In an editorial entitled “The Inquisitor: Charles Schumer, leader of the anti-Bush crusade,” John Miller writes these important words:
[Open full post]…[Schumer] has embarked on a careful strategy of blurring the fundamental distinction between judging and politicking. In 2001, he chaired Judiciary Committee hearings on whether ideology should play a more open role in confirmations. Previously, senators have focused on the professional qualifications of court nominees rather than their political beliefs, which is why a known liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to secure a spot on the Supreme Court with only three Republicans voting against her. With Bush in the White House, however, Schumer decided to try changing the ground rules. One of his mentors has been University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, author of the forthcoming book Radical in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America.
If Democrats want to evaluate nominees on their legal views, Republicans shouldn’t object. What Schumer proposes doing, however, is evaluating nominees on their political preferences. This is something else entirely, and it is a natural outgrowth of legal realism, an academic movement that claims laws aren’t neutral rules so much as tools of power. By the time Schumer sat in Harvard’s lecture halls, variants of this idea were firmly entrenched there – and it is the chief intellectual doctrine behind the judicial activism that liberals applaud and conservatives abhor. It essentially says that judges are no less political than politicians. Therefore, confirmation hearings should not be dispassionate episodes of advice and consent, but raucous quasi-elections that engage the interests and urges of the public…
Schumer cloaks these views about ideology by saying he simply wants to avoid extremes. “People on the far left [and the] far right want to make law,” he said on Meet the Press in July. “Neither of them should be on the bench.” The presumption, of course, is that senators possess the impartiality to determine what’s mainstream and what’s not. “If he thinks that he can set aside his liberal ideology and make these choices,” asks Republican senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, “then why can’t judges do the same when they’re ruling on the law?”…
Power Line highlights the contradictory beliefs and statements of the Left regarding judicial behaviors:
[Open full post]…The Democrats say they need more time so they can “learn more about Judge Roberts’ judicial philosophy, especially on whether he will defer to precedent or seek to undo modern American jurisprudence that many conservatives say has been wrongly settled.” We hear this a lot; the Democrats worry that Roberts and other nominees might not adhere to the doctrine of stare decisis, which, in general, holds that courts should follow their own precedents rather than revisiting settled principles.
But the Democrats’ loyalty to the principle of stare decisis is highly selective. In fact, most of the decisions most beloved by liberals have overturned precedents that held the opposite. For example, in Lawrence v. Texas, which in 2003 discovered for the first time a Constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, the Court expressly overruled its own decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which was decided as recently as 1986. So as far as the Democrats are concerned, stare decisis applies only after the Court has made a liberal ruling. Liberal rulings are carved in stone, whereas “conservative” rulings–those that represent the traditional understanding of our Constitution and laws, as written–can and should be overturned freely.
As Paul has noted, we aren’t sure exactly what Roberts’ judicial philosophy is. But we’re pretty certain it is more principled than the Democrats’.
No word today from my Senators on their positions on UN reform.
Here are some of the gory details. This is from Section 601 of the House version of UN reform.
(1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (4) and in accordance with paragraph (2), until such time as all certifications (or alternate certifications) are submitted in accordance with subsection (a), the United States shall appropriate, but withhold from expenditure, 50 percent of the contributions of the United States to the regular assessed budget of the United Nations for a biennial period.I believe it is the Secretary of State doing the certifying. What types of things are being certified? Most are bureaucratic/personnel type matters. But a few are higher-level policy matters. Here is an example (from Section 201, paragraph (b)) related to the Human Rights Commission
(1) A Member State that fails to uphold the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body.(1) and (4) are kind of fuzzy. But (2) and (3) are objective criteria. If a country under sanction from the Security Council is allowed on the Human rights Commission, then UN funding is withheld.
(2) A Member State shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body if such Member State is (A) subject to sanctions by the Security Council; or (B) under a Security Council-mandated investigation for human rights abuses.
(3) A Member State that is currently subject to an adopted country specific resolution, in the principal body in the United Nations for the promotion and protection of human rights, relating to human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of such country in such country, or has been the subject of such an adopted country specific resolution in such principal body within the previous 3 years, shall be ineligible for membership on any United Nations human rights body. For purposes of this subsection, an adopted country specific resolution shall not include consensus resolutions on advisory services.
(4) A Member State that violates the principles of a United Nations human rights body to which it aspires to join shall be ineligible for membership on such body.
The Senate version adds an extra layer of procedure. This is from Section 12 of the Senate bill
(a) In General- The President is authorized to withhold 50 percent of United States contributions to the United Nations in a year if the President has determined in the most recent report submitted under section 11 that the United Nations is not making sufficient progress to implement the reforms described in this Act.The Senate bill contains provisions about the Human Rights Committee similar to the House bill. The difference is, in the Senate bill, allowing a country under sanction from the security council does not trigger an automatic funding cut; it gives the President the right to withhold funds.
There are arguments for both approaches. Which option do you think is better? And which approach do Senator Reed and Senator Chafee think is better? [Open full post]
An editorial entitled Very Old Labor: Unions need a vision for the new global economy discusses the underlying reason for the breakup of the AFL-CIO:
The AFL-CIO, the giant union consortium formed in 1955 by George Meany and Walter Reuther, is breaking apart this week in a dispute over how to revive labor’s lagging fortunes. The tragedy is that neither faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.
Instead, we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement…
…Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left…and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5%…In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.
Service workers President Andy Stern wants to arrest this decline by diverting more labor resources into union organizing, especially at such large employers as Wal-Mart. One of his rebel allies, Terence O’Sullivan of the Laborers International Union, wants to more aggressively use union pension funds and financial assets to influence corporate decisions and gain seats on corporate boards. Mr. Sweeney doesn’t oppose either idea, but he also wants to pour cash into Congressional lobbying and Democratic coffers. Mr. Stern replies that this money will largely be wasted until unions increase their member ranks, and for our non-union money he’s probably right.
What’s missing on both sides, however, is a vision of economic opportunity that might actually make workers want to join a union in the first place. Tactics aside, both factions continue to believe in the idea of unions that arose in the Industrial Age: Greedy management versus the exploited working man, seniority over flexibility, fixed benefits and strike threats over working with management to keep a U.S.-based company profitable and innovative in a world of growing competition. On the political front, both factions favor trade protection, higher taxes and government help to enforce restrictive work rules. This is the agenda of Old Europe, where jobless rates are above 10%, and it merely offers more economic insecurity in the U.S. as well.
What the labor movement really needs is a new generation of leaders who understand the emerging competition to U.S. workers from the likes of India and China. Rather than oppose imports to protect textile jobs that can’t be saved, such leaders would work to reform education so future Americans can compete in the knowledge industries that will grow the fastest. They’d also work to make pensions and health insurance transportable from company to company, so a worker wouldn’t be trapped by benefits in a job or industry he didn’t like. They’d be partners with management, not antagonists.
Without such a new vision, Big Labor will only continue its slide. All the more so given new Labor Department rules, recently upheld in court after an AFL-CIO challenge, requiring that unions disclose more details about how they spend hard-earned member dues. Some of the nation’s largest unions will now have to disclose their spending by specific categories, such as political donations, grievance proceedings, or organizing. This sunshine will expose just how much labor money is being wasted on political activities that have little to do with improving workers’ lives…
…their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline.
Other stories on the breakup can be read here and here.
[Open full post]From Pennsylvania:
The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying “our government” is against the war.
Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.
She said he “died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country.”
In a phone interview, Goodrich said the funeral service was packed with people “who wanted to tell his family how Joe had impacted their lives.”
Then, suddenly, “one uninvited guest made an appearance, Catherine Baker Knoll.”
She sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, “Who are you?” Then she handed the family member one of her business cards, which Goodrich said she still has.
“Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us,” Goodrich said. “I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign.”
Goodrich said she is positive that Knoll was not invited to the funeral, which was jammed with Marines in dress uniform and police officers, because the fallen Marine had been a policeman in McKeesport and Indiana County.
“Our family deserves an apology,” Rhonda Goodrich said. “Here you have a soldier who was killed — dying for his country — in a church full of grieving family members and she shows up uninvited. It made a mockery of Joey’s death.”
What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, ‘I want you to know our government is against this war,’ ” Goodrich said.
She said she is going to seek an answer from Gov. Ed Rendell’s administration if it opposes the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, this is an extreme case, but it is illustrative of what can happen when one begins to view everything through partisan glasses. When we allow our political selves to be ginned up to the point where we begin to hate domestic political opponents to such a degree, we lose focus on the real enemies to our society. Of course, to too many liberals, the real enemy is not terrorists or belligerent nations: to them the enemy is President Bush and the Republican Party. To these, Michael Barrone’s comments should be both read and heeded:
This summer, one big story is replaced by another–the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media–the New York Times, etc., etc.–to delegitimize yet another Republican administration. . .
. . . for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore was denounced as an outrage, and Democrats noted, accurately, that Bush did not win a plurality of the popular vote in 2000. The nation rallied to his support after September 11, but Democrats held up his judicial and other nominations even if they had to violate Senate tradition to do so. Coverage of Bush during the 2004 campaign was heavily negative; for months the mainstream media mostly ignored the swift boat vets’ charges against John Kerry and broadcast accusations against Bush based on forged documents eight weeks before the election. News of economic recovery in 2003 and 2004 was pitched far more negatively than it had been when Bill Clinton was president in 1995 and 1996.
Now the unsupported charges that “Bush lied” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar. A year after his famous article appeared in the New York Times in July 2003 accusing Bush of “twisting” intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan report, concluded that Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his dispatch to Niger and Chairman Pat Roberts said that his report bolstered rather than refuted the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. So despite the continuing credulousness of much of the press, it appears inconceivable at this point that Karl Rove will be charged with violating the law prohibiting disclosure of the names of undercover agents. The case against Rove–ballyhooed by recent Time and Newsweek cover stories that paid little heed to the discrediting of Wilson–seems likely to end not with a bang but a whimper. . .
The bombings and attempted bombings in London have brought home to the American public that we face implacable enemies unwilling to be appeased by even the most emollient diplomacy. Yet, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has been mostly negative. But mainstream media no longer have a monopoly; Americans have other sources in talk radio, Fox News, and the blogosphere. Bush’s presidency is still regarded as illegitimate by perhaps 20 percent of the electorate. But among the rest, the attempt to delegitimize him seems to be collapsing.
Democrats have to get off of their hell-bent-for-leather attempt to “get” Bush et al aka Nixon. This hyper-politicization of all things only exposes the dearth of ideas on the left. In fact, what has occurred is that those who purport to be “liberal” are actually conservative in their theory of government: they wish to extend or preserve the same failed programs of the past half-century: those started by Roosevelt and expanded by LBJ. They continue to criticize without solutions. This country needs two viable parties so that the best ideas can emerge. Right now, we don’t. But at the bare minimum, would it be too much to ask of the opponents of the President that they discontinue the hyperbolic rhetoric concerning foreign affairs? Apparently, the answer is “yes.”
[Open full post]As an American citizen who happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic, I am deeply offended by the Left’s willingness to engage in anti-Catholic religious bigotry.
Hugh Hewitt tells the latest story in a Friday, July 22, at 7:50 a.m. posting entitled Preparing to play the “deeply held beliefs” card: Charles Schumer’s New Test Act:
…But declarations of victory [about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts] are very premature given the obvious signs that the left is getting ready to mount a two-part campaign against [him].
Part I will be the conventional “give us the documents or we won’t vote” blather that currently blocks Bolton and in the past was used to block Miguel Estrada. This is a delaying tactic, and nothing more. [See Power Line for more on this topic.]
The real assault is coming on Roberts –and his wife’s– Roman Catholicism.
It will be carefully coded, but there is no mistaking the set-up work underway to get the Demcrats’ version of the Test Act established.
Four articles have appeared in two days that set-up the nominee’s religious beliefs as a subject for conversation.
[Read the posting to get the particulars in each article.]
Robert Novak’s column from August 11, 2003 provides the key history to the expected assault on John Roberts:On May 1 in a Senate Judiciary Committee session, Schumer raised religious questions in connection with the nomination of lawyer J. Leon Holmes as district judge from Arkansas. Holmes has the support of his state’s two Democratic senators, but not Chuck Schumer. The New Yorker argued that the conservative religious views of Holmes, a devout Catholic, disqualified him because of disagreements interpreting the separation of church and state. Schumer contended that ‘religious beliefs cannot dictate government policy, even though they can infuse our values.’
That was preparation for Schumer’s opposition to Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor for the appellate bench, another conservative Catholic who is the most recent of the filibustered Bush nominees. In the Judiciary Committee June 11, Schumer said Pryor’s beliefs ‘are so well known, so deeply held that it’s very hard to believe that they’re not going to influence’ him on the bench. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, another Judiciary member, also has cited the ‘deeply held beliefs’ standard.It is going to get ugly, and how ugly depends upon how desperate the left is, and it looks pretty desperate.
Let’s call this behavior by its real name: It is another form of religion called Liberal Fundamentalism.
And it reeks of intolerance, best explained by Richard John Neuhaus:
The conflict in American public life today then is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate…
And here is the full counter-argument to their attempts to enslave us with their intolerant secular religion.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Power Line continues the conversation here, a posting which highlights this editorial by Jonathan Turley and which led to discovering an updated editorial by Robert Novak.
Power Line has more as Senator Durbin, a man known in recent times for speaking only the truth! about the American military, denies what Turley wrote about in his editorial. Power Line has more here.
And be sure to check out Justin’s thoughtful comment (#3) to this posting, a comment that inspires awe as he once again shows off his remarkable gift for clarity in written communication.
Paul Sperry has written an article entitled Politically Correct Suicide: Still No Subway Profiling, in which he says:
After a new series of subway bomb attacks in London, the mayor of New York announced yesterday that police will search backpacks and other bags carried by people boarding city subways.
But the passengers they single out will be picked at random without regard for their race or religion. There will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed.
Talk about politically correct exercises in futility.
Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked Bloomberg’s own city with planes nearly four years earlier. Statistically, they fit the profile of the terrorist targeting the American transportation system.
And yet, still no profiling.
Authorities instead will single out people for special security screening as they do at the nation’s airports. That means stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance for young Muslim men than protecting citizens from them.
At the same time, the NYPD is advising subway riders to be alert for “people” with bulky clothes or fiddling nervously with bags. Could they be more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? They’re too PC to narrow it to a level where it can actually be useful to Americans trying to protect themselves and their loved ones…
Don’t expect the feds to be any more serious about screening Muslim suicide bombers on Amtrak, which pulls into two of the biggest commuter train depots in the country: Penn Station and Union Station.
Asked after the London bombings if the fed-run trains were safe, White House terror czar Fran Townsend claimed: “They’re safer than they were after 9/11, they’re safer after the Madrid bombings … It’s a lot safer.”
What a crock. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, there’s no bag screening — even after Madrid. The only restrictions on bags are a 50-pound weight limit, and that’s no comfort at all. The London bombers used plastic explosives weighing less than 50 pounds.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his Muslim-sensitive civil-rights team act as a bulwark against profiling at airports and train stations. One of Mineta’s top aides is the son of a Wahhabi mosque leader who raised money for Osama bin Laden’s No. 2 in Santa Clara, Calif.
So don’t hold your breath for any policy changes there — even if, as experts predict, as many as 20,000 casualties result from London-type bombs detonated in the New York MTA.
And that’s not the only al-Qaida threat to mass transit that authorities are worried about. According to a closely held DHS security advisory I obtained, the “terrorists have designed a crude chemical dispersal device fabricated from commonly available materials, which is designed to asphyxiate its victims.”
“The device produces cyanogens chloride (CLCN) gas and/or hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas,” continues the five-page document, first issued Nov. 21, 2003. “These gases are most effective when released in confined spaces such as subways.”
And they are extremely deadly, experts say.
By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers, Bloomberg, Mineta and other leaders are not only unnecessarily inconveniencing millions of commuters, but unwittingly giving Muslim terrorists political cover to carry out their plans. Call it politically correct suicide.
Power Line writes:
[Open full post]Apparently lots of London Muslims think it’s odd that people are looking at them funny:
[A spokesman for the Council] said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.
Gosh, why would that be? Maybe I’m being unfair here, but it seems to me that a great many Muslims are refusing to face reality. For their sake as well as everyone else’s, they need to get serious about helping the authorities root out terrorism, in England and elsewhere.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard cuts through all the nonsensical, politically correct talk about the global war on terror with these words:
[Open full post]Could I start by saying the prime minister [Tony Blair] and I were having a discussion when we heard about it [July 7 attacks in London]. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don’t want to add to what the prime minister has said. It’s a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.
Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it’s given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.
And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.
Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia’s involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn’t have done that?
When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan?
When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq — a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations — when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.
Now I don’t know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can’t put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I’ve cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.
As the Tour de France comes to its end in the next few days and it looks like Lance Armstrong has a good chance to win his seventh straight race, I found the following excerpts from this older New Yorker profile article of Armstrong to contain many interesting insights into him:
[Open full post]Lance Armstrong’s heart is almost a third larger than that of an average man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about thirty-two times a minute-slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a minute.) Physically, he was a prodigy…
Armstrong was an outstanding young swimmer, and as an adolescent he began to enter triathlons. By 1987, when he was sixteen, he was also winning bicycle races. That year, he was invited to the Cooper Institute, in Dallas, which was one of the first centers to recognize the relationship between fitness and aerobic conditioning. Everyone uses oxygen to break down food into the components that provide energy; the more oxygen you are able to use, the more energy you will produce, and the faster you can run, ride, or swim. Armstrong was given a test called the VO2 Max, which is commonly used to assess an athlete’s aerobic ability: it measures the maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can consume during exercise. His levels were the highest ever recorded at the clinic. (Currently, they are about eighty-five millilitres per kilogram of body weight; a healthy man might have a VO2 Max of forty.)
Chris Carmichael, who became his coach when Armstrong was still a teen-ager, told me that even then Armstrong was among the most remarkable athletes he had ever seen. Not only has his cardiovascular strength always been exceptional; his body seems specially constructed for cycling. His thigh bones are unusually long, for example, which permits him to apply just the right amount of torque to the pedals…
Within a week, Armstrong had surgery to remove the cancerous testicle. By then, the disease had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. He needed brain surgery and the most aggressive type of chemotherapy. “At that point, he had a minority chance of living another year,” Craig Nichols, who was Armstrong’s principal oncologist, told me. “We cure at most a third of the people in situations like that.” A professor at Oregon Health Sciences University who specializes in testicular cancer, Nichols has remained a friend and is an adviser to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which supports cancer research. Nichols described Armstrong as the “most willful person I have ever met.” And, he said, “he wasn’t willing to die.” Armstrong underwent four rounds of chemotherapy so powerful that the chemicals destroyed his musculature and caused permanent kidney damage; in the final treatments, the chemicals left burns on his skin from the inside out. Cofidis, convinced that Armstrong’s career (and perhaps his life) was over, told his agent while he was still in the hospital that it wanted to reconsider the terms of his contract. That may have turned out to be the worst bet in the history of sports…
Armstrong now says that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him. Before becoming ill, he didn’t care about strategy or tactics or teamwork-and nobody (no matter what his abilities) becomes a great cyclist without mastering those aspects of the sport. Despite Armstrong’s brilliant early start in the 1993 Tour, for example, he didn’t even finish the race; he dropped out when the teams entered the most difficult mountain phase, in the Alps. (He also failed to finish in 1994 and 1996.)
As Carmichael pointed out to me, Armstrong had always been gifted, but “genetically he is not alone. He is near the top but not at the top. I have seen people better than Lance that never go anywhere. Before Lance had cancer, we argued all the time. He never trained right. He just relied on his gift. He would do what you asked for two weeks, then flake off and do his own thing for a month or two. And then a big race would be coming up and he would call me up, all tense, telling me, ‘God, I have got to start training, and you guys better start sending me some programs.’ I would say, ‘Lance, you don’t just start preparing things four weeks before a race. This is a long process.’ ”
Cycling is, above all, a team sport, and the tactics involved are as complicated as those of baseball or basketball. “Ever try to explain the infield-fly rule to somebody?” Armstrong asked me when we were in Texas, where he lives when he is not racing or training in Europe. “You have to watch it to get it. As soon as you pay some attention to the tactics, cycling makes a lot of sense.”…
The physical demands on competitive cyclists are immense. One day, they will have to ride two hundred kilometres through the mountains; the next day there might be a long, flat sprint lasting seven hours. Because cyclists have such a low percentage of body fat, they are more susceptible to infections than other people. (At the beginning of the Tour, Armstrong’s body fat is around four or five per cent; this season, Shaquille O’Neal, the most powerful player in the N.B.A., boasted that his body-fat level was sixteen per cent.)
The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days…
Looking at a wide range of physical activities, Saris and his colleagues measured the metabolic demands made on people engaged in each of them. “On average, the cyclists expend sixty-five hundred calories a day for three weeks, with peak days of ten thousand calories,” he said. “If you are sedentary, you are burning perhaps twenty-five hundred calories a day. Active people might burn as many as thirty-five hundred.”
Saris compared the metabolic rates of professional cyclists while they were riding with those of a variety of animal species, and he created a kind of energy index-dividing daily expenditure of energy by resting metabolic rate. This figure turned out to range from one to seven. An active male rates about two on Saris’s index and an average professional cyclist four and a half. Almost no species can survive with a number that is greater than five. For example, the effort made by birds foraging for food sometimes kills them, and they scored a little more than five. In fact, only four species are known to have higher rates on Saris’s energy index than the professional cyclists in his study: a small Australian possum, a macaroni penguin, a large seabird called a gannet, and one species of marsupial mouse…
Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong’s body is regularly inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules. “Depends whether you want to win,” he replied. “I do. The Tour is a two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less. One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn’t that much. So the people who win are the ones willing to suffer the most.” Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton, Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it…
