Saturday, October 28, 2006

28 Oct 2006 10:14 pm

Worst '80s Video Nominee

28 Oct 2006 07:49 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

As a long time fan of Bill Maher, it's safe to say that I've seen probably every episode of Real Time since it began on HBO. I've seen you on his program several times and I've also seen you on Chris Matthews' weekend show regularly.

I am a proud Liberal and as such, you and I don't agree on some points. However, my observations of you are that above being a Traditional Conservative you are first a Realist and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. You are honest enough to see things as they truly are and you are not afraid to call a spade a spade on either side of the isle. I believe that if more people shared your pragmatic and objective view towards politics this would be a much better country. We don't have to agree on everything in order to respect and appreciate each other while trying to achieve some common goals. It's comforting to know that there are examples of this philosophy - like yourself - who have a public voice and, hopefully, a chance to spread some common sense. You are a good American and it's important that you keep saying what you believe, even the stuff that occasionally pisses me off.

LOL. I appreciate deeply my reader's ability to see past disagreements to see where, on the deepest issues, I am proud to be in the same trench he is. We can fight over Medicare and hate crime laws another time. But habeas corpus, war, torture and basic fiscal responsibility are the issues now. I will join happily with any liberal, any leftist, any conservative, any Christian, any Muslim, any Jew - to fight for these basic principles. I don't care about these labels as much as I care about this country. And it needs saving right now from the thugs and incompetents who are running it.

28 Oct 2006 06:41 pm

Hewitt Retracts

Hugh Hewitt has now retracted his broadcast claim that

"One of the very, very few times that the government needs a compelling reason to treat people differently is when they do so on the basis of race. I mean, that's what's so astonishing about this book, is that you purported to write a book about the Constitution, and you don't know how it works."

After being exposed as plain wrong, he now writes:

That was an error on my part, one of many I have made in 17 years of broadcasting and a decade of teaching, but nevertheless an error. I should have taken the time to more fully school Andrew in the intricacies of Equal Protection analysis. I am glad to correct the error. But I note that the context in which I misspoke was a radio interview when I was pointing out that Sullivan had radically misstated the law completely, not incompletely stated it.

Well let's go to the passage in the book where Hewitt clams I am misrepresenting American constitutional law. It's on page 239, and the subject is not about American constitutional law at all. The chapter is about "A Politics of Freedom". It is an essay of political philosophy, about an ideal form of conservatism that I am advancing as my own political philosophy. It refers to no specific constititution. It's about some basic principles about how a conservatism of doubt should deal with its own citizens, the same politics I advanced in "Virtually Normal":

All that conservatism asserts is something much more modest than a claim that human beings are substantively equal. The conservative merely asserts that while we cannot prove or know the substantive equality of human beings, we do know enough to grant them formal equality. By formal equality, I mean simply the respect due to a fellow citizen, in the limited public world of citizenship. We may think that the woman down the street is a fool or a liar or a saint or a good and old friend. She may be, in our judgment, our inferior or superior on any number of measurements. But none of these qualities or flaws is civilly or politically relevant. None affects her status as an equal citizen in the formal sense. She still has one vote, as do you. She is governed by the same laws as you are. Fools and sages, old and young, male and female, gay and straight, beautiful and ugly, moral and unprincipled, strong and weak: as human beings, we are vastly different. But as citizens, the conservative argues, we are utterly indistinguishable from each other.

All this theory of equality depends on is the fallibility of our own knowledge; and the recognition that, since we cannot fully know another, we owe each other the benefit of the doubt as equal citizens of any political order. From doubt, comes security; and from doubt comes equality.

There may, of course, be occasions when the government must necessarily treat us differently, make distinctions between this group of people or that one. The most obvious distinction is between adults and children. A government is not going to recruit seven-year olds into military service. But even then, in a broader context, the government still acknowledges the citizenship of a child; and the state exists to protect children in some instances, even from their own parents, if their physical security is at stake. There is, in other words, a presumption in the way a government interacts with its own citizens. That presumption is that it will treat each citizen absolutely alike, unless it has a very compelling interest or reason not to. And it is up to the government to prove it has a good reason to discriminate rather than up to a citizen to prove she is equal under the law.

You may notice how modest this political theory is.

[I have added some italics, but some are also in the original.] So it is entirely clear to any honest reader that what I am talking about here is a political theory that may or may not inhere in any specific constitution. It's as much about the English political tradition as the American one. I am trying to argue that doubt itself is a rampart of equality - a difficult claim I base in Hobbes but that is not particularly widespread. (I'd welcome a good debate about whether this is a sufficient philosophical base for formal equality, but Hewitt isn't interested in a good debate.)

It is perfectly clear, in other words, that I am not citing the U.S. constitution here - let alone expounding on the intricacies of the equal protection clause or anything else in the constitution for that matter. I am writing about an ideal philosophical version of conservatism that may or may not exist in the ideal world, but which has roots in many of the ideas embedded in the America political philosophy and English political thought, specifically Hobbes and Locke.

So for Hewitt to wrench that sentence out of context on the air and claim that I have "radically mistated the law entirely" when I didn't even nention the law at all is so dishonest it speaks for itself. To compound this and say that

no one with a legal education in America can agree with Andrew on a major premise of his book

is a batant falsehood which, if he has any intellectual integrity, he will need to retract as well. This isn't a major premise of the book at all, by the way (another Hewitt hyperbole). It is a part of one chapter, the last one. Since he has read the whole book and is a smart man and knows the context, he knows he's lying. But this is his modus operandi: lying knowingly in order to smear anyone who dissents from the current party line. To recap: So far, he has been proven empirically wrong on a basic matter of constitutional law (his alleged expertise!) and has had to retract. But his deeper error is to deliberately mislead people who haven't read the book that the passage he is citing is not about the American constitution at all. It's about political philosophy - where I have the PhD, and he doesn't.

Why are so many contemporary "conservatives" lying about the contents of this book? The only reason I can come up with is that they are deadly afraid of its arguments. They know that, unlike many liberals, I know what they believe, because I have been schooled in conservatism and know exactly how deeply they have abused it. I was saturated in Hobbes and Oakeshott and Strauss and Plato and Locke and Burke and conservative political philosophy. Many of them haven't even heard of these writers. So their only response is a desperate series of smears and lies.

Which is why you should read the book, and make your own mind up.

28 Oct 2006 06:40 pm

Bill Maher's Halloween Costume

Happy Halloween. All rights reserved.

28 Oct 2006 05:44 pm

Bush Backs Civil Unions for Gays

The proof:

28 Oct 2006 05:25 pm

Rumsfeld Jails a Journalist Without Charges

The AP is fighting back. Money quote:

[Santiago Lyon, the AP's director of photography] said he reviewed [Bilal] Hussein's images and interviewed his colleagues and found nothing to suggest he was doing more than his job in a war zone. The vast majority of images depicts the realities of war, Lyon said, and "may be an inconvenient truth, but a truth nonetheless."

David Zeeck, president of ASNE and executive editor of The News Tribune, of Tacoma, Wash., called Hussein's detention without charges "contrary to American values."

"This is how Saddam Hussein dealt with reporters; he would hold them incommunicado," Zeeck said.

28 Oct 2006 04:12 pm

The View From Your Window

Joseph City, Arizona, 9 am.

28 Oct 2006 03:43 pm

Cheney's "No-Brainer"

How did the Bush Office of Legal Counsel actually conclude that "waterboarding" - finally publicly confirmed as a "no-brainer" by the vice-president and practised by the U.S., following the Khmer Rouge - actually qualify as "legal" and "not torture"? Marty Lederman explains why here.

28 Oct 2006 03:01 pm

Listening to Jesus

A reader writes:

I am almost awestruck by how well you handled yourself during the inquisition. I read the transcript yesterday, and I am still thinking about it. You provided many valuable insights, but what I find most remarkable is something I suppose your interviewer could never fathom: You are doing Christianity a service. You inspire me, a person of slight Catholic upbringing and tenuous faith, to turn back to the Church.

My greatest sadness these past few years is how the Christianists and fanatics have made the word "Christian" a dirty word for so many people. As if the inspiring, dangerous, beautiful, unforgettable words of Jesus were not as powerful now as ever. My book is, in fact, a defense of Christianity, of the core message of the Gospels, of peace and forgiveness and love and doubt, against the politicized brutality some have now turned it into. I'm not alone in this. David Kuo makes a moving case for just such a Christianity in his book (and we'll be dialoguing next week about that on this blog and his). My book is not just about politics. The word "soul" in its title is no accident. It is really about the love of God in the person of Jesus. Money quote from Chapter Five:

The message of the Gospels seems to me to be constantly returning to this theme: those who set themselves up as arbiters of moral correctness, the men of the book, the Pharisees, are often the furthest from God. Rules can only go so far; love does the rest. And the rest is by far the most important part. Jesus of Nazareth constantly tells his fellow human beings to let go of law and let love happen: to let go of the pursuit of certainty, to let go of possessions, to let go of pride, to let go of reputation and ambition, to let go also of obsessing about laws and doctrines. This letting go is what the fundamentalist fears the most. To him, it implies chaos, disorder, anarchy. To Jesus, it is the beginning of wisdom, and the prerequisite of love.

Love. Agape. How much of it do you see on the gay-baiting, fear-mongering, politically controlling Christianist right?

28 Oct 2006 12:48 pm

Chrenkoff Re-emerges

Remember Arthur Chrenkoff? He did some great work showing how in the early period of the Iraq invasion, there were indeed signs of hope and progress, now fast eclipsed by civil war. He has a new book out, called "Night Trains". He describes it thus:

"A supernatural, alternative reality war thriller about a contemporary young man travelling back to help right the greatest wrong of the last century."

Calling Dr Freud. I asked him whether he now recants his former optimism about Iraq and scorn for MSM reporting, championed by me and others like Reynolds and Taranto and NRO. His response:

Re Iraq - it's funny, because I'm not by nature an optimistic person (I think that the stereotypically romantic but melancholic and fatalistic Polish psyche has been too strongly beaten into us over the centuries between the hammer of Germany and the anvil of Russia), but I remain cautiously optimistic, even if for the sake of all the decent people in Iraq. I remember what it's like to live in a shit state, so I feel great empathy for all the people over there who want to transcend the horror or the three decades of Baathism and the current problems just to have a normal life, that all too many in the West take for granted.

As my late grandmother used to say, things are rarely as good or as bad as they seem. I think that one way or another Iraq will muddle through. It really sickens me to see people who seem to cheer the problems over there just so they can score a political point domestically.

On that last point, I am in complete agreement. My only motive in exposing the lies and incompetence of the Bush administration is precisely because I want Iraqis to have a decent future, and my heart breaks for those brave souls facing down murder and blackmail each day to protect themselves in the face of our arrogant incompetence. I fear it's too late now. But then I'm Irish, not Polish.

Friday, October 27, 2006

27 Oct 2006 09:23 pm

The Case Against Christianism

Garry Wills at his best.

27 Oct 2006 08:19 pm

Hewitt's Ignorance of Constitutional Law

A constitutional law professor writes:

Hewitt said this, to you, in an attempt to make you feel stupid.

"The only time the government needs a compelling reason to treat people differently is when they do so on the basis of race. I mean, that's what's so astonishing about this book, is that you purported to write a book about the Constitution, and you dont know how it works."

Well, since he kept saying he would flunk you in ConLaw, let me tell you, as someone who has graded several hundred constitutional law final exams, that I, and any other professor of constitutional law, even at the undergraduate level, would flunk a student who said something so dumb as Hewitt's quote.

There are three levels of scrutiny that the courts apply to laws that treat people differently (ie, equal protection cases). In the first, the government merely needs a "rational basis" for making distinctions. I.e. we treat those who commit robberies differently, because there's a rational basis for the law.  Or laws setting sexual age of consent, which clearly discriminate against those of a certain age, but there's a rational basis, which the court accepts.

Then, there is "substantial relationship" test, which is applied only in sex discrimination cases. It means there must be a close connection between the law and some well-founded purpose (ie, it must be more than the assertion of some rational basis). It is consequently MUCH harder to have laws that treat men and women differently than it is to have laws that treat children and adults differently. But, for example, a state-run insurance plan that charged men and women different rates because of established differences in lifespan would probably meet this standard.

Finally, there's the place where Hugh makes his gobsmackingly stupid error: strict scrutiny. In strict scrutiny, any discriminatory law must meet two standards - it must identify a compelling need of the government for the law that can only be met by discrimination, AND it must be narrowly tailored to meet that need.  Sometimes, lawyers joke that it is "strict in name, fatal in practice" because it is so hard to meet that standard. Hugh said it ONLY applied to race. He couldn't be more wrong, as any graduate of my conlaw class could tell him. Strict scrutiny applies to race, religion, national origin, language - and, according to some, any fundamental freedom. There is a debate about which categories strict scrutiny should apply to, but no scholar I've ever read limits it only to race. Hewitt is dead wrong.

Actually, he knew he was dead wrong. That's why he began the interview establishing that I hadn't been to law school so he could then preen in front of his audience that I don't know what I'm talking about.

These people are truly rattled by this book. I believe it's a depth charge into the degerenacy of the current conservative movement. But make your own mind up. It's available here.

27 Oct 2006 07:38 pm

Conservatism Remembered

A reader writes:

I can recall a Firing Line show when William F. Buckley, discussing some intractable inner-city problem with a liberal, made a comment to the effect that conservatives do not have solutions to all of our problems, we have approaches.

George Will has spoken of the conservative mindset as one with a sense of proportion about things, and the first rule of government should be to do no harm.

This probably explains why many truly conservative minded folks are so aghast over the President's Iraq War policies and perplexed by the central theme of his second inaugural.

George Will and Bill Buckley? Don't you realize they're leftists these days?

27 Oct 2006 07:17 pm

Poseur Alert

"It begins with familiar-seeming mild flu-like symptoms (mild in my case, more severe in others), but then tails off into a long, etiolated fugue state in which something more than flu-like lethargy, lassitude and inanition paralyzes you. It's not just a neutral world weariness, it's Weltschmerz—world-historical sadness: Some mournful, emotional, deeply despairing, unremittingly sad and despondent sense of life seizes you and won’t let go for at least a week afterward," - Ron Rosenbaum on the flu.

Dude, get some Nyquil.

27 Oct 2006 07:07 pm

The Family Guy and A-Ha

A nugget of pop-culture cross pollination. But I hereby swear that all true South Park fans post excerpts from "The Family Guy" the way true conservatives quote Sean Hannity.

27 Oct 2006 06:42 pm

Ponnuru Attacks!

Oh, joy. He hasn't read the book, of course. But, according to him, it can only be two things: "daft or dishonest". The insults these theocons are throwing my way is a sign of their real fear that the book exposes them for what they are: deeply alien to conservatism in its old, sane sense, theocratic hijackers of a great tradition of moderation and doubt. in the third chapter of the book, for example, "The Theoconservative Project," I carefully take every theocon argument about abortion, end-of-life issues and heterosexual sex and try to argue that they are completely incoherent on their own terms. I think it devastates the arguments of Ponnuru's mentor, Robert George. But make your own mind up. You can buy it here and here. I welcome all intelligent arguments against my position, and when the book club reading periods ends after the election, I hope to address the toughest with as much candor as I can.

Yes, I haven't read Ponnuru's book either. A book that describes anyone who disagrees with it as "The Party of Death" excludes itself from reasonable discussion. But I restricted myself to criticizing its Coulteresque title (and its front cover Coulter blurb) - designed to persuade no-one but to rally and sell to the fanatical base (the Rove technique applied to intellectual discourse) - and to a couple of emails from people who had read the book.

But I'm thrilled they're angry. They wouldn't be if they didn't know this book exposes them in ways few yet have. I'm not on the left. I've spent twenty-five years on the right. I know who these people are. And how far they have drifted from the principles they once might have held. And, along with growing numbers of real conservatives, I have no interest in going along with it any longer.

27 Oct 2006 05:46 pm

Where the Right Went Wrong

Tonight at 8 pm on CNN, as part of their superb series on broken government, Jeff Greenfield tackles the inflamatory debate on the right, to which my book seems to have provided some gasoline. I'm one of the interviewees, along with fellow heretic Bruce Bartlett. By the way, if you are interested in a book that Hugh Hewitt regards as a mess and as a threat to his version of Christianist Republicanism, you can buy it here or here and make up your own mind.

If the book can prompt the usually level-headed David Brooks to contradict himself in order to criticize it and has sent Hugh Hewitt into conniptions, it might just be on to something about what has gone wrong with American conservativsm.

Later the same night (11 pm Eastern, !0 Central), I'll be on live on Bill Maher's show, HBO's Real Time, on a panel with Harry Belafonte and Christie Todd Whitman. Special guests: Harold Ford Jr and Arianna Huffington. You want fun? I'd watch.

27 Oct 2006 05:27 pm

The Vice President For Torture Ctd

Yesterday, Cheney gave every impression that using Khmer Rouge interrogation techniques was a "no-brainer" to him. Any sane person reading that transcript can see what he's saying. But Tony Snow, who is more and more becoming a character from "Animal Farm" every day, now says this:

"Let me give you the no brainers here. No brainer No. 1 is that we don't torture. No brainer No. 2: We don't break the law - our own or international law. No brainer No. 3: the vice president doesn't give away questioning techniques. No. 4, the administration does believe in legal questioning techniques of known killers whose questioning can, in fact, be used to save American lives."

Lies; lies, and more lies. At the heart of this election is whether the American people should support people who have contempt for the most basic of American liberties, who have suspended habeas corpus for the indefinite future and who think it is a "no-brainer", in this respect, to adopt the moral interrogation standards of the Khmer Rouge.

This should not be a partisan issue or even a political issue. It is a civic responsibility. Vote Democrat or abstain.

27 Oct 2006 05:19 pm

The View from Your Window

Breckenridge, Colorado, 4.10 pm.

27 Oct 2006 05:08 pm

Stand By

Caffeination in progress.

27 Oct 2006 07:09 am

Hitting the Wall

Well I got to LA, did more media today, and my only free evening in a week was tonight. Should I diligently read up on the news and blog? Should I just give in to the near-coma of "what city am I in?" bouktourness and crash? Or should I go out to dinner with two friends and get a little hammered?

See you when I wake up.

27 Oct 2006 07:01 am

Best-Worst 80s Video Nominee

27 Oct 2006 06:57 am

Best 80s Video Nominee

27 Oct 2006 01:15 am

Torture and the Casus Belli

The cancer apparently helped begin this disaster as well:

Iban al Shakh al Libby was apparently taken to Cairo, [former FBI agent Jack] Clonan told the BBC, after being captured in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

"He (Libby) claims he was tortured in jail and that would be routine in Egyptian prisons," Grey said. "What he claimed most significantly was a connection between ... Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. This intelligence report made it all the way to the top, and was used by (former US secretary of state) Colin Powell as a key piece of justification ... for invading Iraq," he told the broadcaster.

Powell claimed in a UN Security Council meeting in February 2003, weeks before a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, that the country under Saddam Hussein had provided weapons training to Al-Qaeda, saying he could "trace the story of a senior terrorist operative", whom Grey alleges is Libby.

"At the time, the caveats to say this intelligence was extracted under torture were not provided," Grey said.

This cancer, so beloved of this torture-friendly administration, helped generate the untruths that so many of us then believed as a reason to go to war. And in turn, it led to more torture, which the vice-president regards as a "no-brainer". In fact, it merely proves that the vice-president has no brain, when it comes to matters of intelligence-gathering.   

Thursday, October 26, 2006

26 Oct 2006 11:12 pm

Quote of the Day

 "Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn't turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too."

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don't understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an assertion that contains no more than fifteen words...

Shall I be fair? Coulter was trained as a lawyer, and she does have an understanding of the rules of evidence... If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite," - Chistopher Hitchens, on Ann Coulter.

26 Oct 2006 08:40 pm

Hewitt vs a Heretic

Hugh Hewitt has published a transcript of his "interview" with me yesterday. Here are some of his questions:

"Are you a Christian?"

"Do you believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead?"

"Do you consider yourself under the authority of Benedict, or before him, John Paul II?"

You can read my answers in the transcript. This was not an interview. It was an inquisition. I was having none of it, and refused to acquiesce in his attempt to hijack an interview. But when I tried to challenge him back, he wouldn't answer. Money quote:

AS: How are you, as a Christian, able to support torture, Hugh?

HH: Now I want to go back ... again ...

AS: Again, you're not answering.

HH: We'll have ... I'm not going to be interviewed ... I'm interviewing you, because I did a lot of work to get ready for this interview, not to debate you. I want to know about your book.

AS: You can't answer. You refuse to answer these questions.

HH: Has any...you are a proponent.

AS: How do you support the abrogation of habeas corpus, and the imposition of torture in America? That's a very profound question. And why are you ducking it?

HH: Well, actually, as Justice Marshall said, it’s a very important question, and it's also not a very difficult one. I don't do either of those things. So that's the end of it.

Really? This is what he wrote today:

The left hates Bush for a variety of reasons, chief among them that it is easy in this age when nothing is easy. It is safe to scream "torture" in an era when threats that boggle the mind are in fact pressing.

So it would appear that Hewitt does believe the use of torture is justified because of the stakes, but he refuses to say it outright because he knows that a true Christian could never say such a thing, without being exposed as someone who is actually the enemy of the teachings of Jesus. Or he has the exquisite moral position of a Glenn Reynolds who is simply anti-anti-torture - but, boy, is he opposed to one crank blogger's "outing" of Republicans. Torture is a minor issue compared with that.

Then there are Hewitt's readers and listeners. On Townhall.com, where he blogs, I have now been called a "Commiequeerbigocrap" and "homosexual sexual pervert". I just got an email from one of his listeners that wrote the following:

Your refusal to accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and your suggestion (from ignorance?) that our Lord's death was not part of His plan have convinced my wife and I - who sat through the whole wetched hour - to vote a straight Republican ticket.

To clarify, I simply stated that the Gospels tell us that on the cross itself, as Jesus' last words, he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" His last words were of doubt, doubt that God was not there - the doubt these fanatics want to expunge from true faith. But notice that they are voting Republican entirely on religious fundamentalist grounds. They prove the whole point of my book of how true conservatism has been subverted and destroyed by religious fanaticism, enabled by apparatchiks like Hewitt. And then, of course, what they really think. From an email from a Hewitt fan today:

Why were you so obnoxious on Hugh Hewitt?
Is it because you're gay and dying of AIDS?

Read the transcript. It speaks volumes.

26 Oct 2006 07:20 pm

Best '80s Video Nominee

26 Oct 2006 06:47 pm

A Sane Gay View of New Jersey

I agree with Chris Crain. Moderation and patience are now what the gay movement needs. Not absolutism. We're winning the argument. So why demand total victory now when reasonable people, uncomfortable with marriage, can give us so much so soon, short of full marriage equality. Are we that impatient?

26 Oct 2006 06:08 pm

"Uncovered Meat"

That's how one Muslim cleric in Australia describes women who do not wear the full Muslim chador, or are immodestly dressed. At the core of this kind of Islam is the notion of women as mere objects to men - and of men as sexual predators who cannot control their own desires. And that it is indeed incompatible with modern Western notions of basic equality and self-government.

26 Oct 2006 05:37 pm

Burke and Balance

A reader writes:

You almost got it right, when you said this:

"And I might add that this balancing act as a whole - sometimes favoring reformed liberalism, sometimes favoring chastened conservatism - might itself be called conservative in a philosophical sense because it rests on a prudential judgment as to what is right at any particular moment in a particular time and place. I.e. it is not a fixed ideology. It is about prudence or practical judgment. Which is, at root, a conservative insight."

Might? There is no might. It most certainly is conservative, and the idea of balance, prudence, and practical judgment comes from Edmund Burke himself. It's all in the last paragraph of "Reflections on the Revolution in France":

"I have little to recommend my opinions but long observation and much impartiality. They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness; and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenour of his life. They come from one, almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others; from one in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever been kindled, but by what he considered as tyranny; and who snatches from his share in the endeavours which are used by good men to discredit opulent oppression, the hours he has employed on your affairs; and who in so doing persuades himself he has not departed from his usual office: they come from one who desires honours, distinctions, and emoluments, but little; and who expects them not at all; who has no contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy; who shuns contention, though he will hazard an opinion: from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end; and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise."

It is indeed the duty of the conservative to go to the other side if his side is the one marching towards tyranny. Principled, rather than partisan, conservatives will vote Democrat or abstain this fall.

26 Oct 2006 04:57 pm

Worst '80s Video

26 Oct 2006 04:43 pm

An Interview in Chicago

"Re-evaluating American conservatism" can be heard on audio file here.

26 Oct 2006 03:11 pm

The President for Torture

I cannot help but notice this casual aside in the Woodward book, a book that deserves its massive sales, because it exposes the incompetence, recklessness, and sheer brutality of the men who now run this country:

The Saudis had arrested and detained some key al Qaeda suspects immediately before and after 9/11. The president told Bandar, "If we get somebody and we can't get them to cooperate, we'll hand them over to you." ... Though the Saudis denied it, the CIA believed the Saudis tortured terrorist suspects to make them talk. In the immediate wake of 9/11 Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained.

What's striking both in Bush's and Cheney's attitude is that it never even occurs to them that there is a moral issue here. It's a "no-brainer." Here we are on the outside having impassioned debates about the rights and wrongs of abuse and torture of detainees and these two most powerful men simply assume it's fine. Their only concern is that they can find a legal euphemism in order to lie about it and pretend it isn't happening. And remember who their base is: Christians. Orwell could not have invented this.

26 Oct 2006 02:12 pm

Best Worst 80's Video

Some of the videos you sent in defy either category. They are so bad they're great; or they're great in an awful kind of way. Journey featured in many such submissions. "Separate Ways" soars above either bad or good. It just is:

26 Oct 2006 02:07 pm

The Vice-President for Torture

Yesterday was a vital day of clarity for what has happened to America in the Bush presidency. It occurred in one of the more sycophantic interviews I've ever read by "journalist" Scott Hennen, of WDAY Hot Talk. Here's the transcript, proudly posted on Cheney's own website:

Q: I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided us with enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth, we've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that. ...

Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.

So we waterboard but we don't torture. It's good to finally hear it from the vice-president's mouth. But wait! We didn't!

Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, denied that Cheney had confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding or endorsed the technique. "What the vice president was referring to was an interrogation program without torture," she said. "The vice president never goes into what may or may not be techniques or methods of questioning."

Do they think we're fools? (Yes.) Do they think the international community doesn't know what this administration is up to? (They don't care.) Does Cheney seriously believe that waterboarding is not the infliction of "severe mental or physical pain or suffering"? (No, he doesn't.)

Vote Democrat or abstain.

(Depiction of a waterboarding from the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. According to Cheney, the Khmer Rouge's tactics were a "no-brainer".)

26 Oct 2006 01:47 pm

They Started It

Dan Savage suggests a new ad for Harold Ford. Ford should look in the camera and say:

The Republicans have accused me of being a heterosexual man. They're implying that I have an interest in women. It would seem that today's Republican Party is more comfortable with elected officials - male elected officials - who take an interest in teenage boys. Mark Foley is acceptable to Ken Mehlman's GOP. Heterosexual men, it seems, are not.

Yes, it's gay-baiting in Tennessee and Glenn Reynolds would get the vapors. (So would I.) But if Karl Rove were a Democrat, he'd do it in an instant. And Rich Lowry would call it effective.

26 Oct 2006 01:20 pm

The View From Your Window

Drumkeeran, Ireland, 11.32 am.

26 Oct 2006 01:00 pm

A Green Challenge

Can you reduce global warming all by yourself? Join the gang over at Slate.

26 Oct 2006 12:28 pm

My Uni-Dimensional Book?

This blogger has a very smart critique of my book:

Sullivan and many others misdiagnosed the disease back in the 1980s: like Margaret Thatcher, they thought that there was no such thing as society, identified liberalism with socialism, and concluded that everything apart from conservatism should be flushed down the drain. What we can now see is that conservatism without liberalism cannot stand: it is too easily warped by the forces of reaction, just as it has been for the last two hundred years.

The challenge is simply this: how do we restore the creative balance between liberalism and conservatism: between compassion and prudence, between idealism and skepticism, between inventing the future and learning from history? Andrew Sullivan has grasped part of this.

I don't actually disagree with this general analysis. Oakeshott's genius was in understanding that society requires both impulses to function correctly: what he called "civil association" (involving individualism, skepticism and prudence) and "enterprise association" (suggesting collectivism, compassion and idealism). But Oakeshott's sympathies in the middle of the twentieth century - after the horrors of fascism, the threat of communism, and the suffocation of big government liberalism - was with civil association. My own sympathies right now are the same - but, for me, the great threat to civil association is collectivist fundamentalism, both at home and abroad. Even worse, at home, this collectivist fundamentalism is calling itself conservative. Hence my distress.

The book is simply an attempt to remedy that by reminding conservatives of something some of them have forgotten: that conservatives have historically been much more leery of enterprise association than civil association. And in this administration, we have one of the most controlling, certain and dangerous manifestations of that tendency since Nixon.

And I might add that this balancing act as a whole - sometimes favoring reformed liberalism, sometimes favoring chastened conservatism - might itself be called conservative in a philosophical sense because it rests on a prudential judgment as to what is right at any particular moment in a particular time and place. I.e. it is not a fixed ideology. It is about prudence or practical judgment. Which is, at root, a conservative insight.

26 Oct 2006 11:51 am

RFK and Obama

A reader writes:

Watching Senator Barack Obama on Meet the Press last Sunday, I suddenly understood how so many people felt about Robert Kennedy in 1967 and 1968.  Here is an enormously talented political figure with the capacity to inspire Americans and remind us of why America is the world's hope. Yet Obama, like Robert Kennedy in 1968, is a freshman senator for whom convention wisdom holds that a presidential run should be another cycle away.  Many of Robert Kennedy's advisors pleaded for him to wait until 1972, when the field would be clear for him.  I have no doubt that Sen. Obama has advisors today who are counseling him to wait until 2012, by which time the Democratic party will be cleared of Clintons seeking the presidency (assuming, of course, that Hilary runs and loses in 2008).

Robert Kennedy died before I was born, but he is my political hero because of his capacity for growth, because of his idealism, because of his toughness, and not the least because he chose to run for the presidency when it was difficult rather than preordained.  He heeded the call to run at a time when our country was mired in an ill-conceived and and badly executed war.  He ran for the nomination against a titan of the party (Hubert Humphrey) who had long been beloved by liberal party stalwarts but whose popularity had waned among among these activists (in Humphrey's case, because of his service as LBJ's vice-president).  RFK declared his candidacy at a time when Americans had come to distrust the words of the occupant of the Oval Office.  And when Kennedy finally decided to run for the presidency, he chose to appeal to the better angels of America's nature.

Robert Kennedy famously quoted George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why?'  I dream things that never were and ask 'Why not?'"

Today I find myself hoping that Barack Obama will think of running for the presidency and say to himself, "Why not?"

But Kennedy had been attorney-general, he had a record as an aide to McCarthy, he'd been intimately involved in foreign policy in the Kennedy White House, and he'd been imbroiled in the civil rights movement for over five years. Obama has none of that experience. Not that I'm opposed to him. But if there's one lesson I've learned these past few years is to be skeptical of potential leaders. I find Obama impressive. I have an open mind about him. But I want to know more - as I'm sure many others do as well.

(Photo: Scott Applewhite/AP.)

26 Oct 2006 03:38 am

Bush on New Jersey's Supreme Court

I think the president is fine with the New Jersey Supreme Court decision. Well, at least if he still believes this:

"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so. I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between a union between a man and a woman. Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others."

So it's up to New Jersey's legislature. And Bush would vote for civil unions. I can live with that. I'd prefer marriage equality, but within a another generation, I really don't think it will even be a contentious issue.

26 Oct 2006 02:34 am

CGI and A-Ha

An email controversy has erupted about the precise time-line of A-Ha's "Take on Me" and CGI. I had no idea so many of you were so ... well, here's the Wikipedia entry that clears it all up. Meanwhile, I was actually right about the video in question:

A-Ha's "Take On Me" video doesn't use CGI. It's an example of rotoscoping, an animation technique in which live-action footage is traced directly onto paper or cels. Max Fleischer developed the rotoscope around 1919 for his "Out of the Inkwell" cartoon series. Ralph Bakshi still uses it.

26 Oct 2006 01:30 am

Lowry and Ford

A reader writes:

Generally, I am not a huge fan of Lowry, but to characterize his brief piece on the TN ad as a "celebration" appears to me that you are picking a fight for the sake of picking one. It appeared to me that he was offering only his opinion as to what the effect of the ad may be. It may be unfortunate that people's opinions, and votes, can be swayed by an idiotic ad. However, merely stating that it is one's opinion that the ad will have that effect is not the cause of the problem.

Re-reading Lowry's post, I think the reader has a point. I over-reacted, and apologize. But the term "scored a direct hit" is a little ambiguous when the ad was so vile. And there is a touch of glee in the phrase: "the controversy helped the ad get more play that it would otherwise, amplifying its effect." I'm pretty sure Rich Lowry backs Corker.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

25 Oct 2006 11:44 pm

Heads Up

I'm on Tavis Smiley's PBS show tonight, talking about the book. We had fun. I just finished an hour and a half of an inquisition on Hugh Hewitt's show. His first question: "Are you a Christian?" "Nooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But that's roughly what it was. I asked Hewitt I think about a dozen times how he could be a Christian and support torture. He refused to answer. But it was a blast. Anyway, why not take being grilled by Cardinal Hewitt as an opportunity to show this:

25 Oct 2006 11:39 pm

"Take On Me"

A reader points out I was wrong:

It was done with CGI. The full length CGI movie Tron came out in 1982, this video is from 1985.

25 Oct 2006 10:29 pm

The Degeneracy of Conservatism

Rich Lowry celebrates the impact of the disgusting ad against Harold Ford I YouTubed yesterday. Even Corker has said it went too far. But Lowry is glad. You realize eventually how few principles these so-called conservatives have. It's about power. It's only about power.

25 Oct 2006 09:30 pm

The Response to Michael J Fox

Is Jim Caviezel speaking in Aramaic? Anyway: here's the counter-ad.

25 Oct 2006 08:09 pm

Worst '80s Video Nominee

I have to say this must be the front-runner right now. It's Barbra Streisand's hideously awful video for "Left in the Dark." No, it's not camp. It's just too bad. Don't miss the bit where she takes a drag on her cigarette, while her voice continues singing. She can't even lip-sync in this one.

Matt Drudge, this one is for you.

Click here to see the other entries...

25 Oct 2006 07:27 pm

Another Doomed Incumbent?

The Iraq war and longevity also seems to have mortally wounded the Labour government in Britain. The Conservatives - the green, gay-inclusive variety - now have a ten point lead in the polls:

Labour has the backing of only 29% of voters, equal to its lowest-ever level of support in a Guardian/ICM poll - recorded in May 1987, a month before Margaret Thatcher won a third term.

David Cameron - younger than me - could be the next prime minister. Obama doesn't seem so unlikely in that context, does he? Except you know what that makes America? An Obamanation.

25 Oct 2006 06:53 pm

Frankly Speaking

When Barney's on a roll, he's on a roll.