Dixiecrats Under the Bed

Or, Drowning the Baby in the Bathwater



Sully can't seem to leave Zell Miller alone. I don't know if he finally sees someone he can denounce as a real live clansmen without sacrificing his "objectivity," but he's zeroing in on one statement and ignoring the rest of the man's subsequent career in public service, which has not been one of uniform racial hostility. Trent Lott he's not.


The sad thing is, he's got a real argument to throw against the old boy, the fact that a few of the weapon systems that Miller chastised Kerry for opposing have also been opposed, at one time or another, by GOP leadership, particularly Dick Cheney. A fair point, even if the WaPo's defense of Kerry that Sully links isn't quite the home run Sully thinks it is (so he didn't vote against them individually, just as part of a big package? Well, that makes it all better). But there is the beginning of an argument here, and if Sully stopped the "he's not a hippy, you redneck!" game, he might get somewhere with it.




UPDATE: Then again, he might not. Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller has the goods on Kerry's Defense stance back in the 80's. The documents are here and here and there's a whole laundry list of weapons systems Kerry wanted to junk. How come Zell didn't have this handy?

Sully's Back, Day Two

Muuuuuuuch better. Not surprising that Guiliani and McCain would draw good marks, but I see a return of the thing that makes Sully's site worth reading: optimism. Hopeful Sully is always sharper and better than Angry, Despondent Sully. And he's aware enough to see that the winds are shifting, and the Swifties are part of that (though he has to insist that McCain's "old soldier" honor would never countenance such things, as though it's that and not his need to defend McCain-Feingold that has him mad at the 527's. A former guest of the Hanoi Hilton being sympathetic to John "VVAW" Kerry? Please).


'Course, the old boy would probably just say that this is his old reasonability coming back to fore. I don't know that he would be wrong.

Oy.

Reading Andrew Sullivan on his first day back from vacation is becoming a yearly exercise in slapping one's forehead. How can any man not memorizing Moveon.org's press releases dismiss the Swifties as merely "jumping like bait on the end of Karl Rove's line"? Does the possibility that these guys might be telling the truth bear no weight at all? And after Bush endured the firestorm about his service, I don't see the injustice in Four-Month Kerry being made to answer a few questions, too. Especially since he's made those four months the lynchpin of his campaign. But no, it's all the work of Bush's "cronies." All that's missing here is a description of smoke-filled rooms.


But, when it comes to the role of the federal government in politics, I can't say I disagree with the guy. Sully says he wants to hear Bush talking about "reform of entitlements, a U-turn on public spending, staying the course on education reform, reforming the military, simplifying the tax code." Frankly, so do I (although how we're to "stay the course" on education while slashing public spending is beyond me, but probably not beyond the chaps at Cato Institute). And I have little doubt that Bush will mention exactly those things, or at least some of them.


But I don't think that's really what Sully wants. Nothing short of the complete repudiation of "Santorum, Dobson, and DeLay" will suit him, even if Santorum, Dobson, and Delay are all willing to vote for reforming the tax code, entitlements, the military, etc. Lacking that, we're all supposed to vote Kerry, who won't give Sully anything he wants (that includes gay marriage, Sully. Kerry won't touch that with a ten-foot cattle-prod).


I'm not thrilled with Bush, either. Declaring war on the 527's last week was but one of a slew of incidents that had me shaking my head. But I don't have a choice between Bush and Thomas Jefferson; I have to choose between a guy who wants, at varying degrees of priority, to fix all the things Sully and I think should be fixed, and will vigorously go after terrorism and terrorist states, and a guy who's demonstrated a talent for nothing beyond straddling issues like a rodeo clown. To vote Democratic this November is to vote for the same old, same old: special interests feeding off the federal teet, socialization of everything that isn't nailed down, and surrendering our foreign policy to the the whores that starved Iraq and are currently playing their fiddle while slaughter goes on in Sudan. To vote Republican is to vote for the possibility of change, even if that change should come from those who don't consider everybody that wonders if God's Word ought to be taken seriously a "theocon."


Time to choose, old boy. What is it you really want?




UPDATE: I'm not alone. For Vodkapundit, merely mentioning Sully's name brought forth a torrent of "Gah, I'm sick of him." Observe.


I do believe I'll put VP on the linksheet. But I'm-a keepin' Sully. Old time's sake and whatnot.




ONE MORE THING:: Sully also unfairly slams Zell Miller, for condeming LBJ's civil rights agenda in the 60's. Fair enough, but when he was governor of Georgia, Zell advised the state legistlature to drop the Confederate flag from the state banner, mentioning that Georgia was part of the CSA for but four of the 270 years of her existence. In 2001 they did so, and in 2003, they adopted the new flag. That sounds like repentance to me. So lay off, Sully.

Whose Country is this, Anyway?

No, Sully, you aren't the only one who started to worry when he heard the Marines were handing Fallujah over to a previously unheard-of Iraqi army. This wasn't precisely what we were promised, was it? Furthermore, who is this Fallujah Protective Army? Who do they answer to? What guaruntee do we have that they'll actually do their job?


The only reason I didn't blog on this subject yesterday is because I was waiting for better information to come down the pike. Now I know that this plan is one they've been considering for some time, and that the FPA officers will answer to our own commanders for at least the time being. The last question remains in the air, but consider this: we're expecting Iraqis to govern themselves at some point. Within a few months, as a matter of fact. Might as well give them a chance to do that. It's not like Fallujah's going anywhere.


The thing to keep in mind is that we're not looking to add Iraq to the Union. All we wanted is for Hussein to be gone, and that Arabs get a chance to try something like the rule of law. We haven't got time to kill or pacify every Islamofascist in the country. There's still, after all, Iran and Syria to deal with.

The Passion -- Missing the Point

I deserve to be scourged for presuming to write about the Passion at this point, so many weeks after everybody else. I'm sure that most folk are sick to death of the issue. But there are some ideas about the movie that I feel obligated to address, and as it took me a while to actually see it, and a few more to digest it, you're putting up with me now. Such is life.


I live in St. Mary's County, MD, in what used to be Tobacco country and what is most distinctly Bush country. It's also Church country. I won't say that the churches have an absolute majority over the bars, but I will say that they give the bars a run for their money. They're mostly mainstream Protestant churches: Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptist, with a noticeable minority of Catholic churches, and the occasional Church of God/Pentecostal types. In other words, a fairly good cross section of American denominational habits. And it is invariably the Protestants who are advertising showings and tickets to "Passion of the Christ" in big shiny banners outside their rectories. Outside the Catholic churches, nary a one.


At first glance, this might be something that a Catholic would be ashamed of, much the same way we occasionally feel buttonholed when discussing Scripture with a Prod. It would seem as though they're "getting" the movie more than we are. Can they have more passion for the Passion?


Before I proceed on this subject, let me relate my experience with the film. I saw it with my dad a few weeks into Lent. That it was a dark, savage two hours, I will not doubt. I cringed at many moments, felt horror far more than I felt joy. That it was a film in any way anti-Semetic, I dispute. Only the modern age could see Pilate as a sympathetic character, rather than the gutless provincial bureaucrat I saw. The only piece of outright racism in the film was when one of the Roman guards escorting/whipping Jesus on the road to Golgotha said to Simon the Cyrenian, who carries the cross for a way: "Get going...Jew." Given the circumstances and the characters, it is hardly logical that Gibson intended such sentiment to be emulated. That everyone who should have spoken up for this man failed to do so, the movie makes abundantly clear. I really don't know what Charles Krauthammer, whose views I normally pay great credence to, is talking about here. He admits that most of the main characters in the story of the Passion, outside of Gibson's film, are Jews. But to depict that in a film is apparently an act of "irreligious agression." When I watched it, there was as much screen time given to Mary, John, and Mary Magdelene, all Jews, as to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Krauthammer ignores this, much as thousands of medieval Christians and Nazis must have. He also ignores the fact that the Satan character walks among the Roman guards as they scourge Jesus. All he can see are Jews: not humans, not Sons of Adam, not carriers of the moral virus known as Original Sin, just members of a particular ethnic group. I can't help but see this as an excessive focus on the racial makeup of a story, an impulse that is no less to blame for anti-Semitic violence than are the Gospels.


All of this makes Andrew Sullivan's me-too from March 5th less than convincing. Sorry, Andrew, if you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that the Jewish children that "turn into demons" disappear as soon as Satan has Judas out by the tree with the rope. This meant that they were illusions, which is what the Devil trafficks in. You can be frightened by Gibson's Traditionalism, reasonably call him a schismatic and heretic if such is your desire. But I didn't see anti-semitism in his film, and from what I've seen and heard since the film came out, the only ones who did were the ones writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.


But the bloodiness still needs to be confronted. Sullivan called the film "pornographic," in the sense that it reduces all matters of importance to the flesh. Christ's physical suffering is so graphic as to crowd out the enormity of the spiritual irony of the Incarnation of God destroyed by those he came to love. I take his point, and William F. Buckley's, such as they are. A more ethereal, more intellectual film could easily have been made, and indeed, might have been better. But they have missed the point and purpose of Gibson's film.


When my father and I walked out of the theater, we understandably had little to say. I felt emotionally exhausted. It had been too much; beating after falling after beating after nailing. But with some fresh air, I found perspective. As the truck pulled out of the parking lot, I said "That's pretty much what I thought it would have been like." Dad agreed. And that's why Catholics haven't been showing screenings of "the Passion" at their churches, because most Catholic churches already have it there.


Gibson's film is basically the Stations of the Cross set to film, with an extra prelude (at Gethsemane) and postlude (the 30 seconds of Resurrection). I've done Stations service on Holy Thursday as an altar boy, so I knew the account. I was able to predict what came next as it happened ("okay, that chick must be Veronica"). The only unique aspect was confronting the raw physical reality of those falls, those nails, that cross. It showed me Christ as a living reality, muscle and bone and blood. It was oddly, the stripping away of that life that made me see his pained humanity, and the horror of destroying a human, the lowliest of humans, let alone the Son of God.


This is, as near as I can fathom, the only justification for visiting such savagery upon our eyes: to show it for savagery, to show that violence really is pain, and that our Caiaphan fury and/or Pilatean complacency are the forces that permit violence and pain to grow to the point where it could devour the most holy among us. Sullivan is therefore half-right: Gibson has made a spiritual film for a pornographic age, an age that views physical truth as the only truth worth understanding. All who see it have a chance to see the fruits of ignoring truth, of giving reign to our pride or our indifference. It may be that the film is too much, that the brutality overshadows this message. If so, we should resolve ourselves to do better, and make films that better balance the spirit with the flesh. It would be a much better use of our cultural energy than most of what Hollywood offers.


And the market may just demand such.

Let Sullivan be Sullivan

After the SOTU, Andrew Sullivan's been getting the usual abuse from Bush-supporters: the accusation that he's gone wobbly. I joined in the chorus last time, but not this time. I disagree with him on his overall take on the speech, but agree on certain points. I am underwhelmed, for example, by the president's attention on steroids, and other points I believe to be beyond the federal government's appropriate purview. Nevertheless, I don't think that this signals the kind of hubris or malaise that Sullivan and others might think. I think Bush is ready and waiting for campaign season to start, and that he wants this re-election, wants it so bad that he will campaign the living hell out of anybody that the Dems push up against him. Bush the Elder, alas, thought the re-election was his by right. I do not think the son is so deluded.


At any rate, Sullivan is right to point out (as he's been pointing out for a year or more) that there is much to worry a true fiscal conservative with regard to the Bush presidency. Alas, I don't take Democratic rhetoric on fiscal responsibility seriously. So I swallow the pill of fiscal stupidity so that I can get continued leadership towards undermining terrorism. So, I think in the end, will Sully. So leave him be. The old boy's not even a Republican.


UPDATE: Just scanned the SOTU reviews over at National Review Online, and many of them bring up the same substantive critiques. Even John Derbyshire (insert "bedfellows" joke here). So qwitcherbitchin'.

No Blood for Oil

Andrew Sullivan posted this piece of nastiness by Ted Rall. It actually made me angry. Note the deftness with which he seperates the "Iraqi resistance" from Saddam's regime, as though if they win another Baathist Sunni dictatorship isn't going to come to power. But here's the beauty:

Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices.

Let's assume that this is true, just because I feel like being silly. If this is true, and Bush and Cheney know it is true, then MAYBE THEY HAVE SOME OTHER MOTIVATION FOR THIS WAR, WHICH DOES NOT INVOLVE OIL. MAYBE THEY THINK THAT THIS WAR WILL INCREASE U.S. SECURITY AND DECREASE TERRORISM IN THE LONG TERM. MAYBE, SINCE THEY'VE BEEN TRYING TO DRILL IN ALASKA AND INCREASE OIL IMPORTS FROM RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET BLOC, BUSH AND CHENEY DON'T CARE MUCH ABOUT IRAQ'S OIL. Ya think?


Oh, but there's more:

If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.

This, you see, is how the Iraqi people are to be freed from oppression. All occupation is oppression, you see. When we occupied Western Germany following World War 2, we were oppressing them. Ditto Japan. In fact, when our troops were massing in Britain prior to D-Day, we were, in effect, occupying them, and therefore oppressing them from their legitimate desire to follow the popular European habit of learning to say Ja, Herr Hauptmann, Ich Weiss wo die Juden sind!


He does this, of course, on Veteran's Day, so that he can make clear his contempt for all appreciation of military sacrifice and traditions of same. Which begs the question: what is Rall's purpose in writing this op-ed? He can't be trying to persuade anyone to his point of view, not with the evident delight with which he pokes fingers in sensitive areas. Rall's given up on the soldiers: "Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor." What then, must he think of those of us who silently voted to send and keep the soldiers there? Beyond hope, obviously. We'll give in when the body count hits X + 1 American soldiers, and/or we realize that we're still paying $1.45 a gallon for gas. Only force may prevail against us.


I'm waiting to be told by one or another that Rall is writing satire, or something else not to be taken literally. Maybe so. But his cartoons suggest otherwise to me, and that makes me wonder: just what does Rall think need be done to remove the Bush "junta" from power? What if the foolish American people return him to power in 2005? What would Che do?

Son of Wobbly

Sully shoots back at his critics, and seemingly me (though I flatter myself not that he reads this eyehole of a blog), regarding his stance on the war. His points are fair: he's a genuine supporter of the President and "fear[s] that he's going astray." I agree that this war, like most wars, is too important a matter to be left to the Democrats (Dean and Kerry, the most hawkish, have nothing to say but "we'd do it better," which is both unenlightening and unlikely), and that those of us, like Sullivan, who understand that importance need to make sure that Dub stays in office, and fair criticism is appropriate to that.


But giving into the hysteria isn't going to help Dub out, as all it does is add fuel to the Dean-Kerry bonfire. Whenever I get news of another explosion/death in Iraq, I run it through the prism of the last guerrilla war we successfully put down, in the Phillipines, 100 years ago. That particular war was 2 or 3 years in the finishing, after we spent a year making fools of ourselves with classically inept sweep-and-clear-and-stumble-into-ambushes-and-abuse-the-population tactics, against an enemy (Aquinaldo) who was far less of a beast than Saddam, and in a country whose ethnic map makes Iraq look like Idaho. There were many butcheries before we won, but win we did, because we gradually made good on our promises and became the better alternative to Aguinaldo, who gradually made himself inimical. The progress was slow and didn't make the headlines, but sure.


It's not a perfect analogy, but the point is that we have to be sure that we're seeing the forest for the trees. One of the best things about Sully during the war was his ability to grasp what was really going on as opposed to what the CNN/NPR/NYT axis was constructing. Let's not let the terrorists impress us with their infantile explosions, horrible though they be. Let's let the Anaconda work.


In conclusion, and in fairness to Sullivan: no, you haven't precisely gone wobbly. We only nag at you, old boy, because we dare not lose you.

Gone Wobbly

A month I wait for Andrew Sullivan to return and put everything so and thusly in that inimitable style of his, and this is what I get? The Aircraft carrier landing is now "the dumbest political gesture of the last two years?" I am plumb positive that wasn't Sully's assessment at the time. Wait, I've checked the archives, and he said it was "a bit hubristic." I stand corrected. I guess one is entitled to one's exaggeration, non sequitor though it be.


On the same token, he's joining the parade of doom-and-gloomers re: Iraq. Behold, the administration is no longer "serious," the shiites and Sunnis are about to explode, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. Exactly what has happened that is going to undo all that we have accomplished so far? I expect this dreck from the New York Times, but not from you, Sully. Either a) a month for you in P-Town is way too long, or b) when headlines blare, you really are just a...journalist.

Strategery

I knew Sully would come 'round eventually on Iraq (thruth be told, he was never off it. The man's been a tower to the pro-war blog community). Today he riffs off of the President's "bring them on," statement, and suggests that fighting terrorists in Iraq is precisely what we ought to be doing. It means we aren't fighting them here. That's the whole point of this operation: yank them out where they live, root and branch, and clean them up. This may make you uncomfortable if you are the kind of person that thinks checking out young Middle Eastern men at airports constitutes a gross racist crime, but it is the objective.


Now, we must point out that most of the conflict the troops are dealing with in Iraq today is coming from Baathists, the supporters of Saddam Hussein, and not terrorists in the secret-cell-blow-up-schoolchildren sense that we use. But I suspect the line between Baathists and terrorists is going to become increasingly porous in the coming months, and is morally a subject of great doubt to begin with (remember: terrorists are nothing more than guerrillas who target civilians). And besides, can there be any greater distraction for terrorists themselves than Americans ruling the lands of the Caliph of Baghdad? They can't stay away too long.


One more thing: I love that our President said the words "Bring them on." I defy you to imagine Al Gore, or any of the Nine Walkers who would replace him saying any such thing. That's why the soldiers love him.

The Sullivan Act

I should have known that Andrew Sullivan would wig out about Eric Rudolph. If I were a gay man, I'd be really uncomfortable around fundamentalists of any stripe. As it stands, I hope they string Rudolph up, or at least lock him up in the deepest, darkest cell they can find. But today the old boy really overreacts. Entitling his entry "Christo-Fascism," Sullivan seems to want to have it both ways, arguing that of course "the concept of a christian terrorisr" is an oxymoron, but then points out that "the crusades were a form of terror. So was the Inquisition at a state level."





Really? I was under the impression that the Crusades were a series of wars designed to take back lands that had been gained by Islam through military conquest in the 7th century. As with many wars of that (or any) era, civilians were directly, often deliberately, harmed. To call this terror is to call all warfare up to (and perhaps including) the Iraq war terror. One could say that the religious aspect of the Crusades grants them special calumny. But then how can one say that "christian terrorist" is in any way self-contradictory?





As to the (Spanish) Inquisition, it wasn't terror. It was tyranny. There is a difference. A subtle one, but it is there. Terrorists are extrapolitical, they exist outside the state. They may be in line with the state's goals (such as the Ku Klux Klan), but there is a line of seperation for the purposes of plausible denial, and just as often terrorists are engaged in overthrowing an established power. Terrorists are guerrillas who target civilians. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand, was an endowment of the Kingdom of Spain, established for the express purpose of carrying out Ferdinand and Isabella's instructions regarding conversos, those Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity at the state's prodding. It enjoyed the state's full and open support, and crushed opposition with the mechanisms of the state (The Pope's sole involvement in this enterprise was to appoint a Dominican friar -- the notorious Torquemada -- as its head later on, to rein in the abuses of the system. He did so, but insincere converts were still punished). This is tyranny, and that word exists so that we can use it. Let's not start calling everything terror, shall we, Sully? Keep this up and before long you'll be calling tax cuts a weapon of mass destruction.