A Case of the Meh's Attacked Me.

Or at any rate, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Sooooo....
What's new, what's interesting? Nothing and nothing. For all that one sometimes hears about living in interesting times, I find most of these proceedings damn dull. I can't even watch TV anymore. 500 channels, and it's all the same self-referential, too-hip post-modern gruel. Utter noise.

But the great thing about free will and living in a society with a fairly broad sphere to exercise it is that I can absent myself from all of this. I can tell the cable company to get stuffed, and use the TV for watching movies (last night I grabbed a copy of Shaun of the Dead, which I can thoroughly enjoy without being familiar with any of George Romero's films, because it's not just a cheap parody). I can read Bass Guitar magazine instead of Spin, and spend my evenings learning to play "Immigrant Song" instead of wondering whether I would ever buy a Kanye West album. And that's if I feel like being lazy. A few carpentry books and I can make my own instrument, stick a police whistle in my mouth, and annoy the neighbors all night. With a modicum of creativity I can make my own mini-culture, and nobody on earth can compell me otherwise. Tell me that's not something worth preserving.


Now, onto the Issues of the Day. I haven't had more than minor interest in the Cindy Sheehan and Barnum and Bailey business, at least not enough to get emotionally charged on the subject. She's mad about her dead kid, whoopty-crap. She's not a criminal and she's well within her rights to picket Bush's house until the Second Coming to make known her views.

The only thing that made me roll her eyes was that the media hacks never bothered to tell us much about the young man for whom Camp Casey was named. Didja know he was awarded the Bronze Star posthumously for volunteering for the mission that led to his death? Didja know this was his second tour in-country, for which he re-enlisted, after Baghdad had fallen? Didja know that he had his own opinion on the war that took his life?

For this and other startlers, read Mark Steyn's piece on the subject, which is as merciless as ever. Most noteworthy is the fact that the President did meet with the Sheehan family, a year ago, when Casey died. Gee, the kid dies a year ago, the mom starts having a fit now. One has to wonder.


In Other News, the Iraqi Constitution. I have no idea whether this one will stick or be another piece of legalese wallpapering the palaces of a failed state. And neither does anybody else. Having read Belmont Club's take, I could go either way. But even if the referendum fails and Iraq splits three ways, I can see value coming out of it. For one thing, neither Kurdistan nor Sunni Mesopotamia are likely to become the regional trouble-makers or terror swamps that Saddam's Iraq was, and the Sunni Triangle, cut off from the oil fields and possibly from Baghdad, is at best going to be a mini-Syria and at worst a Syrian protectorate.

But let's say that Allah's Hell does indeed break loose, as Wretchard almost suggests, and the whole order of the Middle East as it's been since WW1 shatters like a champagne flute. Jolly good, says I. This is a region of the world that desperately needs to take a long hard look at itself. They've tried reactionary theocracy (Iran, Saudi Arabia), they've tried Stalin-lite Tyranny (Iraq, Syria), they've tried banditry (Palestine) and bureacratic scleroticism (Egypt). They've been repaid with poverty, butchery, and a political culture reminiscent of the Montagues and Capulets. If anyone wants to discuss the morality of chickens coming home to roost, that's a perfect place to start.
Besides, continuing chaos may wake up the rest of the world to the fact that we can't wish bloodthirsty exremism away with grave concerns and Roadmaps for Peace. I've been saying for a long time that fighting terror doesn't end with Afghanistan or Iraq. It doesn't even, truth be told, end with the Middle East. It begins to end on the day that the most left-wing Nader-voting Euro-pacifist says "You know what? I'm not gonna offer myself or anybody in my homeland as a sacrifice for your hatred, my jihad-spouting friend. I'm not gonna explain away your motives. Bush may be a retard with a gun, but you, sir, are a fucking demon, the enemy of everything decent, and I'm not gonna rest until your ass is in a deep, dark place."

This, of course, will take years, if not decades. So welcome to the new Cold War. I hope that my grandkids will enjoy its end as much as I enjoyed seeing the Berlin Wall come down.

Credit Where Credit is Due...

And if this is true, I'm going to have to change my opinion on the usefulness of the French as anti-terror allies. Maybe Charles Martel isn't rolling in his grave after all.

But if it is true, why is it not reported in the leftist press? If the French are Gitmo+1, surely that's a provocation to further bloodshed, and even if it isn't, don't the terrorists win if we in the West become like them?

Adeimantus nails it again:

One of the subsidiary paradoxes of relativism is that each of its proponents considers himself an intellectual superior.

Read the whole thing.

A Few Changes

One of the things I hoped to do with this blog was steer away from the usual back-and-forth, minutaie-reporting. This I freely admit to being unsuccessful in doing, as much out of habit as anything else. Still, I'd like to change that, and so have set aside a seperate space for the numbered works, "The Essayist" series. Not all of them are as good as I'd like for them to be, but they're all where I'm aiming. So if you missed them, enjoy, and suggestions are welcome.

Fixed the link to the Belmont Club, too.

See!

Miracles do happen.

What does Africa Need?

One of the reasons I switched from one political point of view to another in my late teens to early 20's was the realization that humans were meant to make their own way in the world, not to depend on handouts from an all-powerful state. With that in mind, read this piece on Aid to Africa and see if you can disagree.

This is a theorem that has been spoken many times (for example, here), but it does not, of itself, produce a solution. So, to return to the title question, what does Africa need?

1. Property rights
2. Rule of Law
3. Universal Education
4. A government that does not interfere with 1, 2, and 3.

1 is the basis for any functioning market economy. 2 allows disputes to be resolved peacefully and end the cycle of putsch, civil war, and purge that is as much a drag on Africa as anything else. 3 levels the playing field for the native genius of the people. The need for 4 is obvious, and unfortunately, it's the only thing the military power of the West may be in a position to supply.

I submit that if we aren't helping Africans achieve these four things, we aren't helping them at all. It's well past time for a change in the political cultures of the poorest region on earth. It's well past time for the left to realize that Mugabe has done more to harm his nation than any white man. It's well past time for American and other G-8 businesses to consider what profits would be had by making Africans into customers instead of laborers.

It's time to stop flagellating ourselves, and start dealing with the problem.

Always and Forever on the March

The great and depressing thing about history is that nothing changes. For example, guess what Russia's doing?

If you said pestering the Baltic states, you win.

They Used to Fight Crusaders on Their Own Turf...

It appears that al Qaeda has decided to spend the summer peppering Europe in much the same way it's allies have been peppering Iraq and Israel: that is, blowing things up and killing civilians.

So far, so typical, although it gives something in the way of truth to those who would argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars haven't made us all that safer. But I wonder why they've decided to try this now. Surely, London, and many other important European cities have been pretty well infiltrated by those professing terrorist and Islamist ideologies. What made them wait?

Those that claimed credit for the bombing were quick to apply "linkage," as the saying goes, to Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming that "all the Crusader governments" will face similar bombings if they do not leave Iraq and Afghanistan.

Further grist for the anti-war mill, it would seem, along the lines of the "blowback" argument. Yet still I wonder, why now? The Counter-Terrorism Blog suggests that this "Secret al-Qaeda" is so only in name, an inspired group of emigrant malcontents rather than an actual cell bearing orders from bin Laden. If so, this may well have been triggered by yesterday's announcement of the location of the 2012 Olympics as by anything in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, we ought well be prepared for anything. The tempo of attacks might increase, or not, as the summer goes. But of one thing we should be sure. The fanatics have brought this war, and intend to fight it on their terms. To respond to them, many options may feasibly be employed, excepting one. We must give them nothing. They are not reasonable men, and their terms for peace will never be ones under which we can live.

History is Too Important to be Left to Historians

One of the numerous habits that family and friends castigate me over is my habit of re-reading books. That happens to be the one I will not give on. As far as I'm concerned, he who never re-reads a book gains nothing from it, and a book that will not bear re-reading was probably not worth the first effort. Why do we keep them in shelves in our houses, if not to use them when we would, however many times?

So yes, I'm now on the fourth or fifth re-reading of Shelby Foote's three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and have been since the summer began. The thrill of the story does not abate. The pagentry of ambition was never so rythmically rendered, as Mclernand and Meade and Rosecrans and Hooker and Buell and Burnside and McClellan and Pope and Fremont rose and fell, each one a bit better suited to the war they were fighting than their predecessor, yet not good enough, until leadership fell into the hands of Grant and Sherman, who, like Ulysses, understood the nature of the conflict. And that's just the Northern side. Watching to the gamecocks of the South preen, ruffle, and charge is likewise a mystifying experience. Proud as Roland they sound to us, and proud as Roland they stood, against the waves of history, and now they sound truly ancient, truly dead.

And yes, I know my politico-socio-encomic arithmetic 'bout the U.S. of the 1860's as well as the cynics would like, and I am confident in the truth of the assertion that no man, however grand, arises from nowhere. Yet cannot we take our Marx with a grain of Virgil? If Foote's epic teaches us nothing, it teaches us that different men drive the same chariot at different speeds to different ends. Would it kill us to again make our history larger than broken pottery, to find in it something other than a hair-shirt for the modern world, to make it human rather than a vast cosmic cog?

Because I prophesy thusly: until we learn to love our history again, we shall never learn it, much less learn from it.

Fair is Fair...

And if I'm gonna fling poo at the lefties on the high court for okaying corporate feudalism with Kelo, then it's only just that I lay a few choice ones for our good President, who used eminent domain to get land for the new stadium for the Texas Rangers back in the day.

It appears that, just as both lefties and righties can find common ground on this issue, so can they find common shame. Thuis, the New York Times, who broke the Bush story with appropriate condemnation, gets to savor the taste of their own words, as they recently had New York City condemn a whole neighborhood next to the Port Authority Terminal so they could build a snazzy new high-rise.

Reason has the scoop, for both.

Zimbabwe is now in the Forefront of Gun Control

That should end the violence. No problem.

To Hell with China...

India is the future. And we just got on board.

News Flash:

Government Agency Wastes Taxpayer Money!

And all the people who insisted that airport security workers being turned into federal employees would improve their performance will now...call for the agency to be given more money. And the band played on...

In Case You're Wondering...

...when I talk about city machines, I mean this:

voter fraud

prostitution rings

attempted murder of federal witnesses

And you thought Bill the Butcher was dead, dint'cha? Alas, no. He's changed colors, but not methods, and not parties, either.

The Essayist #7: The Meaning of Candor

As I've said before, whatever the flaws of the Washington Post, it's no New York Times, and its editors are to be commended for the (albeit occiasionally skittish) support they've given to at least the theory of the War in Iraq. Today's editorial, in response to last night's press conference, is a perfect example of their love-hate relationship with the Iraq War: they're serious enough to see that we need to win, but they won't stop kicking the man whose job it it to win it.

Frankly, I find some of their barbs bizarre:

Mr. Bush didn't explain how a war meant to remove a tyrant believed to wield weapons of mass destruction turned into a fight against Muslim militants

Why does he need to explain that? The Iraqi army melted on the field, and the losers resorted to insurgency, because they didn't want to lose, and were sure we'd run away as soon as they killed enough of us. Ask the average John Q. Voter why the war in Iraq is still going on after two years, and I'll bet you'll get either that or "Because Our Evil President doesn't WANT it to, man!". Does the WaPo believe that anyone who thinks the latter will be convinced by having the former explained to them?

Or this:

When he did turn to Iraq's reconstruction Mr. Bush mostly described the bright side of a very mixed picture. While acknowledging that "our progress has been uneven," his dominant theme was success: in training Iraqi security forces, holding elections and promoting political accord. The progress he described is genuine, as is the reality that the United States has no reasonable alternative to continuing to support the construction of a representative Iraqi government. Mr. Bush rightly argued that a deadline for withdrawal would be a "serious mistake."

Followed by the rest of the piece, which chides Bush for not saying what commanders and senior aides and every newspaper from Sea to Shining Sea has been saying for months: that the insurgency doesn't appear to be going away just yet, and indeed, has remained roughly at the same level of efficiency for the last year. Again, why does the President need to explain this? We see it every day: Bomb kills 40, Three soldiers killed in ambush, and a partridge in a pear tree. WE KNOW the problems. The purpose of the President's conference was to argue why we should continue to stay the course.

Fortunately, most Americans appear to have a hardheaded appreciation of the problems and stakes in Iraq. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that most do not believe the administration's claims of progress, but a majority still is willing to support an extended stay by U.S. forces. If those forces are to succeed in the difficult months and years ahead, Mr. Bush will need to preserve and nourish that fragile mandate -- which will mean speaking more honestly to Americans than he did last night.

No, it's going to require Mr. Bush to continue to point out the "bright side of a very mixed picture." Let me offer a few examples:


In 1941, the two-year mark for World War II, the allied side was in very bad shape. Winston Churchill, more or less the only Western leader still resisting, did not rally his people by pointing out that France had fallen, that half of European Russia was overrun, that Rommel was running rampant in North Africa. The people already knew that. What he told them was that the enemy was monstrous, and that the British people would never surrender to a monster. He didn't tell them about the fact that we were going to start day-and-night bombing of Germany but let the Russians do the heavy lifting until we felt like starting a second front, or about the recent success against the enemy's Enigma code, because, although it might have cheered the Pommies, it would also have told Hitler exactly what he needed to do to win.

In 1863, the two-year mark for the American Civil War, the Lincoln administration had a very mixed picture of its own to deal with. In the Western theater, the Mississippi had been cleared of rebel forces, cutting the Confederacy in half, and the pressure soon to be brought to bear agains the remaining Confederate forces west of the Appalachians was deemed to be inexorable. But in the East, the Rebels had held out, and held out, and held out, embarrassing every Yankee general that could be summoned against them. Sure, they'd won at Gettysburg, but the cost of that battle was horrendous, and that a battle was being fought in Pennsylvania in the first place indicated that all was not well. How was Lincoln to keep the people with him? What could he say?

You know what he said. Read the Gettysburg Address and see if you can find a description of the new strategies to be employed, or candor about the problems faced. Read it with a critic's eye, and it's a masterpiece of vagueness (and more than a few did read it with such an eye. One snark referred to the speech as "the dishwater utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States"). Lincoln did not mention that most of the Union Army's three-year enlistments would be up the next spring, or that Confederate cavalry raiders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest were growing "increasingly sophisticated" in their assaults on union railroads, or that the most recent amphibious expedition against Charleston had failed. He also didn't say that his plan for the future was going to involve appointing his hardest-fighting general, a man alternately accused of being a drunken incompetent and a pitiless butcher, to the head of all Union forces, and direct him to cut down Lee's army, whatever the cost.

Instead, he told them that the were engaged in a war for the survival of their nation, that to lose would be the end of our forefather's beliefs, and that they must steel themselves for the coming struggle, must resolve that the sacrifice of their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers has not been in vain. Thus, Lincoln's candor, not in the tiny decisions that amount to policy, but in the broad meanings that the people, who care not for wonkery, will hear.


Look, if most of the anti-war crowd was as level-headed as the WaPo editorial staff, I'd be a lot less strident on this issue, which I know I said I would stay away from. But if they're so worried about the people not holding fast to a war they know we need to win, mayhaps they could get on board and get their front page to tell both sides of the very mixed picture. If they're stuck for how to get news on the progress they admit to be genuine, they can start here.

Start Kissing the CIA bye-bye...

FBI is getting it's own intel service. Add this to the fact that the DCI is no longer the chief intelligence officer in our goverment, the NSA does all the ELINT, the Homeland Security Department handles the domestic policing, and the fact that the boys at Langely have been farming out HUMINT jobs to the Brits since the 70's, and one has to wonder how long before we start asking our most unpopular government service the Bob question ("What would...you say that...you do here?").

And yes, I know that sentence got away with me.

See, This is Why People Believe in God...

Who will be the next victim of Kelo vs. New London? One of the Justices who wrote the decision. Winds of Change has the goods (Hat tip: Boxing Alicibiades).

Well, It's More Interesting Than the Usual Movie Plug...

I normally avoid celebrity comment, but Cruise's little slapfight with Matt Lauer over Scientology and Ritalin caught my fancy. Note the statements with which Cruise argues:

-"You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
-"Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?"
-"If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That's what I've done."

My curiosity stems from the fact that at no point do we seem to see any actual facts brought out of this. Cruise claims to know, but does not elucidate. Either he's full of it, or he determined that going into the details would be too boring and dry for TV. Inasmuch as he should know that Scientology itself is too boring for TV, I am inclined to think the former.

Seriously, does anyone know anything about Scientology? It's routinely called a cult, but so's every religion until it becomes mainstream.


UPDATE: Never mind.

For Some Reason...

Pirates just never get old. Observe.

I never did like PETA

If this is true, PETA got some 'splainin' to do (Hat tip: Boxing Alcibiades).

It is as if PETA prefers the idea of animals to animals themselves

You know, come to think of it, that sounds familiar, too.

Billy Bong Thornton Rides Again

Only the Washington Post would conclude that the trendiness of hookah bars is "counterintuitive". People want to smoke. Smoking around non-smokers makes them pissy and lawyery. So people who want to smoke go to places where smoking is the very point of being there.

I've been to one, in Manhattan. The Jasmine tobacco was Dee-lish.

The Dog is Dead, but the Tail Still Wags

The Dog, of course, is Socialism, and the tail appears to be wielded by our own Supreme Court. Observe.

So now, if the city government deems that you aren't using your land to the proper economic benefit of all, it will take it from you, and give it, not to the public, but to ANOTHER private corporate interest, who will presumably have plans to stick a mall there.

It sounds like something out of the Democratic Underground's nightmare, as rich captialists throw the honest yeoman out of their homes to get wealthier. It sounds like something out the 19th century. It sounds like the nightmare of Bushitler tyranny finally showing its ugly face.

Except the eminent Justices who approved this decision were not the kind Bush wants to nominate. It was Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. You know, the liberals. The conservatives on the court, Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas, all dissented, joined by perennially swing-vote O'Connor, who wrote the dissenting opinion.

How does this work? Is it Bizarro day and they just didn't tell us? Nope. Read the justification by Justice Stevens:

The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including -- but by no means limited to -- new jobs and increased tax revenue

Isn't that neat? Your house can be taken and turned into an Ambercrombie and Fitch whether you like it or not, provided that the local government has "carefully formulated" (by which they mean...?) that it will be of greater benefit to the whole. This is beyond socialism, beyond Communism, beyond even Fascism. We've regressed back to feudalism, with the local authority installing those that will provide it with the greater revenue, and damn the peasants if they don't like it.

Yet, somehow, some way, someone on the Left will find a way to transmogrify this into a Republican evil.


Update: I appear to have been wrong. Many Lefties are also peeved, as they should be. Good for them, and here's to us all getting together on a truly bi-partisan issue. But not Atrios:

Yes, this is a bad decision, but we must think of what the alternative might have been. I don't know what was in the hearts of the justices who ruled the way did, they may be fully on board this apparent belief in the unlimited power of eminent domain. This is not something I support. However, the alternative could've been a conservative written opinion severely limiting the power of eminent domain and the concept of public use, which would've eviscerated a truly necessary government power.

Hmmmmm...seems to me this logic sounds familiar. "Yes, it sucks, but we'll keep it so long as dirty filthy Bushitler hobbitses can't play..."

Better Kelos than Scalia?

Better Saddam than Bush?

It makes a body wonder...

There's a Very Good Reason Why I'm Not Blogging...

...and it's called Finals. SEE Andrew Battle the Paperwork Beast! SEE Andrew give students grades they don't deserve, to avoid being hassled! SEE Andrew sign another contract to do the same all over again!

Now playing at schools everywhere.

So Close, and Yet So Far, to a Clue...

Movie studios are starting to notice a continuing drop in movie attendance.

So what's in store for us this weekend?

Another Dreamworks high-octane irony-fest "Madagascar" and the remake of "The Longest Yard.

One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

John Podhoretz Hated Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith...

...but likes this movie. I think it's safe to say I'll be ignoring his opinion on films henceforth.

Something to throw in the teeth of so many people...

Haughty Europeans, Arab extremists, Pat Buchanan...

On the Other Hand...

Here's an interesting analysis in today's WaPo, which, if true, is indicative of a larger shift toward centralizing power in the Federal Government's hands. Whether it's really an institutional shift or a political shift remains to be seen.

If it's the former, read your Roman history books. They point the (scary) way of the future.

The Ugly Smell of Compromise

It used to be an axiom that anything bi-partisan should be feared by the voters; because anything that these enemies could agree had to involve neither side giving up anything important. Thus, any compromise involved the voters, and especially the taxpayers, getting screwed.

If this report is true, the rule will have been proved. Dammit, George, it's time to throw down a veto.

Sorry for being gone. Here's a fisking.

In my college days, my folks used to get the Washington Post delivered. I used to get yelled at for reading the paper before my father did, but read it anyway I did. But I was selective in my reading: the editorial page. After the Post's nauseating coverage of the '96 conventions (rapturously fulsomizing for two days over the Clinton's choice of Atlanta before the convention, relegating the Republican convention to an insert on the bottom of the front page), I determined that if I was going to read Democratic political commentary, I was going to read the stuff that was up-front about it.

Nowadays, of course, I find the Post to be perhaps the best newspaper in the country, and certainly the best left-leaning one. It regularly outshines the New York Times in fairness and accuracy. It's still a Democratic paper, and unabashed about it, but its integrity as a news organization has not, to my knowledge, been significantly compromised.

It's columnists, of course, are another story. The Post's editorial page is generally one of the fairest in the business, a roughly 60-40 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. Of the Democrats, William Raspberry is always a good, genial read, Richard Cohen is cheap and tedious, and Colbert King reminds me of an
Enlightenment-era monarch, full of a sense of his own importance, constantly reminding us by his very presence of ages long past, and in the end, he says nothing (I'm not going to bother about Anne Applebaum and Ellen Goodman, because, it pains me greatly to say, I can't remember a word they've written).

But E.J. Dionne, now there's an apparatchik worth letting loose a Fisk on. You can accept this as my statement on the judicial mess as well:

'Watch Those Guys'

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005; Page A17

No one was more relieved last night by the deal that avoided the end of Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees than Arlen Specter.

I imagine that somehow this is intended to be relevatory, as though the known universe were unaware that Specter is a squish who'd sooner eat goat entrails than make a decision between one side or another. We're talking about a guy who, given the choice between saying "Guilty" and "Not Guilty" said "They haven't proved it," just to make sure his rear was covered.

The senior Republican senator from Pennsylvania began his political life revering John F. Kennedy and proudly declared himself a "Kennedy Democrat." The foundation of his career was the idea of checks and balances.

"Checks and balances," you say? I am intrigued. Tell me more of these plucky "checks and balances." I failed high school civics and have no idea wherefrom such a concept might have fallen.

In the late 1960s, Specter decided that party loyalty could ask too much. Despite his Democratic leanings, he accepted the Republican nomination for district attorney in Philadelphia. He was running against a Democratic machine that was, as Specter once put it, "highly suspect if not demonstrably corrupt."

Still is. Philadelphia is one of the worst-run cities on the East Coast. It makes Boston look like the New Jerusalem. The Democratic machine is as entrenched, and as powerful, now as it was then. So Specter appears to have accomplished nothing by this bold crossing of the aisle except getting his name in the papers.

Along with Tom Gola, a legendary basketball star whom the Republicans ran for city comptroller, Specter argued that the citizens of Philadelphia desperately needed the minority party to have some power to curb the abuses of the majority.

Their brilliant slogan, one of my favorites: "We need these guys to watch those guys."

Imagine what might have been if he had decided to say "We need these guys in power, so they can do what's right." This might not have been immediately possible, given the circumstances of Philly politics. But building on this momentum might have led to a growing of the party's base and an actual choice in governance, instead of the one-party kleptocracy the city is today. But Specter's wouldn't be interested in that.

There could be no better argument for preserving judicial filibusters. That's why a substantial group of Republicans led by Sen. John McCain joined with moderate Democrats last night in a compromise that will keep the right to filibuster alive.

The "right to filibuster." Oh, isn't that just what we need? Dark were the days for our most powerful legislators, until the Right to Filibuster was preserved by the brace, the few, the Specters of Truth!

Senators of the World, UNITE!!!

The "nuclear option" was a problem not only because it meant reducing the power of Senate Democrats

Heaven Forfend.

but also because it substantially reduced the ability of the Senate as a whole to challenge presidential judicial appointees. That capacity gives the Senate, currently the most middle-of-the-road of the elected branches of the federal government, the ability to exercise a moderating influence on the president's judicial choices.

All of this would be fine if I perceived the need for the President's judicial choices to be moderated, if I saw a threat they presented. I've never heard a Democrat put forward a cogent argument that detailed what was wrong with the President's picks. They've been described as "extreme," "right-wing," "theocratic" and so on. What I haven't heard is why they shouldn't be judges. Surely, in a world where "we need these guys to watch those guys," a few origonal constructionists in a judiciary full of penumbra-expanders would be a welcome, even moderating influence?


Apparently not.

The nuclear option to blow away the minority's rights promised a huge and unprecedented expansion of presidential control over the judiciary. The Republican compromisers decided that they needed to exercise some control over "those guys" in the White House. They also know they will welcome such influence when the Democrats take back the White House, as they will some day.

Did the President have "unprecedented control over the judiciary" in the days before Clinton when Senates, as a rule passed all but a few of a President's nominees? Or was the judiciary, selected by the President within a select set of parameters, and passed by the Senate provided they weren't completely imbecilic, a truly independent branch of government, as it was intended to be?


Is the establishment of a 60-vote supermajority to pass any judicial nominee not an unprecedented expansion of senatorial control over the judiciary?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other Republicans who backed the nuclear option hurt themselves badly with shameful rhetoric suggesting that murder and mayhem, not honest differences, were at the heart of this battle.

Yes, "shameful rhetoric" always costs senators votes. That's why Ted Kennedy's career in the Senate was so brief.

Thus did Frist accuse the Democrats of wanting to "kill, to defeat, to assassinate" President Bush's nominees. Oh, my. That's what comes out when a Princeton graduate plays the role of counterfeit populist in pandering to the Christian right.

And this is what comes out when a Beltway journalist can't fathom the possibility that a two-term President whose party controls Congress might nominate people whose ideas resonate with a sizable section of the public. The formula is so typical as to be cliche: speak out on the need to soak the rich = "authentic" populism. Speak out on cultural issues that play in Peoria = "counterfeit" populism.

Someone be a sport and tell E.J. that there's a thing called character assassination. If the concept confuses him, he can ask Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to elucidate on the subject.

Frist is waging this fight because he wants to be president and needs support from social conservatives.

Number of words between E.J.'s backhanded comment that there were "honest differences" on the side of the Democrats and his cynical determination that Frist is merely building up an exploratory committee: 39, including the "a's" and "the's".

That's hutzpah, my friends.

Then there was the comment from the other Republican senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. Senate debates routinely produce tortured metaphors. But in arguing that Democrats had no right to demand that Republicans follow the standard rules in changing the Senate's filibuster procedures, Santorum hit new heights of weirdness.

Here's what Santorum said: "The audacity of some members to stand up and say, 'How dare you break this rule,' that's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster."

Huh?

History lesson time: in 1940 Germany took over Paris, by invading the country. The Allies later disputed the Nazi occupation of France, and I'm assuming bombing was involved. The analogy works like this: People cannot claim legitimacy by historical tradition for something that has been recently established. Thus, the "nuclear option" was aimed at the Democratic supermajority, which, as I previously pointed out, is not part of Senate tradition.

Now, can a great big Brookings Institute fellow understand that?

Santorum later insisted that his words were "meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues." Gee, thanks for that.

Why, the impertinence of the thing! The next thing you know, people will start comparing the President to Hitler!

Oh, yes, and although he is not a senator, Pat Robertson certainly speaks for the constituency to which Bill Frist was pandering.

And Micheal Moore speaks for the constituency to which Harry Reid is "pandering," if "pandering" means "agree with" and "speaks for" means "belongs to roughly the same political coalition as."

Don't you love it? Two Senators out of 100, and on we are to Pat Robertson, who's said another dumb thing. This is selective quoting with a vengeance.

The deal is not perfect. There are grounds to worry that the federal judiciary will be dominated at the end of the Bush years by a certain style of conservative -- Janice Rogers Brown is representative -- ready to roll back the New Deal jurisprudence of the last 70 years. Many who buy this legal approach preach that federal rules on wages and hours, environmental and business regulation, should be overturned by courts that would use 19th-century standards to void Washington's capacity to create rational standards for a complex 21st-century economy. Stopping such a judicial takeover would justify filibusters.

Press Summary: "The deal is not perfect. It allows people who have different viewpoints to become judges. That's bad, mmkay?"

Snark aside, at least Dionne had an objection to Brown that didn't involve the a-word, and for that he should be commended. It allows the question of whether 70 years of New Deal jurisprudence has been good for anything other than keeping certain aspects of our economy mired in the 1970's to be debated. But it still sounds too much like an insistence that the judiciary be monolithic, while the political branches be partisan.

It also underlines the degree to which Democrats have become the country's real conservatives. Back when Specter was switching parties, the argument of 70 years of tradition was the last thing any self-respecting Democrat would have respected. Now, it's routinely trotted out as a weapon against any of Bush's proposals, from Social Security to ANWR. None of them seem to realize that such an argument gives off the impression that they have no other arguments to fall back on.

Why didn't Bush think of this?

This sounds like a damn fine idea of what to do with Social Security. The only problem is, we'd be short of cash for paying the current retirees, which would all but guaruntee an AARP revolt (not that we don't have that anyway).

Too bad. It could have saved us all a lot of bother.

Sullying Watch

Andrew Sullivan parodies are now be common in the Corner.

Even Glenn Reynolds has piled on lately, albeit in his typically unruffled (not to say icy) manner.

It makes me sad to see, but I have to say that he's brought this on himself. I mean, Abu Ghraib? How can this story still have legs?

Kofi Annan and the Middle Finger

Classical Values puts them both together in a post involving, of all things, academia.

It's a good thing we have two middle fingers.

Buchanan and Patrick's Law

I've never been a fan of ol' Pat. He's a one-issue pundit who hasn't said anything new about his position in ten years, and everything he's said about the "culture war," indicates that he hasn't got the first clue how a culture changes.

That said, gleaning his teeming brain still produces the occasional intelligent thought. In this Washington times piece, he comes up with a not unfair castigation of so-called neoconservatives:

"I'm often asked what exactly is it that they want to conserve. They are Wilsonian interventionists abroad; they are big government at home."

And within the context of his experience in politics, that's perfectly valid. Bush does sound like Wilson when he waxes rhapsodic about spreading freedom worldwide, and his compromises on education spending and prescription drugs and such are starting to look like LBJ-lite. But once again, I'm forced to stand up and shout "WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?"

How are we to defeat terror, long-term, without changing the region that gives it birth? How are we to gain traction on some issues without compromising on others? Is Buchanan so enamoured of his electoral embarassments that he actively wishes to see the party he has served so long do likewise? It was easy for Barry Goldwater to be uncompromising; he had a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning. Just like nobody really wants to listen to Buchanan's crochety-grampa routine.

The same goes for anybody who accuses the GOP of "fair-weather federalism" or "big government conservatism" (which would include my good self). Politics is the art of the possible, and leadership in politics is the art of getting a few big ideas through, and leaving the rest for the people to either wise up on or accept the consequences of. NCLB can't possibly screw up education worse that it is already, and prescription drugs just might be worth it if we can get Social Security passed. And not getting hit by wave after wave of terrorist attacks like Tel Aviv during rush hour, that doesn't suck either (Maybe that's what the neos are trying to conserve?).

Even on the dangers posed by the immigration problem, where Buchanan and I are largely in agreement (a mob of foreigners, and people who think of themselves as foreigners, in our midst, is not a good thing. DUH, people), I don't think I would agree with his solution. Waves of immigration have been part of American history since time immemorial; what's at issue isn't whether they join our nation or not. When they are; they're a net gain for the U.S.A., When they're not, that's a source of trouble.

Pat wants to bring down an Iron Curtain on the U.S.-Mexico border. How that's isn't a Big Government solution to a problem, I don't know, but noting it makes me think of a thought I had regarding Andrew Sullivan, which I will hereby refer to as Patrick's Law: On the issues that he or she cares about, everyone is Big Government.


UPDATE: Boxing Alcibiades has a great example of what I'm talking about here. The Bush Administration's record on free trade is not the best. It would be a marvelous opportunity for the Democrats to use in '06. Who wants to bet that they'll even attempt to take advantage of it?

Multiculturalism's Lack of Culture

Mark Steyn is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers, not the least of which is the fact that he can draw on knowledge of high and pop culture from the first half of the 20th century and make it relevant. Observe this:

In other words, if “multiculturalism” is intended to impart any facts about other cultures – the capital city of Malaysia; the principal exports of South Africa, apart from Charlize Theron – or even a vague curiosity about other cultures, then clearly it’s a spectacular failure. If you were to compare 2004’s output from Hollywood with 1944’s, you’d think a once thriving culture engaged with the world had suddenly developed a total aversion to foreigners. So obviously an interest in many cultures can’t have been the objective of “multiculturalism”. What then was its real point?

I didn't even know Charlize Theron was South African. Read the whole thing.

Blues

I am currently awash with piles of joyless work. Typical at the end of the year, but it's getting so I can hardly do any of the things I really enjoy doing. This makes it all rather pointless. I don't know how I'm going to respond to this, but I know I need to make a change.


And that poor excuse for a livejournal entry is probably all I'll have to say for today.

Define your Morality

This is kind of interesting, although it's definition of "harm" is admittedly narrow. I'd like to point out that I think the question of whether something can be immoral solely because God says so is a little disingenuous, though perhaps not intentionally so. I would never say that something is immoral because God or the Bible says so. I would say, however, that I can trust that something is probably immoral, even if I don't fully understand why, because I have this secondhand knowledge from God.

The two statements are not the same. What religion tells us about morality does not re-define the world in the light of Revelation. Rather, it tells us what our place in the world is metaphysically. If God exists, then God created the world, and God created us. Morality is what allows us to live in the world and with its creator in an ordered fashion. Both us and our morality come from the same source.

Here's how I scored, for whatever it's worth:

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.60.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.40.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.75.

If There's a reason...

...I should do anything other than roll my eyes over this, do let me know.

Morons.

Interesting...

Adeimantus reveals the fact that he is "a shade or two darker" than many of his presumably WASPy liberal friends. I was not aware of this.

Is it merely human nature that I assume someone of education and a similar point of view is of my ethnicity, or is it just a Sad Commentary on our times?

As I was saying...

Right...Crusades...


Read this.

Then read this.

Discuss.

Topic for the Week

The Crusades.


More later.

Sorry for the Light Blogging...

...but the world keeps getting in my way. I'll pick this up again on Monday. Good weekend to all.

The Population Bomb

It's the opposite of what you think.

Stephen Moore on Social Security Resistants...

From the NYPost:

It is almost as if the Senate Democrats — and some feckless Republicans, too — have a hyper-allergic reaction to the notion of letting workers build up private wealth and personal ownership. A cynic might say that they are so wedded to preserving the welfare state that they want Americans to be dependent on government, even if it means they will be worse off financially.

Well, duh. The fewer money Uncle Sam has, the less powerful they are. What ruling class is anxious to see it's power diminished?

54-40 or Fight!

Austin Bay breathes life into the old bogey that scares Canada and gives secret pleasure to us jingoistic Yankees: the "domino effect" of Quebec nationalism causing Canada's western provinces to join the U.S. Here's my question: legally speaking, is such even possible?

Let's say that Quebec goes, and then British Columbia and Alberta follow suit, as do New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E. Island, and inevitably, Newfoundland, leaving the Dominion of Canada with Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Do the inhabitants of B.C. and Alberta, even as an independent entity, have any standing under U.S. Law to petition Congress for entry? Wouldn't we have to annex the territory first, and THEN grant statehood?

The only precedent we have to guide is is that of Texas, which joined the U.S. after ten years as an independent republic and fifteen years as part of Mexico. It's not the best precedent, either. To begin with, most of the Texans who led the independence movement, with a few notable exceptions, were former U.S. citizens who had moved south of the Louisiana purchase. So the Texans who petitioned Congress to join the U.S. in 1837 and again in 1844 were, by extraction, U.S. citizens "coming home." No such status exists for British Columbians or Albertans.

Moreover, if there's anything the Texas affair demonstrates, it's that these matters are not going to be easy. Tensions with Mexico over the Texas Annexation led to war. We might scoff at the possibility of Paul Martin playing Santa Anna, but no pol likes his constituency reduced without his consent. Especially not to the disliked imperialist southern neighbor.

The irony of quiet, sensible Canada becoming the powder-keg of North America makes it normally a scenario kept to Diplomacy games and South Park movies. But the world has seen stranger things.

The Essayist #6: the Un-Sustainable

My great-grandfather was, in his elder days, what they used to call a "triple-dipper": he had Social Security, a U.S. Post Office Pension, and a State of New York pension. And by the time he died at the ripe old age of 88, he had collected from the system much more than he had ever contributed to it.

I remember that as I read about the U.S. Government taking over the pension plan of United Airlines (Hat Tip: Mickey Kaus).

The temptation to use this to blather fulsomely about Social Security is overpowering, but I should keep a few things in mind:

The airline industry is a money pit second only to the U.S. Government.

A private pension plan going belly-up is precisely the kind of thing that scare the cat food out of people who don't want Social Security messed with.

I am using way too many bullet-pointed lists.

Fortunately, I am armored by the fact that United is planning to shift into a 401k plan. You know, the kind that allows individuals to invest a portion of their income into private accounts and then uses the money to invest in stocks, bonds, and other securities, managed by people who do that for a living, and then holds the money there until the person retires? They estimate they would have to spend $200 million a year to do that, instead of the $9.8 billion they're currently short of.

Traditional pension plans are on the way out. They're un-sustainable, because a) they're too costly if run honestly and b)they're too easy to run dishonestly. Union pension plans were a common source of mob money, and the biggest problem with United's p.p. was that it was allowed to run underfunded for so long.

Those opposed to the President S.S. plan tend to act as though only a few tweaks will be needed to put the ship back on course. Raise taxes here, cut benefits here, and all will be well. They're not quite wrong, but wrong-headed. Trying to maintain Social Security as currently constituted is like trying to jury-rig the engine on a B-17 while supersonic jets whizz by. Sure, you might be able to keep the old beast in the air a bit longer, but are you sure you want to? Is it really worth the aggravation of the double whammy of making workers pay more to get less?

Plus, how long before we have to do this again? Are demographics really our friend on this one? Is this cut-output, raise-input a temporary measure against the harsh winter of Baby Boom retirement, or the beginning of a series of similar measures, until the U.S. Government has to start looking for Japanese bankers to bail out our old folks?

In economics, that which provides a return non-commensurate with investment is deemed wasteful. The costs provided with putting everyone's retirement through one central clearing-house makes such a system wasteful. And that which is wasteful, inevitably, must be discarded if the rest is to survive. Wasteful becomes Un-sustainable.

I don't expect many Democrats to agree with me on this. To their minds, the value of the central clearing-house is that it provides simplicity and accountability. But to mine, these are illusions. There's nothing simple about the machinery needed to run the place, and somehow those on the inside are gaming the system to suit their needs. In the end, all that's left is a monument, bearing the big letters "WE CARE."

I Love My Dead Gay Savior...

Let's make a few things clear: Bishop Gene Robinson did not actually say that Jesus Christ might have been gay, so all the headlines need editing. He merely pointed out that J.C. was a "non-traditional man," who "travelled with a bunch of men," (Hat Tip: Chris McCullouch)and allowed the rest of us to fill in the blanks (and his spokesperson to deny the validity of such inference). So this is less of a story than some are making it out to be, and for that, I can be only grateful.

But I'm more interested in the logic behind the supposition, given that the continuous press coverage of the things Robinson says makes him, for the moment, uniquely influential. Let us examine the evidence:

Jesus never married

He did, in fact, wandered around the desert with a bunch of dudes.

The Apostle John was known as "the one Jesus loved"

He had a very strong relationship with his mother.

He spoke out against lusting after women with severity above and beyond that of the Mosaic Law.

There are more than a few, who faced with this (deliberately incomplete) information, will say "Oh my god, like, HELLO!" and those won't all be gay people. One of the understated conflicts about modern discourse is the amount of disbelief in the possibility of chastity. It informs our arguments on abortion, sex education, AIDS prevention, and yes, gay marriage. To many on the left, the concept of virginity and chastity are things that, like "the troops," they will claim to respect but do nothing to aid. They will not submit to the preaching of chastity, to the preaching of disciplining the sex drive. That's "unnatural." The degree to which the supremacy, the complete irresistibility of the sex drive has been taken as an article of faith among the left, and never questioned, is fascinating. And many righties are so busy tuning in to South Park to demonstrate hipness that they can't be bothered to notice anymore.

Therefore, anyone who speaks to loudly on the subject is a warped freak who hates sex. Anyone who attempts to practice chastity is either a psychological eunuch or, somehow a hypocrite (this last has been the chief damage done by the child-abuse scandal in the Church). And anyone who practices chastity and then preaches to others about chastity is, in the view of many, little short of a genocidal fanatic if he does so in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

And therefore, a holy man who is the promised Godhead in the minds of billions of people worldwide cannot possibly have been acting according to the doctrine that his followers pronounced for millenia after him. Nope, he's simply queer.

Now, I write none of this as an exemplar of chastity, not in the purest sense of the term. My own opinions have never stopped me from doing things that would offend my mother if she knew of them. But I blame all this on my imperfect understanding of the need for chastity (which is not, strictly speaking, the same as virginity), not on the impossibility of chastity. I am reminded of Ghandi's line on Christianity: "It's marvelous, I wish somebody would try it!" Which works for chastity as well as for blasphemy.

Oh, the Militia's Plenty Good Enough to Put Down the Rebellion...

StrategyPage sounds off on the woeful state of our war reserves prior to the Iraq War. Now this is one reason I could see for having waited to take out Saddam.

It reminds me of a debate I once had in college with a group of pals who were vociferous (while I was Excorsist-esque) in their contention that the Defense budget should be greatly slashed because there were no wars on the horizon (this was 1995, when the aftershocks of the end of the Cold War were still being felt). Loudly I shouted that I didn't know who we would have to fight, but that it was ludicrous to believe that we would never have to fight again.

Now were my friends relishing the thought of future U.S. casualties? Of course not. Most of them, I'm sure, opposed this war and the casualties it requires. But this has been our habit since the Revolution (a point I made in the argument, as I recall), to sing "I ain't gonna learn war no more," and then leave to the next generation the task of learning war, all over again.

Note the closing:

The U.S. Transportation Command, and several other agencies involved in this mess, have all taken the pledge to set things right and sin no more. They are half right. Everyone will hustle to get the system patched up and functioning for now. But in the future, the same rot and sloppiness will seep back in. That’s what has happened time and again in the past. Odds are, it will happen yet again. People like to talk about future wars, but no one likes to spend money on getting ready to buy, store and ship the needed supplies.

Indeed. Not when there are bureaucracies to be built and vague, impressive-sounding "wars" on social ills to be waged.

My point? Only this: Do you think this kind of behavior, I don't know. odd for a nation reputed to be so warlike and imperialistic?

Okay, one more...

Adding Mickey Kaus to the blogroll, because he's just about the only Democratic Blogger I can enjoy reading at this point. He's as fair-minded as most bloggers get, and that's worth reading.

See the Music Inside My Head

While I decide if the universe is monolithic or dualistic or a monolith containing a dialogue, here's a list of what I've been listening to lately:


Tangerine Dream - Cyclone

Interpol - Antics

Reverend Horton Heat - The Full Custom Gospel Sounds

Jesus and Mary Chain - Psycho Candy

Why? Because.

Checking in...

I meant to post on Friday, and Thursday, to tell you about Friday's post, but Blogger upchucked. I'll be back tommorrow, at which point all the people who checked me out on wednesday will have moved on to greener pastures. That's the way it goes, I guess...

Whoa.

My hit count just went through the roof. Who the devil just linked me? I can't find anyone that wasn't there already...

Is LiveJournal the Mortal Foe of Blogger?

Added a few links to Friends' sites, one of which is my dahling girlfriend's. I've noticed that not many Blogger sites link to LiveJournal sites? Is this a cultural divide? Outward-focused "news of the world" bloggers vs. Inward-focused "today I am blah..." live-journalists?

Deaf "Culture" and Needless Issue Manufacturing

During one of my post-graduate education classes, I watched a film in which the issue of cochlear implants for deaf children was beat to death like a red-headed horse by a pack of ravenous Frenchmen. I wanted to be deaf by the time the movie was over, just so I wouldn't have to listen to it any longer.

Right on the Left Coast has this post on the crux of the work -- that "deaf culture" is valid and needs protecting. I'm personally of the opinion that parents have the final say in whether invasive surgery is to be performed on their children. If deaf parents have a deaf child, and don't wish to put in the implant, no one, I think, has the right to compel them to do so. But, as providing for the needs of deaf children in education is a requirement upon the state, the state will be able to come up with a "compelling interest" to sue for it in court. Look for continuing legal hullabaloos.

By the same token, a set of hearing parents who wish to give the gift of hearing to their deaf child should be able to do so without self-important "deaf activists" trying to "defend their culture." Let me be plain: I care not a whit about "deaf culture," whatever that might be. I'm not impressed with activists who want to refuse people the possibility of regaining one of the five senses merely so they can keep their numbers up. That impulse is no less tyrannical than that behind compelling surgery over the will of the parents.

To conclude: deafness is not so disabling as to require government intervention, and no disability "culture" has any say over the wishes of a mother and father to have their child be able to listen, speak, and enjoy music and theater. In all cases, let the parents decide, however they wish.

Can we all agree to that?

Is the Pope Catholic?

Being so used to the phrase "Pope John Paul II" I admit that it will be a while before I get used to the sound of "Pope Benedict XVI." I had the same problem, as a boy of twelve, getting used to the sound of "Bush Administration" instead of "Reagan Administration". In 1989, Reagan was the only President I remember. As I was not yet two when John Paul II became Pope, he's the only pope I remember, though he was the third of my lifetime.

I will also freely admit to being a trifle surprised that the conclave elected Ratzinger. I was expecting them to go with the Nigerian, or one of the Latin American, cardinals (their names have escaped me). So, too, apparently did many of the press, who fairly frothed at the thought of the Church electing a younger, darker, liberal-er, dare-I-say-it sexier prelate. I can taste the disappointment in their copy: all that excitement, and waddya get? Another old white dude telling us we need to be holy. BOOOOORRRRRIIIIINNNNNGGGGG....

ABC calls Ratzinger a "hard-liner," as though his views on abortion, homosexuality, etc., (you know, all the important things) were somehow different from those of JPII. In fact, if anyone had been paying attention, they'd have known that all of the "popeful" cardinals had been appointed by John Paul, and all of them solid on doctrinal fidelity as that pope viewed it. So, Andrew Sullivan's histrionics aside, no Pope elected today was going to be opening the preisthood to women or repealing Humanae Vitae. The Doctrine is the doctrine, consecrated by time and usage, and it doesn't change just because people wish it. If you have a problem with your Pope viewing the doctrine that way, then I have a place for you to go.

UPDATE: I haven't even read Sullivan's display on Benedict XVI, but the degree to which he has become a figure of ridicule is astounding, given how many of us stopped by his blog first thing in the morning two years ago.

ONE THING MORE: My girlfriend is a pro-choice Lutheran who voted for Kerry (which has got to mean it's the real thing). When we discussed the new Pope's positions vis-a-vis abortion, homosexuality, contraception and whatnot, she said, "Well, I wouldn't expect the POPE to approve of those things..." If she gets it, how come so many Catholics can't?

File Under "Toothless Moral Opposition"

I don't know that I completely accept the premise of this post at Catholic Light, that Gay Anglican bishops will of necessity be pro-abortion Anglican Bishops. As gays tend to be of the political left, that's generally an acceptable rule, but exceptions are not impossible.

What I am truly interested in is the logic that this particular Anglican Bishop, gay or no, uses to arrive at a pro-choice position:

"Abortion," he said yesterday, is "not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole. On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose."

Let us parse this:

The first part of this "Abortion is not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole," suggests that a fetus posesses a moral worth greater than a mere appendage of the body. One could be forgiven for inferring that the fetus has a value intrinsic to itself. Human entities (and, being a fetus inside a human woman's body, we can only label this a human fetus) which possess intrinsic value are generally referred to as "persons", and, as a matter of law and habit, considered worthy of protection, by other humans, and by the law.

The second part "On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose," seems to say that no one may come between a woman and the choice she makes regarding what goes on inside her body. That which no one may interfere with, human beings have habitually termed "sacred." So, an abortion is a sacred matter concerning a woman and her body. Many will find that term inappropriate, but the speaker here is a Bishop of the Anglican church, and thus, for Anglicans, one empowered to speak as to which matters are sacred and which are not.

So the fetus is a person, deserving of protection, and abortion is a sacred matter involving no one but a woman and her body. Which is exactly the opposite of what the bishop said.

I may be rhetorically reaching, but it is to prove a point: is there anyone out there who actually believes that Bishop Robinson is in any way troubled by abortion? Does anyone believe he's actually spent a half-hour's reflection on the suffering inflicted on pre-neonates, and the physical and emotional damage done to the woman? In fairness, I don't know the man, and he could be sincere on the subject, but I doubt it.

And if he isn't, what does he bother stating anything that even sounds like a moral judgement against abortion? You know why: it's a rhetorical shibboleth, designed to soothe the other side's opposition into a go-along-to-get-along situation. But it goes nowhere towards teaching or persuading anyone to adopt the Anglican view of abortion as something impermissible for "birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience." In fact, judging from some of Bishop Robinson's later remarks (follow the link), I doubt very much he'd deem aborting a fetus because you wanted a girl instead of a boy a sin.

This kind of thinking runs parallel, to my mind, with the people who say they thought Saddam was a murderous bastard and they're glade the Iraqis are free, but detest the mechanism that brought that about. It's a child of "9/11 was awful, but..." It is a declaration of moral awareness hamstrung by a refusal to take the action that awareness demands, and therefore amounts to nothing more than an expression of aesthetics, not morality.

Now, any good leftist can point out where people of my camp to the same thing, but with different issues (poverty being the leadoff hitter, the death penalty perhaps batting cleanup). And I don't know that they'd be wrong to do so. And this is where alternative proposals are so important. There are ways of dealing with poverty other than the bureaucratic spawn of the dead command economies. But if abortion and terrorism and Saddam Hussein are such bad things, what do you plan on doing about them?

You asked for More Al Gore, and We're Giving to You. Hard.

Adiemantus has resurfaced, and, as always, he's worth reading.

The Swing and the Pendulum

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that everything Rich Lowry is reporting in this piece for NRO is accurate, and let us accept the possibility that therapy is not all its cracked up to be. Many will oppose such out-of-hand as right-wing hack work, but let's work from it.

If it is true, than the argument of Signmund Freud--that all civilization is based upon repression--gets an corollary added to it: not only civilization but, to a degree, human happiness, is based upon repression. To pick our scabs and wallow in our pathologies slow our progress. Stoicism is necessary for survival.

But let us not damn in defending. If stoicism were to be universal, we would not have mouths. And let us not forget that it was the repressed Protestant persona that fathered the touchy-feely jargon-spewing therapy culture that thrives today.

The 9 Types of Types

I've always been a fan of Matt Groening's cartoons, even though he's a polar opposite of my kind of politics. I remember the cartoon whose captions are linked here (Hat Tip: Vodkapundit), and I remember chuckling at them when I didn't have a girlfriend. But looking over the list now, I notice something:

Is it just me, or are the guys the effeminate ones here? And the women the dominating brutes?

There's Joe Sensitive, the Dreamer, and Flinchy, with only Bigfoot fulfilling the role of standard-issue caveman. Even the Sneak is oddly fey, sneaking around like a weasel rather than shouting "Bathe her, and bring her to my tent!" like a warrior. As for Old Man Grumpus, think "college professor", "senior editor," and "Dave Matthews fan."

Now look at the ladies. Out of Nine types, three are clearly Alpha-Females (Old Yeller, the Bosser, and Huffy), two are by-nature uncontrollable, (Wild Woman Out of Control, Woman From Mars), and two are the wilting kind (Sickly, Vaguely Dissatisfied). Ms. Nice Guy is clearly "One of the Boys" and any chick who gets into sports carries a degree of ambiguity gender-wise.

All anecdotal, of course. And it leads one to wonder about the kind of men (what, no Perpetual Jock? No Capitalist Captain? No Perpetual Geek?) and women (No Nun-in-Training? No Yammerbox? No Geekess?) Groening encounters. But when I consider the memes about the demasculation of modern society that flew around back in the 90's, and when I consider that underlining such an idea was likely the farthest thing from Groening's mind, I find the co-incidence fascinating.

The Four Things Civilization Needs

Boxing Alcibiades links to this heartening report of what's been going on in Tanzania since socialist Julius Nyerere stepped down as President in 1985. Rose-colored glasses, to be sure. But When P.J. O'Rourke toured Tanzania in the late 90's for his book Eat the Rich, he found a country that had "made nothing from everything," a deeply poor, albeit peaceful country. That the introduction of market economics is beginning to turn all that around, is both obvious and pleasantly surprising.

Property rights. Rule of Law. Suffrage. Universal Education. The basics, folks. Everything else is gravy, and like gravy, can mess up the arteries if you gorge on it.

Shout it from the Rooftops...

The CIA needs HUMINT!

The Remnant

John Derbyshire of National Review is not known for being the most optomistic man in the known universe. This is the man who famously declared that the U.S. was not going to go to war against Iraq, largely because he felt we lacked the cojones. There's more than a little of the doom-and-gloom-crochety-old-drunk-in-a-pub-for-whom-nothing-is-ever-right about him. We ought to take that into consideration.

Nonetheless, I think today he has a point. While everyone who isn't nailed down is crowding Rome to view the mortal remains of John Paul II (I'm waiting for the media backlash against the media overexposure to kick in), Derb is airing the dirty laundry, not of the Pope himself, but of the Church, and no, he doesn't mean anything having to do with priests, children, and K-Y Jelly. He means the gradual erosion of spirituality in the post-modern world, the "posthuman tsunami," as he puts it (I'm proposing a five-year moratorium on the use of the word "tsunami" as a metaphor. Any takers?).

For in spite of the fact that we all loved John Paul, we all hate going to Church nowadays. We all hate any doctrine (birth control, abortion, euthanasia, etc.) that gives us anything more thant momentary inconvenience. We have been trained by modern society to demand release from any pain unjustly caused us, and we have been trained by modern academia to find a way to blame the whole for any particular pain. Despite this saint's leadership, none of that has changed.

So we're doomed. Brave New World, here we come.

But I demur. John Paul II stood for freedom of religion, and freedom of religion is no small thing. As long as religion is not muzzled or censored by the state, religion can grow, and where religion can grow, religion will grow. Look at the Evangelicals in the United States, who are so successful in preaching their version of Christianity that they've made inroads in Latin America and even forced the coastal humanists in their own country to shudder at them. The mass of humanity may be willing to turn their brains into genome-mapped pleasure domes, but not everyone is. The religious impulse is harder to kill than anyone not acquainted with it will realize. Time Magazine proclaimed God dead in 1966, certain that religion would fade away. In 2005, the death of the Pope is the biggest news story of the year. Hardly seems like an end, does it?

But even if Derbyshire is right and worldwide church attendance dwindles to the 10% it likely is in infidel France, so what? Either that 10% is right about their being a transcendent God who promised that the gates of hell would never prevail, or they're wrong. If they're wrong, the Brave New World is no threat to anything, because the Brave New World will be right. If they're right...then they Brave New World is no threat to anything.

I am reminded of the path of the Jews in the Old Testament: raised from slaves to all-conquering zealouts to effete, polytheistic sacrificers to grist under the treads of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. When the Jews went away to Babylon, most of them, too, wallowed in the luxury of the Morning Star's Kingdom and forgot their God. But a handful, the Remnant, stayed true, and to them God promised return and restoration:

Cease your cries of mourning,
wipe the tears from your eyes
The sorrow you have sown shall have its reward,
says the Lord,
they shall return from the enemy's land.
There is hope for your future, says the Lord;
your sons shall return to their own borders.
Jeremiah 31:16-17

This would make John Paul II not John the Baptist, heralding the new age, but Josiah, the last good King of the Davidic dynasty, who labored mightily to restore the old-time religion, and largely failed, because the people had decided that the Mosaic Law was archaic and required re-interpretation in the light of their modern society. Of Josiah it was written: "Before Him there had been no king who turned to the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole strength, in accord with the law of Moses; nor could any after compare with him." Yet his kingdom was devoured by Babylon within a few generations, then reborn in such a way as would never allow it to bow to foreign gods again.

So if God will seek to punish the Catholic Church for the sins of its past (sins that John Paul II knew well), fear not. The remnant will see it's way through to the other side, and be there when the Brave New World is no longer new, and no longer brave, and surrenders as meekly as tyrants inevitably do.

Interesting Times

Is it me, or is this decade a lot more dramatic, and substantially so, than the last one? We got 9/11, the War, the Death of a Pope, the prospect of popular, pro-democracy, peaceful revolutions in corners of the world that are strangers to them, etc. What was going on at the mid-point of the 1990's? The Republican takeover of Congress? The Fall of HillaryCare? Yugoslavia's meltdown? All minor, parochial happenings, unless you happened to be caught up with them. Nothing worldwide, except for Aids.

I know all history is really a simultaneous sowing and reaping of the hearts of humanity, but it seems to me that this is a time of tectonic shifting, of places and possibilities moving in new ways.

The other possibility is that all this is but the aftershock of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which fell so softly as to lead us to believe that we had escaped all consequences. Come to think of it, the U.S.S.R. did technically end in 1991, so I guess you can put that one in the 90's column. So maybe it was the late 90's, the "Roaring" part if you will, the era of Monica Lewinsky, that will be remembered as silly and without consequence. Hell, maybe after the 2006 elections and the (very) gradual petering out of the Iraq insurgency, the pace of history will entropy and we can settle back down to American Idol and swinging the Stock Market again, and the late 00's will be another little nap until China decides to go after Taiwan or Asian Bird Flu starts dropping people like flies, or (insert unforseen event here).

I don't know. You don't know. All we know is all we are...

Ill News

Peter Jennings has lung cancer. When I was a boy, my family watched ABC news exclusively, and so saw the news and Jennings told it to us every night. To this day, I can recall the timbre of his voice when he described the trading on wall street as "moderate". To many on my side of the aisle, Jennings is just another head of the MSM hydra, but he was always a dignified, gentlemanly, non-document-forging head. While I find the tone of his group mailing bizarre(switching from a gentle self-chiding as one who alternates from "cranky to really cranky" to a droned statistic about how many millions of Americans are "living with cancer"), I can't think of many who would want to speak ill of him.

Hopefully my compatriots in the blogosphere will not not prove me wrong. In the meantime, best wishes to him and his at this time.

The Great Debate

Volokh brings up the subject of whether a tomato is actually a fruit or a vegetable, and finds himself cutting through a mass of legal and botanical verbiage, and concludes that they are both. A logical conclusion, I suppose, but one which will not hold water. The placing of the seeds and the purpose of the bloom have nothing whatever to do with the average persons classification of fruits and vegetables.

The delineation is actually palate-related: fruits are sweet, vegetables are bitter or salty or starchy. Apples, oranges, banannas, pomegranates, grapes, strawberries, etc., are fruits. Beans, squash, potatoes, asparagus, etc. are vegetables. Tomatoes, which taste like the rotting interior of a gangrenous wound, are therefore vegetables.

I defy anyone to refute this distinction.

I knew him when...

Boxing Alcibiades has gone crazy, filling himself up with bloglinks and posting all over creation. The Bastard's built himself up into a Flippery Fish while I'm still a Lowly Insect. I send little radiating beads of hate, cheer him on, and tell you to go check him out.

So, Anything happen over the break?

I pretty much absented myself from the Terry Schiavo hullabaloo, because I felt the matter better presented in other formats. John Leo aptly sums up what went on in case you just turned over the rock.

One thing I did notice about the a particular argument that people who were opposed to keeping Schiavo alive kept using. "The religious right is out of control," or some facsimile thereof, they'd say.

"Out of control."

Look, I can see getting annoyed at involving the federal government in a matter this private. And reasonable people will disagree as to the proper point to allow nature to take its course. But to say that the religious right is "out of control" for wanting to save Schiavo's life, such as it was, says a lot more about you than it says about religious conservatives.

We aren't talking about organizing a crusade or setting Jews on fire. We're talking about attempting to re-insert a feeding tube into a disabled woman. Maybe doing so is superfluous, maybe it's not even what Terry Schiavo would have wanted. But if you can't see and understand what motivated the right-to-life crowd, then you might consider if you argued for Schiavo's death for the reasons you thought you did. And if the only reason you wanted to see her die was because it would annoy Pat Robertson, then you are the bigger asshole.

The Essayist #5: The Efficacy of Pain

This was started last week and left half-finished. It's somewhat circular, but I offer it anyway. Eugene Volokh, whose quote started the controversey, has since posted an update of ideas here, which is worth looking at. I hadn't intended it as part of the Terry Schiavo bonfire, but since that's on everyone's mind, I feel obligated to point out that when I hear people saying "Oh, the woman's suffered enough," I keep asking myself "Suffered enough for what?"


Could you accept executing a man like this, with a flogging before a non-gallows hanging?

What if you were told that he was a serial rapist and murderer who preyed on children?

Eugene Volokh, the blogger and law professor, has no problem with it:

I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

Me, I'm not so sure. I've always found something disordered in the lethal injection table, because it's so bloodlessly clinical; execution made safe and clean, down to the last alcohol swab (a longtime foil of stand-up comics). Me for a hanging, public-style, where the crimes against the community are avenged before they eyes of the community. The soft transformation of existence to non-existence is what strikes me as truly creepy.

Yet at the same time, flogging before hanging just strikes me as gratuitous. To knowingly inflict pain, and to derive moral satisfaction therefrom, is a dangerous area to be getting into. If our purpose is to engage in a killing, let us engage in a killing, and be done with it. If our purpose is to inflict pain, then let us inflict pain, and then release. To inflict pain without the possibility of learning from pain is to de-humanize the victim, and to misunderstand the purpose of pain.

Pain having a purpose at all is an idea not much spoken of in modern America. We do not believe in pain. We believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of pain's opposite. This is noted among both sides of our political perspective: our liberals (aka "conservatives") believe pain is caused by excessive government; sweep that out of the way, liberals argue, and humanity will solve its own problems, with freedom and money. Our socialists (aka "liberals") believe that pain is an evil to be eradicated from every corner in which it might inhabit, except for pain caused to enemies of the people, which is deserved. Both groups rail against any discomfort, inconvenience, or hurdle standing in their way.

The liberal view is slightly preferable to the socialist, however naive it may be, because it holds pain as something to be transcended by the individual, not numbed away by the collective. The latter approach, sympathetic as anyone may be to it, runs counter to the Reality Principle: that everything which exists has a cause independent of it, a purpose it fulfills, however unpleasantly.

So what is the purpose of pain? You know what it is biologically: a signal of damage to the brain from the body, data that something has gone wrong. And like any piece of data, what matters is what you do about it. Some pain, like that coming from a cut, indicates that you should be more careful when you try to cut cheese. Should you do so, the pain will be avoided in the future. Other pain, like that you get in your muscles after exercise, tells you exactly what you wanted to hear: that you had a good workout. You'll want to repeat the experience as often as possible, until you have obtained the goal that you want. Thus the principle of gym: "No pain, no gain."

But outside that aerobic context, who want to hear that kind of talk? Who wants to be told that pain is a necessary evil, even a positive force in life? Who could even beging to see the positive aspects of pain except sadomasochists and people so buffered by money from the twists of fate that they'll never have to experience any pain they don't wish to?

I think this is an unacknowledged part of our political discourse. Liberals ("conservatives") can see that pain has a utility, albeit a negative one, and are willing to reserve to themselves the right and capacity to use it. Such folks tend to have a opinion of capital punishment, corporal punishment, the cruelties of the marketplace, and war that agrees to their use, given certain circumstances. Socialists ("liberals") hate war, hate the death penalty, hate spanking, and despise the invisible hand. Using these means to achieve any end, be it international security, local order, discipline among children, or wealth, is unacceptable to the leftist, because, in his mind, the means do not correspond to the ends.

War and spanking and the marketplace, and possibly the death penalty, cause suffering to those that do not deserve to suffer, for various reasons. Civilians killed in the crossfire of battle are certainly innocent, and the poor and unlucky businessmen are not just innocent but arguably wronged. Spanking just makes children resentful and quarrelsome, we are told, and the death penalty restores nothing to anyone.

Ignoring the merits of these arguments, we may see the core idea: to take action that may cause unjust suffering is wrong, to use suffering as a tool of civilization is idiotic at best and monstrous at worst. The notion is certainly consistent, and at first glance, well within the boundaries of Judeo-Christian tradition.

The problem with the argument is that pain and suffering, unquestionable physical realities though they be, are not absolutes. A child who gets soap in his eye is in agony unprecedented, a youth would scoff at such woes, but in the throes of unrequited love is suicidal, to the head-shaking amusement of more experienced men. All new pain is intense to the point of unbearability. Then the mind and body learn that it is not the end, and is thence able to withstand it.

Which brings us back to the wrongness of torturing someone and then killing them. Using pain to change behavior can be permissible, depending on the degree of damage done and the goal being pursued. Using pain to achieve pain, without offering possibility for behavioral change is simply indulging our appetites. There is much to be argued about regarding the efficacy of pain, where the lines should be laid, how to tell when you've crossed the line from reasonable firmness to abuse of power. But before we can have that conversation, we must accept the idea that pain has a purpose, and sometimes, it's the most effective way to communicate.

Annals of the Dead

Sorry I've been out of it. Six-Pack flu turned into a real cold from which I'm still recovering. I've got that Functional-but-wiped-out thing goin' on. I need some coffee to get me through until lunch.

Anyway, I found this Op-Chart in the New York Times covering statistics on the war dead interesting. The majority of war dead seem to be white men in their mid-20's with high school diplomas, and generally middle-class in origin.

Has anyone told Michael Moore? I'm sure he'll be pleased.

Six-Pack Flu

I am beyond useless today...sweaty and vile. Stupid St. Patrick, with his mind-control beams making my drink like a fish last night. Next year I wear the tinfoil.

Glenn, Read your Email

Instapundit links to this post suggesting that any bankruptcy reform should "require credit card issuers and consumer lenders to prominently disclose information about (a) penalty rates and fees, and (b) the proportion of clients currently paying those fees."

Which if you read this space, you know to be already in the bill. Quoth the WaPo, from the day after the bill passed the Senate:

Otherwise the bill remained essentially as it was introduced. It would require credit card companies to give customers more information on how much longer it will take to pay off their balances by making minimum payments, a requirement the industry fought but eventually agreed to.

Either there is a massive disinformation campaign afoot, from one side or the other, or somebody isn't reading the bill (and for disinformation to be successful...).

Still no word from Instapundit. One of us is going to end up with egg on his face.

Busy, Busy

Not much blogging today, unless the world turns chartreuse or the lion lies down with the lamb or something. Mayhaps tommorrow.

More Music, Please

Here's a blog everyone who likes to listen to something other than the garbage the radio inflicts upon us should know: FluxBlog.
I'm puttin' em up permanent-like.

The Tedium of Environmentalism

I wonder if gentlemen behind this environmental call-to-arms (Hat tip: Volokh) have ever read P.J. O'Rourke's All the Trouble In the World. I wonder if they could respond to it's arguments on Environmentalism as anything other than "a more entertaining version of the propaganda generated by the half-dozen market-loving Beltway think tanks listed in O'Rourke's acknowledgments," as Booklist does. I also wonder if anyone can actually get past more than a couple of paragraphs of this screed without their brain starting to cramp up. I sure couldn't.

Just who IS Gen-X, Anyway?

Here's a "30-Something" who calls herself Gen-X and writes a blog all about nostalgia for the 80's. Now I'm "20-something" (still), and I never even heard of Roxy Music. For me, 80's nostalgia means Transformers and the kind of fashion that the chick in Napoleon Dynamite wears.



Of course I'm Happy to see you, waddya think? GOSH!

All of which begs the question: if generations are defined by shared cultural touchstones, and people who are born at different ends of generations have different remembrances, then how valid can the determination of a "generation" be?

Bankruptcy...All My Money's Run Away with Me...

The new hullabaloo in blog-land over the bankrupcy bill that just passed the Senate seems to me like much ado about nothing. The Washinton Post article I just linked lists three main provisions of the bill:

1. Requires credit cards to inform customers of how long it will take to pay off their balances by paying the minimum. The seemingly all-powerful credit industry fought this, to no avail.

2. Allows judges to further penalize the compensation of CEO's of bankrupting corporations. Other industry groups also fought this one, and ended up having to eat it, anyway.

3. Requires some borrowers to file under Chapter 13, rather than Chapter 7 bankruptcy, thus requiring them to actually pay off a portion of the debt owed.


I can feel the fury building up in you even now. Why, those BASTARDS!! To actually expect that some of the money they lend be returned to them! Why it's so horrific, we almost dare not speak its name! In fact, the blogosphere largely hasn't spoken its name, because this is the first analysis of the provisions of the bill I've actually read. And in the WaPo, no less. Admittedly, I've only looked in a few places. But Instapundit has only been denouncing the bill in general, not in specific, this guy is likewise more against the credit card industry than, it seems, the bill itself.

I'm not arguing from a position of screw-the-little-proles, either. I've been up to my eyeballs in C.C. debt, on more than one occasion. I am not, however, about to blame the C.C companies for that. The mere fact of offering "pre-approved" credit does not compell anyone to a) accept the offer, b) use the credit, or c) incompetently arrange one's budget so that it may not be paid off. In a free society, we freely enter contracts and are responsible for fulfilling them. I don't have a problem with people becoming more aware of that.


I've sent an email to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, asking him to explain his position more fully. I hope to hear from him soon. If not, well...there's no contract, is there...?


UPDATE: No word from Glenn. But Eugene Volokh responded to my geek eruption regarding this post with aplomb, which suggests that I might consider getting out more.

Blah

Blah blah blah blah, blah
Blah blah blahblahblah, blah-blah
Blah blah blah, blah BLAH


I need to get out of this place before my will to live strangles me. Be back tommorrow.

This is Brilliant.

Here's a teacher who's found a creative solution to macro and micro-economic problems. I do something similar: I charge knuckleheads who don't bring their book to class between a quarter and a dollar to use the extra copies I keep in the classroom. It's a handy source of lunch money some days.

Creative Destruction = Hooey.

Instapundit's posting of a reader's email invites a storm of correction on Hindu theology and the principle of "creative destruction." I've never accepted that term as being anything other than sophistry and self-justification. Sure, some destruction can get things out of the way for creation of better things, but the creation still comes after the destruction, and is not a guarunteed thing. The one is not the other.

Everybody who wants to destroy something believes their act to be full of righteousness; only nihilists believe otherwise. Many may even be sincere, and wish to create after they destroy, and destroy with that intention in mind. But destruction and creation remain two seperate acts, and how history judges them is dependent on how careful they are in destroying, and whether they get that chance to build again.

Incidentally, someone should let Glenn (or his reader) know that Brahma is the Hindu god of Creation, not Vishnu.

Code Grumbling Bleg

I am starting to find Blogger's selective display of my ecosystem status really annoying. I refresh, I republish, and it still doesn't show up if it doesn't feel like it. Is anyone else having this problem?

Update: Never mind. The Bear says that the display feature is shut down. Maybe I should check the horse's mouth next time.

Progressive Reactionaries

I agree with Matt Yglesias that National Security is the true weak spot of the Democratic Party, and the true reason why Bush won was Kerry's vagueness on the subject. "Moral values" voters may have demonstrated some of their true strength in '04, but that wasn't the tipping issue. I further agree that making the military just one of their special interests won't do the job either (Hat tip: The Corner). But Yglesias can't seem to bring himself to say what should be done: That the Democrats are going to have to out-hawk the Republicans.

Impossible, you say? Not at all. Forty years ago, the Democrats did exactly that. In 1960 and in 1964, the combination of liberal social policies and ferocious anti-communism (Kennedy's "pay any price" dictum) were all but unstoppable at the polls. A similar combination (lefty politics and ferocious anti-fascism) worked for FDR in the 40's. "Have pity on the weak, and slay the dragons," is a potent message indeed.

But to get it back, the Democrats are going to have to cut themselves off from the entire 1968 faction, all the professors and pundits who believe as surely as they believe the sky is blue that the U.S. is an imperialist power bent on world domination. I personally think Yglesias underestimates the degree to which this thinking has become reflexive in Democratic circles, even unconscious. As a matter of principle, most liberals don't think the U.S. is evil necessarily. But with every specific example of American force being used to defeat dictatorship, they seem to find themselves opposed.

It's going to take a lot for the average Democratic voter to cozy up to the institutions of power in American foreign policy: the military ("if we could take that money and spend it on food/education/free needles..."), the State Department (still primarily staffed by Ivy League upper-class types, though less so than before), and the CIA (the whipping-boy for every foreign policy miscue, when not accused of being the Sinister Icy Black Hand of Death for the entire Third World). Second-generation hippies are to be found everywhere, and if their politics are a bit of a pose, that doesn't make them any more willing to support the slaying dragons. Out of habit, they still oppose the knights.

So I agree with the nature of the problem, and I don't blame Yglesias for not speaking to specifically about the solution. He's going to have a hard time convincing the DU crowd that it's not "reactionary."