The Week

-- Saddam Hussein has been a very naughty boy and may need a spanking. If so, Hans Blix has the right man for the job: Jack McGeorge of Woodbridge, Va., U.N. weapons inspector and co-founder of a group called Black Rose -- dedicated to S&M. Really.

-- Sen. John Kerry is the latest liberal Democrat from Massachusetts to run for president. On December 1, he announced that he's forming a committee to raise funds for his party's nomination. As a decorated Vietnam vet, Kerry will first try to distinguish himself with his biography. He will eventually have to turn to issues, however, and on the domestic front he offers little more than the left-wing fare of hostility to tax cuts and school choice. On foreign policy, Kerry can play a more useful role, though he's no hawk -- he opposed the Gulf War a decade ago and is not a fan of military action in Iraq now. His criticism earlier this year of George W. Bush's failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan may have been opportunistic -- but it may also have been correct. Pressing this theme would serve the public interest, insofar as it encourages the administration to risk troops when the cause is important enough. So would robust criticism of the Saudi regime. Most Democrats spent 2002 wishing away the war on terrorism, because they saw it as benefiting the GOP. It's not going away. Kerry is hereby invited to prove that Democrats have their own contribution to make to the war effort.

-- The bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, plus the unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner bound from Mombasa to Tel Aviv with shoulder-launched missiles, invert Flannery O'Connor. Everything that sinks must converge. The hand of al- Qaeda, or some clone, is all over them. The bin Ladenites rail against Zionists and Jews; how natural that they would turn to Israeli targets, sealing their sympathy with Palestinian terrorists and their sponsors. No defense, however thorough, can stifle every assault. The civilized world must punish terrorism's suppliers and cheerleaders. The leadership of that fight has fallen, after 9/11, to the United States. As NRO contributor Michael Ledeen constantly intones: Faster, please.

-- In deciding whether to make a smallpox vaccine available to Americans who wish to be inoculated, President Bush faces a classic case of weighing the alternative risks. According to government officials, Iraq, along with North Korea and Russia, has stockpiles of the deadly virus. Dr. Richard Spertzel, the U.N.'s former chief biological-weapons inspector, has testified that an "errand boy," with no specialized knowledge, could easily deliver a small amount to devastating effect. Released in an office building, the virus would kill 30 percent of those exposed. During the incubation period, ten additional people would be exposed for each person initially infected. Simultaneous attacks would infect thousands, and in turn tens of thousands. Unthinkable? So was the idea that hijacked airplanes would be slammed into skyscrapers filled with workers. In the 1960s, when there were mass inoculations, 15 out of every million people being vaccinated for the first time had severe complications, and one or two died. But a mass vaccination program today could screen out those most at risk for serious complications. And a semi-mass vaccination program is already in the works. A panel of bioterrorism experts has recommended that 500,000 health-care workers be inoculated immediately, and that the vaccine be made available to 10 million emergency workers; but the panel opposed mass inoculations. A pox on them. A president who repeatedly insists that he trusts the American people should trust them to weigh the risks of getting the vaccine for themselves.

-- As if going for socialized medicine weren't enough, Al Gore has continued his leftward lurch by co-authoring Joined at the Heart, a book about the American family, with his wife Tipper. On the surface, Joined at the Heart is a moderately liberal love letter to the American family. The Gores encourage novel family forms, while still worrying about high divorce rates and single parenting. In reality, the book rests on a breathtakingly radical premise -- that the formal legal structure of the family is outdated and irrelevant, and should be set aside by the courts. As long as a group of people love one another, say the Gores -- as long as they're "joined at the heart" -- the law shouldn't prevent them from being considered a family. If this theory is adopted by the courts, not only gay marriage, but polygamy and group marriage are sure to follow. Once that happens, we'll see a massive spike in divorce and single mothering -- the very things the Gores say they abhor. The Gores may be joined at the heart, but they are unfortunately adrift at the head.

-- The homeless are back on the streets of Michael Bloomberg's New York: An Explosion of the Homeless, headlined the New York Daily News; up by 13 percent since July 1, said the New York Times. When street life is marginally onerous, many even of the unfortunate find ways to avoid it. But all the experience of the Giuliani years has been unlearned. What else could be expected from a mayor intent on taxing commuters, seeking handouts from Albany and Washington, and making the bars smoke-free?