I don’t really agree with most of this David Brooks column on S-CHIP, and I certainly don’t agree with his implication that the S-CHIP expansion bill is a bad thing on net, but this is true:

Third, it creates a fund-raising mechanism cowardly in the extreme. Politicians in Washington like to talk in the abstract about shared sacrifice. They could go to the American people and say: We need to insure more children and to do that we’re going to raise broad-based taxes slightly.

But that’s honest and direct, and therefore impermissible. Instead, this program is funded by raising taxes on smokers, who generally are much poorer than average Americans and much less educated. High school dropouts smoke at roughly three times the rates of college graduates.

Now Brooks tries to deploy this factoid into an effort to convince us, I guess, that the Republicans standing against this expansion are doing so out of earnest concern for the well-being of the American working class. And that, of course, is ridiculous. It is, however, quite true that it’s very hard to really make sensible policy in this country within the constraint that everything has to be financed through gimmicks and whatnot rather than through broadish taxes. Now, of course, Brooks has conveniently left out the part of the story where the conservative movement of which he’s a part has worked assiduously to try to convince people that it’s simply not possible for the benefits of any non-lethal government program to exceed the cost of financing it through taxation, which — rather than some characterological predilection for dishonesty — explains why politicians now resort constantly to these sort of tactics.

For the Guardian I try to put the story of Bush rejecting exile options for Saddam Hussein into the broader context of his administration’s approach to nuclear proliferation. Rejecting the rule-based framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Bush sought another way outside the bounds of international law:

That way, known as “counterproliferation” by its advocates, was, in essence, brute force. The US would break its non-proliferation treaty commitments by building a new generation of “bunker buster” nukes, turn a blind eye to nuclear activities by friendly states, and restrain WMD acquisition by hostile states through intimidation rather than a legitimate international process. Iraq was targeted not merely on its own terms but in order that Bush might make an example out of Saddam and send a message to the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea and other states. Cutting a deal with Saddam wasn’t an option.

Unfortunately, as a result of the same thinking, neither were any number of other moves that could have improved American policy. In particular, the invasion force needed to be small enough, and the reconstruction plan fast and cheap enough, that the US could credibly threaten to do it again if other countries didn’t get the message.

Read the whole thing.

White House photo by Eric Draper

Here’s the “Student’s Guide to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”. Jim Henley notes the key passage:

Distributing a petition is an excellent protest tactic for several reasons. First, it is a very easy and cost-effective way to draw attention to the issues at hand. Second, a petition can serve as an advertisement for other events, such as film screenings and panel discussions (when you ask students to sign the petition, hand them a flyer about the other activities you have planned throughout the week). Perhaps most importantly, a petition forces students and faculty to declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies. For this reason, we encourage you to make a special effort to bring this petition to those groups who might be least likely to sign it, for example to campus administrators, student government officers, and the Muslim Students’ Association.

In short, the main goal of the “David Horowitz Freedom Center” here is to write up a petition deliberately designed to be unlikely for Muslim groups to sign and then to use Muslim groups’ failure to sign the petition as evidence that they’re on the side of “our terrorist adversaries.” This is a great way to go about things if you want to (a) be a campus troublemaker, (b) over the long run turn hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world into hardened enemies of the United States, and (c) create a large group of disaffected Muslims inside the United States who’ve been made to feel that adherence to their faith is unwelcome in America and fundamentally incompatible with loyalty to this country.

Back in saneville, what we’d like to do is build as broad a coalition as possible of people opposed to bin Laden-style acts of terrorist violence against civilians. We’d like to frame our opposition to this kind of terrorism in a manner calculated to gain allies rather than alienate them in order to score points in endless and pointless campus political battles. We’d like to empower mainstream Islamic groups so that Muslims around the world can feel that their concerns can be addressed through legitimate political mechanisms rather than violent holy wars, and so that mainstream Muslims have a platform from which to fight back against extremism.