Michael Bennet, Colorado's soon-to-be U.S. senator, has experienced first hand how unions tend to suffocate innovation and change. Which is what makes his likely vote this year on Democratic legislation to abolish the secret ballot in union-organizing elections so interesting.

Will Bennet back this obnoxious measure that attempts to saddle private companies with the sort of reactionary inertia he has had to endure as superintendent of Denver Public Schools?

If he does, he'll take a huge hit on his credibility.

The Denver teachers union didn't merely dig in its heels against many of Bennet's reforms (which included closing nonperforming schools and supporting those that wished to waive contract rules to better serve their students). Union officials also mocked Bennet's initiatives as the product of "policy wonks" in love with "the latest fads," and accused the district of "bad faith."

They even tried last year to defeat the re-election bids of the president and vice-president of the school board, two of the reforms' biggest supporters.

Bennet has made no secret of his disappointment in the union's behavior. If any senator should understand the danger in dispensing with the most fundamental guarantee of election integrity in order to boost the prospects of unions - at a time when innovation and flexibility in the private sector are more critical than ever - he should be the one.

Go, set, ready . . .

We might not know what our next senator thinks about almost any issue outside of education, but we can at least be comforted by the fact that he began organizing his 2010 campaign staff even before his selection had been made public.

Now there's a fellow who understands political priorities!

Defining terrorism

Paul Campos believes the latest Israeli-Palestinian dust-up shows that terrorism "has been emptied of almost all practical meaning. 'Terrorism,' in the context of Middle East politics and warfare, has come to mean something very close to 'violence targeted at people with whom I sympathize.'

"As Nir Rosen puts it in The Guardian," Campos continued, "it is 'an empty word that means everything and nothing; it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do.' "

What rubbish. If the University of Colorado law professor, who writes a weekly column for this newspaper, has difficulty defining terrorism, that's his problem. But lots of us are able to - and it matters that we do.

Terrorism is violence that intentionally targets noncombatants for political purposes.

Campos believes that those who generally support Israel consider "a teenage Palestinian unaffiliated with any group who tries to run down Israeli soldiers with a car" a terrorist. Not so. But we do insist that the launching of missiles into Israel by Hamas are acts of terrorism because their purpose is to kill and maim civilians.

Campos seems to reject any moral distinction between razing a kindergarten and razing a bomb factory if civilians are killed in both attacks, as will probably be the case. It follows from this logic that almost any military operation in an urban landscape can be declared the moral equivalent of a suicide bombing in an ice cream parlor - a proposition that some of us find obscenely simplistic.

Since the days of the Romans (and probably before) humans have understood the moral difference between killing armed combatants and slaughtering civilians.

Early Christian philosophers such as Augustine emphasized the distinction, too. Later, the code of chivalry would develop in part as an attempt to protect the defenseless. Modern international law is hardly silent on the matter, either.

Nor is it true that people in the West never describe what "we do" as terrorism. The bombing of Dresden during World War II, for example, is broadly (and correctly) recognized as "the greatest Anglo-American moral disaster of the war against Germany," in the words of historian Paul Johnson, precisely because it seems to have had no purpose other than to break civilian morale.

If terrorism is becoming an "empty" word, it's because some people have discovered that empty words help them argue for moral equivalence where none exists.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.