Sung to the melody of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets."

Hey kids, shake a leg already
The Fifty-Seven's waiting
Flights like this are lush and heady
We'll hoist the golden calf tonight
So climb aboard
And meet and greet the entourage when
Your cocktail is poured

Say, Denny and Billy, have you seen them yet
But they're so decked out, Nancy and her jet
Ah, but the fed. gov. has paid for it
Oh, Nancy, she's pretty set
She's got cross-country flyin', non-union wine
You know I may as well have voted for 'em
Nancy and her jet

(Nancy! Nancy! Nancy and her jet!)

Hey gang, get a load of the Greens
Maybe they'll bust us
But Nancy keeps them quiet
We'll mouth the words — "CO₂!" — just play along
It's like when we fought our parents in the streets
Who cares who's right and who's wrong?

David Bernstein couldn't recall the Bush administration having "appointed any conservative judges with significant libertarian sympathies" and wonders "If not, why not?"

George Bush nominates appointees; the Senate confirms them. When a certain power of the executive is qualified by the need for majoritarian support from a coequal branch of government, political reality prescribes all selections and judgments during the nomination process. The current environment is possessed with partisan and ideological intransigence on the part of the left, plain in Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Schumer, or statements from other members of the Judiciary Committee, to be found in session transcripts.

Libertarians? Verboten. More so with Congress in Democratic hands. This should be obvious, but then on the question of implementation there is that grand disjuncture between libertarianism and sobriety.

Reporter John Burns of the New York Times has left his station in Iraq to lead the American newspaper's London bureau. On cable television three days ago, he was asked by Tim Russert if Washington could ever have been able to "truly understand the way Iraqis would have reacted" to the deposition of Saddam Hussein; by Russert's implication, the impossible.

Burns responded, fair to the historical record of Iraqis greeting allied troops "as liberators," though he regretted leaders having "completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people." I myself noted in July 2004 that "the one mistake America truly did make was to overestimate the humanity of its authoritarian enemies...the virtuous flaw of peaceful people."

Burns, however, went on, predicting that "history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done...would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring."

There is determinism in that, an ugly kind, the same with which an entire population is held blameworthy for the actions of its criminal and violent minority. John Podhoretz excerpted Burns' interview with Russert, calling the pronouncement "frank, complex, powerful and ultimately tragic."

Off went a short letter. John Burns' opinion may be "frank," I wrote, but it's prepossessed, irresolute and ultimately supercilious. Societies are so damaged that they should simply be left alone? Totalism hasn't been extracted from Iraqi culture after four years, so the liberation was — in principle! — a notional failure? This is typical Boomer sophism, in which one tries to pass off dereliction as forbearance. Remarkable, maybe — for its misanthropy.

Podhoretz replied succinctly: "Oh, come on — the guy has been there before during and after, is brave and honest. This is his perspective, and you can't dismiss it so lightly."

I have nothing against Burns personally. The opinion is a common one, however, and even if it weren't offensive it's been refuted several times in the last sixty years. How many would have believed, shortly after V-J Day, that the sons of the men who raped and butchered in Nanking would be invading the world with cuddly, animated characters?

As for empiricism — there are a lot of Iraqis who have been in-country throughout, necessarily longer than Burns, are capable of objective analysis and have concluded that the belief Burns shares is misguided, and that what has harmed the Iraqi cause most is Western fastidiousness.

One argument made by Burns that I can accept is of a half-million troops, flattening in 2003 the forces now harassing the government and slowly, like General Douglas MacArthur did, instructing the country on how to organize civilly. That is politically impossible at this time, and nobody should take what-ifs seriously. But this stuff, Burns' take, is gloomy excess.

China's National People's Congress, the hardheaded know, passes laws with an independence comparable to the front wheels of a car negotiating a right-hand turn when the steering wheel goes clockwise. Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun has the scoop: "Chinese lawmakers" — read, the Politburo — "are expected to pass and enact in March a property rights law that clearly protects privately owned land." In what language, exactly? Somebody got their hands on a draft and passed along a few sentences. "Ownership rights of the state, groups and individuals are protected by law, and no individual or organization may violate these rights."

The word "expropriate" is in another clause. This is significant because in order to expropriate the state needs to take that which didn't belong to it. Chinese citizens are not privy to ownership as they are to tenancy, within a power structure that has variously resembled medieval allotment for half a century, thank you, Chairman Mao.

The People's Republic, still totalitarian, appears to be gradually acceding to those Chinese republican people, and we would celebrate this reparation of rights, and Oh, wonder what Beijing might do next — if not for inveteracies.

Not long ago I made the transitory acquaintance of a young woman who did not really smoke anymore, except for when there was a lit cigarette passing from her hand to her mouth. By all means, it was first said by correspondence, my reproaches for the sake of health were welcome, fit as they were. When finally in the girl's sullen presence, I chided — and was dismissed, "Not this time" the curt response given to clarify the earlier admission as a gratuity of flirtation, not a mea culpa.

Well, totality of the Politburo is China's little weakness, and curtailments of it, even by the Politburo itself, ought to be regarded by the free world as probationary, not exculpatory. How a Wang Wei fares against Party eminent domain, assuming a serious dispute makes it to court, should tell us a lot.

At certain intervals the far left produces claims about the war or this country or life in general that offend reason, and those on the right have a choice between ignoring what is said because it has already been confuted; or addressing a statement rationally, but strictly to apprise onlookers of its invalidity. This is burdensome, as it might be if you and I were about to design a car, when you went and drafted squarish blocks on the axles instead of wheels. On Friday, a friend was one of several asking a question: "What sort of citizen — what sort of human being would prefer that their country lose a war in which so much is at stake?"

Take someone who believes that 1) all nations are at moral parity; 2) all governments, even illiberal ones, have either as much or more legitimacy than the first fruits of common law, the United States or the United Kingdom; 3) all wars are the result of petty disagreements between obstinate people; 4) terrorists and other violent actors are normal citizens who are pushed, by injustice, beyond desperation. They will view events of today not as an intensifying struggle between a democratic First World and a brutal Third World that is paradoxically strengthened by accomplishments of the First World, but as a chamber full of countries anthropomorphized into legates who have "the same wants and needs." Not the people, mind you; the countries themselves.

Operation Enduring Freedom, therefore, is viewed strictly in terms of crime and punishment; sentence carried out with the removal of the Taliban. Iraq, before Operation Iraqi Freedom, is thought to have been harassed for twelve years after it capitulated in 1991. No religion-studded, transnational fascist movement is remotely conceivable from within this mindset; let alone quiescent threats from China or Russia or other despot states. No, the only problem is the obstreperous United States.

Dateline: New Delhi. Vladimir Putin makes funny. Russia, under slightly different management, was one of two early entries into orbital militarization many years ago. It maintains what is called "space forces," promulgated in 2001, and yet Moscow's current autocrat stood with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today to reprobate the turning of space into another of man's battlefields.

Journalists, some of whom covered the executive meeting, have something worth laughs — which they themselves might not be in on — about an "arms race." The gag is that the race is immemorial, and it has never stopped; and at this point, unless the leading democracies have reason to limit national competition to benign field events without imperiling themselves, it won't end.

Combat high, high above the earth might progress as did combat a little ways below, with the insinuation of aircraft into war. First it was novel to fly an airplane over the front, then to shoot at the airplane flying contrary, then to interrupt a machine gun so as to fire through a propeller arc and along a line-of-sight, then to fly faster and farther and more agilely. Said ace Oswald Boelcke, who fatally collided in midair in 1916, "Well, it is quite simple. I fly close to my man, aim well, and then of course he falls down."

A week ago, totalitarian China completed a simple exercise in obliterating a satellite. This week, the Indian government passed an important test in maintaining a modern space program. The rational equation for a country's intentions is derived from the relationship of the corresponding government and people. India is a maturing democracy, Beijing has placed in excess of one billion of the living under merciless indenture. The People's Republic has a number of sites in several manners of crosshairs and — well! — a few Indian assets are among them. "Our fundamental position," announced Putin, Manmohan Singh beside him, "is that our space should be absolutely weapons-free." Who's "we"? Singh, for his sake, should have been snickering, too.

Ramesh Ponnuru, sorting through a CBS News poll that measured respondents' personal opinions on abortion, sees good news and bad news. "The good news for pro-lifers," he writes on the Corner, "is that in the latest poll, taken from Jan. 18 to Jan. 21, 47 percent of the public says that abortion should be generally banned." Bad news: "there seems to be a bit of a leftward trend." Free license for killing fetuses has widened in its appeal, rigid opposition contracted.

The polls, however, were national. A state-by-state breakdown, I wrote in a letter to Ponnuru, would be interesting, especially if respective populations reflected stronger majorities on one side or the other — suggesting, perhaps, less contention over post-Roe laws — than national surveys.

He responded: "It would also be interesting if states were closer to each other on the policy question than on the general question 'do you consider yourself pro-life or pro-choice'?"

Sentiment and political tolerance may be closer than we realize. The trouble with today's politics, inherited from the state of the argument last century, is the absolute implication of any policy. Of course, that is because abortion has been made a national issue. But should the legal question cease to be academic by an act of judicial review it will necessarily be returned to the states.

If regulation is no longer centripetal it will likely diffuse controversy, as seen in the discrete reinstatement of capital punishment and securement of the definition of marriage. New Yorkers may not care for the decisions of Ohioans, but with no interposing constitutional right, laws are passed and that's that. And though on abortion Ohioans may not be as stringent as Kansans they will probably restrict certain invasions of the womb. Legislatures could set proscription or permission of abortion in laws according to what a state electorate would, in degrees, accept.

"A bit stunned" is the phrase Mark Steyn reserves for his analysis of a column, by William F. Buckley, Jr., on President Bush's policy in Iraq.

Yes, I saw it, too. Buckley's resistance to the Bush Doctrine is by far the easiest and worthwhile to read, mainly because of Buckley's natural equanimity and reflective writing style but also by virtue of the man's respect for the president.

That said, evidence abounds that physical exhaustion, a preferred contemporary subject of the founder of the modern American right, has left Buckley morally and intellectually resigned to the state of world affairs right now. The Buckley of today is not the Buckley of twenty years ago, which is a truism except for the sense of complaisance in Buckley's arguments; even his convictions. I own collections of "On the Right" from the late Seventies and early-to-mid-Eighties, and one would sooner have read a celebratory sonnet to Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker than a recommendation of the mediative services of any sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations — as Mr. Buckley did, goodness knows why, for Ban Ki-moon.

American journalism has reduced the country's strategic tack on the Iraqi front to what sounds like the name of a soft drink, giving opinions to match, as with a shelf brand the metric of success is not potency but public reception.

President Bush's national address on Wednesday was bulleted: troop reinforcement, simplification of rules of engagement that soldiers both active and retired say are punctilious and ineffective, direct application of new rules to targets including the sordid rabble under Khomeinist agent Muqtada al-Sadr, better prevention of gangs from returning to infest cities and villages, recognition of and response to states in open warfare with the United States and Iraq.

At another point of recapitulation and review, one is reminded of the investment and dividend in Iraq. Today, the democracies are another country stronger. In so many years' time, Washington will have an able ally and trading partner that lies in the heart of what has been a malignant region of the world. Fascist states Syria and Iran contend with an old national adversary empowered not by familiar methods of coercion but popular will, and one that could soon gain enough strength to confidently construe paramilitary incursions as acts of war; and declare war, doing so, this time, in the name of the strange but irresistible causes of the Westerners. The ongoing struggle against totalism would shift, and remarkably.

Back in Washington, pessimism. Defeatists in Congress may not quite have momentum or a unanimous majority but are within reach of both. Missing, as always, from the justification for retreat is substance. Iraq, listening to the opposition, is supposed to disappear when the last soldier leaves — what happens to the country or the people is irrelevant to extrication. The act of gifting the enemy with a mostly industrialized country is accepted as incidental. Would defeatists trade a fledgling democratic government for an earnestly authoritarian or totalitarian one? Evidently, since they want to try to compromise with the uncompromising regimes in Damascus and Tehran.

Denied the comfort of certitude, skeptics must at least accept George Bush's gamble as the one means to produce new and advantageous circumstances. Here is a choice between the unprecedented, hard to attain; and the intolerable, which shall be gotten easily enough because it is already nascent. Persistence or resignation, and in this case failure of the first would be the same as the natural outcome of the second.

My friend's father was pulling hard at my friend's leg when he suggested that his son, in town for Christmas, dine with me at a new poultry restaurant because "they don't have 'trans-fat.'" My friend lives in Albany, in the land of the north to where New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has exiled the offending unsaturated fat — along with nearly two dozen other properties or behaviors. Writing in National Review, Jonah Goldberg aptly condemned the practice as immediately fastidious and potentially destructive to liberty.

Today, a reader submitted to The Corner an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man," it goes, "is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons — marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."

Goldberg calls this "great." Is it great? There is a difference between expostulation and legal proscription, but removed from context Lewis doesn't seem to fuss over it. In fact, he is mid-stride through an explanation of sanctimony, the spiritual counterfeit. Taxes, for one, are accepted in word by Christ himself but the act of confiscation is not inherently righteous; filling state coffers in the name of the financial homogeneity of citizens is not apostles' work. Scorn is wrong but can be accomplished outside of the subject of abstention.

Taken too far, the three sentences from Lewis give themselves over to doubts of what makes one idle. Stating that isn't apprehension, not with the contemporary sway of libertine selfishness. We can't tell anybody, Don't? How does one evangelize? Mere Christianity itself impels men to give up willful disbelief and sin and, while they are at it, tell other men to do the same. Though Bloomberg provides us with "all sorts of things" doing no harm, and perhaps not the business of City Hall, among all sorts of things are those which rather should be avoided.