The Week.

John Ashcroft's critics are demanding to know whether he will enforce the nation's laws as attorney general. After eight years of Reno, one can only wonder: Since when is that a qualification for the job?

President Clinton's departing comments on the circumstances of George W. Bush's election remind us, yet again, how fortunate we were to have him as a leader and, in a very real sense, a national companion for eight years. Mr. Clinton's dignity and manly reticence; his simple affirmations of clear goals and plain principles; his intelligence, as rigorous and bracing as it was loath to display itself; his graciousness, to rivals and to associates, marked his entire tenure on the national stage. But nothing so became him as his leavetaking. Conservatives may have had their differences with him on policy, but we salute him as a personal example and, in the largest sense, as a political force for good. We look forward to his understated presence in our national life for many, many, many years to come.

The campaign against John Ashcroft's nomination to be attorney general becomes more disingenuous by the day. His liberal critics say that an AG must be a centrist if he is to enjoy the confidence of all Americans, and that he must support all the laws he is expected to enforce (such as those protecting abortion clinics from protesters). The pedigree of these standards stretches all the way back to . . . well, pretty much to the minute Ashcroft's nomination was announced. The AG he would replace, Janet Reno, was well to the left of public opinion, believing for instance that subsidized prenatal care should be part of any strategy to fight crime. She also opposed federal laws such as those authorizing the death penalty and mandating minimum sentences for drug offenders. It would have been peculiar if she had thought what no serious person does: that every jot and tittle of federal law is wise. Imagine applying the liberals' current standard to other executive departments, such as HUD and Labor. It would mean that nobody would be able to administer those agencies if he were at all skeptical about their missions. No supporter of limited government could be employed in the federal government. Or is that the point?

A speech given by Ashcroft at Bob Jones University was found, upon exhumation, to contain the J-word. "A slogan of the American Revolution," Ashcroft said, "was the line, 'We have no king but Jesus.'" Barry Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called Ashcroft's reference to Jesus "totally unacceptable," and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League called on him to assure Americans that his "religious beliefs would not dictate" how he would carry out his job. Evangelical Protestants need no lectures on the separation of church and state, since they were the main supporters of James Madison and the First Amendment. But we had better hope that Ashcroft remembers his religious beliefs on the job. Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world, so that those who declare "No king but Jesus" are stating that they will have no earthly king. The slogan has a history even older than Ashcroft acknowledged, for it was used by radical Protestants in 17th-century England, when kings could, and did, kill people who said such things. One reason America has no king is that lots of those Protestants moved here. If Ashcroft's critics don't want to move to some other country, could they at least keep their historical confusions to themselves?

If the campaign against Ashcroft has been dismaying, it must also be said that the ex-senator's response to it has not been edifying. His early tack has been to pledge his support for hate-crimes laws and to disavow any intention of asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The latter is a huge concession: The first Bush administration asked the Court to overturn that decision, and public opinion has moved in an anti-abortion direction since then. The political logic of this defensiveness is hard to fathom: It's not going to sway Sen. Barbara Boxer or, indeed, any Democrat who wants to damage George W. Bush's administration. Ashcroft would be better off challenging his critics' race-baiting and religious bigotry, about which they have already shown some defensiveness themselves. There is no point in confirming a conservative as attorney general if the price is a promise not to be a conservative attorney general.

If Senate majority (sic) leader Trent Lott had negotiated a plea bargain with Bill Clinton, the president would probably be settling in for his third term. In a deal with Tom Daschle on how to organize the 50-50 Senate, Lott agreed that committee memberships, staffs, and budgets would be evenly split. Daschle had threatened to block the Senate's reorganization unless his demands were met. The threat was empty: The Senate is a continuing body, unlike the House, and could have remained organized as it had been in the last Congress. Still, Lott folded-and not for the first time. Why shouldn't Daschle behave as though he were majority leader when the post appears to be vacant?

What would happen if they counted every vote-even the ones that weren't really votes-and George W. Bush still won? Such a development would be a blow to Democrats poised for four years of Republican illegitimacy, but it appears increasingly likely to happen. The Palm Beach Post has become the first of the media recounting horde to finish a tabulation of the so-called undervotes in Miami-Dade County, and the news is not good for Al Gore. The Post found that 7,600 of the 10,600 contested ballots had no marking-not even the slightest dimple-in the presidential column. And of those that could be guessed at, the paper found more favored Bush than Gore. After all of the Post's recounting, Bush picked up six votes. Remind us what all the fuss was about?

We go to press before President Bush's inauguration, but the usual scruffy suspects had promised various forms of negative hoopla. When we last checked, they were dickering with the Secret Service about displaying giant hate-figure puppets. Bush should get used to it. He is hated by Democrats, who came only a few suppressed military absentee ballots short of victory; by blacks, living in the ghettos of impotent self-pity; and by the non-partisan Left, which has been energized by the Seattle riots and by the Nader campaign. Not only can he not win these people over, he will be unable to diminish their scorn for him. He will have to rely on the aura of his office, on whatever resources of good humor he has, and on pushing an agenda that builds his base among the large numbers of skeptical, but impressible, voters. All of Bush's enemies hated Ronald Reagan too, but Reagan had a temperament that enabled him not to care; his indifference, and his ideas, then won him the support that enabled him to govern.

"He has flown all the way from Indonesia, where he is now based, to attend the fundraiser. He will be giving $100,000 to this event and has the potential to give much more." So read the staff briefing for Bill Clinton on August 14, 1992, when the Democratic presidential candidate met with Indonesian moneyman James Riady during a campaign trip to California. The meeting was a prelude to the 1996 Democratic fundraising scandal. Riady ended up funneling about $1 million to Democrats, using a series of straw donors to hide his identity. It was all illegal, but the Clinton Justice Department could never work up much enthusiasm for a prosecution-until this January. With just days left in the presidential term, the department and Riady made a deal that calls for his business to pay an $8 million fine-peanuts for him-and includes no demand that he tell investigators what he knows about the scandal. In other words, Riady will walk away untouched from the worst campaign-finance scandal since Watergate. Just like Clinton.

On his first day in office, Bill Clinton signed an executive order forbidding officials from lobbying their former offices for five years after leaving the White House (before that, the law provided for a perfectly adequate one-year ban). The Clinton rule stayed in effect for the entire administration-until the president's most loyal aides began to worry about how to make money after leaving office. So in the last week of December, Clinton quietly rescinded the order. So much for Democratic principles. But here's the good news: The five-year ban was a bad idea in the first place, enacted only to grab some good headlines for the then-new Clinton administration. Now Bush will be rid of it without suffering the inevitable goo-goo criticism.

As part of his last-minute flurry of regulations, Clinton banned new road construction and commercial logging in 58.5 million acres of national forest-an area nearly the size of Oregon. Lawmakers in western states are understandably upset: The decision increases the risk of wildfires, hurts farmers by ignoring the impact that growing forests have on the availability of water, and end-runs Congress. It's the sort of environmentalism that is designed chiefly to please people who don't live near the land affected. It's also one of the first Clinton regulations President Bush should think about undoing.

Thomas Penfield Jackson, the federal judge who ordered the breakup of Microsoft, loves to talk. While the case was under way he talked to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and CNN, thereby, as Microsoft has pointed out in its appeal, violating the Code of Conduct for judges. Most recently, he has talked to Ken Auletta for The New Yorker, revealing in the process that in his mind the prosecution of Microsoft is not so much an antitrust case as a moral crusade against a company that had been too successful too fast. The judge said that the remedy he would really like to impose is to require Bill Gates to write a book report about a biography of Napoleon. Why? "Because I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses." Just what Judge Jackson knows about entrepreneurial reverses is unclear: He is a career government lawyer descended from a long line of career civil servants, and raised, according to Auletta, in "a home where FDR was revered." On Napoleonic concepts of oneself, however, and the arrogance that derives from power, Judge Jackson can fairly be considered an authority.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, in a farewell interview as drug czar, said that he was "unalterably opposed" to mandatory minimum sentences for drug felons, which can put nonviolent offenders, often exceedingly minor players in drug rings, behind bars for decades. McCaffrey's view seemed to be shared by Bill Clinton, who, on his way out the door, pardoned two women, one sentenced to 19 years, the other to 24 years, for such activities. Better late than never. But shouldn't the nation's top drug cop and the president have come forward with these views earlier, and more forcefully? Polls and referendums show that Americans are willing to rethink certain drug policies, but bureaucrats and politicians typically do so only when they're heading home.

The U.S. Postal Service enjoys a formidable array of privileges. It has a monopoly on first-class and third-class mail; it can borrow from the Treasury; it can regulate its competitors; and it is free from taxes and regulations, both those that apply to private companies and those that apply to government agencies. Yet the Postal Service is still in trouble. It's cheaper to fax or e-mail messages. And even though private carriers like Federal Express are required by law to charge higher prices than the Postal Service, they dominate express mail. The service's response? Raise the price of stamps (again) and try to go into e-business. It has also made alliances with Federal Express and Mailboxes, Etc. The Postal Service should be allowed to go off in any entrepreneurial direction it likes-so long as it operates under the same rules that other entrepreneurs do. Sweden, Germany, and New Zealand have already moved toward privatization. It's time for the U.S. Postal Service to join the New Economy, and at quicker than a snail's pace.

The Army announced it will replace "Be All You Can Be" with a new recruiting slogan, designed to appeal to the individualism of potential recruits: "An Army of One." Louis Caldera, Clinton's Army secretary, thinks that today's "me-now group" of young men and women find being part of an impersonal organization, subject to arbitrary orders, unappealing. Of course, Mr. Caldera will be long gone when disillusioned new recruits, in uniforms and with shaved heads, fill the barracks with cries of false advertising. The alternative approach is that of the Marine Corps: an appeal to the idealism of those young people who are willing to accept sacrifice as the price of admission to something bigger than they are. The Marines are the only service that consistently meets enlistment quotas. But following their lead will require that President Bush place some ads of his own for "A Few Good Service Secretaries."

Gray Davis, the governor of California, has been careful to present himself as a business-friendly New Democrat. But the first time he confronted a political crisis, his reflexes were those of an Old Democrat. California is suffering a shortage of electricity, largely because price controls are bankrupting utilities. Democrats, however, are blaming the utilities for greedily refusing to sell power at a loss, and blaming "deregulation" (in reality, a tepid restructuring of the state's regulatory regime) for letting them refuse. So instead of lifting price controls and ending other regulations-such as those that have prevented the construction of new power plants in California over the last decade-Davis is proposing to sue the utilities and create a state-run power-supplier. California once prided itself on leading the way to the future. Right now its future is looking a lot like the 1970s.

Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan, a Republican, opposed a ballot initiative to abolish bilingual education in the state and to require "nearly all" instruction to be conducted in English. Voters approved it overwhelmingly in November. Now she may go ahead and ignore them. "If what you're doing is traditionally successful and on an academic par, go right on doing that," she told the Arizona Republic on January 10, meaning that bilingual-education programs may continue if students in them post acceptable test scores. That sounds reasonable, except that it contradicts an initiative that was passed precisely because the public didn't think the schools were doing a sufficient job of teaching children to speak the language they'll need to know to succeed in the United States. What is it about the plain English of the law that Keegan doesn't understand?

Of all the slanders directed over the years at Sen. Jesse Helms, perhaps the most peculiar is that he is an isolationist. In a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Helms again gave the lie to the label. He came out for, among other things, a further expansion of NATO, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defense of Taiwan, and the promotion of democracy in Cuba. But perhaps his most provocative comments concerned the application of "compassionate conservatism" to foreign aid. Helms proposed to replace much of the foreign-aid bureaucracy with grants to private charities, often religious, that do relief work abroad. Helms's idea will not undo the damage that misguided Western policies do to poor countries' economies; that would require ending the IMF and World Bank's destructive advice to them and slashing Western trade barriers. But it's a start.

Since 1992, the United States has spent some $2.3 billion promoting reform and democracy in Russia. President Bush says that he is likely to staunch this loosely targeted flow of money unless there is evidence that it is being used constructively. The original intention may have been admirable, but there is little or nothing to show for it. Russia is still a free-for-all, in which the strong take the spoils and the weak go to the wall. Our dollars fuel the endemic corruption and postpone hard choices; they end up in Western banks, to the account of Russians with clout but no conscience. The Kremlin may growl, and those who believe that money buys friends will clamor about "Who Lost Russia?" But to stop subsidizing is to help Russians help themselves, which is the one and only way to save the country and leave everyone a winner in the end.

Justice did not come to two young Palestinians, Alam Bani Odeh from Nablus and Madji Makawi in Gaza City. Their fates are horrific. Both had relatives who were terrorists, sought out and killed by the Israelis. Accused of denouncing these relatives and assumed therefore to be traitors, the two youngsters were put before court-martials. Their alleged crime of collaboration is not on the statute book. Existing agreements with Israel expressly forbid punishment for cooperation. No witnesses were allowed. The courtrooms were packed with cheering and clapping men and women, and television crews, with the result that the families of the accused did not dare attend. The cases lasted about an hour each. There was no mechanism for appeal. The two were led out for instant execution by firing squad, in front of crowds shouting "God is Great!" Several other Palestinians are under arrest on similar charges. If Palestine indeed comes into being, it will be a threat not just to Israel but to its own people.

A grotesque and faintly comical situation has arisen in Germany. The present foreign minister, one Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Green party, sits in his palatial office dressed in a custom-tailored three-piece suit. But 25 years ago, during the heyday of the notorious Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, he was a leftist-anarchist street-fighter and closely allied with murderous terrorist groups. Photographs have surfaced showing him beating a policeman. Testimony places him in discussions about Molotov cocktails. He seems to have believed he was supporting Allende and opposing the Vietnam War, though Germany had little to do with either. Today he regrets the violence, but not the causes. If chancellor Gerhard Schroeder needs a jerk in his cabinet, well, let the voters assess the situation.

Steve Thoburn is a greengrocer in Sunderland, a grimmish city in the north of England. Last summer, he sold a customer a pound of bananas, little realizing that he was landing himself in a case bearing on Britain's future. Thoburn says that his customers use only imperial weights and measures, and he is satisfying them. As recently as 1985, an act of the Westminster Parliament confirmed that these traditional measures are legal. But a directive from the European Union in Brussels came into force last year to compel the use of metric measurements. The buyer of those bananas was an undercover inspector, and Sunderland magistrates have brought a prosecution on the grounds that it is now a criminal offense to use imperial weights and measures. Thoburn has become known nationally as "the Metric Martyr." If he loses, the courts will have overturned an act of Parliament, without Parliament's having had a say in the matter. British liberties have famously rested on hitherto obscure private citizens who arose to defend them, and Thoburn is in that mold, looking set to enter the history books.

Last year, television gave us Darva Conger and Survivor; this year we have Temptation Island, unmarried couples put in an artificial Club Med, where hunks and bimbos try to woo the various beloveds from their "commitments." The hook in all cases is "reality"-a real marriage; real people, not actors. So what's the fuss? Whenever television has been good, it has always captured reality. Lucy Ricardo and Ralph Kramden were fictional characters; Capt. Kirk was a fictional character of the future. But their doings were compelling because they dealt with love, embarrassment, or hard choices. Intelligent storytelling trumps hokey "reality" every time.

"You can't keep kids from having sex." Oh, yeah? A study issued by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has acknowledged that "virginity pledges" taken by teenagers do, in fact, work. The study found that teens who publicly promise to remain virgins until marriage delay their first sexual encounters some 18 months longer than their peers. Although they don't all wait until marriage, about 50 percent remain virgins until age 20. Non-pledgers, however, tend to have sex before 17. Additionally, the study found that the more peers who have embraced abstinence a teen knows, the more likely he is to take and honor the pledge himself. Teenagers can be asked to meet high expectations-if they are guided by adults who are willing to set them.

"Confessions of a Lonely Atheist" is the title of a New York Times Magazine essay by Natalie Angier, a science writer for the newspaper. Americans, she laments, see atheism as "illicit" and "unpatriotic." She thinks she's lonely? She should try saying "We have no king but Jesus" at the next Times editorial meeting. n Get ready, "Letter from Al" fans: It was time for that feature, along with Gore himself, to go. But Rob Long-wizard behind the "Letter"-will be back in the next issue, with a new page called "The Long View."