That radical Islam can threaten artistic freedom (along with many other freedoms) is well known. But this story from India, reminiscent of the Danish cartoon controversy, involves conservative Hindus, not Muslims. An art student at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Gujarat state exhibited a digital version of a painting of a multi-armed woman who was simultaneously wielding weapons and giving birth. The painting evoked traditional Hindu goddesses.

On May 9, a lawyer affiliated with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which governs Gujarat, marched into the art exhibit, accompanied by policemen and a film crew, and proclaimed himself offended by several art works, including the multi-armed woman. The upshot was that the student was jailed for "deliberately offending religious sentiments." The university's vice chancellor closed the exhibit, and the dean of the art department that sponsored the exhibit has fled:

Though not charged with any offense, Mr. Panikkar, the art department dean, has also gone into hiding. Friends have warned him that opposing Hindu radical groups in Gujarat state is inviting trouble - and not necessarily protection from the police - he explained in a cellphone interview on Tuesday night.

Artists and others demonstrated in support of the student and the dean in Mumbai:


AP/Rajesh Nirgude

While this is not the first instance of such repression in India, radical Hinduism obviously hasn't begun to launch the sort of attack on modernity that we have seen from Muslim extremists. Nevertheless, the trend, if it is a trend, is troubling. India is a strategic partner of great importance to the United States: a democratic counterweight to China, a booming economic power, and the main outpost of Western values in central Asia. If India were to regress into the sort of anti-modern frenzy that afflicts much of the Muslim world, the consequences would be severe.

I'm no expert on either Hinduism or Indian politics, and don't pretend to be able to assess whether Hindu extremism is a serious threat. I'd be curious to know what Dinesh D'Souza has to say on the subject.

Bernard Lewis is our greatest living scholar of the Islamic world. In today's Wall Street Journal, he drew lessons from our Cold War experience and applied them to the current situation in the Middle East. Lewis's arguments are powerful; doubly so, considering his encyclopedic knowledge of the cultures involved. First, here are some of his observations on the Cold War era:

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward...

***During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals--notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.

Osama bin Laden drew a natural inference from the events that he witnessed: America is weak. To bin Laden and his followers, their victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, an event that played a key role in the demise of the Soviet Union a few years later, represented the harder part of their task. Disposing of the soft Americans, who couldn't stand to take casualties, would be much easier:

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

So when the terrorists attacked America on September 11, they expected little response. For the first time, they were mistaken:

The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

Sadly, the willingness of Democrats and others to surrender in Iraq, which al Qaeda has made the principal front in its war against the United States, constitutes a reversion to the policy of weakness that encouraged the terrorists in the first place:

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory.

These are not difficult lessons to draw; in fact, it is hard to see how anyone can deny them. One can only hope that, coming from a scholar of Lewis's unique stature, they will be absorbed.

In recent weeks, Barack Obama has committed a series of gaffes that have solidified the impression that he is not ready to be a serious contender at the Presidential level.

The most recent is his attempt to misuse the tornado that tragically destroyed much of Greensburg, Kansas, for political ends. First he repeated the silly story, which was invented and then abandoned by Democratic Governor Sebelius, that the Iraq war had somehow prevented Kansas's National Guard from responding effectively to the tornado. That was bad enough, and a poor reflection on Obama's character. But then he entered the twilight zone with the bizarre claim that the tornado had destroyed the entire town and killed 10,000 people.

The election of Nicolas Sarkozy can only be a good thing for the United States. But does it tell us anything about our own Presidential election in 2008? Newt Gingrich thinks it does:

Incumbent French President Jacques Chirac had been twice elected, has served a total of 12 years in office, and is very unpopular. Coming into this election, people were very tired of the Chirac government and there was a sense that there had to be change.

Normally, with the incumbent conservative government so unpopular, the left would have been expected to win the election, probably by a significant margin. But the opposition on the left, the Socialist Party, failed completely to capitalize on this desire for change. Ségolène Royal was actually committed to keeping all the bureaucracies that were failing and all the policies that were creating unemployment. She was committed to avoiding the changes necessary for a French future of prosperity, opportunity and safety.*** And here's where American Republicans really need to pay attention: In France, voting for change meant voting for the party in office, but not the personality in office. And voting to keep the old order meant voting for the opposition, not for the incumbent party.

If Republicans hope to win the presidency next year, they better find a candidate who is prepared to stand for very bold, very dramatic and very systematic change in Washington. Not only that, but they had better make the case that the left-wing Democrat likely to be nominated represents the failed status quo: the bureaucracies that are failing, the social policies that are failing, the high tax policies that are failing, and the weakness around the world that has failed so badly in protecting America.

A plausible analogy. But at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff isn't buying it:

Can any lessons for our 2008 presidential election be discerned from the election that just took place in France? I think not.

Sarkozy's election might be cited for the proposition that a member of an unpopular ruling party, and indeed a member of the unpopular ruling government, can win by distancing himself from the outgoing president. However, Sarkozy has a long history as Jacques Chirac's adversary. The only similarly situated Republican contender is John McCain. But McCain is perhaps the foremost supporter of President Bush's policy on Iraq, and Iraq is the main reason why Bush is so unpopular. To be sure, McCain opposed Bush's approach to Iraq for years. However, he's joined at the hip with the president when it comes to current policy. To the extent that policy is viewed as unsuccessful, McCain will be hard-pressed to distance himself from the president. The bottom line is that Republican prospects are not doomed by Bush's unpopularity, but the party can't take much solace from Sarkozy's success.

I would come down in the middle. Here, as in France, the public's dissatisfaction with the Bush administration hasn't caused it to long for tax increases, weakness in foreign policy, etc. So the Democrats can't assume that policy positions that have failed to get them elected in the past will work much better in 2008. Further, by the end of any eight-year presidency, the public is more or less tired of the President and his administration. Presidential candidates representing the party in power always try to distinguish themselves from the incumbent, even when they themselves have been serving as vice-president. Recall George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000. In general, I don't think candidates like Guiliani, McCain and Romney will have much trouble distancing themselves from the Bush administration.

But there is one big caveat, and this is where I agree with Paul: the public's unhappiness with the Bush administration consists mostly of its unhappiness with the progress of the Iraq war.

There is real irony in Cenk Uygur accusing Fox News--or anyone else--of being factually inaccurate. Cenk never lets the facts get in the way of a good rant. His latest post is typical. Cenk goes after Fox for running a story about "a ham steak being placed in front of Muslim students as a prank in a middle school in Maine." Cenk says that Fox fell for a parody, and that this was "a flat out made up story." If you took Cenk seriously--always a mistake--you'd think that the whole thing never happened.

Actually, Fox's story was closer to the truth than Cenk's post. We were the ones, on Power Line, who first pointed out that someone at "Fox & Friends" had fallen for a parody. I happened to see the segment early in the morning, and I wrote about it here. The story wasn't a fake; there really was an incident in Lewiston, Maine where a student put a bag that contained a ham steak near where some Muslim students were eating lunch:

Police are investigating as a possible hate crime an incident in which a ham steak was placed in a bag on a lunch table where a group of Somali students were sitting.

Superintendent Leon Levesque said the incident is being treated seriously and police are investigating. The center for the Prevention of Hate Violence is working with the school to devise a response plan.

That's all true. What happened was that a news site called "Associated Content" added some embellishments: they made it a ham sandwich instead of a ham steak, and they added several fake quotes from participants, including this one, ostensibly by the superintendent of schools:

These children have got to learn that ham is not a toy, and that there are consequences for being nonchalant about where you put your sandwich.

Fox referred to a "ham sandwich" and included the "ham is not a toy" quote in their report.

So Cenk is wrong: it wasn't a "flat out made up story." The story was real, but a Fox fact-checker fell for some embellishments that, in my opinion, were pretty obviously parody. At Power Line, we pointed this out within a couple of hours after the story aired.

So it was Cenk, not Fox & Friends, that got the story "flat out" wrong.

The Democrats have been lashing out wildly against Republicans lately--wildly, but not truthfully. This morning, John Kerry sent out an email attacking Dick Cheney for criticizing Harry Reid's Iraq "is lost" comment. This is what Kerry wrote:

On the eve of a dangerous Bush veto of a new course in Iraq, the desperate Republicans sent out the attacker in chief Dick Cheney to assail yet another Dem leader.

Why? Because the Majority Leader Harry Reid said that "as long as we follow the president's path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course -- and we must change course."

Any questions? The president's own generals say there is no military solution to the civil war in Iraq, that it requires the political solution the Iraqis have resisted. But that didn't stop the GOP from trying to spin conscience into controversy.

Kerry blatantly misrepresented the Harry Reid quote on which Cheney was commenting. In fact, what Reid said, and what Cheney responded to, was: "This war is lost. The surge is not accomplishing anything..." You can see Reid saying exactly what Cheney said he did, in this YouTube video.

The quote Kerry used was a later one, when Reid was backtracking after he realized he had blundered, not the one that Cheney referred to. Why did Kerry lie? No doubt, because the truth was too embarrassing for Harry Reid, John Kerry and the Democratic Party.

Here's another one, from today's Best of the Web. Howard Dean, like Kerry, sent out an email to the Democrat faithful. This one attacked a statement supposedly made by Rudy Giuliani:

Rudy Giuliani should be ashamed. The former New York City Mayor is politicizing September 11th in his 2008 presidential bid. Here's what he said at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire: "If a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001... Never ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for (terrorists) to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!"

I won't let this wannabe Republican nominee get away with remarks like these.

What's wrong with Dean's rant? It's a lie. The key portion of the quote he attributes to Giuliani, which is bolded above, Giuliani didn't say. Dean just made it up.

Why do the Democrats base their attacks on Republicans on lies? I suppose because the truth just doesn't work for them.

UPDATE: "Second Edition" tries to defend Harry Reid and John Kerry. Like many liberals, however, he doesn't seem to read too well. He quotes the speech by Reid that I referred to as "backtracking after he realized he had blundered." Then he goes so far as to suggest that the video I linked to was "tampered with." This illustrates pretty well how far around the bend many of the Democratic faithful have gone. The video wasn't tampered with, it shows Harry Reid giving a press conference. This was his original statement that the Iraq war "is lost," the one that Vice-President Cheney responded to. Demagogues like John Kerry and Howard Dean prey on the ignorance of people like "Second Edition."

Poor Cenk Uygur! Every time you turn around, he is hyperventilating over some alleged "scandal" in the Bush administration that he is convinced will finally bring down the hated President Bush. This time, it's the news that the Office of Special Counsel is beginning an investigation that grows out of the dismissal of several U.S. Attorneys:

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

Cenk is convinced that this is the long-awaited "big one." I'm afraid, though, that he is destined to be disappointed once more. Despite the Democrats' best efforts, there is no evidence whatever that there was anything improper about the administration's decision to replace eight U.S. Attorneys, who serve at the pleasure of the President. The missing emails are from the Republican National Committee, if they really are missing--it's been reported that Patrick Fitzgerald obtained them all in connection with the Valerie Plame investigation, so whether there is actually anything missing remains to be seen. And the suggestion that there is something wrong with "keep[ing] presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities" is simply incorrect. Following the administration's policy directives, which in a democracy generally are, and should be, based in part on political considerations, is part of the job description of any political appointee, such as a U.S. Attorney.

The fact is that the Bush administration has been the most scandal-free of any administration in memory. To my recollection, Scooter Libby is the only significant member of the administration who has been indicted. Sadly for the Democrats, opposing their policy preferences is not a crime; nor is defeating them in elections. Not yet, at any rate.

...Meet Armed Resistance." That the title of this post at Classically Liberal, which compares the catastrophe at Virginia Tech with four other instances, most of them little-known, which ended quite differently because the would-be mass murderer was met with effective armed resistance by students, a teacher, a store owner, an off-duty policeman. The contrast is very persuasive; it raises some obvious questions.

How many more instances are there where armed civilians have prevented mass murder? Are there counter-examples where attempted intervention by armed civilians has made matters worse? And why, in these instances, do the media persistently fail to report the key role played by firearms in preventing further violence?

Classically Liberal makes what appears to be a powerful argument. If it's wrong, what is the evidence? Let's see whether our commenters can come up with some.

Last week, Harry Reid was widely criticized for saying that the Iraq war "is lost." On Power Line, I explained why I thought Reid's comment was both incorrect and politically misguided. Today, Reid backed off his claim, and, almost as though he were taking my advice, couched his criticisms in terms of a "failed policy" rather than a "lost war:"

The Senate majority leader drew criticism from Bush and others last week when he said the war in Iraq had been lost. He did not repeat the assertion in his prepared speech, saying that "The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential."

There is an irony here; Reid is echoing the "mission accomplished" banner for which President Bush has long been abused. But news accounts haven't focused on this point, instead, they have emphasized Reid's claim that the President is in "denial" on Iraq:

Reid noted disapprovingly that in a speech last week, Bush repeatedly said there were signs of progress in Iraq in the wake of a troop increase he ordered last winter. "The White House transcript says the president made those remarks in the state of Michigan. I believe he made them in the state of denial," said Reid.

In fact, though, there are signs of progress in Iraq, both as measured statistically and as reported by many observers. It is Reid, not Bush, who doesn't want to address the evidence, but rather seeks to achieve his objective by bullying. There is an interesting parallel here to the Democrats' tactic on global warming. There, too, they refuse to engage the evidence offered by skeptics, and instead insist that the debate is over and anyone who disagrees with them is "in denial." This is, in general, not an approach that is followed by people who have strong arguments and evidence on their side. So it shouldn't be surprising that many people conclude that what Reid fears in Iraq is not failure but success, as suggested eloquently by Chip Bok:

By 1994, when the voters finally got fed up with the Democrats and handed control of Congress to the Republicans, the Democrats had pretty much turned the institution into a three ring circus. Only three months after regaining power, the Democrats haven't reached their nadir of the early 1990s, but they're well on the way.

In the Examiner, Charles Hurt reports that the Democrats are losing no time awarding themselves perks, now that they are in the Congressional majority:

Congress is keeping Andrews Air Force base plenty busy this year ferrying lawmakers all over the globe at taxpayers' expense. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi took his wife, nine Democrats and two Republicans - Reps. Dan Lungren of California and Mike Rogers of Alabama - on a whirlwind tour of the Caribbean last week. After stops in Honduras and Mexico, they stopped in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the delegation stayed at the five-star Caneel Bay resort.

In a separate trip to the Caribbean last week, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York squired his wife and four Democratic members to Grenada and Trinidad.

All told, the military flew at least 13 congressional delegations to various destinations during the Easter recess -- at an estimated rate of $10,000 or more per flying hour.

Yes, and just think about all that carbon dioxide. More:

...House guidelines also stipulate that delegations include members of both parties to qualify for military planes -- a requirement that Speaker Nancy Pelosi waived for Engel's group and two other delegations.

Some of the excuses for the Dems' junkets bordered on hilarious:

Thompson's office said he toured the Caribbean because he now chairs the Homeland Security Committee and wanted to see vacation hot spots to "examine border security and port security." Three other members of the delegation also brought along their spouses.

"They are going from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. everyday," a committee spokeswoman told The Examiner. "They do not have down time."

At the Caneel Bay resort, where room rates reach $1,100 per night, the spokeswoman said Thompson and his wife paid the "government rate." But, according to the reservations department, Caneel Bay doesn't "offer any government rates."

Maxine Waters is one Congresswoman who really gets around:

Traveling with Engel and his wife were Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Tex., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who went to Belgium in a delegation led by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., earlier in the week, also joined Engel's Caribbean trip. She brought her husband with her.

The Caribbean is nice this time of year, but some Congressmen prefer Europe:

Frank's trip to Belgium and London was related to his work as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, according to his office. The trip, which also included Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., was designed "to further understand the interrelationship between various issues related to the financial services regulatory structures" of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, according to Frank's office.

Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., also led a trip to Belgium over the two-week Easter recess. In February, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, took a delegation there.

Makes sense to me. I mean, if you want to understand "financial services regulatory structures," you need to tour some Belgian banks so you can see for yourself. I'm a little unsure, though, how Belgium fits in with Oberstar's committee duties, which he describes as follows:

As the senior Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I serve as an Ex Officio member of the Subcommittees on Aviation, Coast Guard & Maritime Transportation, Public Buildings & Economic Development, Railroads, Surface Transportation, and Water Resources & Environment. I have worked tirelessly to improve safety and efficiency for the traveling public.

I suppose he could be worried about the safety of those New York to Brussels flights. You have to admire Oberstar: putting his life on the line for his constituents!

Their twelve years in the wilderness reminded the Democrats of the perks they missed out on by losing the majority. Unfortunately, their conduct now that they're once more in charge is likely to remind the voters why they tossed them out last time around.

The 2006 election cycle was disastrous for Republicans, as just about everything that could go wrong, did. But many Republican leaders are concerned that the party's fortunes haven't bottomed out, and that 2008 could bring further losses.

There is some support for that fear in the Gallup poll on party identification that came out today. Gallup found that by a 33% to 28% margin, more respondents call themselves Democrats than Republicans, with 38% describing themselves as independents. This isn't great, but it isn't particularly bad by historical standards, as the graph below shows:

The figures are worse for Republicans if "leaners" are taken into account, however, and the Democrats' current advantage is reflected in the answers to this question: If the 2008 Presidential election were held today, would you want the Democratic or Republican candidate to win? Fifty percent said the Democrat, thirty-five percent the Republican. The bad news is that this reflects the tendency of independents to lean Democratic at this moment in time; the good news is that "independent" is often synonymous with "non-voter." Bear in mind that the Gallup poll didn't survey likely voters, or even registered voters; it surveyed random adults.

This survey, like all the others taken recently, found that while respondents favor the Democratic candidate in the abstract, they break even or tend to favor the Republican when asked about particular candidates. This reflects, I think, the "stature gap" between the parties' candidates that Paul Mirengoff has written about. Also, negative attitudes toward Republicans generally, occasioned by everything from the Mark Foley affair to excessive spending to media hysteria over manufactured White House "scandals" don't necessarily carry over to a particular Presidential candidate.

Still, everything that we're seeing in the poll data suggests that 2008 will be a bad year for Republican primary voters to hold out for ideological purity. In order to retain the White House, the Republicans will need to nominate a candidate whose appeal goes well beyond the party's core constituencies and whose stature allows him to overcome a headwind of negative publicity that likely will not have dissipated by then.

Today's Daily Pulse focuses on Presidents' poll ratings, and puts President Bush's current slump into historical context. The data are interesting, but I think there is one more data point that should be added: a comparison of the President's popularity to that of Congress.

You hear a lot about Bush's relatively low approval ratings, but very little about Congress's. But Congress's are worse. Currently, President Bush's Real Clear Politics average is 36.5%. Congress's is 35.7%. To some extent, that comparison is unfair because Presidents tend to be more popular than Congresses. But it's noteworthy that Congress's rating has improved very little since the Democrats took control in January; there hasn't been much of a honeymoon.

To some degree, I suspect that low ratings for both the executive and legislative branches are a sign of the times; the voters are surly. Whether that surliness is a reasonable reaction to events, or something else, is a subject for another day.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported on the declassification of a report by the Inspector General of the Defense Department as though it were a scoop, in an article headlined "Hussein's Prewar Ties to Al-Qaeda Discounted." The casual reader would get the impression that the Inspector General's report contained some new, maybe even definitive information on the long-debated issue of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. In fact, though, the IG's report is old news. We wrote about it here, in February. The substance of the report was made public then; the only news that occurred yesterday was that the report itself was declassified at the request of Democratic Senator Carl Levin.

As we noted a couple of months ago, the IG report was something of a joke. It criticized a Defense Department operation run by Undersecretary Douglas Feith for disagreeing with the CIA and the DIA on the significance of intelligence data on the connections between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Given what we know now about the CIA's performance in relation to Iraq, one would think that rethinking that agency's approach to such an important topic would be applauded. But no--the IG thought it was "improper" for a group within the Defense Department to dissent from the CIA's dogmatic interpretations of the evidence.

For those who remember England's days as a great power and consider the U.K. America's most important ally, this headline in the Telegraph is sad indeed: "Without America's might the options are few."

It's no surprise that diplomatic prospects for freeing the captured sailors and marines are dim; diplomacy is possible, let alone meaningful, only to the extent that it is backed by a credible threat of military force or economic pressure. There's the rub; the British Navy no longer has the means to project much power in the Middle East:

The Government has few options if it wants to pressure Iran into releasing the captured Britons.

Military action is unfeasible without American support and so is a military blockade of the Gulf.

The Strait of Hormuz is just 21 miles across, making it a highly strategic chokepoint - and consequently very heavily defended by Teheran. With Iran so reliant on the waterway for its fuel, arms imports and other goods it would be a key area to put pressure on the regime.

The Navy has prepared plans on how to enforce a blockade but it would require almost the entire Fleet at a time when it is facing cuts and many ships have been mothballed. A blockade would also substantially increase the threat of all-out war.

Action on land is even less feasible:

Britain is not a strong enough power to go it alone in a land battle with Iran, especially with so many troops committed to Iraq and Afghanistan. America is unlikely to back military action until diplomacy and possible sanctions have forced Iran to climb down over its nuclear programme.

So where does that leave Great Britain? Facing a drawn-out hostage crisis, I'm afraid, with no clear path to a happy ending. Let's hope the Telegraph is wrong:

There is a feeling that the 15 could be in for a long stay in Iran and face the nightmare prospect for Britain of a show trial.

For now, at least, I think the Telegraph is right in contrasting the position of the U.S. with that of its own country:

Washington has remained largely subdued on the crisis but some commentators have made clear that the situation would have been very different if it had been 15 American sailors.

Let's hope that's still true when we have a new administration in 2009.

In the current issue of Time magazine, Jay Carney writes about the "surprising" fact that the Republican candidates are leading their Democratic counterparts in the 2008 Presidential race. The article offers a revealing glimpse into the liberal mentality:

Could things be any worse for George W. Bush and his beleaguered party? In the new TIME poll, the President's job approval rating continues to wallow near his all-time lows, at 33%, while his disapproval rating breaks the 60% barrier for the third consecutive survey.

Actually, things could be worse. The President's poll numbers could be as bad as the Democratic Congress's. Voters are already experiencing buyers' remorse, and Congress's approval ratings are consistently hovering in the 28% to 31% range.

And then there's the burgeoning scandal stemming from the Justice Department's dismissal last year of eight U.S. attorneys.

Some "scandal." Needless to say, Time doesn't try to explain why it's a scandal when the Bush administration replaces eight U.S. Attorneys, while there was no scandal when the Clinton administration dismissed all 93--one of whom was investigating Clinton himself at the time.

So it's taken almost as a given among the professional political class that the 2008 Presidential election is the Democrats' to lose. Republicans are so morose in general, and conservatives so unhappy with their current field of candidates, that the assumption of a Democratic advantage has become bipartisan.

Of course, the "political class" was convinced that Ed Muskie, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were all powerhouse candidates. The "political class" is liberal, if Time hasn't noticed. And conservatives are nowhere near as unhappy with the current GOP candidates as Time suggests--without, of course, citing any evidence.

Now we finally get to the bad news; bad, at least, as far as Time is concerned:

So why, in poll after poll, including the new TIME poll, does that advantage seem to disappear whenever voters are asked to pick a President in hypothetical head-to-head matchups among front-runners with solid name recognition? In our poll, Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain, 42%-48%, and to Rudy Giuliani 41%-50%. Even though Clinton maintains a 7% edge over Obama among Democratic respondents, Obama fares better in the general election matchups. It's so close that it's a statistical dead heat, but Obama still loses: 43%-45% to McCain, 44%-45% to Giuliani.

Part of the explanation, of course, is that a great many of those who are unhappy with the Bush administration are conservatives who have no interest in voting for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But that doesn't occur to our myopic analyst:

It's hard to know exactly why respondents who are generally unhappy towards - and in many cases fed up with - the G.O.P. might still prefer a Republican for President over a Democrat. Much of it has to do with the individual candidates involved.

That's true, of course, but not for the reasons Time suggests. The real explanation has much to do with the "stature gap" which Paul has written about here and elsewhere. The Republican candidates are simply far more impressive people, with much more impressive histories, than their Democratic rivals. But there is more, as Time reluctantly admits:

Democrats also may have a residual disadvantage going into 2008 - a long-standing disposition among voters to view Republicans as stronger on issues involving national security. Without question, Bush has done serious damage to the Republican brand in this arena. But, with the nation waging two wars and terrorism still a threat, that underlying sentiment might be one of the reasons G.O.P. candidates appear competitive at all.

Time's conviction that President Bush has done "serious damage" to the Republicans' national security image by moving aggressively to overthrow the terrorist regime in Afghanistan, deposing a terror-supporting regime in Iraq, spying on the terrorists' international communications and tracking their finances, and thereby keeping America safe for the past five and one-half years, is touching. If cluelessness is a liability in politics, the Democrats could be in trouble.

Events of the last week or two help to explain why the Democratic Congress is viewed more unfavorably by the public than President Bush, and why the Democrats are generally seen as weak on national security. President Bush wants to fund the ongoing war against the terrorists; the Democrats, on the contrary, see war funding as an opportunity to add $20 billion in pork to the federal budget--but only after declaring a preemptive surrender to our enemies. Today, the House of Representatives, under Nancy Pelosi's feckless leadership, refused to consider a resolution expressing support for the British sailors and marines who have been kidnapped by the Iranian mullahs.

Could a Democrat be elected President in 2008? Sure, and publications like Time will do everything possible to make it happen. But, given the superiority of the Republican candidates and the Democrats' pathetic record on national security--and, hey, we haven't even started talking about taxes--it's no surprise that at the moment, most voters would rather elect a Republican.