Month: November 2006

Wally Olson writes:

If you went looking for some one to write a systematic or impartial account of the conflicts that are pushing America’s conservative movement toward breakup, just about the last author you’d pick for the job would be Andrew Sullivan.

The British-born commentator’s new book, like all his work, is engaged, quirky and personal, the view of a gifted outsider who can’t go for long without circling back to gay issues. Yet "The Conservative Soul" will still resonate as one of the year’s key political books, a free-associating literary polemic that well complements "The Elephant in the Room," the recent book by New York Post contributor Ryan Sager.

Olson goes on to complain about my conflation of many different strands of religious certainty into a monolithic bloc called "fundamentalism." I think his criticism is a fair one, and it is a refrain among several reviewers. Here’s all I’d say in response: you’re right. Two defenses. The book is really a series of essays, like my last two books. It’s not history as such, although it’s full of history. It’s not even political philosophy or theology as such although it is also saturated by both. It’s an essay, i.e. an objective argument informed by subjective experience. I think it’s the most honest way of writing, which is why I love Orwell’s and Montaigne’s and Oakeshott’s essays so much.

The central theme in the essay is a journey from the polarity of complete certainty to the polarity of total skepticism (and then a few steps backward). That’s what I believe is the deepest tension of our time: not right and left any more, but certainty versus doubt. And so I deal with different shades of fundamentalism – and different hues and idioms and expressions of fundamentalism – all under the rubric of the total certainty that is so prevalent in the world right now. I use the Bush administration (and some of my own mistakes and life-story) as a "crucible" for such certainty. And then I try to imagine a conservatism rooted in its opposite – and make a case for why doubt itself is the real key to traditional conservatism, a doubt that leads to individual liberty, especially of conscience and thought.

As I say in the prologue, this is a huge amount to deal with in around 300 pages.

I have bitten off a great deal – probably far too much… It is both alarming and humbling to try and state your beliefs so baldly in one place – and everywhere I look in the text I see further complications and nuances that I want to add or subtract. But there are times when it’s helpful to pull your thoughts together, set them down as clearly as you can, draw a line beneath it, and let the readers take the arguments where they want. Think of this book, then, as an opening bid in a conversation, rather than the final summation of a doctrine.

You can think of this as a lame excuse for not providing The Definitive Account of What To Do Now, or an inadequate description of as vast a subject as religious faith or political thought. I think that’s a fair critique. Or you can take it for what it is: just one argument – idiosyncratic, personal, but passionate and reasonable – about what conservatism can mean in the future. I am grateful to Wally for continuing the conversation. I have a feeling it’s just begun in earnest.

Yes, we’re that meta already. It’s the classic from the British TV series, "The Office," as former office manager David Brent spends his severance money on making a music video. The Buddha is a nice touch.

Morristown, New Jersey, 1 pm.

Scott Horton writes a moving, powerful defense of an honorable soldier who did what she had to against the war criminals who run the Pentagon.

A final confirmation that Haggard was still lying yesterday. But what’s interesting to me is that having adulterous gay sex is apparently, in Haggard’s mind, a worse sin than buying crystal meth. He copped to the meth before the sex. A reader commented yesterday:

It’s telling that Rev. Haggard first admission is to purchasing meth. America can tolerate drug stories. We’ve heard them before. We like them even. The popularity of James Frey’s memoir, err, novel, speaks to our affinity for these tales of dissolution and rehabilitation. After all, a user can be redeemed. Not so with a homosexual. What I believe is most horrifying to many Christianists about homosexuality is that it can’t be fixed, or worse, that its practitioners do not even desire to be fixed. Gays are sinners who don’t want redemption.

Recall that Rep. Foley used a similar tactic in the unspooling of his confessions. As I remember it, Foley checked into a substance abuse program just days after the allegations of page abuse surfaced. That strategy: turn pedophilia into a story about alcoholism and Foley’s own childhood abuse. We don’t know how the Haggard story will eventually unfold, but I bet that his handlers will hide the sex behind the smoke of the meth pipe as much as they can.

Wrong, it turns out. The drugs-worse-than sex may be a story that works in the mainstream; but among some Christianists, drug abuse is nowhere near as bad as being gay.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

David Frum didn’t really argue that a meth-snorting homophobe who for three years cheated on his wife with a male prostitute while at the same time denouncing gay relationships is more moral than an openly gay man, did he?  Oh yes he did.

Kathryn Lopez didn’t really call the piece "excellent," did she? Oh yes she did.

And to think, some people think of the GOP as unhinged or homophobic.

How on earth did anyone get that idea?

Another sane American in a conservative paper draws the same sane conclusion as Jon Rauch:

People in power simply can’t be trusted. If we’re going to have a Republican executive branch, we need a Democratic legislature to hold its feet to the fire. And vice-versa.
So on Tuesday, I’m neither voting Democratic or Republican. I’m voting for the oldest party in the republic. Its name never appears on the ballot, but it’s always there and it has always served us well. Divided government.

If you’re a Republican concerned about national security who still (somehow) believes the Republicans are better at it, your president won’t change. But he will be forced out of denial and compelled to face reality. The Democrats, in a divided government, will also have to take responsibility for the hard choices involved in wartime. So divided government is win-win right now.

Vote Democratic next Tuesday, or if you just can’t, abstain. For the country’s sake – and for the soul of conservatism.

Not the president (who appoints the NSC). That’s his spin. Watch David spin. Spin, David, spin.

A reader writes:

I am a moderate living in Colorado Springs. The main thing that bothers me about those on the far right is their hypocrisy, with Ann Coulter and Ted Haggard being the latest two examples. Another comes to mind here locally as well:  ads for the local Republican candidate for the House that classify his opponent (a retired lieutenant colonel by the way) as a liberal, yet the administration that he is supporting has run up the greatest debt in our history.

I drive my kids and two of their friends to school in the morning and yesterday I was originally not supposed to pick my daughter’s friend up as she was to greet her father returning from Iraq.  She called and told us she needed a ride as they had evidently received a call that her dad would not be coming home yet, and we did not question as we were hoping nothing happened to him.  Today I believe that I saw the reason why.  Mr. Cheney will be here for a campaign stop this weekend part of which will be to greet the troops as they return.

So their reunion should be delayed for political purposes.

Yep. That sounds like Cheney to me. 

From the Washington Post today:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

It couldn’t be because they would reveal the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of torture and abuse, would it? I’ve said it before but the possibility that these three men will one day face charges of war crimes is a distinct possibility. Their desperate attempts now to hide what they have done in our name is predictable. If you re-elect them, their abuse of power will only metastasize, as torture always does.