Month: April 2004

I feel it’s necessary for me to write something about what’s going on in Iraq but this is also one of those moments when the reality is so opaque and events so fluid that it’s hard to know what to say. I’m not ducking this. It looks both terrible and also an opportunity. Better these tnesions flare now than later. But the flaring could also become a wildfire. More tonight when the facts are clearer.

POLARIZATION: Tim Noah has an excellent piece in Slate on geographic political segregation. He looks at counties in America and finds an astonishing development – landslide counties:

Bishop blames this heightened partisanship on the proliferation of “landslide counties.” He defines a landslide county as one in which the presidential nominee of one party receives at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1976, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that proportion had nearly doubled, to 45.3 percent.
And it’s getting worse. The GOP has a lot more landslide counties where the partisan imbalance continues to widen (939) than do the Democrats (158). But because the Democrats’ landslide counties are much likelier to be more populous urban counties, the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Democrats (15.2 million, or 14 percent of the national vote) comes out roughly the same as the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Republicans (16.5 million, or 16 percent of the national vote).

Maybe it’s the country that’s polarizing the politicians and the pundits, not the other way round.

That all depends on what the meaning of fundamentalism is. And it’s complicated. I mean, it’s complicated within the relatively homogeneous world of Catholicism (with which I have infinitely more familiarity), and I confess I sometimes miss the nuances among various stripes of Protestants. I’m also guilty of talking about the “religious right” as a homogeneous bloc. At times, in the political sense, they are. But in the theological sense, it’s much more complicated. Here’s an interesting article deconstructing some of the more hysterical liberal worries about president Bush’s religion and its influence on our politics. Money quote:

Two points, then, should emerge: First, there are differences between evangelicalism in general and the subset called fundamentalism; and second, those differences are hard to specify because they are matters of tendency and preference rather than doctrine or belief. Basically, all evangelicals (fundamentalist or not) believe that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins; that people need to repent of our sins and “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior”; that we must preach the Gospel to those who don’t know or don’t believe; and that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God. The hard part begins when we get down to asking what the Bible actually says.
For many fundamentalists, the way other evangelicals (such as myself) interpret the Bible makes us indistinguishable from liberals: when we say, for example, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old, or approve of the ordination of women, or a hundred other things. You know you’re an evangelical if the fundamentalists think you’re a liberal and the liberals think you’re a fundamentalist.

Welcome to today’s America. Everyone gets a demographic. And they’re getting narrower and narrower all the time.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Don’t equate security with numbers. If that were the case we would have won Vietnam just based on numbers – but that didn’t happen. Whether there be 130,000 troops in Iraq or half a million it wouldn’t have prevented Sadr’s calculated call for violence. Indeed, more troops and more American presence might have given his movement more followers. Furthermore, more troops mean more humvees roaming around which in turn means more easy targets for the layers of roadside bombs. We have to defang Sadr. You’re right about Sistani; he’s sitting back waiting for the coalition to come to him for help as an alternative to Sadr. Sadr’s increasing influence, while threatening to Sistani, actually could empower Sistani. We also have to get the Iraq forces involved – preferably using them to get Sadr. Putting an ‘international face’ on this is bunk – protesters attacked Spanish forces as well. We have to put an Iraqi face on this.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

I was a little surprised to hear the president dress down a reporter for apparently not addressing him as Mr President. Drudge ran with it; so did many other sources. It’s to Josh Marshall’s credit that he points out that this incident may actually have been due to the fact that the reporter asking the question had a cell-phone up to his ear. In that context, “Who are you talking to?” is not so crazy a question. In fact, if this was the case, it seems to me that it was the reporrter who was being ill-mannered, not the president.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “We have both made the choice of Europe and the European Union as a principal vehicle for our economic and political aspirations. For both of us this does not, nor should not, in any way weaken our strong ties of friendship with the United States. These are complementary relationships.” – Queen Elizabeth II, in Paris, spreading a little cordiale on the entente.

This, one recalls, is the battle John Ashcroft was really hoping to wage. Terrorists are one thing, but porn-consumers – now there’s a real threat. With the Justice Department having nothing better to do, like catch Jihadists, it’s very important that they keep a fierce and unrelenting eye on adults enjoying themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Hey, they can’t even arrest homos any more. You’ve got to give the feds something important to do. Now, excuse me while I surf the, er, web.

DODD-GATE: It’s now reached Fox News. Fred Barnes, who always liked Trent Lott, thinks it proves the Republicans were too hard on nostalgics for segregation. C’mon, Fred. You’re so much classier than that.

KEEPING TABS: Two sites worth checking out: No-Pasaran keeps its bloggy eye on the European amd especially the French media. Fact-Check is also an excellent non-partisan resource for dissecting and deconstructing the lies, er, I mean, messages of the Bush and Kerry campaigns. So far, I’ve found most of the official ads appallingly crude and misleading. The Bush ad citing Kerry as wanting to raise taxes 350 times was almost self-parody. But it worked. Sigh.

THE BEEB AGAIN: More sarcastic grilling of soldiers with their lives on the line.

Here’s a quote from a Sadr relative that speaks volumes: “We may be unable to drive the Americans out of Iraq. But we can drive George W. Bush out of the White House.” The violence in Iraq is designed to exert pressure indirectly by leveraging opposition to the war in the U.S. and Britain. The sadr-masochists know they cannot overwhelm the coalition militarily, so they need to destroy its morale at home, as well as create constant instability in Iraq. One obvious point: this uprising isn’t over and it’s having its effect.

That’s the Pew poll’s latest finding on Bush’s approval rating. And that’s with the public behind him on Iraq.

David Beckham reels under a tabloid assault in London. An icon is toppled, or at least wobbled a little. And how have the mighty fallen:

The just-gay-enough metrosexual hipster, the uxorious one, the guy who tattooed his baby son’s name on to his back in Gothic script… suddenly he looked like every nylon-shirted commercial traveller sleeping with a drunk stranger in a motorway services hotel on a three-day break from his wife.

Ouch.

That’s one theory of the terrorist plot foiled last week in Britain.

A home-run early in the season.

He didn’t see the threat of al Qaeda either. It says something about how distorted our debate has become that this is even news.