If you have an hour to spare watch this excellent dialogue between Richard Holbrooke and Bill Kristol on the future direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Holbrooke is right on most of his points, but I have to say he is kind of a jerk.

D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton goes head to head with Stephen Colbert. Best 'Better Know a District' interview yet.

Embedded in an article about the political fallout from Ned Lamont's victory in the Connecticut Democratic primaries, Jacob Weisberg makes the following point:

Lieberman's opponents are not entirely wrong about the war. The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis. The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

I must agree with Jacob that those who harp on the faulty rationale for the Iraq War don't seem to fully appreciate the larger and very different threat of radical Islam. Still, one can't blame them when 50% of the American public believes Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, up from 36% last year.

It's a good thing my department mailbox was moved up above eyesight this week. I just ordered a year's subscription to the The New Criterion, an ultra-conservative publication which, if spotted by my department superiors, could endanger my academic career prospects. Well, no, I kid. That's not true.

But the writers of The New Criterion would have you believe otherwise. Academia, as they see it, has lost its moorings in a sea of suffocating political correctness and intolerance to ideas outside of its liberal dogma. Facing open intimidation, young conservatives learn to avoid careers in the humanities and social sciences, and with each passing generation the liberal university strongholds drift further and further into irrelevance.

The New Criterion was founded in response to this state of affairs, as well as to a similar situation at the New York Times, from where the editor Hilton Kramer fled. It is primarily an art criticism periodical, with strong coverage of culture and current affairs. It is erudite to the highest degree, perhaps exceeding The New Yorker in sophistication and in wit. But, enjoyable as it may be, in its philosophy it is almost always wrong, and at times reprehensible. On foreign policy, the writers are unrepentant neoconservatives. On domestic issues, one senses that their opposition to the welfare state is based not on a cautious analysis of the free market economy, but rather on a sense of entitlement for the already rich and a disregard for the plight of the poor.

But despite the sometimes extreme opinions, liberal readers would benefit from The New Criterion. If nothing else, it is an apt commentator on the increasing marginalization of liberal academic fields that no longer have the ear of Washington. Again and again, we are shown examples of academic silliness: course offerings of dubious value, outrageous theories borne of generations of groupthink, and the harassment of conservative student organizations by university administrations. In my own experience, I have found that my views as a moderate Democrat can sometimes place me in the loony Right of the academic political spectrum. It is no wonder, then, that the U.S. President and his supporters pay no attention to the research of today's university social scientists, most of which is well-conducted and crucial for the formation of good policy. To the extent that the Bush administration pays any attention at all to social scientists, it is to the conservative thinktanks whose members found themselves unwelcome in academia. Referring to the difficulties conservatives face in the university, Harvey Mansfield once quipped, "Well, I guess they'll have to go to Washington and run the country."

If the university is to take back the ear of Washington, it must become more tolerant of conservative ideas. Such change must come from within. External policing efforts by the likes of Daniel Pipes are contrary to the spirit of academic freedom and are bound to backfire. Instead, it is up to the professors and the graduate students already in the universities to scale back the eye-rolling and the heated indignation with which they so often greet conservative ideas. It will be interesting to see if anyone reacts when my first issue of The New Criterion arrives in the mail next month.