With the Bench Cozied Up to the Bar, the Lawyers Can’t Lose

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: August 27, 2007

Dennis G. Jacobs, the chief judge of the federal appeals court in New York, is a candid man, and in a speech last year he admitted that he and his colleagues had “a serious and secret bias.” Perhaps unthinkingly but quite consistently, he said, judges can be counted on to rule in favor of anything that protects and empowers lawyers.

Once you start thinking about it, the examples are everywhere. The lawyer-client privilege is more closely guarded than any other. It is easier to sue for medical malpractice than for legal malpractice. People who try to make a living helping people fill out straightforward forms are punished for the unauthorized practice of law.

But Judge Jacobs’s main point is a deeper one. Judges favor complexity and legalism over efficient solutions, and they have no appreciation for what economists call transaction costs. They are aided in this by lawyers who bill by the hour and like nothing more than tasks that take a lot of time and cost their clients a lot of money.

And there is, of course, the pleasure of power, particularly in cases involving the great issues of the day.

“Judges love these kinds of cases,” said Judge Jacobs, whose speech was published in The Fordham Law Review in May. “Public interest cases afford a judge more sway over public policy, enhance the judicial role, make judges more conspicuous and keep the law clerks happy.”

There are costs here, too, he said, including “the displacement of legislative and executive power” and “the subordination of other disciplines and professions.”

Yet, at the conclusion of a big public-policy case, the bar and bench rejoice. “We smugly congratulate ourselves,” Judge Jacobs said, “on expanding what we are pleased to call the rule of law.”

Benjamin H. Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, examined some of the same issues in an article to be published next year in The Alabama Law Review titled “Do Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?”

That question mark notwithstanding, there is little doubt about where Professor Barton comes out.

He noted, for instance, that the legal profession is the only one that is completely self-regulated. “As a general rule,” Professor Barton wrote, “foxes make poor custodians of henhouses.”

Professor Barton explored a long list of examples, including the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona. Miranda, as everyone with a television set knows, protected the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer.

Over the years, though, courts have approved all sorts of police strategies that have eroded the right to remain silent. At the same time, Professor Barton wrote, the courts “chose to retain quite robust protections for accused who clearly expressed a desire for a lawyer.”

“The advantages to the legal profession are clear,” he added. “Whatever else an accused should know, she should know to request a lawyer first and foremost.”

And the cases keep coming.

This month, a New Jersey appeals court basically immunized lawyers from malicious prosecution suits in civil cases. Even lawyers who know their clients are pushing baseless claims solely to harass the other side are in the clear, the court said, unless the lawyers themselves have an improper motive.

Lester Brickman, who teaches legal ethics at Cardozo Law School, said the decision was just one instance of a broad phenomenon.

“The New Jersey courts have determined to protect the legal profession in a way that no other professions enjoy,” Professor Brickman said. “It’s regulation by lawyers for lawyers.”

Other professions look for elegant solutions. It is the rare engineer, software designer or plumber who chooses an elaborate fix when a simple one will do. The legal system, by contrast, insists on years of discovery, motion practice, hearings, trials and appeals that culminate in obscure rulings providing no guidance to the next litigant.

Last month, Judge Jacobs put his views into practice, dissenting from a decision in a tangled lawsuit about something a college newspaper published in 1997. The judges in the majority said important First Amendment principles were at stake, though they acknowledged that the case involved, at most, trivial sums of money.

Judge Jacobs’s dissent started with an unusual and not especially collegial disclaimer. He said he would not engage the arguments in the majority decision because “I have not read it.”

He was, he said, incredulous that “after years of litigation over $2, the majority will impose on a busy judge to conduct a trial on this silly thing, and require a panel of jurors to set aside their more important duties of family and business in order to decide it.”

Writing with the kind of verve and sense of proportion entirely absent in most legal work, Judge Jacobs concluded that “this is not a case that should occupy the mind of a person who has anything consequential to do.”

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com /adamliptak.

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Two New Deaths, Same Old Questions

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 25, 2007

In a partnership with the State of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s government owns a ruined, contaminated skyscraper at 130 Liberty Street, across from the World Trade Center site. The building appears to have been a howling firetrap, the kind for which private owners would be indicted in days. Last week it killed two men, Firefighters Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33.

Mr. Bloomberg and his partner, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, preached at the funerals that they would find out what their own governments had done.

Here is a short list: They hired what appeared to be a shell corporation to demolish the building. This company plugged stairwells with plywood to keep asbestos from flying around. Workers clipped sprinkler lines. Someone cut a standpipe, a dry water main that is reserved for delivering water during fires.

On many floors, the workers left a carpet knife and a flashlight by plywood doors that led to the stairways. Because the doors were draped with sheets of plastic, the knife could be used in an emergency to get out. The floors, being slowly demolished, were mazes.

All this was done under the eyes of inspectors from Mr. Bloomberg’s Buildings Department. They were in 130 Liberty almost every day, along with agents of Mr. Spitzer from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the official name of the partnership between the governor and the mayor. They issued piles of citations.

However, no one from other branches of the governments run by Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Spitzer got around to telling the Fire Department exactly what was going on. And no one from the Fire Department bothered to find out.

Even though there is a firehouse next door to 130 Liberty Street, no firefighter had set foot in the building to inspect it for about a year. No one from Mr. Bloomberg’s government has yet explained their absence. Nor has anyone explained why the Fire Department had not taken part in discussions about the building’s demolition.

The first mission of the department is to respond to fires. Its second “critical objective,” as defined by the Mayor’s Management Report, is to “reduce the risk of fire incidents through quality inspections, investigations and public education.”

With the city booming and with vast new resources, the Fire Department has conducted 8,000 fewer inspections since 2001, while its budget has grown by more than a third. Officials say this is a normal fluctuation.

The calamity of 130 Liberty Street is not the sole responsibility of the Fire Department, but it will be firefighters who will be buried after the next Liberty Street, wherever it may be, if the department does not figure out how this one happened. If it is possible for the mayor and the governor to conduct thorough investigations of their own government, it still will fall to the Fire Department to protect its members by understanding how this could have happened. If it can.

The modern Fire Department grew out of 19th-century volunteer organizations that were aligned with gangs and politicians. With mass deaths in early high rises, the department emancipated itself from political influence and became a force for reform of building codes. It also became an organization devoted to merit hiring, in the process creating a culture of civil service fundamentalism. The highest-ranking officers are chosen by test. This has had its historic virtues, but it has also clogged the department’s ability to shape and scrutinize itself.

“You have no accountability at the senior levels,” said Thomas Von Essen, who was the fire commissioner under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He noted that in 2001, three firefighters, John Downing, Brian Fahey and Harry Ford, were killed on Father’s Day, fighting a fire in a hardware storage area that had not been inspected in years.

Three months later, the attacks of Sept. 11 found other weak spots: 343 firefighters died. Now, what appears to have been an accidental fire a week ago has killed two more.

In “Young Men and Fire,” a book about a forest fire that killed 12 firefighters, the author, Norman Maclean, wrote that such a disaster had to be honestly examined; otherwise, it would leave “terror without consolation or explanation.”

“Perhaps most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died,” Mr. Maclean wrote, and “those who loved them forever questioning this ‘unnecessary death,’ and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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Running an Empire? No Sweat

By JOE NOCERA

Published: August 25, 2007

Richard D. Parsons sat down at a quiet table by a window at Porter House New York, the fine year-old steakhouse on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Building, and looked at his watch. It was 7 p.m. “I’m going to have to leave at 8:30,” he said. “I’ve got another meeting.” He shot me a small, pained shrug. “It’s the middle of August, and I’m still busting my chops.”

We had come to this restaurant, to be blunt about it, to drink Mr. Parsons’s wine. In addition to his day job as chief executive of Time Warner, Mr. Parsons owns a small vineyard in Italy called Il Palazzone, which makes a high- quality Brunello di Montalcino. He acquired his taste for wine, he told me, back when he worked for Nelson Rockefeller.

Porter House’s sommelier, Beth von Benz — clearly no dummy — had the wit to get some of the Il Palazzone Brunello on her wine list. Mr. Parsons has since become a semi-regular and usually orders the Brunello di Montalcino Riserva for his guests, at $185 a bottle. “Our motto is, ‘We drink all we can, and we sell the rest,’ ” he chuckled.

A line like that — funny and low-key and mildly self-mocking — is classic Dick Parsons. True, the winery doesn’t make any money, but the wine is very good. A spokesman for Domaine Select, the importer, said that Mr. Parsons has been “heavily involved with the winery,” an assessment the man himself did not dispute. It’s just that, well, Dick Parsons would prefer that you never see him busting his chops. All his professional life, he’s wanted to be seen as someone who never seems to break a sweat.

Of course, there are plenty of people on Wall Street who believe that Mr. Parsons doesn’t break a sweat — and that’s been the biggest problem in the five years he has been running Time Warner. Why hasn’t he followed the example of his fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch, scooping up hot Internet companies like MySpace, and buying coveted brands like Dow Jones? Why hasn’t he spun off Time Warner Cable? Why can’t he figure out what to do about AOL? And why, oh, why can’t he get the stock price to rise?

“At the beginning of 2005,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst with the independent firm Peri Research, “the stock was at 19. Right now, it’s around 18. When do they start taking shareholder value seriously? They have had long enough to make this thing work.”

There is another view about Mr. Parsons’s tenure as Time Warner’s chief executive, though. According to this view, which is held almost universally within Time Warner, when he first took over the company, he performed nothing short of a miracle, rescuing it from the single worst deal in modern business history, the AOL-Time Warner merger.

In 2002, when he became chief executive, Time Warner stock had dropped so precipitously that the company was in danger of violating its debt covenants. AOL and Time Warner executives were at war. The company was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department. “It was a mess,” said Don Logan, who was one of Mr. Parsons’s top lieutenants until he retired at the end of 2005. “It needed a calming influence to get it stabilized so that people could get back to running their businesses.” Mr. Parsons is a listener, a persuader, a diplomat — and those qualities made all the difference. To the chagrin of his critics, though, that’s still what he is.

•

It’s a little odd to be in the spot Mr. Parsons is in right now. Not yet 60 years old, he’s getting ready to retire, and everyone knows it. He doesn’t deny it, either. “When you find the right person to take over,” he said, referring to Jeffrey L. Bewkes, his No. 2, “and that person is ready to rock ‘n’ roll, you’ve got to get out of the way.” He added, “I want my legacy to be simple: I left the place in good shape and in good hands.”

I can see his Wall Street critics rolling their eyes. Where is the expansionist drive that fuels competitors like Rupert Murdoch? Where is the fire in the belly? “News Corp. is Rupert’s life’s work,” Mr. Parsons replied calmly. “He inherited a fairly small newspaper operation in Adelaide 50 years ago and has been relentlessly building it into a global media goliath. I think of myself as a professional manager. I am not trying to build a dynasty or create a monument. I know this comment will upset some people, but this is my job. It’s not my life. I don’t define myself by this.”

Sitting across the table from me was his press aide, Edward I. Adler, who didn’t look very happy as Mr. Parsons spoke. He had clearly briefed Mr. Parsons on the talking points he wanted the boss to get across — a list of all the things he had done during his time at the helm: the divisions he had sold ahead of the crowd, like Warner Music; the way he had deftly handled the long-running government investigations (“Now that took some diplomacy,” Mr. Parsons acknowledged); the way he had eased out Stephen M. Case, while ending the culture wars raging within Time Warner. It was a long list, and Mr. Parsons duly recited it, though not, I thought, with any particular passion.

Still, he had to acknowledge that the stock price has been “a huge source of frustration,” and that he hoped it would not be the only prism through which he would be judged. Given the world we live in, however, it seems likely that that rap that he didn’t do enough to “enhance shareholder value” will stick to him. This will be especially true if Mr. Bewkes — more of a money guy by background and inclination than Mr. Parsons — moves to shake up the company and its stock price. In which case, it will probably be right to say that Mr. Parsons was the right man for the first part of his tenure, but maybe not for the latter part. That’s not going to bother Dick Parsons, though. Nothing really bothers him. Or, to put it more precisely, nothing ever rattles him.

Never was this more obvious than a few years ago when the feared investor Carl C. Icahn ran a very public proxy fight, trying to put pressure on Mr. Parsons to break up the company. One thing Mr. Icahn does exceedingly well is get under management’s skin, but that never happened with Mr. Parsons. “I came home one day,” he said with a laugh, “and my wife said, ‘Who’s the guy calling you a moron? That’s my job.’ ”

No matter how many times Mr. Icahn described him as incompetent, Mr. Parsons never took it personally. Instead, he did two things. He ran what amounted to a political campaign, pressing his case with the 600 or 700 institutional investors whose votes most mattered. Secondly, though, instead of giving Mr. Icahn the back of his hand, he embraced him.

“Carl is not stupid and he is not crazy,” Mr. Parsons told me, after he had ordered a second bottle. (Don’t worry: The Times paid.) “And I agreed with him that the company was undervalued. I just didn’t agree with his prescriptions.” So he began to wine and dine Mr. Icahn, hearing him out, and diplomatically devising a solution that allowed his adversary to save face: Mr. Parsons agreed to a huge stock buyback. All the talk of breaking up the company went away.

“I don’t believe it ever serves anyone well to try to crush the other guy or leave him in a position of being humiliated,” Mr. Parsons said. As the well-known mutual fund manager and media investor Mario J. Gabelli put it, “He handled Carl Icahn by saying, ‘Let’s have lunch.’ ”

When I called Mr. Icahn, he denied ever calling Mr. Parsons names. “He lived up to everything,” Mr. Icahn said. “He did the buyback. The stock went up and our fund made a large profit. People thought we gave in, but he agreed to do a lot of things that helped shareholders. I saw it as a victory.” He continues to have occasional dinners with Mr. Parsons and Mr. Bewkes. “I like the guy,” he said.

Mr. Greenfield, the analyst, however, believes that if some new activist hedge fund manager made the same breakup proposal today, it would get a far better reception, because the Street’s patience has largely run out. In the last quarter, for instance, when Time Warner reported that AOL’s advertising growth had suddenly slowed, the stock took a big tumble, reverting back to around $18. (It closed yesterday at $19.01.) The truth is, though, that Mr. Parsons is in his victory lap, and the Street’s frustration notwithstanding, there is a real sense among Time Warner executives and even board members that Mr. Parsons’s work in those first critical years as chief executive has earned him some slack.

It was around 8:45 when Mr. Parsons got up to leave our dinner. Though already late, he seemed a little reluctant to leave. “We haven’t talked enough about wine,” he said. “Do you know what I like about that?” he asked, pointing to the empty Brunello bottle on the table. “Some time ago, those were grapes. We picked them, we fermented them, we bottled them. There is something to show for your effort. We have a product.”

Rumors abound about what Mr. Parsons will do when he leaves Time Warner, the loudest being that he will run for mayor of New York, something he staunchly denies. But I can guarantee he’ll be spending more time at his winery — and doing all the other things he enjoys doing. He’ll live well.

When I was talking to Mr. Icahn the next day, I asked if he had ever drunk any of Mr. Parsons’s wine. Carl Icahn is more than a decade older than Dick Parsons, but he is never going to retire: he remains as maniacally focused on doing deals and making money as ever. Unlike Mr. Parsons, his work really is what he lives for.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Icahn replied. “I guess so. He chooses the wine.” He paused a minute. “Wine really isn’t my thing,” he said.

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Of Fliers, Fines and the Limits of Patience

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: August 24, 2007

The last straw for Simcha Felder came months ago. Actually, it was more like the last scrap of paper. His mother had been given a $100 sanitation summons for some advertisement fliers that lay messily on the sidewalk in front of her house in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

You’ve all seen those kinds of fliers and their pesky first cousins: restaurant menus that are dropped on stoops or slipped under doors by delivery guys. Some people find the advertising useful. But for many New Yorkers — we bet most — it is a giant pain.

“I hate coming home to the stuff,” said Mr. Felder, who lives in Midwood, Brooklyn. “O.K., it’s a nuisance. But my mother, she’s in her late 80s. My father has Alzheimer’s. They have a corner building. They’re getting stuff thrown near the door. She can’t clean up every day. So she gets a sanitation summons for some of the stuff that fell out of the bag, that got wet, that’s on the sidewalk, that’s matted down, whatever.”

“For her to get a ticket is like a convicted felon,” he said. “That’s how she feels. Of course, I paid the ticket. But she was so upset about it.”

Fortunately for Ida Felder of Borough Park, she has a son who looks out for her. But her boy Simcha happens also to be a city councilman. He can do more than fight City Hall. He can try to change it.

In March, Mr. Felder introduced a bill that would make it unlawful to distribute “any unsolicited printed material” in houses or buildings that post notices that say, in effect: Go away. The councilman held a news conference at City Hall, where he threw a fistful of fliers on the front steps

It was, he acknowledged, a touch of silliness. “But that’s what I’m supposed to do to get attention,” he said.

He did indeed get attention. But his bill sat dormant. There was no reason for the City Council to act, not with a similar bill making its way through Albany, sponsored by two Queens lawmakers, State Senator Frank Padavan and Assemblyman Mark Weprin. Signed into law this week by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, it sets fines ranging from $250 to $1,000 for businesses that ignore signs telling them to take their fliers elsewhere.

But Mr. Felder said he would revive his bill if the Legislature failed to make changes in the law. Amendments are already being considered in Albany to deal with matters like what to do if some renters in an apartment building want the menus. Who exactly will enforce the law, and how, also needs to be spelled out.

One could question the usefulness of laws that arguably amount to feel-good measures that are hard to enforce. That said, however, the menu stranglers are trying to get hold of a nuisance that has bugged the daylights out of countless New Yorkers for years.

Don’t forget the security aspect, Mr. Felder said. “If you’re away for a week,” he said, “you come home to 10 copies of the stuff on the doorstep screaming: ‘Hi, I’m not home. Come and take whatever you want.’ ”

Safety aside, laws like this satisfy a certain Garboesque streak in New Yorkers. Sure, they accept the city’s hubbub, even embrace it. But there is also a part of them that just wants to be left alone:

Enough with panhandlers hounding them on the weary subway ride home. Enough with loud cellphone yakkers on the bus. Enough with phone solicitors interrupting dinner.

At least the phone intruders have been held in check by way of the do-not-call registry. As of June, holders of nearly nine million phone accounts had registered in New York State, according to the state’s Consumer Protection Board. That compares with 7.5 million a year ago and 5.5 million in 2005. What are all those people saying? Simply, just leave us alone.

The anti-flier law is the do-not-call list’s equivalent. As with that registry, politicians and charities are exempt from restrictions, our lawmakers having apparently decided that the average Joe may not want to be bothered by a cable company huckster but is somehow dying to hear from someone running for office.

Those exemptions make no sense to Mr. Felder. But even his bill would give charities a pass from a no-flier ban.

How’s that? What makes them a special case?

Things are different “when it comes to God,” the councilman said. With charities, “some of them are not his messengers, but some of them are. I don’t want to be on his bad side.”

When his own time comes, he said: “I don’t want to be asked about this. I have enough on my plate.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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Stacking the Electoral Deck

Published: August 22, 2007

The Electoral College should be abolished, but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. A prominent Republican lawyer in California is doing it the wrong way, promoting a sneaky initiative that, in the name of Electoral College reform, would rig elections in a way that would make it difficult for a Democrat to be elected president, no matter how the popular vote comes out. If the initiative passes, it would do serious damage to American democracy.

California currently gives all 55 of its electoral votes — the biggest electoral college prize in the nation — to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Virtually all states use this winner-take-all method. The California initiative, which could go to a vote in June, would instead give the 2008 presidential candidates one electoral vote for every Congressional district that they win, with an additional two electoral votes going to whoever got the most votes statewide. (Democrats appear to have backed off from plans to try just as anti-democratic a trick in North Carolina, which is good.)

The net result of the California initiative would be that if the Democratic candidate wins in that state next year, which is very likely, the Republican candidate might still walk away with 20 or more of the state’s electoral votes. The initiative, backed by a shadowy group called Californians for Equal Representation, is being promoted as an effort to more accurately reflect the choices of the state’s voters, and to force candidates to pay more attention to California, which is usually not in play in presidential elections. It is actually a power grab on behalf of Republicans.

The Electoral College should be done away with, but in the meantime, any reforms should improve the system, not make it worse. If California abandons its winner-take-all rule while red states like Texas do not, it will be hard for a Democratic nominee to assemble an Electoral College majority, even if he or she wins a sizable majority of the popular vote. That appears to be just what the backers of the California idea have in mind.

If voters understand that the initiative is essentially an elaborate dirty trick posing as reform, they are likely to vote against it. But judging by the misleading name of their organization, the initiative’s backers want to fool the public into thinking the change would make elections more fair. They are planning on putting it to a vote in June 2008, an election when there will be few other things on the ballot, and turnout is expected to be extremely low. This bad-faith initiative is yet another example of the ways in which referenda can be used for mischief and a reminder of why they are a bad way to resolve complex public-policy issues.

Opponents of the initiative announced yesterday that they are sponsoring their own, rival initiative, which would commit California to a national plan that aims to ensure that the winner of the national popular vote becomes president. That idea makes much more sense.

Leading Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been silent about the initiative to split California’s electoral votes, but they should be speaking out against it. The fight isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It is about whether to twist the nation’s system of electing presidents to give one party an unfair advantage. No principled elected official, or voter, of either party should support that.

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The Warrantless Debate Over Wiretapping

By PHILIP BOBBITT

Published: August 22, 2007

CONGRESS just passed, and President Bush hurriedly signed, a law that amends the legal framework for the electronic interception of various kinds of communication with foreign sources. Almost immediately, commentators concluded that the law was unnecessary, that it authorized a lawless and unprecedented expansion of presidential authority, and that Democrats in Congress cravenly accepted this White House initiative only for the basest political reasons. None of these widely broadcast conclusions are likely to be true.

All sides agree that some legislative fix is required because of changes in telecommunications technology. Where once it made sense to require warrants when one party to a foreign conversation was in America, this ceased to be the case when American routers became the transit points for foreign conversations that might or might not involve a person in the United States.

Once linear, analog, point-to-point communication has been replaced by the disaggregated packets of the Internet, two people talking to each other in Europe could find their conversations going through American switches. It also became difficult to determine the true origin of any communication that was routed through the United States. If a terrorism suspect in Pakistan is having conversations with someone on a computer with a New York Internet protocol address via a chat room run by an Internet service provider in London, where exactly is the intelligence being collected? If the answer is the United States simply because the servers are here, of what possible relevance could that be to the protection of the rights of Americans?

Amending the statute to focus on protecting American people rather than an American address would not have dealt with a larger and more profound problem. The change in the global communications infrastructure is both a driver and a consequence of a change in the nature of conflict. The end of the cold war was brought about in part because of technologies that empowered the individual and whetted people’s appetites for more control over their lives. These same developments also empower networks of terrorists, and the war they will soon be capable of waging has little in common with the industrial warfare of the 20th century. Accordingly, foreign intelligence tasks will also change.

It made sense to require that the person whose communications were intercepted be a spy when the whole point of the interception was to gather evidence to prosecute espionage. This makes much less sense when the purpose of the interception is to determine whether the person is in fact an agent at all. This sort of communications intercept tries to build from a known element in a terror network — a person, a telephone number, a photograph, a safe house, an electronic dead-drop — to some picture of the network itself. By crosshatching vast amounts of information, based on relatively few confirmed elements, it is possible to detect patterns that can expose the network through its benign operations and then focus on its more malignant schemes.

For this purpose, warrants are utterly beside the point. As Judge Richard Posner has put it, “once you grant the legitimacy of surveillance aimed at detection rather than at gathering evidence of guilt, requiring a warrant to conduct it would be like requiring a warrant to ask people questions or to install surveillance cameras on city streets.” Warrants, which originate in the criminal justice paradigm, provide a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities.

A statutory fix that simply waived the warrant requirement when both parties to a conversation were foreign would scarcely address this problem. Technology is changing the nature of the threat, not merely the mechanics of collection. The statutory change is unnecessary, I suppose, if you believe that there is in fact no real threat, that it’s all hype by the White House to expand its powers — presumably to some other end — and that all we have to fear is fear itself. Doubtless, some people do believe this. If the editorialists and columnists in the news media make this assumption, they should frankly say so (and hold their breath until the next attack).

Furthermore, there is an unstated assumption that warrantless surveillance is lawless surveillance. There is, however, judicial precedent for warrantless searches, even if you can’t tell this from the public debate. The president of the American Bar Association objected to the new statute by sarcastically observing, “The last time I checked, the Fourth Amendment is still in the Bill of Rights,” which he doubtless believed to be a withering salvo.

In fact, there are many instances in which warrantless surveillance has been held to be permissible under the Fourth Amendment. Searches in public schools require neither warrants nor a showing of probable cause. Government offices can be searched for evidence of work-related misconduct without warrants. So can searches conducted at the border, or searches undertaken as a condition of parole. Searches have been upheld in the absence of a warrant where there is no legitimate expectation of privacy. The Clinton administration conducted a warrantless search — lawfully — when it was trying to determine what the spy Aldrich Ames was up to. The day after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt authorized the interception of all communications traffic into and out of the United States.

Then there is the widespread charge that Democrats supinely accepted all this on political grounds. There probably were Democrats who adapted their long-held views on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to political necessity. But these are most obviously to be found on the other side of the vote. Senators Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden — all of whom are running for president — voted against this legislation, when their records are otherwise quite forceful where national security issues are concerned. With respect to those voting in favor of the statute, I find it hard to believe that Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Senator Jim Webb of Virginia are concerned about appearing insufficiently sensitive to security threats to the country.

Why would we be troubled in any case when a politician in a democracy votes the way he thinks the people want? Polls show that the American public is not as anti-security-minded as the American Civil Liberties Union. That’s why we need an A.C.L.U., I imagine.

One good reason not to want popular politics to guide such decisions arises when the public is not well-informed. Partly this can be laid at the door of the incumbent president, the Great Miscommunicator. But mainly it lies with those people who don’t bother giving reasons, don’t explain or give arguments, who prefer to traduce the people with whom they disagree by attacks on their characters, which are presumed to be insufficiently stalwart.

In Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of central intelligence, we have about as good a team as it is possible to imagine. Most people in Congress know that. Why not assume they are proposing a solution to a real problem? Developments in technology are forcing a long-overdue statutory change — and those developments will be with us long after the politics of the moment have passed.

Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law and the director of the Center for National Security at Columbia University, was a National Security Council senior director from 1998 to 1999.

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Vick Gambled With Career, and Lost

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 21, 2007

Michael Vick is almost surely going to jail and his football career is probably over. All the years he spent as a pampered celebrity in the general vicinity of education did not provide him with the insight that torturing dogs is not good and, besides that, could get him in trouble.

The plea bargain he struck with federal prosecutors in Richmond, Va., yesterday gives no real suggestion that he knows right from wrong. He does know that his former friends turned on him for the prosecutors, and that he is in big trouble, which is a start.

In one significant way, Michael Vick is part of the values of middle America: He is another symptom of America’s major gambling jones.

Up to now, Vick had been scrambling, looking for an opening, the same way he played quarterback — past tense, most likely. But yesterday, the play ended. By admitting to charges from the vile operations of the Bad Newz Kennels in rural Virginia, he could go away for up to five years, although he will probably serve only one.

That guilty plea should be quite enough for the N.F.L. to bar him permanently, particularly because of the gambling implications. These people who slipped furtively into the camouflaged farm Vick owned were not there just because they liked to see dogs chew each other to death. They were gambling.

Here we have Vick’s connection with mainstream America — the commercial on television showing a cute couple arriving at one of those upscale gambling dens, out where Americans used to grow food or make things in factories.

In the commercial, the two young suburban types shuck off their workaday duds at the door, eager to have some fun at the tables. America is hooked on that image, relying on lotteries to build roads and schools. In financing the vicious death machine out in the woods, Vick was right on with the so-called gaming industry. Hey, you never know. Fluffy might rip Spot’s jugular at 6-5 odds. Followed by a lounge act at 11.

Here’s something that might make a new reality show. We all love reality shows, don’t we? For a pilot of “Welcome to the Hoosegow”, I’d recommend putting The Crooked N.B.A. Ref, Tim Donaghy, in the same waiting room with The Dog-Torturing N.F.L. Quarterback, Vick, while they are measured for orange suits.

For plot purposes, Vick would probably think Donaghy is a weasel for violating the sanctity of his sport, while Donaghy would think Vick is a sadist, but then they discover their commonality: the culture of odds. They are Contemporary Americans. They make peace with each other and then they make a wager on who gets out first. (As the Geico Gecko, who, by the way sounds just like David Beckham, says, I’m just making that part up.)

•

The N.F.L. now has enough on Vick to justify keeping him out of the Atlanta Falcons’ uniform, probably forever. The league has sold itself as the bastion of American values and manliness — human pickup trucks barreling into one another at brain-destroying speed — but the league cannot be sending a dog-torturing quarterback out in front of the fans and the cameras, can it?

While the league suspends the occasional roughneck or steroid user for four games here or there, it has a much stiffer code for gambling. After all, the players need to be on the up-and-up for all those folks with the weekly betting cards in their hands on Sunday afternoons.

It does not matter if Vick actually pleads guilty to gambling. Dogfighting would be construed as gambling, and according to the league’s policy, gambling can be punished by “a suspension from the N.F.L. for life.”

Commissioner Roger Goodell is said to be awaiting a report by his staff. Yesterday, the league issued a statement acknowledging Vick’s guilty plea. It said, “We totally condemn the conduct outlined in the charges, which is inconsistent with what Michael Vick previously told both our office and the Falcons.” The statement continued, “In the meantime, we have asked the Falcons to continue to refrain from taking action pending a decision by the commissioner.”

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals issued a statement that it was “happy that swift action was taken in response to Mr. Vick’s dogfighting ring and we fully expect prosecutors to arrive at a punishment that fits the crime.”

The S.P.C.A. added, "The practice of dogfighting is not sport, ever — it’s cruel barbarism and must be stopped.”

•

The Associated Press reported this lovely tidbit, that about a dozen Vick No. 7 jerseys have been donated to the Atlanta Humane Society, which uses them for blankets and also to mop up.

That would be funny, except for the blood that was spilled in the woods on Michael Vick’s property, quite obviously with his active cooperation. Vick deserves a life away from football to ponder it.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

August 20, 2007, 5:45 pm

Regarding Syria

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Joe Lieberman, syria

Faiz Shakir at Think Progress tells us that Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal “that the U.S. ‘road to victory’ in Iraq goes through Damascus.” Well, not exactly, but Lieberman did say that the United States must begin “focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered.”

There were varying degrees of supportive bellicosity on the right. John McCain held a conference call with bloggers this morning and, according to Michael Goldfarb at The Worldwide Standard, said that “one of my great and enduring heroes is George Shultz, who said ‘Never point a gun at anybody unless you intend to shoot it.’ We’ve got to stop pointing our guns but be prepared to shoot. I’m not sure I would bomb the [Damascus] airport but I would certainly make it clear to the Syrians…I would probably go back to the Security Council…but we have to make clear that there are consequences.”

“I agree with Lieberman that it’s long past the time that we dealt with pressuring Syria to stop harboring and aiding terrorists,” insists MacRanger at Macsmind. “President Bush long ago said that we would deal with any country who does so and while we are now beginning to address Iran through a reclassification of the the Revolutionary Guard, we should also show Syria that we will not tolerate their complicity any longer.”

Anton Efendi, a graduate student who writes the Across the Bay blog, does his best to calm things down: “I have long discussed on this blog the Assad regime’s collusion with jihadi movements in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere, regardless of the useless, and easily disproved, conventional ‘wisdom’ that somehow Assad’s ‘secular’ regime simply ‘cannot’ work with jihadists, just like somehow Iran’s Shiite theocracy absolutely ‘cannot’ work with Sunni jihadis, even when we know that they do and have done so in the past … In the ongoing discussion about non-state actors in the Middle East, it’s crucial not to ignore the role of states. In this case, to quote Barry Rubin again, Syria along with Iran are essentially functioning as, or are basically the closest thing to, state sponsors of al-Qaeda jihadism.”

Well, certainly Lieberman intended the piece to be provocative — and the fact that the most reasoned response I found to it included four instances of scare quotes in the first sentence would seem to indicate that he succeeded.

*************************

August 20, 2007, 3:22 pm

Fear Itself

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: terrorism

A couple of new polls on terrorism that won’t brighten anybody’s day: “Britons are more suspicious of Muslims than Americans and other Europeans,” according to a poll for the Financial Times.

“Only 59 per cent of Britons thought it possible to be both a Muslim and a citizen of their country, a smaller proportion than in France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the US — the other countries polled by Harris Interactive. British citizens were also the most likely to predict a ‘major terrorist attack’ in their country in the next 12 months; consider Muslims ‘a threat to national security,’ and believe Muslims had too much political power in their country.”

Meanwhile, the moderately leftish Center for American Progress has polled “100 terrorism experts” with various questions about Iraq and the fight against Al Qaeda. The consensus: “The world these experts see today is one that continues to grow more threatening. Fully 91 percent say the world is becoming more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percentage points since February. Eighty-four percent do not believe the United States is winning the war on terror, an increase of 9 percentage points from six months ago. More than 80 percent expect a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade, a result that is more or less unchanged from one year ago.”

*************************

August 20, 2007, 10:15 am

And One from Column B

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, mark warner, running mates

O.K., let’s forget for the moment that Hillary Clinton hasn’t won anything yet, and join those like Robert Novak and Stanley Fish, who are already gaming the veep race.

Brian Faughnan, the former Republican Congressional staffer who runs
the Influence Peddler blog, disagrees with those sources who told
Novak that the Clinton campaign is souring on Barack Obama. “There
will definitely be pressure to select Obama, for a few reasons,”
writes Faughnan. “First, Hillary does not match her husband in
inspiring adulation among African-American voters. Selecting Obama
would help ensure strong turnout among this core Democratic
constituency — which will help Democratic candidates all the way
down the line. But second, if Hillary is the nominee, African
American leaders are likely to be excited about the prospect that she
will choose Obama. Since Hillary may be seen as the odds-on favorite,
people will be eager to see her select the nation’s first black Vice
President. There’s likely to be great disappointment among these
Obama fans — perhaps enough to sour them to her candidacy. If she
clinches the nomination, she may want to either accept or rule out
Obama quickly, to avoid there being any hurt feelings.”

Sister Toldjah, however, feels that Obama’s stock is slipping: “I think another point to take into consideration is that Hillary has cleaned Obama’s clock the last several months on at least a couple of issues, both of them related to foreign policy (the jab about his tough talk on Pakistan comes to mind) and it would look like a flip flop (not to mention blatantly insincere) if she went from vocally criticizing his approach to foreign policy to all of a sudden turning around and saying he’d make a good fit as second in command to her.”

Justin Gardner at Donklephant isn’t joining many of Novak’s sources
on the Mark Warner bandwagon just yet: “Yes, but let’s say Hillary
does get the nomination and doesn’t pick Barack…would African
Americans stay home out of disappointment?” While Gardner says “it’s
nice to hear Mark Warner back in the news,” he suspects the former
Virginia governor probably has his eyes on another prize: the Senate
seat that may well soon be vacated by the Republican John Warner.

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100,000 Gone Since 2001

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 14, 2007

On Saturday in Newark, three young friends whose lives and dreams vanished in a nightmarish eruption of gunfire in a rundown schoolyard were buried.

On Sunday in a small town in Missouri, a pastor and two worshipers were murdered by a gunman who opened fire in a church.

Murder, that darkest of American pastimes, celebrated in film and song and fostered by the firearms industry and its apologists, continues unabated.

It has been almost six years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the nation’s consciousness of terror was yanked to new heights. In those six years, nearly 100,000 people — an incredible number — have been murdered in the United States.

No heightening of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly bothered to notice.

At the same time that we’re diligently confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we’re handing over guns and bullets by the trainload to yahoos bent on blowing others into eternity in armed robberies, drug-dealing, gang violence, domestic assaults and other criminal acts.

Among those who have noticed the carnage are the nation’s police chiefs, and they are alarmed. Surges of homicides and other violent crimes in many cities and towns over the past couple of years have prompted Bill Bratton, the police chief in Los Angeles, to warn of the possibility of a “gathering storm” of criminal violence in the U.S.

“Philadelphia and Baltimore are having horrendous problems,” he said in an interview. “You just had that awful shooting in Newark. What we’d like to do is bring this issue of crime back into the national debate in this election year. What you don’t want is to let it get out of control like it did in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

Mr. Bratton is a past president of the Police Executive Research Forum, a group based in Washington that is composed of the heads of some of the largest state, county and local law enforcement agencies in the country. The group’s report on crime trends in 2005 and 2006 tracked disturbing increases in robberies, aggravated assaults and murder.

The report described violent crime as “making a comeback,” not to the same degree as the crack-propelled violence of the late-’80s and early-’90s, but in frightening numbers, nevertheless.

Chuck Wexler, the forum’s executive director, offered a particularly chilling statistic. The number of cases of aggravated assault with a firearm is about 100,000 a year. In some cases, the gunman misses, but each year roughly 60,000 people are actually shot.

“Over the past five years,” said Mr. Wexler, “more than half a million people have been the victim of an aggravated assault with a firearm. We have become numbed in this society.”

Law enforcement officials believe there is something more vicious and cold-blooded, and thus more deadly, about the latest waves of crime moving across the country. Robberies involving juveniles with little regard for the lives of their victims are becoming more prevalent. Individuals with cellphones, iPods and other electronic devices are particular targets.

In the forum’s report, Chief Heather Fong of the San Francisco police described a phenomenon called “rat-packing” in which robbers using cellphones call in fellow assailants to surround a victim.

Former Police Chief Nanette Hegerty of Milwaukee noted that in a number of holdups a cooperative victim was shot anyway.

Local authorities need help coping with violent crime. Huge numbers of criminals were locked up over the past 10 or 15 years, and they are leaving prison now by the hundreds of thousands each year. With few jobs or other resources available to them, a return to crime by a large portion of that population is inevitable.

The federal government played a big role in the effort that reduced crime substantially in the 1990s. But much of that federal support has since vanished, in part because of the tremendous attention and resources directed toward anti-terror initiatives, and in part because the Bush administration and much of the Republican Party have held fast to the ideological notion that crime is a local problem.

A similarly rigid ideological stance is undermining the effort to control the flow of guns and ammunition into the hands of criminals.

We have not returned to the bad old days of the late-’80s and early-’90s, but the trends are ominous. “We have to get the feds back into this game,” said Chief Bratton. “They have the resources. They can help us.”

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TimesSelect Truck Stop Confidential

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: August 14, 2007


He talked about the time two young women rear-ended him doing 110 miles per hour in a Camaro (they survived), about the dangers of marrying your secretary, about the introduction of power steering and about the two stints in the Army that interrupted his life on the road.

Karl Marx once observed that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.” Here was a guy who had found in trucking the activity of his essential nature.

I don’t know what came first, the mystique of trucking or the country music songs that defined the mystique, but this trucker had been captured by the ethos early on and had never let it go. He wore the right boots and clothes. He had a flat, never-surprised way of talking. He didn’t smile or try to ingratiate.

He has one of those hard jobs, like mining and steel-working, that comes with its own masculine mythology and way of being in the world. Jobs performed in front of a keyboard don’t supply a code of dignity, which explains the spiritual anxiety that plagues the service economy.

As the trucker spoke, I was reminded of a book that came out a few years ago called “The Dignity of Working Men,” by the sociologist, Michèle Lamont, who is now at Harvard. Lamont interviewed working-class men, and described what she calls “the moral centrality of work.”

Her subjects placed tremendous emphasis on working hard, struggling against adversity and mastering their craft. Her book is an antidote to simplistic notions of class structure, because it makes clear that these men define who is above and below them in the pecking order primarily in moral, not economic terms.

People in other classes may define the social structure by educational attainment, income levels and job prestige, but these men are more likely to understand the social hierarchy on the basis of who can look out for themselves, who has the courage to be a fireman, a soldier or a cop, who has the discipline to put bread on the table every night despite difficulties.

When Lamont’s subjects looked at professionals and managers, they didn’t necessarily see their social superiors. They saw manipulators. They defined themselves as straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip guys. People who worked in offices, who worked by persuasion, were dismissed for being insincere, for playing games.

This is why class resentment in the U.S. is so complicated, despite inequality and lagging wages. When it comes to how people see the world, social and moral categories generally trump economic ones.

This is why successful populist movements always play on moral and social conditions first, and economic ones only later. This is why they appeal to the self-esteem of the working class, not on any supposed sense of victimization. This is why their protests are directed not against the rich, but against the word manipulators — the lawyers, consultants and the news media.

The trucker I met Saturday in Virginia not only believed in the American Dream, he believed he had achieved it. He owned his own truck. He owned a nice house in Texas on a lake near the Louisiana border. His brother owned five trucks.

He probably drew certain conclusions from the way I dress and talk. But if he was at all curious about what I did, he didn’t show it, or didn’t want to veer off into topics where he wasn’t in control. Instead, he talked about the things any guy would want to put at the center of his life: highways, engines, hauling, dogs and food.

I didn’t ask about the wives.

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In Beijing’s Games, a Vision of the Future

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 14, 2007

“China Is Near.” This Italian film came out in 1967, using China as a symbol of the mysterious, the powerful, the future looming over everybody. Lately, that title has been looping across the movie screen of my mind.

The Olympic Games are always sponsored by one city, demonstrating Catalan pride or Australian culture to the world, but the Beijing Games will be a more cosmic harbinger of where the world is going in the next century or three.

Take pollution, for example. During the one-year-out ceremonies last week, a stinging mass of what could be vaguely described as air covered Beijing, much to the chagrin of the proud organizers.

No less an authority than Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, suggested that if the air was this bad next year the I.O.C. would reschedule certain endurance events for the health of the athletes. And he is a doctor.

We usually encounter gloom and doom before every Olympic Games, fears of terrorism or gridlock, but this time the dark cloud of pollution has already enveloped the Games. Starting Friday, Beijing is hoping to ban vehicles with odd-numbered license plates for two days and those with even-numbered plates for two other days.

With nearly 2.5 million private cars in Beijing, how will people get around? By special buses, authorities said. New Yorkers who have been doused with bus exhaust in our narrow canyons may already be laughing derisively. Good luck with that.

What will happen if determined drivers take to the roads on the wrong day? This is a nation of great resolve, which built the Great Wall and stifled dissent in Tiananmen Square, thousands of years apart. Will officers be flagging down uncooperative drivers and handing out tickets, or worse?

It is hard for an American to point a finger at any other society, given the way the United States has willfully produced pollution and ignored global warming. How China handles the choking reality of air pollution may be a tip-off on what kind of air the world will be breathing.

•

By committing itself to these Games inside its walls — drawing the inevitable attention of networks and newspapers — China has done something either mature or foolhardy. If there should be protests and violence, as there were in Mexico City before the 1968 Summer Games, there will be no cover-up this time. If dust storms fly in from the encroaching Gobi Desert, the world will know it.

Yet there is a tremendous upside to these Games: the exposure to modern China, including the Olympic architecture. Exactly one year from today, there will be four swimming finals in Beijing’s National Aquatics Center, nearly finished and already nicknamed the Water Cube because it looks like a square of sparkling water, instantly frozen, bubbles and all.

Next door is the main Olympic stadium, glowing a bright red and nicknamed the Bird’s Nest because of the steel twig-like prongs woven together. “To promote traditional feng shui balance between fire and water, the venues were placed side by side,” wrote John Powers of The Boston Globe, who recently visited Beijing.

China is near. As the most populous nation in the world, China is using these Games to build and advertise itself to the world. Everybody who has been to Beijing says the Chinese will be excellent hosts, providing water, air, food, accommodations, language skills and entertainment. This is too important to botch.

In a way, I have seen contemporary China. In the summer of 2002, I took a train from Seoul to cover the first game played by China in the soccer World Cup, in Kwangju, South Korea. As I settled into my first-class seat, I observed the pricey laptops, cellphones, sunglasses and sweaters and realized most of the passengers were youthful Chinese on vacation, taking in this historic match.

“You guys are yuppies,” I joked to the Chinese man next to me — a Web site developer, as I recall — who introduced me to a fashion journalist, a lawyer, an investment broker, males and females. This new generation will be helping to produce the Games next summer.

•

Meanwhile, old neighborhoods are being demolished, rivers are being rerouted, farmers are being moved into cities with revolutionary impact. While we are obsessing about the decimal points of track and field and the dreary gumshoe business of drug testing, a nation will be evolving.

I just read a marvelous new book, “Shadow of the Silk Road,” by Colin Thubron, a peripatetic British journalist who followed the ancient trading route during the SARS outbreak of 2003. Thubron is of my generation, speaks Mandarin, can find local transportation, lodging and food in obscure villages, starting in Xian and moving north and west, where borders and language and religion and pigmentation have shifted over the millennia.

One year out and counting, China is near. If we are lucky, we will capture a glimmer.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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Floyd Norris: Notions on High and Low Finance

August 13, 2007, 12:51 pm

Thinking of Houses Like Cars

The article in today’s Times on Stockton’s housing woes includes a picture of a home for sale, where the broker proclaims, “Priced Below New!”

There was a time when such a sign would have been considered obvious, when houses were viewed in the same way we now view cars. Of course a used car is worth less than a similar new one. Assets depreciate.

I remember a comment made in the 1950s, when I was a young boy, by an uncle who lived in El Paso and had grown up in the Depression. He had just bought his first home, with more than a little trepidation, after renting for years. “I just hope it depreciates by less than the rent I would have paid,” he said. (Or something very close to that. I remember it because it took me a little while to figure out what he was talking about.)

He had seen real estate prices plunge, and feared it would happen again.

People have come to expect that home prices will always rise — in the long term if not in the short term. Those who did not buy were the losers. If that belief is shaken, the effect could be great.

Over the weekend, I talked to an old friend whose Connecticut home has been on the market for two years. He has, he told me, cut the price repeatedly to keep it below new homes in the area, but now there is a glut of such homes.

He had another observation, which was that he was hoping for a buyer who now rents. He has found that bids from buyers who need to sell their existing homes have a way of vanishing.

August 13, 2007, 7:21 am
Making Sense of the Markets

Easy credit in the American home-loan market has turned from a sales pitch to a curse, as the troubles with subprime mortgages have developed into a credit squeeze that is shaking the world’s markets and has made loans much harder to get. Will the latest upheaval pose a threat to continued economic growth — and your own financial security? Today I will be answering questions from readers.
To ask a question or to see my answers, click here.

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It’s All About Them

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 13, 2007

Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your father’s political campaign.

Last week, at one of Mitt Romney’s “Ask Mitt” forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.

The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. “It’s remarkable how we can show our support for our nation,” he said, “and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president.”

Wow. The important point isn’t the fact that Mr. Romney’s sons aren’t in uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe that we’re engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is, instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.

Yet the week’s prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P. nomination.

Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports that he insisted that the city’s emergency command center — which included a personal suite with its own elevator that he visited “often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced” — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center, an obvious potential terrorist target.

At the same time, Mr. Giuliani is being attacked for his failure to take adequate precautions to protect those who worked on the cleanup at ground zero from the hazards at the site. Many workers have since been sickened by the dust and toxic materials.

For a politician whose entire campaign is based on the myth of his leadership that fateful day — as The Onion put it, Mr. Giuliani is running for “president of 9/11” — anything that challenges his personal legend is a big problem. So here’s what Mr. Giuliani said last week in response: “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”

Real ground zero workers, who were digging through the toxic rubble while Mr. Giuliani held photo ops, were understandably outraged. So the next day Mr. Giuliani tried to recover, claiming that “what I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same risk.” But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can all watch Mr. Giuliani’s actual demeanor as he delivered the original remarks. Empathy had nothing to do with it.

What’s striking about these unintentional moments of self-revelation is how much Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani sound like the current occupant of the White House.

It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: “As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch.”

What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.

This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.

To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should “double Guantánamo,” or Mr. Giuliani’s dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a “Democratic, liberal assumption.”

So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to further their personal ambitions. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn that these men are monstrously self-centered.

All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?

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From India, a Cautionary Tale

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 12, 2007

NEW YORK

If this week did not mark the 60th anniversary of the bloody British withdrawal from India, it would be easy to dismiss the latest attempt to involve the Uited Nations more deeply in Iraq as risible.

Scorn is seldom in short supply on Iraq. Why, the get-out-now brigade will ask, should a UN already battered by Baghdad and led by an unproven secretary general have any chance of easing the mayhem when the mightiest power on earth has labored in vain for four years?

Is the U.S. maneuver that led to the unanimous approval last week of a resolution giving the United Nations a central role in promoting regional and Iraqi national reconciliation not just the latest Bush administration attempt to kick failure far enough down the road for it to become somebody else's problem?

The argument is easy to make, as facile as all the cheap electoral point-scoring that makes up what passes for political debate on Iraq in an America counting the days to next year's presidential vote.

The untidy thing is that the fate of 26 million Iraqis and the fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties do not mesh. The former is a lifelong affair, the latter often a matter of sound bites.

America has incurred a debt to Iraq, and the liability is weightier than the paper on the sub-prime mortgage market. Those in a hurry for neat resolutions in Mesopotamia might cast their minds back 60 years to the summer of 1947 when, on Aug. 15, after almost a century of direct rule, the British quit India, having drawn some hasty lines on a map.

The lines produced Pakistan. The rapid exit - independence and partition had only been approved a couple of months earlier by Parliament - produced a savage outbreak of killing and rape among millions of Hindus and Muslims attempting to disentangle entwined existences. India and Pakistan went to war over still-contested Kashmir.

I know, India is not Iraq, the world of 1947 is not that of 2007, and America's Iraqi foray amounts to a brief interlude compared to Britain's passage to India. But playing with fire still tends to produce explosions. Any U.S. withdrawal, or significant troop reduction, must be meticulously prepared.

Iraq right now involves a proxy war in which Iran wants to consolidate Shiite ascendancy, Saudi Arabia wants to ensure Sunnis have a share of power, and Turkey wants to prevent the Kurds from laying their hands on oil-rich Kirkuk, so establishing the economic basis for an independent Kurdistan.

A proxy war over the most explosive issue in the Middle East today - Persia ascendant - could easily become a direct war, absent America's offsetting influence, however costly that influence is. Which is where the UN comes in.

The resolution calls on the UN to "advise, support and assist" Iraq in "facilitating regional dialogue."

This, along with promoting political reconciliation at a time of national fissuring, will be the core task falling to the new UN envoy to Iraq, who will probably be Staffan de Mistura, a Swede with extensive Iraqi experience.

"The key factor will be getting very active regional diplomacy going, institutionalizing negotiations with neighbors, which we want to involve weekly or bi-weekly meetings," Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the UN told me. "It's hard for us to get a meeting with Iran, but this is something the UN can do."

Khalilzad, who has served as ambassador in both Afghanistan and Iraq since the 9/11 attack, identified the three critical regional powers as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and said "they all fear that an outright U.S. withdrawal could suck them into an outright war in Iraq."

That fear will provide the UN with leverage. The ambassador has received assurances from President George W. Bush that the U.S. will provide full support for the UN as it expands its role. "We are talking about a UN backed by the U.S., not replacing our presence," he said.

Skepticism, tinged with fear, is rife at the UN. The memory is still vivid of the 2003 slaying in Baghdad of many of its best and brightest, led by Sérgio Vieira de Mello of Brazil. But a U.S. drawdown, ultimately inevitable, must be based on intertwined regional and national rapprochement. The UN, if it gets leadership, is better positioned to foster that than a discredited Bush administration.

I knew de Mello in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. He liked his Black Label. He was also a man of courage with a deep sense of responsibility and the long arcs of history.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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"From India, a Cautionary Tale" >>

Center Field and Center Stage Are Cabrera’s

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 13, 2007

Cleveland

A quiet young Yankee takes over center field now, in the minimalist tradition of Bernie Williams, following an expensive, short-term rental named Johnny Damon. For the time being, Melky Cabrera attracts little attention inside the clubhouse, speaks Spanish softly and carries a hot stick.

“You put him in there, and now you can’t take him out of there,” Manager Joe Torre said before his Yankees beat the Indians, 5-3, at Jacobs Field, sweeping what was supposed to be a showdown series with a compelling blend of arrogance and exuberance, experience and youth.

For the bargain salary of $432,000 on a $200-plus-million roster, Cabrera stretched his hitting streak to 17 games yesterday, his average over .400 for that stretch, with a home run in the seventh inning and a single in the ninth that was followed by a stolen base and Derek Jeter’s run-scoring hit. Those two apparent tack-on runs turned into the winning margin when Mariano Rivera struggled in the ninth, not that Cabrera cared to brag on them.

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He celebrated with a plate of food, watching on television as the Red Sox lost in Baltimore, their lead over the Yankees in the American League East shrinking to four precious games. Cabrera took a long shower, left the topic of the surging Yankees to the others, including Jason Giambi, who hit a home run for the second straight day.

That doesn’t change the fact that Giambi is a part-time player now, as is Damon, thanks largely to Cabrera. That’s roughly $36 million combined being paid this season to Giambi and Damon, whose bodies weren’t holding up to the rigors of playing every day, anyway.

Only the Yankees can afford to survive such errors of financial commission, but the bigger news is the roster transformation. These are not your staid post-Paulie (O’Neill) Yankees anymore, plodding along and chanting the existentialist mantra: “We’ll win because we earn.”

Cabrera had a birthday Saturday, his 23rd. Robinson Canó, who had three more hits yesterday as his average soars above .300, is 24. Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain, the rookie pitching jewels who locked down the Indians here in the series opener Friday night, are 21. Everyone says there are even more acclaimed young arms in the minors. The ace of the staff, Chien-Ming Wang, is an ancient 27.

“It feels a lot like when we all came up in the mid-’90s,” said Jeter, referring to himself and other homegrown Yankees — Williams, Jorge Posada and yesterday’s winner, Andy Pettitte.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, the absence of George Steinbrenner — whose health has reportedly been declining — in the daily operation of the team must be cited. The previous commitment to youth occurred when the Boss was under suspension by Major League Baseball.

Whatever his role, Steinbrenner must be enjoying what he’s been watching since early last month, when General Manager Brian Cashman was still on his “big hook,” and the Yankees were a mile behind the A.L. playoff leaders. Writing them off was never a good idea, however, only an opportunity to remember how the baseball season can make false prophets of us all.

It’s a six-month roller-coaster ride, challenging our instincts, toying with emotions, the range of which stretch from Barry Bonds to Rick Ankiel. The season tricks and it teases, but it also instructs. Patience, people. Listen to St. Torre when he says: “You just hang around, go through the streaks. That’s what the season is about, being able to fight through the dark times.”

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Even when your team has outspent everyone by tens of millions, you wait for it to evolve, to decide which piece goes where, whose time is up, whose future is now.

The Yankees couldn’t afford Damon’s weak arm in center anymore. He’s a spot player now in left and center, a part-time designated hitter, along with Giambi. Center belongs to Cabrera. “Ninety percent of the time, that’s what it’s going to be,” Torre said, unequivocally.

He thinks the veterans are on board, but added, “Buy in or not, there is the reality.”

There is the evidence unfolding night after night. Torre watched Cabrera cut off Víctor Martínez’s drive into the right-center-field gap Saturday — a ball that could have easily gone to the wall for a triple — and throw back across his body to Jeter to narrowly miss nailing Martínez at second.

The captain, Jeter, was impressed, offering this full endorsement: “It’s the things that Melky prevents from happening with his arm. He has to play every day.”

Of course, there is a lot of season left, more dips and loops and challenges to a manager’s conviction. Last fall, Torre gave in when the playoffs came around, went for the graying, distinguished Yankees look and wound up with a lifeless, joyless team.

Not this time, he said. Cabrera’s the man, Yankees youth will be served. No turning back.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Shuffling Off to Crawford, 2007 Edition

By FRANK RICH

Published: August 12, 2007

THE cases of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were ugly enough. So surely someone in the White House might have the good taste to draw the line at exploiting the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But nothing is out of bounds for a government that puts the darkest arts of politics and public relations above even the exigencies of war.

As Jane Mayer told the story in last week’s New Yorker, Mariane Pearl was called by Alberto Gonzales with some good news in March: the Justice Department was releasing a transcript in which the long-incarcerated Qaeda thug Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the beheading of her husband. But there was something off about Mr. Gonzales’s news. It was almost four years old.

Condoleezza Rice had called Ms. Pearl to tell her in confidence about the very same confession back in 2003; it was also reported that year in The Journal and elsewhere. What’s more, the confession was suspect; another terrorist had been convicted in the Pearl case in Pakistan in 2002. There is no known corroborating evidence that Mohammed, the 9/11 ringleader who has taken credit for many horrific crimes while in American custody, was responsible for this particular murder. None of his claims, particularly those possibly coerced by torture, can be taken as gospel solely on our truth-challenged attorney general’s say-so.

Ms. Pearl recognized a publicity ploy when she saw it. And this one wasn’t subtle. Mr. Gonzales released the Mohammed transcript just as the latest Justice Department scandal was catching fire, with newly disclosed e-mail exchanges revealing the extent of White House collaboration in the United States attorney firings. Had the attorney general succeeded in enlisting Daniel Pearl’s widow as a player in his stunt, it might have diverted attention from a fracas then engulfing President Bush on his Latin American tour.

Though he failed this time, Mr. Gonzales’s P.R. manipulation of the war on terror hasn’t always been so fruitless. To upstage increasingly contentious Congressional restlessness about Iraq in 2006, he put on a widely viewed show to announce an alleged plot by men in Miami to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and conduct a “full ground war.” He said at the time the men “swore allegiance to Al Qaeda” but, funnily enough, last week this case was conspicuously missing from a long new White House “fact sheet” listing all the terrorist plots it had foiled.

The Gonzales antics are, of course, in the tradition of an administration with a genius for stirring up terror nightmares at politically opportune times, like just before the Democratic convention in 2004. The Sears Tower scenario came right out of the playbook of his predecessor, John Ashcroft. In 2002, Mr. Ashcroft waited a full month to announce the Chicago arrest of the “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla — suddenly commandeering TV cameras in the middle of a trip to Moscow so that this tardy “news” could drown out the damning pre-9/11 revelations from the F.B.I. whistleblower Coleen Rowley. Since then, the dirty bomb in the Padilla case has evaporated much like Mr. Gonzales’s Sears Tower extravaganza.

Now that the administration is winding down and the Qaeda threat is at its scariest since 2001, one might hope that such stunts would cease. Indeed, two of the White House’s most accomplished artificial-reality Imagineers both left their jobs last month: Scott Sforza, the former ABC News producer who polished up the “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, and Peter Feaver, the academic specialist in wartime public opinion who helped conceive the 35-page National Security Council document that Mr. Bush unveiled as his Iraq “Plan for Victory” in November 2005.

Mr. Feaver’s document used the word victory six times in its table of contents alone, and was introduced by a speech at the Naval Academy in which Mr. Bush invoked “victory” 15 times while standing on a set bedecked with “Plan for Victory” signage. Alas, it turned out that victory could not be achieved merely by Orwellian incantation, so the plan was scrapped only 13 months later for the “surge.” But while Mr. Feaver and his doomed effort to substitute propaganda for action may now be gone, the White House’s public relations strategies for the war, far from waning, are again gathering steam, to America’s peril.

This came into sharp focus last weekend, when our military disclosed, very quietly and with a suspicious lack of accompanying White House fanfare, that it had killed a major terror culprit in Iraq, Haythem Sabah al-Badri. Never heard of him? Usually this administration oversells every death of a terrorist leader. It underplayed Badri’s demise for a reason. The fine print would further expose the fictional new story line that has been concocted to rebrand and resell the Iraq war as a battle against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda — or, as Mr. Bush now puts it, “the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”

To understand how, revisit the president’s trial run of this new narrative, when he announced the surge in January. Mr. Bush had to explain why his previous “Plan for Victory” had gone belly up so quickly, so he came up with a new premise that absolved him of blame. In his prime-time speech, the president implied that all had been on track in Iraq after the country’s December 2005 elections until Feb. 22, 2006, when one of the holiest Shiite shrines, the gold-domed mosque in Samarra, was blown up. In this revisionist history, that single terrorist act set off the outbreak of sectarian violence in Iraq now requiring the surge.

This narrative was false. Shiite death squads had been attacking Sunnis for more than a year before the Samarra bombing. The mosque attack was not a turning point. It was merely a confirmation of the Iraqi civil war that Mr. Bush refuses to acknowledge because American voters don’t want their troops in the middle of one.

But that wasn’t the only new plot point that the president advanced in his surge speech. With no proof, Mr. Bush directly attributed the newly all-important Samarra bombing to “Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents,” cementing a rhetorical sleight of hand he had started sketching out during the midterm election season.

In fact, no one has taken credit for the mosque bombing to this day. But Iraqi government officials fingered Badri as the culprit. (Some local officials told The Washington Post after the bombing that Iraqi security forces were themselves responsible.) Since Badri is a leader of a tiny insurgent cell reportedly affiliated with what the president calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Bush had the last synthetic piece he needed to complete his newest work of fiction: 1) All was hunky-dory with his plan for victory until the mosque was bombed. 2) “Al Qaeda in Iraq” bombed the mosque. 3) Ipso facto, America must escalate the war to defeat “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” those “very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”

As a growing chorus of critics reiterates, “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is not those very same folks. It did not exist on 9/11 but was a product of the Iraq war and accounts for only a small fraction of the Sunni insurgency. It is not to be confused with the resurgent bin Laden network we’ve been warned about in the latest National Intelligence Estimate. But this factual issue hasn’t deterred Mr. Bush. He has merely stepped up his bogus conflation of the two Qaedas by emphasizing all the “foreign leaders” of “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” because that might allow him to imply they are bin Laden emissaries. In a speech in Charleston, S.C., on July 24, he listed a Syrian, an Egyptian, a Tunisian, a Saudi and a Turk.

Against the backdrop of this stepped-up propaganda blitz, Badri’s death nine days later was an inconvenient reminder of the hole in the official White House narrative. Mr. Bush couldn’t do his usual victory jig over Badri’s demise because there’s no way to pass off Badri as a link to bin Laden. He was born in Samarra and was a member of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard.

If Badri was responsible for the mosque bombing that has caused all our woes in Iraq and forced us to stay there, then the president’s story line falls apart. Far from having any connection to bin Laden’s Qaeda, the Samarra bombing was instead another manifestation of the Iraqi civil war that Mr. Bush denies. No wonder the same White House “fact sheet” that left out Mr. Gonzales’s foiled Sears Tower plot and, for that matter, Jose Padilla, also omitted Badri’s name from its list of captured and killed “Senior Al Qaeda Leaders.” Surely it was a coincidence that this latest statement of official Bush administration amnesia was released on Aug. 6, the sixth anniversary of the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

And so the president, firm in his resolve against “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” heads toward another August break in Crawford while Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains determined to strike in America. No one can doubt Mr. Bush’s triumph in the P.R. war: There are more American troops than ever mired in Iraq, sent there by a fresh round of White House fictions. And the real war? The enemy that did attack us six years ago, sad to say, is likely to persist in its nasty habit of operating in the reality-based world that our president disdains.

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