In 1983, I watched the New York Yacht Club’s 132 year winning streak terminated by an invasion of gibbering australopithicines, who carried the America’s Cup off in triumph from Newport to their antipodean lair. It was quickly recovered by Dennis Connor, the skipper who had lost it, but in 1988, it became necessary to defend it on short notice against a New Zealand challenge. This precipitated a return to the original spirit of the race, perhaps best summed up as “Who can built the fastest yacht in the world?” within the rules, (which we reserve the right to rewrite if we feel like it)

In the 1988 case this precipitated the design and deployment in under a year of a 60 foot catamaran, a Burt Rutan carbon fiber wingsail creation which, though of exhilarating performance—I spent some hair raising hours helping keep it from becoming fully airborne, I was obliged to describe as “Resembling a pterodactyl on steroids.”

Now the landlocked Admiralty court that interprets the arcana of the 19th-century Deed Of Gift ruling the racing rulemakers has decreed another catfight. Scuttlebut has it that a matched pair of 90-foot catamarans will determine if the cup stays in Geneva, home to the Alinghi syndicate that last won it off New Zealand , or ends up back here—the current victim of America’s Cup fever being the head of Oracle, who seems to prefer power boats, since, well, he likes power.

Fortunately, paleontology has been keeping up with radical yacht design, and an even weirder Big Bird has been dug up to contend for the mascot slot in a giant wingsail catamaran regatta.  Clear the deck, pterodactyl and Quetzalosaurus fans. I’m nominating an Azharkid as the flying marine dinosaur du jour for this Americas Cup:  it sure looks the part , with strong bilateral symmetry, gnarly wing design and the fashion sense of a Siberian Gulag Commodore’s first wife. In short, like the boats, it’s built for the job, which is scaring away the competition and affording a minimum of windage for a maximum of advertising area.

But fast—this is going to be a lot more fun than watching the grass grow.

In “Just Say No to Billary,” my friend G. Tracy Mehan, III writes that “

If Caroline Kennedy wants to do Barack Obama a favor, she will kill the idea of Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential nominee-pronto.

The daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, along with two other prominent Democrats, has been chosen by Senator Obama to pursue the search for his running mate for the general election campaign.”

But Caroline’s defection from the erstwhile feminist camp does not preclude Senator Clinton’s fulfilling her ambitions offshore- America is almost unique in limiting the election of the foreign born. So the question naturally arises :
Will Hillary Clinton be the next president of Kenya?

It takes a village to raise a president. At present , the most electable figure in Kenyan politics is Barack Obama ‘s grandma, but like him, she suffers from political inexperience, her village not being wired for electricity, electicity, or for that matter, the Internet.  Not Hillary. Running for President and Vice-President of Kenya, a Clinton-Obama ticket would be a shoo-in by a five fly whisk margin. Once elected, her new matriarchal power base could network with nearby nations in search of Presidential timber to apply African family values to ridding the region of the deplorable likes of Mugabe and Mbeke.

The key to this new strategy is a principle dear to social conservatives- traditional marriage.

The age old custom of polyandry would allow Her Excellency Clinton to instantly ally with the ruling houses of East and South Africa, power sharing Bill, our former first black president, with the Great She Elephant of Lesotho would upstage Caroline Kennedy ,  while a polygamous exchange of vows with Winnie Mandela would reinforce the rainbow coalition and return Degeneris to the post-feminist fold. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say our chief executive may not undertake multitasking with a vengeance and having one who was simultaneously Head of several States would revolutionize our UN diplomacy, and make America the envy of foreign princes and potentates.

But whence would come the expanded staff Hillary would need ?  Out of Africa, of course.  No continent affords a faster education in foreign policy , or a larger talent pool to provide an incoming Washington administration with K Street operatives. Imagine what the cream of the millions of Nigerians presently employed in writing e-mails offering unclaimed fortunes could do for the letters columns of The American Spectator and the Daily Kos, or the Op-ed page of The Washington Times ?

Secessionists,rejoice: no nation outdistances Bolivia in the ferocity of its anti-Yankee rhetoric,and two opposition-controlled states voted overwhelmingly Sunday to in effect secede from the Union. Their autonomy measures aim to shield the Amazon basin from President Evo Morales’ socialist agenda

it’s hard to suppress warm feelings for nascent nations with names like Beni and Pando which passed autonomy measures by more than 80 percent of the vote, according to preliminary vote counts released Sunday evening.

Morales’ quest to empower Bolivia’s Indian majority has alienated the more cosmopolitan population of the eastern lowlands , including some American agro-expats anda large community of Mennonites , whose near sea level existence contrasts with the Tibetan altitude of La Paz were the national government presides.

The AP reports

“Government officials had encouraged Morales’ supporters to abstain from voting, and pro-Morales groups in the small Pando town of Filadelfia burned voting urns to protest the referendum.

Scattered clashes between autonomy backers and pro-Morales groups in the Beni state capital of Trinidad left about eight people injured, according to local media reports.

State leaders hailed the measure as the latest step in a growing decentralization push that opposition groups hope will provide a counterbalance to Morales’ populist government.

’‘We ask the country and the world to respect our sovereign will to be autonomous,’’ said Beni Gov. Ernesto Suarez at victory rally in Trinidad, as autonomy supporters waved the green state flag and danced through the streets in traditional feathered head dresses.”

His usual venues rendered septic by Press Secretary McClellan’s defection, Robert Kagan has turned to the relatively unsullied pages of World Affairs Journal to lay out the least and latest explanation of the origins of Neocon foreign policy

Kagan begins by erocising the University of Chicago performance artist presently known as He Who Must Not Be Named :

“ it is not really necessary to parse the writings of Jewish émigrés. One could begin with less obscure writings, like the Republican Party’s campaign platform of 1900 In that long-forgotten document, the party leaders, setting the stage for what would be William McKinley’s crushing electoral victory over William Jennings Bryan, congratulated themselves and the country for their recently concluded war with Spain.” declaring it “a war fought for “high purpose,” a “war for liberty and human rights” [giving]” the American people “a new and noble responsibility . . . to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.”

By an odd coincidence,  the tan-cardboard covered 1904 Republican campaign handbook once had pride of place on my coffee table,  a delightful compendium of Victorian sound bytes I read with relish to horrified Cambridge neighbors- I still commend it as far superior to the contemporary How To Talk To A Liberal genre.

I recall the volume as positively bully on Cuba , and very big on Banana Republic bashing and the Big Ditch for the Great White Fleet, but curiously ambiguous about the late unpleasantness in the Philippines , where the Moro Rebellion was smoldering , and the Boer War , which the Kaiser had fantasized finessing by playing the American caed—sending an Imperial prince to sweep Alice Roosevelt. off her feet and into the extended family.

She had other ideas. We got Archbishop Tutu and the comrades visiting the blessings of Democracy on South Africa   instead. Meanwhile ,  the navy has pulled out of Zamboanga ,and across the Sulu Sea in Palawan,  the Islamic insurgency is settling into its 105th year, having been only briefly interrupted by the Japanese Army.

’ Have the Republicans run out of ideas?  ’ asks The New Yorker.  In the current issue of the magazine, George Packer reports that following Bill Buckley’s memorial service ,  the egregious David Frum’s:

“mood was elegiac and chastened.” He now realized that, in 2001, Bush had been right and he had been wrong at their first meeting: the Party did need to change, but not in the way Bush went on to change it.

“It wasn’t a successful Presidency, and that’s a painful thing, and I was a very small, unimportant part of it, but I was a part of it, and that implies responsibility.”

In Packer’s view, “Frum has made his peace with the fact that smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance. The thesis of his new book…. is that the Party has lost the middle class by ignoring its sense of economic insecurity and continuing to wage campaigns as if the year were 1980, or 1968.”

“If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon,” Frum writes. “Republicans have been reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well… Voters want solutions to the problems of today.”

Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, “There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well.

A decade ago, in Dead Right, Frum called Republican efforts to compete with Clinton’s universal-health-coverage plan “cowardly.” In his new book, he asks, “Who agreed that conservatives should defend the dysfunctional American health system from all criticism?”

He told Packer, “The thing I worry about most is if the Republicans lose this election—and if you’re a betting man you have to believe they will—there will be a fundamentalist reaction. Not religious—but the beaten party believes it just has to say it louder. Like the Democrats after 1968….A lot of the problems in the Republican Party will not be fixed.”

Asked if the Conservative movement still existed. Frum replied: “We’ll have people formed by the conservative movement making decisions for the next thirty to forty years,” he said. “But will they belong to a self-conscious and cohesive conservative movement? I don’t think so. Because their movement did its work. The core task was to stop and reverse, to some degree, the drift of democratic countries after the Second World War toward social democracy. And that was done.”
The parting shot from this laxest of weevils :  “One of Buckley’s great gifts was the gift of timing ... To be twenty-five at the beginning and eighty-two at the end! But I’m forty-seven at the end.”

If you think the American economy has its troubles, look at al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq.
One of the jihadist web sites monitored by Hudson Institute visiting scholar Nibras Kazimi features this graph,
authored by the pseudonymous ‘Dir’a limen wehhed’ [‘A Shield for the Monotheist’], who posted his ‘Brief Study on the Consequences of the Division [Among] the Groups on the Cause of Jihad in Iraq’ on May 12 on one of al-Qaeda’s premier media outlets the Al-Ekhlaas website:

Kazimi notes :
The author tallies up and compares the numbers of operations claimed by each insurgent group under four categories: a year and half ago (November 2006), a year ago (May 2007), six months ago (November 2007) and now (May 2008). He demonstrated that while Al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq could claim 334 operations in Nov. 06 and 292 in May 07, their violent output dropped to 25 in Nov. 07 and 16 so far in May 08. Keep in mind that these assessments are based on Al-Qaeda’s own numbers.

The author also shows that similar steep drops were exhibited by other jihadist groups,”

Does this 94% falloff in al-Q’s praxis of terror in Iraq signal a general collapse—or attention focused elsewhere on both sides ? The buildup of US forces in Afganistan facing OBL’s presumed den in Pakistan[‘s tribal areas continues.

Taki writes in The Truth About The Good War of

“the madness that gripped Versailles, a vengeful spirit that alienated America, mutilated Germany”

But it did as much to motivate as mutilate-  everything from ‘rocket clubs’ to the freikorps. In the inter-war years German enthusiasm for military technology blossomed as the economy recovered from the hyperinflationary catastrophe brought on by Versailles.

Before the historical argument boils over, recall that both sides were aware of an accelerating revolution in military affairs. Weapons of mass destruction were being actively developed on both sides, and neither wanted to see the other develop and deploy them to crushing advantage.

The Nazi’s had the lead in nerve gas and missiles to deliver it, and it must not be forgotten that the splitting of the uranium atom was discovered in Berlin.

The rush to war, for whatever constellation of historical reasons, imposed military priorities that disrupted German developments from jet aircraft and trans-channel guns to ICBM’s, and accelerated such great undertakings as the Manhattan Project. All these developments re-emerged as components of the technological stalemate of the Cold War, after Russia and its erstwhile allies helped themselves to the techno-loot in 1945.

Had Churchill not prevailed on Roosevelt to override the America First movement,  a longer peace might have led to an even more violent war.

TORY !  TORY!  TORY!

43’s New Labour pals went to bed to rest up for Red Ken’s customary May Day parade, but arose instead to a waking Walpurgis nightmare.

  Over an hour has passed since Boris Johnson magnanimously accepted demotion from Editor of The Spectator to Mayor Of London.
Though he is the first Conservative elected to that office there are as yet no reports of the Guards massing for a charge into Fulham to raze Hurlingham Stadium , and restore the hallowed ground beneath to its rightful use as a polo field. Still, the night is young and elsewhere in Britain, Labor is reeling at the greatest local council losses in more than a generation.

The overthrow of Red Ken Livingston reminds us that even the most entrenched apparat can fall when the nanny state   fails to protect the electorate it unsubtly oppresses. London has seen crime rates soar despite a panopticon of surveillance cameras and social legislation that has turned police into common scolds at the expense of their attention to deterring violent crime. How London’s example plays in Scotland remains to be seen, but If Boris can undo some of the worst intrusions of Labour’s social engineers, there is hope of the UK becoming an example to Mayors like Bloomberg who seem to want their cities shunned.

Since BJ is a native New Yorker, his electability gives new hope to this magazine’s constituency. It is not too late to lure him to the Republican convention, where the infinite superiority of his front bench rhetoric will send the usual platform crawlers fleeing for cover, as he captures the terrorism issue by invoking his great grandsire’s Grande Porte terribilita. How many neocons can threaten to turn the Turks loose on al-Qaeda?  It’s enough to make Obama tremble in his borrowed Somali finery.

If 43 can parlay a career in undergraduate baseball management into the stuff of executive greatness, why can’t a Slough High captain of school capable of writing his own speeches ? The Speccie is infinitely better reading than The Congressional Record , and Boris even has experience of editing our glorious Proprietor, whose career as Chief of Protocol would seem assured , if only we can persuade BJ that the Special Relationship must be watered with the pink gin of patriots from both sides of the Pond.

We’re Over Here, Boris-  just six hours away , and TAS Washington Spectator is as sorely in need of a rewrite as the rest of the District Of Columbia—O Addison, where is thy Steele ?

Bob Ellis, an uberblogger for Australia’s answer to PBS, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,  won’t be getting an honorary doctorate from Oral Roberts University anytime soon, having stirred the possum with this diplomatically phrased paean to aspirant Presidential pulchritude :

” Last Monday Hillary Clinton said she’d “obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel and on Tuesday picked up some Jewish, redneck, gun-loving, wog-hating, duck-shooting, Catholic and early-dementia votes in nursing homes…

I wouldn’t normally have raised this aspect of her private life but Hillary’s failure to ‘keep the dog on the porch’, as the famous Arkansas phrase puts it, had this not then caused, or partly caused Monica, the impeachment, Karl Rove’s ‘morality politics’, Gore’s loss, Bush’s win and, by global warming, the end of the world; like the length of Cleopatra’s nose it’s been, as it turns out, a big factor in everything that followed including a million deaths in Iraq and therefore probably worth noting by historians like me. ”

Owen Harries couldn’t have put it better.  Is it time for the republic to cash in on generations of research by nominating Jonah Goldberg as lame duck Ambassador to Oz?

Thanks to Mark Steyn for surfacing the ABC link on NRO

Lit without flame by a solar spark, and consuming mere ounces of fuel a day as it is carried by fleet footed runners, the Olympic torch is acquiring a monumental carbon footprint none the less—it is being spirited across the oceans on a dedicated Chinese Airbus 330 belching forth 129 pounds of CO2 for every mile it travels.

In all , Earthlab estimates the jet will consume 462 thousand gallons of fuel-  petro, not bio. So it will take 20,130 tonnes of CO2 to see the torch around the world on its meandering 85,000 mile Odyssey from Greece to Beijing.

It’s not the CO2 that galls , but the hypocrisy of the ‘Green ” olympics ignoring its own detritus.