| Hillary Returns to Earth Ever since Bill Clinton left office, my standard response to the question of whether the Clintons will come back to the national scene has been, "Of course they will. Have you never seen a horror movie? There's always a sequel. Chucky, Jason, Michael Myers: They all come back." The same holds true for Hillary Clinton. I think she's running in 2016. But as I predicted, her poll numbers have started to come down. Why? Well, the main reason is Benghazi. But even if Benghazi never happened, they'd still come down because politics does that to people. When you're outside of partisan politics -- as she was while secretary of state -- you tend not to attract partisan ire. If I were to tell you that I am undefeated in mixed martial arts, you wouldn't immediately assume it's because my fighting style -- I call it the "Helicopter of Fists" -- is so formidable. You'd probably assume it has something to do with the fact that I've never stepped inside an MMA ring. The same goes for politics. Start mixing it up, and you take punches. I still think the Bride of Chucky will be back. But this idea that she's an inevitable winner has always struck me as ridiculous. The simple fact is she's not a very good politician. She's not terrible. But she's no Bill. She's not even a Barack (as I wrote here). It's funny. Remember that "3:00 a.m. phone call" ad she used against Obama in the primaries? Well, if I were writing an attack ad against Hillary in 2016, I'd be very tempted to reprise that ad and aim it squarely at her. It almost writes itself. "It's not good enough to pick up the phone. You need to know what to do." Chiiiiiicoms in (Cyber) Spaaaaaaaaaaaace! A new report says that the Chinese are hacking American computer networks at an alarming rate. This is hardly news. I've been including the phrase "早安，我抱歉有沒有在這封電子郵件中的商業秘密或加拿大色情。請停止殺害酷動物啄木鳥醫學。剛剛買了一些偉哥了" at the bottom of every e-mail for months (I put it just above where it says "Hello Mr. Holder!"). It means, according to Google translate: "Good Morning, I'm sorry there's no trade secrets or Canadian porn in this e-mail. Please stop killing cool animals for pecker medicine. Just buy some Viagra already." What is new is the scope of the problem the report lays out. This is a thorny issue and I think the U.S. needs to be much, much more aggressive in combating it. Why it's not a bigger issue for the WTO, for instance, is baffling to me. They are stealing our stuff, which strikes me as a bigger deal than taxing it at the border. Explaining to the Chinese leadership that they shouldn't be doing this because it's wrong is like explaining to a dog licking its nethers that what he's doing is bad manners: To the extent they understand at all, they couldn't care less. They respect power. They understand when you put a price on bad behavior. So we need to put a price on Chinese hacking. It's really that simple. The hard thing to figure out is how. As I mentioned the other night on Special Report, the coolest idea on this score comes from Jeremy Rabkin. He wants the U.S. government to issues Letters of Marque to freelance squadrons of hackers and other cyber renegades. Before the mid-nineteenth century, "privateers" were often commissioned to attack enemy ships. They were offered a percentage of what they could seize from enemy commerce. They were distinguished from mere pirates -- with whom they had obvious similarities -- by formal authorizations, so-called "letters of marque," issued by the sponsoring state. Privateering was once a common feature of naval warfare, partly for reasons of economy: it allowed governments to extend their force at sea without the expense of maintaining large fleets. There were also diplomatic or strategic advantages. Commissioning privateer attacks was a means of imposing harm on another state without committing to war. Thus the framers of the U.S. Constitution took care to specify that Congress had the power to "declare war" but also the power to "issue letters of marque," implying that the latter could proceed without the former. In interpreting this clause in an early case, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the treatise of the Swiss jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, who associated the practice with "imperfect war," in which some hostilities are permitted but the conflict remains more constrained than all-out war. In practice, letters of marque often were issued to those who had learned the craft of capturing prize at sea without any government authorization. Governments issuing authorization brought these raiders under more state control in return for offering them more state protection. Comparisons between cyber warriors and pirates of old are not fanciful. Cyber crime is a pervasive aspect of today's Internet. Much like international drug dealers, cyber criminals have sought protective relations with sympathetic or accommodating governments. The so-called "Russian Business Network," active in a range of cyber crime activities, seems to have received protection and support from the Russian government. The Chinese government has openly encouraged private hackers and may well have enlisted organized groups to probe Western business and government networks -- and then take or sell what they can. Without getting into the fine print, let me just say that is the most badass public-policy proposal I've heard in years. I want this to happen so badly! It's like a William Gibson novel meets Revenge of the Nerds. Gothy kids with inhalers, cubicle dwellers in chinos, the whole grand coalition of computer geeks can become . . . pirates! Oh, make this happen! On Conservative Books My review of Kevin Williamson's The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesomeis on the homepage today. In a nutshell, I write . . . well, actually, I don't write much in a nutshell because the space is too confining. "Help, I'm in a nutshell! I've got deadlines!" ("Really? It's come to this? You're ripping off Austin Powers's schtick now?" -- The Couch) Anyway, I write: Kevin Williamson's new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work. Those who know how I feel about Albert Jay Nock, the author of Our Enemy the State, should recognize that this is no small compliment. But I can also imagine partisans of, say, Hayek or von Mises reading this and becoming riled up (for some reason, and with no disrespect intended, the moment I wrote that line that scene when the old school orcs and the new-fangled orcs get into a brawl in The Return of the King came to mind). First, I should say that Hayek did not consider the State to be his -- or our -- enemy. He just considered planning folly, socialism immoral, and, oddly, Dick Sargent to be the superior Darrin on Bewitched. Second, both his and von Mises's work was vastly more influential than Nock's. Anyway, you can read the whole review, and should buy the book (ideally along with someone else's book, wink-wink). What I couldn't get into in the review was a point about conservative books generally. A book's importance, fair or not, is heavily dependent not just on what the book says, but when it says it. In fact sometimes the when is more important than the what. Some of the most influential books of the 20th century were hard for some people to distinguish from Shinola -- if you know what I mean. The Greening of America was utter and complete nonsense. The Promise of American Life was pretty lousy. But it became a sensation because it gave progressives permission to commit to statism. It had talismanic power in the sense that it let activists point to something physical -- like a special badge bequeathed by Stalin or a scepter delivered by Zeus -- that said "we're right!" and "we can do this!" The Greening of America gave mid-life-crisis mediocrities permission to leave their wives, grow ponytails, and proposition women half their age with promises of free weed. Or more generally, it gave people permission to do what they wanted to do anyway. Some blockbuster intellectual books were well written, but their success still had a lot to do with the "when" part. Charles Murray's Losing Ground is a really good book, but his timing mattered enormously. Welfare programs were clearly not having the intended effect, but there were no available empirical arguments against them. You could spout homespun phrases about teaching a man to fish or you could offer categorical imperatives about the State. But what people needed were the numbers to prove that the system failed on its own terms. Murray provided them. (I know "neocon" means bagel-snarfing war-mongers to some people these days, but it's worth remembering that neoconservatism did not begin as a foreign-policy thing. It began as an approach to domestic policy based upon the growing failures of New Deal and Great Society liberalism. As William F. Buckley noted a long time ago, what the neocons brought to the conservative movement was sociology. What he meant by that was that the neocons were social scientists. Conservatives had been rejecting the welfare state for decades before the liberals who became neocons joined the winning side. The neocons didn't bring new principles, they brought the new math; they had the ability to fight what Burke called the sophisters, economists, and calculators on their own terms). When Our Enemy the State came out, Frank Chodorov noted in his preface to the 1946 edition that it was celebrated as a literary accomplishment, not a philosophical one. "The times were not ripe for an acceptance of its predictions, still less for the argument on which these predictions were based. Faith in traditional frontier individualism had not yet been shaken by the course of events." Conversely, when The Road to Serfdom -- Friedrich Hayek's least-analytical work -- came out in 1944, the zeitgeist had ripened nicely, thanks to more than a decade of New Deal central planning, World War II rationing, and a greater awareness of the evils of totalitarianism in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. In short order a slew of books (Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences in 1948, Ludwig Von Mises' Human Action in 1949, God And Man at Yale in 1951, Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics in 1952, and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet's The Quest For Community, Whittaker Chamber's Witness (all in 1953) fleshed out or reclaimed the classical liberal or conservative case against collectivism and statism. Not all of them were bestsellers, to be sure. But they all made a splash -- because the times were ripe for the message. Williamson's Hurdle Which brings me back to Kevin. Man, oh Manischevitz, the times should be ripe for this book. Somehow we've gotten to a place where the bullying, sanctimonious, preening of Obama-style liberalism is seen as cool and rebellious. There's no reasoning with what makes things cool. But radical? You'd have to scrape contemporary liberalism against a whetting stone for a week just to get it to "edgy" status. Virtually all the institutions of power young people interact with -- schools, colleges, bureaucracies, corporations, Hollywood etc -- are liberal. And yet these kids think they're rebelling against something! What? Peaceful and hardworking Christians who live a hundred miles away? Still, one of the challenges that Kevin is up against is the fact we've seen a lot of books making the libertarian or conservative case against the State, or what he calls "politics." Some of them have been very good, some of them have been punched up transcripts of radio-show rants (of varying quality), and some of them have been self-published screeds where you can go pages before running into punctuation. Regardless, the simple fact is that lots of people -- on the left and the right -- feel like they've heard it all already. Moreover, they assume that rightwing books amount to new hymnals for the choir. The fact is that The End Is Near is simply not "another one of those books." I know this is a big kick of mine, but one of the things I really love about it is that it actually tries to persuade readers -- on the left and the right -- rather than simply rehash the usual talking points. If I could have college kids buy one book it would of course be one of mine. A man has got to eat! ("Yes, but not that much. Take human bites!" -- The Couch) But if I could have them read one book -- at this moment, at least -- I'd tell them to read The End Is Near, because it makes the libertarian case about as cool and rebellious as it can get while still being persuasive. Various & Sundry My column today is on the incredibly annoying question of whether or not Reagan could get elected today. It's the subject of much jibber-jabber again because Bob Dole -- Bob Dole! -- said neither he nor Reagan could get nominated today. My short response is: He's right! And not just because Reagan would be 102 if he were alive. No former president could get nominated or elected today, including the 2008 version of Barack Obama. Will Collier made a good point on Twitter: You know who couldn't get elected today? Or in 1976, or 1980, or 1988, or 1996? Bob Dole. Complaint Department Okay, so last week's G-File intensified the complaints from people who wish me well and like me, but think I'm squandering my talents with all the sophomoric jocularity. I'm tempted to respond, "pull my finger." But I actually do appreciate the advice. All I can say is that I write the G-File for me. I don't consider it a "public" piece of writing. But a letter to my Dear Readers (and the aforementioned attorney general and the Chinese politburo). If you don't like it, I really do understand. The easiest remedy for that is to send me a check for ten million dollars and I will only write deadly sober "news"letters from now on (that price is negotiable, by the way). Another remedy, which I'm less fond of, is: Don't read it. Various & Sundry Since we members of the Remnant need to keep the memory of Nock alive, here's the Obscure Quote of the Week (which has all the earmarks of a regular G-File feature). Let us suppose that instead of being slow, extravagant, inefficient, wasteful, unadaptive, stupid, and at least by tendency corrupt, the State changes its character entirely and becomes infinitely wise, good, disinterested, efficient, so that anyone may run to it with any little two-penny problem and have it solved for him at once in the wisest and best way possible. Suppose the state close-herds the individual so far as to forestall every conceivable weakness, incompetence; suppose it confiscates all his energy and resources and employs them much more advantageously all around than he can employ them if left to himself. My question still remains -- what sort of person is the individual likely to become under those circumstances? Brad Meltzer is right, this is why the Internet was invented. And if I have my way, a bunch of kids in "Joss Whedon is My Master Now" t-shirts hanging out at a Panera Bread in Cleveland will cause this to be the new homepage of every Chinese general in the Red Army ("What other kind of generals are there in the Red Army?" -- The Couch). The New Ricochet "GLoP Culture" podcast is out! Speaking of pirates, they were ahead of their time. Unfortunate headline department. How kids entertained themselves before video games. Past winning spelling-bee words. Oh, and what happens to spelling-bee kids when they grow up? Fourteen smart-sounding but totally BS lines from movies. Five "romantic products" that will end a relationship (Note: some of these are in very questionable taste -- in both senses of the word). | 
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