If I were the kind of person who had a patron saint, I would choose St. Therese. It was she who supposedly said that “there are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Just looking at the ongoing and quite chilling investigation of a now-famous Washington leak leads me to conclude that the good lady was on to something. The press, alas, is getting what it wanted.

What it wanted was a robust investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to columnist Robert D. Novak. The operative in question was Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson, a former diplomat who had been sent to Africa to see if Iraq had been trying to buy yellowcake uranium, as President Bush later suggested in his 2003 State of the Union message. Wilson said he had found otherwise. He put egg all over George Bush’s face.

There are two ways to read the Novak column that followed. The first is at face value — that had it not been for nepotism, Wilson would not have been sent to Africa. He was a rank amateur when it came to nuclear skulduggery.

The other reading is that Novak was used to punish Wilson by hurting his wife, effectively ending her career as a “covered” employee. Either way, it does not matter to me. And either way, it did not matter to the Justice Department. Outing an undercover agent is against the law. It could be dangerous for the agent.

It turns out, though, that it has been much more dangerous to the press. Plame, at last report, was doing splendidly, posing for pictures in Vanity Fair and otherwise not running for her very life. The press, though, is in something of a pickle. Attorney General John Ashcroft decided to provide exactly what some editorial boards were demanding: a special prosecutor to look into the leak. To some, it must have seemed so simple. Here was the odious Novak on the one hand and the odious Bush White House on the other and not a good guy in sight. Let the subpoenas fall where they may.

Somehow, they have fallen all over the place. The special counsel, the Justice Department’s own Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has either questioned or attempted to question all manner of reporters, but two stand in special jeopardy: Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times. Neither had anything to do with the leak to Novak. Still, they both face jail terms for refusing to reveal their sources.

As one who once was on the receiving end of a subpoena demanding that I reveal my sources, I can tell you what happens in these cases: Your phone goes dead. No one will talk to you. As for the public, it is deprived of information. It gets precisely what the government wants it to get.

At the moment, things are a bit spooky. It’s not clear why Cooper was subpoenaed. It’s not clear why Miller was subpoenaed. It’s not clear if Novak ever was or, if so, what he did about it. What is abundantly clear is that somehow a targeted investigation has gone wildly off track, with reporters apparently being asked to account for stories they have not even written. Congress, the epicenter of leaks, had better set some rules to protect journalists who protect their sources. Many states — red as well as blue — have so-called shield laws, and they seem to work well: Reporters stay out of jail; the public gets the information it needs. Not a bad bargain.

In the meantime, the press ought to remember never to call for a special prosecutor. The trouble with them is that they are, as designed, above politics — which too often means common sense and compromise. Maybe if Fitzgerald were a politician, like Ashcroft, he would appreciate the value of a leak and how it has become an intrinsic part of our democracy. He might even feel compelled to explain himself to the public — anonymously, of course, to reporters he can trust.

My number’s in the book, Pat. •

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

As far as I’m concerned, the guys I’ve seen over and over again on TV throwing punches at various members of the Indiana Pacers are the functional — and nonfunctioning — equivalent of that guy who faced down the tank in Tiananmen Square. Only he had a majestic, noble cause: democracy. What these guys were fighting for is beyond me.

To take on athletes in the prime of their lives, men almost seven feet tall and bulked up to the strength of an ox, is stupidity so sheer, so perfect that it is rarely found in nature and, by itself, contradicts Darwin. People this dumb should have died out by now.

Much attention continues to be paid to Ron Artest, as if he is such a mystery. He is a rough kid from a rough part of the world with what are known as anger-management issues. These are the same issues that bedeviled Lizzie Borden and now afflict road-ragers across the land. Artest has a record when it comes to such matters — this is not his first suspension — and he appears (although I am not personally acquainted with him) a couple cards short of a full deck. It is authoritatively reported, for instance, that while playing for the Chicago Bulls at the usual multimillion-dollar salary, he applied for a Sunday job at Circuit City so he could get an employee discount.

Be all that as it may, you can surely appreciate the sort of anger that erupts in a man when a fan hits him with a cup full of liquid. It is not just the ignobility of it all but the actual potential for serious injury. A cup full of liquid could do eye injury, and it is an assault in itself. Sure, Artest should not have reacted the way he did, but you can appreciate what angered him and why. He deserves to be punished, but he is not all that hard to understand.

But the fans? What is wrong with them? They are idiots being played for suckers by a bunch of millionaires who own ball teams. Because they happen to live in a certain area, they root for a certain team. Never mind that the players usually don’t live in the area and would, for either a buck or a whim, go somewhere else, the fans for some reason identify so passionately with a team that they are willing to risk physical injury on its behalf. Freud, I am sure, had a term for such people: schmucks.

Being nicer, I see them differently. They are mere fools being manipulated by teams in ways that would make Pavlov salivate in appreciation. The noise, the choreographed cheering, the booming announcer, and, not least, the constant acceptance or encouragement of what used to be called poor sportsmanship — for instance, “thundersticks” used to rattle players at the free-throw line — are attempts to bond fans to a team that would, in a flash, desert them for a better arena in another city. It works. Vast numbers of people have turned over a piece of their self-worth to a team. They feel good when it wins and bad when it loses and, in some cases, will risk or inflict injury in a cause so worthless their children should be raised by foster parents for their own good.

I understand wanting to belong to something, and I understand a keen appreciation of the game. But the fan, like “the voter” and “the stockholder,” has become so hypocritically venerated that it has become virtually sacrilegious to call him (or her) a chump and an idiot when they go too far. So, please, sports writers of the world, spare me any more analysis of Artest and throw some light on the world of the fan. It must be a dim one, indeed. n

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.

VIEWPOINT by

A phrase from a press release struck me: “In doing so [voting for George Bush], religious Americans were duped into voting against their best interests.” The operative word is “duped,” and it helps explain why the Democratic Party is in the pits and John Kerry is not the next president of the United States. Only a dope thinks these voters were duped.

The press release comes from an organization called “Retro vs. Metro America,” which — par for the course nowadays — is also a book and a Web site and soon, probably, a breakfast cereal. It is Democratic and consists of some pretty impressive people, including the pollster Celinda Lake. And while a press release is, after all, just a press release, this one does represent the fairly common view that cultural conservatives have no idea what they are doing. For a little piece of heaven, they will sacrifice a better standard of living, health insurance, and a chance to live their retirement in splendor.

In some theoretical way, this may be the case. But in the real world, as they say, you tell me what Democratic program would have improved the economic well-being of your average family so that, even for a moment, it would have to weigh trading off a cultural conviction. Is there a single American out there who really thought that Kerry’s program to end or limit the outsourcing of jobs overseas was going to amount to anything? If so, that person should have been deprived of the right to vote on the grounds of insanity.

And is there anyone out there who thought you could narrow the deficit and fund all sorts of programs merely by eliminating the tax breaks President Bush gave the very rich? I voted for Kerry, but I didn’t believe that for a second.

So just how, precisely, were all these cultural conservatives duped? It seems to me that they saw through the promises for what they were — empty — and voted on what mattered most to them. They knew, just as we all know, that nothing in the Democrats’ oh-so-moderate program was going to make much difference to them, or even if it did, it was not worth what they would have had to give up in exchange.

Sometimes, a voter may actually decide to vote against his or her economic self-interest. Jewish voters, as a definable group, are among the wealthiest in the country and yet they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Most Jews are not voting Democratic out of mere habit. They are making a conscious decision to forgo an economic benefit for something that matters more — a cultural imperative for social justice. They believe in social welfare programs. They believe in redistributing wealth (some of it, anyway), and they believe firmly in civil rights and civil liberties. What are these rights worth? Anything you can name, because history teaches that without them even the pursuit of happiness is futile.

It behooves Democrats to understand that Christian conservatives can make the same, hard choices. Of course, real economic privation can change the equation — would you rather have a job or stop gay marriage? — but barring that sort of choice, culture wins out. That does not mean liberals have to feign agreement or abandon their own values. When it comes to gays, for instance, the Republican Party has engaged in unconscionable demagoguery — and the president knows it. In the short run, gay rights may be a losing issue, but this is a matter of human rights, not to be traded away. With all due respect to the voters of most of the states, on certain issues, I’d rather be right than red.

Still, what matters most is attitude, a mind-set that does not convey the message that people who vote the “wrong” way are dupes. These people know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is the people who insist otherwise who are the true dupes in this case — not of some political candidate, but of their own wishful thinking. n

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.

VIEWPOINT by RICHARD COHEN

Duped?

The Democrats have some soul-searching to do.

A phrase from a press release struck me: “In doing so [voting for George Bush], religious Americans were duped into voting against their best interests.” The operative word is “duped,” and it helps explain why the Democratic Party is in the pits and John Kerry is not the next president of the United States. Only a dope thinks these voters were duped.

The press release comes from an organization called “Retro vs. Metro America,” which — par for the course nowadays — is also a book and a Web site and soon, probably, a breakfast cereal. It is Democratic and consists of some pretty impressive people, including the pollster Celinda Lake. And while a press release is, after all, just a press release, this one does represent the fairly common view that cultural conservatives have no idea what they are doing. For a little piece of heaven, they will sacrifice a better standard of living, health insurance, and a chance to live their retirement in splendor.

In some theoretical way, this may be the case. But in the real world, as they say, you tell me what Democratic program would have improved the economic well-being of your average family so that, even for a moment, it would have to weigh trading off a cultural conviction. Is there a single American out there who really thought that Kerry’s program to end or limit the outsourcing of jobs overseas was going to amount to anything? If so, that person should have been deprived of the right to vote on the grounds of insanity.

And is there anyone out there who thought you could narrow the deficit and fund all sorts of programs merely by eliminating the tax breaks President Bush gave the very rich? I voted for Kerry, but I didn’t believe that for a second.

So just how, precisely, were all these cultural conservatives duped? It seems to me that they saw through the promises for what they were — empty — and voted on what mattered most to them. They knew, just as we all know, that nothing in the Democrats’ oh-so-moderate program was going to make much difference to them, or even if it did, it was not worth what they would have had to give up in exchange.

Sometimes, a voter may actually decide to vote against his or her economic self-interest. Jewish voters, as a definable group, are among the wealthiest in the country and yet they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Most Jews are not voting Democratic out of mere habit. They are making a conscious decision to forgo an economic benefit for something that matters more — a cultural imperative for social justice. They believe in social welfare programs. They believe in redistributing wealth (some of it, anyway), and they believe firmly in civil rights and civil liberties. What are these rights worth? Anything you can name, because history teaches that without them even the pursuit of happiness is futile.

It behooves Democrats to understand that Christian conservatives can make the same, hard choices. Of course, real economic privation can change the equation — would you rather have a job or stop gay marriage? — but barring that sort of choice, culture wins out. That does not mean liberals have to feign agreement or abandon their own values. When it comes to gays, for instance, the Republican Party has engaged in unconscionable demagoguery — and the president knows it. In the short run, gay rights may be a losing issue, but this is a matter of human rights, not to be traded away. With all due respect to the voters of most of the states, on certain issues, I’d rather be right than red.

Still, what matters most is attitude, a mind-set that does not convey the message that people who vote the “wrong” way are dupes. These people know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is the people who insist otherwise who are the true dupes in this case — not of some political candidate, but of their own wishful thinking.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.

Back when I studied anthropology in college, I had to determine the sex and race of skulls. What we did, as I recall, was go from table to table where, on each, was a skull of some dear fellow or gal who was making a contribution to science. Like Olivier in Hamlet, I would hold up the skull (“Alas, poor Yorick”) and determine its sex and race.

In absolute desperation, I concluded that one had belonged to a gay American Indian. To my utter surprise, the teacher said I was right. But I wasn’t — not exactly. The skull actually told me nothing about behavior, just physical traits — mostly masculine, but some feminine. Yet my guess was a reasonable one, and ever since that day I have believed that there is a biological basis to homosexuality, just as there is to heterosexuality. (I don’t remember choosing to be straight.) It’s a belief that has become a conviction as scientific study after scientific study confirm that we do not choose our sexual orientation.

If by now you suspect that I am wending my way to the whole Mary Cheney (non)outing controversy, you are precisely right. I am obligated to start by administering a smart slap to my man Kerry for being such a political klutz and, if I may say so, no gentleman. For reasons that I find hard to explain — after all, Vice President Cheney himself had at least twice referred to his daughter’s homosexuality — I flinched when Kerry referred to “Dick Cheney’s daughter” as a “lesbian.” It is just none of his damned business.

But having said that, let’s turn our attention to what President Bush said on the same topic. He was asked by Bob Schieffer whether he thought “homosexuality is a choice.” This is what Bush said: “You know, Bob, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Ever since 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association ruled that homosexuality is not a mental disorder requiring treatment, stacks of studies have reached this consensus: Homosexuality is not a matter of choice. That does not mean that it is never a matter of choice. It just means that normally it is not. Bush — maybe alone among Yale and Harvard alumni — seems never to have heard of these studies.

On the other hand, there is the remote chance that Bush, along with many social conservatives, does believe that homosexuality is a matter of choice and that it can be cured by faith-based therapies. If that’s the case, he should have said so. My guess is that this is not what Bush believes. By falsely confessing ignorance, Bush was pandering to his base. On this issue, and this issue only, he is willing to tolerate agnosticism.

Deep in his heart — which too often functions as his brain — Bush knows he has pandered to ignorance and homophobia. The effort to ban gay marriage by constitutional amendment is so patently not needed — states can do what they want in this area — it is nothing but a statement of theological or cultural conviction. It does not belong in the Constitution, and Bush, I promise you, will instantly neglect the matter if he wins a second term.

Kerry either made a mistake by mentioning Mary Cheney or callously attempted to “out” her to those Bush supporters who somehow did not know that their vice president has a gay daughter. Either way, he should simply say he is sorry, because, really, he ought to be. Come on, John, be a mensch.

But if and when he issues such a statement, he ought to ask Bush if he wants to rethink his answer to Schieffer’s question. Homosexuality may not be a matter of choice — but willful ignorance sure is.

Richard Cohen is a writer for the Washington Post Writers Group.

In the faraway past, I was a psych major in college, and it was then that I discovered the useful word “projection.” It was, as I recall, the tendency to assign to others the attributes or faults you had within yourself.

I still know projection when I see it. George Bush projects all over the place.

He does so most prominently when he accuses John Kerry of endangering Americans at home and, most importantly, troops overseas when Kerry engages, as a presidential candidate should, in criticism of the current administration. Recently, Bush set the tone for his administration and the more opportunistic members of the GOP by saying that Kerry’s criticisms of the war in Iraq “can embolden the enemy.” It goes without saying that emboldening the enemy is dangerous to our own troops. It is very close to treason.

Something similar has been said for some time by Vice President Dick Cheney, who warned three weeks ago that a Kerry victory would make America more susceptible to a terrorist attack and then, in the manner of a shyster lawyer who knows he will be overruled, took it back. He misspoke — and he has since done so repeatedly.

Also misspeaking is Senator Orrin Hatch, who told Fox News that “Democrats are consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there.” This too would be tantamount to treason on the part of the Democrats — or maybe it’s just stupidity on Hatch’s part. Please ponder the matter.

All this solicitude for the welfare of the troops is both touching — and a bit late in coming. It would have been the better part of prudence not to have gone to war in the first place. Barring that, it would have been prudent to wait until our traditional allies were as convinced as we were that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction.

Even if no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, the United States still might have convinced some other important nations (besides Britain) that Saddam Hussein’s repeated violations of UN resolutions had to be addressed.

Still more solicitude for the troops might have been shown if the Bush administration had worried over its war plan a bit more. The compulsion to fight the war on the cheap meant too few troops and, once Baghdad was taken, too much chaos. The unforgivably arrogant conviction that Iraqis would embrace American troops as liberators and would, somehow, break out in song also cost the United States lives. I doubt if any action report listed a single cause of death as being attributable to “criticism from home.” Karl Rove may want to do something about that.

Even now there are not enough troops to do the job, an assertion made not by me but by some very smart people within the Pentagon. Too few troops means that the situation in Iraq is more dangerous than it need be. That needs to be pointed out, not muffled. After all, lives are truly at stake.

The invocation of “the troops” to smother criticism is beyond contempt. It dehumanizes them, turning them into a political device to advance the campaign and secure, if possible, another little slice of the electorate. It does not show, as Bush must think, a special solicitude for them but just the opposite. They are grist for his reelection.

It’s likely that Bush senses that something has gone terribly wrong in Iraq but that if Kerry is silenced, no one much will notice. The president must, in some nagging way like a mild itch, recognize that it is his mistakes, not Kerry’s language, that have cost American lives. In Bush’s case, projection is both understandable and Shakespearian. Like Hamlet’s guilt-ridden mother, he “doth protest too much.” •

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s not-so-happy

warrior, is breaking with tradition this week and

making at least one campaign appearance while the

Republicans dominate the news with their nominating

convention (a real cliffhanger). I applaud this

aggressiveness, because Kerry could use every day he’s got left until the

election. On the other hand, now would be the time to

pause and wonder what has gone wrong and what can be

done about it. Kerry could start by clearing his throat.

At the moment, the Democratic nominee seems to

be speaking from under water, making glub-glub sounds as

he tries to explain his original vote in support of the Iraq

war resolution, his subsequent vote against funding the war,

and his conduct in Vietnam many years ago and what he

said afterward. The man carries a heavy burden — a long

and complicated public record that can be mined for

negative nuggets. It does not help any that as a public speaker he

is no public speaker.

It just so happens that a man has appeared among

us here in New York City who can show Kerry what to

do. Senator John McCain has been the toast of the town

this week, his birthday (68) being celebrated like the 12

nights of Christmas. On Sunday, though, McCain was all

business when he appeared on Face the

Nation and was asked whether Kerry’s recent dip in the polls was attributable to

those wretched TV ads attacking his war record. McCain did

not launch into praise of George Bush as almost any other

politician would have done but instead ripped the muggy

air with candor: “I can think of no other reason,” he said.

Maybe you heard the thunder.

The irrepressible blurting out of the obvious, a

McCain trait for many years, not only stood in marked contrast

to what I had been watching before he came on — George

Pataki and Rudy Giuliani in full insincerity about the marvels

of the Bush presidency — but to politicians in general.

It is a magical thing McCain does: Tell the truth, tell it simply,

and get on with life. The formula is so obvious you’d think

more politicians would adopt it, if only because it works.

Bluntness is, bluntly speaking, what Kerry could use in abundance.

At the moment, the issue is Kerry’s Vietnam service.

He was first attacked for being a hot dog and a phony who

did not really earn his medals. George Bush himself has

now sort of put that matter to rest by conceding that Kerry is

a hero — although apparently not enough of one for Bush

to denounce the swift-boat ads. Now, new ads attack Kerry

for what he said after returning from Vietnam and becoming

a leader of the antiwar movement.

This is a moment for Kerry to speak plainly, embrace

all Vietnam veterans, and say that any suggestion that they

were war criminals does not represent how he feels now and

how he felt then — and if he gave the opposite impression,

he’s sorry. If it takes an apology — if it takes saying he was

once an angry young man who saw blood spilled in a

dubious cause — then that’s what he should say. Kerry’s inability

or refusal to return to the origin of his problems — a

wrong vote on Iraq and some incautious words on Vietnam —

has trapped him in a kind of rhetorical molasses. He’s

always trimming weeds that need to be yanked out by the roots.

Either by happenstance or design, I’ve been with

John McCain for three nights in a row and have watched the

magic he works on people. At a dinner one evening, someone

asked the secret of his appeal. A colleague and I looked at

each other in disbelief. It’s his honesty, his willingness to

(mostly) say what’s on his mind. He just clears his throat and

says what has to be said. John Kerry ought to try it. It

could make him president.

Richard Cohen writes for The Washington Post

and the Washington Post Writers group.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for the White House as a budget-balancer. After his election, he started to spend money the government did not have, throwing one alphabet agency after another (CCC, WPA, etc.) into the abyss of the Great Depression. FDR called this “the New Deal.” In today’s politics, it would be called flip-flopping.

John F. Kerry now finds himself accused of aggravated flip-flopping in the first degree. The charge comes from various Republican Party front groups, individual GOP fellow travelers, and, of course, the president himself.

Campaigning hither and yon, George W. Bush has had great fun mocking Kerry for, among other things, his vote for the war and a subsequent vote not to fund it. Not mentioned is that in between the two votes came ample evidence of incompetence on the part of Bush. And so Kerry, as behooves a thinking man, chose to voice a protest. The vote did not lend itself to sound-bite analysis, but it made a certain amount of sense: The war in Iraq was a mess; Bush had not earned a blank check.

In supposed contrast to Kerry, Bush presents himself as the immutable politician, a man of fixed, firm beliefs who sticks to them not because they are popular but because they are right — despite all evidence or reason. This is certainly the case when it comes to his core beliefs. His devotion to minimal taxes on the rich, for instance, is touching, but it has put the government in such debt that it will take our children’s children to pay it off. By then, Bush imagines, his visage will be on Mount Rushmore.

But on other matters, Bush has flipped and flopped with the best of them. As a presidential candidate, he declared himself implacably opposed to nation-building. Now we are engaged in building Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the cost has been not merely a ton of money, as it was in Haiti and other places Bush said he wouldn’t go, but nearly a thousand American lives lost and countless more ruined.

Bush also declared himself a determined unilateralist, kissing off treaties and understandings and even spurning NATO’s help in Afghanistan. Now the unilateralist of old is sending Colin Powell around the world, seeking alms and arms for Iraq. Flip-flop.

Bush would not negotiate with North Korea. He did. Flip-flop. Bush told the United Nations to butt out of Iraq. Now he wants it in. Flip-flop.

The president opposed creating the Department of Homeland Security. Soon after, his strong opposition apparently slipped his mind and he flip-flopped his way to an embrace. Bush later opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, but now he cannot thank it enough. He did not want his chief aides — Condoleezza Rice, for instance — to testify publicly before it but relented in the face of popular opposition. Flip-flop. He himself would not testify for all sorts of hallowed constitutional reasons and then, of course, did. Flip-flop. (He insisted, of course, on taking Dick Cheney with him, the functional equivalent of bringing the textbook to the exam.)

Finally, of course, we get Bush’s recent call for the creation of the post of National Intelligence Director, a position he once opposed.

But it is the areas in which Bush’s convictions have not changed that are the most troubling, and this includes a religiosity that comforts him in his intellectual inertness and granite-like beliefs that are impervious to logic, such as his tax policy and his relentless march to war in Iraq. Flip-flopping, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. It can be an indicator of an alert mind, one that adjusts to new realities, or it can be evidence of ambition decoupled from principle. With Kerry, it’s a mix of both. With Bush, who changes his positions but never his mind, it is always the latter.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post.

When it comes to telling you right to your face that black is white, maybe no one compares with George W. Bush. Last week, for example, he responded to yet another report that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction by saying it didn’t matter. “Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush said. “America is safer today because we did.”

“America is safer today because we did.” Just the day before, senior administration officials were saying that Osama bin Laden and his top guys are planning a terrorist attack in the United States sometime before the November presidential elections. How’s that for safer?

As always in these matters, no one knows what, if anything, will happen. As usual, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles are high on the list of possible targets and so too are the national political conventions. Since duty calls me to both, I just want to take this moment to tell my president that I don’t feel either safe or safer. In fact, I have a sensible case of the jitters.

You will note that these senior administration officials did not merely say that al-Qaeda was planning an attack. They specifically said bin Laden. This is the very guy that Bush once vowed to get “dead or alive” but who, lo these several years later, we have not gotten at all. He resides, or so we are told, in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and he does so because the United States failed to get him.

As John Kerry was among the first to point out, bin Laden survives because the Pentagon, distracted by planning the coming campaign in Iraq or maybe fearing that casualties would dampen enthusiasm for a wider war, left it to the Afghans to flush out bin Laden at Tora Bora. They did not do the job — but, not to worry, it didn’t matter anyway. Don Rumsfeld assured us nearly two years ago that wherever bin Laden is, “you can be certain that he’s having one dickens of a time operating his apparatus.” The American ground commander in Afghanistan at the time was even more confident. “We don’t have to find him,” Lt. Gen. Dan McNeil said of bin Laden, “because we’re going to shut down his terrorist apparatus.”

But somehow this terrorist whose capture did not matter all that much, whose apparatus would be shut down by Pentagon apparatchiks, has now caused much of Washington to break out in hives. The election may be interrupted. New York may be attacked. Still, we are safe. Check that: We are safer. In fact, we are both safe and not safe because, as the record makes clear, it is both important to get bin Laden and not important to get him — depending, of course, on which mistake some nincompoop is trying to excuse.

The most solemn obligation of a president is to keep us safe. This is something Bush has not done. Not only did 9/11 occur on his watch, but nearly 900 Americans have been killed in Iraq, a war that could have waited … maybe forever. At minimum, we could have used some allies besides Britain, and we should have waited until bin Laden was either killed or captured.

Instead, we went after Saddam Hussein, who posed only the remotest of threats — he had no WMD, his army was in a shambles, and he was insanely writing romantic potboilers — and effectively ignored the man who is a threat and who had already killed thousands of Americans on 9/11. We’ve got Saddam. We don’t have bin Laden.

Yet, for reasons that totally escape me, I am supposed to feel safe or safer.I don’t. Bin Laden is still in the mountains, and Bush, from what he is saying, is in denial.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.

Fortunately for Jeffrey Goldberg, he not only once lived in Israel but served in its army. Without those credentials he almost certainly would be denounced as an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. After all, Goldberg had the consummate gall and utter chutzpah to say the obvious: Israel’s West Bank and Gaza settlements have to go.

Actually, Goldberg went even further. In nearly 16,000 words in the May 31st issue of The New Yorker, this Washington-based journalist wrote that in some ways the Jewish zealots who have established settlements in the heart of overwhelmingly Palestinian areas are as great — or greater — a danger to Israel as their counterparts among the Islamic extremists, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. His article was titled “Among the Settlers; Will They Destroy Israel?”

For raising that question, he has come under unaccustomed attack. Goldberg has spent the past several years reporting and writing about Islamic radicalism and the threat it posed. This made him the darling of the neocons. But now he’s asking similar questions about Jewish zealotry, and for that his integrity, if not his very sanity, has been questioned by the usual American guardians of Israeli security.

Goldberg’s point is that not only has Israel gotten itself into a demographic and geographic trap with its settlements in Palestinian lands, it has allowed the most reactionary, belligerent, and racist elements in Judaism to establish some of the most provocative settlements. God might want these settlements, as the settlers themselves insist, but it is conscripts, mostly secular Jews, who have to guard them.

For American Jews to keep quiet about these settlements does Israel no favor. After all, in the long run the settlements are unsustainable — difficult to defend militarily, impossible to defend legally. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to remove settlements from the Gaza Strip, but that still leaves the West Bank, with more than two million Palestinians — and only about 200,000 Israeli settlers. The government seems to consider most of these settlements a permanent part of Israel. That’s exactly the way some Israelis saw the Gaza Strip. But Israel is pulling out — not because it wants to but because it has to. The same will eventually happen in large parts of the West Bank.

The longer Israel waits to deal with those settlements — not all, mind you, but most — the deeper it sinks into a quagmire. Goldberg has it right: These settlements, as much as Islamic radicalism, threaten Israel. The latter feeds off the former.

Much of Goldberg’s article is spent on Jewish religious settlers. But he talked to Palestinians too. What they have to say is hardly encouraging, often downright frightening, and usually sad. But the issue for me is not what is good for the Palestinians — I wish them a state of their own and also all the happiness in the world — but what is good for Israel. Getting rid of the settlements would be good for the Palestinians. But it would also be good for Israel.

Some of what the Jewish settlers told Goldberg is disturbing. Many of them have a contemptuous, virtually racist, view of their Arab neighbors. They are wedded to the literal word of the Bible, while much of Judaism is not, and while they by no means share the Islamic radicals’ yen for martyrdom, they are quite willing to die for their beliefs. Okay. But it is the nature of these things that they will take others with them. Not okay.

Goldberg has written a good article about some ugly facts — and done so with a reporter’s keen eye, but also with a Zionist’s loving heart. It should be read by anyone interested in Israel. See for yourself. n

Richard Cohen is a Washington Post columnist; his work frequently appears in the Flyer.

When Richard Clarke left the government, he had an idea: He would write a book. He turned to the subject that had most recently preoccupied him in government, cybersecurity. Had he done a book on that — whatever that is — the world would have yawned. So much for the man’s lust for big bucks.

To Clarke’s good fortune, his agent, Len Sherman, had a better idea: terrorism, especially how the Bush administration (mis)handled it and went to war in Iraq to rid that country of weapons of mass destruction it did not have in the first place. This, the perspicacious Sherman argued, would make a better book. With a little sales help from the White House, it turned out Sherman was right.

I offer you this account of how Against All Enemies happened to be written — proffered by the still-dazed Sherman (“It never occurred to me that the Republicans would make it into an event”) — because it has been charged that Clarke set out to make a bundle on the bodies of the victims of September 11th. So said Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, over and over again.

Maybe not since Joe McCarthy sneered insinuations about communism has any senator waxed so ugly and, in the process, made such a fool of himself. Someone should check: Frist, a physician, may be self-medicating.

Frist started by saying that Clarke wrote his book “in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001.” Having said that, he then fakes fairness by admitting that he doesn’t know why Clarke wrote the book: “I do not know if Mr. Clarke’s motive … is partisan gain or personal profit.” But then, having somehow instantly gotten the answer, he pronounces the book “an appalling act of profiteering” and demands, as only a multimillionaire could, that Clarke “renounce any plan to personally profit from this book.”

Apparently, it has not occurred to Frist that writers write for money. This is why a broke Ulysses S. Grant took the advice of his friend Mark Twain and wrote his memoirs.

When it comes to September 11th, the list of authors who have made money from this tragedy is extensive. One could even argue, as I’m sure Frist has in private, that Rudy Giuliani should return the royalties from his book Leadership, since until September 11th, his leadership was not all that evident.

In a partisan psychosis, perhaps induced by a call from the White House, the good senator has become addled. He confuses perpetrators with victims and bystanders. For First Amendment reasons, I happen not to like “Son of Sam laws,” which deny criminals the fruits of their labors if they should write a book about what they’ve done or sell their sordid tale to the movies. Still, I understand the reasoning. It’s bad enough to be a victim once, but over and over through book or movie sales is truly adding insult to injury. A criminal should not make money off his crime.

But Clarke did not perpetrate September 11th. He wrote a book about it — and what led to it and how the Bush administration used it as a pretext for war in Iraq. Because of the amateurish and distasteful way the White House has gone about rebutting the book, Clarke will, as Frist has rued, “make quite a bit of money for his efforts” — and so what? Ain’t this America?

Sherman says that Clarke’s next project may be a novel. If so, Clarke ought to consider one about a once well-regarded senator who became a White House attack dog and in the process made himself look both unprincipled and foolish. He could call it Frist.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post.