Real inconvenient truths
Our failed political dynasties, Pelosi's stylish appeal and George W. Bush as Queen Victoria. Plus: The hot air about global warming.

By Camille Paglia

Apr. 11, 2007 | Reviving the format of my original Salon column, Ask Camille, each third column will be devoted to my replies to reader letters, collected at this mailbox. I am very grateful to the hundreds of readers who wrote to welcome me back to Salon and who posed fascinating and thoughtful questions. This month's selection of letters follows.

Dear Camille,

Reguardi,
Rosina

There may be an atavistic longing for quasi-divine kingship that surfaces in unsettled times. Especially after 9/11, with its diffuse sense of peril, we should beware of the seductive dream of the strong man or clan who will shield us from harm. Democracy is predicated on sometimes chaotic cross-talk, not on governance by fiat, the whims of a hereditary elite.

Political dynasties are mythic foster families whose princes rise and fall like flaming stars. Does it signify democracy's nostalgia for royalty? The irony is that authentic royalty, re-glamorized by Diana in the 1980s, has waned back into banality in England and everywhere else.

The Wall Street Journal

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Fitzgerald's Cover-Up
April 4, 2007; Page A14

For a prosecutor who claims to be a truth-seeker, Patrick Fitzgerald sure can be secretive. Even now that the Scooter Libby trial is over and his "leak" investigation is all but closed, the unaccountable special counsel wants to keep his arguments for creating a Constitutional showdown over reporters and their sources under lock and key.

THERAPIST'S NOTES — PATIENT: COULTER, ANN March 21, 2007, 5:29 PM

[FROM NATIONAL REVIEW, PRINT VERSION, REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF ROB LONG]

ROB LONG

THERAPIST’S NOTES

COURT-ORDERED REHABILITATION FOR HATE SPEECH

PATIENT: COULTER, ANN

washingtonpost.com

Trial in Error
If You're Going to Charge Scooter, Then What About These Guys?

By Victoria Toensing
Sunday, February 18, 2007; B01

Could someone please explain to me why Scooter Libby is the only person on trial in the Valerie Plame leak investigation?

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald charged Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff with perjury on the theory that Libby had a nefarious reason for lying to a grand jury about what he told reporters regarding CIA officer Plame: He was trying to cover up a White House conspiracy to retaliate against Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had infuriated Vice President Cheney by accusing the Bush administration of lying about intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Fitzgerald apparently concluded that a purported cover-up was sufficient motive for Libby to trim his recollections in a criminal way. So when Libby's testimony differed from that of others, it was Libby who got indicted.

There's a reason why responsible prosecutors don't bring perjury cases on mere "he said, he said" evidence. Without an underlying crime or tangible evidence of obstruction (think Martha Stewart trying to destroy phone logs), the trial becomes a mishmash of faulty memories in which witnesses can seem as guilty as the defendant. Any prosecutor knows that memories differ, even vividly, and each party can be convinced that his or her version is the truthful one.

If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby? This investigation has enough questionable motives and shadowy half-truths and flawed recollections to fill a court docket for months. So here are my own personal bills of indictment:

The Wall Street Journal

Potomac Watch
Senator Feingold's Sin
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
February 2, 2007; Page A18

The Senate is teeming with courageous souls these days, most of them Republicans who have taken that brave step of following the opinion polls and abandoning their president in a time of war. Meanwhile, one of the few senators showing some backbone in the Iraq debate is being shunned as the skunk at the war critics' party.

New York Post

LEBANON'S FATEFUL SHOWDOWN

By AMIR TAHERI

January 27, 2007 -- WHERE do we go from here? The leaders of the two rival camps in Lebanon should be pondering the question in the wake of the showdown that brought Beirut to a standstill last Tuesday.

The showdown started in December, when Hezbollah - having withdrawn its ministers from the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora - started a mass sit-in in the heart of Lebanon's capital.

New York Post

IRAN'S PLANS: STICKS & CARROTS

By AMIR TAHERI

January 24, 2007 -- CONFRONTATION or accommodation? As the U.N. Security Council's latest deadline for the Islamic Republic draws closer, that perennial question of Iranian politics is back at the center of debate in Tehran.

The confrontationists, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believe that the Bush administration, in its sunset phase, won't dare launch any major military operation against Iran. The most Bush can do is to order air and missile attacks on Iran's nuclear installations.

That would damage the project, perhaps setting it back by a year or two. But it would also, in this view, enable the revolutionary faction within the Khomeinist regime to marginalize its conservative rivals and consolidate its hold on power.

The New York Sun

The Second Holocaust
BY BENNY MORRIS
January 22, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/47111

The second Holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them, over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead.

The Wall Street Journal

Making Lenin Proud
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
January 22, 2007; Page A14

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

-- Vladimir Lenin

Mexican historian and author Enrique Krauze has written that he believes that the "last Marxist in history [will] die at a Latin American university." At a minimum, Mr. Krauze seems to have gotten the geography right.

Most of the rest of the world has stuffed communism into the dustbin of history but, as events over the past week remind, Latin America has not. Earlier this month, President Hugo Chávez officially took control of Venezuela's central bank and declared himself a communist. He then traveled to Ecuador to attend the swearing-in ceremony of his latest and perhaps most promising protégé, Rafael Correa, as that country's new president. Mr. Correa has lost no time emulating his mentor.