Victor Davis Hanson is accepting email questions on his new website and answering them when he has the time. The following is an insightful answer to one of the current questions:

Question: The wealth and power that Rome accumulated within a couple of generations, it seems, led to two civil wars and the destruction of the Republic. I feel as though our political situation is becoming as partisan and could very well end in some type of civil strife within another generation. Am I way off base here?
Hanson: I can?t quite adjudicate all your comparisons, but I share your worry about polarization and think this next campaign will be the nastiest in some time. I didn?t really dislike personally Bill Clinton, although I felt he weakened the United States abroad. But there were many on the Right who did?and gave him no fair hearing, especially about his commendable though belated attack on Milosevic. Yet, their animus has been trumped by Bush-haters. And we are now in a spiral whose logical end is sort of frightening.

David Warren’s latest is “One Year Later.”

The New York Times has its faults, but it continues to be one of the best sources of international news reporting. Today, Times foreign correspondence Michael Wines writes this incredible story about the latest coup attempt in Equitorial Guinea, the poor Western African country that has been the site of an oil and gas drilling boom over the past decade. The entire story is the stuff from which entertaining movies are made, and the following will give you a flavor for it:

This malarial West African dictatorship quashed another coup attempt this month, which is like saying the corner 7-Eleven served up another Slurpee. Quashed coups (five since 1996) are a political staple here, so routine that some say the government stages and then quashes them to burnish its image of invincibility.
But the coup this month was different. Nobody could make this coup up.
The coup attempt of 2004 features a dysfunctional ruling family, a Lamborghini-driving, rap-music-producing heir apparent and a bitter political opponent in exile who insists that Equatorial Guinea is run by a gonad-eating cannibal. It is said to involve a Lebanese front company, a British financier, an opposition figure living in exile in Spain and some 80 mercenaries from South Africa, Germany, Armenia and Kazakhstan.
With such a polyglot cast, this whodunit has become almost a parlor game among Africa watchers. Not since Christmas 1975, when Moroccan palace guards shot 150 suspected plotters in the city soccer stadium to a band’s rendition of “Those Were the Days, My Friend” has a botched takeover set tongues wagging so briskly.
* * *
. . . [t]oppling Equatorial Guinea’s government would be no mean feat, because removing the president would barely scratch the surface. The military is peppered with Mr. Obiang’s cousins and nephews. One of his sons is the natural resources minister. A brother-in-law is ambassador to Washington.
A brother, Armengol Ondo Nguema, is a top internal security official and, according to a 1999 State Department report, a torturer whose minions urinated on their victims, sliced their ears and rubbed oil on their bodies to lure stinging ants.
Finally, a second son, Teodoro Nguemo Obiang, is the infrastructure minister and his father’s anointed successor. To the dismay of some relatives, he also is a rap music entrepreneur and bon vivant, fond of Lamborghinis and long trips to Hollywood and Rio de Janeiro, who shows few signs of following his father’s iron-fisted tradition.
* * *
The entire plot, he said, was hatched by Severo Moto, an Equatorial Guinean opposition figure and longtime fomenter of quashed coups who lives in exile in Madrid. Mr. Moto’s coup was said to be financed by $5 million from a British businessman, washed through a front company in Lebanon.
Mr. Moto makes no secret of his hatred of President Obiang: on Spanish radio this month, he called him a demon who “systematically eats his political rivals.”
“He has just devoured a police commissioner. I say `devoured,’ as this commissioner was buried without his testicles and brain,” he said, adding that Mr. Obiang hungered for his body parts as well.
“We are in the hands of a cannibal,” he warned.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest National Review Online op-ed is online. As usual, the entire piece is well worth reading, and Professor Davis concludes with the following observation:

Indeed, we are in one of the rare periods of fundamental transformation in world history ? as the United States has pledged its blood and treasure in both a dangerous and daring attempt to bring the Middle East, kicking and screaming, into the family of democratic nations and free societies. So while American soldiers fight, build, patrol, and sometimes die in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world at large ? the Saudi royal family, President Musharraf, Mr. Khaddafi, the mullahs in Iran, the young Assad, the kleptocracy on the West Bank, and the weak and triangulating Europeans ? wonders whether the strong horse will prove to be the murderous bin Laden and his Arab romance of a new Dark Age, or George Bush’s idea of a free and democratic Middle East.

FrontpagMag.com interviews the always insightful Victor Davis Hanson regarding the recent events in Spain and the Middle East, and how Americans and Europeans have reacted to them. Thanks to Occam’s Toothbrush for the link. The entire interview is a must read, but one sentence about what could defeat America stands out:

I am talking about a secular religion of anti-Americanism brought on by our very success that allows such utopianism and cheap caring-and it does weaken and tire our efforts to win this war.

Clearly worn down by the prospect of dealing further with the Harris County Commissioner’s Court, ChevronTexaco announced yesterday that it had closed the deal to buy the former Enron Building in downtown Houston. In light of the County’s recalcitrance, I suspect that the seller threw come additional consideration to ChevronTexaco to get the deal done.
As noted in this earlier post on the matter, this closing frees Harris County taxpayers from having to deal with Commissioner Steve Radack’s delusions about having the County buy the building.

The Bush Admininistration’s conduct in promoting the Medicare prescription drug legislation last year is coming under increasing scrutiny. Already of dubious financial merit, this NY Times article reports on the opening of a House inquiry into bribery allegations that are based on a Republican congressman’s public comments made immediately following the close vote last year over the controversial bill.
In related news, this WSJ ($) article and this NY Times article report on the controversy swirling around Richard Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary. Mr. Foster was warned last year that he could be accused of “insubordination” if he shared information with Congress about the White House-backed prescription-drug bill without the approval of his politically appointed superiors, according to e-mails from the top aide to Thomas Scully, who was then the Bush Administration’s administrator for the health-care program. A WSJ copy of the email can be reviewed here. The gist of the story is that Mr. Foster was pressured to reduce the estimated ten year cost of the Medicare prescription drug program by about 30% in order to make it more politically palatable. While Republican leaders say the allegations are overblown, no one doubts that release of the higher cost estimates last fall would have probably killed the prescription drug bill, which only passed by one vote after hours of arm-twisting in the House in November.
Again, my sense is that the Bush Administration’s handling of health care finance issues is a major, and largely underappreciated (at least by administration officials), political problem for the administration in the upcoming election.

Hoover Institute fellow Shelby Steele writes this Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he criticizes the notion that the gay marriage is a civil rights issue analogous to that of the struggle to end racial segregation in America. Mr. Steele, who favors civil unions for gay couples, nevertheless does not favor gay marriage. The entire op-ed is well worth reading, and here are a few of Mr. Steele’s poignant observations:

But gay marriage is simply not a civil rights issue. It is not a struggle for freedom. It is a struggle of already free people for complete social acceptance and the sense of normalcy that follows thereof — a struggle for the eradication of the homosexual stigma. Marriage is a goal because, once open to gays, it would establish the fundamental innocuousness of homosexuality itself. Marriage can say like nothing else that sexual orientation is an utterly neutral human characteristic, like eye-color. Thus, it can go far in diffusing the homosexual stigma.
In the gay marriage movement, marriage is more a means than an end, a weapon against stigma. That the movement talks very little about the actual institution of marriage suggests that it is driven more by this longing to normalize homosexuality itself than by something compelling in marriage. . .
But marriage is only one means to innocuousness. The civil rights framework is another. To say that gay marriage is a civil rights issue is to imply that homosexuality is the same sort of human difference as race. And even geneticists now accept that race is so superficial a human difference as to be nothing more than a “social construct.” In other words, racial difference has been made officially innocuous in our culture, and its power to stigmatize has been greatly reduced. Evidence of this is seen in the steady, yet unremarked, rise in interracial marriage rates for all of our races. So if gay marriage, like race, is about civil rights, then homosexuality is a human difference every bit as innocuous. Thus, America should treat homosexuality like it treats race and give gays the “right” to marry as it once gave blacks the right to vote.
* * *
The civil rights movement argued that it was precisely the utter innocuousness of racial difference that made segregation an injustice. Racism was evil because it projected a profound difference where there was none — white supremacy, black inferiority — for the sole purpose of exploiting blacks. But there is a profound difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. In the former, sexual and romantic desire is focused on the same sex, in the latter on the opposite sex. Natural procreation is possible only for heterosexuals, a fact of nature that obligates their sexuality to no less a responsibility than the perpetuation of the species. Unlike racial difference, these two sexual orientations are profoundly — not innocuously — different. Racism projects a false difference in order to exploit. Homophobia is a reactive prejudice against a true and firm difference that already exists.
Institutions that arise to accommodate these two sexual orientations can never be exactly the same. Across time and cultures, marriage has been a heterosexual institution grounded in the procreative function and the responsibilities of parenthood — this more than in either love or adult fulfillment. Marriage is simply the arrangement by which humans perpetuate the species, whether or not they find fulfillment in it.
The true problem with gay marriage is that it consigns gays to a life of mimicry and pathos. It shoehorns them into an institution that does not reflect the best possibilities of their own sexual orientation. Gay love is freed from the procreative burden. It has no natural function beyond adult fulfillment in love. If this is a disadvantage when children are desired, it is likely an advantage when they are not — which is more often the case. In any case, gays can never be more than pretenders to an institution so utterly grounded in procreation. And dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights only consigns gays to yet another kind of mimicry. Stigma, not segregation, is the problem gays face. But insisting on a civil rights framework only leads gays into protest. But will protest affect stigma? Is “gay lovers as niggers” convincing? Protest is trying to hit the baseball with the glove.
The problem with so much mimicry is that it keeps gays from evolving institutions and rituals that reflect the true nature of homosexuality. Assuming, as I do, that gays should have the option of civil unions that afford them the legal prerogatives of marriage, isn’t it more important after that to allow quiet self-acceptance to lead the way to authentic institutions?
The stigmatization of homosexuals is wrong and makes no contribution to the moral health of our society. I was never worried for my children because they grew up knowing a gay couple that lived across the street, or because several family friends were gay. They learned early what we all know: that homosexuality is as permanent a feature of the human condition as heterosexuality. Nothing is gained in denying this. But neither should we deny that the two are inherently different. The gay marriage movement denies this difference in order to borrow “normalcy” from marriage. Thus, it is a movement born more of self-denial than self-acceptance, as if on some level it agrees with those who see gays as abnormal.

Meanwhile, in this Atlantic Monthly piece, Jonathon Rauch argues that principles of American federalism call for the gay marriage issue to be determined on a state-by-state basis.

Earlier today, I blogged this post about this National Review Online op-ed by Hunter Baker, who is described in the preface of the article as a “Texas freelance writer.” Mr. Baker’s article is highly critical of UT Law Professor, Brian Leiter, for Professor Leiter’s earlier criticism of the student author of a Harvard Law Review note that was complimentary of Baylor philosophy professor Francis Beckwith‘s new book, “Law, Darwinism, & Public Education.” Professor Leiter subscribes to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, while Professor Beckwith is as proponent of what is known as the “Intelligent Design Theory,” which is an outgrowth of creationism.
At any rate, my earlier blog was critical of Professor Leiter, not so much because of his views on evolution, which he presents very well. Rather, I was critical of the Professor’s accusation that the student author of the Harvard Law Review note had engaged in academic fraud, which I did not think was clearly reflected by the note.
Well, the student reviewer may be pristine as driven snow, but Mr. Baker — the author of the National Review Online piece — is not. Turns out that Mr. Baker is a graduate student of Baylor Professor Beckwith! And to make matters worse, Mr. Baker did not bother to disclose his close association with Professor Beckwith in his NRO article.
In the last paragraph of his NRO article, Mr. Baker suggests that Professor Leiter owes the student author of the Harvard Law Review note an apology. I initially agreed with that sentiment. However, now I apologize to Professor Leiter for my earlier post, and suggest to Mr. Baker that he owes him one, too.