At a luncheon - politics - News Briefs

National Review, April 8, 2002

-- At a luncheon in New York, attended also by Hillary Clinton, the actor Alec Baldwin referred to two "catastrophic events" that hit America: September 11, of course, and the 2000 presidential election. Mr. Baldwin forgot a third: his reneging on his vow to leave the country if Bush won.

-- The six-month mark in the Terror War was observed in New York by a moment of silence during the St. Patrick's Day parade (so many of the dead firemen and cops were Irish), and by the illumination of two pillars of light, spectral Trade Towers, shining from Ground Zero. New York being New York, there is an intense squabble over what should stand on the site permanently: new buildings plus a memorial? What sort of a memorial? Let us save the permanent commemoration until we have, in fact, won. Meanwhile, ordinary American visitors are showing the proper spirit. St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway is the oldest religious building in Manhattan (Washington worshiped there when he was president). It is blocks from Ground Zero, and the line to one of the viewing platforms snakes around its iron fence, which has become an iconostasis of tributes: flags, hats and shirts, messages. All bear printed or handwritten names of people and places, paying tribute by these tokens. New York after 9/11 has become the Alamo. The country remembers. Our enemies will learn.

-- Operation Anaconda in the Shah-i-Kot valley was a victory-but how much of one? The Army and its Afghan allies went into the fight expecting to confront 200 Taliban and al-Qaeda holdouts. In short order, these mushroomed to 1,000 or more. After the battle, reporters and the Afghans themselves began saying that there were only dozens of corpses to be found. As in every war, there was incomplete intelligence, and as we have seen before in this war, the Afghan allies did a very ragged job of fighting. The American command wisely declines to get into the business of body counts. We can expect to identify significant concentrations of die-hards, and break them up, using more of our own (and British) muscle, though our tactics will require continual refinement, even as our enemies refine theirs. Remember that in mid October the punditocracy believed we could not take Kabul and Kandahar until spring. For the record: One of our battle dead was a soldier captured by the enemy after he fell from a helicopter, and barbarously murdered by them. We trust their comrades in Guantanamo are enjoying their curry and their prayer sessions.

-- Conservative Republican Bill Simon has a shot at winning the governor's race in California-but not if the party establishment would rather refight the primary. Gerald Parsky, President Bush's man in California, said he would "not be involved" in the fall election and warned that the party has to lose its "extremist" image. His words were predictably taken as a shot at Simon. But the real danger for Simon is that he accepts the party establishment's platitudes about being "inclusive." In recent years, California voters have decisively rejected bilingual education and racial preferences at the polls. Democrats are subverting the people's will on these policies. Will Simon challenge Gov. Gray Davis here? Or are California Republicans incapable of seeing an opportunity when it's staring them in the face?

-- Sen. Fred Thompson has announced his retirement. The Tennessee Republican, who holds the seat once occupied by Al Gore, may not be a giant in the Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms mold, but he will be missed when he's gone. Thompson has been a champion of federalism and a strong advocate of term limits. His misguided support for campaign-finance legislation is offset by his tenacious efforts to expose China's meddling in the 1996 presidential campaign. In two elections, "ol' Fred," as he called himself, managed to command 60 percent of the vote- no small feat in a diverse state stretching from the Mississippi to the Smoky Mountains. Two Republicans have emerged as potential replacements, former governor Lamar Alexander and Rep. Ed Bryant. Alexander has carried the state previously, which is an important consideration in a race that won't be a cakewalk; Bryant, one of the managers of Clinton's impeachment trial, has a reliably conservative voting record. Whoever wins the primary, there's reason to believe-and hope-that Tennessee won't be trading down.

-- Guess what? Independent counsel Robert Ray had enough evidence to indict Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky case. That seemed obvious enough in 1998, but we found out for sure only on March 6, when Ray's office released its final report on the Lewinsky investigation. Ray wrote that "sufficient evidence existed" to prosecute Clinton, and that the evidence would likely have been enough to win a conviction. But Ray decided that Clinton's last-minute plea bargain-in which the president admitted making false statements about his relationship with Lewinsky- was enough to serve the interests of justice. So why did Ray need to explain what might have been? Republicans complained bitterly when Lawrence Walsh raged that he could have indicted George H. W. Bush in the Iran-contra affair-even as Walsh chose not to do so. Congress even changed the law to bar prosecutors from turning final reports into substitute indictments for targets never charged with any crime. But Ray ignored Congress's wishes and included his non-indictment indictment of Clinton in the final report. It's one more reason to be thankful that the independent-counsel law is dead and gone.