The Cherry Orchard

Gosh, I love America. You know why? Because America has the good sense *not* to fall for a well-funded plastic candidate like Mitt Romney. New Hampshire put John McCain on top, and while I intensely disagree with McCain’s Iraq policy, I do agree with the Republican voters that McCain is the best of their entire field.

I’m still not completely decided on Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton for my own party — I like them both very much. But I think Clinton’s inability to dominate the Democratic nomination is also a good portent for American democracy in the sense that Hillary Clinton is also a massively-financed candidate.

With regard to both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, voters are proving that well-financed candidates don’t always win. This is very encouraging for America.

Probably the most dramatic moment during last night’s Fox News Republican debate: Rudy Giuliani criticizing outlier candidate Ron Paul for suggesting that the 1991 invasion of Iraq was a primary cause for the September 11 attacks. Here’s Fox’s record of the moment:

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani said, interrupting FOX News panelist Wendell Goler. “That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

All the other candidates then clamored for a chance to echo Giuliani’s strong condemnation of Ron Paul. Here’s the only problem: what Paul said is a simple historical fact. It’s not even a contested fact. Every serious history of the events leading up to the September 11 attacks agrees that Saudi rich kid Osama Bin Laden formed Al Qaeda as a direct response to the arrival of USA troops in Saudi Arabia to reverse Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1991. This isn’t something only lefties and Democrats say — it’s something every credible historian is in agreement on. It’s also one of the main points of Lawrence Wright’s bestselling book The Looming Tower, widely considered the most authoritative (and non-partisan) history of Al Qaeda.

So, if Giuliani is standing there with a straight face saying “I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11″ we must conclude that he has not read Lawrence Wright’s book or any other history of Al Qaeda. And yet he believes he has the ability to lead our country’s absolutely critical battle against this enemy — from a position of ignorance about the history of this enemy, one can only assume.

Fighting an enemy from a position of ignorance about that enemy: I thought that was George Bush and Dick Cheney’s unique style, and I thought our country had at least learned the lesson that we need to understand our enemies better before we engage them in battle.

I guess not. The fact that John McCain and other candidates praised Giuliani’s dramatic criticism of truth-teller Ron Paul is pretty disturbing. My respect for a few of these candidates has just dropped a couple of notches. America cannot afford any more military leadership by politicians too haughty or proud to know the basic facts of their enemy’s history.

I’ve now had two good televised looks at Mitt Romney, who many consider the frontrunner for the Republican nomination: a televised debate on MSNBC several days ago, and a Mike Wallace profile on 60 Minutes last night.

My immediate reaction: slick, slick, slick. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Romney sure does look presidential, and his background as a successful venture capitalist and turnaround-artist for troubled companies is impressive. The 60 Minutes shots of his large family — five sons, ten grandchildren — was heartening. But the fact that he has now thrown away the old liberal-friendly views on abortion rights that got him elected as governor of Massachusetts in order to appeal to a pro-life national Republican voter base shows a lack of conviction on social issues. I also haven’t heard him say anything that’s not a safe, generic cliche about the Iraq war or the war against Al Queda or about foreign policy in general, so it seems pretty clear that he is a fix-the-economy, all-business type of politician. There could be worse, but we are at war and I am concerned that his convictions about foreign policy go no deeper than his convictions about abortion.

Why is Mitt Romney the frontrunner? John McCain’s strong convictions on the importance of victory in Iraq show strong principled consistency, but America is perceiving a fervid believer in need of a reality check. As for Rudy Giuliani — well, as a New Yorker I find his candidacy strange and surprising. For years, Rudy was our familiar “bad cop” mayor here in Fun City. He was undoubtedly an honest man and a hard worker, and he was also a familiar face. I’ve seen him on the streets or at events several times in New York City, and never for a minute (before September 11) did anybody think of this straight shooter as presidential material. When he was mayor, many of my friends just thought of him as the enforcer who put Gotti in jail and kept robberies down but also turned Times Square into DisneyWorld New York, and made it a lot scarier to smoke weed on the streets. That was his image, the sum total of it, and today six years after the September 11 attacks I still can’t imagine this rough player winning a national Republican nomination for anything.

So it looks like Mitt Romney is the frontrunner, and he seems smart enough to take whatever heat he gets in this difficult role. I’ll be watching closely and calling the shots right here.

The news keeps coming so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Some thoughts for a Friday afternoon:

1. I wonder if it’s possible to stake out a moderate position on abortion rights. I guess the conventional wisdom will offer a resounding “No”, but in the light of recent news I’m going to continue to try.

I am personally opposed to abortion, but I believe abortion must remain legal within the United States because the practical consequences of state or federal laws against it would be disastrous. Look at these statistics: about 1.3 million Americans get an abortion every year. In case anybody wants to pretend that these 1.3 million Americans are all godless liberals from bad families, note this item:

Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women account for 31.3%, Jewish women account for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions. 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “Born-again/Evangelical”.

I’m sad to learn that my own state has the highest percentages of abortions in the country, but this state-by-state breakdown shows us that every state has significant abortion numbers. A pro-life friend with whom I engaged in a long debate about the subject last year told me that 35% of Republican families have a family member who’s had an abortion. Maybe this is supposed to demonstrate that Republican families show lower numbers than non-Republican families, but all I can say is “that’s a lot of Republican families”.

My conclusion from all this is that any attempt to make abortion illegal will simply result in the immediate emergence of black markets, inter-state “abortion railroads” and (most dangerously) illegal amateur operations. Why can’t the pro-life movement focus on practical and results-oriented approaches to reducing the incidence of abortion in the United States? Why is legality the sole rallying cry, when there is no reason to believe that allowing certain states to outlaw abortion will significantly reduce the amount of abortions that occur?

I’d love to see a moderate front make its presence felt in this debate. Hasn’t happened yet.

2. I don’t do a whole lot of agreeing with the National Review, but an article called The Culture of Passivity by Mark Steyn says everything I was trying to say here.

3. There was once a time when I respected John McCain. Maybe there will come a time again when I respect John McCain. But right now, he just needs to shut up, because he’s embarrassing himself and everybody else.

Diplomacy, McCain, not bombs. Diplomacy. It’s been known to work.