Who is Tim Griffin, the man Karl Rove inserted as the new U.S. Attorney for Arkansas, bouncing Bud Cummins? Just one of the most accomplished opposition researchers in the Rove machine - as Josh Green reported in this 2004 piece in the Atlantic. Why was he put in place by a provision slipped secretly into the Patriot Act to avoid Senate scrutiny? Isn't it obvious by now? His job was not to prosecute crime, but to prosecute, slime and obliterate the opposition party. Josh Marshall explains it in this video:
Gonzales, in my view, is not the real culprit here. He is now and always has been a tool. It's Rove the Senate needs to investigate, and Rove who needs to provide the answers.
Hey, it's the blogosphere. The substantive challenge of the fisk is to force me to delineate exactly where I would draw the line between what government should and shouldn't do. I have.
He's opposed to same-sex marriage but also in favor of a federalist solution. I think the GOP's best bet on this question is the exact formula McCain has laid out. I can live within a coalition with people who oppose my right to marry the man I love. But I cannot live within a coalition that would amend the federal constitution to forbid it for ever in every state.
You wrote re Rick Stengel and the U.S. Attorneys scandal:
"One might even believe that a scandal a few weeks old isn't exactly the past."
I would go even further (as other Swampland commenters have) and argue that this US Attorney scandal has little to do with the past. These USA firings came in the wake of the 2006 elections, but are not about the 2006 elections. If this scandal really is what it appears to be, it is about using the DOJ to stack the deck in favor of the GOP for the 2008 elections. As such, this scandal is not about the past, but about the future. For this reason, both the media and Congress need to pursue this investigation vigorously.
When I used to work at a record store customers were always asking me to open their new CDs for them. 99 percent of them were incredibly impressed that I could unwrap the plastic and remove the white tape-like label that seals the top of the case in under 3 seconds.
Your tip for the day: Hold the top of the CD on an angle slide the bottom side across the edge of a table. The plastic wrapper will comes right off. Then unhinge the case and the white tape-like label can be peeled off easily. Then just re-hinge the case.
Of course my speed developed from opening a lot of CDs...and boredom.
As a liberal, I hate to defend David Brooks, but you and Greenwald are piling on to him as if he'd never written another word before today's column. Brooks isn't advocating neoconservatism as Greenwald alleges, or big government liberalism as you're alleging. If you've read him before - and I know you have - you know he sees himself as a Hamiltonian conservative who advocates opportunity as a social good. That is a value that if embraced could bring the Republican party back to relevance.
Personally, I hope the Democrats get there first. Opportunity is the flag in the middle of American politics; whoever grabs it wins.
I hope the Democrats get there first as well, because it is the authentically liberal vision: government taking care of its citizens, as parents take care of children. My vision is one where the government leaves its citizens alone as much as possible, and treats them as self-governing adults. I'm not a pure libertarian. If David were merely offering some minimal government help to increase people's ability to enjoy freedom, I'd have no problem. I favor universal private health coverage; I favor strong public funding for secondary education. Like other conservatives, I believe in a strong small state - effective policing, strong defense, etc. But I don't want government re-moralizing families, as David does, or legislating someone's idea of virtue. I don't want more and more entitlements. I don't want a middle-class clamped to the teat of the redistributive machine. I don't want a government marching around the world advancing freedom either; I prefer a government prudently attempting to prevent and deter threats to our freedom. I don't support rendition, torture or the suspension of habeas corpus. I favor either prosecuting captured terror suspects through the regular legal system or treating them as prisoners of war. I want to see government spending on a whole range of areas slashed, not increased. I want Medicare and social security means-tested, and taxes flattened. I don't want the federal government involved in local schools. I have never bought into "compassionate conservatism" which is now and always has been big government liberalism re-branded for evangelicals.
I guess I should address a semantic but perhaps salient point. I believe a strong, limited government is the necessary precursor for any freedom. Hobbes is an intellectual idol of mine. Order leads to freedom. But David's formulation is importantly different. It is that security leads to freedom. That notion of security is for me dangerously open-ended. The point of freedom, to my mind, is to live in the constant presence of insecurity, indeed to embrace such insecurity. That to me is the essence of America: the nerve to live with insecurity. Life is insecure. The goal of America is for individuals to gain the self-knowledge and nerve to live with that insecurity. That can't be given to anyone; it has to be earned by each of us, as best we can.
David wants government to soothe and remove such insecurity, to allay and calm it. He wants a mommy-state at home and a daddy-state abroad. I want to be left alone. I want to be treated as an adult. I want the state to do the minimum necessary and do that really, really well, which is, by the way, really, really hard. That's the conservative understanding of freedom. David's is essentially a liberal vision, dolled up with religion and patriotism. And it has wrought a terrible toll on both America and the coherence of the conservative movement.
D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee March 29, 2007 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee is investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys that critics charge were politically motivated. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
We do indeed have the beginnings of a realignment in American politics. As Glenn Greenwald recognizes, that is the core argument of The Conservative Soul. Conservatism has been highjacked by an ideology favoring an authoritarian, constantly-militarist, debt-ridden welfare state. It has no real roots in the Anglo-American conservative tradition. It explicitly rebukes Reagan and Goldwater as outmoded icons. David Brooks has decided to side with the Bush agenda - against individual freedom and for more government power over people's lives. Glenn Greenwald recognizes and grasps this new and essential divide in today's politics. It is not: are you left or right? It is: are you with this radical, new statism or are you against it? I'm against it, from the perspective of conservatism. And these people are not going to take that tradition away from me without an almighty fight. Money Greenwald quote:
To be considered "liberal" or "leftist" now means, more than anything else, to oppose that [Bush-Cheney-Rove] agenda. All of the people now deemed to be on the "left" - including many who have quite disparate views about the defining political disputes of the 1990s - have been able to work together with great unity because all energies of those "on the left" have been devoted not to any affirmative policy-making (because they have had, and still have, no power to do that), but merely towards the goal of exposing the corruption and radicalism at the heart of this extremist right-wing movement and to push back - impose some modest limits - on what has been this radical movement's virtually unlimited ability to install a political framework that one does not even recognize as "American."
Regardless of what other beliefs one might have, opposition to endless warmongering in the Middle East (and the wonderful tools used to promote it, such as rendition, torture and indefinite detentions) - combined with a belief in the rule of law, along with basic checks and balances, as a means of modestly limiting the power of the federal government over American citizens - is now sufficient to render one a "liberal" or "leftist." That's because the political movement that dominates our country is radical and authoritarian - "security leads to freedom." Our political spectrum is now binary: one is either a loyal follower of that movement or one is opposed to it.
This may shift as new candidates with more complicated policies and responses emerge among the Democrats and Republicans. But until then, vive la resistance! Come one, come all.
... that take five minutes to tear open and CD packages that have you screaming at the cat. And rocky four-legged tables, when three-legged ones would be completely stable. Don't you hate them? Why don't manufacturers? Virginia Postrel asks. Stephen Postrel answers.
It's been a while since I did a good fisking, but David Brooks' column today angered up the blood. He's a friend. I mean no personal animus. He's a good guy. But I think he is deeply, deeply wrong about what ails conservatism. David's column is in italics. My responses aren't:
There is an argument floating around Republican circles that in order to win again, the G.O.P. has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days. It has to once again be the minimal-government party, the maximal-freedom party, the party of rugged individualism and states' rights. This is folly. It's the wrong diagnosis of current realities and so the wrong prescription for the future.
So far, nothing but rhetoric and cliches from David. "Rugged individualism"? Why the "rugged"? Why not just freedom to live one's life as one chooses, as opposed to the way in which David's allies in the religious and authoritarian right want to boss us around?
Back in the 1970s, when Reaganism became popular, top tax rates were in the 70s, growth was stagnant and inflation was high. Federal regulation stifled competition. Government welfare policies enabled a culture of dependency. Socialism was still a coherent creed, and many believed the capitalist world was headed toward a Swedish welfare model.
In short, in the 1970s, normal, nonideological people were right to think that their future prospects might be dimmed by a stultifying state. People were right to believe that government was undermining personal responsibility. People were right to have what Tyler Cowen, in a brilliant essay in Cato Unbound, calls the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm burned into their minds — the idea that big government means less personal liberty.
But bigger government always means less personal liberty. This is simply a fact, not an opinion. The trade-off is always there. It may be worth it in some instances - which is why I'm not a libertarian. But it is simply true that every dollar taken by the government is one dollar less for you and me to spend on what we decide is best; every freedom removed or infringed by the government is one less for you and me to enjoy. You can defend the trade-off, and should at times, but please don't pretend it isn't there.
I'm a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom. I think universal healthcare insurance is an infringement of liberty, but since we have committed to providing emergency healthcare for all, it's a trade-off worth making for fiscal and moral reasons. Small government conservatives don't want to abandon government. We want it small - but strong and focused on what government really ought to do. And we have learned from experience that the bigger government is, the less effective it often is; and the more confusing and massive it is, the less accountable it is.
We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes to make us all feel more secure in amorphous ways? The lesson of our time is the utter incompetence and dysfunction of government at all levels. The solution to this is not to enlarge government, but to remove from it what it shouldn't be doing, and focus like a laser beam on getting it to work right on the essential tasks no private entity can do.
But today, many of those old problems have receded or been addressed. Today the big threats to people's future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation.
And more government is the answer to all this? "Complex, decentralized phenomena" require clumsy, bureaucratic big government to solve them? When did David Brooks become a closet liberal? (Answer: in the 1990s.) What we desperately need is smaller, better government: a more effective use of military and intelligence to contain and deter Islamist terror, freer trade, effective education (which is best innovated at a local not federal level), a simple, serious carbon tax to foment private sector innovation in new energy technology, and shrewder diplomacy. This isn't big government. A Reaganite government could do all these things, after tackling the middle class welfare state that is slowly strangling the capacity of government to operate solvently at all.
Normal, nonideological people ...
Please. This is a straw man. Everyone who differs from David is ideological and abnormal?
... are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The 'liberty vs. power' paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a 'security leads to freedom' paradigm. People with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world.
I'm sorry, but the security-before-freedom is and has always been central to small government conservatism, not the Christianist-dominated welfare state Bush has created and Brooks helped defend. None of us who believe in maximal freedom and minimum government believe the government should not be dedicated to security. In fact, it's the over-extension of government that has helped take its focus off security. I'd love to end farm subsidies, pork, the mortgage deduction, and to means-test social security - and spend the money saved on securing our ports and borders, rebuilding hollowed out necessities like FEMA, increasing the size of the military, and providing universal health coverage through the private sector. And all of that is compatible with small government conservatism.
People with secure health care can switch jobs more easily. People who feel free from terror can live their lives more loosely. People who come from stable homes and pass through engaged schools are free to choose from a wider range of opportunities.
But government has no business and no competence in creating "stable homes". That's the role of families, churches, local leaders, relatives, synagogues, mosques and all the institutions of civil society that David seems to want to be replaced or guided by government. Brooks "national greatness" isn't conservatism; and it never was. It's statism, overlayed with religious sanctimony and imperial ambitions.
The 'security leads to freedom' paradigm is a fundamental principle of child psychology, but conservative think tankers and activists have been slow to recognize the change in their historical circumstance. All their intellectual training has been oriented by the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm. (Postwar planning in Iraq was so poor because many in the G.O.P. were not really alive to the truth that security is a precondition for freedom.)
Well yes on the latter. But providing basic law and order is not what we are discussing in America. I might add I find it amazing that in an era when habeas corpus has been suspended for many, when the government is wire-tapping phones without a warrant, when U.S. citizens are "disappeared" without charges for several years, and when torture has been introduced as a legal government tool, David is actually charging that the problem with the liberty vs power paradigm is that it is outdated?? It has never been more relevant. It is Brooks who is stuck in the past - some time in the late 1990s when the intellectual experiment that created the Bush administration was in its infancy. The authors of that experiment should, to my mind, be leery of venturing out in public, not defending "no U-turns" in Bush conservatism.
The general public, which is less invested in abstract principles, has been quicker to grope its way toward the new mental framework. As a Pew poll released last week indicated, the public has not lost its suspicion of big government. Most Americans believe government regulation does more harm than good. But they do think government should be more active in redressing segmentation and inequality. Almost all corporations, including Wal-Mart, have extraordinarily high approval ratings. But voters are clearly anxious about globalization.
The Republican Party, which still talks as if government were the biggest threat to choice, has lost touch with independent voters. Offered a choice between stale Democrats and stale Republicans, voters now choose Democrats, who at least talk about economic and domestic security.
Hmmm. I wonder why many Independents have become turned off by the GOP? Could it be that David's project of bringing in a cohort of religious zealots has tarred the GOP as a bunch of intolerant, bossy bigots? Could it be that the massive spending, debt and entitlement splurge has alienated fiscal conservatives in the Perot mode? Nah. It's the libertarians fault, isn't it? In my view, the obvious reason voters now pick Democrats is the astonishingly awful legacy - foreign and domestic - of Republican power under the aegis of Brooks's philosophy. If you have to choose between two big government parties, dedicated to taking care of everyone, why not pick the brand that knows how to do it and actually believes in it? And the one that isn't patently mean-spirited toward gays, immigrants, and non-evangelicals?
The Bush Republicans, following David's advice, have exploded spending, loaded massive debt onto the next generation, taken pork to record levels, and passed a biggest new entitlement since the Great Society. They've increased spending faster than anyone since FDR. Meanwhile their actual effective governance has been a shambles. Of course voters prefer Democrats when they have to pick between fundamentalist, insolvent, incompetent big government and secular, solvent big government. I sure would.
The Democrats have a 15 point advantage in voter identification. Voters prefer Democratic economic policies by 14 points, Democratic tax policies by 15 points, Democratic health care policies by 24 points and Democratic energy policies by 20 points. If this is a country that wants to return to Barry Goldwater, it is showing it by supporting the policies of Dick Durbin.
No, they're simply registering that the Brooks experiment in turning the GOP into a religious, statist party for cronies and incompetents has been a disaster for Republicanism and a catastrophe for conservatism. Given no true conservative alternative, voters have gone back to the Dems. Brooks was an intellectual architect of both visions - massive intervention abroad, and warmed-over socialism at home. No wonder the conservative coalition has fallen apart, and people are now backing Democrats.
The sad thing is that President Bush sensed this shift in public consciousness back in 1999. Compassionate conservatism was an attempt to move beyond the 'liberty vs. power' paradigm. But because it was never fleshed out and because the Congressional G.O.P. rejected the implant, a new Republican governing philosophy did not emerge.
The classic dodge: national greatness conservatism - big spending at home, big wars abroad - wasn't tried and therefore didn't fail. Please. It was tried, David, with bells on, and it has failed so spectacularly you need glasses with neocon thickness not to see it. In fact, its manifest failure may consign conservatism to the political wilderness for a generation - and has deeply increased the security dangers America now faces.
The party is going to have to make another run at it. As it does, it will have to shift mentalities. The 'security leads to freedom' paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).
Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future.
And Bush and Cheney are? I know who I'd pick. Until the GOP thoroughly purges itself of the impulses of the Bush era - impulses enabled and supported by Brooks - they're finished. And they deserve to be.
Some begin to realize that Bush and Rove may have destroyed the Republican party for a generation. Some of us have been saying this for a while, but better late then never. Here's my proposal for returning conservatism to its true philosophical roots. Peter Berkowitz sees slivers of hope in each of the post-Bush candidates.
GQ: But you've spent time in Gitmo as a JAG. You had a personal connection to the place. The administration's tacit approval of torture had to have been of interest to you.
DI: Well, I don't like it. This country doesn't stand for that. By condoning torture or near torture, we're as bad as the people we're fighting. Sure, we're not cutting their heads off and filming it, but this country stands for decency. It makes me think of what Bobby Kennedy argued during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military wanted to do a preemptive strike on Cuba. He goes, "You mean, you want us to do a Pearl Harbor, except we're the Japanese. We don't do that. Americans don't do that."
GQ: Does America feel less like America to you now than it did even just a few years back?
DI: For the time being. I don't think that's necessarily something that's going to be permanently in place.
GQ: You think it's something that's going to change on Jan. 21, 2009?
DI: Yes. And I don't care who's in power. I think you're going to see a radically different face to American foreign policy.
GQ: And clearly you think that's a healthy thing.
DI: Yeah. And one other thing I'll say is that this scandal has really grown beyond just us. This has turned out to be a struggle between the executive and legislative branches of our federal government. Our founding fathers when they put our government together assumed checks and balances, assumed compromise. When one party—and it doesn't matter which party—has that kind of unitary power like my party did, bad things happen.
Iglesias is a Republican. I wonder if his conscience on the matter of torture was another reason to get rid of him.
He hasn't endorsed it, but he's flirting with it. If a leading Republican presents a serious proposal to slash corporate welfare, end agricultural subsidies, reform entitlements, wage war on pork with the veto-pen and abolish much of the IRS with a flat tax, designed both to protect the poor and to remove all the tax shelters for the very rich, then a lot of people like me are going to feel more comfortable with the GOP. Keep it up, Rudy. And you might just put the Reagan coalition together again.
I don't consider myself a conservative of any stripe, but I am trained theologically and a regular reader of First Things, and I'm refreshed by Christian conservatives who aren't marching to the beat of the First Things drummer.
Nevertheless, of all the things you might agree with Bush about, I hope you'll reconsider your commitment to the possibility of "pure evil". This is among the least theologically orthodox concepts that Bush has invoked. For the classical theological tradition, everything that exists is good, full stop. "How do we know that God loves sinners?" asks Thomas Aquinas? "Because there are sinners." God does not create evil creatures or natures. And nothing else "creates" in the technical theological sense of that word. Evil must therefore be the lack or corruption of something good rather than the presence of something purely or intensely evil.
This strikes many people as counterintuitive. I'm fine with that. Incarnation and Trinity aren't simple, straightforward reflections either. But you can witness the power of the logic by rereading Augustine's Confessions or City of God. In the latter work Augustine tries to imagine the most wicked creature he can think of - he invokes the mythical figure of Cacus, a big nasty creature who eats anyone who gets near him. Even Cacus, concludes Augustine, seeks peace. Even Cacus wills what he wills under the aspect of some good. Sin does not destroy nature. "Evil cannot wholly consume good" (Augustine, enchiridion on faith, hope, and love, cited by Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Part I, Q. 48, sed contra).
There is a vital practical significance to the classical view. Since we can't reduce our enemies to pure blackness, we have to take them seriously as creatures of God whose evil willing is nonetheless always done under the aspect of some good. Even the suicide - the classical hard case - wills evil for the sake of the good of some peace, namely, being free from the distress of life. Even Bin Laden wills what he wills under some aspect of the good. Even Bin Laden wants peace of some sort.
Amazingly, some neoconservative Christians seem to make nihilism a genuine option in the world. As if one could actually will nothingness. Thus the neoconservative "remedy": annihilate the terrorists. As it turns out, this just makes an entire people feel backed into a corner and spawns more terrorists. It would be far more constructive to try to find some way to connect with that aspect of the good under which even the vilest of offenders are doing their evil deeds. For Bush, there is one path: kill the evil terrorists. This is the cul de sac of the new Manicheaism. But there are other options: get rid of the military bases in the Middle East; treat the terrorists as an international criminal conspiracy that requires international collaboration at the level of policing and prosecuting (like drug dealers and mafia syndicates); seek a genuine solution to the Palestinian crisis.
Here's a legal analysis of what just happened in the David Hicks case. Money quote:
The crime Hicks pleaded to, providing material support to terrorism, is a felony triable in regular federal courts, but not a law of war violation military commissions can lawfully try. The inclusion of this offense in the MCA could allow future commissions exercising hybrid jurisdiction over law of war and statutory offenses to try acts committed after that law was enacted. But retroactive jurisdiction is only permissible over acts clearly violating international law at the time they were committed. Jurisdiction over Hicks, whose conduct dates back to 2001, would be unlawfully ex post facto. The Government bears the burden of proving that this offense violates the law of war, for which I have found no precedent in five years of academic research into military justice and the law of war. If the commission lacks jurisdiction over the charge, any court reviewing the decision per se, or Hicks' subsequent incarceration, should be obligated to set the conviction aside or order his release from custody.
I'm not qualified to make a legal judgment on this, but felt it worth passing along. Glazier believes the case may be a serious blow to the recently legislated military commissions law.
As a citizen, I think it's unfortunate and perhaps short-sighted for Democrats to be perceived as focusing on the past rather than the future. If people see the Democrats as obsessively concerned with settling scores, that's not good for the Democrats or the country.
Norice the subtle shift from partisanship to citizenship in that final phrase. Count me somewhat unconvinced on this minor revision. But count me even less convinced on the major point. The machine Rove has constructed is surely very interesting to cover, especially if it has been corrupting the justice system. One might imagine that the role of an opposition party is exactly to scrutinize those in power. One might even believe that a scandal a few weeks old isn't exactly the past. And one might even think it's the job of the media to inspect it. But then one wouldn't be editor of Time, would one?
"What the leftist and media critics get wrong about Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush is that they screwed up by going in halfhearted and without demanding real sacrifice upfront from the American people."
I think what your reader fails to recognize is that the premises on which the selling of the Iraq War was based were the only ones that could have been successful in convincing the public. I have long believed that most Americans did indeed have justifiable uncertainty about the true threat the Hussein regime in Iraq posed to America. At the same time, they were assured that no significant sacrifices by citizens were warranted, since we would be "greeted as liberators". Thus, even if the threat proved less significant than was advertised, war would be "worth it," since the cost would have been relatively insignificant.
An honest assessment of the potential costs balanced against a potential threat about which there was much uncertainty would have likely produced a level of public support insufficent for intervention in Iraq. The goal was intervention in Iraq (I make no accusations of conspiratorial motivations for this), and the only means by which the goal could be achieved was precisely the means the administration and war supporters outside of government used.
Honesty would have led to better policy. Someone alert Cheney.
"So, David Blankenhorn, I see your three marriage radicals and raise you three!" Dale Carpenter helps defuse the latest attempt to discredit the argument for equal marriage rights from David Blankenhorn.
It is very strange to hear some theocons describe marriage rights for gays as a product of the radical left. I remember the battle within the gay rights movement over marriage. Believe me, many on the left were against it.
Jake Weisberg explains why the White House loves Andrew Roberts. It's all about his grip on reality:
I am seldom bothered by minor errors from a good writer, but Roberts' mistakes are so extensive, foolish, and revealing of his basic ignorance about the United States in particular, that it may be worth noting a few of those I caught in a fast read. The San Francisco earthquake did considerably more than $400,000 in damage. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, did not write for Encounter, which began publication in 1953. The Proposition 13 Tax Revolt took place in the 1970s, not the 1980s—an important distinction because it presaged Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. Michael Milken was not a "takeover arbitrageur," whatever that is. Roberts cannot know that there were 500 registered lobbyists in Washington during World War II because lobbyists weren't forced to register until 1946. Gregg Easterbrook is not the editor of the New Republic. "No man gets left behind" is a line from the film Black Hawk Down, not the motto of the U.S. Army Rangers; their actual motto is "Rangers Lead the Way." In a breathtaking peroration, Roberts point out that "as a proportion of the total number of Americans, only 0.008 percent died bringing democracy to important parts of the Middle East in 2003-5." Leaving aside the question of whether those deaths have brought anything like democracy to Iraq, 0.008 percent of 300 million people is 24,000—off by a factor of 10, which is typical of his arithmetic. If you looked closely enough, I expect you could find an error of one kind or another on every page of the book.
The reality is that we [at The New Republic] don't hesitate to criticize the left, but we devote most of our attention to the right because the right wields far more power in American political life than the far left. How hard is this to understand?
Some encouraging contempt on the Lucianne message boards. More here. Not all Republicans are suicidal, it appears. The important point is to grasp the distinction between Christianists and Christians. Christianists are all about gaining and wielding power. Christians are all about giving it up.
"Tenzin" one of two-month-old Red Panda cub twins, makes his debut at Taronga Zoo March 28, 2007 in Sydney, Australia. The rare cub twins, born in January, have just begun to emerge from their nestbox. The Red Panda cubs are a result of the international breeding program for the endangered species, with Taronga Zoo producing 43 cubs since 1977. By Alan Waldie/Getty.
An honest response from another reader to this post:
Frankly none of the ramp-up to the Iraq War passed the smell test at any point. So, I get annoyed by statements like this:
But conservatives and a lot of moderates rallied around Bush and Co. because of the unfair attacks from the left and the media, whose objectivity was never in evidence, and in doing so we ratified and enabled every bad decision Bush and Co. made in Iraq.
"Unfair attacks by the media"? Huh? I had to dig deep into any newspaper to find any story that wasn't merely parroting White House talking points. Our "objectivity wasn't in evidence"? How do you objectively point out that our country is being lied into a war by a bunch of corrupt incompetents? I mean how do you objectively do that while being called a traitor, or worse, at every turn?
I've finally figured out my crime. I was right too soon.
This Youtube of a Congressional hearing speaks for itself. Tax-payers' money is being spent by federal agencies in order to advance the Rove machine. There's a pattern here, isn't there?
That seems to be the British response to the capture of Royal Navy sailors. Their first offer was classic under-statement:
The first British tactic had been to offer Iran an easy way out. The Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett gave the co-ordinates of the British sailors to the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and suggested that there might have been a "mistake".
Iran at first offered a different co-ordinate and then, when it was pointed out that even this was in Iraqi waters, another reading was given, this time on the Iranian side.
Three strikes and they're out! This, however, is a serious matter and the plain deception of the Iranian regime strongly indicates that this is a deliberate provocation. All the more reason, perhaps, not to take the bait. Slowly, international pressure on Tehran is rising; isolation is growing and this incident can be leveraged to increase that isolation at the U.N.. This may, of course, be a signal that Tehran is going to react to greater sanctions with greater belligerence. In all of this, the fear, of course, is that hotheads will prevail. But this is a time to be cool. That is different from craven. And yes, the sight of a free Briton being forced to wear a headscarf angers up the blood.
At one point Sen. [Lindsey] Graham asked the audience who among us considered Army specialist Joe Darby a hero. Darby was the one who initially gave the Abu Ghraib photos to Army investigators. Pausing just a few seconds, Graham used the momentary silence as a cue to continue talking about how the American people really don't care about torture.
For me, the worst part is that I have found this to be generally true. It is more convenient for people not to care. By and large, they are far more prepared to accept official explanations than to take the trouble to find out what is really going on. For, if they found out, their consciences might require them to do something about it.
Sen. Graham's demeanor was downright eerie in the way he chose to relate to the crowd ... beaming with a kind of delight and mocking the outrage that he must have seen building. This reminded me of my experience in Iraq, where I would hear soldiers discussing their abuse of detainees. It was always cast as a humorous thing, and each recounting won the expected - sometimes forced - laugh.
But now I am in Washington, I thought. Has everyone been bitten by the torture bug? I was sickened to watch a senior senator and lawyer flippantly dismiss what happened at Abu Ghraib, and act as though he knew more about the abuses than the people, like me, who were there. Sadly, Graham is not the first elected official who has become part of the problem rather than the solution.
Check out the comments on Bruce Bartlett's latest column complaining that Ann Coulter does more damage to conservatism than good. The base is with Coulter. As one commenter nicely puts it:
What's his solution? Why, for conservatives to stop pulling the Democrat chains. Don't call fags fags, and the whole uncomfortable subject will just go away.
Meanwhile, Coulter is a guest at the upcoming Media Research Center dinner. You can watch it live Thursday night and see how adored she still is.
March 25, 2007 - March 31, 2007
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