Reihan: Very Specific Josh Ritter Track Recommendations
I own three Josh Ritter albums, and I've listened to and enjoyed scattered tracks from Animal Years and The Golden Age of Radio. In truth, The Golden Age of Radio was purchased for the sole purpose of extracting sappy tracks for mixtapes. Animal Years, in contrast, contains the perfect protest song, "Girl in the War." There is nothing explicitly political about the song, and it's not nearly as dark or eerie as anything done by John Vanderslice, the master of paranoiac, cinematic Iraq-obsessed music. Rather, "Girl in the War" is sweet and affecting, and it turns on a reversal that while not uncommon is certainly rooted in reality: a boyfriend or husband praying for the safe return of his girlfriend or wife from the war.
Paul said to Peter you got to rock yourself a little harder
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire
But I got a girl in the war Paul the only thing I know to do
Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through
When this song came out, it knocked me on my ass. The album did not. Apart from the festive screwball of "Lillian Egypt," nothing else came close. All the same, I enthusiastically recommended the album to friends, including our very own Ross Douthat.
While training from Washington to New York on Friday, I passed the time reading The Abstinence Teacher (more on that later) and listening to Ritter's latest, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. From beginning to end, the album is near-flawless, assuming you like this sort of twangy, jangly music. (Which I do, despite the part of me that mocks the rest of me for this sad fact.)
If for whatever reason you are reluctant to buy the entire album, I recommend "To The Dogs or Whoever," "Mind's Eye" (which sounds slightly Spoonish, and incidentally it seems that Spoon the band has displaced spoon the utensil according to Google, which is saying something), "The Temptation of Adam," "Open Doors," "Real Long Distance," and "Empty Hearts."
Reihan: Subway Demographics
Rest assured, political blogging will return shortly. For now, more half-asleep reflections.
I recently told a friend that I'd sooner have my eyes scooped out with spoons than be caught reading a book commonly consumed on either the F or L trains in New York, which, as she helpfully pointed out, is kind of idiotic. To this day I haven't read The Corrections, and I don't think I ever will. Indeed, when someone tells me that, "Oh man, it's actually a really great book," I immediately think to myself, "when we're living in a post-apocalyptic 'time of troubles,' this person is not, for the good of humanity, sharing my bunker or my canned peas." The trouble is I quite like Tom Perrotta, so I've already caved. The smart and principled thing to do would be to follow the lead of my good friend GCAW and only read book that are twenty years old or older, to know they've stood the test of time.
Just a reminder: all posts that begin "Reihan: Yackety-schmackety, something incoherent" are written by Reihan Salam, not Ross Douthat. I stress this because I don't want you to think that Ross has gone mad. Love-mad, perhaps, but not mad in the, "I'm a character in Jane Eyre, and I have the sneaking suspicion that someone has locked me in a closet," not to be confused with Trapped in the Closet.
The following is a reflective post that can be safely skipped.
Creating a kerfuffle is a commerical imperative. So I'm of course very skeptical when I'm told David Edelstein (long one of my favorite movie critics) is courting controversy by endorsing Brian De Palma's latest. Who exactly is going to attack Edelstein? I assue a doughty band of conservatives will go through the motions of blasting De Palma's film (which I haven't seen), and I assume Edelstein will treat them with withering contempt. As for Edelstein's friends and fans, who are many, they will cheer him on.
Now of course, Edelstein is raging against the powerful, specifically the "warmongers" in the White House, etc. And of course these "warmongers" will do absolutely nothing to disturb the bubble of (relative) domestic comfort most Americans enjoy (relative to military families, and of course relative to Iraqis fleeing their homes and losing their lives, part of the "collateral damage" De Palma evokes). This is part of the reason performing rage can be so gratifyng: it suggests a more expansive moral sense, and it is an implicit rebuke to Bush's manifest failure to call for shared sacrifice.
Let's accept that the invasion of Iraq was an inexcusable blunder, and let's accept that the burdens are overwhelmingly borne by a small minority of Americans. When De Palma talks about "urgency," I have to assume he means that we urgently need to withdraw US forces from Iraq. That, of course, is a much trickier argument, and it's not clear that incendiary images clarify rather than cloud our thinking. Consider the incendiary images and bloody shirts that have started so many wars, including, arguably, the war in Iraq.
Edelstein references the "noise machine" that will surely crank up to attack Brian De Palma. But again, who really believes that (a) a mostly marginalized group of conservative (or rather "right-wing") critics will be able to destroy or even mildly dent Brian De Palma's reputation as an auteur? I'm not even sure a string of astonishingly bad movies could do that at this point. And (b) who believes that a movie like Redacted would get a wide and enthusiastic audience in the absence of this "noise machine"? Yes, it will pack the art-houses. Or it won't. A ferocious "noise machine" can only help in that regard. As for the "other America," the 95 percent who would never consider seeing such a film (it's tough to find babysitters, and why spend an evening watching something like Redacted?), the "noise machine" isn't exactly making much of a difference.
This is one of the inescapable dilemmas of cultural commentary. We need to believe that our work is vitally important. The right-wing and left-wing professional agitators need to keep the cultural temperature at or near the boiling point, to curry favor, to build audiences, to raise donations. And ... and again, the most important issue is: are Iraqi children better off or worse off under a continuing American military occupation? I don't think the answer is obvious. I'm inclined to think we're doing some good, and that the sectarian violence could get far worse, but this is a near-run thing.
What I do know is that no, Redacted really isn't vitally important and standing up to the "noise machine" is a surefire route to bestselling success.
In his Atlantic blog, right-winger Ross Douthat makes fun of my review of Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, which also touches on the moral devastation of Americans in Iraq. I said in my column that although it’s a clunky piece of storytelling and a third-rate mystery, it’s also a powerful and important film. Douthat sees this as representative of a liberal tying himself up in knots to praise a movie he dislikes but agrees with politically. If he thinks those are knots, he should read me on Michael Moore!
To Edelstein's credit, he seems to be acknowledging, with grace and good humor, that Ross's assessment was sound. Most critics would prefer taking a potshot, and he didn't. (My suspicion is that Edelstein sees "right-winger" as insult enough.)
Reihan: Breaking Through
I need to write at greater length about Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the men behind "The Death of Environmentalism" and the forthcomng Break Through. For now I'll just note that I think Dave Hawkins misunderstands their very important and very persuasive argument.
In truth, I'd much rather hear what Brad Plumer has to say first. A friend of mine and I were recently talking about how much we enjoy Plumer's idiosyncatic blog, and we both expressed the hope that he won't become a political beat reporter. That is a noble profession, to be sure, but my sense is that Plumer's comparative advantage lies elsewhere, specifically in synthesizing Vulcanian logic, an impressive command of scientific evidence, and a deep familiarity with many shades of leftish thinking. To the extent Plumer becomes a muckraker, it ought to be more in the vein of Multinational Monitor than Roll Call.
Incidentally, this image bears a striking resemblance to my own winterwear. And people wonder why I hardly ever catch cold. More, and more coherent, blogging to come. I will now submerge myself in a briny tank of knowledge.
Turns out a good friend of mine worked on a related project a short while back called, appropriately enough, Why Tuesday?
Reihan: Why Private Military Contractors Are A Good Thing
A debate has erupted over US reliance on private military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. My sense is that the brilliant and decidedly uneven Robert Young Pelton, a staunch critic of PMCs, has set the tone for the debate. My own view is different. We do depend on PMCs, we're likely to depend on them even more over time, and this is a very good thing. Consider John Robb's thoughts on the subject.
The defining fact of our time, as John Mueller has argued, is the decline of war. This, of couse, contradicts the Colin Gray view and I can see how it might seem strange given the bloody conflicts that dominate the headlines. But this doesn't change the normative shift that has taken place over the last century, from a time when military aggression was seen as both inevitable and acceptable to the present, when it is seen as an offense against all things good and decent. A similar normative shift was behind the decline of enslavement in the West, which began long before the vile practice became economically impracticable. Ideology matters.
The kind of conflicts we're seeing and are likely to see are far more like crime, pervasive and opportunistic, than like conventional interstate warfare. The patriotic sentiments that motivated volunteer armies in the past are harder to apply to campaigns designed to strengthen vulnerable foreign states, or to limit the extent of bunkering and other criminal activities that have no obvious ideological valence. And so we will need to rely on skilled professionals to help police the world.
To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about abuses committed by PMCs. That is a failure of the US and Iraqi governments, but not of PMCs as a matter of principle.
Reihan: What's Good for Wikipedia is Good for America
That is a maxim I can get behind.
Seth Roberts reports on a brief conversation with Aaron Swartz, a savvy activist (savvtivist?) who is frustrated by Wikipedia's failings. The basic take-away: how impressive, and how useful, would Wikipedia be if it had leadership as far-sighted and competent as that of Craigslist? (Check out this amazing chart.)
Reihan: Artists on Consumption
One member of the VII collective is Lauren Greenfield. A friend recently introduced me to her photographs, which focus on how we, and particularly the women among us, shape and manipulate our bodies.
On a somewhat lighter, yet still very vital and intelligent, note, Kate Bingaman-Burt runs a wonderful website called Obsessive Consumption, currently in housecleaning mode.
So much for artists on consumption. The weak-willed among you are welcome to try artistically consuming via Cool Hunting, a fantastically well-designed and smart blog that has duped many otherwise sane people into spending money on freeze-dried fruits, strange sneakers, and distressed denim.
VII, incidentally, is a truly impressive group of gifted photojournalists who've banded together to stick it (gently) to The Man. More power to them.
Reihan: The Frugal Players Club
Recently, my good friend Josh suggested that Delonte West of the Seattle SuperSonics and Roy Williams of the Detroit Lions should double-date: all evidence suggests that they'd be drawn to the same kind of woman, namely a down-to-earth gal with a love of fried foods. First, Delonte (from an ESPN story titled, appropriately enough, "Flowers, Popeye's and romance"):
As you may have read earlier on, my good friend and co-author Ross Douthat is getting married very soon and he'll be out of the country for some time after that. Once he returns, he will be rested and ready to take the blogosphere by storm, if necessary subduing rival blogs with a series of shattering (rhetorical) blows. My advice to said rivals: get your emergency preparedness kits in order.
So who is this Reihan Salam? Rather than bore you with biographical details, I will list a few things I like. Note that I'm deliberately excluding things produced by personal friends or colleagues. I'm also excluding things that could embarrass or haunt me in the years to come, thus radically reducing the scope of this enterprise. In particular, I'm thinking of my favorite shirts. When I idly daydream about how I'd fare in a post-apocalyptic landscape, thoughts prompted in part by the recently-resurrected CBS drama Jericho, I think about whether my shirts will survive the unending chaos.
I'll be gone, getting married and honeymooning, for the next seventeen days. I trust nothing of any importance will take place in that span, but in case it does, Reihan, my frequent collaborator and erstwhile co-blogger, will be offering pointed commentary in this space. So don't go away.
These critics not only disrespect such core American principles as academic freedom and freedom of speech, they disrespect the intelligence of Ahmadinejad’s audience. It isn’t likely that many were swayed by his wild-eyed questioning of the facts of the Holocaust or who was really behind the 9/11 attacks. The biggest laugh of the afternoon came when, in response to a question about the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of homosexuals (a crime punishable by death), Ahmadinejad remarked, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” He also declared that “women in Iran have the highest level of freedom” even though they are forbidden from such basic social activities as attending soccer games, and said “we are friends with the Jewish people” while attributing nearly all the world’s ills to Jews. It’s hard to believe that anyone with a third-grade education would find him convincing.
In 1939, a journalist named Alan Cranston was outraged by a sanitized English-language translation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” so he edited his own abridged version that bared the German dictator’s sinister soul. Cranston, who later became California’s longest-serving Democratic senator, understood something that Obama, Romney, McConnell et al do not: The best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words.
This is astonishingly dumb. As Matt says, "free speech" is not at stake in a private university's decision to invite speakers to address its student body. Nor, I hope, was anyone who opposed the Iranian President's appearance seriously worried that he was going to convert his Ivy League audience to Shi'a radicalism. But just because a bunch of Columbia students found him ridiculous doesn't mean that everybodyelse did - and it's the "everybody else" that he was playing to.
And yes, of course one shouldn't censor the rantings of a tyrant to make him sound moderate. But the notion that "the best way to discredit a tyrant is to let him do it himself, in his own poisonous words" is just pious nonsense untouched by experience. A dictator's "poisonous words" are quite often the source of his strength, not a chink in his armor; so it was with Hitler, and so it is (albeit to a far, far lesser extent) with Iran's dinner-theater demagogue. Alan Cranston's more-accurate translation of Mein Kampf was an admirable contribution to the West's understanding of the Nazi regime, no doubt, but if I recall my history right, it didn't exactly bring Hitlerism to its knees.
She Can't Be Stopped
Nothing in John Dickerson's list of strategies for stopping Hillary goes any distance toward persuading me that any of her rivals can derail her march to the nomination. (I think Dickerson himself would agree ...) Going into the primary campaign, the main hope for the non-Hillary candidates seemed to be the theory that there existed a large chunk - say, sixty percent or more - of the Democratic electorate that would only vote for her under duress, either because they didn't like her personality, because they thought that she was too right-wing (particularly on foreign policy), or because they thought she was unelectable in November. At this point, that hope seems to have been dashed: The anti-Hillary share of the primary vote is shaping up to be right around forty percent, which in a divided field simply isn't anywhere near enough to derail a candidate with Hillary's institutional advantages and deep reserves of support. If Edwards dropped out before Iowa, or if Obama did - or maybe, maybe, if Gore got in - you might see this landscape shift a bit. But small-bore attacks on her honesty, her cozy relationship with lobbyists, or her electability just aren't going to shift the dials as far as her rivals need to shift them.
(Nor will flip-flopping campaign strategies, for that matter, though I agree with Noam that there's good reason to think that Edwards and Obama ought to trade approaches.)
September 25, 2007
The Uses of Illiberalism
Will Wilkinson has a pair of provocative posts on the Haidt thesis, one responding to Yuval Levin, one responding to me. Here are some excerpts from the latter:
Whatever else you might say about them, family, community, and religion are the chief preserves of illiberal sentiment in our society. Of course, family, community and religion don’t have to be illiberal. For example, most strands of Christianity have been successfully “civilized” — by which I mean radically liberalized — by the liberalizing pressures of modernity. One of the problems with conservatives is that, over and over again, they confuse an attack on the illiberal elements of family, community, and religion as attacks on family, community, and religion itself. For example, arguments for gay marriage are not arguments against the family, despite what most conservatives insist. They are liberal argument for equal-opportunity families. Arguments for racial integration aren’t arguments against community. They are liberal arguments for non-racist communities. Etc. If family, community, and religion (and other civil society institutions) are stabilizing, which I don’t doubt, they can be stabilizing without being unjust and harmful.
I would agree that you can liberalize family, community, and religion, and that this process has sometimes been a good thing for everyone involved. But I think that each of these aspects of human affairs must by definition retain an illiberal core, or else cease to exist in any meaningful sense. So for instance, one can reduce the duties that children owe their parents, and the power of parents over children, without eliminating the family entirely. But you cannot treat parents and children, or husbands and wives, as free agents with no obligations to one another save those they deliberately choose, without vitiating the very concept of family. Similarly, nation-states can reduce the distinctions they make among their citizens, and between their citizens and the foreign-born, without ceasing to exist as meaningful communities. But if they eliminate the latter set of distinctions entirely, as libertarians sometimes seem to suggest they should, so that everyone is effectively a citizen of everywhere else, then the very concept of community, or at least political community, ceases to have any practical meaning.
On reading the blog account of the big to-do at Columbia today, it occurs to me that Ahmadinejad must have found Bollinger’s “sharp challenges” much as Francis Urquhart described Prime Minister’s Question Time: “very frightening -- like being mugged by a guinea pig.”
Consider this “challenge”:
Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region?
You could almost imagine Ahmadinejad replying, “I thank the honourable gentleman for his concern for peace and democracy, which my government has always shared. We have always worked to bring peace and democracy to the rest of the world, because we love all of the nations of the world. Naturally, we abhor terrorism and I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer.”
In his speech, Ahmadinejad did actually say, “we love all nations.” ... The point is that posing such questions to a demagogue simply lends meaning and importance to whatever the demagogue says in response. It sets him up to blather on about whatever he would like to say. If he ignores the questions, nothing has been proved that we did not already know, and if he answers them he will invariably spin them to his advantage. Demagogues often have a good knack for turning a phrase and playing to a crowd - that’s how they got to be demagogues.
The core of the problem, to my mind, is summed up by Bollinger's remark, in his email to the school, that this was an opportunity for Columbia students to "listen to ideas we deplore." This sort of earnest liberal piety demonstrates a fundamental inability to grasp what someone like the Iranian President is all about. If Ahmadinejad were interest in making a serious, sustained case for political Islam, or even if he were presenting a David Irving-style brief on the Holocaust, there might be some value in having him appear at Columbia and face questions - perhaps not from the university president, but from someone well-suited to engage with his arguments. (If Sayyid Qutb were alive and writing, for instance, I would be very interested to watch him debate a liberal, secular Ivy League political philosopher.) But the Iranian President was never going to actually elucidate or defend his most controversial ideas before a Western audience - and certainly not at Columbia University, of all places! Not when he could further his objectives by refraining from saying anything at all.
So ask him about the Holocaust, and he'll say that further research is needed, and besides, why should the Palestinians suffer for whatever may or may not have happened to Jews sixty years ago? Ask him if he wants to destroy Israel, and he'll tell you: "We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people." Ask him about women's rights, and he'll say: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." Ask him about the execution of homosexuals, and he'll tell you that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Ask him about nuclear weapons, and he'll tell you that Iran wants to live in peace with its neighbors and the world. And so on and so forth. There are no controversial ideas here; there are, in fact, no ideas at all. Which is why it didn't matter what Bollinger said: He was being played for a fool right from the beginning.
I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?
I think it's worth distinguishing between two inter-related objections to Ahmadinejad's Columbia appearance. The first, which is mine, is that it's shameful for a great American university to supply a prominent platform to an odious figure like Iran's President, particularly at a time when his government is almost certainly involved in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The second, which can follow from the first but doesn't necessarily, is that the act of inviting Ahmadinejad to speak is a manifestation of American weakness that may eventually contribute to our destruction at the hands of our enemies. For hints of the latter take, see this Roger Kimball post, in which he quotes from Bagehot:
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
Were the year 1938, and the speaker in question Adolf Hitler as opposed to Ahmadinejad, this quotation would feel more apropos. But this is where I part ways with some of my confreres on the right: I don't think it's accurate or useful to suggest that the American intellectual class is preparing our country for "destruction" by extending a nauseating degree of courtesy to a poisonous Iranian demagogue. The German Fuhrer was actually an existential threat to the free nations of the West, and the failure of the chattering classes of his era to reckon with that threat did prepare their nations for the destruction visited on them in World War II. Whereas Ahmadinejad is a tinhorn rabblerouser with a tenous grip on power, and the country he attempts to rule is a paper tiger whose quest for nuclear weapons is a manifestation of its weakness, not its strength. I despise him, and I fervently wish that I inhabited a country whose great universities had the good sense not to treat his appearance in New York as an occasion for a lesson in "free speech." (Particularly given the slight double standard that occasionally seems to be at work in American academia these days.) But I don't fear him, because I think that America is easily strong enough - and our enemies weak enough, more importantly - to survive the folly on display at Columbia University today.
In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America's original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and ... you get the idea.
Okay, so this is ridiculous and overblown and self-serving, but ... it isn't totally wrong. To the extent that the President isn't just the leader of our country, but the face of America and our chief overseas PR man - a role that Reagan and Bill Clinton both played well, and that Bush has displayed little facility for - Obama is probably the most attractive candidate in either party's field. (So long as he stops talking about bombing Pakistan, of course.) This is not the sort of consideration on which elections should turn, but neither is it worth dismissing out of hand.
Update: Larison, as is his wont, prefers to emphasize the negative.
Your Daily Dose of Thompson-Bashing
It's a bad sign when Mario Loyola (!) accuses you of "rabble-rousing" and "perhaps laziness, too," for suggesting that the U.S. deny an entry visa to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's an even worse sign when Mark Steyn - self-described as "the least anti-American non-American on the planet" - lays into your "we've shed more blood for liberty than the whole world put together" braggadocio not just once but overandoveragain.
Meanwhile, Papa Bear's unstoppable campaign juggernaut rolls on.
Debating RomneyCare
Cato and Heritage discuss how it's working out so far.
If you missed the Labash-Ferguson one-two punch in the last two issues of the Standard, you should remedy that oversight.
And while I'm definitely on the "Hillary probably can't be stopped" bandwagon, and I think the parallels between 1980 and 2008 can be counted on the fingers of Homer Simpson's left hand, it is remarkable how quickly conventional wisdom can get up-ended in American politics.
The MSM Strikes Back
There are an awful lot of bad sportswriters out there (hello, Murray Chass), but there are even more dumb fans. And when a smart reporter goes up against a busload of outrageously dumb questioners in an online forum - well, that's what I call entertainment.
Sigh. When I saw the Post was running a short "fact-check" piece on Fred Thompson's claim that "our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world," I thought, hey, good for them. But then I saw this:
The number of overall U.S. military casualties, while high, is still relatively low in comparison to those of its World War I and World War II allies. In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine." It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.
If you want to rebut Thompson's claim, might I suggest that arguing that Stalin's Red Army was fighting for "other people's liberty" probably isn't the best way to do it?
Expanding NATO to include Australia, Japan, Israel, India, and various other friendly nations is a marginally better idea, I'd say, than trying to start a "League of Democracies" from scratch. Maybe. But I'm going to have to agree with the paleocons and pomo-cons: It's still a really lousy idea.
Leave aside the issue of whether it's wise to belong to a treaty organization that might require us to intervene on India's behalf if they were attacked by Pakistan, or send troops to Lebanon the next time Hezbollah launches a major assault on Israel. I'm afraid I just don't see what pressing problem an expanded NATO is supposed to solve. Have we conducted any military operations lately where we slapped our forehead and said "wow, if only we had the Japanese locked into a mutual-defense pact, everything would be going much more smoothly?" Back when the Clinton Administration was struggling to convince the Western European powers to intervene more forcefully in Bosnia, did anyone think to themselves "if only we had the Israelis, the Australians, the South Koreans and the Singaporeans at table as well, this would be a piece of cake?"
I suppose one possible idea is that adding India to our primary military alliance would give us more local credibility if NATO wanted to intervene in, say, Bhutan, or that adding Singapore would give our potential operations in Borneo more multilateral cred. (Let's leave aside the question of what adding Israel would do to NATO's credibility in certain areas of the world.) But isn't that what we have diplomats for? When we needed to intervene in Afghanistan, we persuaded the Pakistanis and the Uzbeks and the Russians to go along with it, even though they weren't NATO member states; conversely, when we felt we needed to invade Iraq, we couldn't persuade the French and the Germans to sign on to the invasion, even though they were theoretically our "partners" in NATO. In neither case did the military alliance, or lack thereof, matter nearly so much as old-fashioned diplomatic skill (or, in the latter case, the lack thereof).
Maybe there's some important military advantage to a bigger, badder NATO that I'm missing - smoother joint anti-terror operations, maybe? But more likely, it's just pointless chest-thumping - the equivalent of Romney's pledge to "double Guantanamo" or Thompson's brag about how we're better at defending liberty than everybody else in the whole wide world put together.
The Centrist Media
To Paul Krugman's complaint that right-wing triumphs get characterized by the mass media as "conservatives on the march," while liberal triumphs produce headlines about a return to the "center," Matt writes:
But here's the thing, I've heard conservatives complain about this too. When conservatives secure political power, it's all "holy shit: conservatives!" but when liberals secure political power, it's all "don't worry, they're centrists." There's truth to both perspectives here, but I think the right fundamentally has the better of this argument. It wouldn't have been helpful to liberals or to liberalism for Time to greet the 2006 elections with a photo of Nancy Pelosi flanked by Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, David Obey, and John Conyers under the headline "THE LIBERAL TAKEOVER."
That said, it does pound in some narratives that matter. To go back to my Heath Shuler article, it was the Right who sought to argue that he was a conservative. They did that because it was good for the press to report the election as a triumph for "conservatism," that reigning ideology that had been failed by perfidious Republicans. So rather than the collapse of years of unified conservative rule being seen as the failure of the ideology, which would in turn lead the press to paint future adherents as politically radioactive, it actually enhanced the superficial appeal of "pure conservatism."
I think both Matt and Ezra are right, because they're talking about different terminology. To the extent that the term "conservative Democrat" creeps into the narrative where Democrats like Shuler and Jim Webb are concerned, it's a (minor) victory for conservative talking points. To the extent that winning Democrats are described as centrists, though, it's a sign that liberal media bias - in which a moderate liberalism is the center, and everything else is right-wing kookery - is defining the terms of the discussion.
September 20, 2007
Why I Am A Social Conservative
Everybody's talking - Andrew, Rod, Will (who got there first), the Times - about Jonathan Haidt, his theory of moral instincts, and how it applies to American politics. I thought I'd jump in, starting with a long quote from Haidt's recent critique of the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris tribe of neo-atheists.
In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.
The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.
Morality is about happiness and suffering (as [Sam] Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
I trust that Kevin Drum will be writing a very strongly worded letter to the editors of Dissent regarding their regurgitation of talking points straight from the right-wing sandbox. (hat tip: Cheryl.)
All snideness aside, the essay in question is very much worth your time.
Gossip Girl vs. The O.C.
Here's one take, from the smartest teen soap opera fanatic I know.
Also worth a look: This mini-interview, in which Josh Schwartz dissects the mistakes he made with The O.C.
What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.
... Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.
Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.
What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.
The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.
Read the whole thing. I would only add that while smart liberals may not think much of Barack Obama's tax plan, it seems likely to have a lot more mass-market appeal than anything the GOP candidates are proposing.
Regarding this exquisitely annoying Cass Sunstein piece, which makes the case that the current Supreme Court isn't ideologically balanced but wildly, wildly right-wing - because, you see, it's considerably more conservative than it was when Cass Sunstein was a Supreme Court clerk, in the halcyon year of 1980, against which all other years must be judged - well, what Megan said.
Putin After Beslan
Via a reader, here's a video clip from the Putin speech that's cited in that Paul Starobin profile I mentioned. No subtitles, but you don't need them to get the idea.
The EITC Versus Wage Subsidies
Don't let your eyes glaze over - it's one of the most interesting anti-poverty debates, I swear. Megan digs in to the difficulties with the EITC here, while Matt makes the liberal case for a much more generous, much less strictly-policed EITC here. The smartest case for wage subsidies can be found here or here, from the recent Nobel winner Edmund Phelps. (I should note that Reihan and I will make a somewhat-less-brilliant case for wage subsidies in our forthcoming book.)
D.C. and the Constitution
The gang over at the Plank have been hammeringaway at this representation-for-D.C. issue, so I thought I'd see how TNR's editorials on the subject dealt with difficulty that any legislation granting the District a voting representative in the House is almost certainly unconstitutional. Here's their entire take on the constitutionality issue:
McConnell and Bush base their opposition on ostensibly constitutional grounds, arguing that the Constitution grants congressional representation only to states, which, of course, the District of Columbia is not. But the legislation, as it's crafted, addresses these concerns--since it provides for expedited judicial review of the bill if it's challenged after becoming law. As Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in voting for the bill in committee last week, "I have concluded that the constitutionality of this legislation is a close call and is best resolved by the courts and not by this committee."
Er, okay, I guess. So Congress has no responsibility to consider the constitutionality of the legislation it votes on, beyond ensuring that the Supreme Court rules on it ASAP? Really?
And even if it's okay for Congress to punt the question up to the Court, shouldn't an opinion magazine that supports the measure at least take on the (sound-seeming) constitutional arguments against it?
Update: Also, isn't NR's position - a vastly smaller federal district centered around the Mall and Capitol Hill, and then retrocession of the rest of the District to Maryland - a vastly better option? Yes, it's unlikely to happen, since Maryland would have to agree to the transfer, but it seems at least as a plausible a possibility as the Supreme Court signing off on the current proposal.
... the generational breakdowns are interesting. The youngest voter group—those 18 to 30—are the least likely to support "the death penalty," "embryonic stem-cell research," "the separation of church and state," "abortion rights," "physician-assisted suicide," or "affirmative action." These voters are, however, the most likely to support "gay rights" and "same-sex marriage."
This comports with my general impressions of "the kids" these days, and of the culture-war landscape going forward: Abortion and the "life issues" in general have staying power; homosexuality, probably not so much.
September 18, 2007
Robert Jordan, RIP
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.
Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.
Robert Jordan was, for about four years during my adolescence, easily my favorite writer in the world. The first five books of his Wheel of Time saga are among the best popular fantasy novels of the last few decades, with only George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn providing serious competition. Now he is dead, still young at 58, with his saga still unfinished. It went on too long - eleven books, with at least two more projected - and when it is completed (as I assume it will be, with his family or other writers filling in the blanks), it will be less than it could have been. But at its best, it was remarkable indeed: Few writers have given me such pleasure, and few, I suspect, ever will. It's hard to imagine loving any books more than the books that you love when you're fifteen years old.
Jordan was a pen name; his real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He was a South Carolinian, a Citadel graduate, a Vietnam veteran, a devout Episcopalian. He is survived by his wife, Harriet. Requiescat in pacem.
The New Liberal Media
Chait-Mania '07 is over, but like Will Wilkinson, I want to make one last point. It concerns a secondary thesis of Jon's book - his argument that the Republican Party, and particularly the Bush Administration, has been able to disguise the radicalism of their agenda by effectively gaming the press corps. Jon fingers two tendencies in the press that have played into Republican hands: First, the persistence - particularly among the David Broders of the world - of a misplaced faith in the old center-left consensus, and a concomitant belief that the best way to get anything done in D.C. is for Democrats and Republicans to split the difference; second, the tendency of reporters seeking balance to report every debate about policy as "he said, she said," even when what he (i.e., the Republican supply-sider) says is either implausible, mendacious, or both.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, I wanted to advance a slightly different hypothesis about the press in the age of Bush - namely, that the current Administration was the beneficiary of a long overdue, but probably temporary attempt by the (yes, liberal) media to take conservatism seriously, after years of hoping that the whole Republican majority would just blow away in a strong wind. I don't quite agree with this Jim Henley post, but he's on to something when he writes, in response to an Atrios remark about the absurdity of believing in a liberal media:
Dear Atrios: I’m about twelve years older than you. When I was a teen and you were a toddler, and for a time after that, the media was very liberal. How do I know? I remember! Also, there used to be no ATMs. We had things called “traveler’s checks” that you bought at the bank before going on vacation instead of taking cash. In fact, an important part of vacation planning was deciding how many traveler’s checks to buy.
Now, I don’t think “the media” as such is liberal any more. I think the transformation completed itself early this century. In fact, I think the media is now as out of touch with popular sentiment from the right as the earlier media used to be out of touch with popular sentiment from the left - I’m thinking of the period from Ronald Reagan’s first campaign in 1980 to the Republican congressional takeover of 1994. I’d go so far as to say that the period in question convinced the honchos of newsrooms that “We’re out of touch with America and we have to change.”
Henley's wrong about the extent of the media's rightward turn, but he's right, I think, that somewhere in the late 1990s and early '00s, and particularly amid the rise of Fox News and the blogosphere, the MSM finally realized that they had lost a large chunk of their audience by being completely out of touch with the political changes at work in post-Sixties America. Their response was to hire more conservative columnists, inject a little more balance in their reporting, and generally change the tone with which they covered right-wing ideas and politicians. These efforts were patchwork and sometimes a little bit silly (like assigning a reporter to the "conservative beat"), but they reflected a real attempt to improve on the frankly embarrassing way that the national media had often written about figures like Reagan and Gingrich, or movements like the religious right. And they coincided with 9/11, and the rally-round-the-flag spirit that followed, which would have delivered a Republican Administration better-than-usual coverage no matter what.
So I'm watching a Red Sox-Yankees game this weekend, and midway through the telecast what looked like some frat-boy doofus decked out in Sox gear showed up in the Fox broadcast booth. It wasn't Ben Affleck, the most likely candidate, and since I had the sound off it took a good five minutes to realize that it was none other than Dane Cook, the lamest comedian in America - and (naturally) the new face of post-season baseball.
Football passed baseball as America's real national pastime sometime in the late '60s or early '70s, and for a while MLB arguably slipped to third in the pecking order, behind the NBA and with hockey nipping at its heels. Since a certain early-90s low point, baseball has arguably clawed its way back to number two, but as long as the NFL's in business it's always going to be a distant number two. Still, do they need to make it quite so obvious? Compare this:
To this:
Now, which sport do you want to be a fan of?
Or as Cliff Corcoran put it, watching the same travesty: "Dane Cook and MLB on FOX were made for each other, both are loud and completely unqualified to do what they're doing."
Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.
It's this latter debate that's crucial to understanding what's wrong with the contemporary university. In a better world, the multiculturalists and the canonists should have been able to meet halfway - preserving the idea of a canon, while expanding it to include more works from outside the circle of Dead White Males. Such a compromise would have ended up cluttering syllabi with more politically-correct junk than a reactionary like myself might like, but it would have preserved the essential liberal-arts notion that there are great books, and that one of the missions of the university should be to expose its students to as many of them as possible.
This did happen to some extent: As Donadio writes, "In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars ... In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison." Obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing, but it wouldn't be all that objectionable if most students at top-flight colleges were being required to read this group of authors; a week wasted on Sula seems a small price to pay for a student body that's acquainted with Shakespeare's tragedies. The trouble is that they aren't. Instead of keeping requirements in place but compromising on their content, too many colleges - my alma mater included - rushed to embrace the "modes of inquiry" (or in Harvard-ese, "approaches to knowledge") view of education, and then breathed a sigh of relief that they'd set aside the messy debates over whether there's a Proust of the Papuans, while freeing their overspecialized young professors from the burdens of teaching survey courses. And that was how the canon wars ended - they made a desert, and called it peace.
Why Iraq Has No Army
I've always thought that while we were wrong to disband the Iraqi army, it was nowhere near such an obvious a decision as the chattering class's 20-20 hindsight would have you believe. Christopher Hitchens' latest contrarian foray confirms both of these judgments - I'm not persuaded by his arguments, but neither are they easy to dismiss.
Haggisprop
Clearly there are people who really like the cinema of Paul Haggis - David Denby, for instance. And more power to them. But those critics sensible enough to recognize that the man makes lousy movies have an obligation, I think, to come out and say it - even when they agree with the political statement Haggis happens to be making. The alternative is to produce weird reviews like this one, from David Edelstein:
Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah is vital in spite of its mustiness. As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries—and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.
So basically, if you ignore the plot and the characters and just use Elah as a visual aid for meditating on the awfulness of the Iraq War, you'll like the film.
Elsewhere in the review, Edelstein writes that Elah is better than Haggis' Crash, because whereas that movie hammered home the same point (racism = bad) in every single scene, in Elah it's only "every other scene that makes the same point." He notes that the film's central plot device - a broken PDA that slowly reveals its horrifying contents - is an "especially wheezy contrivance," but accepts the contrivance because the PDA's contents "echo what too few of us have seen in documentaries like The War Tapes (composed of videos taken by reservists) and in accounts from places like Haditha." He complains about the opaque, pretentious symbolism of the title (it refers to the place where David slew Goliath), but concludes, "I forgive Haggis for overreaching. He must have thought he needed to invoke the Old Testament to say what he feels about a war that stinks to high heaven."
I'm guess I'm just not sure it's a film critic's job to forgive a director for making a bad movie - a musty, clunky, repetitive, contrived and predictable movie, if we believe Edelstein's own review - because Paul Haggis happens to have his heart in the right place.
Can I just point out that if Hillary Clinton—or really, anyone—wins the Presidency and then tries to "end the war and bring our troops home" without, you know, completely ending the war or bringing all of our troops home (or at least reducing US casualties to zero), The Left isn't going to take it any more. As Kevin Drum points out, Clinton leads Democrats on the question of who is "best at ending the Iraq war", which means that if she doesn't, she will disappoint a lot of her fans by the time 2010 or 2012 rolls around.
The Dirty Fucking Hippies—and I'm not talking about Code Pink, but the 25% of the public that's always been against the Iraq War without marching in the streets about it, plus the 30-35% of us who have become convinced there's nothing more that the US military presence can accomplish in Iraq—will have put up with a Kerry/Edwards ticket that sold itself as "Bush with better management" on Iraq, sat patiently as a Congress caved after the withdrawal veto, and endured serious dissembling from Clinton on the question of the US mission in Iraq. If Iraq continues to be a quagmire with no signs of progress or intent to withdraw, anti-war voters (and again, not just scruffy college kids but Midwesterners who don't see what we're accomplishing) will stay home in 2010 and find a primary challenger in 2012. Hell, I'd get on the Russ Feingold bandwagon at that point.
Since I think there's about a two percent chance that Hillary Clinton will have all U.S. troops out of Iraq - or U.S. casualties down to zero - by 2010, you can expect to hear a lot more of this in the days and years ahead.
September 16, 2007
Pondering Putin
Re-reading that Starobin profile I mentioned, and then this article from the Times of London (via Larison), I thought of the memorable Perry Anderson essay on Putin's Russia from earlier this year - and particularly this passage:
... there is another, less obvious side to his charisma. Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.
In a strange way Putin’s prestige is thus also intellectual. For all his occasional crudities, at least in his mouth the national tongue is no longer obviously humiliated. This is not just a matter of cases and tenses, or pronunciation. Putin has developed into what by today’s undemanding standards is an articulate politician, who can field questions from viewers on television for hours as confidently and lucidly as he lectures journalists in interviews, or addresses partners at summit meetings, where he has excelled at sardonic repartee. The intelligence is limited and cynical, above the level of his Anglo-American counterparts, but without much greater ambition. It has been enough, however, to give Putin half of his brittle lustre in Russia. There, an apparent union of fist and mind has captured the popular imagination.
I think there's little question that Putin has been one of the most successful world leaders of the new century, and I've always had the impression that this success is related to his being smarter, in some meaningful way, than most of his rivals and partners on the world stage. But sometimes I wonder if my high estimation of his intelligence isn't partially a function of the freedom that he's afforded by his semi-autocratic position - a freedom to be honest, to talk explicitly in the language of power politics, and to eschew the kind of pious cant that's required of politicians in the West (and particularly in America). I remember being particularly struck by this passage from the Starobin profile, describing Putin's response to the Beslan massacre:
On the day after the bloodbath Putin addressed the nation on television from the Kremlin. He seemed stripped raw; the brief clip I caught on the news was painful to watch. "It is a difficult and bitter task for me to speak," he began. "During these last few days each one of us suffered immensely." The thrust of his message was shame and embarrassment that Russians, "living in conditions formed after the disintegration of a huge, great country," had failed to pay enough attention to their defenses. "We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten." His face was drained of color. I wondered if he was in shock.
Now obviously this kind of language, and the worldview it betokens, is connected to many of the Putin era's excesses, from the Chechen war to the partial rehabilitation of Stalin. But even so, it's hard to help feeling a sneaking admiration for a leader who can respond to a tragedy without resorting to either bluster or bathos, and who can acknowledge weakness and humiliation without immediately seguing into the narrative of self-congratulation and moral uplift that American Presidents automatically reach for in suchcircumstances.
It will be very interesting to watch what he does after 2008 - both how he continues to exercise power in Russia (as he assuredly will), and what his de facto political dominance will mean for the leaders who succeed him. He will only be fifty-six when his term ends - younger than any of the front-runners for the GOP nomination, it's worth noting - which means that the Putin era, in one fashion or another, probably still has decades left to run.
Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
September 15, 2007
The Haves and the Have-Nots
Having spent the week siding with Will Wilkinson against Jon Chait in the debate over whether crazy tax cutting has ruined America, let me briefly return to the grounds on which Will and I disagree - whether these are propitious times for a new left-populism - and point to the following Pew study:
Over the past two decades, a growing share of the public has come to the view that American society is divided into two groups, the "haves" and the "have-nots." Today, Americans are split evenly on the two-class question with as many saying the country is divided along economic lines as say this is not the case (48% each). In sharp contrast, in 1988, 71% rejected this notion, while just 26% saw a divided nation.
Of equal importance, the number of Americans who see themselves among the "have-nots" of society has doubled over the past two decades, from 17% in 1988 to 34% today. In 1988, far more Americans said that, if they had to choose, they probably were among the "haves" (59%) than the "have-nots" (17%). Today, this gap is far narrower (45% "haves" vs. 34% "have-nots").
One can certainly over-interpret these kind of numbers, but at the very least they provide the partisans of social democracy with something to work with.
September 14, 2007
The Talented Mr. Mortensen
I'll have a review of Eastern Promises, the new Viggo Mortensen-David Cronenberg collaboration, in the next National Review; for now, suffice it to say that I liked the movie much more than A History of Violence, and (like Chris Orr) I thought Mortensen was flat-out fantastic.
He was profiled in the most recent GQ (not online, unfortunately), and he came across (as usual) as a particularly pretentious breed of Hollywood lefty, whose research for his new film - about a literature professor in Nazi Germany - inspired him to rattle on about the parallels between Bushism and National Socialism. (His list of Nazi-style crimes committed by this administration included "replacing all the judges - and not just the federal ones"). On the other hand, he also came across as something of a badass - he's been stabbed, had his face pushed into barb wire, broken his legs in an industrial accident while working at a smelting plant - and it's hard not to be impressed with a guy who researched his Eastern Promises role by taking long train rides through the Urals, talking to Russian mobsters and taping them in order to get his character's accent just right.
And it's hard, as well, not to admire any pretentious thespian with this kind of taste in comedy:
"Happy Gilmore, of course, is flawless from start to finish," he says, utterly serious. "It's a classic. The grandmother's performance is genius. Truly a heartbreaking performance."
On a related subject (Russia, not Adam Sandler), we've just taken Paul Starobin's 2005 profile of Vladimir Putin out from behind the firewall, and with the Russian succession in the news, it's well worth your time.
Governing A House Divided
It's increasingly clear that even in the unlikely event that the GOP manages to hold on to the White House in 2008, the Democrats will probably expand their Congressional majorities and hold a commanding position on Capitol Hill. This is the context in which Reihan makes the tentative case for John McCain, and it suggests an interesting subtext to the GOP nomination contest. The various candidates are essentially competing to spend four years bickering with a Democratic majority, and it's safe to say they'll go about it in different ways. A vote for Mitt Romney, for instance, is probably a vote for Clinton-style triangulation, and a Republican White House that views bipartisan reform efforts (health care, anyone?) as the ticket to high approval ratings and second term. The same goes for McCain, most likely, given his track record in the Senate - unless he ends up engaged in a political war of attrition with the Democrats over Iraq. A vote for Rudy, on the other hand, is likely to be a vote for confrontation over triangulation - which is probably why so many conservative primary voters, a confrontational bunch if there ever was one, find him so easy to like.
My calculus here has less to do with ideology than with governing style. You could argue, based on his record as New York's mayor, that Rudy Giuliani is technically ideologically closer to the Democratic Party than most of his rivals in the field. But I'm nonetheless willing to bet that Washington would be a more polarized and nasty place with Giuliani in the White House than with McCain or Romney (or Huckabee or Thompson, for that matter) occupying the oval office.
Ridicule
I started out a big Sarah Silverman fan, but I don't know ... I think it's enough already. The obligatory New Yorker profile called her brilliantly-conceived comic persona "quiet depravity", but I think "naive depravity" describes it better. At her best, Silverman plays the nice Jewish girl from a nice bourgeois family who remains blissfully unaware that she's a terrible, terrible person. It's hard to describe why this persona works so well; better to just quote it in bulk, as the New Yorker's Dana Goodyear wisely did:
“I’m just sensitive,” she says onstage. “My skin is paper thin. People don’t realize it, because I’m sassy and I’m brassy, but I just— I see these care commercials with these little kids with the giant bellies and the flies, and these are one- and two-year-old babies, nine months pregnant, and it breaks my heart in two.”
As the audience reacts, she presses on. “It breaks my heart in half. And I don’t give money, because”—out of the side of her mouth—“I don’t want them to spend it on drugs, but I give. You know I give. I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors—expecting nothing, by the way—and they culled their money together, whatever they call it, and bought a stamp and sent me a postcard thanking me, and it said thank you and that they had enough sweaters for every single member of the village to get one and that they were delicious.”
...In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: “They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie.”
Now obviously this sort of act doesn't translate all that well to the kind of things that really successful comics are asked to do - like, say, host award shows. But I still think it's instructive, and a little depressing, to contrast the Silverman routine quoted above with her now-famous takedowns of Paris Hilton (at the '06 VMAs) and Britney Spears (at this year's edition).
Chris Orr links to some interesting data on a leftward (or Ron Paul-ward) shift in political contributions among military families. It's far too small a sample size to be dispositive in any way, but it's at least suggestive that the Democrats have a chance to regain some of the ground they lost in the 1970s and '80s, when the post-Vietnam collapse in military morale, followed by the Reagan-era restoration, pushed the military's political allegiances rightward.
But of course, for that to happen, liberals would need someone to play Reagan to Bush's Carter.
More Chait-Mania
Will Wilkinson weighs in here. I offer further commentary here.
I was talking to some guys in Seattle at my book signing last week and I said, 'You know, Patriots-Colts is a lot like Yankees-Red Sox.' For a while, the Red Sox were everyone's favorite and people wanted them to beat the Yankees, but after a while, people were so sick of the whole thing that anyone who isn't a Red Sox or Yankees fan despises both the Red Sox and Yankees. I think we're about four months and five billion Peyton Manning ads away from hitting that same point with the Colts and Pats. Right now, everyone is out to get the Pats, but in a few months, they'll hate the Colts just as much and be desperate for someone like San Diego or Pittsburgh to win something.'
This seems exactly right. It's clear, I think, that dynasties are good for the health of sports overall. Yes, parity is important, but so is familiarity and the joy of having someone to root against come playoff season. Thus baseball in the late '70s, with the Big Red Machine giving way to the dysfunctional Yankee dynasty, and a bunch of consistently good teams (Phils, Royals, Red Sox, etc.) nipping at their heels, was better than baseball in the '80s, when the only thing you knew going into spring training was that last year's division winners wouldn't be repeating.
But two-team rivalries, on the other hand, tend to only be interesting to the fans of the two teams involved, particularly once the weaker half of the rivalry finally pushes itself over the top. The Yanks-Dodgers combat of the '40s and '50s stopped being interesting to anyone who wasn't personally invested in the two teams the moment Sandy Amoros ran down Yogi Berra's liner in '55; for anyone outside the northeast corridor, the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry died in October 2004; and the same will go for Pats-Colts from now on, I'm sure.
This means that having either the Red Sox or the Yankees in the playoffs is good for baseball: They're the big kids on the block, and someone for the rest of baseball to measure themselves against. But having both of them - not so much. So last year, as painful as it was to watch, was good for the health of the sport. And now, of course, it's the Yankees turn to take an October off - except that being the Yankees, they don't seem to have realized it yet.
Photo by Flickr user Brent Danley used under a Creative Commons license.
September 12, 2007
Entourage
I had more or less given up on the show after the mediocrity of last season, but I was pleasantly surprised with the run of episodes that just ended. My only complaint, in fact - apart from a faint disappointment that Anna Faris isn't as good at playing herself as she is at playing Cameron Diaz and Christina Aguilera - has to do with the lack of verisimilitude on two fronts: The movies-within-the-show, and the paparazzi (or lack thereof). Obviously, Entourage is a fantasyland version of Hollywood, not the real thing, and a certain degree of implausibility is par for the course. But the show is supposed to be a mix of realism and satire, not a straightforward send-up, and it seems to me that the creators could have put a little more effort into, say, the clips from Medellin, this season's big project, which is supposed to be a flawed movie from a talented director, not a Zucker brothers version of Scarface. And the next film Vincent Chase has lined up - Silo, "a futuristic thriller set on a farm circa 2075" - sounds like something from Mad Magazine.
But that's a quibble (and movies-within-movies are always laughable - it's a Hollywood tradition in its own right). The curious absence of the paparazzi, though, is more annoying, both because it's deeply implausible that the defining feature of celebrity life circa 2007 wouldn't ever touch this fast-living band of brothers, and (more importantly) because it's a lost dramatic opportunity. I understand that you can't have Vincent Chase and his pals constantly trailed by paparazzi, because that would cut the heart out of the male fantasy the show is selling, but the role of photographers and gossip-mongers in modern Hollywood seems like awfully fertile ground for a show that occasionally seems to be running short of ideas.
Juan Cole on why Iraq could spell political doom ... for the Democrats.
If the Democrats cannot prevail in withdrawing before Bush goes out of office (and they cannot), and if they then rapidly draw down the troops on taking office in 2009, they face the real prospect of a "Gerald Ford meltdown" of the sort that occurred in 1975 when the North Vietnamese and their VC allies took over South Vietnam.
You will note that Ford only served a couple of years as president and lost his election bid to a relative unknown named Jimmy Carter. Although economic stagflation and the stain of Watergate contributed to his defeat, I think the spectacle of the debacle in Indochina harmed Ford a great deal. The United States lost a war, and lost out to its ideological rival in an entire subcontinent of Asia in the midst of the Cold War. That would cause at least some Republicans to stay home in 1976, a sure way for Democrats to win an election.
Could 2010 look for Iraq like 1975 looked in Vietnam? Yes. I just do not see evidence that either the new Iraqi political class or the Iraqi security forces are likely to have the maturity to avoid a conflagration when the US military withdraws.
... In all likelihood, when the Democratic president pulls US troops out in summer of 2009, all hell is going to break loose. The consequences may include even higher petroleum prices than we have seen recently, which at some point could bring back stagflation or very high rates of inflation.
In other words, the Democratic president risks being Fordized when s/he withdraws from Iraq, by the aftermath. A one-term president associated with humiliation abroad and high inflation at home? Maybe I should say, Carterized. The Republican Party could come back strong in 2012 and then dominate politics for decades, if that happened.
Such an outcome is possible, but is it really plausible? It assumes, to begin with, that the next President will effect an immediate, tails-between-our-legs withdrawal, when everything the Democratic candidates are saying a much more slow-moving retreat. I think it's safe to say we won't have 150,000 troops in Iraq two years into a Hillary administration, but I wouldn't be surprised if we have 80,000 troops there, or more; as long as the public has a sense that the numbers are trending downward, I tend to think that the Robb calculus is more or less correct. And I think Cole's wrong, as well, to suggest that the Democrats will "own" whatever chaos follows in the wake of a drawdown of U.S. forces. That might have been true had John Kerry won the White House in '04 and attempted a hasty exit, but at this point the public's sense of Iraq-as-disaster is so deeply associated with George W. Bush that I'm hard-pressed to imagine it turning on a dime once he's out of office.
Voters looking for a little proof that Thompson has stuck by [conservative] principles are shown a biographical video before each campaign event. It's on the underwhelming side, though. Thompson's campaign video says he voted for certain conservative pieces of legislation in the Senate. Usually the minimum bid for bragging rights is a bill that a senator either authored or at least co-sponsored. (Even Obama can claim that.) The campaign also makes much of not much in stressing the role Thompson played in shepherding Chief Justice John Roberts through his Senate confirmation battle. Introducing the conservative jurist to former colleagues required finesse and collegiality, but it was hardly a trial by fire. Thompson "was not picked for that job because of his conservative credentials," says one official who was involved in the nomination process. "He was picked because he was inoffensive to Democrat senators and looked good sitting behind Roberts."
Almost like ... an actor, you might say.
Getting specific about what he believes might get Thompson into trouble, so he's remaining vague. "Part of my efforts is not to get down in the weeds in a particular province in Iraq," he said. When I asked him about his plans for Social Security, he was even blurrier. Though he repeatedly blamed Washington politicians for not acknowledging the dire fiscal condition of entitlements, he said he wouldn't be talking about any of the hard trade-offs required to restructure Social Security or Medicare. "It's not necessary at this stage of the game to say exactly what you would insist upon or not insist upon; it would be counterproductive," he said. "You don't have to get down and say precisely the particular trade-offs. Everybody knows the potential array of things that are on the table. It is like most of the big problems in Washington. It's not a matter of lack of knowledge or picking the right mix. It's a matter of will."
I'm being hard on Thompson of late, as you may have noticed. I think it's more than justified, despite - or, really, because of - the fact that his substance-free Papa Bear schtick isn't exactly hurting him at the polls. At some point, one hopes, the unbearable lightness of his candidacy will catch up to him, but for now it's working like gangbusters. If you can get close to first place in the polls without saying anything even vaguely controversial, well, why would you say anything at all?
More Supply-Side Excitement
Megan McArdle joins Chait-Mania 2007. And on a related subject, I highly recommend Bruce Bartlett's history of starve-the-beast theory.
September 11, 2007
Rudy and the Map
On his way out the door for a few days, Marc left readers with the following provocation:
If Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, he'll put Connecticut and New Jersey in play for the GOP and force the Dems to spend money in the expensive NYC market.
Which Democrat(s) could similarly expand the map, in which states, and why?
I'm inclined to dispute the premise, and agree with the argument Peter Keating made recently for TNR Online. Looking at current state-by-state polls, Keating pointed out that against Hillary Clinton, "Rudy is likely to lose Connecticut, lose Pennsylvania narrowly and run well in Florida and Missouri - just like George W. Bush did last time around." As in 2000 and 2004, he suggested, the next election will be determined by swing voters in the Upper Midwest and the Mountain West; even with a New Yorker like Giuliani in the race, there's almost no way to bring the northeast into play for the GOP.
Sure, Rudy might do better in Connecticut than Bush did, but Bush lost my home state by ten points last time around; he lost New Jersey by seven points, and New York by nineteen points. You'd need an awful lot of socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative, Giuliani-loving "security Moms" to swing right to make those states competitive, particularly in a year when the GOP brand is a lot more tarnished than it was in '04.
It's not that the conventional wisdom about Rudy's unusual general-election impact is entirely wrong: I'm sure he would draw some Rockefeller Republicans into the GOP column, even as he would lose some pro-life, economically-moderate voters to the Democratic column. But in a polarized electorate, these shifts are likely to happen on the margins, not on the kind of grand scale that would be required to make the GOP competitive along the I-95 corridor. Should he take the nomination, how Giuliani expands or contracts the Republican base will indeed determine the election. But it will determine it in states like New Mexico and Florida, Iowa and Ohio, Colorado and Wisconsin - in the purple states, rather than the heart of Blue America.
The Long Run
John Robb explains why we'll be staying in Iraq for a long, long time.
Romney may be leaving a door open, in case he wins the nomination, to say that while America still cannot run from Iraq, he would probably not have become involved to begin with, knowing what he knows now. Such a position would be invaluable when debating Senator Clinton, who spoke out for and voted for a war that 57 percent of Americans now say was a mistake.
Future presidents, like the current one, will face agonizing choices over whether to become involved in foreign wars. For that reason, the eventual Republican nominee will be forced to answer the “hypothetical” question about this war. He may need to give an answer that many Republicans don’t want to hear.
You could take this as evidence of Romney's possible crypto-realist tendencies, or of his eye for the main political chance (or both). Either way, though, I think Freddoso's broader analysis of the political dynamic facing the GOP is pretty astute - as is his point that Newt Gingrich's latest take on the war on terror amounts to a sotto voce rejection of the original push to invade Iraq.
I’m surprised that Jon doesn’t talk at all about the key political role of race in the political shift in this country. Reagan didn’t start as a supply-sider: he started as the enemy of welfare queens in their welfare Cadillacs. And what I’ve learned from Larry Bartels, Tom Schaller, and other political scientists is that race is really central to the whole thing. Here’s a preview quote from my own book:
“The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its domestic policies sharply to the right. In most of the country, this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.”
Really? That's it - that's the whole story? The Cold War, the crime wave, the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade, the tax revolts, and about sixty other smaller things that I can think of were all trumped by the race issue? What an utterly ridiculous interesting idea.
You can find some of my earlier thoughts on this question here and here; I also think this Yglesias post (written in response to a previous Krugman foray on this topic) makes a great deal of sense. More generally, I would suggest that anyone who tells you that there's "an almost embarrassingly simple story" that explains thirty years of American politics (and happens to prove that their political opponents are evil bigots, and bigot-enablers) probably needs to do a little bit more reading on the subject.
Iraq: An Opinion
I just wrote a long, rambling, back-and-forth and back-and-forth post about Iraq that started nowhere, went nowhere, and made no coherent sense. I won't inflict it on you. Instead, I'll just associate myself with an actual position on what we should do - specifically, the position David Kilcullen articulates in George Packer's New Yorker piece this week:
In Kilcullen’s view, allowing the surge to run its course into next spring, while doing as much damage as possible to Al Qaeda in Iraq in the meantime, would make it likelier that a gradual withdrawal of troops would not leave behind the chaos of previous drawdowns—from Falluja and Mosul in 2004, from Tal Afar and Baquba in 2005, and from Baghdad in 2006. He said, “The longer you stay there doing police and counter-intelligence work, the more long-term stability there is once you leave.” He compared the surge to a course of antibiotics: “You keep taking it as long as possible, even after the symptoms are gone, to kill the underlying infection.”
... Kilcullen argued that next summer, when the surge is scheduled to end, American forces could be reduced to a level—say, eighty thousand—that might allow most of the core interests to be protected. Such a move would involve difficult calculations: as American commanders pull back from more stable areas—starting in the northwest, the west, and the south, where there are fewer sectarian divisions—they will risk a return to higher levels of violence. On the phone from Baghdad, General Petraeus said, “There’s an issue of what you might call ‘battlefield geometry.’ Where do you thin out and how do you do it? It’s not as simple as ‘Put in five brigades, one each month, take out five brigades, one each month.’ You might want to thin out in one place and not another. As you do that, you do want to modify your mission.” He added that “you may still be emphasizing protecting the population in one area,” while in more secure areas American forces might take on a role of supporting and advising Iraqi Army units. The changes in mission will come sector by sector and incrementally, with commanders hoping that today’s local ceasefire or the formation of a friendly Sunni militia in one town somehow holds and leads to long-term stability.
But, when the surge ends, there will have to be a strategic turn, away from Americans in the lead. An indefinite war in Iraq “costs us moral authority across the world,” Kilcullen said. The occupation of Iraq remains hugely unpopular with America’s democratic allies and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. “We need that moral authority as ammunition in the fight against Al Qaeda,” he added. “If we’re not down to fifty thousand troops in three to five years, we’ve lost the war on terror.”
The situation in Iraq obviously balances dozens of competing American interests against one another, but the two interests that weigh most heavily in my mind these days are 1) our obligation to mitigate the death toll in a civil war that we ourselves created, and 2) our obligation to minimize the number of Americans who are asked to die for what will almost certainly be remembered as a mistake. (This is why the Huckabee-Paul face-off was so riveting to me: I sympathized with both of them.) Obviously, these obligations push in opposite directions - the former militating for a long-term presence (because, as Reihan says, even if you're making the civil war less bloody only at the margins, those "margins" might mean tens of thousands of lives saved), the latter for an immediate withdrawal. I see the Kilcullen strategy as an attempt to balance the two: I freely admit that it's imperfect in almost every possible way, but today, at least, it seems like the best course.
The question then becomes whether this strategy requires a timetable for withdrawal, in which troop levels are required, by Congressional fiat, to drop consistently from 130,000 in the spring of next year to 80,000 in, say, the following spring. There are good arguments against such timetables, but without them, I have no confidence that this White House - and possibly even the next one - will ever be willing to take the plunge into the unknown that dramatically reducing troop levels requires. Because that's what it is: A leap in the dark, with the possibility that what comes next will be much, much worse than the awfulness we have now. But it's a plunge we have to take.
So that's my opinion, at the moment at least. Have at it.
Photo courtesy Joint Combat Camera Center.
September 10, 2007
Left Brain, Right Brain
I appreciate Megan's grain-of-salt point (and Reihan's old take on studies of this sort), but I wouldn't be surprised at all if these results were at least roughly correct, and your average liberal has some cognitive advantage over your average conservative. How could it be any other way? It isn't just that the left, far more than the right, tends to tell brainiacs what they want to hear - that they were born to rule, that the world is just waiting to be reshaped for the better by their combination of smarts and expertise. (Though of course right-wingers sometimes give in to this temptation as well.) It's that we live in a society that makes an aggressive attempt to select for intelligence in the formation of its elite, and then educates that elite in a university system that is liberal to the core - not left-wing, necessarily, or not anymore, but certainly not conservative either, unless you think (as some fools do) that Thomas Friedman qualifies as a man of the right. The modern meritocracy has evolved to bring up most of its pupils to be Friedmanites, a minority to be Chomskyites, and a vastly smaller minority to be actual conservatives. Small wonder, then, that if you're brainy in America, you probably call yourself a liberal - you were raised that way, after all. Whereas conservatives are the stupid party - the party of the Boston phone directory, not the Harvard Faculty Club, with some crankish intellectuals thrown in for ballast. Thus we have been, and thus we shall always be, until the world - or at least America - is forever changed, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.
I'm joining a bunch of people who've forgotten more about economics than I'll ever know (plus some guy named Krugman) at a TPMCafe Book Club on Jon Chait's The Big Con. Jon's first post is up, and while you wait for the rest of us to pile on, here's some prebuttal action from Megan and a Free Exchange blogger who seems to agree with Will Wilkinson an awful lot.
Huckabee the Extremist
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to Garance Franke-Ruta's suggestion that Mike Huckabee might be too far right on social issues to be a winning Presidential candidate, but I think this is a bit much:
I mean, just look at his agenda. Mr. Guitar-Rocker Folksy Nice Guy wants to: eliminate all contraception education in schools; use our tax dollars to fund ideological and ineffective abstinence education programs in those schools; and get rid of condom distribution in schools in favor of Bible distribution programs that have been overturned by the courts. He favors: a federal marriage amendment to the U.S. constitution; a human life amendment; the teaching of creationism to children; and the South Dakota law that banned all abortions and was so extreme the state's own highly traditionalist voters overturned it in a referendum.
... In short, Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and religious TV executive, is the candidate of exhausting and divisive social issues and the ongoing war by what Andrew Sullivan calls Christianists against the mainstream views of the majority of the American people. But, hey! As long as he can tell a good joke and strum a guitar, right?
Um, about "those mainstream views of the majority of the American people" ... Yes, it's true that Huckabee's abortion position and his opposition to sex ed in schools place him decidedly to the right of the public. (Although many Democrats are to the public's left where funding for abstinence education is concerned.) But as for the rest, well, more than half of John Kerry voters shared Huckabee's position on teaching evolution in public schools, and as of 2006 a slight majority supported the federal marriage amendment. I don't know how Americans feel about handing out Gideon Bibles in classrooms, but seventy percent or so reliably support returning prayer to public schools, which I assume was the issue that Huckabee was gesturing at in that comment.
Michael Hirsh, on the GOP field's foreign-policy advisers:
The Republican candidates have the opposite problem: with the president's popularity at Nixonian lows and his foreign policy in broad disfavor with the electorate, nobody is rushing to hire the president's team. Normally, candidates would rush to seek the counsel of high-powered alumni of the president's foreign policy team. But so many of its members—like neocon hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—are now thought to be tainted, their views are not widely welcomed. (An exception: the highly respected Robert Zoellick, former U.S. trade rep and deputy secretary of state. But Zoellick took himself out of the game when he replaced Wolfowitz as World Bank president in May.) At the same time, the Republicans' conservative base doesn't have much taste for the realists who dominated foreign-policy thinking in past GOP administrations (except for über-adviser Henry Kissinger, who has managed to transcend these divides with the same aplomb he has shown in past campaigns). For Republicans "there's no upside in declaring, 'These are my advisers.' The base hates realists, and neocons are too controversial," says sometime Romney adviser Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. "So the thinking is, don't define yourself by foreign-policy advisers."
This seems about right, although I'm not sure how often candidates do define themselves by their foreign-policy advisers - save when, like George W. Bush in 2000, their lack of foreign-policy experience is so painfully apparent that they need to surround themselves with steady (or steady-seeming) hands to make up for it. But even if none of the GOP candidates are exactly trumpeting the names of their foreign-policy gurus to the skies, we know enough about who's advising whom to indulge in some informed speculation about the current foreign-policy divisions in the field. Sure, all the top-tier candidates may be talking about foreign affairs in the language of Rick Santorum, because that's what the base seems to want, but there are almost certainly real differences, and subtleties, at work behind the scenes.
Fred Thompson came to the offices of National Review some years when he was still in the Senate. I liked him fine. He has done nothing, anywhere, ever. The Hubble Telescope could not find what he has done, because he has not done it.
"Maybe the times have changed, and the Webcast and his celebrity are enough. Maybe he and his tactics are the wave of the future," Cullen said, adding a stinging comparison between Thompson and the failed 1985 launch of a new Coca-Cola formula. "Or maybe he's the New Coke."
The rationale for Thompson's run has been refreshingly phony: It's all about his looks, his voice, his personality. His backers have confused all of that with leadership, and Thompson, like the worst actor, is starting to believe his reviews. That's a mistake. The point of Fred Thompson is that he was never serious.
The good news is that he's really coming into his own on the stump ... or, you know, not.
Photo by Flickr user FreddThompson used under a Creative Commons license.
September 7, 2007
An Acceptable Time
There are invisible strings, hundreds and thousands of them, that run back deep into our childhoods - Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory," if you will - and often you don't know that one exists until something happens to pluck it. Madeleine L'Engle is dead, at eighty-eight: I never got very deep into anything she wrote except the Time trilogy and its companion volume, Many Waters, but those books I probably read six times each at least, and the string her death plucked has been vibrating in my mind all day - for Charles Wallace and Meg Murray and Calvin O'Keefe and Mrs. Whatsit, but also for the child I was when I encountered her books, the near-yet-faraway past in which I read and then re-read them. For John Podhoretz, whose building she lived in when he was a boy, the chord is thicker, the note stronger. If you loved her books, go read his tribute.
Being There
In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens has a wonderfully savage review of Philip Roth's new novel, in which he punctuates his summary of what sounds like a dull rehash of better Roth plots by remarking "Am I by any chance boring you?" And then, later, "Are you absolutely sure that I am not boring you?" It isn't the most cutting line in the piece (that one has to do with oral sex of a particularly unpleasant variety, but you'll have to subscribe to read it, I'm afraid), but it's the one that seems most applicable to the candidacy of ol' Fred Thompson, who looks more and more like the political equivalent of a bad Philip Roth novel - that is, a mediocre simulacrum of a far superior product.
For instance, Thompson went on Hannity and Colmes last night, and one of the questions Hannity asked him was this:
When you look at the other current crop of candidates, Republicans, where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?
Seems like a pretty important question for a candidate - especially one jumping into the race late - to answer. Now sure, a twenty-minute interview on Fox News isn't the time or place for a terribly substantive answer, but you'd think that Thompson would have something to offer - some one-liner, at least, about how "I'm the only candidate who X, or Y, or Z." Not so much:
Responding to a reader's suggestion that one can both believe that abortion should be outlawed and believe that killing a baby is morally worse than killing an embryo, Andrew writes, "I wonder if this argument leads one to believe that morning-after contraception is less morally troubling than second trimester abortion?" The obvious answer seems to me to be yes (this is a point that came up a long-ago blog discussion of abortion, for those interested in wading into the weeds). But it's also worth noting that case of the morning-after pill is distinct from the case of the late-term abortion in another way, because it isn't clear that the most common form of morning-after pill is an abortifacient at all. I made this point a while back in the context of the debate over the South Dakota abortion ban, when Will Saletan argued that it's morally inconsistent for a state to ban abortion but permit - or even encourage - the use of Plan B. Not so, I wrote:
The law's provision allowing "the sale, use, prescription, or administration of a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical" before a pregnancy can be detected is an obvious nod to morning-after pills like Plan B, as Saletan admits. Now, it's true that Plan B can act as an abortifacient, by inhibiting implantation of a fertilized ovum. At least, it can in theory. But it's designed to work as a contraceptive, one that prevents ovulation and fertilization - and its abortifacient effect seems to be largely speculative at this point. Which means that a woman taking Plan B is intending to contracept, using a method that has a microscopic chance of accidentally causing an abortion - and this seems obviously different, legally speaking, from a woman who deliberately procures an abortion. Accident is different from intent: After all, it's been argued that the regular-old birth control pill itself (of which, I believe, Plan B is just a particularly high dose) can lead to abortions in extremely rare situations, leading some Protestants to join the Catholic Church in rejecting its use. But I don't think that this means that pro-lifers are logically required to support a legal ban on the Pill.
For the curious, here are a pairof studies that suggest that Plan B does not, in fact, have an abortifacient affect. And you can find a more in-depth look at the subject from a pro-life blogger here.
(Of course, it's also worth noting that if emergency contraception may not be as close to abortion as some pro-lifers suggest it is, neither does it seem to have the kind of potential to reduce the abortion rate that many Saletan-style "queasy-about-abortion" pro-choicers credit it with.)
Mitt Romney is--well, he continues to seem like someone who's stepped from the shower and been handed a dress shirt by his manservant George. He's like a senior account executive on "Mad Men."
Harsh. But true.
America The Boastful
I like making jokes about how if it weren't for us, all those stuck-up French waiters and hoteliers would be speaking German as much as the next Yankee. But having a Presidential candidate respond to a question about why we're hated overseas by going on about how "our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples ... than all the other countries put together" just comes across as weirdly defensive braggadocio. Particularly since - as Larison, scourge of American triumphalism, points out - it's probably not true:
Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false. It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII.
Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the “liberty” of other peoples. In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000. The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for “the liberty and freedom of other peoples,” and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States. Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India’s 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France. If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater. Given how much smaller its population was, Britain’s losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours.
In Fred Thompson's defense, estimates of World War II casualties do varya bit, and you could argue that his overall estimate looks a bit more accurate if you factor in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. Except, as Larison says, for the pesky matter of World War I, where the Brits - whose defense of poor hapless Belgium gives them at least as solid a claim to have been fighting for the liberty of other peoples as Woodrow Wilson's "make the world safe for democracy" posturing - took eight times as many casualties as we did, and more than we took in the whole of World War II as well.
Obviously this sort of obnoxious mythologizing isn't confined to Fred Thompson, but it doesn't do him any credit either.
September 6, 2007
(Still) Looking For A Political Strategy
Jim Geraghty responds to the (qualified) praise I offered Sam Brownback for bringing up the possibility of a soft partition in last night's debate:
I think there’s a reason no other candidate made any kind of stab at addressing the political problem. They had a window of ninety seconds before an audience looking for applause lines, not exactly the ideal venue to lay out a detailed strategy to sort out violent differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds and their Turkish neighbors. I mean, in a perfect world, Brownback would have the time and audience attention span to get into how the oil revenues from around Kirkuk will affect the Turkmen minority, but if you go into a debate looking for that, you’re invariably going to be disappointed.
Two points. First, it's certainly true in a debate forum like last night's, there's a strong incentive for politicians to stick to potential applause lines, and avoid going deeper into the weeds. But that doesn't mean that pundits and journalists should just treat the event like a boxing match, root for the devastating punch or the best one-liner, and make fun of anybody who tries to elevate the discussion even a little for missing an opportunity to win some easy applause. I wasn't disappointed that the debate didn't offer a high-minded discussion of oil revenues and Kirkuk; I was disappointed that when Sam Brownback tried to go at least some distance toward addressing the political problem America faces in Iraq - rather than just insisting that the surge is working, full stop, end of story, no dissent allowed - he got dumped on for being a loser.
Second, maybe a Fox News debate wasn't an ideal venue to lay out "a detailed strategy to sort out violent differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds and their Turkish neighbors." But Brownback's remarks on a soft partition were more detailed, on that front, than anything I can find on, say, John McCain's entire website. Or Rudy's. Or Romney's. McCain's site offers the most material on Iraq of any of the major candidates, but it's all just a defense of staying the course with the surge, followed by this:
John McCain believes that only by controlling the violence in Iraq can we pave the way for a political settlement. But once the Iraqi government wields greater authority, it will be incumbent upon Iraqi leaders to take significant steps on their own. These include a commitment to go after the militias, a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, more equitable distribution of government resources, provincial elections that will bring Sunnis into the government, and a large increase in employment-generating economic projects.
All well and good, but it seems clear that whatever the surge's military successes, this kind of political follow-through from the Maliki government just isn't happening. So we need to decide what to do next. Sam Brownback tried to make a contribution to that debate last night. Nobody else did.
Supply-Siders and Their Friends
In the course of a larger debate over the influence of supply-side economics, touched off by Jon Chait's book and TNR excerpt, Ezra Klein complained that mainstream conservative (and non-conservative) economists regularly write for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and in the process lend "their titles and credibility to an outlet that continually promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology."
I’m sure it seems to many intelligent people that the collected work of Robert Kuttner, the founder and editor of Ezra’s magazine, is extremist and intellectually sloppy (if not always mendacious) and “promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology.” Yet Ezra still chooses to write for The American Prospect. And so do many perfectly respectable academics. Why? Probably because its editorial vision is closer to their views than the relevant alternatives. And, just perhaps, the economic outlook of the Journal editorial page is closer to the views of many Nobel Prize-winning economist than the relevant alternatives, as inconvenient or annoying as that fact may be to some people.
It isn’t a question of credible people lending support to a “laughable ideology” or credible people who are ideologically inclined towards the paper’s editorial views publishing in a comfortable venue. Prominent, respectable economists submit articles to the WSJ op-ed page because the paper is one of the most widely-circulated national newspapers whose main focus is reporting on business and finance. A huge percentage of WSJ readers, whose politics are happily not always that of the immigration-cum-imperialism crowd who write the paper’s editorials, is made up of people who make their living working for corporations or investing in the market (or both) and who want to have informed commentary about developments in the economy. Economists publish their op-eds in the WSJ to reach an audience that is going to be interested in what they have to say. And supposedly clever schemes of building up the empire of the supply-siders really has nothing to do with it.
I think they're both right. As Daniel says, the WSJ op-ed page is important because the WSJ is important, and so if you're interesting in reaching influential readers it makes sense to publish there regardless of what you think of the editorial page next door. (The same goes for the Times op-ed page, obviously; if I had an op-ed published there, I wouldn't beat myself up because I was somehow "lending credibility" to the Times' arch-liberal editorials.) But it's also the case, as Will says, that mainstream conservative economists don't go around bashing supply-siders because, well, supply-siders tend to be their political allies. As Megan has beenarguing, it's possible to support lower tax rates - as it's possible to support any policy - for good reasons and bad, and it's the nature of politics that alliances form around shared support for particular policies, not on "quality of your reasoning" grounds. So yes, conservatives who believe in lower taxes and leaner government but recognize that cutting taxes doesn't raise revenue could spend all their time anathematizing Larry Kudlow and attacking every GOP politician who makes "free lunch" claims. But I don't think it's intellectually dishonest or hypocritical for the Greg Mankiws of the world, who publicly acknowledge that tax cuts don't directly raise revenue but support them for other reasons, to work with and for supply-siders, rather than threatening to resign in protest every time a Bush Administration official makes an implausible boast about tax cuts' magic powers. It's just a recognition that political reality requires making alliances with people who believe the right things (or what you take to be the right things) for the wrong reasons.
Now, I also think that conservatives have taken this principle too far where the Kudlows of the world are concerned, but I'm participating in a forum on Jon Chait's book over at TPMCafe next week, so I'll keep the rest of my powder dry till then.
September 5, 2007
Political Theater
Andy McCarthy, watching Sam Brownback propose a soft partition of Iraq during tonight's debate:
... is Sam Brownback insane? Chance to pounce on Paul after Wallace cleared the path, he's blathering.
Brownback totally whiffs on chance to whack at anything Paul has said, and cites Thomas Friedman's call for a political surge. Urrrrrgh. Seriously disappointing. We had some serious drama going there. Okay, who's gonna swing away at Ron Paul, since Brownback won't?
Look, I get where they're coming from: It's good when the candidates mix it up and actually address what one another are saying, and Brownback generally seems lost in the crowd during these debates, and from a tactical perspective he ought to be throwing more punches. (Or getting out of the race entirely.) But - but - what Brownback did, in his non-response to Paul, was offer an actual strategy for moving forward politically in Iraq, addressing the central problem of our occupation head-on in a way that almost nobody else did during tonight's debate. His plan for partition may be a terrible plan (or at best, a plausible endpoint of a "stay till it burns out" strategy), but it's an infinitely more substantive contribution to the argument over Iraq than, say, Rudy Giuliani's famous slam of Paul a few months back, and Brownback deserved better - as do we all - than to have his response scored a failure because he didn't use it to score cheap points against a fellow also-ran.
While I share theCornerconsensus that the frequent invocation of African proverbs by Democratic politicians is kind of annoying, I think Matt Feeney's critique of right-wing Africa-bashing scores some significant points as well.
Is Larry Craig Heterosexual?
Probably not. But last week, Christopher Hitchens played devil's advocate:
But there's actually a chance—a 38 percent chance, to be more precise—that the senator can cop a plea on the charge of hypocrisy. In his study of men who frequent public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys discovered that 54 percent were married and living with their wives, 38 percent did not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual, and only 14 percent identified themselves as openly gay.
I'm not sure I buy that. I'll bet many of them are closeted, conflicted or gay-and-married-to-a-woman. They say they're hetero, sure. But the Onion had the best riposte to that.
I don't buy the numbers Hitchens cites, either - not least because they're from 1970, a much more closeted time than ours. But on the other hand, there is clearly some percentage of heterosexual men who engage in gay encounters outside of the all-male environments, like prep school and prison, where opportunistic homosexuality is most common. Yes, there's evidence to support the proposition that male bisexuality doesn't exist as a distinct category of sexual orientation (though I retain some skepticism about this finding), but even if there's a gay-straight binary, in some sense, on the level of biochemical arousal, there's also clearly a certain number of people whose behavior places them in the 2-4 range on the Kinsey scale, and not all of them are gay men who are lying to themselves. Consider the findings of the same recent study that seeks to debunk the idea of bisexuality as a distinct sexual category:
In the experiment ... the researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.
Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.
Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.
But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.
Now obviously it's impossible to know what the overlap is between the population of self-described "bisexuals" in this survey and the population of men who troll for sex in public restrooms. But it's suggestive, at least, that there might be a one-in-four chance that when Larry Craig says he's not and never has been gay, he's telling the truth.
Failing Upward
I missed this bit of Labor Day Weekend intelligence:
Three of the eight announced 2008 Republican presidential campaigns are considering retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks as their pick for vice presidential candidate, according to Republican Party operatives.
Gen. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command until he retired in 2003, orchestrated the military campaign that ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The choice of Gen. Franks as vice president would be a direct affront to antiwar Democrats, who plan to make opposition to the Bush administration's handling of the war the main plank of their campaign platforms.
Um, actually, it would be a gift to antiwar Democrats, and an "affront" to anyone who knows anything about Tommy Franks' record in Afghanistan and Iraq. Short of picking Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Bremer for the veep's slot, I can't imagine any better way to tie the next GOP nominee to the current Administration's blunders than to nominate the guy who let Osama Bin Laden get away for VP in '08.
The Man Who Wasn't There
I don't care whether you're for Fred Thompson or, as he might drawl, agin' him - if part of you isn't rooting for him to get absolutely clobbered in the first GOP debate he deigns to show up for, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The good news is, with Mary Matalin in his corner, a clobbering is more or less guaranteed.
September 4, 2007
Your Semi-Regular Scottish Independence Update
Ben Crair makes the interesting suggestion that "historians might look back at the war in Iraq" as the catalyst for Scottish secession from the United Kingdom. But Alex Massie isn't buying.
(I'm going to be terribly disappointed, incidentally, if the push for Scottish independence ends with a boring Parliamentary vote instead of "rough wooing"-style border campaign, followed by a rematch of Culloden.)
The Family That Drinks Together ...
I'd always assumed that introducing kids to alcohol in the home, rather than trying to enforce our society's ridiculously draconian restrictions on teen drinking, made adolescents less prone to really stupid booze-related behavior. But it's good to have some cold hard statistical proof.
Why We Fight?
Citing this Newsweek piece on the ethnic cleansing that's ongoing even during the "surge," both Kevin Drum and Matt suggest that, in Matt's words, "it's worth considering the possibility that the essential 'plan' in Iraq is just to stay there, in force, vaguely allied with whichever side (or sides) we perceive to be willing to ally with us, until, eventually, the civil war ends, a brilliant victory is portrayed, and the hippie peacenik scum are told to beat it. After all, civil wars do end if you just wait long enough."
Take out the sneering and yes, this is the case for staying in Iraq that seems most persuasive to me at the moment. By remaining there in force, this argument runs, the U.S. can mitigate the violence associated with ethnic cleansing, degrade al Qaeda's capabilities, and prevent the bloodletting from spreading beyond Iraq's borders - with the long-term goal of ensuring that the civil war burns itself out with as few civilian casualties and as little collateral damage to U.S. interests in the region as possible. The hope would be that Iraq eventually settles into a relatively stable state of de facto partition, with a weak central government and strong regional power centers, and with the various fault lines policed by a much-reduced American force. And were this goal achieved you would declare victory, not to stick it to the hippies but because that's what you would have won - not the victory we hoped for in 2003, certainly, and the not the kind of victory that lends itself to Gettysburg analogies, but victory of a certain kind nonetheless.
Now it may be that the American presence in Iraq, far from mitigating the violence, is actually making it worse (by effectively funneling arms to sectarian militias, etc. etc.). And it may be, as Matt says, that the civil war could take decades rather than years to burn itself out. Both of these possibilities, along with the ongoing loss of life, the cost of the occupation, and so forth, militate against the "stay till it burns itself out" strategy. But given that most of the plans for phased withdrawal that I've seen run the risk of ending up as a more-ineffectual variant of exactly the same strategy we're employing now - with a much-reduced U.S. presence trying to, well, fight al Qaeda and mitigate the ongoing violence - it's hard for me to dismiss the idea that staying in strength might be the lesser of two evils.
Update: I should note that this Hilzoy post, despite some fuzzy math in the title, is the most comprehensive rebuttal I've seen to the "stay till it burns out" point of view.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Scott Taylor.
A Further Note on Populism
While on the subject, I should mention that like Reihan, I consider “populism” a less-than-ideal term to describe the constellation of policy ideas that he and I support (I don’t think we use the term very often in our forthcoming book). On the other hand, I think it’s pointless to deny that our program, such as it is, would require some harnessing of popular sentiment in order to shift the governing consensus on various issues. This strikes me as a fairly banal observation, though, since any program of reform necessarily requires either popular pressure or a shift in the elite zeitgeist (or both) to come to fruition. And I’m afraid that I don’t quite get where Will Wilkinson is coming from when he writes:
My guess is that some intellectuals get excited about populism because they thrill to the fantasy of riding popular passions to power and harnessing them to set in place their ardently desired policies. It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream.
This is an exceedingly odd position for a libertarian to take, I would submit, given that the story of America’s recent rightward shift on various liberty issues – particularly taxes, but extending to issues as diverse as economic deregulation and gun control – has been in large part a story of smart libertarians “riding popular passions to power and harnessing them to set in place their ardently desired policies.” (Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that a major left-wing talking point of late – from Thomas Frank and others – has been the notion that Republicans have harnessed popular passions to trick the public into supporting free-market policies that they would otherwise reject.) This is how policy change in a democracy works – except, of course, when it’s just imposed by intellectuals without the public having much of a voice in the matter, as has been known to happen from time to time.
Obviously, there are aspects of Reaganism and the Contract With America that a consistent libertarian like Will would reject, but both the Gipper and Gingrich – and the policy minds around them – played a substantial role in making America more libertarian than it was circa 1975, and they used “popular passions” to achieve their desired results. Was this really so “repulsive”? Or are intellectuals and politicians who harness popular discontent “repulsive” only when their “ardently desired policies” don’t conform to Will’s own worldview?
Last, what is populism anyway? I think of a politics that pictures the economy as a huge zero-sum game, sets social and economic classes against each other, and promises “the people” free stuff at the expense of some other, usually richer, people. Ezra adduces evidence from the recent Pew Political Typology that shows increased support for a bigger, more domestically activist government. I certainly don’t dispute it. But what does that have to do with populism, exactly? Is this shift in opinion Ezra identifies motivated by “people vs. the powerful,” “two America’s” stuff? Where’s the evidence of that? And, more to the point, if there is any evidence of it, where’s the evidence that it is driven largely by economic anxiety?
Broadly understood, I take the term “populism” to refer to any politics that champions issues that have a broad base of popular support but receive short shrift from the political elite. This explains why you can have left-populists and right-populists, populists who demand higher welfare spending (see Long, Huey) and populists who champion welfare reform (see every successful GOP politician from Nixon to Gingrich), and so and so forth. More narrowly, though, in the case of the new left-populism I was discussing in my Atlanticmini-essay, I take it to describe a politics that pictures, not the economy in general, but the welfare state specifically as a zero-sum game (a not-entirely-accurate assessment of how taxing and spending works, but one that isn’t all that wide of the mark), and that argues either that the well-off should be taxed at higher rates or that wealthy interests should receive less government money than at present, with the goal in each case being to distribute federal largesse across a broader portion of the population, whether through spending on health care or education or what-have-you.
I think it’s very hard to argue that this latter sort of politics doesn’t command more support today than it did a decade ago – so difficult, in fact, that Will doesn’t bother to make that argument, and instead suggests that rising support for an expanded welfare state doesn’t count as “populism” because it doesn’t come wrapped in “two America’s” or “people vs. the powerful” rhetoric. In defense of my locution, I would note that it was precisely this sort of rhetoric of “people vs. the powerful” that launched much of the Democratic class of ’06 into power; I would note, too, that I specifically described the new redistributionism as a new-model populism, to distinguish it from the more-explicitly class-warriorish appeals of leftisms gone by. But I’m not all that invested in the term, so if Will admits that the country has moved steadily left on tax-and-transfer issues since the ’94 GOP landslide, then I’ll declare victory and accept whatever terminology he prefers.
I suppose Labor Day isn't the ideal moment to link to a story about a lottery winner, but this is too priceless to pass up:
A Wicca devotee and small businessman from Dundalk came forward yesterday with a photocopy of a lottery ticket showing the winning numbers to Friday's Mega Millions drawing and claimed a share of the estimated $330 million jackpot, though lottery officials have yet to verify his assertion.
... Bartlett gathered just a stone's throw from the Walther Boulevard store to celebrate with friends and fellow pagans at Mystickal Voyage, a New Age gift shop he considers his spiritual home and that he said he plans to help improve with his winnings.
As an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, Bartlett recalled feeling compelled to do more teaching in the New Age store last month, but felt torn because he couldn't pull away from his job. He told the "powers that be" that if he won the lottery, he would focus on teaching completely.
"And a month later, here I am," he said. "I thank the gods for this gift. ... I don't know which one granted me this wish, but whichever one did, thanks!"
If you click through to the story, you'll see that he looks at least a little bit like the Comic Book Guy. Which somehow doesn't seem at all surprising.
September 1, 2007
The Huckabee Surge
It's real. For now. The good news for Huckaboosters is that he's managed to slip partway into the space left by Fred Thompson's failure to transition from a (brilliant) pre-campaign to an actual, you know, campaign. The bad news is that Thompson is about to officially lumber into the race, and while he may have nothing to offer except "a series of conservative cliches interspersed with long pauses," he's got more money and more glitz - for now, at least - than the Huckster, and it's quite possible he'll be able to suck up all the non-Romney, non-Giuliani oxygen long enough to deal Huckabee a fatal blow. The other bad news, meanwhile, is that while Huckabee has a keen instinct for what's missing from the current GOP field of front-runners - i.e. someone who's orthodox on social issues but unorthodox on economics - many of his specific ideas (from the Fair Tax to a national smoking ban) tend toward the semi-baked. But then again tone matters a lot more than substance in the primary season, and there's plenty of time - particularly if he's looking to set himself up for another run in '12 or '16 - for Huckabee to put a little more policy flesh on his bones. (Insert your own weight-loss joke here.)
The most important thing, to my mind, is that a Huckabee-Giuliani-Romney race would be a lot healthier for the GOP than a Thompson-Giuliani-Romney race, which is reason enough to wish the Huckster well.
Oh man - I go away for the weekend to help my sister move into college (in a certain "medium city" on the Long Island Sound), and Will Wilkinson decides to take this as an opportunity to launch one of his patented and totally unfair "hey, look at me, I've got all these smart arguments" attacks on something I wrote. Damn you, Wilkinson! How dare you use the power of intelligence against me?
Seriously, read the piece in question (yes, you'll have to suck it up and subscribe to the Atlantic), then read Will, read Ezra, read Will again, read Reihan and read Larison. I'll try to muster some extended thoughts on the subject, I promise, before the long weekend is out.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
