Reflections  

Imposing democracy — In his second debate with Al Gore, George W. Bush denounced "nation-building," by which he meant intervening in other countries to try to impose democratic and free-market institutions on them whether they wanted them or not. He also criticized the previous administration for being too dependent on support from alliances like NATO and international organizations like the United Nations. He favored a more independent foreign policy.

Since NATO and the U.N. had ensnared the U.S. into dubious foreign military activity (in Haiti, Somalia and Yugoslavia), activity that involved nation-building, it seemed pretty certain that Bush was advocating a much less activist foreign policy than President Clinton's. Indeed, it looked as if the U.S. under Bush might very well adopt the traditional, classical liberal foreign policy: free trade and friendship with all nations, and a military kept for defensive purposes only.

Bush kept half of his foreign policy promises: he has gleefully ignored the U.N. and NATO, proceeding with plans to invade Iraq, occupy it, and set up a puppet government, all in the name of nation-building.

The hubris of the Bush policy knows no limits. The administration has already set up a task force to determine what sort of taxes the new, democratic, free-market Iraq will impose on its citizens. Right now, the Iraqi government is funded mostly by oil revenues; its only taxes are modest levies on real estate and inheritance. Plainly, according to the Bush administration task force, it needs more taxes, though not at first. Initially, to build popular support, there will be no taxes at all. But once a popular government has been established, Iraqis will get a progressive income tax. — R.W. Bradford

What comes around goes around — The CIA is now reporting that North Korea has the technology to hit targets on the west coast of America. It just occurred to me that these targets include large clusters of people who supported Clinton throughout the '90s, whilst he was selling missile technology to the Chinese in return for campaign contributions. It's nice to know that since so many west coast residents subscribe to Eastern religions, the concept of "Karmic Justice" is not foreign to them. — Tim Slagle

Lies, damned lies, and the dodo — We all "know" that plant and animal species are constantly "going extinct," and that they are "going extinct" at a "rapidly increasing rate." But some of the things that we supposedly know aren't really true.

Ask yourself, What's the most recent species to go extinct?

Huh? You don't remember? No, it's not a trick question. And yes, you should have heard about it, if the environmental organizations are doing their job. That's one of the things they're for, isn't it — to let us know when species go extinct? Unless species go extinct so rarely that the environmentalists don't want to bring it up . . .

And please, don't go on and on about the extinction of the passenger pigeon, or the dodo — or the Neanderthal, which one environmental website lists along with the passenger pigeon and the dodo as an example that we should all be mindful of. Those extinctions happened a long, long time ago.

I recently asked myself this question about the last extinction. The stimulus was one of those articles that the local paper runs on a slow news day. It was the ordinary, desperate report on the state of the world's flora and fauna, as viewed by environmental experts and a newspaper reporter whose job is to swallow everything that such people have to say. Amid all the dire forebodings and authoritative predictions, a stray fact stood out: "Of 20,000 species of plants native [to the United States], more than 200 have gone extinct." You can see the dimensions of the problem! And they're not very large.

But the story got me curious. How rapidly are extinctions taking place? To simplify matters, I decided to confine myself to mammalian species, the only kind of species that people generally care about, and the kind of species that are, generally speaking, most vulnerable to extinction, being so large and all.

To find the answer, I went to the Web. I figured that if the environmental activists are doing anything to inform the public, they're doing it over the Web. And there are, in fact, so many environmental websites that I expected the crucial information to leap into view very rapidly. It didn't. Virtually all the sites that concern themselves with extinction turn out to be more concerned with scaring you than with providing detailed, factual reasons for you to be scared. They simply lament the loss of a few sample species, without ever mentioning how long ago those species were lost. It takes you a while, but eventually you realize that you can dry your tears for the eastern woodland bison. It perished in 1825.

The sites also have strange practices with lists and statistics. They say that so many species are "threatened" or "endangered" or "qualify" to be considered as such, but the closer they get to the current die-off rate, the fuzzier their data become. Also, they commonly inflate the notion of "species," a word that means, according to one of them (a site more candid than most), "species, subspecies, varieties [!], and vertebrate populations." This appears to mean that when I'm off in the desert by myself, and thereby constitute an isolated vertebrate population, I become a new species, California desert man, a mammal that is severely endangered and in need of protection. After all, it's down to only one animal. I think this may be why the lists of extinct animals include so many wolves and bison and foxes with geographical adjectives attached: "Great Plains wolf," "Southern Rocky Mountains wolf," etc.

The cotton rat is listed as having gone extinct in 1996, but the last specimen was collected in 1909, so who knows when it happened? The chipmunk is said to have died out in 1980, but there's a problem with that, too. The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish — which, by the way, considers the Penasco chipmunk "a subspecies of the least chipmunk" — appears to be of two minds on the question of whether the little guys are gone. It talks about them as if they were still alive, but notes that the last, unconfirmed, sighting happened in 1993.

Speaking of confirmation, I have so far failed to confirm the extinction of the big thicket hog-nosed skunk, which according to some lists became extinct in the mid-1990s. I hope that it didn't. Anything with a name like that should live forever. Other sources proclaim the end of the Mexican gray wolf and the black-footed ferret, two mammals that are not only alive but the object of programs designed to repopulate the wild with them.

Environmentalists helped to save those critters. If that's what environmentalists do, it's fine with me. But I've stopped worrying about their comments on the dizzy pace of animal extinction. — Stephen Cox

One-trick donkey — Abortion sure brings out the libertarian rhetoric in Democrats. The six Democratic presidential candidates shared a stage for the first time at a gala dinner put on by NARAL Pro-Choice America, the new name of the National Abortion Rights Action League. The candidates fell over themselves to make the most ringing defense of abortion rights and the sharpest criticism of President Bush and the Republican Congress.

Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, proclaimed, "This government is so impressed with itself in promoting individual freedom they can't wait to get into your bedroom and tell you how to behave." Of course, abortions don't usually take place in the bedroom but rather in a doctor's office. And Governor Dean wants to nationalize doctor's offices and take away medical freedom with his "universal health care" program. He doesn't even believe that a terminally ill woman should have the right to choose medical marijuana to ease her pain.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) promised to bring up the abortion issue if he finds himself debating President Bush next year: "I'll tell him, 'There's a fundamental difference between he and I (sic; it's been a long time since Kerry's prep school grammar classes): I trust women to make their own decisions. You don't.'" Fine words. But it looks like the only decision John Kerry trusts women to make is the decision to have an abortion. He doesn't trust a woman to make the decision to invest her Social Security taxes in private accounts that would provide her a more comfortable retirement. He doesn't trust a woman to own a gun. He doesn't trust a woman to make her own decision on where her children will go to school.

Former House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt acknowledged a change of heart on the abortion issue: "I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered not by the state but by the individual." With language like that, Gephardt could run for the Libertarian Party nomination. But what question of choice — other than abortion — does Gephardt think should be answered "not by the state but by the individual"? Like Kerry, he opposes Social Security choice, school choice, and the right of individuals to choose what drugs they will use, either for medical or recreational purposes. He voted to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry the person they choose.

Too many people these days think "choice" only refers to abortion. I'd like to hear a presidential candidate say, "I believe in a woman's right to choose. I believe in a woman's right to choose whether to have a child. I believe in a woman's right to choose any job someone will hire her for. I believe in a woman's right to choose to own a gun. I believe in a woman's right to choose the school she thinks is best for her child, public or private. I believe in a woman's right to choose what kinds of art she will spend her money on, even if she prefers Madonna or Randy Travis and Congress wants to give her money to Robert Mapplethorpe or Luciano Pavarotti. I believe in a woman's right to choose to drive a cab, even if she doesn't have a license. I believe in a woman's right to choose the employees she wants for her business, even if they don't fit some government quota. I believe in a woman's right to choose the drugs she prefers for recreation, whether she chooses Coors or cocaine. I believe in a woman's right to choose how to spend all of her hard-earned money, without giving half of it to the government."

Whatever one's decision on the right to choose abortion, surely that is a more difficult issue, involving more lives and more complexities, than the right to choose a school for your child, to use marijuana, or to own a gun. And yet many of the supporters of "a woman's right to choose" don't support a woman's right to make those choices.

When a Republican president is holding U.S. citizens without a court hearing, implementing a Total Information Awareness program to compile information on all citizens, and spending more taxpayers' money on every nook and cranny of the federal government, it's great to hear leading Democrats talk about freedom, trusting people to make their own decisions, and limiting the power of the state. It would be even better if they applied those noble principles to more than one issue. — David Boaz

Revenge of the New Dealers — The Department of Homeland Security is a Republican version of New Deal public works programs. — Richard Kostelanetz

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