The week.(Mitt Romney, John Bolton, Jimmy Carter)

* Are we allowed to be against Obama?

* Running for the Senate in 1994, Mitt Romney pledged to work for "full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens" and argued that he would be a more effective champion of this cause than Ted Kennedy. He pledged to co-sponsor a federal ban on discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, and credit. He supported President Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, and looked forward to the day that homosexuals could "serve openly and honestly in our nation's military." What should social conservatives, whom Romney has been courting as part of his presidential campaign, make of these facts? That depends. Presumably Romney still believes, as he should, that gays deserve "full equality." Since Romney also said, in 1994, that the law should recognize marriage as the union of a man and a woman, he evidently thought that the traditional marriage laws were compatible with full equality--and still believes it. It would be entirely plausible for Romney to explain that the experience of fighting the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage has given him a new perspective on some of these issues. Perhaps he had considered employment discrimination as a discrete issue, for example, but has come to see it as one front in a campaign to force the unwilling to look favorably on homosexuality. Or perhaps he has just changed his mind. A lot of primary voters are looking forward to hearing Romney's explanation.

* John Bolton's tenure as U.N. ambassador was both a diplomatic and a moral success. He shone the spotlight on the atrocities in Darfur at a time when the world was inclined to forget them. He eloquently and persistently made the case against Iran's nuclear program. He got the Security Council to pass a resolution sanctioning North Korea for its nuclear test, and put as much pressure as any man could on China actually to enforce it. All of this caps a long career of diplomatic achievements. On proliferation issues in particular he has been visionary. The Proliferation Security Initiative--a vital tool for interdicting shipments of illicit arms--is his creation. His resignation is a loss for the United States and the U.N., and an ignominy upon the senators who blocked his confirmation the better to savage President Bush's foreign policy.

* Jimmy Carter's latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, provoked political scientist Kenneth Stein to resign his fellowship at the Carter Center. We were already resigned to Carter's behavior in the Middle East, and in general. His signal achievement as president was to broker peace between Israel and Egypt; he has spent the rest of his life since trying to pull the same rabbit out of every hat. Where Israel and the Palestinians are concerned, he displays the structural anti-Semitism of the professional peacemaker. If one's goal is progress toward peace, and if the Palestinians make no real concessions, then progress can come only from Israel--which becomes the object of the peacemaker's wrath whenever it balks. Now Carter, who as an election observer has certified grotesquely corrupt Palestinian contests, compares Israel to the South African apartheid state. Our 39th president has gone from being a misguided idealist to being an ugly crank.

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* Has there ever been a sadder failure, even at the United Nations, than retiring secretary general Kofi Annan? Consider him on his own terms. In one of his farewell speeches, this one in honor of International Human Rights Day, he deplored mass murder in Darfur. "Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and 30 years after the Cambodian killing fields, the promise of 'never again' is ringing hollow." But how could this impotent organization, including all the world's tyrants and despots, do anything constructive in Darfur, or anywhere else? Only the United States and a coalition of the willing could make good Annan's human-rights talk. But all he offered in return was international oversight and demands for money. As a result, nations good and bad pursued their own agendas. With nothing better to do, the U.N. sank into corruption, as exemplified most flagrantly by the Oil for Food program in Iraq. One of George W. Bush's greatest failings was to take this tainted sad sack and the organization he presided over so seriously.

* Mary Cheney is having a baby, to be raised by her and her longtime lesbian partner. From one angle, this decision seems to combine some of the problematic aspects of both in vitro fertilization and ...