Month: May 2006

A reader predicts:

Thanks again for another fine column … but it will be Gore in ’08, not Hillary. Hillary is like the guy in the gym who only works the upper body and has the biggest arms, chest and shoulders, but his legs (his base, if you will) are weak. Just like the top heavy gym stud who can easily be beaten by a quick blow to his legs, Hillary (who has really bad legs!) can be toppled too.
Feingold (the Dean of ’08) will hit Hillary hard and undercut her liberal support-supposedly her rock solid base. Now, I can hear you scream at your screen, "that’s just what Hillary wants – a candidate that makes her look less liberal!"
Yeah … but once Feingold exposes that Hillary has been wrong on so many issues Dems care about (Iraq, civil liberties, Iraq, attacking Bush), she’ll be reduced to normal size for others to take on. Gore can sit back and watch Feingold do the dirty work and get in as Hillary weakens.
Gore’s big advantages: he’s been right on the issues, he retains stature among Democrats, and, surprisingly, he’ll appear fresh from being away so long. Other than SNL last night, when was the last time you saw Gore on TV (and if you didn’t see Gore on SNL…go to Crooksandliars.com for a very good laugh!)?
Gore-Warner is the winning ticket in ’08.

I’d dismiss this if a very canny Republican hadn’t said exactly the same thing to me the other night. I still cannot see it. But in politics, anything can happen, I suppose.

(Photo: Frederick M Brown/Getty).

Garance has an update, and some friendly advice for liberal pundits unused to the rough and ready world of the blogosphere.

It was sad, if understandable, to read the encomiums to the late John Kenneth Galbraith penned by those still influential in liberal and Democratic circles at the time of his death last month. And yet this man was so wrong about so much for so long and with such disdain for the empirical refutation of his theories that he deserves little in retrospect but our pity. He represents the highwater mark of hubris for technocratic liberal triumphalism, as well as its fathomless self-regard and supercilious intolerance of other ways of thinking. Clive Crook gets it right:

He appeared to believe that the sensible thing would be to find more brilliant men like himself, difficult though this would be, and to put them in charge. This approach to managing the economy would become more desirable over time, not less, because economic growth would otherwise mean the increasing accrual of power to corporate interests. The countervailing power of the state would need to grow in response – just the opposite of what modern economic orthodoxy (based on all that specious math) called for.

Modern liberals’ continued attachment to men like Galbraith, rather like their inability to concede that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were Communist traitors and spies, is an impediment to a revived liberalism. Because the truth matters. And Galbraith was on the wrong side of the truth for most of his life. This was a man who was still impressed by the Soviet Union in 1984. The only response to a person like that is sadness mixed with contempt.

Update: Brad DeLong has a (predictably) different take on Galbraith here.

(Hat tip: Tom). (Time cover, February 1968, by Frank Lerner.)

A liberal reader explains why he’s open to a McCain candidacy – and it’s not because McCain is a liberal:

The people bashing you for what you’ve written about McCain are wrong to suggest that McCain will turn out to be another Bush.

I have a lot of problems with Bush, and I’m a liberal. But they’re not problems that are rooted in his conservatism.  I’m on the left, but if a conservative wins, then those are the rules, that’s the outcome, and I can live with it.  I believe in democracy.
My problems with Bush come from his contempt for our system and our values.  He’s a guy who looks for reasons to torture people, and for legal excuses to cover him after he does. He doesn’t believe in checks and balances, or in any restraints on executive power. He doesn’t think search warrants or judicial supervision is a good thing. He doesn’t think Congress should have any role in oversight.

Those aren’t conservative postions. They don’t really have much connection to anything in the American political tradition. They express a kind of ignorance of, or perhaps even a contempt for, what’s made this country great.

McCain is a conservative, and in normal times, I’d oppose him.  To give you an example of a policy on which I disagree strongly with him, I’d toss out the recent bankruptcy law. I think that was terrible, that it hurts working poor people. McCain was a big supporter of it. I don’t have any illusions about him on those kinds of issues.

But I believe that McCain believes the same sorts of things about the way our government should be structured that most everyone else does. I think he understands the roles of the various branches. I don’t think we’d have the torture, or the signing statements, or the warrantless surveillance under McCain.

Bushism has inflicted terrible damage. It’s eaten away at many of our core institutions and our core values. And that has to be put right. If our next president continues on as Bush has, it becomes bigger than one man, or one administration. It becomes the new status quo.

I would love to see a Democrat win. Or rather, I would love to see a Democrat who is good enough to win. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think the GOP primary will decide who our next president is. And as far as I’m concerned, McCain is the pick of the litter. Not because he agrees with me on any of the issues that are normally in play; he doesn’t. But because he seems honest and competent, and because he seems to understand the difference between right and wrong. He seems to understand the things in the Federalist papers – how the various branches of the government are supposed to fit together.

We have to be realistic about where we are. A president who won’t torture people would be a big improvement. I don’t need a president who will implement European-style social-democratic policies. I’d like to see that, but it’s not going to happen.

I just want a President who will follow the law.

That would, indeed, be an improvement.

A reader forgives me:

I probably disagree with the majority of McCain’s positions, but I, too, found his commencement speech moving, inspirational and, above all, eloquent.  It was also full of the left’s supposed favorite thing:  nuance.
I do hope that McCain makes it past the primaries, if only to raise the quality of discourse.  The last election was a battle between Bush’s focus-group driven platitudes ("I’m a uniter, not a divider") and Kerry’s mealy-mouthed drivel ("I voted for it before I voted against it").  In sharp contrast to those two, McCain’s public statements are usually refreshingly direct, and his speeches address his audience as intelligent human beings rather than aggregations of polling data.
I don’t think you’re the only one on the right, left or center who’s hungry for a leader like McCain.  A little extra exuberance about genuine leadership can be excused, given that there’s so little of it in the current political milieu.

I have no way of verifying it, but that’s what Omar at Iraq The Model is saying. Money quote from a report in an Iraqi paper:

The Iraqi daily az-Zaman which is published in London and Baghdad quoted credible Iraqi sources as revealing that the IRGC had given al-Qaeda in Iraq, Strela-type SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles, modern explosives, and a large number of personnel arms including Kalashnikovs and BKC machineguns.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is believed to be led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is on the United States’ wanted list.
The report said that representatives of al-Zarqawi’s group met in Beirut with members of the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah and through them established channels with Tehran.
Three close aides to al-Zarqawi travelled to Iran via a security checkpoint in the Iraqi border province of al-Amara from where they met with Iranian officials, the report added.

Why Iran would funnel support to people who target Iranian-allied Shiites is beyond me. Unless, perhaps, they fear that the Jihadist insurgency is fading, and that the new Maliki-led government has a chance at gaining legitimacy and support, while including Sunni Arabs. I don’t know, but this report surely deserves further inquiry from other media sources.

Let’s hope it doesn’t pan out.

An interesting split has opened up in the right-of-center blogosphere. Bainbridge stands his ground, for cogent reasons.

It seems a few professors at Patrick Henry College actually believed they should provide their students with a liberal education, and encourage open-ended questioning and dialogue. Er … wrong. Here’s the issue over which the fight ensued:

"There is much wisdom to be gained from Parmenides and Plato, as well Machiavelli and Marx," the professors wrote. "When we examine the writings of any author, professed Christian or otherwise, the proper question is not, ‘Was this man a Christian?’ but ‘Is this true?’"

The authors of those heretical sentences have either been fired or have quit. They seem not to understand that the core feature of Christianism is the submission of reason to ecclesiastical, Biblical or political authority.