Sen. Larry Craig’s rehabilitation is occuring while he’s still in office. Apparently, the Idaho Hall of Fame–did you even know there was such a thing?–is preparing him for induction.

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David Brooks has a provocative piece in today’s Times arguing that American conservatism has run aground because, in essence, it isn’t conservative enough. Burke is Brooke’s man, the defender of the great oak of English liberty against the marauding Frenchmen, the “projectors” intent on upending humanity to achieve their insane schemes of reinventing society. As Brooks sees it, conservatives have lost touch with Burke and indulged in promoting their own pet causes.

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David Brooks has a provocative piece in today’s Times arguing that American conservatism has run aground because, in essence, it isn’t conservative enough. Burke is Brooke’s man, the defender of the great oak of English liberty against the marauding Frenchmen, the “projectors” intent on upending humanity to achieve their insane schemes of reinventing society. As Brooks sees it, conservatives have lost touch with Burke and indulged in promoting their own pet causes.

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Sen. Larry Craig may be listing in the polls, but, as I predicted here weeks ago, he’s not going anywhere. Craig, who seems convinced that he’s really not guilty of anything, shows every sign of wanting to fight, to the extent of preparing for a Senate ethics committee investigation. Republicans will have to resign themselves to the fact that Craig isn’t resigning.

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So Sen. Larry Craig isn’t retiring after all. Or at least he may not, says his spokesman. I can’t say I’m surprised. There’s no real incentive for Craig to step down, apart from wanting to help the GOP’s electoral fortunes. But he may not care about them any longer. The rapidity with which the GOP elite went after him may be backfiring. It sounds like Craig’s dander is up. What he cares about is clearing his name, at least in his own mind. He’s already trotted out his children to vouch for him. The truth is that he himself has nothing to lose by staying on in the Senate, especially if he’s going to continue to maintain that’s he innocent. Resigning would be a further admission of having done something untoward. But Craig believes, or has convinced himself, that he didn’t.

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The New York Times and Washington Post are running with stories about Jack Goldsmith’s opposition to the Bush administration’s attempt to perform an end-run on civil liberties issues when it came to the war on terror.

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That’s what Hamas is apparently calling Fatah. As the power struggle over the Gaza strip reaches its final stage, it’s clear that the Palestinian Authority is unauthoritative. This probably shouldn’t be completely surprising.

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It’s official: the lunatics have won.

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The shrieks of agony emanating from conservative circles about the terrible punishment being inflicted upon Scooter Libby strike me as misplaced.

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Albert Gonzales’ attempt to bully an ailing John Ashcroft into signing off on a dubious intelligence order requires no comment. That episode alone would be enough to disqualify him to be attorney general. But his comments yesterday at the National Press Club, blaming the firing of federal attorneys on Paul McNulty, who has just resigned as deputy attorney general, provided fresh insight into Gonzales.

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So the United Nations is up to it’s old tricks again.

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Robert George makes some points that sound telling about a movie that I don’t know if I can bring myself to see. I was pleasantly surprised by the first Spider-Man movie, which took some liberties, but captured the spirit of the comic book, particularly in its early, Steve Ditko incarnation.

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Doug Feith has a pointed and, in many respects, devastating book review of former CIA director George Tenet memoir “At the Center of the Storm” in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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Today’s Guardian has some interesting pieces on the British fiasco in the Persian Gulf, which is already fading from consciousness here in the U.S. Apparently, feminists in Britain are in an uproar over attacks on lead seaman Turney for being apart from her three-year-old daughter for months at a time. Any reservations from male commentators are being dismissed as so much chauvinism.

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Anybody else find it a trifle odd to see former Secretary of State James Baker urging President Bush to continue building on the recommendations of the Iraq Study group?

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I can only stare in disbelief at Stefan Kanfer’s post below. Kanger, normally the most perspicuous of observers, has completely gone off the rails in dismissing Barack Obama. Kanfer says he’s a lightweight, inexperienced and unqualified to be commander-in-chief. But these seem to be the very qualifications that Americans often demand from their leaders. Since when has shallowness stopped anyone from rising to the highest office in the land, whether it’s Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, or, most recently, George W. Bush?

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Robert George, in a post below, is right. The death of Captain America does have some larger implications for the U.S. Conservatives such as Michael Medved have been grousing that the good Captain has turned anti-American since 9/11, showing insufficient ardor for the war on terrorism. I disagree.

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The notion of the commander-in-chief as monarch, promoted by former Bush administration official and law professor John Yoo, has received some useful debunking in recent days. First Garry Wills in the New York Times noted that the phrase itself is overblown and, for the most part, inappropriate, at least when used to refer to American citizens. It applies to the military. Unless you’re a member of the U.S. military, Bush isn’t your commander.

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This is turning out to be one of the intriguing episodes, so far, in the war on terror. My guess is that it’s hugely significant, even a turning point, but the Bush administration is keeping mum about it.

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Lots of conservatives are scoffing at the Baker study’s group’s report. (See below.) They shouldn’t.

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William Kristol and Robert Kagan are scrambling to retrieve something out of the Iraq mess. Their latest editorial caught my eye: “Although neither the American media nor many observers of the American political scene seem to realize it, there is nothing the Baker commission can do to force Bush to take a different course than the one he chooses. Nor is it easy for a Democratic majority in Congress to call the shots in Iraq. In the American system, the president always has enormous authority in foreign policy, if he wants to exercise it. President Bush clearly does. He intends to pursue steadfastly his own course in Iraq. He is determined not to withdraw before it becomes stable and, yes, democratic. He will not be buffeted by conventional wisdom or by Baker and his colleagues, no matter how much they employ public relations tactics to defeat him.”

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In a speech today at the Chicago Council for Global Relations, Barack Obama just took another step toward declaring his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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President Bush bowed to the inevitable today by tossing Donald Rumsfeld overboard. Bob Gates is no fresh face. He is, if you want to put it bluntly, a Bush 41 retread.

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I’m glad to see that Jonathan Kay is continuing his musings about the Iraq war. Sooner or later, I think, anyone who supported the war, and who is willing to reexamine it, is going to come down pretty much where Kay has.

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So Jonathan Kay has joined the growing ranks of conservatives turning against the Iraq war. I wonder about two things. First, how was it that neoconservatives, who were always skeptical about the Arab world, while liberals displayed considerable credulity about it, at least during the 1970s and 1989s, fell into the trap of thinking that Iraq could be turned into a flourishing democracy? Why should Iraq have been an exception to the violent feuds and religious battles that plague the region?

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Gary Rosen, managing editor of Commentary magazine, has an excellent piece appearing next week in the National Interest, a foreign policy monthly, that makes the case for securing Baghdad. He calls it “Baghdad or bust.”

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Some readers may recall that I noted a few days ago that historian Tony Judt has written a piece in the London Review of Books savaging liberals for supporting the Iraq war. I think the piece is over the top, but no matter. Judt is one of the finest historians of the 20th century whose book on Europe rightly earned him numerous plaudits.

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Whoops, I see that I’ve been beaten in posting about the new pamphlets. But my recommendation still stands. Adam Bellow is as enterprising as they come, and this is a nifty beginning.

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Shameless plug: Adam Bellow of Random House is launching a fascinating new series of pamphlets that starts with the war in Lebanon. They’ve even got a collection of Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches. Check it out at: www.pamphletguys.com

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Two prominent Republicans are having memory problems. Secretary of Condoleezza Rice says she can’t remember meeting with then-CIA director George Tenet and Cofer Black in July 2001.

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Today’s Washington Times, as you may know already, demanded that House speaker Dennis Hastert’s resignation. Watch for other conservatives to pile on and try and make Hastert the fall-guy. My guess is that Hastert will indeed have to resign his leadership post–but so will John Boehner. This page scandal has tsunami written all over it.

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The German Opera in Berlin has canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo, directed by Hans Neuenfels. Neuenfels added a final scene in which King Idomeneo lurches onto the stage and sits next to the severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. The reaction in Germany? Outrage–at the decision to cancel. There was no actual threat. Chancellor Angela Merkel made the rather obvious but apparently necessary declaration that “self-censorship out of fear is not acceptable.”

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One of the unexpected results of the war against terror has been to embolden–or more precisely, force–Germany to take an active military role.

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Numerous pundits have declared neoconservatism dead. But is liberalism also a casualty of the Iraq war?

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