surfaces; different atmospheres, hydrospheres, lithospheres. Most planets were inorganic; others teeming with life. Players could land on one of 32,400 points of latitude and longitude, then explore each topographically varying surface in a radius determined by planetside weather and the fuel efficiency of their terrain vehicle. If a site yielded nothing or surveys gathered everything of worth, players could launch into orbit and land again. If the vehicle ran out of fuel, crews made the trek on foot and Interstel would bill players for a replacement.

Graphically, Starflight might have struck one as mediocre in the mid-Eighties and antediluvian today but for the strength of iconography. Representation made the game's universe possible; like chess pieces, every unit was defined by a categorical symbol. Hidden behind a generality was specificity. A "bilateral bipedal" or "medium producer" lifeform; a mineral deposit; a ruin; an alien starship; when examined, could carry one of dozens of particular descriptions. Like memetics, a series of icons instantly and efficiently communicated what were a bewildering number of distinct entities. Starflight was not so much simplistic as it was masterfully ordered.

The game was underpinned by an objective: Preventing a mortal, apparently natural intergalactic threat that was revealed early in the game. Only through successful ship-to-ship diplomacy could a player determine the force's nature, cause and weakness. As each alien race possessed differents cultures and expectations — idiosyncrasies and enmities — skill and patience were required to befriend or otherwise engage a species. Communication had great depth, and one — at least one eight years of age — began to believe in an intelligence transcendent of the game's artificial one.

Binary Systems created, by design or else by the sheer impression of so rich an experience, a powerfully educational computer program for a youngster. I learned basic finance, checks and balances, and the cause and effect of stimulus-response. I learned about star spectra and mineralogy. I learned dozens of words: lithosphere, hydrosphere, monetary, flux, flare, obsequious, curio, molybdenum, cobalt, ataraxia.

I have only beaten the game once. Not because I could not — technically speaking, for I soon bought a clue book, too young to quite grasp the finer points — but because I so enjoyed the adventure, the process of growth and advancement. At times I am more satisfied with accomplishment than completion, and Starflight, in its non-linearity, was a fitting medium. There is no game I remember more fondly, nor one that more greatly contributed to my childhood.

All Harriet Miers needed to do was to step forward! Were the terms "crony" and "stealth candidate" registered trademarks, their respective owners could retire on royalties collected in the month of October. Justice David Souter can reflect on the privilege to hear and read his name as one most taken in vain — and perhaps the first neologized — since Robert Bork.

Critics asking "What were you thinking?" have meant it as a rhetorical accusation, not as an inquiry that would grant President Bush the benefit of a) A broad appointment strategy to which critics may not be privy; and, b) Nearly five years spent placing, at no small cost to political capital, judicial traditionalists on federal courts. When a president — a creature of habit — who usually zigs decides to zag, he is less likely to have changed the destination than to have altered the route.

Back in July, the president announced his interest in a Supreme Court justice with legal experience solely from the public side of the bench while senators in and beyond the Judiciary Committee — none of them allies, from Republican Arlen Specter to Democrats Patrick Leahy and Harry Reid — spoke of the idea warmly. From which side the suggestion arose is unclear; most accounts reported a loose mutual agreement, the product of closed meetings between the White House and the Senate. The request for a non-judge was reasonable enough: present circumstance called for historical fact and we learned or were reminded that about two-fifths of high court justices had never before swung a gavel. One might expect that President Bush would attempt to both meet the political ante and secure the interests of his administration and party — experience, intelligence, discipline, familiarity; enter Harriet Miers, one of the lawyers who the president most closely knows.

Harriet Miers will not meet Capitol Hill scrutiny until the end of the month — so without Miers in the flesh, opinionists have caricatured her in advance. In terms of politics, some conclude that a sorority here and statement there might add up to David Souter or Sandra Day O'Connor. Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family disagrees — intrinsic to her evangelical Christian faith is integrity, he argues.

Judges do not, strictly speaking, "vote." They rule. If a robed legislator is what we do not want, politics should be mostly irrelevant. I myself would be supportive of a justice who believes that abortion is acceptable contraception (a definition I strongly oppose) but, when on the subject of rights, will rule that the electorate's right is to circulate a petition or elect a legislature to mitigate or outlaw the practice. Likewise, an evangelical without originalist guidance will not challenge unconstitutional law. So in principle, what good are politics? If a nominee insists that propriety demands a burnt offering of cattle to Odin every other Wednesday — yet maintains that "right" pertains to majoritarian empowerment consistent with the Constitution as written — he is welcome on the court.

Another caricature is Harriet as novitiate. Decent, say opponents, but not as good as could be; whereupon subtle implications are made as to the refined practice of justice. Good Heavens. Which jurisprudential phenom must be summoned to argue, in three hundred words or less, why the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey assertion that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" — operatively, in defiance of popular will and Constitutional authority — is of an intellectual extemporaneity otherwise found in Cole Porter's rhapsody "You're the Top"? You are a Bendel bonnet; a Shakespeare sonnet. And Mickey Mouse. How? Penumbras.

Contra Charles Krauthammer, who on Friday demanded Harriet Miers' withdrawal, a jurist using the Constitution as drafting paper for his own architecture is engaged in a notional practice "steeped" in things other than "scholarship." The trouble with the Supreme Court is that brilliant minds are increasingly responsible for silly ideas, enough of them to build majority rulings. For appointment, one had best consider the value of adherence to the rule of law over pedigree.

But still! critics say. Toss the deal for non-judge nominations aside. Why not, instead of Miers, one of the familiar names of originalist justices whose rulings, associations and statements send the likes of Ralph Neas for a bottle of antacid? This is where the Bush choice is incomprehensible should one refuse optimistic speculation, and appealing — even laudable — should one consider it.

If ideological control over the judicial branch is war, there is the danger of hasty deployment. John Bolton, Ambassador to the United Nations, did not intend to take office for life — and thanks to the Senate as composed, he was forced to settle for an interim appointment. Trading Sandra Day O'Connor for, say, Janice Rogers Brown would yield a significantly rightward turn of the court; but not an incredible one. There would undoubtedly be a fight, and a filibuster to check majority support, and President Bush would entrust legislators who have so far refused to shrink their estate to accommodate the White House.

Imagine the Oval Office briefing when it is perhaps learned months from now that one of the four leftist justices will retire, in the wake of an appointment sharing the notoriety of Clarence Thomas' or — worse — Robert Bork's. Senators may not be willing to risk their standing, in spite of the superior argument, to follow Brown with another originalist or traditionalist. Democrats would demand remuneration: Ginsberg for Ginsberg, Stevens for Stevens. If the left had successfully defeated Brown, forcing a second and less strident nominee, Democrats would be practically guaranteed a leftward pick.

Such an unpleasant scenario could be avoided by investing in public esteem and frustrating leftist opposition. It is more likely that two courteous confirmation proceedings will benefit Bush, not the Democratic Party. Staffing the federal bench is work for the executive branch, White House selections a picture of a sitting president's judgment and confirmation an approval thereof. A senator who votes "Aye," then, does so in applause of the president's wisdom and not his own. Polls taken before and after the Senate confirmation of John Roberts reveal senators neither conferred authority in a selection that is not theirs, nor politically rewarded for choosing not to prevent the president from carrying out his task.

Recall that Democrats made clear they were prepared to stand against an originalist. Instead, there is Harriet Miers. The left cannot be heard over the roar of the punditry right; it is still and almost silent for the moment. As a feint, a non-controversial appointee could very well throw the left, eager for pugilism, off-balance: swing at Miers with the intended haymaker and miss, or hesitate and fall out of rhythm. After Roberts and Miers, replacing an activist with Janice Rogers Brown would cast an indomitably originalist court; it would be the fight worth having. Even as speculation, it makes more sense than "White House, non compos mentis."

This is not to say that Miers is better politics than policy. Americans may learn that the competent are every bit as productive as the eminent. For this nominee's competence we can look to televised hearings. Conducted responsibly, the Senate Judiciary Committee's interview of Harriet Miers will be the most substantive conversation with a legal mind in years.

Assure a man that he can keep his situation as an orthodox, and what do you get? You get Congress, in which a political culture still alloyed by the New Deal and Great Society dictates how one can affect reform. Tenure is limited only by the ability to be re-elected, and that introduces Congressional standing as a sort of barony where stability encourages survival. In the Senate, there is an homage to deliberation — a balance of power — at the expense of White House intiative and prerogative. In the House, where they spend, there is the expectation of provincial largesse.

So we hear of dissatisfaction on the right. John Fund wrote about GOP fortunes in the Wall Street Journal; they are clouded, says Fund, mostly because of high expenditures and new entitlements. President Bush, responsible in his own part for this legislation, was offered the same cautionary in 2003 and 2004, insofar as the right would not re-elect what they saw to be a fiscal and federal libertine. That prediction was wrong — all because of the war on terror? No; overspending is rarely a lethal offense in Washington. Leftists risk blaspheming their own religion by criticizing the size and reach of the state, which best explains the absence of pejoratives like "miserly," "draconian," and "mean-spirited" in the 2004 presidential campaign. If a notable percentage of Americans is not revolted by a government takeover of Hippocrates, well, you have not exactly got a hot-button issue in the federal budget deficit.

Naturally, the right wants to see reformers in the majority they elected. Unfortunately, there are pundits and there are politicians; keeping true to form, neither one could succeed in the occupation of the other. Most Hill speeches are tepid, guarded and open-ended. Seek a statesman who is unequivocal and candid on the conception and practice of every policy matter and you will find an elected official who shall serve one term, or many terms from an unassailable district. Many blame a certain House Speaker for his own vilification because he tried to separate politics from statecraft. Reformist Republicans will, therefore, spend according to mores while reforming where feasible and favorable.

Now it is being whispered, even considered seriously in some quarters on the right, that the 2006 midterm election will follow that of 1994, Congressional GOP possessed with the same extravagance and rodomontade as the Democratic Party from whom Republicans took fifty-four seats eleven years ago. This is like postulating that James Brown and Jim Brown — on account of sharing effortlessly graceful motion, irrepressible vitality, and starburst entertainment careers followed by domestic instability and public incivility — could be seamlessly interchanged after a simple trade of hairstyle and chosen first name.

The last Democratic House majority might be confused with this Republican one for a few reasons, all consequent to the charitable monophony it received from a predominantly leftist mainstream intellectual and news media during its 1954-1994 reign. Dissent among Congressional Democrats was marginalized when it did not simply go unreported. Party debate was recognized as the percussion for a bracing rhythm, not mischaracterized as untoward factionalism. Press elites rush up with stretchers on so much as a cough from today's Republican majority. Policy disagreements are fractures, mutiny, ruin; always. Newt Gingrich won himself, in just over four years, more unflattering Time magazine covers than Moammar Ghadafi. But a sound premise extenuation does not make.

Forty years of power serves as a thick underscoring for the phrase, "Time for a change." To be equitable, we can focus on the last thirteen years of Democratic rule and the unwise use of public trust diligently enumerated by Mort Kondracke's Capitol chronicler Roll Call. There was Abscam, the 1980 sting operation that caught four congressmen, including two Democratic House committee chairmen, as they took bribes from FBI agents costumed as sultans of sop. The 1983 House Page Scandal was bipartisan and extra-Congressional but said nothing good of the establishment.

The early Nineties, in turn, said everything bad and worse. The House Banking Scandal, or Rubbergate, brought four convictions of Democratic representatives, led to the proprietary banking system's termination and sent dozens of congressmen into retirement. That was followed closely by the House Post Office Scandal. Polls showed public confidence in Congress on the level of "Throw the bums out." After a net gain in the 1990 midterm elections, Democrats lost nine seats in 1992. Newly inaugurated President Clinton brought the party twin flops — social-science tinkering in the military and the First Lady's socialized medicine dreamchild.

What has the Republican majority to show for impropriety? Scattered lapses of judgment on travel and outside income, troubles shared with minority congressmen. The rolling indictments of Majority Leader Tom DeLay from Texas DA Ronnie Earle stand as the most serious accusations against a Republican leader, and they are to the naked eye a legal parody. Last week Earle indicted DeLay for conspiracy to violate state campaign laws: A crime that for DeLay isn't, at a time when, if it were, it wasn't. A second round came this week when Earle adjusted his indictment to include money laundering — evidence TBA. The third, fourth and fifth counts of the Inquisition might, respectively, charge DeLay with double-parking, copying a Johnny Mathis album from the local library and using a toothbrush long after the blue replacement indicator has faded; at which point Cardinal Earle will stutter, summon his men to leave and try something different when they "Come in again."

What have Democrats to show for originality? For vision? The Republicans' 1994 "Contract with America" campaign was an astounding rejoinder to the voter cynicism that Congressional tradition warranted. Politics were made national, and specific; the electorate was invited to look elsewhere in 1996 if a GOP majority failed to bring ten reform bills to a floor vote.

Is it fair to say that Republicans are listless and complacent? Less so than to understand 1994 as a fine example of an exception. Republicans have not mutated into the German Workers Party — nor has any Democrat a dogeared The Wealth of Nations snug in his attaché. OK, rightists can cut off their noses by staying home or electing a Democrat next year but they must prepare to consign a larger portion of their paycheck to Washington and watch a Congress go soft on Iran, Syria, China and al Qaeda franchises while they wait for an authentic small-government revival. Republican voters are welcome to hold representatives culpable in primaries rather than conceding to a Democrat. Is that not how it should be done? Failing that, people must accept that the prescribed nature of the business of the United States legislature involves a great deal of muddling along; they can push to amend the Constitution to better reflect a government of citizens. One or the other.

Cleveland's leading AM news-and-talk radio station recently changed its affiliate from ABC News to Fox News, and while the oeuvre of the latter is more attractive, headlines must be headlines. I overheard one such just this morning. Someone — a White House reporter, a Congressman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in dainty cursive on the inside of a Hallmark Forget-Me-Not — asked for the United States to surrender Iraq to Near East fascists and retreat from the country. This question appears to now be a fortnightly regular, though its relevance to events on the front is conversely related to its frequency. The United States military has been forthcoming about its months-long campaign to defeat the enemy in Iraq, part Islamist invader and part Ba'athist fugitive. Bloggers, chiefly Bill Roggio and Richard Fernandez, compile, corroborate and present in objective narrative the slow constriction of the enemy presence.

As has been predicted and described here, the enemy is continually reduced in his ability to prevent Iraqis from building, with Allied assistance, a democratic state. Terrorist acts fail, or cannot be carried out and are scuttled, or ranks must be composed of the stupid and the tricked; and the enemy is beset by his own as much as our defenders. The only strength shared between thugs is ruthlessness; deprived that, their esurience can be tilted inward and they can be made to destroy themselves.

This perspective is almost totally absent in mainstream journalism. When the terrorists in Iraq are diminished to the irrelevance of the terrorists in Afghanistan — whose threats against Afghan democracy, specifically the highly attended parliamentary election, are something of a national laughingstock — the gentry media might as well blame its wildly disparate reports on military obfuscation, and then the next day begin eulogizing the lost nephews of Mao, Ho and Che. But we do have this repeated bid to give up, and we do have polls which indicate an American public that is — considering its fair majority re-election of a president who ran on his administration of the war — frustrated with the clarity of victory in the mind's eye.

One of these polls, when divided, generally comes in three parts: loyal supporters, loyal opponents and the middle that has swung from the supportive two-thirds of polled Americans in early 2003 to the undisposed three-fifths of polled Americans today.

The moral relativists are responsible for solid opposition. Many leftists, mostly the anti-nationalist solipsists, are entombed in an ether that has guarded them from history — nothing good has come of conflict, they say. What of the democratic state's inherent right and obligation to self-defense? They are unmoved. Soldiers who are too old to be patronized as "boys" or "children" are men whose respective wives, children and professions are commitment in supersession of any sworn oath to serve. Over the last thirty years the left has advanced the military not as a voluntary martial order in which men and women fight and kill, and perhaps die, in the defense of a republic and her people but rather as a showpiece, vestigial and exorbitant, for parades and allegorical maneuvers to commemorate what should have been the 1945 end to all human conflict had it not been for oh, say, America.

Now, that is make-believe. If not for the American force of arms, a great many states and populations would be either enslaved or conspicuously absent. Lumbering carriers flying the stars and stripes keep Seoul and Taipei free; and GIs do the same for Baghdad and Kabul; a proposition that is, for the sake of the lives of millions, better left untested.

Americans who have become worried or disappointed by the war, despite marked and continuing progress, appear to be those who may have taken too seriously the meaning and application of the Powell Doctrine of modern warfare. The Powell Doctrine, eponymous geo-political ethos of Retired Army General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is one born amid an experience of singular American failure. Its single substantive application was the Gulf War of 1991. In short, the doctrine is low-risk, limited-commitment warfare: engage only threats that consensus will deem are clear and present, and engage them only with irresistable force that obviates American ideational epilogues of the Tokyo General HQ and Marshall Plan variety.

General Powell himself wrote on the subject for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992. "Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do." He wrote that some months after tens of thousands of rebelling Iraqis were murdered by a recrudescent Saddamite army in the spring of 1991, the would-be revolutionaries absent the help of Americans who stood by on the advice of reasonable people. To abandon the Iraqis then was to "Abandon any claim to the triumphant act of statesmanship we have all applauded," said another man during the holocaust, and that man was right.

A decade-and-a-half later, what the free world gained in science and skill and vision came with the desolation and Islamist infiltration of Iraq and the Near East. To demand stability but refuse means by which that must be accomplished — nation-building, democratizing — is on the order of instructing a man never to marry a woman unless he is certain that the couple will never disagree, fall into misunderstanding, quarrel, shout, slam doors, stomp about, question the relationship or otherwise dabble with any of that "for richer or poorer" nonsense. The Powell Doctrine is for the nation that does not intend to fight any wars, or fight them and not complete them, or ignominiously lose all of them; in the same manner that the aforementioned romantic advice is perfectly tailored for the eternal bachelor or serial divorcé.

The Powell concept is yet respected by a good number of intellectuals and citizens. Will Americans break? No, very probably not. With the defeat of John Kerry went Vietnam defeatist politics, and those who try again will pay dearly. President Bush still has Congress, and how. Still, impatience is wearisome. In lieu of editorial — common sense. We must find a good capstan shanty to encourage these fifty states to do with quiet hearts the work given them these years.

In the democratic state sound policy of strong leaders will duly right a body politic, and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proved it by sacking uncooperative Liberal Democratic Party members in a special election this last September 11th. Koizumi's original 2001 platform included reformation of Japan's corpulent national postal service, the preeminent government-run agency for parcels, savings, insurance and state revenue known since 2003 as Japan Post. Calling for privatization of Japan Post was in 2001, and was still six weeks ago, an affront to the country's political class and despite Koizumi's popularity the prime minister was met with timeserver opposition à outrance.

Preservationists in the minority vanguard Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party's old school have stood behind statist convictions, hailing Japan Post as a monument that one simply should not pull down. Great Britain introduced the penny post — investment without banking, beneficial in design for both the government and the humble. From its Meiji Restoration start, the Japanese postal savings colossus survived the early Twentieth Century, the entrance and annihilation of the militarists, the dark first postwar decade, the late-century bonanza and market doldrums that have followed since. Today, Junichiro Koizumi's target for privatization is 134 years old; the world's leading and last great postal savings institution; the caretaker for one quarter of Japanese individual assets; and Japan's largest employer. Does he stand by his pledge? Well, yes — as the prime minister sees it, Japan Post does indeed have an enormous piece of the country's economy and work force between its jaws, and wary of bureaucratic instinct, Mr. Koizumi is trying to prevent deglutition.

Speaking at the 2005 Forbes Global CEO Conference in early September, an advisor to the prime minister, Haruo Shimada, put in signally libertarian terms what the left-wing newspaper Asahi Shimbun admitted two years ago. Asahi: "If Japan Post goes private, the Finance Ministry will lose a massive funding source." Shimada: "[Japan Post is] the cancer of Japan...[a] communist kind of segment in the huge financial market." Asahi: "If Japan Post were a bank, however, it would fall far short of the 4 percent capital adequacy ratio required to operate domestically." Shimada: "[The current system is] a tremendous burden for the future of Japan." Koizumi versus City Hall.

Japan's characteristically sedentary politics were vividly described by former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman in his book Inventing Japan. "Prime Minister [Shigeru] Yoshida," Chapman wrote, "had set the stage [in the Forties and early Fifties] by dismissing the Diet members as monkeys playing in a zoo. In the years that followed, they were seen as irrelevant meddlers, men concerned only with their own survival and not with the serious business of the government." Politics was for a friend of Chapman's "the game across the street," an activity nearby but isolated from and of little interest to passerby. Power was centralized and familial, noted Chapman, who ended his sour commentary thusly: "[P]oliticians are satisfied with [a] lack of citizen involvement. They do not appear to think that what they do should be of any concern to the ordinary man."

Fifteen years after Chapman's damnation cynics must have chuckled. This past August, Koizumi's own LDP majority in the upper-chamber House of Councillors helped throttle a privatization bill from the lower-chamber House of Representatives.

That would have been the end of most. Koizumi responded by dissolving the House of Representatives and establishing the subsequent, breakneck campaign as a public referendum for government reform — "Are you in support of privatization of the postal services? Or are you opposed to it?" asked the prime minister in his dissolution press conference. Koizumi reminded the Japanese electorate of a 2001 promise to "Change the LDP. And if it will not change, I will bring it down." And — he did. Privatization opponents found themselves running against candidates handpicked by Koizumi and his allies, dubbed "assassins" by Japan's press — celebrities, entrepreneurs, models, loyalists all. The LDP gave succor to pro-reform DPJ members, whose leadership — watching September polls swing towards the nimble prime minister — vacillated on its once-lucid understanding of the word "reform."

The erstwhile DPJ leader suggested that voters would "make a smart decision," and he was literally correct. On September 11th Koizumi's risk won him 327 seats of 480 in the House of Representatives; a supermajority to override a House of Councillors veto and the political capital to make that check unnecessary. The prime minister can celebrate his gain towards postal privatization but with that policy victory comes a mandate for constitutional revision, a deepening alliance with Washington and increased participation in diplomatic and military assertion.

LDP heavy Shizuka Kamei, who publicly challenged Junichiro Koizumi at the beginning of the year, was out of the prime minister's good graces at the start the snap election and hung onto a Diet seat by running in an ad hoc party. His post-election statement was mostly hyperbole but his lamentation for the Liberal Democratic Party was, unintentionally, instructive. "The LDP," said Kamei, "which I once loved, has completely changed." And that the Liberal Democratic Party has returned to parliamentary domination of better days as the reformist, not the smug postwar inheritor, is an inspiring departure from Japanese tradition.

Nearly two weeks ago, reader M.B. sent me a message and an offer. He lives in Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina left his family's home with reparable if unsightly gashes, his father's office building was destroyed. Photographs were to be taken for insurance claims — would I care to publish some of them, remind other readers of the disaster, and perhaps comment? I wrote back to M.B. that I was happy to do so.

The photographs arrived by e-mail yesterday. As it would happen, both were skillfully shot. The tree in the first photograph winds upward through a golden mean, its pitch bark in contrast to the powder blue sky far behind it and the pale oak, collapsed and half-submerged remains of the office between the two. Power and telephone lines offset an odd-angle incline of the second photograph's horizon. The office wreckage recedes as the eye runs along the water's faint crests; then to an array of small trees and finally to the face of a second building, intact but several feet too short; then upwards on the limbs of trees to the sky, and then off to the edge, along a black wire.

These photographs only subtly convey the destruction, nothing as dramatic as the famous image from the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood. A Georgian-style house is pictured fallen backwards, resupine, its façade pierced by a javelin of a tree. The sight of it is shatteringly improbable even in black-and-white, something like an anthropologist's documentation of aboriginal elephantitis in its perversion of an object of man, as one contemplates that before the nearby dam burst there stood a regal home with a front lawn in shade.

Some of us will be deceived, and one would hardly say that we can help it. For these two glimpses of Louisiana we have been given, only in knowledge and memory does the pain of loss reside. Behind the split and soaked walls, where we can't see, are likely all of what composed an office until the cusp of August and September — desks, chairs, computers, printers, telephones, file cabinets, memos, records, decorations, magazines, books, trinkets, family pictures, mementos. Did M.B.'s father have time to evacuate a few of the essentials? Did something happen to find its way home, or into the car, in the days preceding?

How luck and the hand of greater authority spare us in strange ways: in May of 1989, when I was eleven, a series of powerful thunderstorms swept Ohio. The strongest storms were heralded a day in advance; my family and our neighbors discussed "the storm" all afternoon and evening. My parents, at first anticipating a tornado, carried treasures down to the basement. But before bed that night, as the winds picked up, they decided to return everything to the first floor. The next morning, thirteen inches of rainwater came and went. What would have been drowned? For one, my father's beloved Martin Dreadnought. That brassy acoustic guitar my father purchased at Manny's in New York City nearly forty years ago; his Excalibur, it was by playing that for a local church that he met my mother, an irony driven home by the fact that the wedding photographs sat beside the Martin.

Good fortune, of course, has left me with no comparable experience. I can only describe the faint sense of horror in examining the rubble; vicarious audience is impossible. Thankfully, no considerate Louisianan, Floridian, Alabamian or Mississippian is asking for empathy so much as sympathy — and anyway, charity requires but equal parts compassion and generosity. So for what ignorance to which those of us on northern high ground must admit, we have donation and solace to give; but more importantly hope and faith, which was always our only redoubt.

Not one month ago I warily regarded Israel's surrender of the Gaza Strip to Arab refugees as a farsighted sacrifice, every bit as painful as it was shrewd. Necessary? Perhaps, and I refrained from calling marks without Ariel Sharon's vantage. But the inconsonance of rewarding a slum-ridden gangland with territory to govern was plain. "Watch, over the months, the fate of Gaza farms being confiscated from their Jewish owners," I wrote. "That will be a measure of the stewardship of men who say to us that the people they rule should have a state."

Richard Fernandez cites grim but expected news: mobs of refugees, alongside constables in the employ of the Palestine Liberation Organization, descended on greenhouses in Gaza. Israelis brought flower to the arid landscape, and in spite of a desperate appeal for preservation — New York Jews led an effort to buy the greenhouses for a total of $14 million — the pride of Yasser Arafat has decided Arrakis will return to sand. The estates have been compromised and stripped.

There is a terrifying comedy in the thought that, add a day or two, $14 million might have purchased deeds for the memory of greenhouses. That kind of farce makes a devil laugh, for it is a skit within the travesty of the "Palestinian state": transnationalist diplomats persuade Israel to purchase bonds for the humanity of Arab fascism, a debt on which the transnationalists know the fascists will default. But of course, everyone — creditor, broker, confidence artist — can claim, like the Gaza annex in better times, the remembrance of good intentions.

Last January President Bush erred when he in political magnanimity asked us to conflate balloting in a violent and superstitious authoritarian hovel (the election of Arafat scion Mahmoud Abbas) with a vote that was administered after three years of guarded reform (Afghanistan's election and retention of Hamed Karzai). PLO-land is a dictatorship, and a dictatorship is not a national reflection of the character of the populace. It is a false projection established by a ruling elite that wields power, indefinitely, through the very real projections of force, intimidation and political unipolarity.

In that immutable law is hope for the long term and a warning for the short term. The hope is that Arabs and Muslims will readily act as men when they are allowed by the state. Think Baghdad, Kabul, Beirut. But not Gaza; we are presently in the short term. Keep watch in the press for news of the farms, for the soil itself is next.