The best that can be said for 2007? It's almost over.

 

Proving once again that America got the wrong Bush brother as president, Jeb Bush wryly noted that "intellectual curiosity" is something "the next president of the United States is going to need to have." Imagine how much fun the holidays were at the Bush homestead.

 

Recall that George W. Bush won the White House by a margin of 537 votes in Florida only because in 1994 brother Jeb lost the Florida governor's race by 63,940 votes.

 

If Jeb had won that election - and Floridians were only delaying the inevitable; he took it in 1998 - then Jeb would have probably been the GOP nominee, and perhaps the president, in 2000. And George W. today would be a well-liked former governor in line to be next baseball commissioner. History: a game of inches.

 

The nation's capital had plenty of ridiculousness to go with its tragic irony. The State Department saw fit to issue new, redesigned diplomatic license plates for the 11,619 diplomatic vehicles of our foreign guests. Something must have been wrong with the old ones (in service for 23 years). The cost of the switch - not to mention the redesign - hovers around $300,000. True, with a federal 2007 budget of $2.8 trillion, this is really just a matter of pennies. But surely those pennies could have been better spent elsewhere.

 

Or maybe not. The U.S. Mint revealed this year that the cost of making a penny had risen to . . . wait for it . . . two cents. Why? The price of zinc is up. And zinc makes up most of our copper pennies these days.

 

Like Japanese soldiers bunkered on a remote Pacific island in 1955, planning ways to stop the Allies' advance, some of us are still fighting the Terri Schiavo wars. There was welcome news on that front when a Venezuelan man was declared dead after a car accident. He was taken to the morgue and stored. When the coroner began the autopsy, the deceased woke up. Things are not always as they seem.

 

In the midst of a slow-motion catastrophe, Russia's population is sinking like a stone, by 750,000 each year. By 2050, its population will have dropped by a third. To combat this, the governor of Russia's Ulyanovsk region declared a sex holiday, urging couples to take the day off and make boom-boom for the motherland. Children born nine months later - on June 12, 2008 - will receive gifts from the government, including cars, televisions, and other fabulous prizes.

 

Not all countries are so eager for children. The Italian newspaper La Stampa reported on the trials of a 13-year-old girl in Torino. She was impregnated by her 15-year-old boyfriend. She wanted to have the baby. Her parents did not. They took her to court, where a judge ordered her to abort.

 

In Seattle, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, an Episcopal priest, had an interesting life journey. A Christian minister for more than 20 years, she has now decided she's a Muslim, too. That is, in addition to being a Christian. "All I know," she told a Seattle Times reporter, "is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be. . . . I could not not be a Muslim.

 

"It wasn't about intellect," she said. Well, obviously.

 

Incidentally, Rev. Redding teaches a class on the New Testament at a Catholic university. If only everyone were so ecumenical.

 

In Sydney, the Muslim cleric Feiz Mohammed was caught on tape urging his flock to teach their children to die as jihadist martyrs. "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam," he said. "Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom." Jews, he added, are "pigs."

 

In Saudi Arabia - which is, remember, an American ally - a woman was sentenced to 200 lashes. Her crime: being the victim of a gang rape. It's instructive to note how the Saudi judicial system works. The 19-year-old woman was originally sentenced to only 90 lashes, for being alone with a man not related to her. But a higher court reviewed the case and revised the punishment upward to 200 lashes and six months in jail. The rapists may receive as little as 2 years in prison.

 

In late December, the girl was unexpectedly pardoned by King Abdullah, who took pains to make clear that his intervention didn't mean he doubted the judges' decision. One is tempted to call it a Christmas miracle, but that sort of thing is frowned on in Saudi Arabia, where it is illegal to own a Bible or wear a cross around your neck.

 

Not everyone takes such a dim view of women's rights. After 500 years of all-male guards, the Tower of London got its first female Beefeater in 2007.

 

And David Beckham, the Anna Kournikova of men's soccer, moved to Los Angeles. One suspects this was England's retaliation for having been forced to accommodate Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow for the last decade. America got the better of that deal.

 

Finally, proving that there is (sometimes) justice in the world, the hot-hot-hot New York blog Gawker published its first book, the humbly titled Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media. Gawker was reported to have received a $250,000 advance. The Internet, you may have heard, is the future.

 

Nielsen BookScan reported that in its first month of sales, the Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media sold 242 copies.

 

Happy New Year to you all.

 

Pennsylvania State University professor Philip Jenkins is a man to be taken seriously. One of America's most thoughtful academics, he is a deep thinker. Two of his books in particular, The Next Christendom and The New Faces of Christianity, are landmark works. In a recent issue of the New Republic, Jenkins makes an intriguing proposition: that the demographic profile of Iran might make the Islamic republic into the "Denmark of tomorrow."

 

This would be good news. The Middle East could use a Denmark or two (or seven). But an examination of Jenkins' predictions and the history of fertility and demographics suggests that he may be mistaken.

 

Jenkins makes essentially the following case: Iran has been experiencing a giant decline in fertility rates, from more than 6.5 children being born per woman 30 years ago, to a rate of 1.71 today. This puts Iran below the all-important 2.1, the rate needed to keep population constant. Unless matters change, Iran will begin to experience a population decline within two generations.

 

No prob, says Jenkins. Population decline, he believes, could "usher in a new era of stability," creating "an Iran that is bourgeois [and] secular." To support this thesis, Jenkins notes that high-fertility nations include hot spots such as Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, while low-fertility nations include countries such as Italy, Germany and Japan.

 

Jenkins then notes that declining fertility rates lead to smaller extended families, and hence to an increased reliance by the elderly on state support. In the future, he argues, Iranians will be "invested in the state's continued stability." He also sees the lower fertility rate as a boon to Iranian business: "With fewer heirs, you are more likely to spend money on yourself; increased spending buoys the economy; and, suddenly, industry is buzzing away."

 

Finally, Jenkins argues that the presence of fewer children in Iran will weaken communal, and hence religious, ties, promoting secularism and even helping to make Iranians "more accepting of people who seek options outside of traditional marriage" - by which he means same-sex marriage.

 

Jenkins ultimately may be right in his assessment, but his reading of the Iranian fertility bust is, at best, optimistic. It seems much more likely that Iran's demographic implosion will lead to instability, conflict and economic collapse.

 

Let's look first at the structure of Iran's population. With Iran's fertility rate dropping, it currently has what is known as a "youth bulge." Its median age is 25.8, and 23 percent of its males are under the age of 15. The German demographer Gunnar Heinsohn makes a compelling case that such bulges of young men lead historically to military conflict.

 

But this will be Iran's final youth surplus. By 2050, 30 percent of Iran's population will be composed of elderly dependents, and a dwindling number of younger workers will be forced to support them at their own expense. In wealthy First World countries such as Denmark, this situation leads to discussions about pension benefits and taxes. In poor, developing countries such as Iran, it could well lead to unrest and instability. It is one thing to be old and rich; being old and poor is quite another.

 

And Iranians have little hope of becoming rich. Oil is, far and away, Iran's leading industry, but its exports are diminishing every year. As soon as 2020, Iran may no longer have an oil-export business. Oil makes for 80 percent of Iran's exports today, according to the CIA World Factbook; the other leading exports are "fruits, nuts and carpets." Its only industries of note are textiles, cement and food processing. Oil revenues equal roughly one-fifth of all personal income in Iran. Once oil disappears, it's unclear how happy, childless Iranian couples will have money to burn. Certainly, no industries even exist in Iran to begin "buzzing away."

 

Already, Iran's economy is fraying at the seams. In 2002, 40 percent of the population was below the poverty line. The Iranian government's own (rosy) projection puts unemployment at 15 percent (it is likely twice that, and even higher among the volatile youth cohort). Inflation was 12 percent in 2006 and has, by all accounts, risen since.

 

Iran's government seems to understand the long-term implications of its demographic situation, which is why President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has relocated millions of people from rural villages to cities, where they can be controlled more easily. He has also introduced more comprehensive social services. To be sure, this is an attempt at stability, of a sort. Some would call it a strengthening of authoritarianism.

 

That's the short-term outlook; the medium term is more unsettling. From a geostrategic perspective, Iran must understand that its weak position will become progressively weaker, leading to ruin. Its only hope lies in the prospect of expansion: Southeast Iraq, Saudi Arabia (where Shiites dominate the oil-rich eastern region), and the United Arab Emirates all present attractive targets for Iran, with ample oil reserves and potentially sympathetic populations. Empire is Iran's most logical path to salvation.

 

After all, with economic ruin on the horizon, and a demographic catastrophe in progress, they have nothing to lose in a conflict, other than several million military-age young men who, if left to their own devices, might someday turn on the regime in any case. Of course, if Iran were to attempt to establish regional hegemony, it would face the wrath of the United States and the Western powers, much as Saddam did in 1990. Unless they had a nuclear deterrent. When you game it out, Iran would be foolish not to try for nuclear weapons. Its fertility rate and economic reality practically demand it.

 

And what about Jenkins' hope that lower fertility will, in the long run, make Iran a secularist paradise, like Denmark or Germany? As demographer Philip Longman demonstrated in his essay "The Return of Patriarchy," fertility rates do not fall uniformly across populations. They tend to dip most precipitously among secular, liberal segments, and remain higher among orthodox, religious segments. If this rule were to hold in Iran, it would mean that, in the long run, the population would become more, not less, religious, as secular families dwindle and fundamentalist families flourish in their place.

 

Demography, we must remind ourselves, is not destiny; but neither can we allow it to become fantasy.

 

-Jonathan V. Last

Bernard Lewis was in Washington recently, courtesy of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He put on quite a show. Lewis, 91, spoke for nearly 40 minutes, without notes, before taking questions. Google a few TV chat-show transcripts, and you'll see that, even among people who talk for a living, it is rare to find someone who speaks in complete sentences. It has famously been observed that Lewis - did I mention he's 91? - speaks in complete paragraphs.

 

Lewis is the last, and perhaps greatest, of a breed of intellectual the world no longer makes. An expert on the Near East, Lewis possesses all of the requisite characteristics of a great cultural thinker: a preternatural facility with languages; an impish sense of adventure; intellectual modesty; and a love of the foreign that springs from genuine admiration, rather than repulsion.

 

If Islam is the most important cultural subject of our time, then Lewis may be our most important intellectual. His deep affinity for Islam is what allows him to be such a penetrating, clear-eyed thinker on the subject. He intuits the nuances, and understands their importance. During his talk, for instance, he noted that:

 

"It is quite usual in writing the history or discussing the history of science, to talk about Islamic mathematics, Islamic chemistry, Islamic astronomy - meaning the research and progress that was made in these fields during the great age of Islamic civilization. We don't talk about Christian astronomy, or Christian mathematics. If we say 'Christian art,' this would be understood to refer to votive art - art in places of worship and connected with worship. If we say 'Islamic art,' it means the entire artistic production of the Islamic art, including a great deal that we would call secular, a word for which until very recently there was no equivalent in Arabic or Persian or Turkish. A word that was lacking because the notion was lacking."

 

An esoteric matter, on the surface, but one that speaks to the baseline differences between Islam and the West.

 

In the course of his talk, Lewis made two other points about how many Middle Eastern Muslims view the world, which have more obvious consequences and are worth unpacking a bit.

 

The first is the legacy of the Cold War in Muslim thinking. Lewis noted that, in America, we tend to view the collapse of the Soviet Union as an American, or Western, triumph. Freedom, democracy and capitalism beat repression, oligarchy and communism. The truth of this view seems self-evident. Not, however, to our current radical enemies.

 

"According to the point of view of Osama bin Laden and his many, many followers, it was nothing of the kind," Lewis explained. "It was not a Western victory in the Cold War; it was a Muslim victory in a holy war. It was a triumph of Islam in a jihad against the infidels."

 

To radical Muslims, the West and the Soviet Union were not competing powers, but simply two halves of the larger whole with which they were competing. They saw the fall of the Soviet Union as their victory (because, in large part, of Afghanistan). This myopic, parochial view puts one in mind of the old theater joke about the actor cast as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. He tells a friend about getting a part in a show and is asked to explain the plot. The actor replies, "You see, it's about this druggist . . . "

 

The immediate corollary to this insight is the understanding that our radical Muslim foes were unhappily surprised by the American reaction after 9/11. They had taken Beirut and Somalia as their models in predicting American behavior. The extremists "knew that there had been an election and that there was a new president, but, in their experience, elections do not change governments, governments change elections," Lewis explained. "And the response to 9/11 clearly came as a shock which caused some reconsideration."

 

Lewis' other key point applies to the proposition that democracy might be incompatible with the Arab world. "There are people to talk to, there are people we can seek the friendship of in the Islamic world," he insisted. "The dictatorial regimes that we have seen in our time in Iraq, in Syria, and in other places - these have no roots in the Arab or Islamic past. These are an importation from Europe."

 

First came fascism, following the capitulation of Vichy France. After World War II, Russian-style communism filled the ideological void. These two systems are "the immediate political heritage of the Middle East," Lewis says.

 

Which bears, obviously, on the question of Iraq. Lewis seems relatively optimistic, not to say confident, that something like democracy can survive in Iraq and may lead, eventually, to something like liberalism.

 

A counterargument might note, however, that the dysfunctional European systems were layered on top of a dysfunctional strain of Islam (Wahhabism), which was itself layered on top of a dysfunctional Arab tribalism. Whether or not all three problems can be untangled remains to be seen.

 

-Jonathan V. Last

In case you're not convinced the American university system is broken, consider the reactions of two college communities to two different speakers.

Four years ago, Smith College invited former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to be its commencement speaker. The Smith community was outraged and flew into action. At the graduation ceremony, students handed out pamphlets claiming that Albright was guilty of "crimes against humanity." When she took the stage, many graduates and others in attendance turned their chairs about and sat with backs to her. For the first seven minutes of her speech, she faced constant heckling and booing from the crowd; she was forced to beg the audience to allow her to continue. Twice during the short speech, protestors rushed the stage in an attempt to disrupt the event.

Contrast that with the reception Columbia University gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week. Sure, there were anti-Ahmadinejad protests outside (one sympathetic soul counter-protested with a sign reading "May Allah Make a Mushroom Cloud Over 'Israel'!"). Unlike Albright, Ahmadinejad was given a combative introduction by Columbia President Lee Bollinger. But the audience of Columbia students and faculty was much more respectful with Ahmadinejad than the Smithies were with Albright.

When Ahmadinejad began his remarks by swinging back at Bollinger, several in the audience actually applauded him. More applause occurred when he called for Palestinian self-determination (which is, in itself, curious, since Palestinians have recently self-determined that they want to be led by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas). When Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran was the victim of U.S.-sponsored terrorism and was "the first nation that objected to terrorism," there was even more applause. When he defended Iranian executions by asking, "Don't you have capital punishment in the United States?", more applause. When he said that nuclear weapons go against "the whole grain of humanity," more applause. When he suggested that George W. Bush was "retarded," more applause. And when he finished his performance, there was another spate of applause, just for good measure. How hospitable of them.

Of course, it wasn't all hearts and flowers. When Ahmadinejad suggested we may not know the real truth about the Holocaust, the audience was largely quiet, with some scattered moans. Likewise, it was impassive while he asked "who was really involved" in 9/11. And it was positively derisive - moved to actual boos and laughter! - when Ahmadinejad said, regarding homosexuality, that "in Iran, we do not have this phenomenon."

I mean, really, you can rewrite the history of the Second World War, call for the destruction of Israel, insult our leaders, and lie about nuclear weapons while waging a low-grade war against American soldiers - but the bounds of civilized discourse only go so far!

Of course, that's the point. The academy has become so warped that it seeks civilized discourse with dangerous madmen, yet it spews rage and protest against rational people with whom it has political disagreements. The political is no longer merely the personal; it is the alpha and omega. A civilizational divide over human rights or sharia or theocracy - the sort of things wars are fought over - must be discussed politely. A political disagreement over State Department functions - that's where discourse is replaced by the brute intimidation.

This philosophical inversion would be pathetic were it not so pernicious.

It is pernicious because events such as the Columbia debacle do not take place in a vacuum. The Iranian media reported his speech as a triumph, noting how "the audience on repeated occasion[s] applauded." No mention was made of Bollinger's criticisms. (Ahmadinejad's own Web site portrays the speech as a big success, but edits out Bollinger completely.) To suffering Iranian liberals and dissidents, this must be a body blow.

In case you've forgotten, in Iran, real people face real repression every day. Liberal political dissidents are routinely tortured. Men and women who commit adultery are stoned to death. In 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh, a 16-year-old girl, was executed for being the victim of rape. (She was convicted of "crimes against chastity.") Here is Human Rights Watch describing part of the Iranian penal code: "Iranian law punishes all penetrative sexual acts between adult men with the death penalty. Non-penetrative sexual acts between men are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are punished with death."

Oh, but how the audience guffawed when Ahmadinejad said Iran doesn't have "the phenomenon" of homosexuality.

They really showed him.

Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.

The Rev. Tiny Muskens, a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands, has a novel idea. His excellency recently proposed that, in the name of religious toleration and understanding, Christians refer to their God as "Allah."

Perhaps the good bishop believes that if Christians use the name "Allah," then Muslims will be more kindly disposed toward them. Perhaps he even believes that Muslim extremists will be less likely to butcher them, as they did filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

You'll recall that in 2004 a man named Mohammed Bouyeri attacked van Gogh on a Dutch street in broad daylight. Bouyeri shot van Gogh eight times, slashed his throat so deeply that his head was nearly severed, and, for good measure, stabbed two knives deep into his chest. Pinned beneath the second dagger was a note listing Bouyeri's Islamic grievances.

Presumably, Bishop Muskens would like to avoid such unpleasantness. He seems to believe that the best way to do so involves Europeans' accommodating themselves ever more to the Muslim minority living in their midst. While his recommendation is certainly novel - to say nothing of theologically problematic - it perfectly represents the mind-set of certain European elites.

Take just the last few months. In December, Sir Ian Blair, Scotland Yard's commissioner of police, attended a graduation ceremony for police recruits in London. One of the recruits was a Muslim woman. Since 2001, Scotland Yard has gone out of its way to make female Muslim officers feel comfortable, going so far as to allow them to wear a hijab as part of their official uniform.

But shortly before the ceremony, the new recruit stated that when Blair came by to congratulate the class, she would neither shake his hand nor appear in photographs with him.

The recruit claimed it was against her religion to shake hands with a man. And as for being pictured with her commanding officer, she did not want such a photo to be used for "propaganda purposes." Sir Ian Blair, her boss, complied with her demands.

Back in the Netherlands, an elementary school in Amsterdam-Noord stopped teaching a unit on rural living in April. Apparently, Muslim children became agitated when the teachers discussed pigs, which are considered vile creatures in Islam. The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant quoted a local official recounting how "various pupils began to demolish the classroom when the pig came up for discussion." Rather than discipline the students, the lessons were dropped.

After the car-bomb incidents in London and Scotland this summer, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown forbade his ministers from using the word Muslim in connection with the attacks, carried out by Muslim terrorists. The reason, the minister's spokesman explained, was that "there is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities."

So there should likewise have been little surprise last week when the BBC drama Casualty dropped plans for a show revolving around an attack by Muslim terrorists. Or rather, changed its plans: The attack in the episode will now be carried out by an animal-rights group.

The BBC, of course, has been striving for a "consensual tone" for a long while now. On the network's Web site, the section on Islam repeats the phrases "peace be upon him," or "pbuh," after every single mention of the prophet Muhammad. It does not accord similar honorifics to other religions by placing, for example, "our Lord and Savior" before mentions of Jesus Christ.

The capitulative impulse has become so deeply held that it has practically entered the subconscious. On Oct. 8, 2002, the French prime minister at the time, a Catholic named Jean-Pierre Raffarin, gave a speech to the French National Assembly. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned the Islamic hero Saladin, explaining that Saladin was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem."

As Bernard Lewis would later note, "When a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties."

There is a term for this sort of thing in Muslim tradition: the concept of dhimmitude. In antiquity, Islamic states provided some protections to conquered nonbelievers, whom they called dhimmis. The dhimmi were allowed a fair degree of autonomy and given some certain protections of life and property, provided that they pay a special tax and acknowledge Muslim supremacy.

Throughout Muslim lands, these dhimma laws began to fall away by the late 18th century. But now, a perverse form of dhimmitude is spreading throughout Europe: The leaders of the liberal, non-Muslim majority are searching for ways to subjugate themselves to the Muslim minority.

It would seem to represent a rather extreme case of a failure of leadership.

Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.

Every presidential campaign looks to history for comfort, for a theory of victory. Late last week, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign suggested its model was Ronald Reagan's 1980 capture of the Republican nomination. Reagan made a very good president, but he is a very bad electoral parallel for Sen. Obama. The more apt one is Jimmy Carter.

The Carter presidency was disastrous indeed, but because of the malaise and hostages and killer rabbits, people forget what an impressive, interesting campaign he waged to win the Democratic nomination in 1976.

The best account of the race is Jules Witcover's excellent 1980 book Marathon. Witcover explains that the 1976 campaign actually began four years earlier - much like the current campaign. At a 1972 meeting of the National Governors Conference in Houston, Jimmy Carter, who had been governor of Georgia for just a year, led a last-minute move among Democrats to drop George McGovern as their presumptive presidential nominee. The revolt failed. At the Democratic convention a few weeks later, Carter mounted a quiet campaign to become McGovern's running mate. This also failed, leaving Carter and his advisers unsure about their political futures.

By 1973, Carter had decided to run for president himself. He had served only four years in the state Senate and was limited to a single term in the governor's mansion by Georgia law. But despite this lack of experience, he had immense personal charm and a sense that America was yearning for moral leadership.

Carter's principal problem was Ted Kennedy. As Witcover wrote, "1973 saw a seemingly inexorable drift in the party back to the dream of another Kennedy candidacy, with all of the political magic it promised. . . . National polls showed him far ahead of all prospective contenders; local and state politicians who came to Washington for party meetings and other affairs adopted an attitude of resignation. . . . They shared doubts about the man's electability, but accepted the inevitability of his nomination."

The Carter team did not. As an early memo from aide Hamilton Jordan argued, "You may be sure that in two decades of American politics, the Kennedy family has run over and alienated a lot of people." Still, Kennedy was making campaign trips as late as mid-September 1974. Then he abruptly withdrew from the race. Nearly a dozen other candidates jumped in shortly after his announcement, but Carter had already taken a lead in organization.

The political environment changed suddenly, too. Democrats had not planned on running against an incumbent Republican, but Watergate blossomed in 1974, and Nixon's resignation allowed President Ford to run. Democrats won the midterm elections in a landslide, finishing with 61 seats in the Senate, 291 seats in the House, and control of 36 state houses. A year later South Vietnam fell, putting a period to America's failed war.

By the time the primaries began in earnest, the Democratic field was crowded, but with victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Carter had a final obstacle: George Wallace. A 1972 assassination attempt had crippled Wallace. His political life appeared over, but while he concentrated on recovery, the specter of his potential to throw the 1976 contest into chaos loomed large in the minds of campaign strategists. Eventually Wallace did enter the race, only to be soundly defeated by Carter in Florida, effectively ending his run in national politics. From there, Carter breezed to the nomination, bothered only by the blip of Jerry Brown's last-minute foray.

How did Carter do it? It wasn't his bold policy ideas. As Witcover acknowledged, "taking clear-cut positions was never his cutting edge."

What succeeded was the idea of Jimmy Carter. He campaigned on the concepts of unity and personal excellence (his election book was titled Why Not the Best?). Plus there was the novelty of a liberal Democrat who would compete in the South. All of this, combined with his personal presence, won him favorable, even fawning, treatment by the media. Carter's staff had actually counted on this. Jordan predicted to Carter, talking about the liberal media elites, "It is my contention that they would be fascinated by the prospect of your candidacy and treat it seriously through the first several primaries."

Raise your hand if any of this sounds familiar. Barack Obama served six years in the Illinois state senate and just two years as a U.S. senator before launching his presidential campaign. He is quite charismatic, has made few policy distinctions, and has fixed his campaign on the notion of unity and national excellence. (His campaign book is titled The Audacity of Hope.) His press coverage has been - objectively speaking - somewhat messianic.

However, Obama faces the mirror image of Carter's 1974 dilemma: The inevitable candidate (Hillary Clinton) sits to his right, and potential Big Trouble (Al Gore) waits off to his left, casting, like Wallace, a long shadow over the race. Like Carter, odds are that Obama will have to face, and beat, only one of these titans to win the nomination.

There are differences, to be sure; such analogies go only so far. Obama does not seem to possess Carter's comfort with dealing from the bottom of the deck. (In his run for governor, Carter's campaign went to a Ku Klux Klan rally and passed out pictures of his Democratic primary opponent, Carl Sanders. The pictures showed Sanders socializing with two of his black friends.) But the most important difference may be in the environment around them. Obama may be Jimmy Carter, but will 2008 be 1976?

Perhaps. The 2006 midterm elections bore some similarity to those of 1974. But, at least for now, the national mood seems closer to what it was in 1979. It is faint praise to observe that the last eight years have not given us either Watergate or Vietnam. Instead, we've been subjected to a hapless Bush administration whose errors are more reminiscent of President Carter than of President Nixon.

Whether or not that creates the demand for a fresh face, like a Carter in 1976, or a strong hand, like a Reagan in 1980, remains to be seen.

Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and writes the column One Last Thing for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a blunder of grotesque proportions, World Wrestling Entertainment canceled the normal edition of Monday Night Raw last week and put on a three-hour tribute to professional wrestler Chris Benoit, who was found dead Monday in his home with his wife, Nancy, and 7-year-old son, Daniel. Even as the show was airing, wire services were reporting that this was no garden-variety tragedy: Benoit had slain his family and then committed suicide. By Tuesday morning, WWE was pushing the ill-advised tribute show down the memory hole and air-brushing Benoit from history, removing nearly all mentions of him from its Web site.

But wrestling fans will not soon forget Benoit, because while the circumstances of his death were unanticipated, the fact of it was not. For those of a certain age, witnessing the deaths of favorite wrestlers has become a grisly commonplace.

So far in 2007, Bam Bam Bigelow, Mike Awesome and Sensational Sherri have died. None was even 50. If you think back to the wrestlers from your childhood Saturday mornings, you'll be chilled at the list of the dead: Crash Holly, Kerry Von Erich, Owen Hart, Adrian Adonis, Yokozuna, Brian Pillman, Davey Boy Smith, André the Giant, Rick Rude, Bruiser Brody, Miss Elizabeth, Big Boss Man, Earthquake, Curt Hennig, Junkyard Dog, Hercules, Big John Studd, Road Warrior Hawk.

And here's the scary part: None of those wrestlers lived past 46.

The causes of death vary widely, of course. André the Giant, for instance, had acromegaly. (As he once touchingly remarked to Billy Crystal, "We do not live long, the big and the small.") But a striking number of the deaths were related to steroid or drug use.

Three years ago, USA Today did a study on the death rates of professional wrestlers. It found that between 1997 and 2004, about 1,000 people under the age of 45 had worked in professional wrestling (this included not just the WWE, but many minor circuits). During that time, 65 of them died. Keith Pinckard, a medical examiner who follows pro wrestling deaths, said wrestlers have death rates roughly seven times higher than the general population.

It's a hard life. Many wrestlers work three to five events a week. The lifestyle is part carny, part rock star, with all the attendant risky behaviors - including heavy drinking and recreational drug use.

Steroids have been a bane of the industry. As the legendary wrestler Bruno Sammartino said in 1991, "There was a joke: If you did not test positive for steroids, you were fired." But this overstates things, since steroid testing has rarely risen to a level of laxity in the wrestling world. (Steroids were found at Benoit's house.)

And then there is the physical punishment from the work itself. Professional wrestling isn't "real" because the outcomes are scripted, but the pain the athletes endure is very real. You can't fake the hurt out of falling 10 or 20 feet onto a hard surface.

Pushed to achieve comic-book physiques, wrestlers must perform despite pain or lose their contracts. And unlike traditional athletes, they cannot rely on meritocracy to protect them, as in "as long as I excel, they can't touch me"; they can't precisely because the outcomes are scripted. Add that at the major-league level, professional wrestling has essentially become a monopoly. (A nascent promotion, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, is beginning to establish roots in the wrestling world, but it is far from being a true competitor to the WWE.)

The management of WWE can hire and fire at will because they are less like the commissioners of a sports league and more like the owners of a theater.

Except that at this particular theater, the actors often die.

It is a bizarre juxtaposition that as the WWE was distancing itself from Benoit on Tuesday, a number of retired NFL players were testifying before Congress about the long-term physical hazards of professional football. They were arguing that lawmakers should step in and force the NFL Players Association to protect them.

But, as a USA Today report discovered, professional wrestlers are 20 times more likely than football players to die before the age of 45. And unlike football players, wrestlers don't have a union to protect their interests.

It would not be untoward for Congress to investigate pro wrestling, but perhaps what it really needs is a union. Unions can be stifling, counterproductive things. Sometimes unions act against the long-term interests of workers. But in some cases, where the circumstances of an industry are so heavily weighted against workers as to make their jobs unfairly dangerous, unions can be an important protection. And if ever an industry fit the bill, it is professional wrestling, which has come to make 19th-century coal mining look like a cushy gig.

A wrestlers' union would go against much of the free-bird culture of pro wrestling - goodness knows how it would fit with the tradition of "kayfabe" (the wrestlers' code that they never break character when in the presence of outsiders). But it would be worth the trouble if it cleaned up the business and saved some lives.

At the end of the ill-fated tribute to Benoit, the WWE showed highlights from WrestleMania XX, where he won the championship belt in the main event. He was greeted in the ring by his good friend, fellow superstar wrestler Eddie Guerrero. This was in 2004, and both men were 37.

Three years later, both of them were dead.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and writes the column One Last Thing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. This essay originally appeared in the July 1, 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer.

The theologian David Hart famously wrote that Europe is dying of metaphysical boredom. That may be true. But surely unseriousness has something to do with it, too. For the latest example of European dithering, we turn to the Republic of Ireland.

In the waning days of April, Ireland's parliament, the Dáil, was dissolved and new elections were called. The sitting prime minister (the Irish call the position the taoiseach) was a fellow named Bertie Ahern, who led the center-left Fianna Fáil party. Because Ireland, like many American big cities, has no right wing, the contest was between Fianna Fáil and its smaller center-left coalition partners and a more radical coalition of Ireland's Fine Gael, Labour, and Green parties.

The brief election campaign--barely five weeks--was dominated by a low-grade financial scandal of Ahern's, but when the scandal wasn't in the headlines, one of the main issues was . . . climate change. The Green party made global warming the center of its campaign, and Ahern's party anted up, trying to outdo them in their devotion to the environment, touting a recently imposed plastic-bag tax, a pilot program to eliminate chewing-gum litter, more bicycle lanes, a proposal to use wood as a renewable energy source, and a plan to somewhat reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

This last item--reducing emissions--also carried with it a corollary: a plan to pay about €270 million (roughly $364 million) for carbon credits over the next eight years. This in a country with a gross domestic product of only $177 billion.

That's a pretty substantial commitment to the environment, and you'd tip your thatch hat to the Irish for being so concerned. But the reality is that even if everything the global-warming enthusiasts believe is true, there is one simple, immutable problem: Only 4.2 million people live in Ireland. That's 0.063 percent of the world's population, and, if the climate really is changing, then it's highly improbable that Ireland's handful of residents can do anything about it. (Incidentally, despite the traditionally muddled election results, Ahern is now set for his third straight term.)

The only thing the Irish might do for the environment is slaughter the 6 million cows and sheep that dot their countryside. A 2006 U.N. report suggested that livestock account for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that "cause" "global warming." That's more than cars, trucks, buses, and planes put together.

What makes this all particularly interesting is that, while the Irish were fussing this way and that over what non-solutions they could offer to a problem that may or may not exist, they glossed over one very real and pressing environmental problem: the water in Galway.

Galway is Ireland's third-largest--and fastest-growing--city, home to about 159,000 people in the metropolitan area. And since March, its water has been undrinkable.

The episode began in early March, when 43 people in Galway fell ill with similar symptoms after drinking tap water. On March 15, the city issued a "boil water" alert, saying no one knew what the problem was, but the water probably wasn't safe either to drink or brush teeth with. It took an additional week before city officials could diagnose the problem, which they did on March 21, announcing that their water supply had become infected with parasites from the genus Cryptosporidium.

The disease they cause, cryptosporidiosis, is a nasty bug. The parasites can be found in any number of places--say, the dead carcass of an animal that makes its way into a reservoir. The Galway authorities never did find the source of the problem. But over the next several weeks, they counseled residents to use bottled water or to boil the bejeezus out of their tap water. They introduced reimbursement schemes to help defer the cost of bottled water, which must have helped, because soon the city was awash in glass and plastic bottles.

No one in Galway seems to have a strict count on how many bottles of water were brought in, but some back-of-the-envelope math will do for speculative purposes. Suppose you have 159,000 people consuming two liters of water a day, say an average of two one-liter bottles per person. That would be 23.85 million bottles of waste so far. (On April 30, city officials announced they would be giving out clear plastic bags--for free!--to help people recycle.)

And it's not just the physical waste--imagine the energy costs. That amount of water would weigh 26,235 tons, without packaging. I'll leave it to the environmentalists to calculate the carbon impact of transportation and distribution for such a haul.

Even now, three months into what the Irish refer to as "the water crisis," Galway is still importing its water in bottles. By mid-June, city fathers and mothers hope to have a small alternative supply of drinking water, but it won't be enough for regular use, and water rationing will be in effect. By January, they hope to have a temporary treatment plant built, which would render the city's water potable again. They hope to have a new, permanent water-treatment facility up and running within four to five years.

It's a funny juxtaposition: a government going through contortions to try to solve an environmental problem that, even if it does exist, is beyond its capacity to solve--and, at the same time, this government cannot deliver a basic environmental service, safe drinking water.

To avoid real responsibilities and real problems, Irish politicians have gone off in search of more ethereal ones. It is a pattern we see often in Europe these days.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and a weekly op-ed contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where this essay originally appeared.

In 2006, it was difficult to tell the tragedy from the farce.

President Bush, who has a reputation for honesty and forthrightness, assured the American public on the 1st of November that Donald Rumsfeld would be secretary of Defense until the end of his term. Seven days later, Bush fired Rumsfeld, replacing him with Robert Gates. The administration has long maintained that the CIA is a broken, dysfunctional bureaucracy in need of change. Gates began his professional career as an analyst for the CIA and eventually ascended to the position of director, helping to make the agency what it is today.

The wise souls on the New Jersey Supreme Court acknowledged that neither the state's marriage statutes nor its constitution provide for the right of marriage to be extended to same-sex couples. The justices further found that the democratically enacted Domestic Partnership Act of 2004 explicitly acknowledges that same-sex couples cannot marry. After issuing said pronouncements, the court ruled in favor of gay marriage, saying that these niggling bits of law were trumped by a "developing understanding" in the world about the goodness of same-sex unions.

Democrats won an election, finally. Across the country, Democratic congressional candidates ran hard against the Iraq war, despite the fact that Congress has little influence on its conduct or course. After the election, no prominent Republicans threatened to move abroad. Neither did Republicans blame the loss on Diebold voting machines, voter intimidation, or the stupidity of the electorate. Not that conservatives were without their analytical crutches. On the morning after the election, radio host Hugh Hewitt wrote that Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) was the cause of the Republican defeat.

The complexities of Islam continued to puzzle the West. A newspaper in Denmark made headlines for publishing cartoons depicting images of Muhammad. Some of these drawings suggested that there was a casual, if not causal, link between Islam and violence. Muslims around the world rioted in protest, killing dozens of people. Amid the riots, a Catholic priest was murdered by a Muslim assassin in Turkey. A few months later, two Muslim students at an Islamic school in Melbourne urinated on a Bible, spit on it, and then burned it. No Christians, anywhere, rioted, protested, or even bothered to organize a stray boycott. The Associated Press reported that "residents of a southern Somalia town who do not pray five times a day will be beheaded" as part of a regime of Islamic religious law being instituted there.

Andrew Sullivan, who was editor of the New Republic before he ascended to the position of blogger, coined the term Christianist as a way of comparing Islamist radicals with Christians who disagree about the "developing understanding" on gay marriage.

Meanwhile, Muslim taxi drivers came into conflict with two pillars of Western civilization: disability rights and booze. In British Columbia, Behzad Saidy, a taxi driver who is Muslim, refused to pick up Bruce Gilmour, who is blind. The sticking point was Gilmour's guide dog, which Saidy declared was against his religion to transport. At the Minneapolis airport, Muslim cab drivers refused to drive passengers carrying bottles of liquor or wine - or, for that matter, people who wanted rides to bars. In light of the Minnesota Twins' playoff collapse, this proved deeply unfair to the local citizenry.

Tom Cruise became the first silver-screen leading man in a generation to self-destruct on public. Sages could not agree which was more damaging to his image: the "silent birth" of his child; his dismissal by Sumner Redstone, chief honcho at Viacom, the parent company of Paramount, who ended Paramount's deal with Cruise's production company; or the discovery that he wore a girdle under his tuxedo at his celebrity all-star wedding. Cruise and bride Katie Holmes declined even to wave to the locals of Bracciano, Italy, who patiently hosted the circus.

Lindsay Lohan, philosopher, completed a final, unimpeachable proof of the Slippery Slope Theorem. For several years, the "accidental" nipple slip has been a staple of the celebrity-fashion industrial complex. With the bourgeoisie no longer so easily épater-ed, Lohan upped the stakes, beginning the trend of the "accidental" nether-slip.

President Bush made a trip to King County, Wash., in June to raise money for local Republicans, including congressman Dave Reichert. A school bus driver made an inappropriate gesture to the presidential motorcade as it passed by. The president - who once called a reporter a "major-league [expletive]" over an open microphone - noticed the gesture and remarked on it to Reichert. Reichert called the school district. The bus driver was fired.

It was that kind of year.

Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com

This piece originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.