OUR VIEWS

Taking case to the people

And the president will have to get used to antiwar demonstrations. He might have defused the Cindy Sheehan protest if he had met with her at the outset of his vacation, but she was only a rallying point for a movement that would have coalesced sooner or later.

Given the American political landscape, the formation of an antiwar movement was inevitable; a sizable number of Americans has opposed, at least at the outset, every war we've been in.

So far, Bush has handled the Sheehan protest correctly — expressing sympathy for her loss and support for her right to disagree, but, meanwhile, arguing for the importance of his Iraq policy.

That policy moves on two tracks.

There's the military, with U.S. troops suppressing the insurgency while Iraqi police and military are being trained. "As the Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down," Bush says. The president should be realistic and candid about how fast and well that standing-up is going.

Then there's the political track, moving in fits and starts — adoption of a constitution, its ratification in October and election of a new government in December that by then will presumably be able to defend itself.

In defending this process, the president might want to go easy on such comparisons as "we've got to remember our own history." Our Constitution arguably had its roots in the 1620 Mayflower Compact and had one complete flop, the Articles of Confederation in 1771, before the 1789 version we live with today.

And, oh yes, we fought a civil war over unresolved constitutional questions. With our help, the Iraqis may have it a little easier.

The Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq war has changed. Wars are like that. But, as the president said of the U.S. war dead, "... each of these Americans have brought the hope of freedom to millions who have not known it."

Leaving behind a functioning democracy that respects basic human rights, including the rights of women and minorities, is not an unworthy goal. The president should defend it.

No eulogy for Hugo, either

On his Christian Broadcast Network show, "The 700 Club," Robertson calmly called for the United States to kill Chavez. "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," he said of Chavez, who even as his view of his own importance has become more grandiose has become more and more stridently anti-United States.

President Bush thinks about Chavez rarely — a possible defect in our Latin American policy — but Chavez thinks about Bush constantly, taunting and deriding the U.S. president while accusing Bush of plotting to assassinate. Said Robertson, "... if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."

Chavez was elected president in 1998, in Venezuela's last honest election. Since then, he has been tightening his hold on the courts, police, military and media — all the usual dictator stuff — at home, while abroad he has been sucking up to Cuba's Fidel Castro, spouting Marxist bilge, funding leftist groups in neighboring countries, playing footsie with Islamic radicals and generally trying to frustrate U.S. foreign policy in the region. All of this is financed by Venezuela's vast oil revenues.

Privately, most people might admit, Robertson's plan to cap Chavez has a certain forbidden appeal, but the United States rightly holds itself to higher standards and has long since forsworn assassination. And since the United States accounts for about 60 percent of Venezuela's exports, if we wanted to get ugly with him there are other ways.

Robertson, a former presidential candidate, is famous for his outrageous statements. But he is a man of the cloth, and endorsing assassination — even with a belated apology — suggests there may be some places more in need of the Ten Commandments than a courthouse wall.

YOUR VIEWS

We didn't know defense works well

Karl Rove has used this defense well. He said he didn't know Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA agent and he didn't give anyone her name but indicated Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Now how hard could it be to find out the name of Wilson's wife? Giving up her identity put her life and previous informers lives in danger but Rove excused himself by responding; "I did not know."

Had Rove been turned in as the source of the outting of the CIA agent earlier, it is unlikely he would have been around to get Bush re-elected. Make no mistake. Bush won because he had Rove and Kerry didn't. The press could have exposed Rove earlier and didn't. So much for the liberal press.

Previously the "We Did Not Know Defense" worked with WMD and Iraq's involvement with al-Qaida and 9/11. President Bush gets away with "I did not know" there weren't WMDs or that Iraq had no connections to 9/11.

Even baseball greats like Barry Bonds and Raphael Palmero are using the " I didn't know defense," taking no responsibility for their illegal use of steroids.Whatever happened to people taking responsibility for their misdeeds rather than excusing themselves by saying; "I didn't know."?

Joe Eversole
Pelham 35124-2605

Appeased too long

To the appeasers today, nothing is worth fighting for. They would adhere to a phrase I heard in the Cold War "Better Red than Dead."

It is time to stop the terrorists of the world. We have appeased them entirely too long and we are paying a deadly price to defeat them. The longer we delay victory over the terrorists, the higher the cost will be in lives and freedom.

Donald Dunlap
Irondale 35210

We'll know

Now, if a hurricane happens to take a wild turn and hits Venezuela killing Chavez, we'll surely know who's behind it all, by God.

Armond "Si" Simmons
Pell City 35128

OTHER VIEWS

America's secret weapons hit streets

By MARTIN SCHRAM
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

It is the Toyota Prius — also the Ford Escape and other full-hybrid or similar gas-saving vehicles. They are our best hope for ending America's self-endangering dependence on Middle East oil. Petrodollars we have long paid to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere too often have wound up as protection money or look-the-other-way charity bribes paid to militant Muslim clerics who sympathize with, support and may even be terrorists.

Saudis are as happy as kids in a sandbox over the fact that soaring oil prices are giving them a windfall budget surplus that has been estimated at $26 billion or more for this year.

This is one of those problems where the government and the people can make a difference. If they have the will, there is a way. Our cars and SUVs combined are less efficient today than they were in the 1980s — because of the great increase in SUVs on the road today. But if our cars averaged 40 miles per gallon, it would cut U.S. oil consumption by 2 to 3 millions of barrels a day — which would cut the price of oil by more than $20 a barrel.

A word about hybrids: Not all hybrids are equal. Toyota's Prius, which has both gasoline-powered and electric-powered motors, and the Ford Escape, a small sports utility vehicle built with technology from Toyota, can start up and run at lower speeds entirely using their electric motors. But the Honda hybrid vehicles, in contrast, have two motors but run on both simultaneously, with the electric motor permitting the gas-powered engine to run more efficiently. (Meanwhile, when the brakes are applied on the Toyota, Ford Escape and Honda hybrids, good things happen: Not only do the cars stop, but the heat energy from the braking is captured and used to recharge the battery for the electric motors.)

But more important, not all hybrid technology is being used equally. Toyota uses its hybrid technology for its full-size SUV, the Highlander, and a Lexus luxury full-size SUV, only in part to increase the mileage — but also to increase the engine's power. Honda does much the same with its Accord hybrid. The tradeoff is a car that is more powerful but with gas mileage that is not as great as it could have been.

There is some good news: This national-security way of thinking about hybrid and similar gas-saving vehicles (a case this column has been making for a decade) is being accepted at last by the government, in a way that is broad if not deep. And skyrocketing gasoline prices, coupled with skyrocketing oil company profits, have forced even an administration run by (and sympathetic to) oil men to begin addressing with new urgency the problem of America's dependence on imported oil.

Thus, the new energy bill, while providing bountiful incentives to oil companies, also provides a modest but significant one-time tax credit (up to $3,400) to a motorist who buys a hybrid or other vehicle with similar gas-saving capability. It doesn't fully pay for the added cost of the hybrid car, but it helps.

But now we need do more. We need to be sure that we are using that government money to deploy our new and best national security weapon with the same urgency that we use for the deploying all the other high-tech missiles and bombers that keep us safe.

That means we need to rethink — and probably retarget — the Bush tax cuts.

Not to worry, winger pals. We are not arguing here to roll back or deep-six President Bush's tax cuts. We are only suggesting that while the total amount of the Bush tax cuts remains unchanged, perhaps we can target money we are spending so that we get in return what our nation needs most — in this case, consumers buying gas-saving cars.

Perhaps the government ought to be using the Bush tax cuts not as a broad-but-small give-back to all taxpayers, but as significant incentives in the form of credits to all who drive cars that have mileage of 45 miles per gallon — every year that they drive them. This would provide a huge incentive that keeps on giving. It would provide a huge incentive to keep taxpayers buying, energizing the economy as Bush's tax cuts always envisioned — but spending their money in a way that helps America most and drives us toward energy independence.

Sheehan reflects shrill extreme that dooms Democrats

By GEORGE WILL
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

But before she becomes fully relegated to the role of opening act for more durable luminaries at anti-war rallies, prudent Democrats — those political snail darters, the emblematic endangered species of American politics — should consider the possibility that, although she was a burr under the president's saddle for several weeks, she is symptomatic of something that in 2008 could cause the Democratic Party a sixth loss in eight presidential elections. That something is a shrillness unlike anything heard, in living memory, from a major tendency within a major party.

Many warmhearted and mildly-attentive Americans say the president should have invited Sheehan to his kitchen table in Crawford for a cup of coffee and a serving of that low-calorie staple of democratic sentimentality — "dialogue." Well.

Since her first meeting with the president, she has called him a "lying bastard," "filth spewer," "evil maniac," "fuehrer" and the world's "biggest terrorist" who is committing "blatant genocide" and "waging a nuclear war" in Iraq. Even leaving aside her not entirely persuasive contention that someone else concocted the obviously anti-Israel and inferentially anti-Semitic elements of one of her recent e-mails — elements of a sort nowadays often found woven into ferocious left-wing rhetoric — it is difficult to imagine how the dialogue would get going.

He: "Cream and sugar?"

She: "Yes, please, filth spewer."

Do Democrats really want to embrace her variation of the Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11" school of political discourse? Evidently, yes, judging by the attendance of 12 Democratic senators at that movie's Washington premiere in June 2004, and by the lionizing of Moore at the Democratic Convention — the ovation, the seating of him with Jimmy Carter.

If liberals think that such flirtations with fanaticism had nothing to do with their 2004 defeat, they probably have nothing to learn from what conservatives did four decades earlier. But for the record:

In the 1960s, just as conservatism was beginning to grow from a fringe tendency into what it has become — the nation's most potent persuasion — it was threatened by a boarding party of people not much, if any, loonier than Sheehan. The John Birch Society, whose catechism included the novel tenet that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Kremlin, was not numerous — its membership probably never numbered more than 100,000 — but its power to taint all of conservatism was huge, particularly given the media's eagerness to abet the tainting. Responsible conservatives, especially William F. Buckley and his National Review, repelled the boarders, driving them into the dark cave where, today, they ferociously guard the secret of their size from a nation no longer curious about it.

MoveOn.org, which claims 3.3 million members and is becoming a tone-setting tail that wags the Democratic Party dog that is mostly such tails, adopted Sheehan during her Crawford demonstration, organizing 1,627 vigils around the country to express solidarity with her. But the Democratic Party, whose democratically elected chairman is Howard ("I Hate the Republicans and Everything They Stand For") Dean, is not ripe for lessons in temperate rhetoric, which may be why the Republican Party has far fewer worries than it deserves.

It is showing signs of becoming an exhausted volcano. Regarding Iraq, it is mistaking truculent asperity and tiresome repetition for Churchillian wartime eloquence. Regarding domestic policy, intellectual anemia has given rise to behavioral patterns not easily distinguished from corruption, as with the energy and transportation bills.

Yet the Democratic Party, which by now can hardly remember the far-distant past when it was a volcano not of molten rhetoric but of serious thought, seems preoccupied with the chafing around its neck. The chafing is caused by the leashes firmly gripped and impudently jerked by various groups like MoveOn.org that insist the party adopt hysteria as a policy by treating the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts as a dire threat to liberty.

If Hillary Clinton has half the political sense her enthusiasts ascribe to her, she must be deeply anxious lest all her ongoing attempts to adopt moderation as her brand will be nullified by the increasing inclination of her party's base to succumb to siren songs sung by the likes of Sheehan. But, then, a rapidly growing portion of the base is not just succumbing to those songs, it is singing them.

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