Year: 2005

It behooves me to write that I’m chastened – and extremely heartened – by the progress we’re making in Iraq. The elections were obviously the key – and they should have been scheduled at least a year before they were. But it’s equally true that the constancy of our amazing troops, and the magic of democracy, are turning this long hard slog into a long hard slog with an end in sight. The criticisms of the past endure. But the fundamental objective seems to be within sight. The right decision – to remove Saddam – is no longer being stymied by wrong decisions. I feared the worst. I was wrong.

HIPPIES, HAWKS AND THE HOLY: The strange but wonderful geo-green alliance. My take in the Sunday Times.

THEY ARE STALINISTS: The more I read about the recent conference for conservative critics of the judiciary, the scarier it gets. One attendee, according to the Washington Post, had this to say:

[L]awyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said. The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”

Cornyn is beginning to sound mainstream. This was a meeting Tom DeLay promised to attend, before going to the Pope’s funeral. Last week also saw the meeting of something called the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Christian reconstructionists play a part in it – they want to abolish the Constitution and put Biblical precepts as the only source of American law. They have an agenda, as cited by the National Journal:

According to [organizer, Don] Feder, the manifesto will call for a plan to begin impeachment proceedings against federal judges; remove judicial jurisdiction over issues key to religious conservatives, including marriage and the separation of church and state; limit courts’ jurisdiction over the establishment clause of the Constitution, which has been used to enforce the firewall between religion and government; initiate a process for defunding courts that defy these new rules and continue to overstep their authority and eliminate the ability of Democrats to filibuster Bush’s judicial nominees.
The manifesto is based in part on legislation introduced early last month by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., known as the “Constitution Restoration Act.” Their bill would limit federal courts’ jurisdiction and would enshrine a recognition of God in federal law — a provision the bill would make nonreviewable.

Theocracy? Only hysterics think that’s going on, don’t they?

ATWOOD, KANSAS: The residents of this small town voted 984 to 113 to deny gay couples any protections for their relationships whatever. Even hospital visitation rights. The man who set up the town’s newspaper website, a man who calls Atwood his home, is now one of the undesirables. So he’s taking down the website. And letting his neighbors know what it’s like to be declared an enemy of society, even while you have long been one of its most solid citizens. The attack on gay relationships continues.

EUPHEMISM WATCH: I think I know what the NYT is trying to tell us here:

Prince Albert, meanwhile, has been linked to a long list of high-profile women known for appearing on the arms of middle-aged bachelors. There have been no signs of anything like a romance. “Knowing Rainier, I am convinced he was sorry not to see his son marry a young Catholic princess and have children,” said Claude de Kemoularia, a former chief of staff in the palace and a longtime friend of the prince. “He was always reluctant to give the power to his son too early because he was waiting for his son to marry and have a male heir.” So reticent has Albert remained about marriage throughout the years of public speculation and private pressures that his father sought changes to the Constitution three years ago to allow the crown to pass to one of the princesses or their children if Albert abdicated or died without a child.

Take a wild guess.

One is a bare-knuckled political operative; the other a young soldier who was awarded a Purple Heart in Iraq. Last week, we discovered that the former has married his long-time partner and the latter has demanded that he be allowed to serve openly to defend his country. You can argue over homosexuality for ever, but what is changing the world – what has already changed the world – is the simple witness of people from all backgrounds and walks of life that this is who they are. What social conservatives have to grapple with is that openly gay people are not going away. The coming generations will have even greater cohorts, as fear and shame recede. Where do these people fit in? How can they be integrated into family life? How do we acknowledge their citizenship? And their humanity? The pro-gay-marriage forces have an argument: we want full integration into civil institutions, the same rules, the same principles of responsibility. No excuses. The anti-gay-marriage forces have … what exactly? They are against civil unions, against domestic partnerships, against military service, against any form of recognition. They want to create a shadow class of people operating somehow in a cultural and social limbo. That strategy may have worked as long as gay people cooperated – by staying in the closet, keeping their heads down, playing the euphemism game. But the cooperation is over, as last week once again demonstrated. The old conservative politics of homosexuality has disintegrated; so the social right turns to even older, more virulent and prohibitionist methods. They won’t work either. Get real, guys. Deal with the world as it is, not as you would imagine it should be. That was once a conservative project.

ANOTHER PVS TWIST: This time in Ohio.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I was glad to see you praise John Derbyshire’s latest column (which was excellent, I agree). The thing is, I think you’ve been too hard on Derbyshire; he’s one of the few interesting writers left at National Review. Yes, he is virulently and often appallingly homophobic. But that’s nothing new among conservatives (or among people in general), is it? But his open homophobia is far more tolerable than a Stanley Kurtz, who disguises his homophobia, or at least homophobic policy prescriptions, behind a veneer of fake sociology. At least with Derbyshire you know where he stands. And he’s willing to admit inconvenient facts that don’t support his worldview, as in his piece on why he believes that homosexuality is inborn. Have you ever seen Kurtz admit that? Doubtful. He will not admit anything that doesn’t back up his talking points.

Which is the reason I like Derbyshire’s writing even when I find it appalling: he’s one of the few writers at NRO who has no use for talking points. Most of the writers there just go to prove that conservatism now is where liberalism was twenty years ago: ossified, unthinking, dependent on stupid cliches. My heart sinks whenever a new issue comes up because I know exactly what most of the posters in The Corner will say; they’ll recite the same talking points that are on Fox News. The exceptions are Jonah Goldberg, who doesn’t have a lot of original ideas but seems uncomfortable with reciting talking points (except about the war in Iraq, where he never really seemed to know what he was talking about), and Derbyshire, who, for good or for ill, always has something original to say.

I notice that of late Derbyshire’s tendency to think for himself has taken him “off the reservation” several times, as he’s split with the other NRO-niks on nation-building in Iraq, on intelligent design, on Terri Schiavo and now the Pope. Be interesting to see whether he gets dropped from NRO, not for being homophobic, but for independent thought.”

“The memo ‘does not sound like something written by a conservative; it sounds like a liberal fantasy of how conservatives talk. What conservative would write that the case of a woman condemned to death by starvation is ‘a great political issue’? Maybe such a person exists, but I doubt it.'” – Powerline, as reported in Salon.

“Darling, 39, has been an active conservative for more than 15 years and is a former board member of Young Americans for Freedom. He was co-chairman of Conservative Working Group, an organization for Republican Senate aides.

Darling has an undergraduate degree from Salem State College in his native Massachusetts and a law degree from New England School of Law. He worked for former senator Steve Symms (R-Idaho) and the late Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.), then was counsel to former senator Robert H. Smith (R-N.H.).

Darling briefly detoured to lobbying as a partner at Alexander Strategy Group, from 2003 until he joined Martinez’s office in January. The firm’s chairman is Edwin A. Buckham, who was chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) when he was majority whip.

Buckham said Darling worked with a coalition of airline pilots on the guns-in-the-cockpit issue. “He would take making a mistake very hard,” Buckham said. “Our staff loved Brian. We didn’t want to lose him, but he loves the Hill. He is still going to have a bright future in this town.” – from the Washington Post today. Darling is, of course, an absolutely typical apparatchik of the religious right. Maybe the partisan blinders over at Powerline will eventually fray.

Cardinal Law, one of the late pope’s favored abetters of child abuse, will be in the conclave picking the next Pope. He also just gave a lengthy interview with ABC News, refusing to answer any questions on the church’s record on the abuse of children and teens in its care. It’s an important rule: don’t just listen to what the hierarchy says; look at what they do.

SCHIAVO THIS: A bizarre echo of the Schiavo case in Australia. A man who attacked his wife wants to keep her in a persistent vegetative state so he can avoid being charged with her murder. My head is spinning.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Old Trout-ism has been sadly missing lately on the public stage. The current queen isn’t theatrical enough to carry it off. Old Trout-ism was at its height with Queen Mary, the immensely grand wife of King George V. Think big picture hats, shoes wide enough to handle a muddy field, a generous monobosom alternating at night with deep cleavage and a heavy-duty diamond necklace nestling in the valley. Camilla will be great at this look.” – Tina Brown, writing about the monarchy, her best subject.

NO PURPLE HEARTS, PLEASE: A gay soldier awarded the Purple Heart asks to stay in the military and serve openly. He’s got to be kidding. The military will get rid of him as soon as they can.

EMAIL OF THE DAY I: “I want to call into question your use of statistics to argue against the effectiveness of John Paul II’s tenure as Pope. I’ll flag two points because I need to get back to work.

1) The decline in the number of priests. I do not know how to account for the decline. You attribute it to the Pope. However, it’s certainly a logical possibility that there would have been even more of a decline had he not been Pope. Consider two factors which might have contributed but were not due to his papacy. (A) Sociological changes in the West. Here in the US, we are becoming more materialistic and having smaller families. I suspect that neither is conducive to large numbers of people signing up to be priests. Nor are these two likely the consequences of the Pope’s actions. (B) Changes in the perception of priests. Vatican II redefined the role of priests. Given that much of the mystique and power of the priesthood has been (in my view) diminished, fewer are going to feel the tug of these factors and become priests. And that’s not an altogether bad thing of itself. But it has nothing to do with John Paul II.

2) The decline in numbers of people attending Church. I think that Church attendance is a very weak indicator of whether someone is a “good” Catholic, and, so, whether the Church is thriving. Certainly attending church regularly is important to developing one’s faith. We are part of the community of God, so how can we thrive off by our lonesomes? But there is so much more to the Catholic faith than church attendance. If there are fewer people attending Church, but they are doing this act more out of response to the gift of life and of love from God than were the multitudes once upon a time, I’d be inclined to think that the Church is now healthier. I’d add that the sociological changes for priesthood that I described above might also apply here. Correlation simply is not causation.

I step back and allow myself to not know what the overall outcome of this papacy will be. I suspect we won’t know for centuries. In the meantime, I can have faith that God is present to us, and that as we inexorably yield to truth (for what else is there?), the Kingdom will continue to grow. And I can rejoice in what I perceive to have been a genuinely deep-felt sense of spirituality that John Paul II lived for us all to see. In that context, I’ll voice concerns about particular actions of the Church, but I do so with a lot of humility (seeing how much my views have changed as I’ve learned both faith and life) and from the context that I’ve just described.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Twenty four years ago I was a young priest who had been assigned to the chancery as vocation director. JPII just came on the scene and like many others, I wondered what the future of my ministry would look like with him at the helm. For a while I tried to convince myself and others that he was the perfect choice for pope since his obvious narrowness was stirring an energy in the church that would finally force the laity and clergy to stand up and say “Whoa!”
Twelve years later my “Whoa” became “Enough” and I left active ministry and while I still believe JPII has caused many to take a clearer stand on what they believe, I am saddened by the regressive place he has left the church. I just read some of his Last Will and Testimony and was heartened by his request for forgiveness. I forgive him for trying to turn me into a poparatchik and for not accepting me as a gay man and I pray that he rests in peace.”

Josh does the right thing on the Martinez memo.

Money quote:

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of “GOP Talking Points.” True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part–it didn’t come from Martinez–left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

My italics. Read the whole piece in light of what we now know.

My TNR piece is now up.

Locusts and frogs are falling on my head, but John Derbyshire has a must-read on the failed papacy of John Paul II. This Pope lost even Ireland. Yes, Ireland. How much more damning an indictment can there be? I disagree with Derbyshire on his lack of hope for the Church. But I do believe that its revival will come from the West, not the South, and it will require amending some of the most anti-modern aspects of Church teaching on sexual ethics or the role of women and a refocus on the simple and powerful message of the Gospels.

I’m surprised that hard data on the damage the late Pope did to the Catholic church has not been readily available in the mainstream media. But here are some interesting statistics. Since 1975, the number of priestly ordinations in the U.S. declined from 771 a year to 533 last year. (In 2000, the number hit a low of 442.) When you adjust for population growth, in 1975, 771 newly ordained priests faced a Catholic population of 49 million; today, 533 emerge for a total of 64 million Catholics. Essentially, per Catholic, we saw a 50 percent drop in vocations under this Pope. No wonder that in 1975, 702 parishes had no priest; and today, over 3,000 are without a pastor. That’s quite an indictment. Globally, the picture is a little brighter, but still not encouraging. The number of parishes without priests went from 23 percent of all parishes in 1975 to 25 percent in 2000. In the U.S., weekly church attendance has slowly but innexorably declined to well below 50 percent of all Catholics. The decline in religious orders has been particularly steep: down by over 30 percent. And all this understates the crisis facing the American church, because almost half the current priesthood is over 60 – and their replacements are in shorter and shorter supply. This is the legacy of John Paul II: a church that may soon have no-one to run it. John Paul the Great? Puhlease.

POWERLINE CHOKES: So the Schiavo memo did come from Republican sources. Does Powerline concede? Barely. When your blog makes Sean Hannity look bipartisan, that’s what you’d expect. Yes, some of the original reporting was too vague. But the basic truth is that this was a GOP memo, it was crass, and it does reflect the cynical nature of many on the GOP right.

HEARTY STONERS: A marijuana-based compound could be a breakthrough in controlling heart disease. But what if these people living longer had more fun while they were at it? Time for Mr Bush to step in.

IN THE LITERARY LOCKER ROOM: “The locker room of the Fighting Illini didn’t have any fight left in it Monday night. In fact, the grief was so heavy I thought for a moment that I had left home for St. Peter’s, not St. Louis, where Illinois succumbed to North Carolina in the NCAA finals, 75-70. This particular locker room at the Edward Jones Dome, just outside of where the players would soon go to change their clothes, contained large dark wood cubicles, mostly empty, that looked almost like confessionals. Inside them, or on chairs just in front, sat young men–boys, really–staring off into space like novitiates who had lost their Holy Father. The pope was dead, and so was their season.” – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek.

WHY NOT FEDERALISM? Kansas is the latest state to put discrimination against gays into its constitution. A terrible stain but within the rights of the people of that state. Stanley Kurtz exults and points out that 18 states now have such constitutional bans against committed gay unions. Kurtz predicts 30 such anti-gay bans by 2008. But then he says this makes it all the more necessary to pass a federal amendment banning protections for gay couples in every state. Huh? Isn’t the opposite actually the case? Doesn’t state action mean federal action is less, rather than more necessary? This is surely how federalism is supposed to work. Why is it so terrible if the voters in Massachusetts or Connecticut or Vermont choose another path? (And voters have been involved. In Massachusetts, voters have punished pols who voted against marriage equality and rewarded those who supported it. The state legislature may well kill off an anti-gay-marriage amendment this year. In Connecticut and California, legislative bodies have enacted broad civil union laws, that are the effective equivalent of civil marriage.) We may well soon have a situation in which there are states that are safe for gay couples, and states that are unsafe. Gay people can move to the free states, rather as inter-racial couples moved across country to states where equality and freedom were respected. And in the process, we can see whether the gay-friendly states see marriage collapse, as opposed to the flourishing of marriage in those states which are constitutionally hostile to gays. I’m in favor of federalism. Today’s GOP right isn’t.

They’re inevitable. This president, who knows how to duck personal responsibility, may not have to preside over them. But his successor will be forced to. The Medicare explosion and Social Security crunch mean something obvious to anyone with eyes to see:

[B]aby boomers’ children and grandchildren face massive tax increases. Social Security and Medicare spending now equals 14 percent of wage and salary income, reports Bell. By 2030, using the trustees’ various projections, that jumps to 26 percent. Of course, payroll taxes don’t cover all the costs of Social Security and Medicare. Still, these figures provide a crude indicator of the economic burden, because costs are imposed heavily on workers via some tax (including the income tax), government borrowing (a.k.a. the deficit) and cuts in other government programs.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative (or what used to be a conservative), has begin to think of how best to minimize the damage Bush is doing to the economy, and believes a VAT is the least worst option. My only point is that it is absurd to believe that this president has really lowered the tax burden. By spending through the roof, while cutting taxes, all this president has done is borrow. The debt will have to paid off, or inflated or devalued away. But before then, this president’s big government spending will require either massive cuts in entitlements (which he has threatened to veto) or massive tax hikes. I have no confidence that either party will cut entitlements. Bush’s domestic legacy is that he has made America safe for a vast expansion of government and taxation.