Early Debate Returns: Bad for McCain

I watched the debate tonight with growing frustration at John McCain's failure to attack Obama squarely on his confiscatory economic policies. I've finally come to the conclusion that John McCain is unable (or unwilling) to promote the kind of conservative economic message that I think much of this country is wanting to hear.  Instead, he's splitting hairs with Barack Obama on the economy -- and losing in the process. I'm always interested in the views of Steven Hayes at the Weekly Standard -- he's a smart, reasonable writer who I read frequently.  His review of the debate is that Obama won. Here's part of what he had to say:

"John McCain had a very strong debate tonight. It’s too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless.

The debate began with questions on the economy and for thirty minutes Obama answered those questions with the kind of substance that I suspect anxious voters wanted to hear and with exactly the right tone – empathic, aggravated and determined. Most important, he spoke to voters in their own language. In his first answer, in response to a question about things the government can do to help average Americans through these tough economic times, Obama spoke of a $400,000 junket that AIG executives took after the government bailed them out. “Treasury should get that money back,” he said, “and those executives should be fired.” Sure, a little demagoguery. But it’s exactly the kind of story – in a debate that included back-and-forth accusations and lots of statistics – that voters will remember and talk about tomorrow with their neighbors.

McCain took that first question and he turned immediately to energy. “Americans are angry, they’re upset and they’re a little fearful. And it’s our job to fix the problem. Now, I have a plan to fix this problem and it’s got to do with energy independence.  It didn’t work. Two months ago, when gas prices were nearing $5 and the cost of oil dominated the headlines, the McCain campaign deftly used anxieties about energy as a proxy for anxieties about the economy. So when McCain proposed to lift the ban on offshore drilling, voters responded positively and the polling reflected their enthusiasm."

This is what I was afraid of: McCain being unable to clearly articulate why Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress is a danger to our economy. The reflexive return of McCain and Palin to the energy issue is a comfort zone and understandable -- but not good enough in this economy. McCain seems unable to explain to the American people that Obama's tax policies and his liberal record will be a poison pill to an economy that needs liquidity. It needs low taxes to fuel growth -- something that simply isn't possible with Obama's tax-and-spend plan.

Even worse, McCain's populist instincts are taking him down the wrong path. Rather than returning to a free-market solution to what should be a free market problem, his instinct is to increase regulation and government control -- exactly what Obama and the Democrats want to do. He again misses a chance at differentiation. Here's Hayes again:

"But while energy issues remain important and cannot be separated from the broader economic picture, the convulsions in world markets over the past two weeks and the need for a $700 billion federal bailout have rendered worries about gas prices and energy independence to second-tier status. It’s not that these issues don’t matter, it’s just that they matter less now than they did over the summer. He later broadened his answer to include spending, tax cuts and his jaw-dropping plan to have the federal government buy up “the bad home loan mortgages in America” to “let people make those payments and stay in their homes.” So bigger government is bad, quasi-governmental entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “ignited” the current economic crisis, too much government spending is leaving us broke and we want the U.S. Treasury to renegotiate individual home mortgages? Seriously? No thanks."

No thanks is right. The correct and powerful answer here is to reignite the economy through lower taxes to stimulate jobs and growth so people can pay their mortgages -- NOT to have the government take over that role. This mess in the housing market is partly an issue of personal behavior -- not simply predatory lending. I, for one, am not interested in my tax dollars going to bail out people who made bad decisions. I think many Americans would agree with that. Unfortunately, McCain's instincts don't lead him down that path. He's still in the "Wall Street greed" mode.

I hate to throw in the towel here, but...it is now clear that the issues that many conservatives have with McCain are legitimate and real. That despite his great personal story, his maverick personality often betrays a message that would greatly appeal to a great swath of America. He's actually give people less of a choice by co-opting the position of Obama on so many issues.

My guess is that the polls are not going to be good for McCain after this performance tonight. In a debate where he really needed to help himself, I'm afraid he's come up short.

We'll see.

Words worthless to halt aggression

(London, Oct. 6) The mistaken belief that clever diplomacy was a substitute for force of arms led to Athens’ defeat by Sparta, according to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Two thousand years later the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu- himself a master diplomatist- observed that diplomacy was useful only when it was the “velvet glove adorning the mailed fist.” Finally we recall the 19th century German Chancellor Bismark who famously stated that “ the great questions of the day are decided not by speeches in the Diet but on the battlefield by Blood and Iron.”

These ideas may sound harsh to some contemporary ears but they remain highly applicable in our very imperfect modern world, as the Russian invasion of Georgia reminds us yet again.

Russia’s aggression has rudely shattered illusions and highlighted unpleasant truths worldwide.

Prominently revealed in the wreckage is the terminal disunity of the European Union. While French President Nicholas Sarkozy flew to Moscow to appease Vladimir Putin- reminding many of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous flight to Munich to appease Adolf Hitler- the Presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine flew to Tbilsi to support the embattled President of Georgia.

Besides revealing the stark divide between “Old” and “New” Europe this sad scenario puts a final end to EU dreams of being a coherent diplomatic and military power on a par with Russia, China, and the United States.

Thoughtful commentary across Europe is now realizing the EU is trapped between its ongoing hostility to its nominal American ally and its newly revived fear of Russia’s imperial ambitions. Equally clear is the fact that answers to these challenges are different in virtually every member state and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

The major lesson here is that diplomacy and the attendant speeches in the U.N., European Parliament and U.S. Congress are utterly useless absent a credible determination to impose serious consequences on aggressors.

Just as Hitler correctly perceived the flabbiness of the Western democracies at the time of Munich, so too did Putin calculate that he would face no serious consequences for his invasion of Georgia. Also like Hitler, no one should believe that he sees Georgia as Russia’s final territorial acquisition.

The hard lessons that Europe is relearning have considerable implications elsewhere in the world and are highly relevant to the choice Americans will make in the upcoming Presidential election.

Within the coming year the United States will face important decisions regarding the next chapter in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly the nuclear confrontation with Iran may reach critical mass.

As their first debate illustrated, Senators McCain and Obama have starkly differing worldviews and approaches to the projection of American power around the globe.

While Obama ritually insists that “all options are on the table” and casually repeats a willingness to send U.S. troops across the Pakistan border, absolutely everything we know about him and the Democratic Party he now leads strongly suggests that the preferred options favor talk over action. These include deference to the U.N., the World Court, the E.U., and “world opinion” generally. He worries that the U.S, is not “liked” and believes this should be corrected by a multilateral approach to just about everything.

When asked how he would handle Russia, Iran or other tyrannies Obama’s usual response is “tough, direct diplomacy." As Hillary Clinton pointed out he has a “naïve belief in the efficacy of sitting down face to face with dictators."

What exactly would he say to them? Does he really believe that his breathtaking eloquence would persuade Putin to leave Georgia, Ahmadinejad not to exterminate Israel, or Kim Il-Jong to cease his nuclear program? Would he be willing to actually threaten them with consequences, even if he lacked the full backing of the U.N., E.U. etc.?

McCain is much more like Truman or Reagan: Utilize diplomacy when helpful, but always be willing to take forceful action when needed. Seek allies whenever possible, but be prepared to go it alone when vital American interests are at stake. McCain’s motto as he noted in the debate is that of his hero Theodore Roosevelt who said “Speak softly and carry a big stick."

The worldview, policy inclinations, and attitude toward their country of these two men is as divergent as their life experiences. Not within living memory has a Presidential election presented Americans with a clearer choice. ---------------- William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Rocky Mountain News.

Echoes of history at 2008 Olympics

The Beijing Olympic Games have replayed not only the international political and cultural story of our generation, but the ultimate, age-old story of heaven and earth themselves. The top three medal-winning countries stand in fascinating relation to one another. Russia, led by Soviet throwback Vladimir Putin who is even now in the process of a hostile occupation of independent Georgia: 36 medals.

China, led by an old-world Communist Politburo which systematically abuses the basic human rights of its people while attempting to project an image of justice and prosperity to the world: 67 medals.

United States, far from perfect but still a beacon of liberty, justice, strength, and real human rights for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the tempest-tossed of the earth, and with one-seventh the population of China: 72 medals.

No mere jingoism or Olympic-week enthusiasm, this synopsis reveals that these Beijing Games are what every Olympic replay is: a microcosm of both the recent and ancient past that produced the athletes and international relations involved in them.

In our case, the recent past is the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Adolf Hitler attempted to use the 1936 Berlin Games in much the same way China is attempting to use the 2008 Beijing Games: as a demonstration and tour de force of his nation's political, social, and economic advancement, and thereby of his own ideology. Unlike China, he also intended to use the games to display German athletes' physical prowess and genetic superiority over people groups such as ethnic Africans.

The delicious irony was not lost on the world, least of all the United States - my mother told me the story with relish in the suburbs of American Georgia when I was but a lad - when James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens, grandson of a slave and son of a sharecropper, collected four gold medals in track and field events in Berlin while Hitler watched: the 100m dash, the long jump, the 200m dash, and the 4x100m relay. This feat would not be repeated until another American, Carl Lewis, did it in the 2004 Games in Los Angeles, long after Hitler had been swept from the world stage in due ignominy.

Hitler, in the stands on the first day of the Owens events, came down to congratulate German event winners but declined to congratulate any others, including Owens. Owens responded with the same kind of grace American athletes have demonstrated at the 2008 games: "I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany."

Even at home, two Democratic Party presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, neither invited Owens to the White House nor bestowed on him any honors in the wake of his accomplishment. Owens would have to wait for his proper national recognition until the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who heralded Owens as an "ambassador of sports."

Yet while Stalin was enslaving and slaughtering his own countrymen and Hitler was on the verge of enslaving all of Europe, America had shed its own sons' blood to abolish domestic slavery, and despite remaining cultural prejudice at home the descendants of her former slaves had now risen to international acclaim. Nine years after the Owens games the United States would be the main power responsible for defeating Hitler, and for holding Stalin and his ideological heirs in check for another half century until they could be decisely defeated without firing a shot in direct warfare, under the steadfast American leadership of a man for whom, when he died a mere four years ago, Lady Margaret Thatcher suggested that "all the trumpets sounded on the other side," Ronald Reagan.

There is a litany of American Olympic stories as long as the litany of the general international triumphs of the United States. The unlikely conquest by the U.S. national hockey team of the heavily favored Soviet team in 1980 at Lake Placid matches the unlikely conquest of the United States of the technology, logistics, national determination, and financial investment required to put a starred and striped flag - the only such flag to this day - on the moon, or a scientific lander - the only such lander - on the distant planet of Mars, with plans for a manned mission to Mars to come in the near future.

There is the 1972 collection of seven gold medals - an Olympic record until another American surpassed him in 2008 - by swimmer Mark Spitz, or the repeated domination of both springboard and tower diving events by Greg Louganis between 1980 and 1988, to match the American invention of the telephone, the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the transistor, the Internet, satellite navigation, and many more core technologies that define what it means to live anywhere on earth in the 21st century.

Louganis was of Samoan and Swedish descent and was raised by Greek-American adoptive parents in California. Like Albert Einstein and the other German scientists who fled Hitler's Germany following World War II to establish nuclear technology in the United States, Louganis' adoptive ancestors came to America to be free and to give their descendants the opportunity to prosper.

From every corner of the world during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, they came to America. They replayed, wittingly or not, the coming of the Mayflower and the desire of its passengers to build a nation that was a lighthouse. Even beyond the immigration of Louganis' adoptive family, the symptoms of this mass migration to the land of the free are everywhere to be seen in every Olympic Games, and 2008 is no exception.

The personal coach of lead American women's gymnast Shawn Johnson is Liang Chow, who once competed on the Chinese national gymnastics team then came to America in 1990 to study and coach at the University of Iowa. Johnson is from west Des Moines. The father of American men's gymnast Alexander Artemev is Vladimir Artemev, the former Soviet all-around world gymnastics champion in 1984 before he came to America in 1994 when Alexander was 9. Both became American citizens in 2002.

One searches the Russian and Chinese Olympic teams in vain for any sign of an American who migrated to those countries to achieve athletic greatness or any other kind of greatness not offered in better timber in his native land.

The greatest athletes competing for other nations at the 2008 games, if they have not migrated permanently to the United States, have come to the U.S. to train, compete, and to get an education. Premier Chinese basketball player Yao Ming plays professionally in the American National Basketball Association (NBA), as do Spain's Pao Gasol, Germany's Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina's Manu Ginobili, and every other international basketball great.

The University of Auburn swimming program alone boasts members from Australia, Brazil, Estonia, Denmark, France, Croatia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Arizona State University boasts athletes from Brazil, Canada, Finland, Italy, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, and Sweden. At the University of Alabama, swimmers from Ecuador share the pool with ones from Greece, Kazakhstan, Romania, Hungary, and South Africa. In swimming as in so many other international sports, the road to Olympic glory for one's home country usually passes through an American league or university.

They not only came to America to live free, but they came to bring glory back to the land of their ethnic heritage. They came, they worked, they learned, they trained, they sent money home, and with their help America not only mounted athletic conquests to match her economic, social, political, and military conquests - military not in aggression against free, independent states like Putin in Georgia, but military in defense of free, independent states, like Eisenhower in Normandy or Reagan in Nicaragua or Bush in Iraq - and in the process America became a blessing to the nations.

Her 23-year-olds become Olympic legends by winning more gold medals than any other Olympian in history. Her 41-year-old mothers become Olympic legends by winning medals two years after giving birth at the age of 39. Games of size and speed such as basketball are not simply won but dominated by the United States, and her basketball players are celebrated around the world as icons of athletic genius.

Her athletes, in turn, educate the world on why it is at least as cool to love the United States as it is for anyone else to love his or her country, despite widespread international media and political prejudice to the contrary, a prejudice born of too great a sympathy for Russian and Chinese visions of political wisdom. Kobe Bryant, American basketball great, in an interview with NBC's Chris Collinsworth, said a few days ago that when he first received his Team USA basketball jersey he laid it on the bed and "just stared at it." This exchange followed between Collinsworth and Bryant:

Collinsworth: "Where does the patriotism come from inside of you? Historically, what is it?"

Bryant: "Well, you know it's just our country, it's... we believe is the greatest country in the world. It has given us so many great opportunities, and it's just a sense of pride that you have; that you say 'You know what? Our country is the best!'"

Collinsworth: "Is that a 'cool' thing to say, in this day and age? That you love your country, and that you're fighting for the red, white and blue? It seems sort of like a day gone by."

Kobe: "No, it's a cool thing for me to say. I feel great about it, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I mean, this is a tremendous honor."

Bryant may not understand exactly where American greatness comes from, or how the exceptional opportunities he rightly appreciates first developed, but like so many normal, everyday Americans from Bryant's Los Angeles to Shawn Johnson's Des Moines to Michael Phelps' Baltimore, he senses at a deep level that the greatness is real and the greatness is unequaled by another nation.

Americans do not compete at the highest levels in every world sport, to be sure, but the 2008 games have shown once again that they compete at the highest levels on a wider and deeper athletic scale, and across a wider range of ethnicities and people groups producing athletes who call themselves Americans, than any other political entity recognized by the world, past or present.

And American athletes accomplish their feats with the same kind of grace, charity, and universal concern for all nations with which President George W. Bush carries and expresses himself, notwithstanding foolish caricatures everywhere to the contrary.

It is as difficult to pinpoint the source of this grace and charity in American athletes as it is for Kobe Bryant to pinpoint the source of his patriotism, but the question leads beyond the immediate history of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in which the United States has stood at the center of the international epic, back to...

... Plymouth Rock and into the Middle Ages; to the fall of Rome; to the birth and death of Jesus Christ; to the ancient mystery of the Jewish people group that produced both Him and His chief disciple, the Apostle Paul, who compared his efforts to be like Christ to the efforts of an Olympic athlete preparing for his games; and further back still...

...to the vicious world of the ancient Near East out of which the Jews were first called - a world where Everyman was nothing and the king was Everyman, a world of nothing if not one of universal slavery before the Jewish presence illuminated it with the message, the commandments, and the very presence of Yahweh.

The question of grace and charity takes us to these places because the question of grace and charity is, as America has shown the world better than any other nation in the modern era, the real center of history. In the end the Olympic games are only games. They will pass, the glory will fade, the medals will lose their luster, and the records will be broken.

But the presence of grace and charity on the international scene beneath, behind, and in the midst of an unrelenting drive toward victory - the reality of virtue and humility in the face of evil and slight, of national health, endurance, determination, and stability in the face of the rise and fall of international despots, of the promise such national strength represents of a Kingdom yet to be revealed in which grace and charity will find their complete fulfillment and manifestation among every tribe, tongue, and nation - this is the stuff of lasting legends, the story of Earth, and the meaning of the cosmos: that grace and charity, and the God who is their ultimate source, and the peoples who worship that God, become and remain triumphant, though charlatans and derelicts give battle to the end.

Why did the Dems go Euro?

The elitists who dominate the Democratic Party have embraced the New Europe and its world view. The fawning reception of Barack Obama in Europe illustrated this. They see him as the anti-Bush, their best bet ever to lash “rambunctious” America to the collectivist chariot of Europe’s “Brave New World”. [So writes Bill Moloney in his overview of liberalism's trans-Atlantic convergence and its significance for Election 2008. Here's the piece in full. - Editor]

The Europeanization of the Democratic Party

In the 19th century Americans took very seriously Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances” which might interfere with the country’s unfolding “Manifest Destiny” of dynamic growth and expansion. A corollary to this belief was that the “Great American Democracy” was a unique-perhaps even divinely inspired-form of political organization vastly superior to the Old World’s tired regimes of aristocratic privilege and downtrodden masses.

In the 20th century America entered upon the world stage powerfully and decisively coming to the aid of embattled European democracies and leading them to victory in two World Wars and the Cold War. Launching these extraordinary interventions were three memorable Democratic presidents- Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Though American actions in the two centuries were starkly different- isolationism in the 19th, and intervention in the 20th-one compelling theme was constant: American Exceptionalism- a general notion that foreigners were a source of problems and Americans were a source of solutions. This attitude was often naïve, and jingoistic, but it provided a sturdy foundation for American patriotism through most of our history.

This enduring national consensus, however, collapsed during the “perfect storm” of the 1960s when a toxic brew of social, military and political convulsions tore gaping holes in the fabric of our national life-self-inflicted wounds that remain unhealed to this day.

Out of this turmoil there emerged a powerful body of left wing opinion and activism that turned the old national consensus upside down. Rejecting Henry Clay’s “my country-right or wrong”, the left substituted “my country-always wrong”. More extreme elements declared their country to be the most oppressive society in history- racist at home and imperialist abroad-while discovering sublime virtues in genocidal tyrants from Mao Tse-Tung to Pol Pot.

While this raging ideological virus infected in varying degree a wide range of American institutions-e.g. media, academia- its principal victim was the national Democratic party.

In less than a decade the party that boldly sponsored the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, and the NATO alliance went from the confident activism of the hawkish John Kennedy-“pay any price, bear any burden to assure the success of liberty”- to the “Blame America First” defeatism of George McGovern-who aptly themed his 1972 acceptance speech as “Come Home, America”.

Betraying allies in Viet Nam, ignoring genocide in Cambodia, accepting communist aggression from Angola to Afghanistan, and bowing to humiliation in Iran, America’s defense of liberty abroad was reduced to Carter’s pathetic gesture of boycotting the Moscow Olympics.

The sorry Democratic mismanagement of both economic and foreign policy led to a series of landslide Republican Presidential victories and finally a decade of GOP Congressional dominance. Yet, amazingly none of these severe reality checks halted the Democrats steady leftward drift.

To understand this hostile take-over of the Democratic Party it must be seen in the context of what happened to all “parties of the left” in Europe in the second half of the 20th century. Traumatized by the shocks and dislocations of World Wars and Cold War the entire European political spectrum moved decisively leftward. While the Socialist parties led this progression, the parties of the Center and Right- shaken by their own crises of confidence- succumbed as well. European Capitalism and Nationalism was decisively weakened and the door opened to a continent-wide shift to collectivism and the trans-nationalism represented by the United Nations, and the European Union.

Today the elitists who dominate the Democratic Party have embraced the “New Europe” and its world view. On virtually every issue- Iraq, taxes, abortion, global warming, energy, hostility to religion, suspicion of Israel, regulation, U.N. worship etc. etc.-difference are only of degree not kind.

The fawning reception of Barack Obama in Europe illustrated this perverse harmony. Clearly Obama’s view of the future fits with Europe’s. They see him as the anti-Bush, their best bet ever to lash “rambunctious” America to the collectivist chariot of Europe’s “Brave New World”.

While heir to Western Civilization, America has always stood apart in the degree of its faith, patriotism, individualism, opportunity, and vitality. Most basically the Presidential election will decide whether this American Exceptionalism will endure or not. The Democratic Party has already given its answer. In November, ordinary Americans will give theirs.

Jews slant media, candidate claims

Rima Barakat Sinclair of Denver, born in Jordan, now a US citizen and a Republican candidate for HD6, told a Jordanian newspaper that "wealthy Jewish supporters of Zionism like Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch" are responsible for "the reality of a Western media hostile to Arab and Islamic issues." How exceedingly odd. You'd think Sinclair would be too busy contacting voters here in town to opine on global Zionist influence for the home folks in Amman. What does this inflammatory allegation have to do with her aspiration to be a state legislator in Colorado? What is her evidence for it? And where does it fit in with her claim to be a Republican, a free enterpriser, and a voice of tolerance?

Sinclair's interview with the Jordanian paper, Al Arab Al-Yawm, appears in Arabic here. An English translation, made locally in Denver, is posted here.

The latter link is to the blog of Joshua Sharf, who's running against Sinclair in the GOP primary next Tuesday, Aug. 12. Below is the Sinclair translation in context, from Sharf's website. The boldface emphasis is mine.

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EXCERPT FROM JSHARF.COM... VIEW FROM A HEIGHT BLOG

More from Rima's big adventure, the email chat session with the Jordanian newspaper.

We are aware that the Arab media influence on Western society is limited, and we also know that the Arab issues are not fairly covered in the western media. There are many Arab American organizations that provide activities aimed at the definition of truth and justice the Palestinian cause.

The source of activities in non-Arab countries, which were founded some 20 years ago, has remained limited within the point of view and vision of the founding members of those organizations. Most have focused their efforts in Washington DC, leaving their influence on public opinion and American media deflated.

There are several factors affecting the ability of Arabs to launch publicity campaigns to explain the issue and win the American people to their side. One of them was the lack of interest by Arab tycoons or companies in producing films or television program available for worldwide sale. This is the reverse of the actions taken by a number of wealthy Jewish supporters of Zionism like Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. So media campaigns advocating for Arabs or Muslims in America are limited to the efforts of individuals or small enterprises that suffer most from financial difficulties and limited distribution.

The reality of a Western media hostile to Arab and Islamic issues will not change as long as Arabs are only waiting for the West to see the "right," one day, without developing an integrated effort to deliver their message. A dialogue of religions is needed, and part of the Divine message is that the powerful should have compassion for the weak.

Ideally, morality starts with tolerance of others and self-understanding. If people applied this principle in their own lives, it would solve many of their problems. What applies to individuals applies to relations between nations. But reality dictates that the strong decide what is "right." It is the duty of the victim to remind the strong that he didn't consider the effects of his unjust abuse. Therefore, it remains important that one talk with a strong knowledge of his thinking and point of view. This does not mean forgetting or abandoning the right.

The Saudi Madrid initiative has received wide and positive media coverage, especially by the one rabbi invited to the conference. And since Saudi Arabia began and will continue this initiative, it is preferable to encourage religious scholars and Islamic institutions to study and support such initiatives, instead of having the positive reaction only or participating in conferences organized to discuss Islam by non-Muslims. [End of Rima Sinclair comments to Jordanian paper]