August 12, 2008 The Georgian mess allows John Podhoretz to continue his theme of the end of the vacation from history. Quick show of hands: Who among us expected that, in the course of the convention acceptance speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama and throughout the three debates in which they face each other in the fall, the words “South Ossetia” might be mentioned again and again? Or that the nation of Georgia might loom larger over the November election than the state of Georgia?

This is the thing about presidential elections — they can turn on a dime. This one has already. The success of the surge is playing a complex role in the calculations of both camps, with the possibility of a clear victory in sight in Iraq before anyone actually casts a vote in November. For a time, it appeared the surge victory might, in an odd and unexpected way, help Barack Obama by taking Iraq off the table as a source of anxiety and allowing him to focus the election more specifically on the economy. But Obama’s own uncertainty about how to address the surge suggests otherwise. ...

National Review editors on Russia's invasion of Georgia. ... A massive Russian response, quite manifestly ready to go, was launched. Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia. Another pro-Russian force attacked Georgia in that part of the second breakaway province of Abkhazia that Tbilisi still controls. Georgia’s well-trained but modest army was forced to withdraw. Russian planes continued to bomb central Georgia, seeking to degrade both military and economic targets. When Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire, the Russians at first refused to talk to him, then started multiplying conditions for their acceptance; those conditions now include Saakashvili’s resignation. Throughout this calculated aggression, the Russian media has played an inglorious but technically brilliant role. They have used the most modern techniques of journalism and marketing to broadcast the worst lies of the Kremlin. Those lies themselves have been cleverly designed to imitate the West’s own justifications for the Kosovo intervention: “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Doubtless the Georgian forces committed crimes in their incursion into South Ossetia. There are plausible reports that they shelled villages. But they were overwhelmed so quickly that they simply could not have committed crimes of the scale alleged by the Kremlin. Besides, Russia’s long patronage of South Ossetian attacks, its invasion across internationally recognized borders, and its relentless bombing of a country that has retreated and offered a cease-fire deprives it of any right to make such accusations. Russian policy is a war crime in itself. None of this is or should be about Russia or the Russian people. All of it stinks of Soviet propaganda, Soviet brutality, Soviet morality, and Soviet nostalgia. It is the handiwork of the siloviki clique that currently monopolizes power in Russia through authoritarian politics, kleptocratic economics, and media manipulation. This clique must be shown that war crimes do not pay. The Russian people, too, need to learn that nostalgia for Soviet imperialism is a dead end for Russia. ... Corner posts on the subject. ... We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin's brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia's border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this. George Will is brilliant. Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Now, into America's trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded -- a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again. ...

... What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990. (The August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev)

This year's August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world's preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

As for Iraq, Chris Hitchens wonders why it's so hard for some people to accept and celebrate good news. One day I will publish my entire collection of upside-down Iraq headlines, where the true purport of the story is the inverse of the intended one. (Top billing thus far would go to the greatest downer of them all: the tale of Iraq's unemployed gravediggers, their always-insecure standard of living newly imperiled by the falling murder rate. You don't believe me? Wait for the forthcoming anthology.) While you wait, you might consider last week's astonishing report about the Iraqi budget surplus and the way in which the report was reported. ...

... It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist "insurgents" as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn't even be Saddam's goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight. ...

The Politico points out seven worrisome items for Barack. A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge. Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters,

according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide. “It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. ... Thomas Sowell thinks there is little substance to Obama. Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation.

Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures.

Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.

Senator Barack Obama's campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith. Many people were ecstatic during the early primaries, as each state's voters heard his glittering generalities for the first time.

The media loved the novelty of a black candidate with a real chance to become president, and his left-wing vision of the world was largely their vision as well. There was a veritable media honeymoon for Obama. ...

Debra Saunders has Edwards thoughts. ... The pretty-boy candidate always was the biggest phony at any Democratic debate. He was the $400-haircut poster boy for poverty. The 28,000-square-foot mansion owner, who preached about global warming. The candidate who demanded that other Democrats swear off accepting contributions from Fox News baron Rupert Murdoch, after he pocketed a $500,000 advance - with an extra $300,000 for expenses - from Murdoch's Harper Collins. The man who ran as the doting husband of the cancer-battling Elizabeth Edwards while he was boffing an overpaid campaign aide.

If I were a Democrat, I would be spittin' mad. If Edwards had won his party's nomination for president, news of the affair most surely would have gotten out and the Democratic Party's chances of winning the White House would have evaporated instantly, as would-be supporters would have realized they can't believe a word the man says.

Edwards had asserted that National Enquirer reports of an affair with Rielle Hunter were "completely untrue." In admitting to the affair - but not the lovechild, if you care to believe him - Edwards explained in a statement, that he relied on inaccuracies in the story to deny it, "But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough."

99 percent honest? Even when he is coming clean, he's a snake. ...

David Harsanyi says, when it comes to politicians, low expectations would be our wisest course. ... Incredibly, despite our low opinion of elected officials and countless examples, this election season millions of otherwise reasonable Americans will once again dutifully plaster their cars with bumper stickers or plant yard signs bearing the name of some lifelong bureaucrat who has promised them the world.

Are these men and women running for office so special that they deserve near-religious adoration?

Is government so important in your life that you offer it?

Politicians exist to implement public policy. They lean left or they lean right.

Do they possess an extraordinary ability to magically "fix" the economy, or "create" jobs or change the world? Hardly.

Let's keep expectations for politicians where they belong: Stay out of jail. Everything else is gravy.

What's it like to challenge the globalony greens in England? The documentarian Martin Durkin has some answers. ... In the year that has passed since the film was broadcast, I have discovered what that "chilling effect" is. It is when a programme maker needs to risk his career in order to make a particular film. It is when a commissioning editor or a broadcaster is genuinely fearful of straying into certain areas.

The main Ofcom complainant noted: "This is Not an Attack on Free Speech". So rather than try to shut me up, bully and vilify, why don't they engage in an honest discussion about the science?

I'll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that's according to the IPCC. I don't remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.

I no longer give a stuff whether left-liberal types agree with my views on global warming. However, I do expect every last one of them who claims to value the freedom to speak one's mind, to defend my right to air them.

Contentions The End of the Election’s Holiday from History? by John Podhoretz

Quick show of hands: Who among us expected that, in the course of the convention acceptance speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama and throughout the three debates in which they face each other in the fall, the words “South Ossetia” might be mentioned again and again? Or that the nation of Georgia might loom larger over the November election than the state of Georgia?

This is the thing about presidential elections — they can turn on a dime. This one has already. The success of the surge is playing a complex role in the calculations of both camps, with the possibility of a clear victory in sight in Iraq before anyone actually casts a vote in November. For a time, it appeared the surge victory might, in an odd and unexpected way, help Barack Obama by taking Iraq off the table as a source of anxiety

and allowing him to focus the election more specifically on the economy. But Obama’s own uncertainty about how to address the surge suggests otherwise.

The role of foreign policy and diplomacy was bound to take center stage in the fall in any case, because Iran seems intent on keeping its nuclear program at the center of worldwide discussion. The complexities there, at least regarding the time frame in which Iran might actually become a nuclear power and the possibility of Israel’s moving to take care of the crisis, was always bound to lead to fuzzy answers about hypotheticals. But the very real fact of an old American enemy, Moscow, either dismembering or swallowing up anew a democratic American ally aborning, Georgia, is a different matter. This may prove to be an ongoing crisis in a key part of the world in the middle of an American election, and there will be no avoiding the question by alluding to hypotheticals.

At the end of last year, I said that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan represented the end of the primary season’s holiday from history. Obviously, I was wrong about that, perhaps because primaries are largely conducted among voters who want their preexisting questions answered and don’t care so much about the responses of candidates to issues of the moment. General elections are about something else — they are about how the candidates might conduct themselves in the Oval Office. In these circumstances, the issues of the moment are vitally important because they speak to how quickly a candidate can respond to a crisis and how unexpected problems fit in with the more general agenda a candidate has been laying out in the months and years previous.

So welcome, South Ossetia, to the presidential election of 2008. Ere long, we won’t even remember we had no clue where you were only a day or two before the Olympics began.

National Review - Editorial Georgia on our Conscience

Though the order “Lights, camera, action!” was given by Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, the wartime drama now unfolding in the Caucasus was devised, scripted, directed, and produced in Moscow by Vladimir Putin and his fellow siloviki (or former KGB kleptocrats.) For almost two decades Russia has sought to divide and destabilize the new independent states in its former backyard by helping to establish, finance, and protect “breakaway” ethnic statelets such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia within the sovereign territory of Georgia. These statelets fulfill two important functions. First, they provide the siloviki with country estates. Almost none of the officials in the South Ossetian government are locals. Most are high-ranking former KGB officials from other parts of Russia. But South Ossetia provides them with a safe haven in which they can launder money, run smuggling operations, traffic in women, divert official funds into their pockets, and wage small but useful wars. Those wars are the second function: They help to destabilize independent states, especially pro-Western states such as Georgia, already weakened by division. South Ossetian “forces” have been bombing Georgian villages at irregular intervals for years, but recently more intensively. That gave Saakashvili a choice of evils. Either he did nothing — and lost a large chunk of his country to Putin’s salami tactics. (He recently gave Russian passports to South Ossetians otherwise unable to travel.) Or he sought to regain at least some of South Ossetia by a lightning raid. Saakashvili chose what is manifestly the worse of the those two evils. It proved to be a disaster for him and for Georgia. A massive Russian response, quite manifestly ready to go, was launched. Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia. Another pro-Russian force attacked Georgia in that part of the second breakaway province of Abkhazia that Tblisi still controls. Georgia’s well-trained but modest army was forced to withdraw. Russian planes continued to bomb central Georgia, seeking to degrade both military and economic targets. When

Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire, the Russians at first refused to talk to him, then started multiplying conditions for their acceptance; those conditions now include Saakashvili’s resignation. Throughout this calculated aggression, the Russian media has played an inglorious but technically brilliant role. They have used the most modern techniques of journalism and marketing to broadcast the worst lies of the Kremlin. Those lies themselves have been cleverly designed to imitate the West’s own justifications for the Kosovo intervention: “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Doubtless the Georgian forces committed crimes in their incursion into South Ossetia. There are plausible reports that they shelled villages. But they were overwhelmed so quickly that they simply could not have committed crimes of the scale alleged by the Kremlin. Besides, Russia’s long patronage of South Ossetian attacks, its invasion across internationally recognized borders, and its relentless bombing of a country that has retreated and offered a cease-fire deprives it of any right to make such accusations. Russian policy is a war crime in itself. None of this is or should be about Russia or the Russian people. All of it stinks of Soviet propaganda, Soviet brutality, Soviet morality, and Soviet nostalgia. It is the handiwork of the siloviki clique that currently monopolizes power in Russia through authoritarian politics, kleptocratic economics, and media manipulation. This clique must be shown that war crimes do not pay. The Russian people, too, need to learn that nostalgia for Soviet imperialism is a dead end for Russia. But that means that the West must demonstrate unmistakably that the post–Cold War international order will not be overturned — neither in the world nor in the Caucasus. Not much can be done at present on the ground. We have neither the military means nor the political unwisdom to imitate Saakashvili’s rash adventurism. What the West can do is to use its influence and diplomatic skills to ensure that the conflict ends before more people die or more of Georgia is dismembered. Unless the desire to punish Georgia has driven the siloviki beyond all common sense, they will be content with this de facto annexation. For Saakashvili, a settlement binding Georgia to use only peaceful means in seeking reunification with South Ossetia is probably the best that can be obtained in the wake of military defeat. In effect the conflict would be “re-frozen.” In the long term, however, America and its allies must demonstrate that Russia has lost more than it gained from this conflict. One first step must be for the U.S. to agree with its NATO allies to confirm an offer of NATO membership for both Georgia and Ukraine. Poland, the Baltic states, and other central European countries are already calling for an emergency NATO summit that might issue such a declaration. Only Germany seems to stand in the way of such a decision — and the Germans should be told firmly that their opposition to Georgia membership earlier this year encouraged the siloviki to mount this attack. Time for them to forget Rapallo once and for all, and join the rest of the West in resisting the re-emergence of the USSR. Second, we should ask Poland and the Czech Republic to hold any necessary referendums on installing a missile defense system to be held at once — and campaign on the argument that Russia has just shown that it cannot be trusted to be a good international neighbor. Such a victory would lose the Kremlin far more than it gained in the Caucasus. Third, once the fighting has definitively stopped, the U.S. should offer a generous rebuilding program in Georgia — to be carried out, in part, by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That is one piece of social work that the Pentagon should relish. Is there a role for economic sanctions here — such as expelling Russia from the G8? Not in the first instance. Sanctions generally work better as a threat than as a policy. And Europeans are reluctant to lose the business they cut off. So sanctions should be used as a threat. Russia should be quietly told that if it obstructs any of the policies outlined above, then a list of economic sanctions will be progressively imposed. Russia looks stronger — economically and militarily — than it really is. The siloviki know it; so do we. We should make plain that everyone will know if they continue along the path of resuscitating the Soviet corpse.

The Corner Georgia: Just the Beginning? [Mark R. Levin] I think NRO's editorial on the Russian invasion of Georgia is quite good. I would add that we, on our own or with allied or NATO support, should help the former captive nations and East bloc nations arm up so they at least have the ability to try to defend themselves against Putin's Russia. If there is to be some kind of quasi-Cold War with Russia, let it be on better terms and conditions than the first. Diplomacy and threatening loss of membership in this group or that will have little effect. Putin surely understood the diplomatic fallout that likely would follow his invasion. This is a man who defies his own constitution, denies the systematic murder of inquisitive journalists and critical ex-pats, claims to seize the North Pole for his country, and assists Iran in its pursuit of nuclear status. We are limited in how we can help our Georgian ally, but Putin's brazen attack on Georgia should be a warning to the United States and our allies on Russia's border and elsewhere in the area that they need to be prepared for more of this. Russia's Invasion of Georgia: Another Intelligence Debacle? [Andy McCarthy] As observed in today's NRO editorial, the Russian response, upon successfully baiting Georgia, was "massive" and "quite manifestly ready to go."

How could the Russians possibly have pulled this off so swiftly without extensive preparations and the marshaling of formidable amounts of troops and munitions?

Shouldn't our overhauled, 17-agency, $40+ billion intelligence community have seen this coming?

Did we warn President Saakashvili against giving Russia the pretext Putin was looking for?

Michael Ledeen may have to fire up his oija board ...

Medals So Far [John Derbyshire] Russia: 0—4—2

Georgia: 0—0—1

Just, you know, checking. Georgia's bronze was Nino Salukvadze's for shooting: ladies' 10m air pistol. Congrats to Ms. Salukvadze, but they're going to need more firepower than that …

Washington Post Russia's Power Play by George F. Will

Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Now, into America's trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded -- a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again.

Russia supports two provinces determined to secede from Georgia. Russia, with aspiring nations within its borders, generally opposes secessionists, as it did when America, which sometimes opposes secession (e.g., 1861-65), improvidently supported Kosovo's secession from Russia's ally Serbia. But Russia's aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally. This is the recrudescence of Russia's dominance in what it calls the "near abroad." Ukraine, another nation guilty of

being provocatively democratic near Russia, should tremble because there is not much America can do. It is a bystander at the bullying of an ally that might be about to undergo regime change.

Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia's military, thereby making his poodle, "President" Dmitry Medvedev, yet more risible. But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

On ABC's "This Week," Richardson, auditioning to be Barack Obama's running mate, disqualified himself. Clinging to the Obama campaign's talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, Richardson said that this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama's zest for diplomacy and that America should get the U.N. Security Council "to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint." Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the United Nations for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

This crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the United Nations regarding major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama's serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama's second statement about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia's invasion, underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush administration's initial evenhandedness. "Now," said Obama, "is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint."

John McCain, the "life is real, life is earnest" candidate, says he has looked into Putin's eyes and seen "a K, a G and a B." But McCain owes the thug thanks, as does America's electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows of John Edwards and wondering what "catharsis" is "owed" to disappointed Clintonites.

McCain, who has called upon Russia "to immediately and unconditionally . . . withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight, and organizing a league of democracies to act where the United Nations is impotent, which is whenever the subject is important. But Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain's league of democracies, e.g., Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia. NATO is scheduled to review the question of Georgia's membership in December. Where now do Obama and McCain stand?

If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO's 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded -- the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.

What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990. (The August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev)

This year's August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world's preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

Slate's fighting words Iraq's Budget Surplus Scandal Why do we have such a hard time hearing good news from Baghdad? by Christopher Hitchens

One day I will publish my entire collection of upside-down Iraq headlines, where the true purport of the story is the inverse of the intended one. (Top billing thus far would go to the greatest downer of them all: the tale of Iraq's unemployed gravediggers, their always-insecure standard of living newly imperiled by the falling murder rate. You don't believe me? Wait for the forthcoming anthology.) While you wait, you might consider last week's astonishing report about the Iraqi budget surplus and the way in which the report was reported.

Largely attributable to the bonanza in oil prices, to new discoveries of oil since the eviction of Saddam Hussein, and to the increasing success of Iraqi exports via the pipelines to Turkey, this surplus could amount to as much as $79 billion by the end of this year. A good chunk of that money is sitting safely in a bank in New York. I would call this good news by any standard, though of course I understand the annoyance of Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and others involved in the auditing of Iraq, who complain that all the unspent wealth is a bit much, given the heavy outlay from the U.S. treasury for the rebuilding of Mesopotamia.

Yes indeed, Iraq should pay for its own reconstruction. But, just before we all join hands on this obvious proposition, may we take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq's liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq's recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing. Now the opponents of the intervention are yelling that Iraq ought to be opening its bulging wallet right away.

There will be time enough for that to happen, since Iraq's vast resources are back in the hands of its own people and are no longer "privatized" as the personal property of a psychopathic crime family. Sen. Levin, who with Sen. John Warner, R-Va., requested the original report from the Government Accountability Office on Iraq's finances, was the ranking Democrat on the Senate subcommittee investigating the "oil for food" outrage. He knows perfectly well what used to happen to Iraq's oil wealth, which was prostituted through a U.N. program and diverted to such noble causes as the subsidy of suicide bombers in Gaza and the financing of pro-Saddam and "anti-war" politicians in London, Paris, and Moscow. While this criminal enrichment of Iraqi and overseas elites was taking place, the population of the country was living on garbage and drinking tainted water as a result of the U.N.-mandated international sanctions.

I think we should be glad that the luridly sadistic and aggressive Saddam Hussein regime is no longer in power to be the beneficiary of the rise in oil prices and thus able to share its wealth with the terrorists, crooks, and demagogues on its secret payroll. I think we should also be glad that its private ownership of Iraq's armed forces, and its control over a party monopoly called the Baath, has been irrecoverably smashed. Iraq's resources are no longer at the disposal of an aggressive, parasitic oligarchy. Its retrained and re-equipped army is being deployed, not in wars of invasion against its neighbors and genocide against its inhabitants, but in cleanup campaigns against al-Qaida and the Mahdi Army. An improvement. A distinct improvement.

It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist "insurgents" as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn't even be Saddam's goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who

answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight.

Before 2003, there was, in a way, a socioeconomic basis for fascism in Iraq, in that the lack of oil on Sunni turf supplied an imperative to the Tikrit-based gangsters for the domination of Kurdish and Shiite areas that did possess the needful oilfields. Now, new discoveries of oil and new laws on regional and provincial decentralization provide at least the socioeconomic basis for federalism. Again, a distinct improvement. This element of the substructure, as we Marxists say, does not in itself guarantee the superstructure, any more than the vast new wealth in Iraqi coffers is automatically a promise of prosperity for all. (After all, in spite of a huge improvement in prison conditions in Iraq in general, one has to admit the crimes and coverups of Abu Ghraib.) But does anyone seriously regret that these questions are being addressed in their only feasible context, namely the post-Saddam era that was the necessary if not the sufficient condition?

So, yes, major combat operations appear to be over, and to that extent one can belatedly say, "Mission accomplished." If there is any Iraqi nostalgia for the old party and the old army, it is remarkably well-concealed. Iraq no longer plays deceptive games with weapons of mass destruction or plays host to international terrorist groups. It is no longer subject to sanctions that punish its people and enrich its rulers. Its religious and ethnic minorities—together a majority—are no longer treated like disposable trash. Its most bitter internal argument is about the timing of the next provincial and national elections. Surely it is those who opposed every step of this emancipation, rather than those who advocated it, who should be asked to explain and justify themselves.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. The Politico Seven Worrisome Signs for Obama by Glenn Thrush A few weeks back, Time magazine was musing that John McCain was in danger of sliding from “a long shot” to a “no-shot.” Around the same time, a hard-nosed former Hillary Clinton insider declared the race “effectively over” thanks to the McCain campaign’s ineptitude, the tanking U.S. economy and Obama’s advantages in cash, charisma and hope. And Obama, up by three to six points nationally, was about to leverage a much-anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe into a pre-convention poll surge.

Barack Obama has at least seven reasons to be concerned about his chances in November.Photo: AP Instead, his supporters are now suffering a pre-Denver panic attack, watching as John McCain draws incrementally closer in state and national polls – with Rasmussen’s most recent daily national tracker showing a statistical dead heat.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been privately enumerating her doubts about Obama to supporters, according to people who have spoken with her. Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation red-flagging Obama’s lukewarm leads among white female voters and Hispanics – while predicting a five-point swing could turn a presumed Obama win into a McCain landslide. “It’s not that people think McCain will win – it’s that they are realizing that McCain could win,” says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown, whose surveys show tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. “This election is about Barack Obama — not John McCain — it's about whether Barack Obama passes muster. Every poll shows that people want a Democratic president, the problem is they’re not sure they want Barack Obama.”

Obama’s aides point to the stability of his small national lead, say they aren’t worried about his summer stall and think his numbers will improve when voters begin tuning in to the conventions. “This is a country that is looking for a fundamentally different direction, and John McCain offers nothing but the status quo,” said spokesman Bill Burton, adding that he wasn’t “losing any sleep” over Obama's rough patch. The campaign’s confidence may turn out to be justified, but two weeks prior to the national convention there are more than a few worrisome signs for Obama. Here are seven: 1. Race. “The idea that Obama was going to win in a blowout was always preposterous,” says former Nebraska senator and onetime presidential hopeful Bob Kerrey, an Obama backer. “A big piece of this, of course, is whether white people are going to support a black guy. ... If [Obama] is a tall, skinny white guy named Paul Jones, it's a different story.” Obama is running nearly neck-and-neck with McCain among white voters in most polls, a major cause for optimism considering that John Kerry lost the white vote by 17 points and that Al Gore lost it by 12 points. Among whites, he does well with women, the affluent and college grads but fares poorly among low-income earners and Catholics — key swing groups that handed Hillary Rodham Clinton stunning blowouts in West Virginia and Kentucky. How much does his race factor into tightening contests in Missouri, Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota and Ohio? Nobody knows — and that’s the problem. A huge challenge for Obama, insiders say, is simply determining how much skin color will matter in November. Race is nearly impossible to poll — no one ever says “I’m a racist” — and no campaign wants it revealed they are even asking questions on the issue. “It’s the uncertainty that kills me — we know it’s going to be factor, but how big a factor?” asks a Democratic operative with ties to the Obama camp. “How do you even measure such a thing? Adding to the jitters: GOP surrogates like New York Rep. Peter King have vowed to make Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a centerpiece during the homestretch. 2. Obama’s strength in Virginia may be overhyped. His chances of ending the Democrats 44-year losing streak in the commonwealth are pretty good — thanks to the explosive growth of the liberal D.C. suburbs, and a 147,000 spike in voter registration sure to benefit Democrats. But Obama’s aides privately concede his odds in Virginia are probably no better than 50-50 and that the state is far from a lock-solid hedge if he loses Ohio and Florida. 3. Michigan’s in play for McCain. In the year of the downturn, the hard-hit upper Midwest should be prime Obama country. Instead it’s a potential minefield. Obama is still ahead by two to five points there — similar to margins of victory enjoyed by Gore and Kerry in the last two presidential contests — but McCain has

quietly crept up over the past month and could vault ahead if he anoints ex-Gov. Mitt Romney as his running mate. Simmering tensions between predominantly black Detroit and its white suburbs could hurt Obama. And McCain’s surrogates were handed a gift in the jailing of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, an Obama supporter.

“Watch Michigan — the Democrats think they've got it but they don't,” says Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown, a longtime Michigan observer. “Obama should be killing [McCain] there, but there's a lot more racial tension in Michigan than in other states.” Obama also hasn’t pulled away in other Democrat-friendly neighboring states, watching leads in Wisconsin and Minnesota erode over the last month. 4. Bad times could be good for McCain. If anger helps Democrats, fear works to the advantage of Republicans. A growing number of Democratic strategists worry that some swing state voters may opt for McCain if the economy veers from merely awful to downright terrifying. The typical political calculus —that bad economic times will deliver the White House to Democrats — may not hold if people start viewing the downturn as, essentially, a national security crisis that can’t be entrusted to a novice. And that was McCain’s underlying message in his Paris Hilton ad: Bank failures, soaring gas prices and plummeting house values are forms of economic terrorism, and he’s an all-purpose anti-terror warrior. “John McCain is a known quantity,” says Bob Kerrey, who thinks Obama will ultimately prevail. “You don't look at John and say, ‘Who the heck is he?’. He's a veteran, he's a guy who got pretty banged up in Vietnam. He can deal with crisis. There's some uncertainty about Senator Obama.” The good news for Obama, of course, is that McCain — who infamously admitted he “never understood” economics — is loathed by unions, was somnambulant at the dawn of the housing meltdown and still gropes for a coherent economic policy that doesn’t include the words “offshore drilling.” But he doesn’t have to win the argument, just reinforce doubts about Obama with wavering swing state voters. The Illinois senator still enjoys a major edge on the economic issues, but his 20-point June lead on the question of who can best fix the economy slipped to a 17-point edge in July, according to the Pew Research Center. “Obama wins on the economy,” said Guy Cecil, Hillary Clinton’s field director during the primaries. “But it will be interesting to see if McCain’s able to close the economic gap.” 5. Where have you gone, Ross Perot? Bill Clinton, the lone two-term Democratic president since FDR, wouldn’t have been elected if independent Ross Perot hadn’t siphoned 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, staging an indie bid from McCain’s right, has little cash and doesn’t seem to be a factor in competitive states. 6. The Legacy of LBJ, Jimmy and Bubba. Barack Obama would have been a trailblazer no matter what —but the Democrats’ trail to the White House has been remarkably narrow since 1960, accommodating only Southern whites with border-state strength: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (Add Al Gore if you’re counting the popular vote.) 7. Americans may want divided government. Some Democratic operatives think a possible landslide for their party in congressional races could backfire on Obama. “Fairly or not, folks think he’s pretty liberal and nobody wants a pair of Pelosis running things,” says a New York-based Democratic consultant. Adds Bob Kerrey: “The country's still pretty divided … people may want a divided government. They want change, but I'm not sure that the Democratic agenda has the support of a majority of Americans.”

Jewish World Review The Galbraith Effect by Thomas Sowell Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation.

Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures.

Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.

Senator Barack Obama's campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith. Many people were ecstatic during the early primaries, as each state's voters heard his glittering generalities for the first time.

The media loved the novelty of a black candidate with a real chance to become president, and his left-wing vision of the world was largely their vision as well. There was a veritable media honeymoon for Obama.

There was outrage in the mainstream media when ABC anchor man Charles Gibson asked Obama a serious question about the economic effects of a capital gains tax. Who interrupts honeymooners to talk economics?

The fact that Senator Obama did not have a very coherent answer made things worse— for Charles Gibson. Since Obama can do no wrong in the eyes of many of his supporters, they resented Gibson's having asked him such a question.

The question, incidentally was why Senator Obama was advocating a higher capital gains tax rate, when experience had shown that the government typically collected more revenue from a lower capital gains tax rate than from a higher rate.

Senator Obama acted as if he had never thought about it that way. He probably hadn't. He is a politician, not an economist.

Politically, what matters to the left-wing base that Obama has been playing to for decades is sticking it to "the rich." What effect that has on the tax revenues received by the government is secondary, at best.

What effect a higher capital gains tax rate will have on the economy today and on people's pensions in later years is a question that is not even on Senator Obama's radar screen.

Economists may say that higher capital gains tax rates can translate into lower levels of economic activity and fewer jobs, but Obama will leave that kind of analysis to the economists. He is in politics, and what matters politically is what wins votes right here and right now.

The kind of talk that won the votes— and the hearts— of the left-wing base of the Democratic Party during the primaries may not be enough to carry the day with voters in the general election. So Senator Obama has been changing his tune or, as he puts it, "refining" his message.

This was not the kind of "change" that the true believers among Obama's supporters were expecting. So there has been some wavering among the faithful and some ups and downs in the polls.

Despite an impressive political machine and a huge image makeover this year to turn a decades-long, divisive grievance-promoting activist into someone who is supposed to unite us all and lead us into the promised land of "change," little glimpses of the truth keep coming out.

The elitist sneers at people who believe in religion and who own guns, the Americans who don't speak foreign languages and the views of the "typical white person," are all like rays of light that show through the cracks in Obama's carefully crafted image.

The overwhelming votes for Obama in some virtually all-white states show that many Americans are ready to move beyond race. But Obama himself wants to have it both ways, by attributing racist notions to the McCain camp that has never made race an issue.

The problem with clever people is that they don't know when to stop being clever— and Senator Obama is a very clever man, perhaps "too clever by half" as the British say. But maybe he can't keep getting by with glittering generalities, any more than Galbraith could.

San Francisco Chronicle The not-so-pretty boy by Debra J. Saunders

John Edwards is done.

The pretty-boy candidate always was the biggest phony at any Democratic debate. He was the $400-haircut poster boy for poverty. The 28,000-square-foot mansion owner, who preached about global warming. The candidate who demanded that other Democrats swear off accepting contributions from Fox News baron Rupert Murdoch, after he pocketed a $500,000 advance - with an extra $300,000 for expenses - from Murdoch's Harper Collins. The man who ran as the doting husband of the cancer-battling Elizabeth Edwards while he was boffing an overpaid campaign aide.

If I were a Democrat, I would be spittin' mad. If Edwards had won his party's nomination for president, news of the affair most surely would have gotten out and the Democratic Party's chances of winning the White House would have evaporated instantly, as would-be supporters would have realized they can't believe a word the man says.

Edwards had asserted that National Enquirer reports of an affair with Rielle Hunter were "completely untrue." In admitting to the affair - but not the lovechild, if you care to believe him - Edwards explained in a statement, that he relied on inaccuracies in the story to deny it, "But being 99 percent honest is no longer enough."

99 percent honest? Even when he is coming clean, he's a snake.

And a cad. If he'd won the Democratic nomination, Edwards would have damaged his party. Having lost, he could only be a drag on his wife's reputation, and he was. By announcing that he told Elizabeth about the affair in 2006, Edwards has allowed his better half to share in his big lie.

Now neither Edwards is credible.

Edwards said in a statement, "If you want to beat me up - feel free. You cannot beat me up any more than I have already beaten up myself." I doubt that.

See how Edwards beat himself up during Friday's interview with ABC's Bob Woodruff. He tried the everybody-does-it approach: "Well, what I was thinking was this was something that was personal to my own family. My family knew everything about it. Everything. And on top of that, if you look back, Bob, I mean,

I've seen people like, for example, John McCain talk about the mistakes that he's made in his past, with respect to his first marriage and left it, I think, basically at that. I mean, I'm not the first person to do this, but I don't want to - I don't want to talk about that."

Yes, McCain was married when he met his current wife Cindy in 1979. The former prisoner of war did pay a political price for his behavior. Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported how the breakup of McCain's first marriage "fractured" his relationship with President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy.

That the L.A. Times would devote a story to a political rift that occurred almost 30 years ago only feeds the perception that there is a double standard in newspapers. Of course, the best exhibit of the double standard is the bogus New York Times piece in February that alleged, but failed to prove, that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist.

I believe The Chronicle was right not to report on rumored Edwards' story until his confession. Better to be late and right than early and wrong.

That said, only a double standard explains why the New York Times and other biggies failed to jump on reports that National Enquirer staff had caught Edwards after he met with Hunter at the Beverly Hilton Hotel during the wee hours of July 21. Sure, they first had to verify the story, as ABC News was working to do, but Times editors couldn't be bothered.

On the one hand, Democrats should feel good about having dodged the Edwards recklessness bullet. But the story has only served to feed the rage of Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters, some of whom believe that without Edwards in the Democratic primary race, their gal might have won.

Or as former Clinton spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told ABC news: Without Edwards, "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee."

If only the cad had stayed home.

As they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.

Denver Post Enquiring minds always seem surprised by David Harsanyi

There's a standard refrain you'll hear after every high-profile Washington indiscretion: Americans should expect more from their politicians.

But really, we should expect less. Much less.

The John Edwards affair was reported in great detail by the undependable National Enquirer weeks ago, yet only when the immaculately quaffed former presidential candidate admitted the peccadillo to ABC's Bob Woodruff on "Nightline" was it considered worthwhile for the masses.

The Edwards story is newsworthy, but it certainly isn't earth-shattering. And it absolutely isn't "surprising," as some have labeled it.

Guess what? Politicians regularly cheat on their better halves (even when cancer-stricken) and then, almost invariably, lie about it.

"I took it really personally," a man from Charlotte, N.C., told CNN.com after the Edwards affair's disclosure. "I always thought John Edwards was different from the typical politician."

Why on Earth would a citizen ever take the private blunders of a politician personally? Why would anyone believe Edwards was anything more than typical? His preening hypocrisy and self-proclaimed importance were very typical, actually.

When it came to politics, Edwards and his fans — though there never seemed quite enough of them to make a difference — were loyal devotees of state-imposed economic "equality," an imposition Edwards didn't rely on himself to become wealthy and famous.

Well, maybe "loyal" is a stretch. In reality, the former senator was a profound believer in positions that were politically expedient.

In a few years' time, Edwards transformed himself from a centrist Southern Democrat, capable of winning a conservative Senate seat and voting for the Iraq war, to a populist demagogue who, from his $25 million North Carolina estate, was one of the nation's leading detractors of capitalism.

Some of us believed Edwards was a fraud and his newfound ideology was destructive to the nation. We believed it when we thought he was a magnificent husband, and we believed it after we found out about his infidelity.

His public self-flagellation doesn't change anything.

And if you were a fan of Edwards, don't worry. Democrats can unearth thousands of other talented and attractive trial lawyers to spread the identical message.

As much as some of us dislike Edwards, personal gotchas are a lazy way to tie indiscretion and corruption to the political ideals of the offender. As we all know, unfaithfulness and dishonesty are bipartisan hobbies.

In only a month's time, we have the U.S. Senate's longest-serving Republican, Ted Stevens, arraigned in federal court on seven counts of failing to disclose more than $250,000 in gifts. In Detroit, we have Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick violating the terms of his bond in a perjury case by making an unauthorized business trip and being sent to jail. Kwame was charged with perjury for allegedly lying under oath about an affair.

Incredibly, despite our low opinion of elected officials and countless examples, this election season millions of otherwise reasonable Americans will once again dutifully plaster their cars with bumper stickers or plant yard signs bearing the name of some lifelong bureaucrat who has promised them the world.

Are these men and women running for office so special that they deserve near-religious adoration?

Is government so important in your life that you offer it?

Politicians exist to implement public policy. They lean left or they lean right.

Do they possess an extraordinary ability to magically "fix" the economy, or "create" jobs or change the world? Hardly.

Let's keep expectations for politicians where they belong: Stay out of jail. Everything else is gravy.

The Independent, UK 'To greens, I was worse than a child abuser' With his dissident images in ?The Great Global Warming Swindle?, Martin Durkin pitted himself against Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'. A year after the airing of the film, he says he is still being vilified by environmentalists by Martin Durkin

Martin Durkin's documentary 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', aired on Channel 4 last year, enraged the green lobby by claiming human activity wasn't behind global warming. Ofcom, the TV regulator, received 265 complaints and last month ruled that its writer and director lacked impartiality. However, Ofcom ceded that, despite "certain reservations", it did not believe audiences had been "materially misled". Writing for the first time since the documentary was screened, Durkin tells 'The Independent on Sunday' why he stands by his film in the face of continued criticism.

The fuss over Swindle is a bit like Fatal Attraction: every time I think it's over, up pops Glenn Close, looking rather like George Monbiot of The Guardian in a wig, and takes another swipe at me with a kitchen knife.

The latest dramatic episode is Ofcom's adjudication on the many complaints about the film.

Swindle went out more than a year ago and ordinary viewers loved it: the duty log was swamped with calls, 6:1 in support. Evidently many of them thought this global warming stuff was baloney, and were rather relieved that someone had stood up and said as much.

The BBC's environmental journalists were embarrassed. Why hadn't Roger Harrabin and his crew raised any of the issues I had covered in Swindle? Take the famous Ice Core data. This was the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. Al Gore said it proved a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. He failed to mention that in the data the connection was clearly the wrong way round – temperature driving CO2 levels, not the other way round.

Harrabin had to go on to Newsnight and put some of these obvious points to Gore in person. Big Al squirmed and evaded and, according to Harrabin, later accused him of being a "traitor"'.

As it happens, I have made a number of science documentaries debunking irrational scare stories, and the greens have had a whack at me before – scares are the oxygen of the green movement. And I know from experience how illiberal these liberals are. But even I have been stunned by the sustained ferocity of their response to Swindle.

Besides a vitriolic campaign in the press, the instrument of their fury has been Ofcom. A swift internet campaign rallied the troops. Hundreds of complaints were sent off, many using the same phrases and displaying a surprisingly good knowledge of the Ofcom code.

Every line in the film was subjected to scorn. The contributors were all in the pay of baby-strangling capitalists. As for me? I was a member of the special steering committee of the World Congress of Science Producers. I had recently won an award from the British Medical Association for making the best science documentary of the year. But now I was "worse than a child abuser".

One complaint stood out. It ran to 200 pages and was orchestrated by three "concerned citizens". It claimed to be peer-reviewed, which it wasn't. But it was backed by the great and good of the global warming brigade.

Our response was long and detailed: 300 pages, not counting supporting science papers etc. What has been the result?

To heighten the dramatic effect, let's compare Gore's beloved Inconvenient Truth with Swindle. The veracity of Al's film was tested in the High Court, when a lorry driver from Kent baulked at the prospect of his taxes being spent on disseminating it to British schools.

The verdict was a blow to the greens. Mr Justice Burton cited at least nine significant "errors" in Gore's film. Using words such as "alarmism" and "exaggeration", the judge said the film couldn't be sent out to schools without a health warning.

Harrabin wrote a piece admitting he had thought the film was a bit off when he first saw it. Did he indeed? So why didn't he tell the rest of us? What do we pay him for? And how about all those "scientists" who, to their eternal shame, lined up to heap praise on the film?

Now let's look at Swindle. The global warmers made buckets of complaints to Ofcom that the science was wrong, that the film contained hundreds of factual errors, falsifications and misrepresentations. It was, in short, unscientific and scurrilous.

How many of these complaints did Ofcom uphold? Not one.

So what did the regulator say? Well apparently we could have been a bit clearer with an oceanographer we interviewed about what the final film would look like. We gave the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) nine working days to respond to our allegations; apparently we should have given it 10. And we didn't give a right to reply to the UK's chief scientific adviser, David King, who did not appear in the film but whose entertaining views on global warming were alluded to. These were such insignificant infringements of its code that Ofcom has not asked Channel 4 to apologise to anyone.

How was all this reported? In Australia, The Herald Sun ran the headline, "Great Global Warming Swindle Cleared". Its columnist, Andrew Bolt, wrote: "This witch-hunt against The Great Global Warming Swindle has failed utterly to discredit it, discrediting instead the accusers." The Sydney Morning Herald declared, "Lonely Voice of Dissent Declared Valid", adding: "There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. If their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view?"

Over here, it was a different story. The greens were furious Ofcom hadn't played ball, but tried their best to spin the decision. According to Newsnight, Channel 4 had had "its fingers burnt". Suddenly the report was said to be "damning".

The most surreal response came from the head of the IPCC: "We are pleased to note Ofcom has vindicated the IPCC's claim against Channel 4 in spirit and in substance."

Meanwhile, in the "liberal" press, the attacks continue. Some bloke called Leo Hickman said the film was "toxic" and George Monbiot emerged from his bath- tub again slashing and slashing. The film, he reminded us, was a "cruel deception" and, he asked innocently: "Why is Channel 4 waging war against the greens?"

Sadly I missed all this. I was taking my family round the US in a gas-guzzling Winnebago. My reading matter was Milton Friedman, who writes: "It is entirely appropriate people should bear a cost – if only of unpopularity and criticism – for speaking freely. However, the cost should be reasonable and not disproportionate. There should not be, in the words of a famous Supreme Court decision, 'a chilling effect' on free speech."

In the year that has passed since the film was broadcast, I have discovered what that "chilling effect" is. It is when a programme maker needs to risk his career in order to make a particular film. It is when a commissioning editor or a broadcaster is genuinely fearful of straying into certain areas.

The main Ofcom complainant noted: "This is Not an Attack on Free Speech". So rather than try to shut me up, bully and vilify, why don't they engage in an honest discussion about the science?

I'll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that's according to the IPCC. I don't remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.

I no longer give a stuff whether left-liberal types agree with my views on global warming. However, I do expect every last one of them who claims to value the freedom to speak one's mind, to defend my right to air them.

Borowitz Report Athlete without Compelling Personal Drama Expelled from Olympics Diver Hid Details of Intact Family

A member of the U.S. Olympic diving team was disqualified from competition today when it was learned that he did not have a sufficiently compelling human storyline to exploit on the NBC telecast of the worldwide sporting event. Tracy Klujian, the expelled diver, was not raised by a single mother, never had a career-threatening injury, and did not overcome a personal tragedy of any kind before making the Olympic diving team, U.S. Olympic officials revealed today.

"Had Tracy been involved in an organ donation, as either a donor or a recipient, that would have been acceptable to us," a diving team spokesman told reporters. "However, he was not." According to sources close to the diving team, Mr. Klujian had concealed the fact that he comes from an intact middle class family who never lost their home to a flood, tornado, or typhoon. But what may have sealed Mr.Klujian's doom, sources said, was his utter lack of a gravely ill family member to win a medal for. "Tracy did his best to hide his background from team officials," one source said. "But when the truth came out, he was finished." Speaking to reporters in Beijing, NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol was even less charitable, terming Mr. Klujian's actions "a reprehensible betrayal." "We do our best to check out all of the athletes to make sure that their backgrounds are full of compelling human drama, but we can't catch everything," Mr. Ebersol said. "This is a case of one really bad guy exploiting the system."