Newspapers are very good at what they do when they do it by rote. News breaks and reporters are assigned, photographers are dispatched, space is allocated, headlines are written, and the miraculous convulsion that is the production of a newspaper takes place routinely every 24 hours.

For journalists, the critical qualification is not the brilliant turn of phrase, the incisive interviewing skill, or the size of the Rolodex. Instead, it is news judgment. It is news judgment that enables an editor to know what to assign; a reporter what to write; a news editor where to place it in the paper; and a whole process of production to move ahead quickly without delay, debate or second thoughts. It is news judgment that allows the idea to exist that journalists conspire to produce similar coverage. If you want to test the news judgment theory, you can do so by watching a political debate, a major speech, or the Sunday morning talk shows. All the major newspapers will cover the same items the next day, as though their reporters had consulted with each other. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times in isolation will have selected the same newsworthy utterances to display.

This smooth operation of the news machine grinds to a halt when too many editors are involved, when editorial managers inject themselves, and when the publisher’s office is intercedes. Take the current humiliation of The New York Times over its story that intimated that Sen. John McCain might have had an affair with a lobbyist. For all of the talent at The New York Times, the story when it was published had all of the signs that it had been manhandled by a committee. It began by hinting at sexual impropriety by the senator, and went on to a much more valid analysis of how McCain’s confidence in his own rectitude blinds him to ethical challenges.

In most newspapers, this story would have been spiked at the first level of editors. They would have said to the reporter, “This is a story about how you didn’t get the story,” or “This just doesn’t stand up.”

But a strange ethos dominates The New York Times. Long ago, it read its own notices and decided that it was the greatest newspaper in the world. That has made it hard to be self-critical. When it has suspended normal news judgment and fairness, it has gotten into huge trouble–as it did with reporting by Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. When The Times was edited by Abe Rosenthal, he took it upon himself to be the ultimate arbiter; and, in hindsight, he was an excellent editor of The Times. Since his departure, there has been pusillanimity in the editor’s office. In a double blow, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a fine publisher, retired in favor of his son.

I have seen big newspapers get it wrong and get it right.

In the early 1960s London’s Sunday Mirror, where I worked, got it wrong. It had the biggest story of the decade: the scandal involving party-girl Christine Keeler, war minister John Profumo, and a Soviet military attache. Fearing libel suits, the paper declined to publish. Too many people got involved in the decision; managers, financiers and lawyers overruled the editor.

In sharp contrast, a decade later, I was at The Washington Post when Watergate broke. The editor, the wily Ben Bradlee, took charge of the story with the direct and unequivocal support of his publisher, Katherine Graham.

In both cases the result was the same. In England, the story came out and the war minister was forced from office and members of the aristocracy were disgraced; as was the newspaper that had not had the courage to publish. In Washington Bradlee, Graham, and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein entered the pantheon of journalistic excellence.

When a major government-shaking story is in the works in newspapers, politics is irrelevant. There is adrenalin in news. Are newspapers politicized? It is an open question. In England, the left constantly rails against the Tory press. In America, conservatives rail against the liberal press. It is probably true that a majority, though far from all, journalists lean to the left. But politics is not a preoccupation of newsrooms: news is.

A new country limped onto the world’s stage on Feb. 17: It is Kosovo. And, true to its Balkan heritage, Kosovo is a problem for most of Europe and Russia. It is also a problem for the United States, which is expected to recognize Kosovo, though mutedly.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia has infuriated Russia, which immediately called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. Some European countries, including Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia, have told the European Union that they will not recognize Kosovo—in essence a successful separatist movement in Europe.

Serbia is predictably apoplectic. It claims that Kosovo is “the heart of Serbia,” although less than 20 percent of Kosovo’s 2-million population is Serbian. Serbia blames the United States, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the loss of Kosovo. In fact, these entities have been tirelessly trying to find an answer to the Kosovo question. No one wanted to see the last remnants of Yugoslavia broken up, not least because of the fuel Kosovo’s independence provides to other separatist groups. Think Scotland, Northern Ireland, Spain’s Basque region, France’s Corsica or Canada’s Quebec province.

Another problem is that Kosovo will be the first Muslim country in Europe. Much of its population was converted to Islam under Ottoman Turkish rule. And European security officials worry that Kosovo will provide a safe haven for Muslim extremists across Europe.

The new government says that minorities will be protected in Kosovo. But it was the Kosovar authorities’ disinclination to protect minorities that gave rise to the atrocities against the Kosovars by the Serbians under Slobodan Milosevic. This, in turn, led to the bombing by NATO and the de facto independence of Kosovo as a U.N.-administered territory. Now the U.N. will withdraw its forces, and a EU peacekeeping force will go to Kosovo.

Russia’s anger derives both from its fight against separatists in Chechnya, the mainly Muslim region that borders Georgia, and its historic alliance with the Serbians. The Russians are hinting that they will now give material support to two breakaway regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Transdniestria, which split from Moldova. Russian rhetoric toward the West heated up it became apparent that many Western countries would recognize an independent Kosovo.

A big country, with many ethnic divisions like Russia has reason to fear the whole concept of separatism. It is not just that the Russians want to make trouble for the West: They genuinely believe that there is mortal danger for Russia if the concept of separatism gains international acceptance. Even in the time of the tsars, a primary goal of Russian administrations was to hold Mother Russia together. Moscow has been fighting Chechen separatists for 150 years.

The Balkans are yet another test for the U.S. policy of embracing any democratically expressed will without regard to historical alignments or future viability. Sickly Kosovo, with its endangered Serbian minority and its history of intolerance, is not a credit to democracy, even though the democratic will of the people is for independence from Serbia. Kosovo is the current sick man of Europe: poor, resource-challenged, and with a bitter ethnic history. Unfortunately, Kosovo sees the United States as its vaccine against the Serbs and the Russians.

If you want to be president of the United States, it is a good thing to tell the electorate that the federal government is too big and you will shrink it. Yet if you are president, you may find this impossibly hard to achieve.

The problem has two dimensions. First the great sprawling bureaucracy that is the U.S. Civil Service has very low productivity. Second, the population is always calling for more government services not fewer.

In the private sector, the size and cost of the federal government could be reduced by demanding higher productivity and dismissing poor performers. But in the federal bureaucracy, it is nearly impossible to do so. In the private sector, the possibility of losing your job is an ever-present factor. Federal employees have de facto lifetime employment. Unable to introduce the fear-of-firing as a disciplinary tool, reformers have instituted performance bonuses to shake up the federal bureaucracy. But they have not worked.

The problem inside the federal government is that those who calibrate performance are the immediate superiors of employees. These managers have found it nearly impossible to hand out poor grades. Poor grades do not cause the under-performers to leave government service, they simply affect morale. Most federal government managers, who have to live cheek by jowl with those who they supervise, know that pointing out incompetence only builds up department-wide resentment against themselves. Most working groups in the federal government are communal operations, and they are not subject to the normal managerial discipline that abounds in the private sector.

The tolerance of incompetence in the federal government is particularly hard on those who strive and care about what they are doing.

If you work in Washington, it is very difficult not to know something about the incompetence factor in the federal government. An acquaintance of mine who works in national security shakes her head despairingly about what she sees every day: sloth, indifference, incompetence and defeatism. An auditor acquaintance in the Department of Health and Human Services decided that he would make a lot more money in the private sector. He did not: He was fired twice. He went back into the federal government, drawing a salary of more $100,000 a year. Now, in retirement, he is consulting to the federal government for even more money.

Political appointments do not solve the problem; they complicate it. Only in the Department of State can high-performers really rise to the top positions. Many ambassadors are drawn from the ranks of career Foreign Service officers.

But there is no such ladder of opportunity in most of the federal government. Ergo, the only incentive to perform well is to improve your grade, but you cannot hope to manage an agency. In that way, it is a little like working for a family corporation.

It is hard from anecdotal evidence to gauge how overstaffed the federal government is and where the overstaffing exists. Air traffic controllers are overstressed and do a superb job. But there is evidence that the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Education have a high percentage of the slothful.

Yet they are all politically protected. If they work in Washington, and live in Maryland or Virginia, federal government employees are catered to by their elected political overseers. The same thing happens if you get a concentration of federal employees elsewhere. If you want to see how it works, look at base closings. Federal jobs are good jobs–and jobs are the opium of the political class.

The larger question of reducing the federal government divides over what people say they want and what they demand. They say they want smaller government, but they demand more federal services year after year. Every national crisis spawns a new bureaucracy: a buildup of personnel that becomes permanent and immutable. Today the buildup is in national security, immigration management, border security, safety standards for Chinese imports, global warming, and arcane but real problems like the shortage of honeybees. As society grows more complicated, the demand for the government to do more increases exponentially.

So if you were president, what could you do to reduce the size of the federal government? You could close the departments of Education, Energy, and eradicate more than 1,000 programs. But most of the functions of the axed departments would be glommed onto other departments; and most of the programs would reappear elsewhere in the bureaucracy.

Every president tries to reduce the size of the federal government, and mostly they fail.

Myths are part of the fuel of foreign policy. The Roman Empire was driven by the myth of its own invincibility. The British Empire was driven by the myth of British superiority. Wherever they raised the Union Flag, the British believed they brought civilization; defined by laws, social order and Christianity. Ditto the Romans, but they did not export their religions.

Sometimes myth is reality. And sometimes it is just that: myth. Here are some of the prevailing myths that dominate our policy debate:

The first myth is that the United States is the freest country in the world, and that our freedom imposes a moral obligation to export it to the rest of the world. Reality: We enjoy great freedoms in the United States, but they are not notably greater than the freedoms enjoyed by people in Canada, Scandinavia, and many other functioning democracies. Australians, for example, do not feel deprived of freedom any more than Arkansans do.

A second myth is that nothing works in countries whose social order is left- of-center. By and large, Europe works very well and its people enjoy standards of living that are comparable or superior to people living in the United States. The French may need to pull their socks up and work a bit harder, but do the British or the Finns?

A third myth is that hundreds of millions of people around the world are yearning for democracy. China and Russia are powerfully indifferent to democracy. Both are huge players and in the world and will shape the future of it. But they will not do so at the ballot box. People who yearn for a democratic future tend to set up governments in exile to propagandize their situation. This is an option open to the Chinese, and not since the uprising in Tiananmen Square has there been any indication that the Chinese are anything but satisfied with what they have. Many Chinese intellectuals told me in Beijing, and around the country, that they consider their form of communistic mercantilism “a third way.” Russia is moving away from democracy without a fight.

Wherever there are Muslim majorities in the world, from Morocco to Indonesia, there are dissident movements. But many are not seeking democratic governance. They are seeking governance under sharia law.

Another powerful myth, favored by progressives everywhere, is that multiculturalism increases creativity and productivity. Periods of great creativity around the world suggest that there is as much output by homogeneous societies as there is by multicultural ones, and maybe more. In Japan, China and much of Europe, the periods of the greatest output have been in times of homogeneity. This is hard to gauge in the United States, which has always been a multi-ethnic nation.

The myths that govern us that have an historical basis, tend to be myths favored by conservatives. Liberals tend to favor myths that are speculative and have no track record. These include the myths surrounding energy and the environment; and the myth that universal comity is possible, if it is fostered.

Myths are essential in the national enterprise, but they move from asset to liability when they are transformed from mythology to inflexible doctrine. Great leaders are men and women who add to mythology and do not govern by it–for example,Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. All four leaders used mythology for their purposes and created new myths for their successors.

The most pervasive myths are the ones that we live by; the market is infallible (So why did Mozart die a pauper?); sport builds character (as long as steroids are available); organic food is better than other food (There is no such thing as inorganic food.); American football is innately superior to soccer (Tell them in Brazil.).

What should have been a modest piece of commercial news out of the 2008 New Delhi Auto Show has seized the world’s imagination. Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate, whose Tata Motors is the world’s 18^th largest automobile company, unveiled a new “People’s Car”: the Nano.

Given the reception the Nano has received, one would think that it is a new weapon of mass destruction. In fact it is a very small, slow, basic four-seater, designed to operate in Indian cities at speeds of not more than 50 mph. The bombshell is the price: $2,500, according to Tata.

This is great price, but it is not much of a car. Tata seems to know this because it has been frugal with information; releasing a list of specs, but not allowing automotive journalists to even sit in the car. What we know is that the Nano has two cylinders and develops between 30 and 40 hp. This is basic transportation. Very basic.

Tata’s hope is not that the Nano will elbow Ford Neons out of the market, depress the sale of Toyota Camrys, or hobble the market for its own conventional range of cars. No, this car is several orders of magnitude less of a vehicle than anything now being sold on the world automobile market.

You would have to go back to the 1930s to find something with the same range of performance and economy as the Nano. I would suggest that you look at the Jowett Bradford light van, made in the English city of Bradford from the 1940s to the 1950s. It boasted a two-cylinder, horizontally-opposed, water-cooled engine, and probably developed about 35 hp. It was rated at 8 hp under the British system of measuring horsepower at idle. What the Bradford lacked was hydraulic brakes and a synchronized gear box. Even so, it met many of the targets of the Nano. Of course, it was not a sedan but they were easily converted.

The People’s Car has intrigued automobile manufacturers throughout their history. While the term goes back to 1938 and the design of the Volkswagen Beetle, it could be claimed that the first People’s Car was the Ford Model T.

Aspirants to the title of the People’s Car, besides the most successful of all, the Beetle, include the French Citroen Deux Chevaux and the English Morris Minor. But only the Beetle saw global distribution and really earned the title.

For a People’s Car to work, it not only requires a price point that will tempt people who have never owned cars to buy, but it also requires a classlessness that makes the rich and the poor alike comfortable behind the wheel. There are a few things in society that are classless: blue jeans, sneakers, and hamburgers come to mind. The Beetle, the Morris Minor, and the Honda Civic triumphed in this regard.

There is a good place for a classless car in the world. It would have to be inexpensive, fuel-efficient and safe—and ideally a hybrid. This is not the Nano. It is not even clear that Indian families will buy the Nano because it meets so few of today’s motoring criteria besides fuel efficiency. It has very little space for luggage; it would be murderous on a long trip; and despite protestations from Tata, it would not meet most Western safety standards.

There is also considerable doubt whether Tata can hold its declared price for the car. This has been achieved by skimping on features, using cheap labor, and receiving massive subsidies from the state of West Bengal.

Don’t know much about West Bengal? It is India’s most densely populated state; its major city is Kolkata, formerly Calcutta; and it has had a Marxist government since the British left India in 1947. Like all Marxist governments, it has been economically ruinous. Its subsidy to Tata to build the Nano is a blatant attempt to paper over the economic stagnation of the state. It is unlikely that the subsidies will last or that Tata can build a car, with or without, subsidies for $2,500. Automotive economists believe that the real price of the Nano will be about three times the introductory price.

Despite the huge publicity that the Nano has received, it probably will revolutionize the world automobile industry. Remember the Proton? Of course not, but it is a Malaysian car that has been trying to revolutionize the world automobile industry since 1985.

In the 1950s, America’s infrastructure was the envy of the world and it was getting better. Plans to build the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly called the Interstate Highway System, inspired highway projects around the world. These included the national highway systems of France, Italy, the United Kingdom and South Africa.

The message was the Americans knew what they were doing and the sensible thing was to emulate them.

At the same time, on farmland in Northern Virginia, the federal government authorized construction of an international airport named for the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. It was an act of faith. From its opening in 1962 until the early 1980s, Dulles International Airport was something of a white elephant. Today, it has taken its place as one of the busiest international airports and the premier airport for Washington, D.C.

It is awesome to contemplate that the politicians and bureaucrats could have been so farsighted as to build a giant airport in the belief that the airplanes would come. But those were the days when people were confident and planners believed that infrastructure was integral to future prosperity. They only had to look at the railroads, still largely intact, carrying goods and passengers between cities; waterways, constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, operating as the least expensive means of moving heavy loads, and a private bus network linking villages and towns to the metropolises. The electrification of rural America, which began in the 1930s, was nearly complete. And in Shippingport, Pa., Adm. Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, was building the prototype of a civilian nuclear power plant.

In the 1960s, the change from major to minor in infrastructural thinking was sudden and catastrophic. Big government building was out, local control was in. Transportation projects were shelved by the thousands, from small local highways to grand urban bypasses. The Army Corps of Engineers was denounced, nuclear power was opposed, and new transportation initiatives were seen as being at odds with the integrity of local communities. The first steps toward the gridlocking of America were taken.

The hostility to growth in the 1960s was initiated and executed by the left, operating through environmentalists, social reformers, academic dreamers, and even the anti-Vietnam War activists and the women’s movement.

Today, the hostility to growth and repair of the infrastructure comes as much from the right as from the left. The left sings its old choruses against big public works projects, including airports, dams, highways, new electric generation and nuclear. Its only remaining dream from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt is urban transportation. And the right? It is singing harmoniously with the left against the future. Its rationale is different, but the consequences are the same. The right reasons that governments can do nothing right, and therefore nothing should be done; and there can be no money for big projects, because new taxes are an unspeakable evil.

So it is that last week, the Department of Transportation pulled the plug on a plan to extend Washington’s subway system to Dulles International Airport. There is irony here: the airport was built by visionaries and this needed link has been felled by the shortsighted. The amount of federal money at stake is one-fifth of the total cost of the project, some $900 million.

This is the picture: there is money to stimulate the economy, but no money to build the infrastructure that created the economy. The neoagrarians of the left and those who have no hope on the right are allied against the future.

By the way, much that the government has done over time has returned enormous dividends for the people; materials from NASA, dams and ports built by the Army Corps of Engineers. And, yes, the last gift that big, bad government gave to us was the Internet.

If you listened only to talk radio, you might not realize that behind the conservative ascendancy were some powerful intellectual ideas, honed by political thinkers such as David Frum. They were the people who gave direction to the “Reagan Revolution,” but they had been disappointed by George H.W. Bush and stymied by the political skills of Bill Clinton. And they had expected the world of George W. Bush.

In George W. Bush, they felt they had a pure Republican: an untrammeled conservative who would make America respected abroad and rich at home. As Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, told a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in early 2001, Bush would be a “transformational president.”

What Gingrich did not say was that AEI, a conservative think tank, would play a critical role in advising and staffing the Bush administration. It was the home to many neoconservatives, some old-line men and women of the right, and a cadre of thinkers with very strong views about the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While AEI is still close to the administration, it is now the home of revisionists who believe that Bush has damaged conservatism and betrayed some of its core objectives, such as shrinking the size of government.

Central to the new thinking at AEI is David Frum. He was too young to influence the Reagan years. But during the Clinton tenancy at the White House, he was building a war chest of conservative ideas.

Frum writes books that influence those who call the shots in Washington. A list of their titles is revealing: “Dead Right,” “What’s Right,” “How We Got Here: The 70’s,” “An End To Evil,” and “The Right Man.” The latter is an impassioned defense of Bush, which Frum wrote after he left his speechwriting job at the White House–which is where he entered the pantheon of the memorable by putting three words into a State of the Union address: “axis of evil.”

Now Frum is the voice of the disillusioned right. His latest book, entitled “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” is both a call to arms and a fairly specific assault on what has happened to conservatism in the nation and in the White House.

“Americans are trapped in obsolete politics, engaging in phony arguments over issues that are in fact largely settled,” Frum says in the book. “Political partisans fail to learn from their opponents even when they discover something new and true.”

The nation, according to Frum, has solved many of the problems that defined the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. New challenges call for new creativity, he says.

This is his indictment:

· “America’s war on terror is not being won; the struggle for world economic leadership looks to many as if it is being lost.

· “Standards of living are stagnating for the American middle class because health care costs zoom uncontrollably.

· “High energy costs transfer the world’s wealth to thug regimes, even as evidence accumulates of serious environmental risks from the fuels we burn.

· “The United States seems increasingly divided by race and class, and individual Americans express mounting alienation from their political system.

· “New medical technologies offer dazzling cures and therapies—and present horrifying moral dilemmas.”

 

Frum says that instead of addressing these challenges, the political system seems capable only of polarizing

He believes that conservatives should stop denying realities like the mess in health care, the insecurity of the middle class, the evidence of global climate change, and the rise of China. Also, he believes that foreign policy should be more flexible in order to be more successful. In fact, the author of the axis of evil told the AEI gathering that the United States should offer to restore diplomatic relations with Iran.

Other radical offerings from Frum: make private health insurance available to every American; lower taxes on savings and investment, financed by higher taxes on energy and pollution; promote federal policies to encourage larger families; make reductions in unskilled immigration; launch a compassionate conservative campaign for prison reform, and government action against the public health disaster of obesity.

At the reception afterwards, some of the high priests of conservatism were nodding approvingly, and the books were selling briskly.

 

From the time that Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, passed into British control in 1815, it was the place that British civil servants longed to be posted. The oblong island off the southeast coast of India had everything that a colonial administrator wanted: a settled population, a huge tolerance of religions, a prosperous plantation economy, and a great relationship between the British and the Sinhalese.

To this day, Sri Lankans speak well of the British colonial experience. They point out that only one life was lost in the 133 years of British rule: an Englishman was executed by the colonial government for conduct unbecoming.

The word that characterized Ceylon was peace. Its tropical climate was ameliorated by sea breezes. And in a relatively small geographic area, there was a feast of topography; deserts, forests, mountains, and plains added to the island’s charm.

Alas, Sri Lanka’s days of peace and plenty came to an end in the 1970s. That is when the ethnic Tamils in the north and the east began demanding their own homeland, and launched an undeclared civil war that has raged since then, costing tens of thousands of lives. The Sri Lankan government will tell you that Tamil atrocities, complete with the use of suicide bombings against civilians, rank with the worst on earth. The Tamils will tell you that the Sri Lankan military is as brutal as was the French military in Algeria.

Last week a ceasefire, brokered by Norway in 2002, was formally abandoned by the government in Colombo. In abandoning the ceasefire, the government was simply recognizing that it had never held, despite the peace-keeping efforts of the Norwegians.

The Sri Lankan conflict may be the first insurgency where the Internet has played an important role. Although the Tamils are proscribed as a terrorist organization by most nations, there are Tamil communities scattered around the world and these are accused of fanning the insurgency, arming, equipping and masterminding it through the Internet.

Sri Lankan officials told me that they are particularly distressed by the role played by Tamil supporters in faraway Canada and New Zealand. But fund-raising takes place globally, and the money is channeled into the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, just 19 miles off the coast of Sri Lanka.

While ethnic Tamils in India support the insurgents, known as the Tamil Tigers, the Indian government has been more ambivalent. In 1987, India sent troops to the northern areas of Sri Lanka to mediate the Tigers dispute with the Sri Lankan government. The Tigers rejected the Indian effort and turned their hostility the troops, who withdrew in 1990 in something close to defeat. The following year, a Tiger assassinated Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, for his betrayal of their cause.

The territorial claims of the Tigers preclude any logical settlement, according to the Sri Lankan government. The Tigers are laying claim to the entire northern part of the island, the East coast, and part of the West coast. The Tamils are in the majority only in the north.

The Tamils are Hindus, but the majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhists. Significantly the civil war is a political and ethnic war, not a religious one. Like the Kurds, the Tamils are an ancient people who have never really enjoyed a recognized homeland–even Tamil Nadu has mostly been part of India.

Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at The Brookings Institution, says there is no hope for peace in Sri Lanka. He believes the barbarous civil war will drag on for decades. In fact, he told me that he knew of no conflict as hopeless as the one in Sri Lanka.

However, at least in their northern stronghold, the Tamils have won. There, the Sri Lankan government is forced to operate through Tamil agents: a de facto recognition of Tamil autonomy. Like Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Tigers have established legitimacy. The dilemma for the United States is recognizing that a group we have labeled as “terrorist” has become the legitimate expression of a people’s aspiration.

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On Christmas Eve, here is a thought: Are we in the media up to covering the story of Christmas?

Imagine that time is a continuum, having no beginning or end; so that what has passed is to come, and what is to come has passed. Hold on, this is not crazy. Mathematicians have been wrestling with this possibility for a long time.

Now imagine that you are sitting in the executive suite of a great cable television network, located on the Avenue of the Americas. Yes, Fox. An excited scientist is explaining to a room full of Fox executives and news producers that scientists at a U.S. national laboratory have found a tear in time, and they believe that a reporter could travel through it to cover the first Christmas.

The room is electrified. A young producer shouts, “The greatest story ever told, and we are there!”

“Sounds like a job for Bill O’Reilly,” says the wily boss of Fox, Roger Ailes, deftly slipping a candy into his mouth.

Another producer, who has just accepted early retirement, demurs, “O’Reilly isn’t a reporter; he’s a commentator. We need somebody who can interview without interrupting.” Everyone scowls at the departing producer.

“How about Geraldo Rivera? It’s his kind of thing,” says an ambitious young woman, who hopes that Ailes will notice her contribution.

“No, not him,” Ailes says. “He hasn’t found Al Capone’s treasure yet. Nobody believes Geraldo.”

The scientist takes the floor again. He explains, “The time tear is at the end of BC 1, so you could be on location at the manger in Bethlehem. But there are limits. At the end of a very complex calculation, we discovered that the tear is small and only one person can get through it. Your reporter will need transport when he or she arrives, and the options are a camel or a donkey. Your reporter will have to conceal his or her camera and recording equipment. And he or she will have to speak Hebrew.”

“No donkey,” a senior Fox producer says flatly. “We are not going to give the Democrats a boost.”

Ailes’s face clouds. The thought of Bill O’Reilly, his greatest asset, traveling into time on a camel worries him. Suppose the hateful people at MSNBC get a video of Bill on a camel, riding into time? Ailes shudders. Suppose O’Reilly berates a Roman soldier and gets a broad sword across his neck?

One producer asks, “What about the other networks? CNN’s Wolf Blitzer speaks Hebrew.”

“Glenn Beck speaks in tongues,” another producer adds.

Fox executives, who were dreaming of the greatest TV spot every sold, are beginning to realize that the greatest story ever told is turning into the greatest risk ever taken.

People start shuffling out of the room, calculating the chances of an upset in Iowa on their clipboards. The most ambitious of the ambitious young producers approaches the scientist.

“Could the national lab prove that Obama is a Muslim, or that Hillary is a communist?” he asked. “That’s the kind of story we need this Christmas. It would be a huge gift to our viewers.”

There is a melancholy that pervades the Russian character which outsiders can see but cannot know. A brutal history played out against a harsh land has made the Russians fatalistic and inclined to believe things will get worse rather than better. Oh well, they sigh, there is always music, poetry and vodka. Always vodka.

Then along came Vladimir Putin. Since his arrival at the Kremlin in 2000, pride and possibility have come to Russia. To prove it, Putin’s United Russia party has swept the polls, garnering an extraordinary 64 percent of the vote. Yes, the polling was suspect. Yes, Putin has curbed the media and thugs have murdered journalists. Indeed, the pro-Putin rallies have smacked of state sponsorship. But nonetheless, Putin has restored Russian confidence and has replaced chaos with order.

The Russians love Putin. To them he is either the young Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan–the Reagan of “Morning in America.” Putin has meant “Morning in Russia” to most Russians. He did not have to rig an election, any more than Richard Nixon’s people had to break into the Watergate; but paranoia goes with power.

Putin’s election victory is all about Putin, although he was not on the ballot. He told the Russians to vote for his team and they did in droves. More, they did it with very little idea about the philosophy of the United Russia party. He told them there is a plan for the future, but he has not disclosed it. Presumably, it is more of Putin; although he says he will honor the constitution and step down in March, when his two terms are up. Of course, Putin could tear up constitution, and all that would be heard would be the deafening roar of an approving public.

Politics in Russia is the politics of personality. The only real opposition to Putin’s bunch is the Communist Party, a spent force. Two smaller parties vote with the Putin bloc.

With the press muzzled or intimidated, Putin was able to pull off his election coup with little analysis of how he has run the country or who wields the power in his administration. Most Russians grasp that the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, has little real power. That rests with the “siloviki”–the former KGB men and military officers who have carved out powerful positions in the administration. They do this by controlling part of the cash flow of the state-owned gas and oil behemoths, Gazprom and Rosneft. While the siloviki understand power, they are inept managers. But thanks to record oil and gas prices, there is enough money to paper over the cracks.

The Russians know that, by and large, they are better off today than they have been in living memory—that includes the waning days of the Soviet Union and the economic chaos of the Yeltsin years. A young Russian friend of mine, who has grown up and prospered in Putin’s Russia, thinks Putin is a saint. He thinks the evidence for this is that Putin has not made himself president for life. Instead, Putin’s own future is extremely hazy. He may settle for the weak office of prime minister, or, as rumored, as head of Gazprom or Rosneft.

Russians understand the cruelty of fate, the wonder of music and literature, and the efficacy of vodka. But they are awed by a potential dictator who would walk away from power. That, Ivan, calls for another vodka.