The Week - News Briefs

National Review, Dec 3, 2001

-- Attorney general John Ashcroft moved, it is said, to "overturn" Oregon's law permitting assisted suicide. Critics, mostly liberals, say that his action demonstrates that conservatives are hypocrites when they defend states' rights. But that appearance is solely the result of an imprecise formulation. What Ashcroft has done is to say, in effect, Look, Oregon voters can decide what the State of Oregon will or will not prosecute. But they cannot nullify federal law. And federal law prohibits doctors from using drugs to kill people deliberately. For the same reason, state referenda cannot legalize the medical use of marijuana; they can only register disagreement with the federal prohibition. Opponents of federal drug law should work to repeal or amend that law. Until that time, the question to ponder is not whether conservatives have abandoned federalism-but whether liberals, in taking up the cause of nullification, should pay homage to John C. Calhoun.

-- The Justice Department reached a settlement with Microsoft that imposes some restrictions on the company but preserves its "freedom to innovate"-the bottom line on which Bill Gates has always insisted. But the case is not yet over. Microsoft's competitors consider the settlement too lenient, and they have persuaded the attorneys general for nine states and the District of Columbia to press on. It will be up to the courts to remind the AGs that the purpose of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not competitors.

-- Few high-wire acts are quite so death-defying as Yasser Arafat's. Time and again, he plummets to disaster, only for some kind soul to catch him in a safety net at the last moment. His latest resort to violence in the intifada against Israel has left a thousand dead, while at the same time he pretends to be painfully shocked by Islamic or any other kind of terror. President Bush favors a Palestinian state, but refuses yet to shake the hand of the double-dealing Arafat. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, tells him, "You cannot help us with al-Qaeda and hug Hezbollah." It's a new experience for Arafat that nobody is rushing forward with the safety net. If this continues, he may have to withdraw from the world-traveling terrorist circus.

-- "Blood debts have been repaid in blood. America has bombed other countries and used its hegemony to deny the natural rights of others without paying the price. Who until now has dared to avenge the hurts inflicted by unaccountable Americans?" So runs the voice-over in Attack America, a documentary that's flying off the shelves of book and video stores. Only the buyers aren't Palestinians, Pakistanis, or Saudis; they're Chinese. Even as Jiang Zemin smiled for the cameras with President Bush, his government's propaganda machine-through such outlets as Beijing Television, China Central, and Xinhua-was cranking out tapes, books, and games that praise the terrorist attacks as America's just deserts. Party officials, defending the materials, called them "educational." Many things changed on September 11. The fundamental nature of Chinese Communism, and of the Chinese regime, was not one of them.