Edwards' suit gets emptier

Mark Steyn:

My New Year's resolution is not to make any New Year predictions. I called last year pretty badly -- readers may remember my confident assertions every week or two that the Republicans would hold the House and Senate. War is a tough sell in a democracy, particularly the kind of war we face today. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the seductiveness of complacency. If you happened to catch John Edwards, the hair-today-gone-tomorrow pretty boy of the 2004 campaign, re-emerging in the artfully positioned debris of New Orleans last week, it was hard not to be impressed: An empty suit had somehow managed to get emptier. He's running for president on five big priorities: ''guaranteeing health care,'' ''leading the fight against global warming,'' ''strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty,'' and by then my fingers were too comatose to write down the fifth theme but, if memory serves, it was guaranteeing to lead the fight to strengthen ending the shame of platitudinous campaign rhetoric.

Listening to Edwards, you get no sense that this man is in any way engaged with the times. He's not alone, of course. It's been striking to read accounts of the incoming House leadership (of both parties) unable to tell the difference between Sunni and Shia or name a single book they've read on the present conflict. We are in an era of fast-moving demographic and technological transformation, and lavishly remunerated national legislators (with huge numbers of staff to do all the research) have minimal curiosity about it.

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Mustaf Jama, a Somali ''asylum seeker'' in Britain wanted for the murder of a policewoman, fled the country by taking his sister's passport, wearing a niqab (the full Islamic head-to-toe get-up that covers everything but the eyes) and passing unhindered through the checkpoints at Heathrow.

How about that? It turns out we are profiling after all, but we're profiling everybody except Muslims. Your wizened l'il ol' gran'ma on a Yuletide break to London is bent double and out of breath struggling to take off her coat and shoes. The officials sternly scrutinize her passport to check that the picture matches her flustered and bewildered face. All around her hundreds of women are doing the same, mutely shuffling through the scanner in their stocking feet. But Britain's most wanted man is breezing through because he took the precaution of dressing as a Muslim woman. And it would be culturally insensitive to expose them to the same scrutiny as your gran'ma.

Many of us think about the long-term shifts necessary to win this struggle: euthanizing the United Nations and overhauling other malign and anachronistic institutions. Fat chance. Mustaf Jama's express check-out is the perfect parodic reductio of "security": The state is willing to inflict pointless bureaucratic discomfort and inconvenience on everyone else, but the demographic group with the most links to terrorism gets to go through the fast-track VIP channel.

The funniest line in the Jama story was Her Majesty's government's touching faith in the Horn of Africa's extradition procedures:

''He is thought to be hiding in Somalia where approaches have been made to the transitional federal government to return him to Britain.''

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Perhaps they will find him in his niqab attempting to sneak out of Kismayo soon. Edwards seems to be focusing on his base of the 4.5 percent of the work force that is currently unemployed. The math of adding that up to more than 50 percent of the vote does not compute.