The most instructive thing to me about the captured Osama Bin Laden video was the response by the “fellow travelers” in the Arab Muslim world. There is convincing evidence here of a society totally in denial and incapable of introspection, a characteristic of a culture that denies philosophy and is not worthy of inclusion in the civilized world. There will always be those societies, and they will ultimately fail, but they should be ostracized and eliminated where possible, and any nation-state that harbors such a society should not be included in the world council of nations. An additional point: this cancerous growth is not about fundamentalist religion; it’s not about religion at all. It’s all about power, and it is a direct descendant of the ideas of the post-World War II European leftist intellectuals, apologists for Stalinism, who spawned Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and other notables who want to repeal modernity in the name of “blood and soil” collectivism.

Clearly, there are critical lessons to be learned from the Enron debacle—about transparency in reporting, improper capital structures for derivative and commodity trading, and management hubris—all of which, and more, will be paraded before us as the regulatory and judicial process unfolds. From my perspective, one very significant lesson, or reminder, may be that there is a reason that most successful hedge funds (which, after all, is what Enron was) are not publicly owned: they are almost impossible for any but the most sophisticated investors to understand. In all that we will learn from this, however, we should keep in mind that the market worked, and this should be reported as a success. As important, we should strongly resist the tendency on the part of many to use this experience to roll back or impede de-regulation and privatization initiatives. For example, the failures at Enron are not an excuse to re-regulate the energy and electric utility markets; they are not a warning not to privatize Social Security; and they are not a message for tighter controls on defined contribution (401k, etc.) plans.

Incredibly, the Board of Regents at Texas A&M University seems determined to “gerrymander” its definition of diversity in admissions, despite the Hopwood decision and clear evidence that preferential race-based admissions and lowered standards are the wrong approaches. What else can explain the recent approval of a plan to expand the top 10% automatic admission rule to the top 20% in schools with a high percentage of minority students? The Wall Street Journal wonders, as do I, how far Texas is willing to lower academic standards “to produce the desired color scheme. If 20% doesn’t work, will we go to 30%?” Or maybe we will follow the proposed plan at the University of California and drop all SAT requirements for admissions! Thankfully, a number of national civil rights leaders have followed the lead of the Young Conservatives of Texas in opposition to the plan and have asked Attorney General John Cornyn to rule against it. Where are our state political and business leaders? As I have argued before (April 2000), admissions parity for economically and socially disadvantaged students will come only when these students are much better prepared for higher education by our public school system. When will we learn?

Let me be clear: war is never a positive good. However, a just war can produce useful by-products, and this one is no exception. For instance, I have no doubt that this country is in the midst of a soul-searching experience and dialogue like no other in at least a century, if not since the Civil War. In coffee breaks, chat rooms, talk shows, churches, schools, boardrooms, and on op/ed pages, we are re-examining the American idea and the sources of moral authority in ways that will produce renewed purpose in our society. For “wonks” like me, this is great, and I particularly like the fact that, for a change, we’re being forced into serious national debates about our convictions in matters other than material progress or the size of our 401k’s.
When we begin again to think in these terms there follows a re-evaluation of our priorities in life and the grounding of our values. I am reminded of a remark by Lynne Cheney, whom George Will has called our “secretary of domestic defense”: “A people cannot be expected to defend what they do not understand.” This is a direct reference to our higher education system and the degree to which it has distanced itself from grounding in our founding ideas. In many instances, this has been manifest in anti-Americanism, pure and simple. A reversal of this trend would be another useful by-product as well as a beneficial restoration of the mission of higher education in the transmission of our cultural heritage.

The dialogue on religion has been instructive, and I hope that another by-product will be to dispel this notion of equivalence between Islamic fanaticism and Christian fundamentalism (see “The Bin Laden Tapes” above). Bill Moyers, in his recent Middleton Lectures address, seems to think that religion will be this century’s biggest problem and that we should put our “faith” in democracy, which he feels is threatened by religious believers. In fact, democracy, properly understood, doesn’t stand a chance outside a moral order and the rule of law, which are well informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Finally, as I have mentioned previously, another useful result of the war would be a transformation of the Arab world to a secular governing paradigm based on consent of the governed and the rule of law. This will no doubt be impossible without an Islamic “Reformation”, and will truly be a battle of ideas and theology that may have more to do with the shape of the world in this century than any other conflict. We in the West can not be a direct participant, but we can encourage it by facing up to the duplicity of these regimes and our complicity with them, and by forcing states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to make choices. It will not be pretty, but the battle should be fought to a conclusion because there is no room for the “Islamism” that preaches nihilism in the name of Allah. There are many cultures, but only one civilization, and the leaders of responsible Islam must decide whether or not they want their people to join it. This will be the most significant by-product of all.

Texas has been hailed as a beacon state for public school accountability, and rightfully so. It is far ahead of most states in the rigor of student testing and holding school administrators accountable for results. The primary testing vehicle, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), although roundly criticized, was a major enhancement and a good start. It will be replaced by a new assessment test next year, the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills). As this transition is implemented, it behooves us to ensure that the new test is even more rigorous and demanding. Why? Because, in spite of recent improvement, Texas students still lag behind national norms. In addition, there is considerable evidence of a disconnect between TAAS scores and scores on national norm-referenced tests. For example, based on my analysis of the data, the reading scores for many elementary schools in Houston as measured by national norm-referenced tests do not at all correlate with the TAAS reading scores for the same groups of students. In other words, many schools whose third-graders scored well on the TAAS reading test are well below national average in vocabulary and comprehension. And, according to a study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the same is true for Texas eighth-graders on the science test. The point here is that success on the TAAS does not necessarily equate to the success we want and deserve for our children. The new TAKS test has been touted as a significant improvement. Let’s hope so. The nation will be watching.

The debate over the economic “stimulus” bill reached silliness pretty quickly and I for one am pleased it went down. To split hairs over relative degrees of Keynesianism is not my idea of enlightened policy discussion. The whole idea was misguided from the outset. The Wall Street Journal sees the “ghost” of Dick Darman’s 1990 budget deal in Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s approach to tax policy and it’s difficult to argue. The Republicans refuse to lead with the growth policies that won them a majority. President Bush could have done worse (and probably did) than appoint Steve Forbes as Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He has been preaching growth policies for years as an unabashed supply-sider and has also been warning of deflationary Federal Reserve policy. Others, including George Gilder, have recently picked up the deflationary argument. They make the strong case that productivity growth can be resumed only by urgent action to increase monetary liquidity, cut taxes on new plant and equipment and on investment generally, and reduce the drag of over-regulation, particularly on broadband expansion. One of the real tragedies of the 1990’s is that the Republicans allowed the pro-growth Reagan supply-side success story to be perverted and discredited. I believe that George W. Bush has the pro-growth, supply-side convictions that his father never had. And he has plenty of political capital. He urgently needs to use them both.

About a week ago, I happened to read a “letter to the editor” from former Senator Bob Dole that really resonated. In it, he laments the confusion of the media in its failure to reflect the concerns of most Americans in reporting current events. In part, Dole says, “Perhaps I’ve lost touch with the soul of America and what it stands for, but for one, I’m tired of the constant media chatter about (John) Walker and terrorist prisoners……..Tell us more about real heroes, those who have kept America free and continue to do so.” Count me as one with Dole. Am I completely out of the loop? Almost everyone I know is repulsed daily by the news leads on the major TV networks and the constant drivel about the “victims of the week” and their “feelings”. Have we become simply a nation of whining voyeurs? The Walker and Al Qaeda prisoner stories are complete fabrications of the sensation-driven news producers. The sad part is that we buy it. One more thing: Enron is a big story, but it’s an important business story kept alive as a political story by those who still can’t accept the 2000 election results, a complicit media that craves the politics of class envy, and a few Enron/Ken Lay business peers who are overcome with schadenfreude. Again, I’m with Bob Dole: wake me when the media circus is over.

The title of this essay is a direct quote from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, referring to the families of the victims of the 9-11 attack, including those who are illegal aliens. This is the ultimate entitlement sentiment and demonstrates just how far the entitlement mentality has reached. This Federal program is unprecedented, but now sets a precedent that will add a new layer to the cult of victimology. We now have many of the survivors complaining about the size of the payments, one calling it a “disgrace”, another saying “my children should never have to want for anything”. Some people in Oklahoma are complaining that the Oklahoma City bombing survivors were slighted. Whatever happened to gratitude? What would happen if, God forbid, we were engaged in a total war with massive destruction in multiple locations around the country? Is the government, through its taxpayers, responsible for full restitution as though it is to blame for the attacks? We seem to be treating this as a non-recurring event, but what about the next one and the one after that? The average payment to families of victims of 9-11 is $1.6 million tax-free. How much will be expected next time? And what differentiates these particular victims from other victims equally as innocent?

Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating makes the sensible point that the Federal payments are discriminatory in amount based on the income level of the victim, creating a class based entitlement. He further reminds us that private charities are required to demonstrate need, criteria not required of taxpayers’ money!

Compassion is a great virtue and Americans have always had it in abundance. But compassion is a private virtue and its expression should be as well. There is misguided policy at work in these government payments to victims of 9-11 and we need to seriously question what we have wrought.

Recently I re-read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 classic “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, as powerful a testament of the American ideal as has been written this side of The Declaration of Independence. There is no better exposition on natural law as it applies to contemporary public policy issues. In reading these words, I couldn’t help but reflect on the juxtaposition of them with the dialogue from Harvard professor Cornel West and that of his surrogates, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, as they dealt with the “disrespect” shown by Harvard’s President, Larry Summers, in his criticism of West’s and his colleagues’ Afro-American Studies program. The Dr. King of 1963 (if not the later version) would be appalled at the level to which the current “stewards” of his legacy have sunk. Even arch-liberal Al Hunt agrees that their “silly conduct reinforces the political bankruptcy of these national black politicos……..(who) seem often irrelevant, relying chiefly on a press that feeds and stokes the faux conflicts on which they thrive.” The sad end of this story is that what Shelby Steele has so aptly described as the “muteness of white guilt” succeeded in forcing Mr. Summers into appeasement, a complete compromise of institutional moral authority, and deference to mediocrity. Not a credit to MLK’s legacy.

Consistent with the soul-searching experience and dialogue that I discussed in the January issue as a “useful by-product” of the war on terrorism will be the debate orchestrated by the President’s Council on Bioethics over the next couple of years. Leon Kass seems the ideal choice to lead this panel and, if reports of the Council’s first session in January are an indication, we are indeed in for some morally serious deliberations. As Kass himself said, “one feels a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness, a fresh breeze of sensible moral judgment, clearing away the fog of unthinking and easy-going relativism.” Wow! I can’t wait. As Andrew Ferguson reports in The Weekly Standard, it is the second of two Council charges that is unprecedented—“to undertake fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance” of recent advances in genetic science. One gets the distinct feeling that there are critical issues at stake—like what it means to be human—and that there are grown-ups in the room deliberating them. It’s about time.

If you want some insight into the thought of Leon Kass and the direction in which he might lead the Council and the country in this regard, I recommend his article “The
If you want some insight into the thought of Leon Kass and the direction in which he might lead the Council and the country in this regard, I recommend his article “The Meaning of Life-In the Laboratory”, in the Winter 2002 issue (No. 146) of The Public Interest. One quote will give you a flavor: “The current boundaries defining protectable human life, gerrymandered for the sake of abortion—namely, birth or viability—may now satisfy both women’s liberation and the U. S. Supreme Court and may someday satisfy even a future Pope, but they will not survive the coming of more sophisticated technologies for growing life in the laboratory.” In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis says that human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man. There is now serious work underway examining the possible repercussions. Let’s pay close attention.