Month: May 2006

A reader suggests an interesting wrinkle to the immigration debate:

This may or may not be an obvious point, but don’t you find the right-wing hyperventilation about such a dated issue as immigration a bit too contrived and convenient?  Put another way, many of us have suspected a day would come I which even the most adamant Bush loyalists/apologists would have to acknowledge that his entire presidency, aside from being a manifest case study in incompetence, was also a repudiation of nearly all things that Republicans once held dear.

That said, for several years running, I‚Äôve often wondered how exactly this would happen.  Riddle me this, riddle me that:  as polls have revealed that their audiences had become hip to this President‚Äôs considerable shortcomings, under what pretense could Hugh Hewitt, the boys at Powerline, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and company (to say nothing of Republican congressmen running for reelection) possibly turn their back on this President without completely invalidating nearly every word they‚Äôd spoken or written in the previous 6 years blindly defending him?

The answer, it turns out, has been to use the age-old debate about immigration to set the President up and then, as he rejects the ridiculous proposal of erecting walls around the nation and conducting mass deportations, use the occasion to throw him under the bus.  In fact, were I more cynical, I would think it a near ideally orchestrated political strategy which would provide cover for the Republican machine to distance itself from a President who must know his fortunes are irreversibly sunk at this point anyway.

Well, it won’t work for Glenn Reynolds.

(Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty.)

Conservatives are beginning to think the unthinkable.

The emails won’t quit:

Thank you for your essay on Christianism. I thought I was the only one who felt like this. I have been through a lot in my life – and never has my faith been so shaken as it has been by the last 5 years of judging by the political Christians. I have even thought about changing my faith but I know I am a Christian.

Hang in there. Then this:

Thank goodness you wrote the article on Christianism. As a woman pastor in an evangelical church I am appalled at the way political ideologies castigate the authenticity of the faith of the majority of Americans. It is stupid to assume that the religious right encompasses the perspective of thoughtful faith-filled people. It is a stereotype that creates stigma, and this constant assumption in the news media undercuts the very liberty and respect for others upon which this country was founded.

Oh yes … and let’s get some people on the news next time a catastrophe occurs who can answer questions about good and evil with theological integrity and humble authentic reflection. Those that spoke after Katrina didn’t do it for me. People deserve more than superficial ‘God’ answers to human tragedy. Certainly, political ideologies are far from the minds of those in the midst of tragic circumstance. Jesus, however, was always right there in the mix bringing ‘good news to the poor … and setting the captives free.’

Those last two ideas do not exactly seem central to the Christianist agenda, do they?

So they published an HIV denialist. They’ve still published the Muhammad cartoons (even with Art Spiegelman’s occasionally dumb comments). I’d say the one cancels out the other. Which reminds me: now that M: I 3 is officially over, will Viacom have the balls to re-run the Scientology episode of South Park? Or let Matt and Trey portray the prophet? Or are the Viacom suits still the pathetic, Cruise-whipped quislings we have come to know and loathe?

The big problem, as Jeff Jarvis sees it, is not that we are suffering from

an attention deficit ‚Äî that is, that we have so many opportunities for attention, we don‚Äôt know where to put it all; we‚Äôre overloaded, overdosed. This is an extension of the very old argument that life became too complicated when there is too much information available ‚Äî which implies that nirvana was sometime between the Garden of Eden and the Library at Alexandria. … I disagree… What I’m really suffering from is a relevance deficit. I want the means to discover and use the content I find interesting and good, the conversations I find worthwhile, the ads that help me get what I want to get, the emails that are worth answering.

That’s why blogs are still a growth area on the web, I think. Because they are a humanizing way for people to get a grip on all the myriad things vying for their attention online. They are filters of an idiosyncratic but reliable kind. They are the emerging brands of the new media era.

Heart-breaking. More context here.

"The second clause says no law may contradict the principles of democracy. Can you imagine millions demonstrating in Iraq, calling for same-sex marriage, like in Sweden, America, and Britain? Same-sex marriages means a marriage of a man with a man, or a woman with a woman. This is a terrible catastrophe, totally forbidden by Islam. Whoever marries someone of the same sex must be killed. Both must be killed as soon as possible and must be burned as well," – Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini Al-Baghdadi.

What prompted the conservative exodus? One reader credits a blogger:

As for Bush supporters jumping ship over the last three months, I think that a lot of credit can go to Glenn Greenwald’s much-discussed post entitled, "Do Bush Followers Have a Political Ideology?," which used you as a prime example of how Conservatives had abandoned conservatism in their loyalty to Bush. Greenwald wrote it in February and after I read it I told my friends that it was the equivalent of the "touch of death" delivered by Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill, with Bush’s followers in the David Carradine role. They were dying and they didn’t know it yet, so they blathered about his piece for a while and about how you weren’t really a Conservative, but the noise they made became weaker and weaker as they were forced to accept reality. They’re toast.

At CATO, when Bruce Bartlett and I let rip on Bush’s betrayal of anything faintly resembling the conservatism we knew from the recent past, I noticed the absence of real dissent in a roomful of right-wingers. Fear and loyalty kept up the pretense for a while; and a hatred of the president’s enemies. When all else failed, some resorted to glib avoidance. But in the end, reality does indeed undermine even the most rigid of ideologies. And when reality wins, real conservatives cheer.

The conservative immigration ironies mount.

The Anchoress decides not to blog about politics any more. Wretchard sees some kind of sea-change:

My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there’s been a change in the tone of the blogosphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the degree of abstract tendencies of the blogger. Authors who trafficked in ideas and concepts have altered the most. Some have paused to take stock, pleading disgust or confusion; still others have returned to writing as seemingly different persons; others seem to be suffering a kind of nervous breakdown, obsessed with hatred for one or more public figures or inventing new words and finding conspiracies in everything they see.

Is that a thinly veiled swipe at moi? No nervous breakdown here. My own catharsis was the period after Abu Ghraib was revealed. I gave up on Bush over two years ago. Reality bit me in the keister.

My own view is that what has happened these last few months has been the final collapse of denial on the part of conservatives about Bush. With the Iraq engagement offering little but incremental progress and demoralizing, daily bloodshed, conservatives are asking why they liked Bush in the first place. The "war-on-terror" loyalism has broken down. They look at massive spending hikes, a staggering and growing debt, a large expansion of executive power, the biggest new entitlement in a generation, Cunningham-type sleaze, and now a refusal from the president to build a huge new wall to seal off Mexico… and they cannot maintain the pretense any longer. That’s why the polling has collapsed. It’s not as if liberals or libertarians have become more opposed to Bush. It’s that conservatives have finally rubbed their eyes and opened them.