If President Bush achieved nothing else in his Inaugural Address last week, he at least provided fodder for media pundits to chew on for a solid week or more.

This is an unusual accomplishment, even for inaugural addresses, most of which are endured and then ignored by those whose job it is to listen to them and talk and write about them.

It was predictable that Republicans would like the speech, but what was notable about responses to it was what the neo-conservatives had to say. “Say” is perhaps not quite the word.

Their reaction was less one of verbal articulation than the kind of gushing one hears in tidal waves and mud slides. The neo-cons liked the speech. They should have, since they essentially wrote it.

The neo-conservative influence on the inaugural address is obvious from its text. The president’s unqualified endorsement of pop utopianism, the Wilsonian principle that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” is exactly what neo-cons have been peddling for decades.

It reflects their breezy assumption that “democracy” and “liberty” are virtual synonyms (an idea largely foreign to both classical political theory and the Founding Fathers, who thought they had established a republic that mixed forms of government, not a pure democracy). It accepts without question the assumption that “freedom” as the West understands it is a universal value for the whole world and can be institutionalized only in Western political forms.

And from those flawed premises, it draws the non sequitur that American foreign policy should therefore export freedom (meaning “democracy”) everywhere. The premises, the flawed logic, and the reckless conclusion are all neo-conservative commonplaces.

But the speech not only reflects neo-conservative ideology; it was in large part the work of neo-conservative hands. The Washington Postnoted that neo-cons like Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and “a leading neoconservative thinker,” advised the president and his speechwriters on the address.[Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say, Washington Post, Jan 21, 2005]

So were neo-conservatives Victor Davis Hanson and Charles Krauthammer, and so was Israeli politician (and neo-conservative) Nathan Sharansky, whom the president invited to the White House in November to talk about his own book on exporting democracy.

Predictably, the neo-cons not only helped write the speech but managed the gushing about it afterwards. “It was a rare inaugural speech that will go down as a historic speech, I believe,” Mr. Kristol swooned to the Post. “His importance as a world leader will turn out to be far larger than the sort of tactical issues that are widely debated and for which he is sometimes reviled,” neo-conservative kingpin Richard Perle solemnly pronounced a few days later. “Put this in a historic perspective: He’s already created profound change. All around the Middle East, they’re talking about the issue of democracy. They’re talking about his agenda. It’s an extraordinary thing.”

The neo-con domination of the inaugural address of course reflects their own continuing domination of the administration itself, now entrenched even more powerfully than in Mr. Bush’s first term. Just as the first term brought us war in Iraq, so the second we can expect to bring us wars—well—just about wherever the neo-cons want to wage them. By the logic of Mr. Bush’s speech, that could be almost anywhere that doesn’t conform to what he and they want.

As yet another neo-con gusher, Jonah Goldberg, affirmed, Mr. Bush’s foreign policy is “truly revolutionary.” In that description he concurs with liberal Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who writes that the president’s “goals are now the antithesis of conservatism. They are revolutionary.”

That’s OK, you see, because “the United States is a revolutionary power,” and Mr. Bush has now “found his way back to the universalist principles that have usually shaped American foreign policy, regardless of the nature of the threat.”

What is interesting here is not the flawed analysis of what has “usually shaped” our foreign policy but the convergence of neo-conservatism and liberalism. It’s interesting because for a generation it has been the constant theme of Old Right criticism of neo-conservatism that it is largely just liberal wine in a new bottle.

Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were liberals, and all remain neo-conservative heroes. Their foreign policies, and the words with which they defended and explained them, were barely distinguishable from what Mr. Bush wrapped himself and the nation in last week. The president perhaps accomplished something else in his address: He confirmed once and for all that the neo-conservatism to which he has delivered his administration and the country is fundamentally indistinguishable from the liberalism many conservatives imagine he has renounced and defeated.

The most recent installment of Politically Correct mind control comes from Harvard University itself, the world capital of Political Correctness and at least a major metropolis of mind control.

It concerns no less a victim than the president of Harvard himself, Lawrence Summers, a veteran of the Clinton administration, who recently uttered some remarks about women that made the mind controllers sick at their stomachs.

A tip of the hat to President Summers.

What exactly he said is not clear since there seems to be no transcript or record of it, but in general he unbosomed the heresy that maybe human beings (in this case, women) are not merely blank slates on which social engineers can scribble whatever fictions they please.

As the New York Times described what he is supposed to have said (and does not deny saying):

“Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.”[Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women , By Sam Dillon, January 18, 2005]

He was discussing the general reason why there are so many more male scientists than female ones, and one such reason was possible biologically based sex differences.

On the scale of Political Incorrectness, this is not much more than a misdemeanor.

But it’s Harvard, you see, and up there they’re just not used to hearing opinions they don’t like.

To date, Mr. Summers has had to apologize at least three times.

“I felt I was going to be sick,” trembled one female scientist in the audience, M.I.T. biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who listened to part of the speech. As the Washington Post noted, “she walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust.” [Harvard Chief's Comments on Women Assailed, by Michael Dobbs, January 14, 2005]

“My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she panted to the Post. “I was extremely upset.”

Dr. Hopkins’ breath is perhaps not the only thing about her that’s shallow.

But she wasn’t the only one, and for the last week or so, Mr. Summers has enjoyed all the vitriol that modern totalitarianism can pour upon him.

To be sure, he has had his defenders, including several women scientists, who have suggested that there really may be the kind of innate biological differences between the sexes that he postulated.

But, as in tyranny’s more prosperous days under Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, truth is no defense. Even after his third apology, one Thought Patroller, the female head of the Harvard chemistry department, sniffed that it just didn’t go far enough. Of course it never does.

“The problem is that you can’t take it back,” she sighed.

What is remarkable about the hate fest directed at Mr. Summers is not that he was necessarily right (though there’s strong evidence that innate differences between the sexes account for differing mathematical aptitudes as well as many other differences) nor even that a distinguished academic official has to grovel in multiple apologies for his innocuous comments.

What is remarkable is why those who objected to what he said did so at all.

They got sick at their stomachs because they can’t stand the idea that “innate“ or “biologically” grounded differences account for anything.

What Mr. Summers said contradicted the blank slate model of humanity that has been enthroned in academic dogma for nearly a century.

And one reason denying that human beings are blank slates is such a dreadful sin and makes some people physically sick is that it ultimately threatens their careers, their whole world-view, and indeed their power.

The blank slate ideology, increasingly discarded by scientists, asserts that there are no constants in human nature, that in fact there is no such thing as human nature at all, and it implies that whoever or whatever controls the “environment”—the social or cultural environment in which a child grows up—controls the man (or woman) that eventually emerges.

It’s an idea that underlies both communism and much of modern liberalism.

What Mr. Summers’ remarks imply is that you can’t reconstruct human beings, that there’s something natural—meaning genes—in human nature that survives even totalitarian manipulation and social engineering.

So far from making people sick at their stomachs, the possibility that human beings possess a nature beyond the capacity of political power to twist as it wants ought to make us rejoice.

But if that’s true, then the ideologies rooted in the blank slate dogma are in serious trouble, and so are those whose careers are based on such ideologies.

That very thought is enough to make some people sick, and it’s also enough, if you challenge the dogma, to cause a few problems for your own career—even when you’re the president of Harvard.

Mr. Barone’s advice was no criticism, since he fairly gushed with toasty sounds about the similarities between Wilson’s beliefs and Mr. Bush’s “vision of an America spreading freedom and democracy to new corners of the world.”

And in fact Mr. Barone was correct. Wilson is exactly who Mr. Bush sounded like in his speech yesterday.

Woodrow Wilson of course was the president who not only launched America into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”but also helped forge the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which helped spawn the chaos that led to Nazism in Germany and World War II.

Among Wilson’s other dubious accomplishments were the creation of the Federal Reserve System, a massive expansion of federal regulations, the federal income tax and the rise of what he called “presidential government” to “get around” the “obstructions” of “congressional government.” Why anyone purporting to represent conservatism of any kind would invoke Wilson as a positive icon is beyond comprehension.

Wilson also resembles Mr. Bush in that he campaigned in the 1916 election on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Then, a few months later, he helped bring us into war. Like Wilson, Mr. Bush is rapidly acquiring a reputation for violating the commitments of his last presidential campaign. That, perhaps, is his most notable contribution to American political history so far.

While not exactly a violation of a campaign promise, Mr. Bush’s renewed enthusiasm for amnesty for illegal aliens can fairly count as a betrayal. Though he proposed the amnesty early last year, before the campaign really started, he dropped it after a less than rousing response from Congress. He may have mentioned it once or twice during the campaign, but he has never described it as the amnesty it actually is.

Only after the election did Secretary of State Colin Powell, while on a visit to Mexico, say the plan would be revived .

“In light of the campaign and other things that were going on, we weren’t able to engage the Congress on it,” Mr. Powell said . “But now that the election is behind us and the president is looking to his second term, the president intends to engage Congress on it.”

In other words, we couldn’t tell voters what we were going to do because we would have lost. Now that we don’t have to pay attention to them any more, we can speak plainly. Ever since the election Mr. Bush has repeatedly promised to push his plan through Congress.

Plain Speaking Event Number Two is the proposed constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage. Personally, I am not in favor of it and have written against it in the past, but many conservatives, especially those who supported the president, are, and one major reason they did support him is because he said he was in favor of it too. Now he’s not.

Interviewed in the Washington Post last week, Mr. Bush said he is advised by Republican senators that the amendment can’t possibly pass. Actually, it didn’t pass last year when it came up in Congress, but the religious right and its allies want to push it again.

As the Washington Post noted this week, social conservatives are already grousing about the president’s apparent lack of interest in pushing it . “Clearly there is concern,” said a spokesman for the Family Research Council.

Add to concern about the amendment the president’s appointment of an “abortion rights supporter,” Kenneth Mehlman, as head of the Republican National Committee, and Mr. Bush may start having problems with a large part of his political base. [Bush Upsets Some Supporters, By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher, January 19, 2005]

Plain Speaking Event Number Three, assuming we don’t count the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and his positions on abortion and immigration, is Mr. Gonzales’ most recent statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he “he will support reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons, which Congress allowed to expire in September.”

Since voting blocs like gun owners were at least as vital to Mr. Bush’s re-election as the religious right and since the expiration occurred because the president didn’t oppose it, this too can fairly be counted as a betrayal of the president’s conservative base.

Is it surprising that Mr. Bush, even before he was inaugurated for a second term, started betraying the conservative positions he took during the campaign and the conservative image he and his handlers so carefully cultivated? No, it’s not. Some of us knew, even before he became president at all, that he is a phony-con.

Those who elected and re-elected him have yet to learn that, but in the next few years, they will—again—have ample opportunity to do so.

Like the fog in Carl Sandburg’s insipid poem, Martin Luther King Day this year seems to have crept up on the nation on little cat feet. We have heard few of the usual neo-conservative slobberings over how they wish they could have marched with King in Selma, nor even many of the usual lamentations of King’s now-decrepit comrades that nobody sufficiently appreciates their accomplishments.

Those noises may yet come, but the real reason we have not heard them so far may be that the festivities arrived a bit early this year, in the arrest of 79-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.

The murders of course were notorious at the time and are immortalized by Hollywood in the 1988 anti-white film “Mississippi Burning,” which manages to smear every white man and woman in the state (and by implication everywhere else) by virtually stating that whites are by nature genocidal.

It’s therefore not too surprising that the media reaction to Mr. Killen’s arrest has been one of almost universal gloating. To bust a 79-year-old white Southerner for racial murders is almost as much fun as deporting 80-year-old concentration camp guards to communist countries to stand trial for war crimes, and that amusement has worn thin in recent years. Concentration camp guards have the habit of dying natural deaths eventually, but there’s an endless supply of white Southerners to put on trial closer to home.

But Mr. Killen wasn’t the only unusual suspect to win the interest of the national press last week. The New York Times, after a large story about his arrest and the murders and a long interview with the surviving relatives of the victims, also found space to tell us all about another killer of the same era—one who long ago was tried and convicted and today even acknowledges his guilt. For some reason, he doesn’t elicit quite the same reaction from the Times as Mr. Killen.

The case is that of Wilbert Rideau, who as a 19-year-old black man in 1961 robbed a bank in Lake Charles, Louisiana, kidnapped three white bank employees, and shot all of them near a bayou at the edge of town.

Two survived to tell the tale; the third, a woman, survived only briefly. Rideau polished her off by stabbing her in the heart and slitting her throat.

Like its report about Mr. Killen, the Times story about the Rideau case is full of woe—but not that of Rideau’s white victims. Its sympathies are all for the killer himself.

“All-white, all-male juries” convicted Rideau of murder and sentenced him to death, and they did so three times. Appeals courts threw out the verdicts on the grounds of “misconduct by the government.” We never hear too much about what that means, because the Times reporter, Adam Liptak, is too busy singing about Rideau’s achievements ever since. [With Little Evidence, 4th Trial Opens in '61 Killing, By Adam Liptak, January 11, 2005]

Prosecutors in Louisiana “are trying once again to obtain a conviction that will stick,” he writes, and that may be hard, in part because Rideau has been so “transformed.” (As it turned out it was too hard. A mixed race jury this week found him guilty of mere manslaughter, allowing him to go free after serving more than the maximum sentence for that crime.) “He has, from prison, become an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker,” but, well, it’s Louisiana, you see, and we know what that means.

“The community’s rage lives on in this racially divided oil and gambling town near the Texas border,” and no doubt it’s all those white people, the kind Mississippi Burning warned us about, who keep nice fellows like Rideau in prison. “It’s ferocious, the way we hold on to this episode,” grumbled the Rev. J. L. Franklin, a black pastor who is monitoring the case.

Right, you’d think after 43 years, people would forget a white person being kidnapped, driven to the edge of town, shot and having her throat cut. But it’s those white folks, so full of hate and ignorance, just like over in Mississippi, where they’re probably mad about the prosecution of Mr. Killen after only 41 years.

“Little evidence endures” in the Rideau case, Mr. Liptak informs us, which only adds to the problems of yet another trial. It’s not very clear how much evidence endures in the Killen case either, but that wasn’t quite the point the Times wanted to make, was it?

The Times’ transparent double standard, its lip-smacking glee over the arrest of the white man in Mississippi and its weepy apologies for the black killer in Louisiana, tell us what the real point is.

What Mr. Killen is supposed to have done was not only murder but also an act of political and racial resistance, and that sort of thing has to be stomped on, regardless of how little evidence remains after 41 years.

As for a forgotten white woman in Louisiana who had her throat cut—who cares?

“No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration,” gasps neoconservative David Frum in National Review’s Dec. 31 cover story. [Full article here].

Mr. Frum, the original “patriotic conservative” who tried to smear the entire anti-war right as “unpatriotic” back in 2003, has now defected from the ranks of the Open Border lobby, at least in a way.

Should those who were never part of that lobby welcome him?

Not especially. He still doesn’t quite get what the real problem with mass immigration is—in part because he’s not that much of a patriot himself.

Mr. Frum’s article pants that the Republican Party will actually be harmed by the mass immigration it has refused to control for the last two decades and that it’s high time the GOP did something about it.

Indeed, that seems to be the major thrust of his case against immigration—it’s bad for the Republicans.

That there are other reasons for being for tighter immigration control or even for a complete moratorium he only obliquely suggests.

There are some national security problems with letting millions of aliens ramble across your borders, and there are some economic problems with permitting “entry by an ever-expanding number of low-skilled workers, threatening the livelihoods of low-skilled Americans.”

But nowhere does our Patriot mention the major problem immigration causes—the creation of a massive subculture of unassimilated Third World aliens inside the country.

For Mr. Frum, the immigration problem is mainly political, and partisan politics at that. “GOP You Are Warned,” the article’s title rumbles.

Of course Mr. Frum is right about that, but it’s interesting that this is hardly the first time National Review has issued such a warning. Back in 1997, Peter Brimelow, then an NR senior editor, and Ed Rubenstein wrote an article warning the Republicans of the same thing—but for rather different reasons.

The Brimelow-Rubenstein article argued that immigration would hurt Republicans because immigrants would vote for the Democrats (and they do). Mr. Frum is arguing that Republican failure to deal with the immigration crisis could alienate the party’s base (and it will).

“There’s no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party’s leaders,” he writes. “Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.”

But what he misses is just why the “party rank-and-file” is so upset about immigration.

It’s upset for precisely the cultural and national reasons I noted and which Mr. Frum rather manages to miss. National security and economics are significant parts of the case against immigration, but mainly Americans don’t like their nation being colonized by an alien, Third World mass that speaks a different language, imports different values and is often loyal to a different country.

The problem, as Mr., Frum sees it, is that sooner or later the Democrats will seize the immigration issue if Republicans don’t deal with it—as I argued also in a recent column, quoting none other than Hillary Clinton’s dim views of illegal immigration.

Mr. Frum quotes the same remarks, but if Hillary can’t walk off with the GOP base, he suggests, there may well be other Democrats who could use the immigration issue to do just that.

He thinks the way the party should deal with the issue is to “develop and practice a new way of speaking about immigration, one that makes clear that enforcement of the immigration laws is not anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican: It is anti-bad employer,“because employers hire illegals at the expense of Americans and legal immigrants.

Of course, the Open Borders people have an easy and perfectly logical answer to that: Legalize it all.

If the only problem with illegal immigration is that it’s illegal, if you’re not willing to say mass immigration by itself is a problem, then why should we have any laws against it at all?

The famous Wall Street Journal position—“there shall be open borders”—is the logical conclusion.

Mr. Frum’s only response to this, apparently, would be that there’s the security problem, but that’s flaccid enough.

His real problem is that he—like most of the rest of the neo-conservatives—will not affirm the reality and significance of the nation, the national identity.

Security, economy and party interests are all well and good, but the fundamental issue in the immigration debate is who we are and what sort of nation we want to be.

Mr. Frum, like a lot of his neo-con buddies, for all their ballyhoo about “patriotism,” doesn’t seem to offer a very clear answer.