Month: December 2006

Theocon Kathryn-Jean Lopez writes the following about Mary Cheney:

Unless Mary Cheney asks to be part of a political debate about this, there is no need to have a public discussion about her life. The New York Times raises the question of how/who, etc. That just seems outrageous to me. She is not the vice president. She is not the president. That’s just uncalled for from anyone in the media/commentariat. I could be wrong but the media/commentators seem to be making it ‚Äî Mary Cheney’s pregnancy ‚Äî a political issue, not the Cheneys.

Yes, I think fatherhood is crucial and am opposed to redefining marriage and all the rest. And my "deafening silence" on the Mary Cheney "issue" (what nonsense) doesn’t change that. But unless Mary Cheney asks to be a spokeswoman on this issue, folks ought to leave her alone.

It’s a fascinating post, as is the self-imposed silence at the Corner and elsewhere on the social right. So let’s unpack it, shall we? Lopez frames the issue as an egregious media seeking who the father is. I see very, very little of this, since almost everyone assumes it’s an anonymous sperm donor. Then the following:

Yes, I think fatherhood is crucial and am opposed to redefining marriage and all the rest. And my "deafening silence" on the Mary Cheney "issue" (what nonsense) doesn’t change that.

But this is absurd. Lopez aggressively favors all efforts to strip the Cheney grandchild of two mothers. Lopez has politicized this family’s personal life, and attacked it viciously. Lopez supported the Virginia state constitutional amendment that will mean that the Cheney grandchild will only ever have one secure parent. Lopez favors adding this terrible insecurity to the Cheney-Poe child’s life. And she wants it not to be personal. Sorry, but it is personal.

National Review institutionally believes that what Cheney’s family is doing is evil. Some have the integrity to keep saying so even when their actual impact on an actual human being they actually care about is at stake. Lopez, Podhoretz and Goldberg do not have that much integrity. Remember: David Frum once threatened to make Mary Cheney a criminal for her committed relationship of a decade and a half. Remember also: these people wanted to declare this family illegitimate in the very Constitution of the United States, declaring that one group of Americans do not belong in their own country. And now they find themselves demonizing and marginalizing and discriminating against one of their own. Stupid poetic justice, as Homer Simpson would say.

So what do they do? They are forced to be silent, or to blame others for bringing it up. Their double standards and intellectual dishonesty are now up there in neon lights. Where is Stanley "Slippery Slope" Kurtz? Cat got your tongue? Thousands of words to demonize abstract others. Sudden silence when he has to cast out one of his own. These people do not even have the courage of their own prejudices.

As for Mary Cheney not seeking to make this a political issue, that is not true. In her book, Cheney quite clearly takes a stand. She opposes the federal constitutional amendment; and she opposes the amendment because it removes the woman she loves and is mothering a child with from the realm of legality, decency and humanity. Kathryn-Jean Lopez has spent the past several years directly attacking the Cheney family. She just doesn’t have the integrity to continue the attack when its real nature is fully revealed.

Or am I not allowed to ask? Someone else is.

Or should it be Googleschaden?

"Quod vides perisse perditum ducas" – Catullus.

"What you see is lost, set down as lost."

(Photo: Hadim Izban/AP.)

Specter says he’s open to new legislation restoring the most basic of individual liberties. If the Democrats have the balls to restore our constitutional order, I may have to stop being an independent for a while. 

Julian Sanchez scans the reactions to Brink Lindsey’s recent TNR essay. Bummer.

Here’s their view:

So let’s add up the "realist" proposals: We must retreat from Iraq, and thus abandon all those Iraqis – Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, and others – who have depended on the United States for safety and the promise of a better future. We must abandon our allies in Lebanon and the very idea of an independent Lebanon in order to win Syria’s support for our retreat from Iraq. We must abandon our opposition to Iran’s nuclear program in order to convince Iran to help us abandon Iraq. And we must pressure our ally, Israel, to accommodate a violent Hamas in order to gain radical Arab support for our retreat from Iraq.

A little melodramatic but: Yep. That’s what Kagan’s and Kristol’s beloved administration has brought us to. And by supporting it so ferociously for so long, it is what Kagan and Kristol have also helped bring us to. Do they have any serious alternative? More troops. And if Bush won’t send or the US cannot find or America will not support more troops? What will K&K say then?

Here’s what they will never say: that they bear serious responsibility for this foreign policy catastrophe. In the world of the Bushies, it is always, always, always someone else’s fault.

Manhattan, 3 am, jackhammers at full volume.

A reader writes:

Thanks for your post regarding Ann Althouse and her Grand Blinking Conspiracy and the death of habeas corpus. Isn’t it just fabulous watching 800 years of jurisprudence and a cornerstone of Western civilization get treated like so much birdcage liner?

This shouldn’t be a surprise though. Where communism is the endpoint of leftist extremism, fascism is the endpoint of the extremist right. In either case, the State is all and the individual but a footnote. I think the Founders must be crying in Heaven right now.

I do think Godwin’s rule needs to be amended somewhat in the age of Cheney and Bush. And I do think the logical consequence of the denialist far right at the moment is indeed closer to Schmitt than to Burke.

A reader writes:

If a European superpower had invaded the United States after the first battle of Bull Run, determined to save us from our own Civil War, what could the superpower have done? How would Americans of the North and South have responded? If we can’t answer those questions satisfactorily even with the benefit of 160 years of hindsight and a clear understanding of our own history and culture, I see no chance – none – that we can make it up as we go along in Iraq.

Chuck Hagel and others are correct: there is no military solution to Iraq. At the most basic level we can’t even identify an "enemy" against whom the fresh troops wold be engaged. The lure of adding more troops is twofold: it is the simplest option available to us, at least in the short term; and it offers those who supported the invasion in 2003 the hope of being vindicated in some way. The drawback is that, like everything we have done in Iraq, it has no basis in reality. The ISG report is a good starting point for tugging the American government back to a reality-based view of the world. Let’s not go backward.

Another reader grinds the point home:

You wrote:

"He needs to embrace much of Baker-Hamilton and add more than 50,000 and probably closer to 75,000 new troops into the theater – in the next three or four months."

Madness. Shinseki said it would take 500,000 troops to do what you and McCain want to do. Nothing has changed since he said that. (Actually, things have changed: more troops might be needed now than were needed three years ago).  75,000 would bring us to less than half that total. Unless the U.S. wants to re-invade Iraq with a grand coalition and half a million men, it should leave.  All the evidence is in. Unless we are prepared to follow the original, accurate recommendation, then we should bite the bullet and get out.

I see no other viable option at this point. Our goal must be to take measures to save those few Iraqis who can be saved.

(Photo: Mohammed Ameen/Reuters.)