Month: May 2006

A reader observes:

I have often chuckled at the titles that head conservative bestsellers these days (as a resident of liberal Ann Arbor, they’re usually lined up for me in the discount section of my bookstore). Nowhere has the decline of rational conservatism into rabid partisan rhetoric become more apparent.

I always hoped someone would write a parody of these books, punctuated of course by some absurdly hateful title. However, I now realize it would be almost impossible to exaggerate the bloodthirsty verbal attacks that now define popular conservative writing. After all, what warped description of liberals could one come up with that has not already been taken.

Terrorists? Done (Hannity). Death-lovers? Yep (Ponnuru). Treasonous? Absolutely (Coulter). Mentally disabled? Sure (Savage). And the ever popular, godless (all of the above). By equating liberalism with Nazi fascism, Jonah Goldberg has used the last and most desperate of all attack methods. In their attempts to incite hate (and sell books) these writers have created the closest thing to a parody of the conservative movement I could have imagined.

My favorite is still Sean Hannity’s "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Yep: terrorists and liberals, the same evil. But that guy is now a very, very, very rich man.

(Update: I forgot to mention Jon Chait’s analysis of the same phenomenon. Worth a chuckle.)

Some disturbing news, if Juan Cole’s analysis of an al-Zaman/AFP report is correct:

[Majid al-Sari, adviser to the Minister of Defense,] said that for the last month, Basra has been afflicted by a mass of assassinations, equalling one each hour of the day. (That would be 24 a day, and 720 for the month). Sources in the city allege that the police are helpless to intervene, and indeed refuse to go out to the crime scene to attempt to capture the assassins, since they would take fire from tribesmen supporting the assassins, who belong to their tribe.

Al-Zaman’s sources told it that Basra is in chaos and dominated by militias and lawless gangs. Automobiles with darkened windows cruise the streets, armed militiamen within, who impose their law on the city. These sources blamed Kuwait and Iran for the situation, alleging that their intelligence services are funding and arming the Iraqi militias for their own purposes. Tribal firefights between the Marsh Arab Al-Bait Sa’idah tribe and the Bani Mansur are common– as is fighting between Bani Ammar and Al-`Ashur. The sources say that Basra is without authority save that of the militiamen. The major political parties are unable to dampen down the violence because they are so divided against one another.

Elsewhere, the violence continues to rage, while the politicians continue to dither over the composition of the new government.

Her top ten pieces of music include Brahms, Elton John and Kool and the Gang. I like her even more.

He abandons his fatwa against gays, after a spate of recent murders in Iraq.

Here’s a reader who is expressing some of the frustration among Republican stalwarts right now:

I am a 58 years old retired military intelligence officer, and a current employee of a national intelligence organization … I have never voted for a Democrat (although I would if a good one received the nomination of the Democrat party – but they won’t); Richard Gephart, Joe Leiberman, Jane Hartman, Diane Fienstein, James Webb, Bob Kerry and a few others come to mind. I declined to vote for the re-election of G.W. Bush because I knew he hadn’t earned it, and I voted for a 3rd party candidate in the last election. I did vote primarily for the Republican slate however. This time, I’m staying home. I remain a conservative, but I am no longer a Republican and I will not lift a finger for a Republican candidate.

Current history has taught me that in this modern America, divided government is the best government. I pray the Republicans lose the House of Representatives and/or the Senate this fall. This Republican Party is corrupt. It has been sold to the highest bidder, and since I cannot give $100,000 to the Republican, I have no voice within the party.
The Bush administration is incompetent at the basic level of execution of its responsibilities. Its excessive spending and the betrayal the nation’s future generations through debt accumulation condemn it. It’s prime claim to leadership is a war fought on the cheap with insufficient troops, faulty decision making at the most basic level, and Chicken Hawk wartime civilian leadership. Katrina.

Andrew, the war against fundamental Islam is simply too important to lose. This administration doesn’t seem to understand that winning the war with those who wish to extinguish us is more important that tax breaks. It doesn’t understand that control of our nation’s borders is more important than winning the next election. And it doesn’t understand that more often than not, doing the right thing on a routine basis because it’s the right thing to do is a way of life, not a campaign slogan. These guys are losers.

We’ll see in November.

Just reading this web-page from Seattle’s public schools sends a shiver down your spine. There are religious fundamentalisms and there are secular ones. The secular religion of multiculturalism has the same tropes as a real religion. It constructs an abstract devil and posits one completely virtuous state of being. There can be no compromise between them. The abstract devil is "institutional racism":

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

Notice how this is not some individual choice to perform a specific act; it’s a structure of attitudes and ideas that must be resisted. Foucault is turned into the very oppressive thought-system he loathed. And just as your conscience can be "misinformed" in religious fundamentalisms, when you are not in conformity with true doctrine, so you can be a racist in the religion of multiculturalism without realizing it. Hence the insidious threat of "Cultural Racism":

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as ‘other’, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Individualism is now racist? And so is showing up on time for an appointment? Our culture is besieged right now by these fundamentalist religions and pseudo-religions. It’s as if people have given up thinking for themselves and have to adhere to one or another totalizing thought-system that can also render them moral. The only response is the exercize of ordinary reason, the insistence on individual moral responsibility, and political resistance to the inevitable attempts to impose these religious thought-structures by law or policy on everyone else. Occasional guffawing at the hubris of the new puritans helps as well. So scoff away. It helps you feel better as well.

The "Da Vinci Code" seems to be forging an ecumenical breakthrough. Now, even Muslims are protesting.

Welcome, Mr Podhoretz, to the world where you dissent just a teensy bit from current conservative orthodoxy. Money quote – and the ironies are rich given its provenance:

[T]here’s a difference between heated disagreement and the insistence on lock-step uniformity. Suddenly, immigration restriction has become one of those issues about which one is not permitted to disagree, because to disagree is to join with the forces of Evil. Those who favor a less restrictive policy are said to be bought and paid for by Big Business, to want to oppress poor American minorities who can’t earn a decent wage, and to seek the cultural destruction of America. Chief among these villains, it appears, is the president of the United States … He is not a conservative, my e-mailers tell me. He is Jorge Arbusto, an agent of the Mexican government. And neither, by the way, am I, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and someone who left mainstream journalism to toil in the fields of conservative media when conservative media weren’t cool, to put it mildly…

[T]he fact is that a more expansive view of immigration policy has long been part of the mainstream of the conservative movement — indeed, Ronald Reagan himself held such an opinion. We are moving into very dangerous territory here — territory in which it has been declared that there is to be no debate, no discussion, and no heterodoxy any longer. This is how political-intellectual movements become diseased and sclerotic. This is how they die.

I have a feeling rigor mortis has already set in.

Our redirect from the old URL http://www.andrewsullivan.com is temporarily down. My apologies. We’re trying to figure out how to get it back and running.

Their source on Internet legal copyright squabbles … turned out to be a cab driver:

Mr [Guy] Goma, a graduate from the Congo, described his surprise interview ordeal as "very stressful". He found himself being ushered into a studio and fitted with a microphone after raising his hand when a producer called out the name Guy Kewney.

They didn’t realize their mistake until they’d already interviewed Goma on live television. Another big score for the MSM. The transcript is hilarious.