Claremont’s Matthew Peterson has strong views about the state of contemporary higher education, especially if you consider what goes on at the colleges and universities with the best reputations. My own much less colorful reflections are here.

Matt thinks, with some reason, that these exceptionally wealthy places are frittering away their moral, intellectual, and cultural capital and that we may be approaching a time when it might actually be a good career move actually to gain an education at a currently less reputable (but morally, culturally and intellectually more sound) institution. He names a few; I’d add a few more to his list.

But.... I have this residual concern about "monasticism" and the inability to respond effectively to "the other," though Matthew himself goes a long way toward allaying my concern.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. says it was a bad week for the Bush Administration on the Iraq war. He points to poll numbers suggesting that opponents of the war are intense than proponents, to speeches in the Senate that follow, rather than lead (of course, he didn’t put it that way), and to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, whose call to bring the troops home is supposed to be news. Well, Instapundit and friends demonstrate that Murtha has been publicly grousing about the war since late 2003.

Here’s a story focusing on Judge Alito’s participation in a few 3rd Circuit cases. Although I haven’t yet read all his First Amendment opinions (I’m working on it!), I haven’t yet seen anything that puts him outside the mainstream as I defined it here.

According to the Employment Minister of France, polygamy is one of the causes of the riots in France. This is the whole of the AFP dispatch (via Little Green Footballs):

"Polygamy among immigrants is one cause of the rioting that has plagued France for the past two weeks, according to Gerard Larcher, the Employment Minister.

M Larcher was quoted as saying that large, polygamous families sometimes led to antisocial behaviour by youths who did not have a father figure in the home, making employers more cautious of hiring staff from ethnic minorities.

There are fears that M Larcher’s comments could further fuel the debate about the cause of the unrest and possibly outrage Muslim and anti-racism groups. Polygamy is banned in France, but an estimated 30,000 mainly African families have more than one wife.

Power Line calls our attention to this interview with a former UNSCOM weapons inspector. Here’s a taste:

FP: Let’s talk a little bit more about how the WMDs disappeared.

Tierney: In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land, you reply “I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof, sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.” You won’t last very long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for an educated guess).

According to this story, the youth vote may have been more significant than exit polls indicated in 2004. Exit polls showed that just 9% of those voting in November of 2004 were in the 18-24 year old category. The figure was the same in 2000. New Census Bureau data, however, shows that 47% of eligible 18-24 year olds voted in this last election--up 11 points from the 36% number in 2000. Young voters still had the lowest turnout of all groups, but no other group of voters increased their turnout by more than 5%. One important thing to keep in mind about these statistics however: they depend upon people being honest when questioned about whether or not they voted and respondents are questioned long after the election.

This is interesting. It looks like Libby was not the first official to reveal to a reporter where Plame worked: A Washington Post story claims this: "Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed. In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday." And then this:

"Fitzgerald interviewed Woodward about the previously undisclosed conversation after the official alerted the prosecutor to it on Nov. 3 -- one week after Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis ’Scooter’ Libby, was indicted in the investigation."

It will be impossible to ignore Judge Alito’s 1985 statement about abortion. That much is clear.

I hope he doesn’t say that he has changed his mind. And I hope that he doesn’t simply assert the distinction between advocacy and judging, for he was, after all, advocating a position regarding the content and meaning of the Constitution, which is also something that judges do. Nevertheless, he can suggest that judicial statesmanship requires some attention to the role of precedent and settled expectations in a system characterized by the rule of law. And he can remind everyone that the abandonment of Roe and its progeny (if one can use that word in conjunction with that case) simply puts the ball in the court of the political branches and the states.

Because these are mainstream positions, he’ll be confirmed.

Update: Ramesh Ponnuru thinks that, as long as Alito and his supporters don’t simply disavow the 1985 statement, this is a good thing for future conservative nominees: they don’t simply have to clam up on Roe.

Demonstrating how difficult it is to "demonize" Judge Alito on his abortion opinions, Dahlia Litwick offers a measured account of them. Here’s a snippet:

It’s almost impossible to predict what a judge will do with cases that present fact patterns that do not yet exist; and it’s hard to tell what an appellate court judge might do once he’s seated on the high court. Certainly we should scrutinize Alito’s 1985 job application for hidden motives, just as we should scan his opinions for judicial theory. But randomly classing together disparate abortion cases will tell us very little about Alito—save for the fact that he’s not so reflexively pro-life or pro-choice that the rest of constitutional law is just wallpaper for him. That should give both sides in this discussion some measure of comfort going forward.

I’m guessing it won’t.

Power Line calls our attention to another excellent Bush speech. Here’s a taste:

Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people. Leaders in my administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat.

Let me give you some quotes from three senior Democrat leaders: First, and I quote, "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons." Another senior Democrat leader said, "The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as Saddam Hussein is in power." Here’s another quote from a senior Democrat leader: "Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think the President is approaching this in the right fashion."

They spoke the truth then, and they’re speaking politics now. (Applause.)

The truth is that investigations of intelligence on Iraq have concluded that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world -- and that person was Saddam Hussein. In early 2004, when weapons inspector David Kay testified that he had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he also testified that, "Iraq was in clear material violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441. They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because it showed what they were doing that was illegal."

Eight months later, weapons inspector Charles Duelfer issued a report that found, "Saddam Hussein so dominated the Iraqi regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when the sanctions were lifted."

Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. And that’s irresponsible.

As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory. (Applause.)

Bill Bennett raises the appropriate questions regarding Senator Jay Rockefeller’s 2002 tour the the Middle East, when he apparently told the Saudis, Jordanians, and Syrians that President Bush "had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq." Here’s Bennett:

This is not a prewar intelligence mistake, it is a prewar intelligence giveaway.

Syria is not only on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the country many speculate is where Hussein has secreted weapons, it is also the country from which terrorists are flowing into Iraq to fight our troops and allies. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have had, over the years, conflicted loyalties. What was Senator Rockefeller doing? What was he thinking? And all this before President Bush even made a public speech about Iraq — to the U.N. or anyone else.

There’s more, all of it worth reading. And Senator Rockefeller has some explaining to do.

These articles describe the contents of this document, written in 1985 as Samuel Alito was seeking an appointment in the Reagan Administration. I’m shocked, just shocked, to learn that Alito is a lifelong conservative, who owes his conservatism to William F. Buckley and the 1964 Goldwater campaign, and that he’s proud of his work in the Office of Legal Counsel during the first Reagan Administration (which appears to have included contributing to briefs opposing abortion and affirmative action).

The WaPo’s Fred Hiatt wrote this column, quite critical of the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq War, but also of the typical Democratic critique, which focuses on if and when someone lied. Here’s Hiatt on Bush:

President Bush can lash out at the Democrats, as he did Friday, but ultimately they are mostly exploiting public opinion; he is largely responsible for shaping it. And had he been more honest from the start about the likely difficulties of war, readier to deal with them and then more open in acknowledging his failures, the public likely would be more patient.

Here’s Hiatt on the Democratic critics:

Congress...pours most of its Iraq-related energy into allegations of manipulated intelligence before the war.

"Those aren’t irrelevant questions," says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to sustain public support for the war."

What Lieberman doesn’t say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush’s war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy -- to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.

Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, seems to override that understanding.

Quoting liberally from Joe Lieberman and Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, Hiatt is critical of both the Administration and the Democratic opposition. Still, that’s not good enough for this Kos-sack, who accuses Hiatt of practicing "the new McCarthyism" and of being "a Bush media lackey of the first order." Whew!