Immediately after the success of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” all the buzz in foreign policy Washington was: to where can we next export it? Russia? Belarus? Azerbaijan? Iran? The answer became blazingly clear this week: Syria. With Syria’s assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut on February 14, Porter Goss has been handed a golden opportunity on a platinum platter to expand the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East and get rid of the Assad tyranny. The critical question: is his CIA up to it? Despite the usual denials and red herrings, only Syria could have made the professional hit on Hariri, with 700 pounds of explosives planted under the asphalt after “repairs” a few days before, blowing up his armored convoy as it passed over. The hit was conducted by a Lebanese unit of Syria’s Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-'Askariyya, Military Intelligence Service, on the orders of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat.

For every newspaper in the country and around the world this morning, the supersize-font headline is the same: North Korea Admits It Has Nukes!! or a variant thereof. Yet while everyone else is running around like a panicked Chicken Little, the White House remained calm. “This is unfortunate,” Condi sedately pronounced. The most White House spokesman Scott McLellan could rouse himself to say was, “It’s rhetoric we’ve heard before.”Why the insouciance? Because they think North Korea is bluffing. As Donald Rumsfeld put it when queried at NATO meeting in France, yes, the North Korean announcement was a cause for concern, “if you believe them that they have nuclear weapons.”Bush has to go beyond the initial response of calm indifference and there is a debate going on among his advisors as to what that should be. A number are arguing that it should be just two words to Pyongyang: Prove it. Declare that North Korea has to prove its claim of possessing nuclear weapons with a demonstration, and until then its claim will not be taken seriously.That means a test.

Condoleezza Rice is not only not black, she is not a woman either. Not as far as the Left is concerned. For the Left, if you’re black or a woman, whatever your achievements are, they count only if you got them because you’re black or a woman - not because you deserved them on the basis of your ability. If you got to where you are in life because of your ability and talents irregardless of your race or sex, then you are, for the Left, not “really,” “truly,” or “authentically” black or a woman - like, say, Al Sharpton or Barbara Boxer. Would anybody pay any attention to Al Sharpton if he wasn’t black? Would anybody pay attention to Barbara Boxer if she wasn’t a woman? This is why, if he were alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a Republican.

2005 is a twin-centennial for Rand and Einstein. Today, February 2, is the centennial of Ayn Rand’s birth in 1905. This week, scientists around the world launched a series of commemorations of the centennial of the annus mirabilis, the “miraculous year” of 1905, when a 26 year-old unknown clerk in a Swiss patent office published five papers in an obscure journal that revolutionized science and changed the way we look at the universe. In one of these, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein introduced his Theory of Special Relativity. Yet this was an incredible misnomer - for what Einstein did was replace one absolute - time - with another - the speed of light. This misnomer is one of the great social tragedies of modern times.

Notice how quick President Bush’s father was to explain to the press that we don’t have to take seriously what his son said at his second inaugural about “ending tyranny in our world”? Thanks for sharing, Dad. What you really made clear is why you never had a second inaugural yourself.The speechwriter who wrote Bush the Elder’s first and only inaugural address (where he pledged to achieve a “kinder and gentler nation,” and Nancy Reagan exploded in anger, whispering to her husband, “Kinder and gentler than what?”), Peggy Noonan whined once again in the Wall Street Journal today about GW’s “overweening” idealism, and that his speech had no “historical context.” I guess Peggy, like her former boss, didn’t pay much attention to the news last year.Perhaps the most important story of 2004 was the achievement of democracy in so many countries. Every “realist” squish in Washington has the vapors over GW’s suddenly becoming a radically dangerous Lone Ranger cowboy - when what’s really happened is he’s acting on the old political adage that if you discover a parade that’s going where you want, get out in front and lead it. GW’s second inaugural address was the Vision Statement. What is needed now is the Business Plan, how the vision is to be actually implemented. For an insight into Bush’s Business Plan for Ending Tyranny, we can look at the drunk coal miners of Donetsk.

It must have been a scatological moment for dictators around the world, as they soiled themselves watching George Bush’s inaugural address on global television. They must have known this was coming, for GW has been telegraphing his punches for a long time.That’s why they put all their hopes on GW’s defeat last November. They knew John Kerry would never come after them. Now they know George Bush will.The appropriate reaction to Bush’s Inaugural Address yesterday is: awe-struck. This was a Babe Ruth moment, pointing to where he wanted to hit the ball and swinging for the bleachers. I couldn’t help laughing when I read Peggy Noonan’s petty, small-minded essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning, grouchily complaining about Bush’s “mission inebriation.” She didn’t like the speech because it was so much better than any she wrote for Ronald Reagan.I saw three of Peggy’s former colleagues - White House speechwriters for President Reagan - at one of the Inaugural Balls last night, and they all agreed that Bush’s Second Inaugural will be seen as one of the historically greatest of any American President.So Peggy can cluck, and British newspapers can smirk, but anyone with an ounce of common sense had better start perceiving the reality behind the Left’s myth about GW. You can be sure folks like Hugo Chavez and Aleksandr Lukashenko have no such illusions.For they know, as do their fellow dictators such as Robert Mugabe, Kim Il-Sung, Than Shwe, Ayatollah Khameini, and Fidel Castro, that there is now a bulls-eye painted on them by someone scary-smart and scary-serious who happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

I’m writing this from a place called Mea Culpa City. It’s not a lot of fun being here, but it’s where I have to live until I finish this essay. It turns out that I have wronged a friend. The silver - well, pewter - lining is that in attempting to rectify it I learned how easy it has become for the Federales to turn any of us into criminals.The Cato Institute in Washington has just published a book on this: Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization Of Almost Everything. It documents how the federal government now views its jurisdiction as limitless - which means almost anything you or your business does can be a federal crime. The Cato book paints a frightening picture - but the truth is, it’s much worse.It’s worse because of the depraved collusion between politicians and their buddies in the media to demonize and criminalize someone on the front pages of newspapers. This of course is not exclusive to Washington. States are on to the game as well. New York’s Elliot Spitzer has turned the State Attorney General’s office into his private Gestapo. But he’s New York’s problem. Federal agents and federal politicians are a problem for all of us.

The most monumental mistake of George W. Bush’s first term was his Medicare Prescription Drug bill. You have read that it is going to cost American taxpayers an estimated $6 trillion. That’s more than the entire current federal debt. But - it is much, much worse than that.Let’s begin with the asinine assumption that in order for the cost to be only six trillion over the next 40 or so years, average American life expectancy will increase by just two years. For the last 125 years, life expectancy in America has been increasing by three months per year. For the last 30 years, as infant mortality rates have shrunk to be statistically marginal, all of the increase has gone to the elderly. By 2050, Americans will be living at least 11-12 years longer than today - which doubles the time folks will collect Medicare (and Social Security) benefits. So now we’re at twelve, not six, trillion in prescription drug costs alone. Yet we are just getting started. George Bush’s bribe of prescription drug “benefits” for old folks who still refused to vote for him in the numbers he expected is going to cost our kids and their kids well over 20 trillion dollars.I can tell you what the solution is - but unless you’re a fan of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, economists who fully understand how government regulation can ruin a market sector, it will take getting used to.

It is a humbling experience to have a deep conversation with a truly great man. Harry Wu has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is in the same league with Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is Harry Wu who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year, not a racist kook, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who believes AIDS was invented by white scientists to exterminate black Africans. When I had lunch with Harry this week, we agreed that China faces chaos - and that the Chicoms will most likely try to cure the chaos with war. The New York Times reports (12/31/04) that there were over 60,000 - sixty thousand - riots, disturbances, and public protests throughout China in 2004. "People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," a demonstration leader was quoted. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

There has been a rumor floating in the Washington ether for some time now that George Bush has figured out what Sword of Damocles is suspended over Osama Bin Laden’s head. It’s whispered among Capitol Hill staffers on the intel and armed services committees; White House NSC (National Security Council) members clam up tight if you begin to hint at it; and State Department neo-cons love to give their liberal counterparts cardiac arrhythmia by elliptically conversing about it in their presence. The whispers and hints and ellipses are getting louder now because the rumor explains the inexplicable: Why hasn’t there been a repeat of 9-11? How can it be that after this unimaginable tragedy and Osama’s constant threats of another, we have gone over three years without a single terrorist attack on American soil? The proximate reasons aren’t sufficient: that we have taken the fight to the enemy in Iraq, drawing their attention and energy away from America; that the intel and law-enforcement folks have caught and prevented a number of planned attacks. These are good reasons why there haven’t been more attacks - but they don’t explain why there haven’t been any.

What a great year. I think, all up and all in, 2004 was a fabulous year for freedom and America. It started out with the Rose Revolution in Georgia, throwing out the Soviet apparatchiks to elect a free market pro-America government, and ended with the Orange Revolution doing the same thing in Ukraine. In between, liberated Afghanistan successfully held its first-ever democratic elections.We got to memorialize for history the greatest American of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan. We re-elected George Bush and inflicted an utterly demoralizing defeat on the George Soros-Michael Moore Democrats. Inflation and unemployment are low, stocks are higher, the economy is humming. We didn’t suffer a single terrorist attack on American soil, took the fight to the terrorists and are close to winning in Iraq. And on top of all of this, Yasser Arafat gave to the world the best possible gift he could give: he died. Frank Sinatra himself couldn’t ask more from a year like 2004.Right, very interesting, thanks Jack for yesterday’s news - what about 2005? That’s what you’re asking, yes?

Merry Christmas. If that offends you, why should I care? It’s your problem, not mine. Let me explain your problem a little more fully. America is a Christian country. It’s your job to deal with that, because you’re not going to change this fact. America has always been a Christian country, and - open wide now, because you’re going to have to swallow this - it will continue to be.It will continue to be because most Americans aren’t Euroweenies. They haven’t lost the moral courage to be proud of their country and their civilization. Notice the “most” - which you are not a part of. You are anti-Christian because you are anti-American. You are anti-American because you are anti-Western Civilization. You are anti-Western Civilization because you are afraid of and intimidated by the envy of the world’s impotent. Fear of being envied defines your soul.

The Soviet Union was merely the Imperialist Empire of Czarist Russia with Marxism-Leninism as its religious justification. This is why the hope that Russians would embrace freedom and democracy once liberated from Communist tyranny in 1991 was delusional. Their egos, so dependent upon being imperialist masters, collapsed once their colonial subjects were free to stop taking their orders.Yet, the frustrating yet, is that anyone who has spent time with individual Russians knows what wonderful people they can be, what good friends they can be. They can be an enigma wrapped in a riddle, as Churchill observed, but they are nonetheless a Western people, a Christian people belonging to Western Civilization. And for that reason, as well as for our own national security, we must now come to their rescue.If we don’t, China will take over most of what is now Russia. A Chinese Siberia will face us across the Bering Straits.

I had a chance to visit with Porter Goss after he returned from Afghanistan last week. He was there to make personally sure everything was solidly OK for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to attend Karzai’s inaugural in Kabul.He got the biggest kick when I told him there’s a name in town for what he’s doing to the CIA: Gossification. I got a big thumbs up when I said, “Now we have to make sure Condi gossifies the State Department.”Then he gave his assessment of how we’re doing in Afghanistan: “Jack, I’m telling you, the place is humming, it’s sizzling. People have so much energy, they are so excited about their future. We have a fantastic success story in the making here, a tremendous victory for America and for the Afghan people. Funny how you never hear about it in the media, huh?”Yes, big surprise to the both of us. All we hear about is the latest disasters in Iraq, and nothing about Afghanistan any more - because we’re winning.Porter easily read my mind. “You know, Jack, it’s going to be the same in Iraq. We’re winning - and the media can’t stand it that we’re on a roll from Kabul to Baghdad.”

Chinese, written and spoken, is my candidate for the weirdest major language on earth. At the Monterey Institute, where US diplomats are taught foreign languages, it takes on average 600 hours of instruction to be fluent in a European language such as French or German, 1200 for Arabic - and 2400 in Chinese. (This means, of course, that for China and the world to communicate, Chinese must speak English, as the world will never speak Chinese). Beyond the technical difficulties lie far deeper problems, resulting in a grossly myopic view of China’s history and future. The one buried most deeply is the way Chinese grammar reverses time: the past, in Chinese, is in front of or before you, while the future is behind you. Chinese culture is oriented towards the past, reading Chinese history through a distorted lens, and stubbornly attempting to apply illusory lessons to the present. This is precisely what China’s military and government leaders are doing with their strategy towards America.

Just like Al Gore, John Kerry’s most human moment during his entire campaign for the presidency was his concession speech. As I sat crying in relief that it was over and we had won, I heard him say something I will never forget. He said that no matter who you voted for, we’re all winners:

In an American election, there are no losers, because whether or not our candidates are successful, the next morning we all wake up as Americans. And that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on earth.