A couple of neat op/eds at the Washington Post this morning:
Robert Samuelson tries to break down the problems with French labor laws:
The dilemma of advanced democracies, including the United States, is that they’ve made more promises than they can keep. Their political commitments outstrip the economy’s capacity to deliver. Sometimes the commitments were made dishonestly. Sometimes they were made sincerely based on foolish assumptions. Sometimes they’ve been overtaken by new circumstances. No matter. The dilemma is the same. To disavow past promises incites public furor; not to disavow them worsens the country’s future problems.
Richard Cohen weighs in on the silence of the Muslim countries over the Abdul Rahman apostasy case:
[Y]ou can say that these horrors are usually being inflicted by a minority. You say it is a few crazed terrorists of Iraq who are doing the killing. It is not most Iraqis. You can say the same about suicide bombers and torturers and rogue governments, like the one Saddam Hussein once headed. You can take solace in numbers. Most people are like us.Then comes the Rahman case and it is not a solitary crazy prosecutor who brings the charge of apostasy but an entire society. It is not a single judge who would condemn the man but a culture. The Taliban are gone at gunpoint, their atrocities supposedly a thing of the past. In our boundless optimism, we consign them to the “too hard” file of horrors we cannot figure out: the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the communists of the Stalin period. Now, though, this awful thing returns and it is not just a single country that would kill a man for his beliefs but a huge swath of the world that would not protest. There can be only one conclusion: They were in agreement.
And then Charles Krauthammer went after Francis Fukuyama with a two-by-four.