Pee Wee Herman's foreign policy.

[T]he men and women we send to the nation's capital have always purported a certain pretense to seriousness on things that mattered--foreign policy and the larger domestic issues. The year 2005 was a large fall from seriousness.

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The patronizing derision around Capitol Hill of the effort to build a democratic order in Iraq is especially ironic. . . . Here [in the U.S.], members of Congress read illustrated front-page accounts of bomb stories and call for "withdrawal." They know more about the "politics" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi than about any of Iraq's organized national parties. . . .

The rank politicizing of foreign policy is unfortunate . . . . Even if the government informs senior Democrats such as Senator Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of a sensitive policy decision like the surveillance of suspected terrorist phone calls, their only comments on the leaked press reports are feigned expressions of denunciation and outrage. . . .

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The U.S. remains the sole superpower in a world beset by organized Islamic terror, by nations such as Iran and North Korea that are actively proliferating nuclear bombs and long-range ballistic-missile delivery systems, by a China with strategic ambitions, and by a geographically important Russia of profoundly amoral political intent. For men and women seeking the high challenge of a serious public life in Washington, this should be a golden age. On the evidence of 2005, we are heading toward the Stone Age.

"Politics Get Smaller. Washington's year of living unseriously." By Daniel HenningerWall Street Journal, 12/23/05 (emphasis added).