Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: News briefs

The trap

Senator Carl Levin recently added his voice to those demanding the removal of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq's prime minister. This worries me, because Levin is one of the most respected Democrats in the Senate, and he has set a trap for himself. If al-Maliki is replaced, Levin will have to give the new leadership a fair chance to produce. This will mean extending American involvement in the war. The problem is that there is no Iraqi leader in sight who is clearly more likely than al-Maliki to bring about the needed reforms. The only chance I see of these reforms is an American pullout schedule that will scare the Iraqi parliament into getting off the dime. Regardless of what we do, Iraq is more likely than not to face a chaotic next few years. So the only sensible course for us is to keep more of our soldiers from being killed or maimed.

Those of us old enough to remember will recall the one plausible excuse after another offered by the Johnson and Nixon administrations for staying in Vietnam: give the new government a chance; give new military tactics a chance; provide time for the South Vietnamese army to get up to speed. And all this accomplished was to prolong the misery for our troops.

Give me a break

You probably have heard by now about how executives of "private equity" firms like Blackstone and the Fortress Investment Group have been getting away with paying just 15 percent of their earnings in taxes instead of the 35 percent paid by others of similar income. Since there is no justification for the tax break, with some members of Congress proposing to end it and even a conservative like Ben Stein finding himself unable to defend it, you would think the private equity executives would admit that they should pay what other people pay.

After all, as Stein points out in his New York Times column, "What possible difference can it make to Steven Schwartzman, the chief executive at Blackstone, if he makes $400 million or, say, $350 million a year?"

Such reasoning has, however, failed to commend itself to the private equity profiteers. Just one firm, Blackstone, has paid $3.74 million to the lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations to save the break. And that's just in the first six months of this year, which, according to the Washington Post's Jeffrey Birnbaum, makes it "the heftiest six-month payment to any lobbyist ever reported."

Peter's principles

Ironically, you will recall that Peter Peterson, one of the eminences of Blackstone, made his reputation as a deficit hawk. His take, when Blackstone went public last year, was $1.88 billion. My former colleague Michael Kinsley observes in Time: "Here was an opportunity for statesmanship that you would have thought Peterson would be unable to resist. Like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates Sr., he could be the rich man who speaks truth to the other rich folks about the need to pay their taxes."

Thus far, Peterson has found himself able to resist the mantle of statesmanship. Remember that the next time you see him pontificating about the deficit.

Carrie vs. Kerouac

An interesting point is made in the new book Deluxe. Its author, Diane Thomas, explains how the distaste for luxury that had been a product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s had ended by the 1980s. Among the factors she mentions are the obvious ones of the growth of disposable income and the increasingly easy adjustment to credit card debt--and a not so obvious one. It is that "a new and financially powerful demographic, the unmarried female executive, emerged in the 1980s." Anyone who watched Sex and the City, as I'm embarrassed to admit I did regularly, knows that Thomas is onto something.

The thrust of her book is a different matter, however. It is hinted at by the subtitle, "How Luxury Lost Its Luster." Her lament is that the quality and craftsmanship of luxury goods has been compromised and cheapened by the pursuit of a mass...