The PublicAffairs division of Perseus Books has published a memoir by former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan. The book is titled, What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

It somewhat overshadows an editorial by Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy for four years from mid-2001. Published in the Wall Street Journal, How Bush Sold the War is a highly critical assessment of the White House’s foreign policy positions — and one with which I find myself largely in agreement. But unlike Feith’s well-reasoned and carefully considered judgement, McClellan’s tell-all memoir is getting all the press. After all, a book by a man on the lecture circuit needs selling.

Here’s how I reckon the conversation between McClellan and his publisher went:

Scott McClellan, author: Hey, I want to cash in on a book deal, like all the other losers who’re out of jobs and get ghostwriters tell their inside-track stories. At least I was actually employed by the White House. Unlike, say, Joe Wilson.

Peter Osnos, publisher: Not sure a PR’s story is going to sell well. You lot are not much more sympathetic than lawyers and estate agents, in the eyes of the public, and the media hate your kind. So what do you propose writing about?

McClellan: Bush, and what a great job I did defending him in difficult times.

Osnos: Bye-bye. Nice talking to you. May I recommend Vantage Press? Vanity publishing won’t cost you that much, and most people never even notice.

McClellan: Okay, what would you need?

Osnos: To make money? How about inside-track confessions? Sordid tales of sex and betrayal? Did you know Bush lied about the war? Did you have doubts about White House policy?

McClellan: No, not really. If I had, I would have taken my own advice, as I said about Dick Clarke when he published his memoir, Against All Enemies: “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let’s look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry’s campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments [that Mr. Clarke made] up on their website.”

Osnos: Best you never bring that paragraph up in public again. We can’t have people questioning our publishing ethics, now can we? Okay, let’s try another angle. Did Bush and Cheney confide in you?

McClellan: No, they didn’t. I just made press statements. Karl Rove actually ran the show.

Osnos: Then here’s an idea: write how the evil twins, Karl Bush and George W. Rove, didn’t confide in you, and told you only what they thought you needed to know to lie to the media.

McClellan: Like what?

Osnos: Take Katrina.

McClellan: Her name was Monica, and that wasn’t Bush, anyway.

Osnos: No, you idiot, the hurricane.

McClellan: Oh yeah. Forgot about that. What about it? I had my hands full defending the White House against charges that they should have violated states rights to send in the cavalry, when the fools in charge of Louisiana didn’t bother to summon federal assistance. Not one reporter would believe that Bush’s powers are actually limited by the constitution.

Osnos: You were the spin doctor, right? Did you set up disaster photo-ops?

McClellan: That’s my job. PRs stage photo-ops.

Osnos: Excellent. Nobody likes staged photo ops. Like spin, or PR, they’re synonymous with insincerity and lies. So just explain matter-of-factly how they were staged, and your book will sell like hotcakes. Nothing of actual substance required.

McClellan: And then?

Osnos: Well, just write how Bush screwed up on this, that or the other, in your extremely well-informed opinion. Without hindsight, book publishers like me would be out of business, and great authors like you would never make the bestseller lists.

McClellan: But my opinion wasn’t well-informed.

Osnos: Who cares? You stood on the podium in the White House briefing room, didn’t you? You have hindsight, don’t you? So you were the only dolt who actually said “yes” to a question on whether Saddam was involved in 9/11. Most people think that was a Freudian slip anyway, because they think a press secretary is supposed to be well-informed of what goes on in the inner circle. People will believe whatever you say now, just because of that White House seal behind you, and the hindsight in front of you. Hindsight will not only make you look well-informed, but it will make you look like you were smarter than them all along.

McClellan: Yeah, I guess. So I write about what I think about Iraq, and the PR job leading up to it — before I was in charge of PR, mind you — that sort of thing?

Osnos: Exactly! Or take the Plame affair. Everyone knows a special investigation failed to turn up anything incriminating at all, except maybe against that Armitage fellow over at State, who wasn’t even being investigated. Bush, Cheney and Rove never did tell you about their role in leaking her identity, did they?

McClellan: Of course not. They knew nothing about it. Well, except that Joe Wilson was a proven liar, and then offered to campaign for John Kerry. Even Kerry washed his hands of him. I advised the White House that if he’s too toxic even for the Democrats, they’d better not comment at all, because that would only give his story credit it didn’t deserve.

Osnos: No, you prat. Want to make money from your book? Just write that the cabal didn’t tell you anything, but they did “collude” to get their stories straight, so they wouldn’t make the mistake that poor fool Libby made. Presumably, this is standard PR advice, but don’t mention that. Just say they met at the time to discuss the Plame case and how Fitzgerald’s investigation might affect the White House. This makes them look like liars, without actually calling them liars, and without implicating you in any way. So you get to dodge lawsuits, and the book will sell millions. Then, when they heed your advice about Joe Wilson once again — not to respond to your book, for fear of looking defensive — everyone will believe they’re guilty as sin. The headline will read: “Bush White House doesn’t deny that Rove and Cheney were in cahoots”. They’re hung by what everyone will think is their own petard — not knowing it’s yours — and you’ll come out smelling like roses.

McClellan: But I have no idea what they actually discussed.

Osnos: Who cares? Write exactly that, in fact. In fact, not taking you into their confidence suggests dishonesty. So why don’t you call it a “culture of deception” or something?

McClellan: But I don’t think calling the White House deliberately dishonest is very smart. Or very honest.

Osnos: So write about “Washington’s culture of deception”. If Barack Obama can say it, why can’t you?

McClellan: Won’t all this look rather dishonourable?

Osnos: Look, Scotty. Mind if I call you Scotty? There are a million people out there who already believe all the adjectives in the world aren’t enough to describe the evil of the Bush cabal. They already believe every word you have yet to write, and more importantly, every word you won’t write. Most won’t even bother to read the book, but will blog about it anyway. Just write them something that doesn’t conflict with their partisan prejudices, and you’ll come out looking like the brave dissenter who did your duty but whose honour now compels him to go public. Who cares that you’re not going public with anything of actual substance? For that matter, who cares about honour? This is Bush we’re talking about, remember?

McClellan: Wow. And I thought I was pretty hot stuff as a spin doctor.

Osnos: No. You gave two-page press releases to journalists who are paid to read them. A mechanical monkey can do that. I’m hot stuff. I have to sell turgid 500-page tomes filled with the partisan drivel of non-entities to a million illiterate nobodies, and get them onto the NYT and Amazon.com bestseller lists to boot. You’re an amateur. That’s why you’re on that side of the desk, and I’m on this side. You have no idea how to spin stories.

McClellan: I see now what you mean by your “innovative and aggressive new model of publishing” that ensures profitability. I’m impressed. Just remember to put in the blurb something like that I was kind of the power behind the throne — one of Bush’s closest aides, or something — and that the White House couldn’t say anything without going through me. I hear what you say. You’re a professional. So am I, so let’s go make some money. I must say, this book-writing business is pretty cool. Used to be you had to actually save for your retirement, and protect your integrity. Now you can just turn around and screw everyone you worked for and make a killing. Here I thought PR was a pretty dishonest but profitable job. It’s clearly got nothing on book publishing.

Osnos: Indeed it doesn’t. Now let’s go find some rare whiskey to toast with. I’m buying.

McClellan: Och aye. A wee dram would numb the pain of prosperity.

Osnos: That it does, Scotty. That it does.

No less an orator than president George W Bush of them great misunderestimated United States, trotted out this line in an address to the Economic Club of New York just now. He promised to strongly promote his free trade proposals, and spoke eloquently against isolationism and protectionism — sentiments that I, as a foreigner, cheer.

This raised a laugh:

It makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the US markets. It’s our money to begin with. It seems like we ought to let it back.

Proof that seven years of regular practice can make a moderately competent speaker out of anyone.

William McGurn, George W Bush’s head speechwriter until a couple of weeks ago, has written an editorial that is well worth reading. It’s illuminating to get such a view from the other side of the media fence, even if this piece comes across a little plaintive.

When a man hangs up his byline to write for a president, he gets more than a new job. He gets to see how the press and pundit corps look from the other side of the notepad.

And over three years in the West Wing, you see a few things. You see who’s a straight shooter, and who’s full of snark. You see who’s smart, and whose outrageous behavior would have made its way to Drudge had it involved White House staffers instead of White House correspondents. Most of all, you see how conventional wisdom can keep otherwise talented reporters and commentators on the same stale storyline long after the facts on the ground have changed.

He does make a few very good points. In particular, he notes the irony of the protrayal of Bush as a stubborn, intransigent ideologue, when several examples illustrate the stubborn determination of an editorialising media corps to cling to a story once they’ve made up their minds.

A line in his resignation letter (PDF) reads: “I remember [on 9/11] looking up at the sky and wondering what kind of world my girls would inherit. And I remember saying to [my wife] Julie, ‘Let’s be thankful that George W Bush is president’.”

In this article, he echoes that sentiment. I largely agree with his assessment, and like him, I also admire George W Bush for having the courage and conviction to take necessary decisions, difficult decisions, and as McGurn describes it, to “take the heat” for them.

Still, you can’t help thinking that McGurn is defending not only Bush’s failures to communicate, but his own.

When US president George W Bush praises Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi for her leadership, as he did over the “stimulus package” he proposed, you know something bad just happened. When Pelosi beams broadly, and places emphasis on how the measures are “temporary”, you just know she means, “when the election is over, you’ll be paying for it, you gullible fools”. If there’s anything more distasteful than a misguided but principled partisan proposal, it’s a waffly but expensive bi-partisan cop-out.

I couldn’t do a better job of demolishing the latest fiscal abortion than Kimberley Strassel, in Bush’s Economic Surrender. This editorial doesn’t do a bad job either. Bush has failed his citizens. Bush has failed his economic principles. Bush has failed the GOP candidates. Bush has failed the cause of sane tax policy. No stimulus at all would have been a better option than this ill-disguised redistributionist handout. Arthur Laffer, he of the famous Laffer Curve, follows on with an admirable explanation of how tax works in the real world, unpolluted by deal-making politicians.

So, I take back what I said about Bush. He may still have been the sheriff in DC in 2007, but it’s 2008 now, and he’s shaping up to be a lame duck, alright.

Barack Obama mentions Ronald Reagan, and Paul Krugman has a fit. He proceeds to revise Reagan’s legacy, because Clinton failed to change the narrative and Republicans are trying to rewrite history. Seriously.

Here’s the column, by celebrated New York Times columnist, former Enron adviser, and economist extraordinaire, Paul Krugman.

Debunking the Reagan Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 21, 2008

I thought, “Well, that was a quick read”, and was just about to retire for a power nap, when someone asked me for comment. So I thought, “Well, that’ll make a nice fisking.”

And it turned out to be very much worth fisking. Writes Krugman:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

It’s not the perception that matters, it’s the economic policies and principles that matter. Whether the New Deal was or was not sound economic policy matters very much, because it is on such historical lessons that many base their decisions of today.

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Indeed. Maybe that’s because the Reagan era still matters immensely for Americans (not to mention the rest of the world).

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

And low taxes, the defeat of inflation, low oil prices, and the defeat of the Soviet Union. A Gilded Age indeed.
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This item, from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, is one of the funnier contributions I’ve read:

How Clemenceau Crippled Clinton

A Los Angeles Times editorial ponders the difficulties of the onetime Democratic front-runner and blames them on … President Bush! Seriously:

For Clinton, the trouble is not emotion but, perversely, President Bush. So badly has this president performed that he has discredited not just his own administration but the very idea of Washington knowledge. Voters frustrated by the war in Iraq and anxious about the economy have turned on the man who brought us those troubles and on experience itself — and thus on Clinton.

But this is much too simplistic. After all, it’s not as if George W. Bush just sprang forth out of nothing. And if you look at history, it’s clear that the real culprit — perversely! — is Georges Clemenceau.

Clemenceau was the French prime minister in 1919 who at the Versailles conference pushed for the imposition of harsh peace terms on Germany, the loser in World War I. The hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty contributed to Hitler’s rise to power, leading to World War II.

World War II made a hero of Dwight Eisenhower (no wonder Mrs. Clinton can’t stand him), thereby making possible his election as president in 1952. This made it possible, 16 years later, for Ike’s vice president, Richard Nixon, to ascend to the White House.

If Nixon hadn’t been president, he would not have resigned, and Gerald Ford would not have entered the White House in 1974, which means he would not have been an ex-president in 1980, when Ronald Reagan invited Ford to be his running mate. Surely under such circumstances Ford would have accepted the offer rather than hold out for some ridiculous “co-presidency.”

If Ford had become vice president in 1980, George H.W. Bush would not have. It’s hard to see how George W. Bush could have ascended to the White House on the strength of daddy’s legacy if daddy were a mere former U.N. ambassador.

So you see, Clemenceau, with a little help from Hitler and every Republican president since World War II, caused George W. Bush to become president, thereby discrediting the very idea of experience. And to think, when Mrs. Clinton spoke of the vast right-wing conspiracy, people scoffed.

It’s also an excellent excuse to highlight the paper’s new online design, and the fact that the editorial page on free markets and free people is now, well, free. After all that ribbing about the New York Times’s failed TimesSelect subscription experiment, it’s about time the Wall Street Journal capitulated too.

The conservative Media Research Council has announced the Best Notable Quotables of 2007. The winner is truly funny, and most are very instructive. However, another entry from the MRC, which arrived in my inbox a week later, caught my attention.

It appears sexism against Hillary Clinton has to become a big issue. Whether it’s idiots falling for deliberate trolling, or defenders who need foils for attacks they can’t handle, accusations of prejudice become the last refuge of political hacks.

The original of a curiously sanitised piece by Jonathan Tilove in the Seattle Times of 29 November was a little different from what’s posted there now. The original was published in an MRC email on 26 December, but has not yet made it to its rather primitive-looking website. The MRC says that in excerpt, it reads as follows:

Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression. Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in ‘bitch,’ ’slut,’ ’skank,’ ‘whore’ and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language….Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

I say bollocks. What a prick. For start, this schmuck surely knows that the C word is commonly applied to men, without reference to either women or their degree of sexual sulliedness? And what tosser removes offensive language from an article after it’s been published? I’d also challenge this dickhead to search the “thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Bushland”, and analyse the epithets found there. Hint: they’re not “clear-eyed” and “rosy-cheeked”. Not even with witty sarcasm. In fact, I’d wager he’d find a fair few of a character that would offend his delicate sensibilities.

Besides, how anti-feminist of Tilove to think that Mrs Clinton is too fragile as a woman to tolerate the sort of ribald political rough-riding that typifies the more puerile corners of the interwebs.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).

Pictured alongside is Lauren Bush, the niece of US president George W Bush. She made the news recently with a charity project called FEED. Each designer canvas bag sold will generate enough money to feed one child in the developing world for a year.

Good Magazine quotes her as saying: “I would love for [this] to be completely nonpolitical because I think it distracts from the real humanitarian point of the project.”

But that’s not good enough for Sky News, whose Adam Boulton spent most of his interview with the 23-year-old trying to trip her up over his own prejudices about her uncle. According to the Sky report:

However, the US is often seen by some as the main obstacle to helping the Third World in terms of world trade.

It has the largest economy but as a proportion of its wealth it does not give as much as some other nations.

Nevermind that this is irrelevant, ill-informed and uncalled-for editorialising. Nevermind that it confuses aid with trade. Nevermind that the US is the biggest global aid donor in nominal terms, is on a par with many others in relative terms, and that the Bush administration has increased aid commitments to Africa compared to previous US administrations. Nevermind that the US is the leading promoter of trade (as opposed to aid) in the fight against poverty. Nevermind whether trade should be preferred to aid. Nevermind whether simply dispatching an arbitrarily chosen share of gross national income on foreign aid is better or worse than spending less money more effectively. Nevermind whether throwing good money after bad in foreign aid is likely to address “Third World” poverty (as opposed to merely soothing the collective conscience of the rich). These weren’t the questions Boulton asked of Lauren Bush.

Instead, Boulton threw his own simple biases about the US president at his college-age niece, which strikes me as pretty low. If he’s going to bash Bush, why pick on her? Is she to blame for the public’s perception (or more accurately, the media’s lack of objectivity) about the US? Why would she have anything at all to say about US policy on foreign aid or free trade? Why not ask her directly under which conditions she believes aid works, and when she believes aid trumps trade in poverty relief? Why not ask her about her own project, instead of harrying her with cheap shots about her uncle?

When the activistreporter closed by asking why she didn’t want to go into politics, she tartly shot back: “Because of questions like these.”

That barb didn’t make it into the online version of the report. Well done, Ms Bush, for revealing the brave Bush-bashing Boulton as nothing more than an editorialising chicken-hawk who can’t handle being smacked down by a good-looking girl.

Listening to CNN hail some recent economic pessimism as an “It’s the economy stupid” moment like the one which swept Bill Clinton to power in 1992, it not only sounded like a Democrat stump speech, but prompted me to give the US economy some thought. The proximate cause of the current low economic confidence is, no doubt, the mortgages problem. “Credit crunch”, “subprime crisis”, it’s all over the papers.

What I’m wondering is what this has to do with the current president, and how a different president with different policies would have done (or rather, would do) things differently.

To simplify somewhat (but not much): after the dot-com bubble burst two things happened. Both were designed to ease the pain and soften the landing. Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates, and kept them at record lows for a long time. George Bush proposed a raft of tax cuts. So Greenspan made debt look attractive, by making the real interest rate (nominal rate minus inflation) negative, prompting a rush of zero-rate deals offered by banks. Bush, by contrast, took less money from people’s incomes, leaving more in their pockets for spending or investment.

Lots of people took the debt deals, with or without the elementary understanding that zero interest rates couldn’t possibly last, whether or not they could now afford it. Since then, interest rates have risen, but taxes have not.

So who’s the villain in this piece? The Fed chairman, who independently determines interest rates, or the president, who doesn’t? Granted, it’s always nice to blame your bank when you’re in trouble, or your spouse, or your kids, or your government, but it’s not always accurate. St Alan, not the devil in the White House, was most responsible for today’s credit crisis. Unlike the president’s remedy, the Fed’s medicine was at best a temporary salve. Greenspan is already gone, but his successor, Ben Bernanke, has as much power in controlling the price of money. Price controls don’t work anywhere else, so why would it work in the credit market?

And if you think the problem is larger than bad credit, and point, say, to the ever-weakening dollar, one can again point to the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy. If you’re printing money to keep consumer spending up, your currency is going to devalue. Ask Bob Mugabe.

Since Bernanke isn’t up for re-election, and the Federal Reserve isn’t up for a renewal of its charter, why would these issues even feature in a presidential election campaign? They have little, or nothing, to do with the current president. (Just like Congress’s profligate spending has nothing to do with the president if he doesn’t even have a line-item veto.) If I were an American voter, I’d be thanking the president for doing what he could do — cut taxes — and considering any candidate who looks skeptical enough of the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to try to do something about it.

Why would CNN be telling us they’re critical election issues for Campaign 2008? This is misdirection, and partisan misdirection at that.

Neoconservatism, since its revival in the popular consciousness after 9/11, is often misunderstood. It defies old-fashioned classification as either idealist or realist, being in many ways both. Most often, it is used as a general, usually derogatory, term to describe the policies of the Bush administration. This association, while in some ways accurate, often is not. Using it as such a simplistic political label is misleading. It disregards the ideology’s classical liberal origin and basis, its history as offshoot from the Democratic party in the United States, and the guiding political and philosophic principles it retains today. Even the term “ideology” itself could use some clarification, being often misunderstood in a similar way: as a rigid, blind dogma, rather than as a set of underlying ideas or philosophical principles on which logical political argument can be based.

In a long but eminently readable article for Commentary magazine, republished in the Wall Street Journal, Joshua Muravchik, who has been closely associated with the neoconservative movement and its central figures, does a remarkably clear and comprehensive job of describing what neoconservatism really is and where it’s at. First he explains its origins and principles. Then he sets the record straight on a number of misconceptions and fallacies. Finally, he analyses its current vitality in the light of both global and American domestic politics. Many commentators — including some neoconservatives themselves — have declared neoconservatism dead, or at least irreparably damaged by the failures and complications of the war in Iraq. Muravchik begs to differ. He concludes that as political ideology, is still the only game in town.

It’s essential reading, in my view. Especially if you want to understand, for example, why neoconservatives think the way they do, or why I’m not afraid to describe myself as one, despite the popular opprobrium with which the label is used, and despite my deep affinity with libertarian economics.

Sokwanele has some stark pictures of the wages of price controls. Look what you’ve done, Bush and Blair!