Month: January 2007

Maybe Charles Krauthammer’s disavowal of a "surge" to support Maliki will somehow give cover for other sane conservatives to look at how best to manage and exploit a withdrawal from most of Iraq. Rich Lowry acknowledges that sheer force is insufficient:

Trying to securing Baghdad is going to involve lots of patrolling and policing (which [Victor Davis Hanson] warns against) and lots of negotiations and compromise (which [Ralph] Peters warns against), just inevitably. If we could win by sheer aggression and offense, this would be a much easier proposition — like the initial invasion.

But, as Lowry concedes, this is not like the initial invasion. It never has been. A light force to decapitate the regime was a brilliant stroke. But a light force to restore order and construct a democracy? That was always a self-contradiction, as many of us saw as long ago as 2003. That was the year in which a long-term surge would have been appropriate. Bush’s too-little-far-too-late proposal for Iraq reminds me of his handling of Katrina: he recognized the need for action long after it was really needed; and then he failed to follow through. His only real goal throughout was managing the politics of it. Hence the idiotic support for incompetents like Brown and Rumsfeld and Cheney. The problem is the president. And we’re stuck with him for two more terrifying years.

Yes, the Kamber-O’Leary test is dated. It’s still fun. I spent several minutes trying to figure out whether I distrusted the Postal Service more than the Pentagon. The funny thing is: I end up more conservative than either Glenn Reynolds or Ann Althouse. And Bainbridge is swinging left fast.

"Although Gov. Mitt Romney brings what many describe as intelligence, solid management skills, optimism, and charisma to the presidential race, an increasing number of Catholics are concerned that Romney’s recent conversion to pro-life, pro-family conservatism contrasts dramatically with his public record of speaking and governing as a social moderate or liberal, routinely backing down when the going gets tough, and accomplishing few conservative successes," – theocon Deal Hudson of the Morley Institute and once a leading figure on the Catholic right.

From Pulaski County in Kentucky:

While presiding over his first fiscal court meeting, new county judge-executive Barty Bullock wanted to make it clear to everyone that he would be the county’s leader.

"I’m the judge and I‚Äôm going to run county government," said Bullock during his first fiscal court meeting yesterday … Bullock went on to add that he had not chosen anyone by who they are, but by who he believed will do a quality job. Bullock said he formed a committee to select his employees, one made up of a chairman and a member ‚Äî God as the chairman and himself as the member.

Bradford Plumer suggests an explanation for the following comment on NPR about the appalling treatment of Jose Padilla:

Indeed, there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, "the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person."

Or, in Orwell’s words, the point of torture is torture. I’m still reeling from the notion that a "high-ranking official" of the U.S. government would actually say that the Bush administration, rather than try and interrogate a terror suspect legally, would choose to drag a suspect off the street, detain him with no charges for three and half year and torture him into insanity. Hey, it’s another terror suspect off the streets, after all. But again, one wonders where the allegedly Christian right is on this? Today, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

Dave Weigel asks: "Is the shadow of Mengele over any proposal of ‘experimenting’ on a captured prisoner, no matter how bad the prisoner and how promising the experiment?" I hope so.

If this is true of abusing Saddam, isn’t it also true of abusing Padilla? Or are all moral strictures abandoned when Bush is violating them?

A reader writes:

Did you see or read the play? I never had a chance to see it, but I did read the play.  The movie is quite faithful to the original until the end. The play is significantly more depressing for the Posner character … He goes to Oxford, fails to complete a degree, has a nervous breakdown, and is on the dole when he tracks down his former tutor, now a paraplegic journalist, who had been his rival for the attentions of the handsome classmate. Posner never, to my recollection, becomes a teacher in the play. His final defeat and humiliation is essentially eliminated from the screenplay.

As an out gay high school teacher (I teach French!… my students are ages 15-18), I must agree with your reader who saw more of the old tortured-homosexual-syndrome at work in this otherwise brilliant play/screenplay. Our distance from the oppressive atmosphere portrayed by Bennett’s film is more significant than you initially supposed.

I’m grateful for the info about the play, which I have neither seen nor read. Poor Alan Bennett.

Last fall, I argued that fiscal conservatives should vote Democrat to jolt this fiscally uber-liberal president toward balancing the budget. It worked! Without Democratic pressure, the president would never have signed on to a balanced budget by 2012, or a pushback against pork. Money quote from the WaPo:

Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little sustained objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year.

But now for the first time since he took office, both parties have set a mutual target for eliminating the deficit — an implicit agreement that raises the profile of the issue and may create a political imperative that prods the two sides to find ways to meet the goal or be held accountable for failing.

Congrats to those of you who switched from Republican to Democrat in 2006. Of course, ignoring the entitlement crisis is still the Beltway consensus. And the entitlement crisis – which Bush and the Republicans profoundly exacerbated with their Medicare expansion – is 90 percent of the problem. But tackling ten percent of the fiscal problem is better than nothing. And in order to get a semblance of fiscal sanity in Washington, you now have to vote Democrat. That tells you something about what has happened to conservatism.

Money quote:

Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror. A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement. In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.

Our troops and the American people have already sacrificed a great deal for the future of Iraq. After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, and over $300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close.

Next week will be fascinating.

Here’s a fascinating piece of context for the decision of at least two Virginia Episcopalian congregations to seek inclusion in a much more conservative, Nigerian diocese. The shift was not driven so much by politics; and it wasn’t sudden. In some ways, it was the inevitable consequence of a thirty-year process whereby modern evangelicalism and pentecostalism came to dominate a previously more traditionally Episcopalian church. Money quote:

At least two-thirds of the worshipers [at Falls Church] are Methodists, Presbyterians or Baptists, and there is no pressure on them to be confirmed as Episcopalians, said the Rev. Rick Wright, associate rector.

Wright said the diverse membership of both congregations illustrates one of the great changes in American religion of the past half-century: The divisions between denominations are far less important today than the divisions within denominations.

"I tend to feel very comfortable rubbing shoulders with folks at McLean Bible or Columbia Baptist … that are real orthodox, evangelical, biblical churches," said Truro’s chief warden, or lay leader, Jim Oakes, referring to two Northern Virginia megachurches. "We share core beliefs. I think I would be more comfortable with them than with anyone I might run into at an Episcopal Diocesan Council meeting."

They key divide in faith today is between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. The divide exists within most churches, including the lay Catholic population. As fundamentalism advances, the clash between the two may become so severe in the U.S. that more and more American churches will tilt to the developing world for leadership and clout. The orthodox Catholic hierarchy would have no future without reinforcements from Africa and Asia. And charismatic pentecostalists, with socially conservative politics, are going to find their worldview far better represented in Nairobi than New York.

But you also see in this story a shift from a traditional, ritual-based, small-c conservative form of faith toward a radical, modern, individualistic brand of fundamentalism. This is the strain within Islam as well. The Wahhabists – with their contempt for tradition, custom, conventional authority, and ritual echo the modern mega-churches of evangelical Christianity. Both strains hark back to the ideal of an original, pure faith – and deploy modern technology to advance it. They also more crudely but effectively answer the sense of personal loss and fear of "moral entropy" that tends to occur in periods of rapid economic and social change. They have the momentum. Whether they have the answer is another question.

You ask:

"At the end of this cycle…?"

Orwell answers:

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."