Bernard Lewis reminds us

Sometimes we can forget, but you don't have to have read Machiavelli to get the idea.

Bernard Lewis writes about the perception of the U.S. in the world of Islamism, and he concludes with this reminder:

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.

There may not be many of us left, however, to prove this correct.

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Is Maryland risking its congressional representation?

Last month, I wrote about the bill passed in Maryland that would "throw out the traditional winner-takes-all method of assigning electoral votes for the state and substitute a rule that gives all of the state's electoral votes to the national popular vote winner," if enough states passed similar legislation. I analyzed this as a manifestation of Bush Derangement Syndrome, in which Democrats were refighting the 2000 presidential election.

Now, via Instapundit, I notice there's a decent argument that joining the interstate voting compact (which is how this is described) risks depriving states of their congressional representation under section 2 of the 14th amendment, which says that "when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State."

Please read the argument I've linked, but the basic idea is that if a state ignores the vote of its citizens and throws its electoral votes to the popular-vote winner (assume for now it's someone different), that would abridge their right to vote for electors. The constitutional remedy would be to reduce the state's representation proportionately.

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