The Week - current events, commentary - Column

-- A headline coming soon: "sen. lott opposes national missile defense -- fears its effect on blacks and other Minorities."

-- Our recent cover story charging that South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson's 524-vote victory over Republican challenger John Thune was the result of absentee-ballot fraud, illegal electioneering, and lax voter- identification practices has stirred strong emotions across the state. The story, based on more than 40 affidavits collected by Republicans in the days after the election, as well as interviews with both Republican and Democratic election officials, has particularly gotten under the skin of state attorney general Mark Barnett, who recently characterized it as "shoddy and irresponsible and sensationalistic and garbage." Barnett, a Republican with designs on someday becoming governor, rejected most of the evidence of improprieties -- echoing a decision by Thune, a Republican with designs on someday running for the Senate again, not to ask for a recount. (Barnett declared that two of the affidavits were false, but they made up a tiny part of the NR story.) Democrats cheered Barnett's statements, but it hasn't made the issue go away. In fact, new evidence has emerged that points toward more shenanigans in the election. A Democratic activist named Becky Red Earth Villeda, who was suspected of creating fraudulent absentee-ballot applications, has now been indicted for forging signatures on hundreds of applications. And in a lawsuit against Barnett, Red Earth says she was "operating on orders from her superiors" in the Democratic party. All of this suggests that the South Dakota situation is a mess that cries out for investigation -- and then reform. Some state legislators are considering just that. It's too late for John Thune -- this time at least -- but it might ensure that this doesn't happen again.

-- Saddam Hussein has blown what everyone a few weeks ago at the U.N. was insisting is his "last chance." His 12,000-page declaration denying any prohibited weapons programs is obviously incomplete and a lie, and thus constitutes a material breach of U.N. Resolution 1441. This breach renders the inspections process pointless, since inspectors are designed only to certify the compliance of a cooperating state, rather than to try to chase down every nuke and germ in a country determined to play hide-and-seek. The question now should only be when does the Bush administration decide -- despite the wailing it will likely produce at U.N. Plaza -- to pull the plug on this travesty, and on Saddam.

-- Al Gore announced he would not run for president in 2004, and acknowledged that he was foregoing "probably the last opportunity I'll ever have to run for president." Gore has run in the last four election cycles (for the presidency in 2000; for the vice presidency in 1992 and 1996; for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988). He has been running for office, in a sense, since his childhood as the son and namesake of a senator. There is evidence that Gore felt that politics was a burden; he has said that his favorite book is The Red and the Black, Stendhal's novel of a career chosen against the hero's inclination. His decision probably comes as a relief to him. Not necessarily to the voters. Whatever the polls say about President Bush after 9/11, Al Gore got half a million more votes only ten months earlier. The Democrats have a large and loyal base; a candidate who is luckier and more skillful could well ride it to the White House.

-- Justice Clarence Thomas's intervention in oral arguments on a Virginia anti-cross-burning statute -- Thomas supported the Virginia law on the grounds that burning crosses were a tool of "intimidation and harassment" in an anti-black "reign of terror" wherever the Klan held sway -- was dramatic. Yet the case symbolizes the bollixed state of thought on freedom of speech. Stripping can be speech; so, in some cases, can Klan crosses (in 1995 the Court let the Klan hoist a cross in a Christmas display in Ohio). Meanwhile, on campuses, sexist speech -- which can be jokes that lesbians do not get, which includes a lot of jokes -- can be intimidation. All of which leads to the suspicion that when the establishment likes something, it becomes speech; when it doesn't like something, it becomes action.

-- The Bush administration's next major civil-rights test will come on January 16, when briefs are due in the University of Michigan admissions case now before the Supreme Court. There is some concern the Department of Justice won't file one for fear that coming out against "diversity" is the wrong thing to do in the I-am-not-a-Dixiecrat era. Yet the principle of racial equality is too important to be sacrificed to politics, and the events of 9/11 dramatized what a generation's worth of immigration has already made obvious: America cannot afford to become a nation of racial and ethnic enclaves, all jostling for most- favored-color status. Preferences are overwhelmingly unpopular among all Americans, and especially among those who vote Republican. The administration should file a brief making clear that the University of Michigan's policy is flawed not just in its execution, but in its fundamental conception: Pre-fab "diversity" is not a persuasive justification for racial and ethnic discrimination. A brief that says anything less will be worse than no brief at all, and will be deeply disappointing to those who hope this president will leave as part of his legacy an America that is more united than ever before.