According to an 1998 article citing contemporaneous German periodicals, Germany has paid more than $61 billion in wartime reparations since 1951, much of it to the New York City-based Jewish Claims Conference since the Federal Republic of Germany’s Federal Restitution Law took effect in 1965.

That’s right: $61+ billion as of eight years ago.

Yesterday, U.S. Holocaust Museum Senior Advisor for External Affairs Arthur Berger declared that “Germany's leaders had embraced their country's responsibility for the evils of the Nazi era,” as the New York Times reporter paraphrased it.

This was not in response to a report on the magnitude of German reparations. No, he simply learned that the German government acceded to his demand that it liberalize access to the fifteen miles of Holocaust archives in its possession.

Two months ago, however, again according to the Times article, Mr. Berger characterized resistance to this demand as “a form of Holocaust denial.”

As we previously noted Zionist apologists are not content to try to undermine the claims of two Ivy League political science professors about The Lobby’s inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy. No, they must characterize them as all but Nazi in inspiration and hope the smear “sticks.”

Now, when one is playing to the peanut gallery, such tactics are useful. Having the attention span of dust mites, its occupants can grasp only the broadest of strokes. They want to size up a fight quickly and tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys.”

But there are others who can evaluate, and are waiting for, a more considered and temperate reply to Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, and for them rhetorical antics simply will not do. There is evidence that some apologists realize this, but it seems they cannot always restrain themselves.

Thus in “Essay Stirs Debate About Influence of a Jewish Lobby” by Alan Finder (apparently the New York Times has finally deemed this story fit to print) we read that Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz asks why the paper’s authors “recycled accusations that ‘would be seized on by bigots to promote their anti-Semitic agendas.’” The hilarious implication is that unnamed bigots are so close to seizing power that a merely academic answer to the accusations is irresponsible. And so Johns Hopkins’ Eliot Cohen trashes Mearsheimer-Walt as “anti-Semitic” and a “wretched piece of scholarship.”

Let’s conjecture that Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz would characterize David Duke as a bigot. It happens that on March 21, the former had the chance to tear the latter to shreds (figuratively speaking) on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country.”

Joe Scarborough, who’s vying with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly for the title of Rudest Host in Primetime, repeatedly talked over Duke, his first guest, during the entire program. (Its impartial title was “Hate at Harvard.” Duke did not get his Ph.D. from Harvard. The label is clearly intended for Harvard Professor Walt.)

Scarborough’s second guest, Professor Dershowitz, blathered on and on about how he has challenged Professors Mearsheimer and Walt to a debate, but to no avail. Duke, however, was ready, willing, and able to be shown by the famously argumentative law professor that he didn’t know what he was talking about, right then and there.

Apparently, Duke is good only as a foil for undermining Mearsheimer and Walt, as the New York Sun tried a few weeks ago; they are not to be used to raise Duke’s standing. For some reason, however, MSNBC's honchos were not so sure of the outcome of a Dershowitz-Duke duke-out on live television.

The Flogger hasn’t yet slogged through all 45 pages of Alan Dershowitz’s “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt ‘Working Paper’”, cited in the Times article. For now I’ll note only that it starts badly by inserting “cabal” between quotes of Mearsheimer and Walt, even though they do not use that charged term.

One more thing. Dershowitz cites CFR Senior Fellow Max Boot’s judgment that Mearsheimer-Walt expresses the “paranoid style in American politics” (a topic the late Richard Hofstadter famously investigated). Dershowitz himself won’t say directly that Mearsheimer and Walt are politically paranoid, but lets Boot float that balloon, citing his characterization of the paper as “nutty” and comparing it to, of all things, the footnote-studded John Birch Society pamphlet purporting to show President Eisenhower’s Communist affiliation.

Now, what are we to infer about Dershowitz’s paper, with its 157 footnotes, if in a footnote he ridicules Mearsheimer-Walt as Birchite-quality propaganda because of its 211 notes?

To Be Continued.

On last night’s (still pre-Katie Couric) CBS Evening News, the IRS’s capo Mark Everson assured America that his agency has “stepped up the credibility of enforcement.” Not only against “the rich” (on whom it’s always open season), but also against the poor slobs who work for cash and then succumb to the temptation to “underreport” their income to the otherwise omniscient (and, of course, omnibeneficent) guv’mint.

Most of da guv’mint’s tax sheep “follow the rules” by aiding and abetting their own fleecing, Everson proudly noted. He promised a crackdown on “Others,” however, who enjoy an “unfair advantage” in managing to hold onto their own money. Audits have doubled in the last five years, and in the near future will target and, if necessary, dragoon even more runaway slaves.

You see, “any money that doesn’t come in, in this era of deficits,” our Commissar for Extortion Services nearly wept, “is just more debt for our children and grandchildren.”

The gall! Bush’s current budget is $2.7 trillion, up from last year’s $2.4 trillion but, if we care about our children, we will applaud the IRS's enforcement of a virtual Fugitive Slave Act on those who work for tips.

On the same day, libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s essay “Cough Up” appeared on LewRockwell.com. It is both chock full of facts and charmingly naïve. Perhaps someday the Honorable Mr. Paul will believe and confess that A taxes B, C, ... n because (nearly) all of them believe it is "God's Will" or "in the Natural Order of Things" for A to do so. Once that proposition is granted, it is only a matter of time before a Republic becomes an Empire.

Really, Sir: if the State Massachusetts may tax, just why may the District of Corruption not also do so? Because, you say, the Constitution makes no provision for such predation? Contempt for that response characterized the prevailing attitude no less in oh-so-civilized 1913 than in 2006.

The permission to tax, tacitly granted or cheerfully embraced, is a moral hazard.

If Zacarias Moussaoui deserves death for failing to inform authorities of what he knew about 9/11, what should be meted out to those who actually installed and detonated the explosives in the Twin Towers that day?