Best of the Tube
For those who'd like to see us on television, here's a list of our currently scheduled appearances (times are Eastern, check your local listing, and as always we're subject to being bumped):

• CNNfn, 3:15 p.m. Friday
• "Kudlow & Cramer," CNBC, 5 p.m. Friday
• "CNN Saturday Morning," 9 a.m. Saturday
• "Fox News Live Weekend Edition," Fox News Channel, 2 p.m. Saturday

Washington Remembers Reagan
Yesterday found us in the nation's capital for a brief visit. NBC's "Today" show had long ago booked us to discuss "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore), and as it turned out Katie Couric was on location in Washington covering the funeral of Ronald Reagan, so we were summoned there for the interview.

We didn't have time to see the casket, but we did see the people lining up for the viewing--the backdrop for Couric's makeshift outdoor set. Reagan, of course, was more responsible than anyone else for the end of communism, a system among whose lesser horrors were that it forced people to spend much of their lives in queues for such necessities as food and toilet paper. Somehow then it seems a fitting tribute that thousands of free men and women would voluntarily wait in line to pay their last respects.

Before flying back to New York yesterday afternoon we stopped by the Heritage Foundation, where we worked years ago. Heritage was holding an open house in Reagan's honor. It also has a nicely done online tribute, ReagansHeritage.org.

What touched us most, though, was that our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, had gone out of its way to honor Reagan. At the front desk were three monochromatic bowls of jellybeans--one each red, white and blue. When we got to our room, the bed had been turned down, and in place of the standard chocolate were a small package of jellybeans and a card with the famous quote: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

This proves better than anything else we've seen that Reagan has transcended the partisan divisions of his own era. Can you imagine a hotel putting a quote from Bill Clinton or George W. Bush on its guests' beds? Of course not; it would annoy half of them and be a terrible business decision. But Reagan-haters these days are practically extinct.

Then and Now
"Ronald Reagan was a partisan president and remains one," writes Harvey Mansfield in "Presidential Leadership":

Our greatest presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were America's founder and its savior, and they are held in esteem, or revered, by all. But to like Reagan without reservations, you have to be of his party. Otherwise, you can admire certain of his qualities, but much of what he did you will not approve of.

It's worth recalling, though, that during Reagan's tenure, many of his opponents did not "admire him, but with reservations." Although the vituperation did not reach the levels it has today with George W. Bush, it still got pretty vicious. This is from a July 21, 1988, report in the Boston Globe on the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta:

Earlier last night, Sen. John F. Kerry took to the convention hall podium, telling the delegates that the "moral darkness" of President Reagan's presidency will soon end.

"A Republican president once reminded us, 'There is absolutely nothing to be said for a government of powerful men with the ideals of pawnbrokers,' " Kerry said.

"That president's name was Theodore Roosevelt. And today Theodore Roosevelt would be ashamed to be a Republican."

Said Kerry: "It is time we once again had a government of laws and not of lawbreakers. It is time we had an attorney general of the United States who is an agent of justice and not the target of a criminal investigation."

Four years later, of course, voters tossed the GOP out of the White House. We suppose that at this year's convention Kerry will promise to restore the moral rectitude of the Clinton years.

Andrew Sullivan has a nice collection of contemporaneous quotes from Reagan detractors. Our favorite comes from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in May 1988:

A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today.

As we noted yesterday, Schlesinger in 1996 conducted a notorious survey of mostly ultraliberal historians in which he asked them to rate the presidents, and Reagan ranked 25th out of 39. Four of these scholars actually rated the Reagan presidency a failure. Schlesinger weighs in again in this week's Newsweek, and he's only slightly less grudging than in 1988: "Reaganism may prove to be a transient episode in the stream of American history," he writes. "His historic achievement came in foreign policy," Schlesinger writes, then proceeds to disparage that achievement:

Reagan's admirers contend that his costly rearmament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster--which is what the architects of the policy of peaceful containment had predicted 50 years before.

According to Dinesh D'Souza, however, in 1982 Schlesinger described "those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" as "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves." D'Souza also quotes Schlesinger as saying after the Soviet collapse, "History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. No one foresaw these changes."

Well, Reagan foresaw them. The Gipper might or might not have been smarter than history, but there's no question he was smarter than certain historians.

You Don't Say
"Media's Praise of Reagan May Soon Subside"--headline, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, June 11

Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000

"Number of Homeless Up Slightly for 4th Year"--headline, Washington Post, June 10

This Just In
"Undecided Voter Is Becoming the Focus of Both Political Parties"--headline, New York Times, June 11

One Woman's Mutilation . . .
A familiar topic in this column is the press's use of Orwellian language to promote an attitude of moral relativism--Reuters' policy that "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" and the pervasive formulation "what opponents call 'partial-birth abortion' " are doubtless the best examples. But here's one that really caused our jaw to drop.

The New York Times the other day published a piece giving the encouraging news that African countries are moving away from a barbaric and horrific practice. Here's how the article, datelined Nairobi, Kenya, opened:

Isnino Shuriye still remembers the pride she felt years ago when she leaned over each of her three daughters, knife in hand, and sliced into their genitals.

Each time, as the blood started to flow, she quickly dropped the knife and picked up a needle and thread. Quickly, expertly, she sewed her daughters' vaginas almost shut.

"I was full of pride," she recalled recently. "I felt like I was doing the right thing in the eyes of God. I was preparing them for marriage by sealing their vaginas."

Now she feels like a butcher, a sinner, a mother who harmed her own flesh and blood, not to mention the thousands of other girls she says she circumcised in the last quarter-century as part of a traditional rite still common in Africa.

Scroll down a bit and you find this sentence: "She started as an apprentice while still an adolescent by holding down girls' legs for her mother to perform the rite, which opponents call genital mutilation." The reason opponents call it genital mutilation, of course, is because that's precisely what it is. Why does the New York Times, which supporters call a newspaper, feel obliged to distance itself from a clear, factual description?

The Barren North
Ted Byfield of the Calgary Sun asks why the "feminarchy," which he defines as "the grand coalition of the feminist lobby and gay lobby that for years has dictated the social policies" of Canada's major institutions, has had such a hard time mustering opposition to some Canadian politicians' socially conservative positions.

His answer: "Political values tend to pass mainly from parent to child. The feminarchy made it a point not to produce children, and to quietly destroy them if they tried to make an uninvited appearance. So now that they need them, they aren't there."

Here in "the states" we call this the Roe effect.

Which Side Is Paterson, N.J., On?
Paterson, N.J., "has become the ninth New Jersey municipality to go on record opposing the USA Patriot Act or provisions of the anti-terrorism law, saying it unacceptably compromises civil liberties." Paterson isn't just any left-wing burg, though. It has a heavily Arab population, and "as many as six of the Sept. 11 hijackers either lived or spent time here shortly before the attacks."

Maybe it's time for a little regime change in Paterson.

The Plot Thickens
Here's a strange story that's worth keeping an eye on. From the New York Times:

While the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was renouncing terrorism and negotiating the lifting of sanctions last year, his intelligence chiefs ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom, according to statements by two participants in the conspiracy.

Those participants, Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader now in jail in Alexandria, Va., and Col. Mohamed Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi custody, have given separate statements to American and Saudi officials outlining the plot.

Gadhafi's son calls the alleged plot "nonsense," though he "acknowledged that the Libyan intelligence officer, Colonel Ismael, was missing and presumed by Libya to be in Saudi custody."

Daniel Pipes has more on Alamoudi, a former official of the American Muslim Council who, Steve Emerson noted in 2000, had been a White House guest during the Clinton administration, and whose contribution to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign Mrs. Clinton had been forced to return.

The Moral Authority of the U.N.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan gave a commencement address at Harvard yesterday. The previous day, the Harvard Crimson reports, "nearly 150 people--including several who appeared to be alums or Harvard-affiliated--turned out to protest what they called Annan's failure to take action against slavery and genocide in Sudan." The anti-Annan protest doesn't seem to have attracted much attention, though, from the national press, which seems to prefer its protests anti-American.

The Crimson, meanwhile, notes that Annan struck an anti-American tone in his speech:

Without explicitly referencing the current U.S. administration, Annan challenged various elements of American foreign policy, including the use of preemptive strikes in the war in Iraq.

"What kind of world would it be, and who would want to live in it, if every country was allowed to use force, without collective agreement, simply because it thought there might be a threat?" Annan said, to applause from the audience.

The real question is: What kind of world would it be if no country were willing to use force against terrorists except with the unanimous consent of countries that make corrupt deals with terror-sponsoring governments?

City Folks Get In Free
"U.S. Charges Australian Guantanamo Prisoner Hicks"--headline, Reuters, June 10

If It's on Mars, Isn't It Already 'Unearthed'?
"Rover Unearths More Evidence of Water on Mars, Scientists Say"--headline, New York Times, June 9

Better Late Than Never
"Castlemont Grads Urged to Study"--headline, Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, June 9

About That Disclaimer
A reader who asks not to be identified has gotten to the bottom of that odd disclaimer on the California State Library Web site ("The content found herein may not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the Schwarzenegger Administration"), which we noted Wednesday:

I noticed that disclaimer on the California Department of Motor Vehicles Web page a couple of months ago. I looked around on other state Web pages and found it in most places. I called the governor's Los Angeles office to ask whether they were aware that the DMV appears to be disputing his executive authority. The staffer there investigated and reported back that those disclaimers were placed at the request of the governor's office. Apparently they want to review each state Web page to see that it accords with the current governor's policies and views, and until they do the disclaimer stays.

The Onion Imitates Us
"Kerry Names 1969 Version of Himself as Running Mate," reads a headline in the Onion:

Kerry said his newly chosen running mate graduated from Yale University in 1966, after which he volunteered for the Navy, serving as a swift-boat officer on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. For his exemplary service, the young soldier was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts.

"My running mate is a natural-born leader," Kerry said. "He was born at Fitzsimons Military Hospital in Denver, where his father was recovering from tuberculosis after volunteering for the Army Air Corps in WWII. He continues to uphold a belief instilled in him from a young age: that you must always fight for what you believe in, no matter the cost. Man, to be 25 again."

This is pretty funny, though not exactly cutting-edge humor. After all, we've been making fun of Kerry's Vietnam obsession since December 2002.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lawrence Peck, Barak Moore, Joel Goldberg, William Schultz, Craig Renner, Kevin Hudson, Dave Johns, David Stern, John Moran, Aaron Alexander, Dave Vasquez, Michael Siegel, Glenn Patterson, Michael Segal, Tom Linehan, Joshua Weiner, Jonathan Stephens, Brian O'Rourke, Yehuda Hilewitz, Andy Hefty, Ethel Fenig, Mara Gold, Erica Sieguer, Mark Schulze, C.E. Dobkin, Kerk Phillips, Marc Tarrasch, Robert Clucas, Bruce Barnhart, Ed Falkner, Dennisdane Hagensipkin, Brian Tully, Daniel Goldstein, Alan Richman and Sean Thomas. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Lech Walesa: Poles owe Ronald Reagan our freedom.
• Daniel Henninger: Ronald Reagan started a war that rages today.

And on the Taste page:

• Review & Outlook: The Tony Awards are out. But will GOP conventioneers enjoy any of the winners?
• Tony & Tacky: Marauding wild pigs and carnivores at a Quaker school.
• Brian Carney: Charles McCarry's novels keep coming true. And his new book is about the end of the world.
• Daniel Akst: Ignore the high-minded advice. Make some money. It's your moral obligation.
• Paul Kengor: The Soviets' atheism bothered Ronald Reagan.