Okay. Maureen Dowd must be tired of taking pot shots at Hillary and Barack. Now it’s Al Gore’s turn… Oh, sorry, “the Goracle.” Then we have Thomas Friedman on Israel, starting with Amir Peretz who looks through binoculars with the lens caps on. Let’s gag down MoDo first, shall we?

Al Gore now has a movie with an Oscar and a grandson named Oscar.

Who could ask for anything more?

Al Gore could.

The best ex-president who was never president could make one of the most interesting campaigns in American history even more interesting. Will he use his green moment on the red carpet in black tie to snag blue states and win the White House?

Only the Goracle knows the answer.

The man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism and Iraq admitted that maybe his problem had been that he was too far ahead of the curve. He realized at a conference that “there’re ideas that are mature, ideas that are maturing, ideas that are past their prime ... and a category called ‘predawn.’

“And all of a sudden it hit me,” he told John Heilemann of New York magazine last year. “Most of my political career was spent investing in predawn ideas! I thought, Oh, that’s where I went wrong.”

As Mr. Gore basked Sunday night in the adoration of Leo, Laurie David and the rest of the Hollywood hybrid-drivers, Democrats wondered: Is this chubby guy filling out the Ralph Lauren three-piece tuxedo a mature idea or an idea that’s past its prime?

With Hillary overproduced and Barack Obama an unfinished script, maybe it’s time to bring the former vice president out of turnaround.

Hillary’s henchmen try to prognosticate the Goracle’s future by looking at his waistline, according to Newsday; they think if he’s going to run, he’ll get back to fighting weight.

With her own talent for checking the weathervane, Hillary co-opted Mr. Gore’s eco-speak right after the Oscars, talking environment throughout upstate New York. Given his past competition with Hillary, Mr. Gore must have delighted in seeing his star rise in Hollywood as hers dimmed.

If he waits long enough to get into the race, all the usual-suspect-consultants will be booked — which would be a boon for Mr. Gore, since his Hessian strategists in 2000 made him soft-pedal the environment, the very issue that makes him seem most passionate and authentic. The same slides about feedback loops and the interconnectedness of weather patterns that made his image-makers yawn just won his movie an Academy Award.

But what’s going on in his head? Like Jeb Bush, Al Gore was the good son groomed by a famous pol to be president, only to have it snatched away by a black sheep who didn’t even know the name of the general running Pakistan (the same one he just sent Vice to try to push into line.) It must be excruciating not only to lose a presidency you’ve won because the Supreme Court turned partisan and stopped the vote, but to then watch the madness of King George and Tricky Dick II as they misled their way into serial catastrophes.

Even though Chickenhawk Cheney finally got close to combat in Afghanistan, his explosive brush with a suicide bomber has not served as a wake-up call about the danger of Osama bin Laden’s staying on the lam, and Afghanistan’s slipping back into the claws of the Taliban and Al Qaeda while we are shackled to Iraq.

A reporter asked Tony Snow yesterday what the attack on the Bagram Air Base that targeted the vice president and killed at least 23 people said about the Taliban’s strength. “I’m not sure it says anything,” he replied.

Mr. Gore must be pleased that he’s been vindicated on so many fronts, yet it still must rankle the Nobel Peace Prize nominee to hear the White House spouting such dangerous nonsense. He must sometimes imagine how much safer the world would be if he were president.

The Bush-Cheney years have been all about dragging the country into the past, getting back the presidential powers yanked away after Watergate, settling scores from Poppy Bush’s old war, and suppressing scientific and environmental advances. Instead of aiming for the stars, the greatest power on earth is bogged down in poorly navigated conflicts with ancient tribes and brutes in caves.

Surely the Goracle, an aficionado of futurism, must stew about all the time and money and good will that has been wasted with a Vietnam replay and a scolding social policy designed to expunge the Age of Aquarius.

When he’s finished Web surfing, tweaking his PowerPoint and BlackBerrying, what goes through his head? Does he blame himself? Does he blame the voting machines? Ralph Nader? Robert Shrum? Naomi Wolf? How about Bush Inc. and Clinton Inc.?

With the red carpet rolled up, the tux at the cleaner’s, and the gold statuette on the director’s mantle, not his, the Goracle is at his Nashville mansion, contemplating how to broker his next deal. Will he cast himself as the savior of the post-Bush era, or will the first Gore in the Oval Office be Karenna, mother of Oscar?

And now here’s Thomas Friedman on “The Vision Gaffe:”

Yes, it’s true, a picture is worth a thousand words — but some are worth a whole dictionary. I came across one the other day on BBC.com. The story was headlined “Israeli Minister in Vision Gaffe.”

Next to it is a picture showing Israel’s defense minister, Amir Peretz, inspecting troops on the Golan Heights alongside Israel’s military chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. Both men are peering into the distance through binoculars, but with one big difference: Mr. Peretz was watching the maneuvers through binoculars with the lens caps still on. ... “According to the photographer,” the BBC reported, “Mr. Peretz looked through the capped binoculars three times, nodding as Gen. Ashkenazi explained what was in view.”

Oh my, I’d rather misspell “potato” on national TV than be remembered for that.

That picture is so evocative not only because Mr. Peretz — a former labor organizer — has already been savagely criticized for being out of his depth as defense minister. It’s also because much of Israel’s leadership seems to have blinded itself lately with all sorts of bizarre and criminal behavior.

Where do I start? Israel’s police commissioner just resigned after an investigative committee criticized his actions in a 1999 case involving an Israeli crime family. His resignation came in the wake of a rape allegation against Israel’s president, Moshe Katsav, as well accusations of corruption against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the suspension of his office director, whose house arrest is part of a widening investigation into the Tax Authority — whose chief also just resigned under a cloud. The finance minister is being questioned about embezzlement at a nonprofit, and the former justice minister has been convicted of indecent behavior for kissing a female soldier against her will. There’s more, but I don’t have space.

Here is the really bizarre thing: Israel’s economy — particularly its high-tech sector — has never been better.

“The economy is blooming, growing in the last quarter of 2006 by almost 8%,” said Sever Plocker of the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, who is one of Israel’s top economics writers. “Foreign direct investment is flowing in at unprecedented rate — $13.4 billion in 2006. The high-tech sector exports are approaching $18 billion, and the stock exchange is at an all-time high. The shekel is stronger than ever, the inflation nonexistent. Interest rates are lower than in U.S. or Britain, the budget deficit less than 1% of G.D.P., and the balance of payments is positive, which means Israel achieved its economic independence and is actually a net creditor to the rest of the world.

“In short, we never had it so good in the economy.”

Yossi Vardi, one of the founding fathers of Israel’s high-tech industry, told me that in the last month alone, four start-ups that he was an investor in were sold: one to Cisco, one Microsoft, and two to Israeli companies. “In the last nine months I’ve probably invested in at least nine new companies,” added Mr. Vardi, all started by “kids 25 to 35 years old.”

So maybe Israel doesn’t need any cabinet ministers? It’s not so simple. When the cabinet is so weak, no peace deal is likely with the Palestinians because no leader has the strength to push it through — and that is a ticking time bomb. Moreover, high-tech doesn’t employ a lot of people, and if the cabinet that should be looking out for the rest of Israel is hobbled — another bomb is ticking.

“Almost half of the population does not enjoy the boom,” Mr. Plocker said, noting these statistics: The unemployment rate is 8.3 percent. Israel’s poverty rate is still the highest in the West, by far: 24.4 percent of the entire population and 35.2 percent of all children are described as poor, living under the official “poverty line.” In the Arab and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors, child poverty is especially high: more than 50 percent. The real income of the poorest quarter of Israelis is lower than six years ago.

“There is a growing feeling that something is deeply rotten in the Israeli political system,” Mr. Plocker e-mailed, “as it can’t deliver a decent social policy — reducing poverty, inequality and unemployment — even during the good times.

“Tom, I never saw in the streets of Israel such a total contempt for the government by almost everybody — the poor and the rich, the Jews and the Arabs, the left, the right and the collapsing center. This is the essence of our situation — a contrast between the ‘you never had it so good’ economy and the ‘you never had it so bad’ government. This is the spring of our discontent. Excuse me for being rather lengthy, but it hurts.”

Ann Althouse tells us she started blogging with NO interest in politics… Yeah. Right. Nicholas Kristof tells us about Somaliland. Let’s see what Prof. Althouse has to say:

Unlike a lot of other political bloggers, I started blogging with a distinct lack of interest in politics. My first post about a presidential campaign, back in January 2004, the first month of my blog, was purely an accident. I was reading The Isthmus, our free alternative newspaper here in Madison, Wisc., when I ran across a chart comparing the Democratic candidates for president.

Because I had the longtime habit, inherited from my grandfather, of reading out loud whatever little things in the newspaper happened to catch my attention, I said: “Hmm. ‘Little known fact: at 59, Wesley Clark has only 5% body fat.’ ”

My son Christopher, who was used to finding himself on the receiving end of this habit, came back with: “Should it be: ‘Wesley Clark is 5% body fat?’ ”

That cracked me up, and, instantly making the transition from old family habit to new blogging habit, I posted our little interchange on my blog. I didn’t care at all whether I was helping or hurting Clark’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. I had merely encountered something that amused me at the time. I wasn’t aiming to become a political pundit. That blog post had more to do with my interest in the rhetoric of dieting, the subtleties of language and my son’s sense of humor than with politics.

Blogging is just writing, and there is no end to the things you can do with writing. When you read a political blog, you might be running into someone like me, a solo blogger who reacts casually to issues that surface on any given day, or you might be reading the work of a writer who is pursuing an intense, partisan agenda and pushing particular candidates.

If the blog is open to comments — as mine is — there is a mysterious additional layer of writing. Who are these people who tap into another person’s readership? Some of them must be there just to pass the time interacting with other people who have responded to the personal style of the blogger. Others are much more politically engaged, perhaps to the point where you wonder whether they are part of some candidate’s campaign.

“Political Bloggers Fear Publicists Will Infiltrate Sites” was the headline for the column Alan Wirzbicki wrote in The Boston Globe last Friday. He tells us about a little incident on the Redstate blog, where a commenter seemed excessively supportive of John McCain (who is, apparently, not terribly popular on Redstate).

This moved Erick Erickson, who runs Redstate, to do a little research and discover that the commenter worked for a company with some connection to McCain’s political action committee.

“This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant,” Erickson told Wirzbicki.

Somehow I can’t work up much fear over this. How vigilant do I need to be? As long as no one is dropping unverifiable factual assertions in the comments — trying to stir up a scandal for a candidate? — why should I care if my commenters have their secrets, their ulterior motives and their as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways? That’s the way life is in the real world.

It’s good to have a place where strangers can meet, and it’s fine if it takes you awhile to learn what other people are really up to. The blog is a coffeehouse, and if some new commenter is actually a political operative, I think it would be fun to see how well he can take on the sharp, individualistic commenters who have already set up here, carrying on a long conversation. I bet it wouldn’t take them long to unmask and embarrass him.

Let life on the blog unfold like off-blog life.

I can understand the urge to enforce standards in the blogosphere, but my inclination runs the other way. Watching a video dialogue on the Web site bloggingheads.tv (where I regularly participate), I rankled when the columnist Eric Alterman said:

“I think it would be good if we had some sort of, you know, blogging — you know — council, where we could condemn people. ... You could still blog if you want. Nobody’s going to stop you. But ... everybody’s gonna know that you’re not to be trusted.”

What undermines my trust is that impulse to control. Those who want such things worry me as much as a candidate with too little body fat.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. She is a guest columnist this month.

Well. Now here’s Mr. Kristof, who actually is worth reading:

Here’s the ethos of Somalia, as a former Mogadishu resident explained it to me: “If I use a dollar to buy food, then tomorrow I have nothing. If I use a dollar to buy a bullet, then I can eat every day.”

That enterprising can-do spirit has turned most of Somalia into the poster child of a failed state, where you feel underdressed without an assault rifle. But wait! Here in the north of the carcass of Somalia is the breakaway would-be nation of Somaliland, and it is a remarkable success — for a country that doesn’t exist.

The U.S. and other governments don’t recognize Somaliland, so the people here get next to zero foreign aid. And when the “country” was formed in 1991, it had been mostly obliterated in a civil war and was a collection of ruins and land mines.

Yet the clans and elders here formed their own government, held free elections and even established an international airline. Relying on free markets and a general exhaustion with violence, the people of Somaliland embraced tranquillity and democracy and searched for ways to make a buck.

Walk down the streets of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, and instead of gunmen you come across the thriving jewelry and financial market: scores of vendors, most of them women, are hawking millions of dollars worth of gold, precious stones and foreign currency out in the open air. (Don’t try that at home!) Continue down the street, and you see that Hargeisa has police cars, DHL service, cable television, orthodontists, a multitude of Internet cafes and traffic jams (including the horses and camels). There are public schools and hospitals — even a public library.

This is a conservative Muslim country, yet it is generally pro-American and tolerant. In the last election, more women voted than men. Women’s groups are fighting the traditional practice of genital mutilation, administered to 97 percent of girls here.

The lesson of Somaliland is simple: the most important single determinant of a poor country’s success is not how much aid it receives but how well it is run. If a country adheres to free markets and good political and economic governance, it will generate domestic and foreign investments that dwarf any amount of aid.

As President Dahir Rayale Kahin told me: “There is a proverb in our country: ‘You can wash your body only with your own hand.’ Outsiders can help, but the indigenous people must find a solution themselves.”

One lesson is that Western countries should not only increase their financial aid but also their pressure for better governance. It’s great to forgive debts, but not graft or antimarket policies.

The U.S. Millennium Challenge aid program, which promotes good governance, is a useful step in that direction. So is Tony Blair’s program to battle corruption in Africa.

One useful kind of Western aid is simply support for civil-society groups that battle corruption. Here in Somaliland, the press is generally free, but the president recently tossed three journalists in prison for reporting on corruption in his family. If Western countries speak out strongly in their defense, that effort may be worth a few million dollars in aid by reducing corruption in the future.

More peer pressure from within Africa would also help. Other African countries should stand up to a racist like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe with the same vigor they once used to stand up to white racist governments.

Another essential kind of foreign aid is supporting market-friendly economic policies, especially those that would nurture manufacturing industries.

In Mauritania, whose location in northwestern Africa would be ideal for exporting clothing to Europe and America, it takes 82 days to start a new business, which would then have to make 61 tax payments each year, requiring 696 hours to calculate and pay. And in the end, the tax would amount to 104.3 percent of the profit, according to the World Bank.

All that explains why you don’t have any shirts in your closet labeled “Made in Mauritania.”

So let’s be more generous with foreign aid, giving more than 22 cents per $100 of national income to development assistance (the average for rich countries is 47 cents). But those of us who call for aid and debt forgiveness also need to push just as hard for recipient nations to improve their governance, for ultimately the best way for poor countries to prosper is to adopt pro-growth policies.

And in the meantime, it’s time to recognize Somaliland as a nation. When a place does this well, we should hail it as a model, not shun it.

Bob Herbert says the Clintons are slinging mud at Barack Obama, and Paul Krugman suggests we should elect people based on substance rather than style. Dream on, Mr. Krugman…Here’s Mr. Herbert:

If Bill and Hillary Clinton were the stars of a reality TV show, it would be a weekly series called “The Connivers.” The Clintons, the most powerful of power couples, are always scheming at something, and they’re good at it.

Their latest project is to contrive ways to knock Barack Obama off his white horse and muddy him up a little. A lot, actually.

Most of the analyses after last week’s dust-up over David Geffen’s comments to Maureen Dowd have focused on whether the Clintons succeeded in tarnishing the junior senator from Illinois. What I found interesting was that no one questioned whether the Clintons would be willing to get down in the muck and start flinging it around. That was a given.

When Senator Obama talks about bringing a new kind of politics to the national scene, he’s talking about something that would differ radically from the relentlessly vicious, sleazy, mendacious politics that have plagued the country throughout the Bush-Clinton years. Whether he can pull that off is an open question. But there’s no doubt the Clintons want to stop him from succeeding.

Senator Obama has come riding out of the wilderness (all right, Chicago) to stand between the Clintons and their dream of returning to the White House and resuming what they will always see as the glory years of the 1990s.

He hurts Senator Clinton in myriad ways. In all the uproar over Mr. Geffen’s comments, hardly anyone has said they were wildly off the mark. There would be no Obama phenomenon if an awful lot of people weren’t fed up with just the sort of mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners politics that the Clintons and the Bush crowd represent. Senator Obama — at least for the time being — is an extremely attractive alternative.

Right behind that as a factor is the distinct possibility that Mr. Obama will ride off with the black vote, without which the Clintons are doomed. Those who joked that Bill Clinton was the first black president are now confronted with someone who might be the real deal.

Senator Obama is also much freer to take fresh stands on the issues. His camp has been delighted, for example, to watch Senator Clinton twist herself into a pretzel on Iraq. From day care to health care to trade and beyond, Mr. Obama is free to offer something new. He’s not tied to the Clinton experience, the Clintonian way of viewing the world.

And, finally, this campaign is not the be-all and end-all for Senator Obama. More easily than the Clintons, he can afford to make mistakes. He does not have to win this election. He can fight another day. In the absence of any catastrophic misstep, he could be selected as a vice-presidential candidate this time around. (It’s not too hard to imagine a John Edwards-Barack Obama pairing.) He can run again for president four years from now, or eight years from now.

His future, as Yogi might have said, is all in front of him.

The Clintons were fresh once. I remember the exhilarating bus tour they took with Al and Tipper Gore right after Bill Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination in the summer of 1992. There was a spontaneous quality to that tour and a sense that these four young leaders represented a new dawn of American politics.

Almost 15 years later, Hillary Clinton has to fight the perception that she is chasing yesterday’s dawn. She has the benefit of universal name recognition, uniformly high poll numbers and trainloads of campaign cash. But she still gives the impression that she’s riding the political high wire with the mixed blessing of Bill Clinton planted firmly on her shoulders.

It’s ironic that the first woman with a real shot at the presidency comes off not as a compelling underdog but as the powerful front-runner at the controls of a ruthless political machine.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Senator Obama is really offering a new, more hopeful brand of national politics. But here’s a bit of unsolicited advice for a candidate making his first foray into the crucible of presidential politics:

Don’t listen to those who tell you not to fight back against the Clintons. You will not become president if you allow yourself to become their punching bag. Keep in mind the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Raising politics to a higher level does not mean leaving oneself defenseless.

And now here’s Mr. Krugman:

Six years ago a man unsuited both by intellect and by temperament for high office somehow ended up running the country.

How did that happen? First, he got the Republican nomination by locking up the big money early.

Then, he got within chad-and-butterfly range of the White House because the public, enthusiastically encouraged by many in the news media, treated the presidential election like a high school popularity contest. The successful candidate received kid-gloves treatment — and a free pass on the fuzzy math of his policy proposals — because he seemed like a fun guy to hang out with, while the unsuccessful candidate was subjected to sniggering mockery over his clothing and his mannerisms.

Today, with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead thanks to presidential folly, with Al Qaeda resurgent and Afghanistan on the brink, you’d think we would have learned a lesson. But the early signs aren’t encouraging.

“Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course,” declared Newsweek’s Howard Fineman last month. Oh, my goodness. But in fairness to Mr. Fineman, he was talking about the almost content-free rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — a rivalry that, at this point, is mainly a struggle over who’s the bigger celebrity and gets to lock up the big donors.

Enough already. Let’s make this election about the issues. Let’s demand that presidential candidates explain what they propose doing about the real problems facing the nation, and judge them by how they respond.

I know the counterargument: you can’t tell in advance what challenges a president may face, so you should vote for the person, not the policy details. But how do you judge the person? Public images can be deeply misleading: remember when Dick Cheney had gravitas? The best way to judge politicians is by how they respond to hard policy questions.

So here are some questions for the Democratic hopefuls. (I’ll talk about the Republicans another time.)

First, what do they propose doing about the health care crisis? All the leading Democratic candidates say they’re for universal care, but only John Edwards has come out with a specific proposal. The others have offered only vague generalities — wonderfully uplifting generalities, in Mr. Obama’s case — with no real substance.

Second, what do they propose doing about the budget deficit? There’s a serious debate within the Democratic Party between deficit hawks, who point out how well the economy did in the Clinton years, and those who, having watched Republicans squander Bill Clinton’s hard-won surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy and a feckless war, would give other things — such as universal health care — higher priority than deficit reduction.

Mr. Edwards has come down on the anti-hawk side. But which side are Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on? I have no idea.

Third, what will candidates do about taxes? Many of the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Should they be extended, in whole or in part? And what do candidates propose doing about the alternative minimum tax, which will hit tens of millions of middle-class Americans unless something is done?

Fourth, how do the candidates propose getting America’s position in the world out of the hole the Bush administration has dug? All the Democrats seem to be more or less in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. But what do they think we should do about Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan? And what will they do if the lame-duck administration starts bombing Iran?

The point of these questions isn’t to pose an ideological litmus test. The point is, instead, to gauge candidates’ judgment, seriousness and courage. How they answer is as important as what they answer.

I should also say that although today’s column focuses on the Democrats, Republican candidates shouldn’t be let off the hook. In particular, someone needs to make Rudy Giuliani, who seems to have become the Republican front-runner, stop running exclusively on what he did on 9/11.

Over the last six years we’ve witnessed the damage done by a president nominated because he had the big bucks behind him, and elected (sort of) because he came across well on camera. We need to pick the next president on the basis of substance, not image.

Babbling Brooks is back, burbling on about “Hipster Parents.” Hipster? Oh, wow, and 23-Skidoo… Then we have Nicholas Kristof on maternal health and Frank Rich on terror’s comeback. First, here’s Bobo:

Can we please get over the hipster parent moment? Can we please see the end of those Park Slope alternative Stepford Moms in their black-on-black maternity tunics who turn their babies into fashion-forward, anticorporate indie-infants in order to stay one step ahead of the cool police?

Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey T-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad-parody club clones of mom and dad? Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies’ iPods?

I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves? Don’t they observe that with their inevitable hummus snacks, their pastel-free wardrobes, their unearned sense of superiority and their abusively pretentious children’s names like Anouschka and Elijah, they are displaying a degree of conformity that makes your average suburban cul-de-sac look like Renaissance Florence?

Enough already. The hipster parent trend has been going on too long and it’s got to stop. It’s been nearly three years since reporters for sociologically attuned publications like The New York Observer began noticing oversophisticated infants in “Anarchy in the Pre-K” shirts. Since then, the trend has exhausted its life cycle.

A witty essay by Adam Sternbergh announced the phenomenon in an April 2006 New York magazine. Sternbergh described 40-year-old men and women with $200 bedhead haircuts and $600 messenger bags, who “look, talk, act and dress like people who are 22 years old,” and dress their infants as if they’re 16. He called these pseudo-adults “Grups,” observing that they smashed any remaining semblance of a generation gap.

He noticed that the music of the parental generation sounds exactly like the music of the kids’ generation. They have the same rock star fashion sense, and share the same taste for distressed denim. He found a music video director, Adam Levite, who had a guitar collection propped up in his TriBeCa loft, and then similar miniature versions of the same guitars for his 6-year-old son, Asa.

Then came the hipster parents’ own online magazine, Babble.com.

Babble is a normal parental advice magazine submerged under geological layers of attitudinizing. There are articles about products from the alternative industrial complex (early ’60s retro baby food organizers). There’s a blog from a rock star mom (it’s lonely on the road). There’s a column by L.A.’s Rebecca Woolf, a sort of Silver Lake Erma Bombeck. (“Who says becoming a mom means succumbing to laser tattoo removal and moving to the suburbs?”)

On top of that there’s been a flourishing of the movement’s official gathering site — the message board complex UrbanBaby.com. Here, highly educated parents trade tips about the toxic dangers of aluminum foil. Stay-at-home Martyr Mommies trade gibes with their working mom frenemies. High-achieving types try to restrain their judgmental, perfectionist tendencies with self-mockery: “I horrified myself the other day when I found myself being surprised that Angelina [Jolie] would let Zahara eat Ms. Vickie’s chips. Shoot me before I turn into a sanctimommy!”

Finally, in a sign that the hip parenting thing has jumped the shark, the movement got its own book, the indescribably dull “Alternadad,” about a self-described whiny narcissist who tries not to let his son’s birth get in the way of his rock festival lifestyle. Surely a trend has hit absurdity when you have a book in which the most memorable moment comes when the writer succumbs to the corporate temptations of Toys “R” Us.

Let me be clear: I’m not against the indie/alternative lifestyle. There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity.

What I object to is people who make their children ludicrous. Innocent infants should not be compelled to sport “My Mom’s Blog Is Better Than Your Mom’s Blog” infant wear. They should not be turned into deceptive edginess badges by parents who refuse to face that their days of chaotic, unscheduled moshing are over.

For God’s sake, let’s respect the dignity of youth.

I wonder what on earth set him off on this rant… Oh, well… Here’s Mr. Kristof with something worth reading.

President Bush’s budget request this month proposes that the U.S. cut spending on global maternal and child health programs to $346 million, or just $1.15 per person in the U.S.

To understand what the cuts mean, meet Simeesh Segaye.

Ms. Simeesh, a warm 21-year-old Ethiopian peasant with a radiant smile, married at 19 and quickly became pregnant. After she had endured two days of obstructed labor, her neighbors carried her to a road and packed her into a bus, but it took another two days to get to the nearest hospital.

By then the baby was dead. And Ms. Simeesh awakened to another horror: She began leaking urine and feces from her vagina, a result of a childbirth injury called obstetric fistula.

Ms. Simeesh’s family paid $10 for a public bus to take her to a hospital that could repair her fistula. But the other passengers took one whiff of her and complained vociferously that they shouldn’t have to share the vehicle with someone who stinks. The bus driver ordered her off.

Mortified, Ms. Simeesh was crushed again when her husband left her. Her parents built a separate hut for her because of her smell, but they nursed her and brought her food and water.

In that hut, she stayed — alone, ashamed, helpless, bewildered. She barely ate, because the more she ate or drank, the more wastes trickled down her legs.

“I just curled up,” she said. “For two years.”

Ms. Simeesh was, in a sense, lucky. She wasn’t one of the 530,000 women who die each year in pregnancy and childbirth — a number that hasn’t declined in 30 years. Here in Ethiopia, a woman has one chance in 14 of dying in childbirth at some point in her life.

For every woman who dies in childbirth worldwide, another 20 are injured. But because the victims are born with three strikes against them — they are poor, rural and female — they are invisible and voiceless, receiving almost no help either from poor countries or from the developed world.

So Ms. Simeesh huddled in a fetal position on the floor of her hut for two years, thinking about killing herself. Finally, last month, Ms. Simeesh’s parents sold all their farm animals and paid a driver to take her to the hospital in a vehicle with no other passengers present to complain.

So now Ms. Simeesh is lying in a bed here in the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital (www.fistulafoundation.org). The hospital is run by an Australian gynecologist, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, whom I’ve written about before. Dr. Hamlin is the Mother Teresa of our age.

The doctors here will try to repair the fistula, but first they must strengthen Ms. Simeesh, who is skeletal. Her legs have withered and are permanently bent into a fetal position, so that she can’t straighten them or move them.

In the U.S., neither Democrats nor Republicans have ever shown great interest in maternal health. But it’s an issue that deserves far more support, partly because we know exactly what to do to bring down maternal mortality and morbidity: Sri Lanka and Honduras have both shown how poor countries can drastically cut rates of death and injury.

And in the breakaway Somaliland region of Somalia, an extraordinary woman named Edna Adan Ismail runs her own obstetric hospital and trains midwives, underscoring how women’s lives can be saved even in the most difficult environments. Ms. Edna struggles one moment to deliver a breech baby, and the next to round up surgical masks. She is helped by a group of Americans, Friends of Edna Hospital (www.ednahospital.netfirms.com), who raise funds and scavenge supplies. (To see Ms. Edna, Ms. Simeesh and others in this column, please visit the video I have posted on my blog at www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

Dr. Hamlin and Ms. Edna deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for showing the world how to turn the tide of maternal mortality and morbidity, and for offering comfort to some of the most forlorn people in the world. At a time when we’re proposing further cuts in our negligible budget for maternal and child health, I was deeply moved by the sight of Ruth Kennedy, a British midwife at the fistula hospital, comforting Ms. Simeesh and bringing a lovely smile to her lips.

“They think they’ve been cursed by God,” Ms. Kennedy explained. “And we tell them that they haven’t been cursed by God and that they’re beautiful and that the only reason that they got a fistula is because we failed them as health professionals.”

And now here’s Frank Rich:

“United 93,” Hollywood’s highly praised but indifferently attended 9/11 docudrama, will be only a blip on tonight’s Oscar telecast. The ratings rise of “24” has stalled as audiences defect from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of “Heroes.” Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week’s terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American “intelligence and counterterrorism officials” leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda’s comeback, and ask yourself: Haven’t we been here before?

If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system “was blinking red,” as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq “surge” is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what’s going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on “Meet the Press” that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was “pretty well confirmed,” he said (though it was not), that bin Laden’s operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

In the Scooter Libby trial, Mr. Cheney’s former communications aide, Catherine Martin, said that delivering a message on “Meet the Press” was “a tactic we often used.” No kidding. That mention of the nonexistent Prague meeting was the first of five times that the vice president would imply an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration on that NBC show before the war began in March 2003. This bogus innuendo was an essential tool for selling the war precisely because we had lost bin Laden in Afghanistan. If we could fight Al Qaeda by going to war in Iraq instead, the administration could claim it didn’t matter where bin Laden was. (Mr. Bush pointedly stopped mentioning him altogether in public.)

The president now says his government never hyped any 9/11-Iraq links. “Nobodyhas ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq,” he said last August after finally conceding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact everyone in the administration insinuated it constantly, including him. Mr. Bush told of “high-level” Iraq-Qaeda contacts “that go back a decade” in the same notorious October 2002 speech that gave us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds. So effective was this propaganda that by 2003 some 44 percent of Americans believed (incorrectly) that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis; only 3 percent had seen an Iraq link right after 9/11.

Though the nonexistent connection was even more specious than the nonexistent nuclear W.M.D., Mr. Bush still leans on it today even while denying that he does so. He has to. His litanies that we are “on the offense” by pursuing the war in Iraq and “fighting terrorists over there, so that we don’t have to fight them here” depend on the premise that we went into that country in the first place to vanquish Al Qaeda and that it is still the “central front” in the war on terror. In January’s State of the Union address hawking the so-called surge, Mr. Bush did it again, warning that to leave Iraq “would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy.”

But now more than ever, the opposite is true. It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn’t used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: “Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that’s where it is.” It’s typical of Mr. Bush’s self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake — dropping the ball on Al Qaeda — was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a “truce” with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. “This deal is not at all with the Taliban,” the president said, claiming that “this is against the Taliban, actually.” When Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post reported that same month that the bin Laden trail was “stone cold” and had been since Mr. Bush diverted special operations troops from that hunt to Iraq in 2003, the White House branded the story flat wrong. “We’re on the hunt,” Mr. Bush said. “We’ll get him.”

Far from getting him or any of his top operatives dead or alive, the president has sat idly by, showering praise on General Musharraf while Taliban attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan have increased threefold. As The Times reported last week, now both bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be “steadily building an operations hub” in North Waziristan. We know that last year’s London plot to bomb airliners, like the bus-and-subway bombings of 2005, was not just the work of home-grown jihadists in Britain, but also of Qaeda operatives. Some of the would-be bombers were trained in Qaeda’s Pakistan camps much as their 9/11 predecessors had been trained in Afghanistan.

All of this was already going on when Mr. Bush said just before the election that “absolutely, we’re winning” and that “Al Qaeda is on the run.” What’s changed in the few months since his lie is that even more American troops are tied down in Iraq, that even more lethal weapons are being used against them, that even more of the coalition of the unwilling are fleeing, and that even more Americans are tuning out both the administration and the war they voted down in November to savor a referendum that at least offers tangible results, “American Idol.”

Yet Mr. Bush still denies reality. Ten days ago he told the American Enterprise Institute that “the Taliban have been driven from power” and proposed that America help stabilize the Pakistan border by setting up “Reconstruction Opportunity Zones” (remember that “Gulf Opportunity Zone” he promised after Katrina?) to “give residents the chance to export locally made products to the United States, duty-free.” In other words, let’s fight terrorism not by shifting America’s focus from Iraq to the central front, but by shopping for Taliban souvenirs!

Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us — asleep — even as the system is blinking red once again.

This morning Ann Althouse describes the elaborate gavotte Rudi and Mitt are dancing around abortion (she’s okay with that, by the way, and says we should be patient), and Maureen Dowd finds a group that St. McCain isn’t pandering to – Americans. Here’s Prof. Althouse:

We’re seeing some awfully complicated positions on abortion from some of the presidential candidates. It’s easy to hoot with derision.

Rudy Giuliani did an elaborate dance the other day. Speaking in South Carolina, he said that “as a lawyer,” he liked having “strict constructionists” on the federal courts. But he didn’t specify what he wanted those “strict constructionist” judges to do with Roe v. Wade. Instead, he shifted to talking about how it’s “part of our freedom” for the legislatures in the various states to make their own decisions about law.

More recently, on Larry King’s show, Giuliani said he was pro-choice, though he hates abortion, and retreated again into ideas about the sort of judges he would appoint. King dogged him for blunter answers, and Giuliani must have sounded evasive to most people.

When King assumed that “strict constructionist” judges would overrule Roe v. Wade, Giuliani said, “We don’t know that.” When King asked, “Would it hurt you if they overturned it?” Giuliani turned the focus away from himself: we need good judges, and then there are always the states.

Meanwhile, Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post is pointing at a contorted pose that Mitt Romney struck, explaining something he said when he ran for governor of Massachusetts: “What I said to people was that I personally did not favor abortion, that I am personally pro-life. However, as governor I would not change the laws of the commonwealth relating to abortion.

“Now I don’t try and put a bow around that and say what does that mean you are — does that mean you’re pro-life or pro-choice, because that whole package — meaning I’m personally pro-life but I won’t change the laws, you could describe that as — well, I don’t think you can describe it in one hyphenated word.”

If you’re already opposed to Giuliani or Romney, I’m sure the ridicule practically writes itself. Something so convoluted has got to be manipulation. Right? Compare them with straight-talking John McCain, who said: “I do not support Roe v. Wade. It should be overturned.” That’s harder to mock.

But it is the candidate who sets out to deceive us who has the most reason to keep it simple. By contrast, complexity may signal that the candidate is actually trying to tell us something about how he thinks. He may have a sophisticated grasp of the role of the executive in relation to the courts and the legislatures. We might do well to tolerate some complexity.

What should a candidate say about abortion? To represent what the country as a whole thinks, the president ought to take account of the deep beliefs Americans have about both reproductive freedom and the value of unborn life. To deserve the trust embodied in appointment power, the president should have a sound understanding of the judges as independent decision makers who follow an interpretive methodology that operates differently from political choice.

So instead of smirking, we should welcome the kind of complicated statements we’re hearing from Romney and Giuliani. Any individual who is offering to wield presidential power should resist assuring us about what his judicial appointees will do. To do otherwise is to tip us off that he means to populate the judiciary with politicos.

If we listen with a decent sympathy, the things Giuliani and Romney say about abortion make sense. When Romney ran for governor, he made a commitment to Massachusetts voters not to attack the law he knew they supported. That was politically expedient, of course, but it also took an admirably limited view of executive power and acknowledged the independence of the legal system.

Similarly, Giuliani respects the distinctive work of judges and the separate role of the state legislatures. If Roe were overruled, those legislatures would decide how to regulate abortion. And decentralized legislation really is fairly called “part of our freedom” because the Constitution’s framers saw the balance of power between the national government and the states as a safeguard against tyranny.

So I’d like to see a little more patience with what Romney and Giuliani are saying. But that doesn’t mean we should be naïve. The next president will select real individuals to be judges, and no matter how diligent they are, they will bring something of their humanity to their interpretation of the law, a version of humanity that will express something of the president’s cast of mind.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. She is a guest columnist this month.

And now here is MoDo:

So some guy stands up after John McCain’s luncheon speech here yesterday to a group of business types and asks him a question.

“I’ve seen in the press where in your run for the presidency, you’ve been sucking up to the religious right,” the man said, adding: “I was just wondering how soon do you predict a Republican candidate for president will start sucking up to the old Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party?”

Mr. McCain listened with his eyes downcast, then looked the man in the eye, smiled and replied: “I’m probably going to get in trouble, but what’s wrong with sucking up to everybody?” It was a flash of the old McCain, and the audience laughed.

Certainly, the senator has tried to worm his way into the affections of W. and the religious right: the Discovery Institute, a group that tries to derail Darwinism and promote the teaching of Intelligent Design, helped present the lunch, dismaying liberal bloggers who have tracked Mr. McCain’s devolution on evolution.

A reporter asked the senator if his pandering on Roe v. Wade had made him “the darling and candidate of the ultra right wing?” ( In South Carolina earlier this week, he tried to get more evangelical street cred by advocating upending Roe v. Wade.) “I dispute that assertion,” he replied. “I believe that it was Dr. Dobson recently who said that he prayed that I would not receive the Republican nomination. I was just over at Starbucks this morning. ... I talk everywhere, and I try to reach out to everyone.”

But there’s one huge group that he’s not pandering to: Americans.

Most Americans are sick and tired of watching things go hideously backward in Iraq and Afghanistan, and want someone to show them the way out. Mr. McCain is stuck on the bridge of a sinking policy with W. and Dick Cheney, who showed again this week that there is no bottom to his lunacy. The senator supported a war that didn’t need to be fought and is a cheerleader for a surge that won’t work.

It has left Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, once the most spontaneous of campaigners, off balance. He’s like a cat without its whiskers. When the moderator broached the subject of Iraq after lunch, Mr. McCain grimaced, stuck out his tongue a little and said sarcastically, “Thanks.”

Defending his stance, he sounds like a Bill Gates robot prototype, repeating in a monotone: “I believe we’ve got a new strategy. ... It can succeed. I can’t guarantee success. But I do believe firmly that if we get out now we risk chaos and genocide in the region.”

He was asked about Britain’s decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq. “Tony Blair, the prime minister, has shown great political courage,” Mr. McCain said. “He has literally sacrificed his political career because of Iraq, my friends,” because he thought “it was the right thing to do.”

He said he worried that Iranian-backed Shiites were taking more and more control of southern Iraq. (That was probably because the Brits kept peace in southern Iraq all along by giving Iranian-backed Shiites more and more control.) And he noted that the British are sending more troops to Afghanistan, “which is very necessary because we’re going to have a very hot spring in Afghanistan.”

But then he got back to Tony Blair sacrificing his political career, and it was clear that he was also talking about himself. When a reporter later asked him if Iraq might consume his candidacy, he replied evenly: “Sure.”

I asked him if he got discouraged when he reads stories like the one in The Wall Street Journal yesterday about Ahmad Chalabi, the man who helped goad and trick the U.S. into war, who got “a position inside the Iraqi government that could help determine whether the Bush administration’s new push to secure Baghdad succeeds.”

Or the New York Times article yesterday about a couple of Iraqi policemen who joined American forces on searches in Baghdad, but then turned quisling, running ahead to warn residents to hide their weapons and other incriminating evidence.

He nodded. “I think one of the big question marks is how the Maliki government will step up to the plate,” he said.

And how, I asked him, can Dick Cheney tell ABC News that British troops getting out is “an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well,” while he says that Democrats who push to get America out would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy.” Isn’t that a nutty?

But Senator McCain was back on his robo-loop: “I can only express my gratitude for the enormous help that the British have given us.”

Sometimes I miss John McCain, even when I’m with him.

Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman this morning. First up is Friedman on what passes for foreign policy in the W administration, then Krugman on climate change.

Watching the Bush team wrestle with Iran, North Korea and Iraq reminds me of something that used to be said of the Reagan administration: The right hand never knew what the far right hand was doing.

In fact, my bet is that when the inside history of the Bush team is written, we will discover that, contrary to its carefully managed image of a disciplined core operating from consistent, conservative principles, it has actually been one of the most internally divided administrations — ever.

The only thing the Bush folks all agreed on was that they would never do anything Bill Clinton did. Beyond that, it’s been a food fight. The trial of Scooter Libby, with its testimony about wars between the V.P.’s office and the White House, the White House and the C.I.A., and everyone against the State Department, proves that beyond a reasonable doubt.

When the former Bush U.N. ambassador John Bolton trashed the president’s recent deal with North Korea as a “charade,” though, he highlighted the biggest internal division of all within the Bush team: how to deal with rogue regimes like Iran, North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq — whether to go for regime change or behavior change.

On Iran and North Korea, “this administration does not have clear policies, it has competing impulses,” said Robert Litwak of the Wilson Center, who just published a smart book on this theme: “Regime Change: U.S. Strategy Through the Prism of 9/11.” “The administration’s mantra is ‘all options are on the table.’ But the dilemma is that too many objectives are on the table as well.”

Because this administration was divided for so long on Iran and North Korea, over regime change or behavior change, it got neither. All it got was that Iran and North Korea both went out and bought Bush insurance: a nuclear weapons program.

President Bush obviously recognizes that and is now trying to remedy it. Bill Clinton was criticized for taking more golf mulligans — do-overs — than any other president. Mr. Bush will be remembered for taking more foreign policy mulligans than any other president.

On North Korea, the president has finally decided to focus purely on changing behavior. He struck a very sensible deal last week with Kim Jong Il to take his country off our terrorism list and normalize relations, provided Mr. Kim gives up his nukes.

But we could have had a similar deal years ago — when North Korea had only two nukes — had the Bush team not been wrangling with itself over regime change or behavior change. While it wrangled, Mr. Kim built up his nuclear arsenal, adding six to 12 more bombs. If this deal is carried out, which is still uncertain, the wasted years will not have been a disaster. If it isn’t carried out, they will have been very costly.

Why do you think that a year after Mr. Bush told us we were “addicted to oil” we still have no serious plan to end that addiction? Because the market fundamentalists in his White House — led by Dick Cheney, who opposes any government effort to impose carbon caps or taxes to promote alternative energies, à la California — keep blocking the market pragmatists who do. And Mr. Bush won’t intervene.

The irony of Iraq is that it’s the one place where Mr. Bush decisively chose regime change, but he then executed it so poorly, with insufficient troops, that Iraq never stood a chance. If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland. Today’s Bush troop surge in Iraq is just another mulligan — the president’s trying to do in 2007 what he should have done in 2003. In between, we’ve paid a huge price.

How about we avoid a mulligan on Iran? Let’s put a clear deal on the table: full diplomatic relations, security guarantees and thousands of student visas if Iran puts its nuclear program under U.N. inspection and stops supporting terrorism. If not: more sanctions and isolation. Such an offer would at least get us some leverage, unite us more with our allies outside Iran, energize our allies inside Iran and force some excruciating choices on Iran’s leaders.

“Resolving the contradiction in Washington will sharpen the contradiction in Tehran,” Mr. Litwak argued. “Taking regime change off the table in America will put behavior change on the table in Iran.”

I guess we should be thankful that Mr. Bush is trying to fix some of his mistakes, but we have paid a huge, unnecessary price for his learning curve. Which is why it’s always best to get it right the first time. The best golfers never take mulligans, and the best presidents never need them.

And now here’s Mr. Krugman:

The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it.

Aside from a few dead-enders on the political right, climate change skeptics seem to be making a seamless transition from denial to fatalism. In the past, they rejected the science. Now, with the scientific evidence pretty much irrefutable, they insist that it doesn’t matter because any serious attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions is politically and economically impossible.

Behind this claim lies the assumption, explicit or implicit, that any substantial cut in energy use would require a drastic change in the way we live. To be fair, some people in the conservation movement seem to share that assumption.

But the assumption is false. Let me tell you about a real-world counterexample: an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle centered on automobiles and single-family houses.

The name of the economy? California.

There’s nothing heroic about California’s energy policy — but that’s precisely the point. Over the years the state has adopted a series of conservation measures that are anything but splashy. They’re the kind of drab, colorless stuff that excites only real policy wonks. Yet the cumulative effect has been impressive, if still well short of what we really need to do.

The energy divergence between California and the rest of the United States dates from the 1970s. Both the nation and the state initially engaged in significant energy conservation after that decade’s energy crisis. But conservation in most of America soon stalled: after a decade of rapid progress, improvements in auto mileage came to an end, while electricity consumption continued to rise rapidly, driven by the growing size of houses, the increasing use of air-conditioning and the proliferation of appliances.

In California, by contrast, the state continued to push policies designed to encourage conservation, especially of electricity. And these policies worked.

People in California have always used a bit less energy than other Americans because of the mild climate. But the difference has grown much larger since the 1970s. Today, the average Californian uses about a third less total energy than the average American, uses less than 60 percent as much electricity, and is responsible for emitting only about 55 percent as much carbon dioxide.

How did the state do it? In some cases conservation was mandated directly, through energy efficiency standards for appliances and rules governing new construction. Also, regulated power companies were given new incentives to promote conservation, via rule changes that “decoupled” their profits from the amount of electricity they sold.

And yes, a variety of state actions had the effect of raising energy prices. In the early 1970s, the price of electricity in California was close to the national average. Today, it’s about 50 percent higher.

Incidentally, since someone is bound to mention it: the California energy crisis of 2000-2001 has nothing to do with this story. That crisis was caused by market manipulation — we’ve got it on tape — made possible by ill-conceived deregulation, not conservation.

Back to California’s success. As the higher price of power indicates, conservation didn’t come free. Still, it’s striking how invisible California’s energy policy remains. It’s easy to see why New York has much lower per capita energy consumption than, say, Georgia: it’s a matter of high-rises versus sprawl, mass transit versus driving alone. It’s less obvious that Los Angeles is a much greener city than Atlanta. But it is.

So is California a role model for climate policy? No and yes. Even if America as a whole had matched California’s conservation efforts, we’d still be emitting about as much carbon dioxide now as we were in 1990. That’s too much.

But California’s experience shows that serious conservation is a lot less disruptive, imposes much less of a burden, than the skeptics would have it. And the fact that a state government, with far more limited powers than those at Washington’s disposal, has been able to achieve so much is a good omen for our ability to do a lot to limit climate change, if and when we find the political will.

Babbling Brooks has guidance for you if you want to win the Publican nomination, and Bob Herbert says news about serious matters is just boring because, well, look — Brittany shaved her head! Let’s have our dose of Bobo first. (At least he’s not writing the book…)

I want you to know I’ve shelved the idea of writing a book called “The Idiot’s Guide to Winning the Republican Presidential Nomination.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas. Here are a few rules the G.O.P. contenders should follow if they want to sweep this thing.

First: Be the Snowball. The conventional view is that Feb. 5 is going to be the decisive day of the race, when California, New Jersey, Illinois and a bunch of other states will probably have their primaries. That’s wrong.

Since so many states will be voting then, the candidates will be stretched thin in all of them. As a result, the Republican candidate who does best in the first three states — Iowa, New Hampshire and, on Feb. 2, South Carolina — will sweep on Feb. 5 through sheer momentum.

You want to be that snowball rolling downhill. Focus your efforts on the first three, especially New Hampshire. Win those, and the big states will take care of themselves.

Second: Remember the Rule of Three. When three big candidates go up against one another, two of them often get into a mutually destructive grudge match and the third skates through to victory. (Right now, the McCain and Romney camps seem set to brawl, leaving Giuliani alone.) Whatever you do, don’t let yourself become one of the duelists.

Third: Don’t Be a University. Most campaigns organize their policy experts like academic departments — economists on one committee, social policy types on another, religious leaders on a third. They come up with utterly conventional recommendations.

You want to organize your committees according to priorities. For example, create a Flourishing Families Committee. Get economists, religious activists and psychologists in one room to figure out how government can reduce stress on struggling families. You’ll be surprised by how much interdisciplinary creativity you can unleash and how much closer you get to the problems of real people.

Most of all, you’ll break free from the useless categories most pundits use to define Republicans: social conservative, free market libertarian, neoconservative. If you define yourself by those categories, you’re dead.

Fourth: Be the Change. You are running to lead a traumatized party. Many Republicans think their party can recover from recent setbacks by returning to the old verities: cutting spending, cutting taxes, attacking government bureaucrats.

That’s wrong. The world has changed since the glory days of the 1980s, and no amount of Reagan nostalgia will bring those conditions back.

For example, Republicans in the 1980s could win by promising to expand freedom and reduce overbearing government. But today, post-9/11, most Americans aren’t anxious because their freedoms are being impinged. They’re anxious because there’s chaos all around: foreign policy chaos, fiscal chaos, cultural chaos. The authority structures they rely on have let them down.

You need to lead the party to a new definition of Republicanism. This is a Republicanism that can provide safety, order and authority, so people can feel secure enough to pursue their dreams. This doesn’t mean championing a big government. It means championing a strong government that can do the jobs it is supposed to do.

Your main job over the next few months is to come up with a governing philosophy that explains how individual freedom can be enhanced by a strong, limited and energetic federal government.

Fifth: Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse. If your last name is Giuliani, McCain or Romney, social conservatives are never going to love you. Don’t try to pander to gain their devotion. Instead, offer them a deal.

Tell them: You social conservatives may not agree with me on everything. You may doubt my recent conversions on your issues. You may not even like me. But I’m the guy who can deliver on four programs you want. Then pick out four programs you and they can agree on and repeat them in every speech for the next year.

Sixth: Get Ready for Phase II. Over the next several months, the surge in Iraq will dominate debate. But by late summer, the surge will either have succeeded or failed. A new, broader debate will start. One candidate will define the landscape by coming up with a new Grand Strategy for the war against extremism. Be that guy.

Seventh: Win the T.R. Primary. Many of you admire Theodore Roosevelt. You’ve got his picture on your walls. Every day, as the campaign madness swirls around, wake up and ask, Would T.R. be proud of what I’m doing? If not, take a risk. Do something else.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert about the state of the news. It ain’t pretty.

Have they buried Anna Nicole Smith yet?

Are you kidding? Ms. Smith may be dead and rapidly decomposing, but there’s too much fun still to be reaped from her story to let it die just yet. This is world-class entertainment: Larry King, “Today,” CNN, The New York Times.

Even the judge in the televised hearing over what to do with Ms. Smith’s remains is milking his 15 minutes, like Judge Ito of O. J. Simpson fame. In a burst of wisdom from the bench, the judge, Larry Seidlin, said, “Like a Muhammad Ali fight, sometimes you have to wait the whole 10 rounds.”

When we were kids we were taught not to laugh at people who were obviously mentally or emotionally disturbed. With Ms. Smith, who was deeply and unmistakably disturbed, we put her on television and laughed and laughed. Would she say something stupid, or spill out of her dress, or pass out in public from booze or drugs? How hysterically funny!

Then her son died. Then she died, leaving an orphaned infant daughter. Instead of turning away chastened, shamed, we homed in like happy vultures. Whatever entertainment value Ms. Smith had when she was alive increased exponentially when she was kind enough to die for us. Now she’s on the tube around the clock.

The story, as they say, has legs.

There are other stories out there, but they aren’t nearly as much fun. The Times reported on Monday, for example, that Al Qaeda is getting its act together in Pakistan and is setting up training camps in an area that, apparently, we don’t dare trespass in.

According to the article, “American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.”

The article went on to say, ominously, “The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.”

I imagine that there are a fair number of television viewers and newspaper readers who have trouble distinguishing the relative importance of celebrity stories, like the death of Anna Nicole Smith, from other matters in the news, like the reconstitution of forces responsible for the devastating Sept. 11 attacks.

If air time is any guide, there’s no contest. It’s been obvious for the longest time that the line between news and entertainment has vanished. News is entertainment. And the death of Anna Nicole Smith is more entertaining — for the time being, at least — than the war in Iraq or the plodding machinations of bin Laden and Zawahri.

Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were on the cover of Newsweek last week with the headline “The Girls Gone Wild Effect.” When you turned to the story, there was a full-page picture of the former best friends, with a glassy-eyed Britney looking for all the world like a younger version of Anna Nicole Smith.

The lead-in to the article said in large type: “Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole — They seem to be everywhere and they may not be wearing underwear.”

The nation may be at war, and Al Qaeda may be gearing up for a rematch. But that’s no fun, not when Britney is shaving off her hair and Jennifer Aniston is reported to have a new nose and the thrill-a-minute watch over Anna Nicole’s remains is still the hottest thing on TV.

It was Neil Postman who warned in 1985 that we were amusing ourselves to death. I’m not sure anyone knew how literally to take him.

More than 20 years later, the masses have nearly succeeded in drawing the curtains on anything that’s not entertaining. No one can figure out what do about Iraq or Al Qaeda. A great American cultural center like New Orleans was all but washed away, and no one knows how to put it back together. The ice caps are melting and Al Gore is traveling the land like the town crier, raising the alarm about global warming.

But none of that has really gotten the public’s attention. None of it is amusing enough. As a nation of spectators, we seem content to sit with a pizza and a brew in front of the high-def flat-screen TV, obsessing over Anna Nicole et al., and giving no thought to the possibility that the calamitous events unfolding in the world may someday reach our doorsteps.

Today Maureen Dowd is the only one cowering behind the NYT firewall. She’s dishing about Obama and Hollywood, and, like, how Hillary’s like, you know, all pissed and all…

Hillary is not David Geffen’s dreamgirl.

“Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high,” says Mr. Geffen, the Hollywood mogul and sultan of “Dreamgirls,” as he sits by a crackling fire beneath a Jasper Johns flag and a matched pair of de Koonings in the house that Jack Warner built (which old-time Hollywood stars joked was the house that God would have built). “Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.”

Barack Obama has made an entrance in Hollywood unmatched since Scarlett O’Hara swept into the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Instead of the Tarleton twins, the Illinois senator is flirting with the Dreamworks trio: Mr. Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave him a party last night that raised $1.3 million and Hillary’s hackles.

She didn’t stand outside the gates to the Geffen mansion, where glitterati wolfed down Wolfgang Puck savories, singing the Jennifer Hudson protest anthem “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” But she’s not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, either. Hillary loyalists have hissed at defecting donors to remember the good old days of jumping on the Lincoln Bedroom bed.

“Hillary is livid that Obama’s getting the first big fund-raiser here,” one friend of hers said.

Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between “The Queen” and “Dreamgirls” when you’ve got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?

Terry McAuliffe and First Groupie Bill have tried to hoard the best A.T.M. machine in politics for the Missus, but there’s some Clinton fatigue among fatigued Clinton donors, who fret that Bill will “pull the focus” and shelve his wife’s campaign.

“I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Mr. Geffen says, adding that if Republicans are digging up dirt, they’ll wait until Hillary’s the nominee to use it. “I think they believe she’s the easiest to defeat.”

She is overproduced and overscripted. “It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Mr. Geffen says. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”

The babble here is not about “Babel”; it’s about the battle of the billionaires. Not only have Ron Burkle and David Geffen been vying to buy The Los Angeles Times — they have been vying to raise money for competing candidates. Mr. Burkle, a supermarket magnate, is close to the Clintons, and is helping Hillary parry Barry Obama by arranging a fund-raiser for her in March, with a contribution from Mr. Spielberg.

Did Mr. Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? “Yes,” Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? “I hope so,” he says, “because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

Once, David Geffen and Bill Clinton were tight as ticks. Mr. Geffen helped raise some $18 million for Bill and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom twice. Bill chilled at Chateau Geffen. Now, the Dreamworks co-chairman calls the former president “a reckless guy” who “gave his enemies a lot of ammunition to hurt him and to distract the country.”

They fell out in 2000, when Mr. Clinton gave a pardon to Marc Rich after rebuffing Mr. Geffen’s request for one for Leonard Peltier. “Marc Rich getting pardoned? An oil-profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice?” Mr. Geffen says. “Yet another time when the Clintons were unwilling to stand for the things that they genuinely believe in. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

The mogul knows it’s easy to mock Hollywood — “people with Priuses and private planes” — and agrees with George Clooney that it’s probably not helpful for stars to campaign for candidates, given the caricatures of Hollywood.

I ask what he will say if he ever runs into Bill Clinton again. “ ‘Hi,’ ” he replies. And will he be upset if Hillary wins and he never gets to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom again?

“No,” he says with a puckish smile. “It’s not as nice as my bedroom.”

It's a pity that the Democrats only have two people considering a run for the White House, isn't it...

This morning it’s Ann Althouse on, well, being a law professor, I guess, and Nicholas Kristof, writing from Ethiopia, suggests we should start a war we can win. First up, Ms. Althouse:

“The Paper Chase” is the book you’re supposed to read before you go to law school. “Paper Chase” or “One L.” Me, I read Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year of law school, “One L.” I’d seen the movie “The Paper Chase” when it came out in 1973, but not because I had any thought back then of going to law school. I didn’t. It was just a good movie about a young guy’s struggle with an authority figure, like so many other movies we saw back then. The authority figure just happened to be a law professor.

When I was applying to law schools in 1977, I really didn’t need an anti-authoritarian novel about a young guy who lets a love affair with the professor’s daughter eat into his study time. I was married and — it seemed then — a little old for that sort of frippery.

I was 26. What I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead. “One L” — which was new then — laid out the facts about law school and got you just scared enough to fire you up for the challenge.

But last Friday, I found myself at New York Law School, at a conference on writing about the law, and the lunch-hour speaker was the author of “The Paper Chase,” John Jay Osborn Jr.

Osborn, who, like me, is a law professor, came to tell us why his protagonist, James Hart, folds his first-year transcript, unread, into a paper airplane and sails it into the ocean and why, less metaphorically, law students hate law school.

Do law students hate law school? When I went to law school, I told myself I loved law school. It was a pose, a strategy, and I knew that. I was being pragmatic.

But Osborn says they hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer,” said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of “their own narrative,” as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to “reclaim” it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose, like the domineering grading system that Hart pitched off in the form of a paper airplane.

Osborn knocked that other book: “ ‘One L’ doesn’t have a H[e]art.” He believes in the ways of fiction. There ought to be a hero to show us the way to live. And we need a villain like Kingsfield, whom, Osborn said, he concocted for dramatic purposes. I preferred the memoir, the account of an ordinary man as he encounters some interesting, fallible human beings who did the work that both Osborn and I do now.

Though none of the law professors I know are much at all like Kingsfield, Osborn chided us law professors for making our students so unhappy: stop calling on them; listen only to volunteers; don’t dictate how they should think; let them tell their own stories.

Law should connect to the real world. But that doesn’t mean we ought to devote our classes to the personal expression of law students. The cases we read for class are always based on factual disputes that arose in real life. In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching cases on standing doctrine, which prevents the courts from articulating the law in the abstract and ties the judicial power to resolving concrete controversies between genuine adversaries. If it’s not real enough, it’s not a case.

So law is not abstract unless one makes the mistake of turning it into an abstraction. We law professors tend to worry about seeming like Professor Kingsfield. But we ought to worry less about that prospect and more about preserving and respecting our own tradition of teaching from the cases.

The students who come into our law schools are adults who have decided that they are ready to spend a tremendous amount of time and money preparing to enter a profession. We show the greatest respect for their individual autonomy if we deny ourselves the comfort of trying to make them happy and teach them what they came to learn: how to think like lawyers.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse. She is a guest columnist this month.

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

They were two old men, one arriving by motorcade with bodyguards and the other groping blindly as he shuffled on a footpath with a stick, but for a moment the orbits of Jimmy Carter and Mekonnen Leka intersected on this remote battlefield in southern Ethiopia.

Mr. Mekonnen, who thinks he may be 78, is a patient in Mr. Carter’s war on river blindness. He is so blind that he rarely leaves the house any more, but on this occasion he staggered to the village clinic to get a treatment for the worms inside him.

His skin is mottled because the worms cause ferocious itching, especially when they become more active at night. He and other victims scratch until they are bloodied and their skin is partly worn away. Ultimately the worms travel to the eye, where they often destroy the victim’s sight.

Ethiopia has the largest proportion of blind people in the world, 1.2 percent, because of the combined effects of river blindness and trachoma. As in many African countries, the wrenching emblem of poverty is a tiny child leading a blind beggar by a stick.

As Mr. Mekonnen waited on a bench by the clinic, there was a flurry of activity, and an Ethiopian announced in the Amharic language that “a great elder” had arrived. Then Mr. Mekonnen heard voices speaking a foreign language and a clicking of cameras, and finally the whirlwind around Mr. Carter moved on.

“Do you know who that was?” I asked Mr. Mekonnen.

“I couldn’t see,” he replied.

“Have you ever heard of Jimmy Carter?”

“No.”

Yet in remote places like this, former President Carter, at 82, is leading a private war on disease that should inspire and shame President Bush and other world leaders into joining. It’s not just that Mr. Carter’s wars have been more successful than Mr. Bush’s; Mr. Carter is also rehabilitating the image of the U.S. abroad and transforming the lives of the world’s most wretched peoples. (Here's a video of Mr. Carter's trip.)

On the previous night, Mr. Mekonnen had slept under a mosquito net for the first time in his life, as part of a Carter initiative to wipe out malaria and elephantiasis in this region. And Mr. Mekonnen now uses an outhouse as a result of a Carter Center initiative to build 350,000 outhouses in rural Ethiopia to defeat blindness from trachoma.

Mr. Carter has almost managed to wipe out one horrific ailment — Guinea worm — and is making great strides against others, including river blindness and elephantiasis. In this area, people are taking an annual dose of a medicine called Mectizan — donated by Merck, which deserves huge credit — that prevents itching and blindness.

Mectizan also gets rid of intestinal worms, leaving Ethiopian villagers stronger and more able to work or attend school. Among adults, the deworming revives sex drive, so some people have named their children Mectizan.

Mr. Carter’s private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America’s image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?

So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria — but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.

“That would certainly be my preference,” he said. “I thought the war in Iraq was one of the worst mistakes our country ever made, and we’re possibly about to make an even worse mistake by precipitating a war with Iran. But I would like to see us shift away from war being a high priority, to diplomacy and benevolent causes.”

So, President Bush, how about if we as a nation join Mr. Carter’s war on diseases that afflict the world’s poorest peoples — and are one reason they are so poor. That’s a war that would unite Americans, not divide them. Come on, Mr. Bush, sound the trumpets!

You're invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof's blog, "On the Ground". And, in case you missed it, here's Sunday's column also about Jimmy Carter.

This morning we have Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. First, Bob Herbert, who says the question for 2008 is not so much whether a Republican or a Democrat takes the White House; it’s whether we can take back the country. Second, Paul Krugman says the Democratic base wants someone who doesn’t suffer from an infallibility complex, who can admit mistakes and learn from them. (He also takes a few well-aimed shots at McCain and Giuliani.) Here’s Mr. Herbert:

If we could manage to get past the tedious and the odious — like the empty speculation on whether a woman can win, or whether Barack Obama is black enough — we might be able to engage the essential issue facing the U.S. at this point in our history.

And that is whether, once the Bush administration has finally and mercifully run its course, the country goes back to being a reasonably peaceful, lawful, constructive force in the world, or whether we continue down the bullying, warlike, unilateral, irresponsible, unlawful and profoundly ineffective path laid out by Bush, Cheney & Co.

The question is not so much whether a Republican or a Democrat takes the White House in the next election; it’s whether the American people can take back their country.

I don’t think most Americans are up for perennial warfare. And whatever the polls might say, it’s very hard for me to accept that the men and women who rise from their seats and cover their hearts at the start of sporting events are really in favor of dismantling the system of checks and balances, or holding people in prison for years without charging them, or torturing prisoners in U.S. custody, or giving the president the raw power and unsavory privileges of an emperor.

It was Richard Nixon who said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, operating behind the mammoth fig leaf of national security, took this theoretical absurdity to heart and put it into widespread practice.

There are, however, many thoughtful Americans who want to stop this calamitous disregard for the rule of law, two of whom I’ll mention today — Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Senator Chris Dodd.

Mr. Schwarz is one of the most decent men I’ve known. I covered him when he was the chief lawyer for New York City during the Koch administration. He was then, and still is, the quintessential straight arrow.

In the 1970s Mr. Schwarz was chief counsel for the Church Committee (named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), which uncovered extraordinary abuses and led to historic changes in the nation’s intelligence services. He is now the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

To say that Mr. Schwarz is disturbed by some of the things that have occurred during the presidency of George W. Bush is an understatement. In a book to be published next month by The New Press, “Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror,” Mr. Schwarz and a colleague at the Brennan Center, Aziz Z. Huq, write:

“For the first time in American history, the executive branch claims authority under the Constitution to set aside laws permanently — including prohibitions on torture and warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. A frightening idea decisively rejected at America’s birth — that a president, like a king, can do no wrong — has reemerged to justify torture and indefinite presidential detention.”

Undermining checks and balances here at home and acting unilaterally abroad have made us less safe, said Mr. Schwarz. Some of the actions the U.S. has taken “have so hurt our reputation,” he said, “that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay have become in many eyes more the symbol of America than the Statue of Liberty.”

Senator Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is running for president, has introduced legislation that would definitively bar the use of evidence obtained by torture or coercion, reinstate full U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions and restore rights of habeas corpus for certain terror suspects that were stripped away by the federal government last year.

(Habeas corpus is a legal proceeding that allows suspects to challenge their detention in a court of law. To get a sense of its significance, imagine that you were locked up somewhere and were not permitted to show that a mistake had been made, that you were innocent. Imagine that you, or a loved one, were held under those circumstances for a period of years, or forever.)

Senator Dodd said this corrosion of the rule of law has been tolerated primarily because “people have been frightened.” As he put it, in an atmosphere of crisis, “the temptation to succumb to the demagoguery of these things is strong.”

The senator and Mr. Schwarz, in their different ways, are among the many quiet patriots who are spreading the word that the very meaning of the United States, the whole point of this fragile experiment in representative democracy, will be lost if the nation’s ironclad commitment to the rule of law is allowed to unravel.

And now here is Mr. Krugman:

Many people are perplexed by the uproar over Senator Hillary Clinton’s refusal to say, as former Senator John Edwards has, that she was wrong to vote for the Iraq war resolution. Why is it so important to admit past error? And yes, it was an error — she may not have intended to cast a vote for war, but the fact is the resolution did lead to war; she may not have believed that President Bush would abuse the power he was granted, but the fact is he did.

The answer can be summed up in two words: heckuva job. Or, if you want a longer version: Medals of Freedom to George Tenet, who said Saddam had W.M.D., Tommy Franks, who failed to secure Iraq, and Paul Bremer, who botched the occupation.

For the last six years we have been ruled by men who are pathologically incapable of owning up to mistakes. And this pathology has had real, disastrous consequences. The situation in Iraq might not be quite so dire — and we might even have succeeded in stabilizing Afghanistan — if Mr. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney had been willing to admit early on that things weren’t going well or that their handpicked appointees weren’t the right people for the job.

The experience of Bush-style governance, together with revulsion at the way Karl Rove turned refusal to admit error into a political principle, is the main reason those now-famous three words from Mr. Edwards — “I was wrong” — matter so much to the Democratic base.

The base is remarkably forgiving toward Democrats who supported the war. But the base and, I believe, the country want someone in the White House who doesn’t sound like another George Bush. That is, they want someone who doesn’t suffer from an infallibility complex, who can admit mistakes and learn from them.

And there’s another reason the admission by Mr. Edwards that he was wrong is important. If we want to avoid future quagmires, we need a president who is willing to fight the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, which still — in spite of all that has happened — equates hawkishness with seriousness about national security, and treats those who got Iraq right as somehow unsound. By admitting his own error, Mr. Edwards makes it more credible that he would listen to a wider range of views.

In truth, it’s the second issue, not the first, that worries me about Mrs. Clinton. Although she’s smart and sensible, she’s very much the candidate of the Beltway establishment — an establishment that has yet to come to terms with its own failure of nerve and judgment over Iraq. Still, she’s at worst a triangulator, not a megalomaniac; she’s not another Dick Cheney.

I wish we could say the same about all the major presidential aspirants.

Senator John McCain, whose reputation for straight talk is quickly getting bent out of shape, appears to share the Bush administration’s habit of rewriting history to preserve an appearance of infallibility.

Last month Senator McCain asserted that he knew full well what we were getting into by invading Iraq: “When I voted to support this war,” Mr. McCain said on MSNBC, “I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough, and those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of an easy task, then I’m sorry they were mistaken.”

But back in September 2002, he told Larry King, “I believe that the operation will be relatively short,” and “I believe that the success will be fairly easy.”

And as for Rudy Giuliani, there are so many examples of his inability to accept criticism that it’s hard to choose.

Here’s an incident from 1997. When New York magazine placed ads on city buses declaring that the publication was “possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for,” the then-mayor ordered the ads removed — and when a judge ordered the ads placed back on, he appealed the decision all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

Now imagine how Mr. Giuliani would react on being told, say, that his choice to head Homeland Security is actually a crook. Oh, wait.

But back to Mrs. Clinton’s problem. For some reason she and her advisers failed to grasp just how fed up the country is with arrogant politicians who can do no wrong. I don’t think she falls in that category; but her campaign somehow thought it was still a good idea to follow Karl Rove’s playbook, which says that you should never, ever admit to a mistake. And that playbook has led them into a political trap.