The World Around You

Time and again, Michael Kinsley attacks President Bush with precision,

One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference to “sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East.” This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father, among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

If you’ve really been thinking about a Big Question recently, you ought to be taking recent evidence into account. But Bush’s eloquent speech is stuck in 1989. In Europe and Asia and “every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace,” he declared. We used to think like that, before Bosnia and Kosovo. These episodes taught us that free people will sometimes vote for bloodshed that the previous government was able to suppress. This doesn’t undo the case for democracy and freedom, but it complicates that case. Acknowledging and addressing such complications is another way to demonstrate that your change of mind is sincere.

There is also an excellent article by Kenneth T. Walsh in this week’s US News and World Report about the pluses and minuses of operating the way this President does. Just as more people had a problem with Clinton’s “way” than with Clinton’s policies. There are those who have a much bigger problem with Bush’s “way” than the policies that result.

I first asked for Roy’s removal in a post on August 5, 2003. Well, it only took 3 and 1/2 months, but that day has arrived.

Roy Moore has been removed from office by the Court of the Judiciary. Now what? The Governor will appoint his replacement. That should be interesting.

The verdict from the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission is expected to be handed down at 11am today.

Moore is charged with violating the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics when on Aug. 14 he publicly stated his intention not to comply with U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s order to remove the Ten Commandments monument from public view. Moore was later suspended, leaving the associate state Supreme Court justices to remove the granite stone.

Wednesday’s trial, set against a backdrop of tight security, a mild demonstration and high political drama, pitted Moore’s oft-made argument that he followed his oath of office by acknowledging God in the face of an “illegal” court order versus Attorney General Bill Pryor’s assertion that a state judge who disobeys a federal court is unfit for the bench.

The judiciary panel may exonerate Moore; formally reprimand him, akin to a censure; suspend him with or without pay for any amount of time up to the end of his term in January 2007; or expel him from office. Pryor has asked for Moore to be removed. Such a penalty would require a unanimous vote of the court.