Does Bill Frist have issues? No, not some comment he made on the hustings back in 1994. Not anything to do with his positions on abortion. Let’s get to where the real action is: the online CV. Check out how long this thing is!!! Do we need to know about the “William Martin Award for best all around boy in the school, Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville, Tennessee” from 1970? Or how about “United States House of Representatives, Intern, Congressman Joe L. Evins, Tennessee (1972)”? What’s up with this guy? Okay, okay, you’ve done a lotta stuff. Sheesh!

It’s a whitewash, I tell you!!! Well, no, really, it really is. It seems after North Carolina Congressman Cass Ballenger got in trouble for describing his “segregationist feelings” (why does this remind me of Jimmy Carter’s 1970s admission to Playboy that he’d lusted in his heart?) he knew the scrutiny was going to get punched up a few notches. So on Friday he had the black lawn jockey in his front yard repainted white. “It was painted with the knowledge that he was attacked in the past for it, and it was likely to come up again,” Dan Gurley, Ballenger’s chief of staff, told the Hickory Daily Record.

Mickey Kaus takes issue with my post questioning Bill Frist’s use of Marion Barry in his 1994 campaign stump speech, and says: “Does Marshall know that in the early ’90s Sasser [Frist’s opponent] was chair of the Senate subcommittee in charge of the District of Columbia — at a time when Congress exercised considerable control over the District’s budget (and when federal taxpayers picked up the tab for a large chunk of that budget)?”

To this I would say, yes, I know that. But does Mickey remember that Sharon Pratt Kelly won election as Mayor of Washington, D.C. in November 1990 and didn’t leave office until early 1995 — a couple months after Frist won election.

(Click here for more details.)

Barry was mayor of DC from 1978 to 1990 and then again from 1994 to 1998. In other words, the four years prior to Frist’s campaign were the only four years out of twenty when Barry wasn’t mayor of DC.

I want to get into some other questions on the race issue. But first, Mickey Kaus.

I’ve been watching Kaus’s posts on the Frist matter pile up. And to me it looks like another distressing case of Mickey’s BOBL — bend-over-backwards-liberalism, the curious but telling desire on the part of the afflicted to turn over every stone and spare no effort to find excuses for or rationalize the behavior of the right. One can certainly find better examples of it in recent weeks. But this one definitely fits the symptomatology.

The question with Frist is not whether excuse-making conservatives and Mickey can retroactively shoehorn his comments back into respectability by bringing up the fact, as he does today, that Barry was himself born, raised and educated in Memphis, Tennessee. Not even the fact that his then-opponent Jim Sasser sat on a subcommittee charged with overseeing the District.

The best evidence here is Frist’s own defense of his use of Barry at the time. When Sam Donaldson asked him what Barry had to do with a Senate campaign in Tennessee, Frist said: “Not very much, but Marion Barry symbolizes a lot about what people think about politics today.”

Mickey’s retroactive excuses had never even occurred to Frist. Or if they had, he knew they wouldn’t pass the laugh test under actual questioning. The essence of Mickey’s argument, as I myself argued earlier, is that a politician can’t be barred from bringing up a legitimate political issue relating to a black politician simply because that reference might also be interpreted as having a racial overtone.

As I said earlier, this matter of Frist and Barry is very much a close-run thing. But Frist couldn’t even seem to come up with what his legitimate political issue was. And that brings me back to the common sense understanding of Frist’s use of Barry, which is that he was an uppity-you-know-what who got videotaped in a hotel room smoking crack. That doesn’t mean Frist is a racist. I doubt he is. It just makes him cynical and willing to use race, albeit subtly, when convenient.

Barry proved a convenient way to marry together a legitimate, if extremely obscure, issue of the subsidy the federal government rightly pays the District of Columbia — bear in mind that Tennessee is one of those states that receives back more in programs and subsidies than it sends to the federal government in taxes — and an appeal to unflattering views of blacks.

One of Mickey’s great claims to fame was forcing Democrats to stop their excuse making for one of their favored constituencies and start getting them to confront their problems. Now Mickey has a favored constituency of his own. And they could use the same sort of help.

Flip open your average conservative magazine or website this week and you’ll read the a slew of articles arguing that the Democratic party is today the real party of race politics. The GOP is clean on the issue, the argument goes, with the notable and now dealt-with exception of Trent Lott. (Call this the conservative commentariat’s mopping-up operation after Lott’s defenestration.)

We’ll be saying more about the particular fooleries, dishonesties and tendentiousness involved in these arguments. But for the moment, let’s note a broader assumption that underlies almost all of them. That is the premise that there is a basic equality between appeals to racism and charges of racism. It’s a equation which is as morally vacant as it is logically flawed.

Of course, when Republicans play race politics conservatives seldom even concede that that’s what’s being done. But for the sake of argument let’s assume more conservatives were candid enough to admit that George Bush’s visit to Bob Jones University was a play to race politics. That would be playing the race card. And Democrats calling him on it would also be playing the race card.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats can do no wrong on race or that they can’t on sometimes egregiously step over the line. (Stephen F. Hayes has an example of Jesse Jackson doing this, in a new article in the Weekly Standard which, I’m sorry to say, wholly buys into the equation above.) They can. And false or overstated charges of racism are wrong and damaging. But calling people on their bias, their playing to racist sentiment, or their indifference to the consequences of racism isn’t ‘playing the race card.’ If it is, then the phrase is meaningless.

For conservatives who have a hard time grasping the difference, try the HRASST, the Honest Republican’s Anti-Semitism Substitution Test. If a certain politician makes an anti-semitic statement or appeals to an anti-semitic constituency and then the ADL calls them on it, are both sides playing the anti-semitism card? Of course, not. Only the foolish and the immoral would say so.

Or as long as we’re taking the HRASST topic out for a spin, if a given politician gives an interview to a magazine known to espouse anti-semitic views, is that okay? Is it a sufficient answer to say that you don’t happen to agree with their anti-semitism but you give interviews to a lot of magazines? I doubt that would cut it.

Try the HRASST out. It’s great at cutting through a lot of malarkey.

“Schroeder in Germany, Lula in Brazil, now Roh’s victory in S. Korea…latest ‘wake-up call’ to U.S., but not clear what’s being heard.” So read the headline summary little more than a week ago in the Nelson Report, the news and gossip sheet of choice for DC’s Asia policy hands and trade policy mavens. (Yes, such a thing actually exists and it’s an extremely entertaining and informative read.)

In his inimitable style, Chris Nelson was pointing to an increasingly clear trend which has yet to garner much notice in the mainstream press: the growing number of elections around the globe in which the winning candidates ran on some variant of anti-Americanism.

Each of the cases Nelson noted have deep local determinants. Germany has a deep-seated — and quite welcome, thank you — anti-militarist tradition dating back to the de-nazification period. And Schroeder cleverly played to this sentiment in pulling out a devilishly thin margin of victory. Brazil — like most of Latin America — is in a deep economic crisis. And it only makes sense that as the boom years of the 1990s were tied to the free-trade and open currency market mantras coming from Washington that much of the bust would be credited — rightly or wrongly — to America too.

The Roh victory in South Korea (ROK) is perhaps the most sobering, as Roh is the first Korean head of state since the partition to be elected on a platform which called into question key aspects of the US-ROK security alliance, which has been a linchpin of America’s position in East Asia for half a century. An Asia hand TPM spoke to said Roh had gotten elected “by playing the Schroeder card.” There too there was a recent incident of American soldiers acquitted for criminal acts against South Korean civilians.

So, yes, in each case, the roots of the election result were multi-causal. But add these and other election results up and you start to see that hostile reactions to America’s newly strident and confrontational stance in the world are becoming an important force in world politics and an important force in the domestic politics of many of our allies.

Think of it this way: when was the last time one of our friends — or someone friendly, rather than unfriendly, to our current policies — won an election in a major country around the world?

Does this matter? Is it our fault? These are difficult questions to answer, certainly. It would be wrong to say or assume that just because people don’t like what we’re doing that we shouldn’t be doing it. What’s more, much of this is clearly in response to our policy toward Iraq. And as I concluded — quite to my own surprise — last June, I think military action against Iraq probably is necessary — if it is done in the right way.

The point here, I think, is in that last clause. If it is done in the right way. Much of what we’ve done in the last eighteen months since 9/11 has been absolutely necessary. The question is how we’ve gone about it. And I think the election results noted above are some of the first signs that there are costs to how we’ve gone about it, for the petulant unilateralism, the mania to tear up every global treaty which might possibly constrain us in any way.

Think how much time and diplomatic capital might have been saved if the White House had figured out three, or six, or even nine months earlier that it’s guns-blazing-screw-the-UN policy toward regime change just wouldn’t work.

The standard answer to this on the pacifist left would be to say that clearly we’re doing something wrong if everybody’s getting so pissed at us. On the right, you’d have another knee-jerk response about blame-America-First, appeasement and various and sundry other yadas. But clearly there should be some thoughtful middle-ground. It’s one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

I can’t give you the precise lunch money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I’m getting at. This isn’t about blaming America first. It’s about making sure America is as smart as she can be in her own interests, about managing the realities of the unipolar world system in ways that most benefit our long-term interests rather than simply doing what we can force through in the near-term. What we’re learning is that there’s a price you pay for telling everyone else in the world they can #$%& themselves and trying to govern the globe by sporadic applications of blunt force.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last several days about whether North Korea is a bigger threat than Iraq, whether there’s an inconsistency between the policies the administration is pursuing with regard to each, and so forth.

These questions ignore the big issue, one that’s being inexcusably ignored in the American press.

This entire crisis — and it’s foolish to pretend it’s not a crisis — is an administration screw-up of mammoth proportions. The administration is trying to portray this as just another crisis that happened on their watch. But that woefully understates its own responsibility for the situation we’re now in. Here’s how our friend Chris Nelson put it today in an email …

[I] Will wait until next week and look at whether he’s succeeded in finally climbing out of the hole Bush and the hardliners dug for US policy back in March, ’01, when they dissed DJ and nixed any talks, thus enshrining the neurotic nonsense that negotiation equals appeasement.

For now, my analogy is that you can’t blame the cop for trying to bust the bad guy…NK definitely is the bad guy…but you for sure can blame the cop if he blows the arrest and it gets violent. Ruby Ridge? Waco? Will Pyongyang someday find itself on that list…with obviously more consequence?

The same inimitable style — and I think he’s got it about right.

There are two points to focus on here. One is that the situation we’re now in isn’t so much a matter of an over-focus on Iraq, or even the pursuit of too belligerent a policy. It’s really the product of the administration’s inability over the course of two years to figure out what its policy on North Korea was. It’s flip-flopped back and forth between Powell’s policy of engagement (which was essentially a continuation of the Clinton policy) and the hawks’ policy of confrontation. In so doing it’s let the whole thing spin out of control.

Point two: One of the most important rules of foreign policy is not to let yourself get pushed around. An even more important rule, though, is not to make threats or issue ultimatums that you either can’t or won’t follow through on. That not only makes you look weak. It also makes you into an object of contempt. That’s just what the administration has done in this case.

The White House called the Clinton policy craven and dishonorable. That policy was essentially to pay the North Koreans to behave and hope that in the medium-term a better solution — perhaps a soft landing in the North — would arise. Not pretty certainly, but it was a difficult situation.

The Bushies told the North Koreans that they either had to shape up or we’d take them out. Now the North Koreans have called our bluff. And the administration — as signalled by Powell’s comments over the weekend — has caved, enunciating a policy which is now substantially more dovish than the Clinton policy.

Tough talk sounds great until your opponent calls your bluff and everybody sees there’s nothing behind the trash talk. Then you look foolish. That’s where we are right now with North Korea. As Nelson says, no doubt the NKs are the bad guys. And this is an extremely complex problem with no easy solutions. But the Bush administration has pursued a keystone cops policy on the Korean Peninsula for two years now, mixing think-tank braggadocio with feckless inconstancy. Now we’re all going to pay the price.

They shouldn’t get a pass on this.

More details soon.