It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

Apparently the pro-choice types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Even if you don't mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters.