Month: April 2007

What is there to say except pray for those murdered and for those who survived the rampage? I guess we’ll find out more soon. I should add I don’t think this is a particularly appropriate time to argue that gun control may have been part of the problem.

It’s a full-scale collapse. A reader writes:

Based on what my younger son, a college sophomore, and his friends tell me, the "Young Republican" organizations on many campuses are falling afoul of the same problems that created a revulsion against their political parents in the Nixon era, when I was in college. With the ascendancy of Nixon, the YR became storm troopers of the imperial presidency – doctrinaire, authoritarian, exclusive, dishonest and generally obnoxious in the way they coated their realpolitik with a transparent veneer of moral self-righteousness.

They behaved then and, I understand, behave now like a bunch of middle-aged, self-important know-it-alls around whom the stench of hypocrisy hovers like a visible fog. Or, they are perceived as too dim-witted to know any better. These characteristics, hypocrisy and stupidity, have ever been repulsive to the young and and are turning many college students today (a far more focused and pragmatic bunch than my feckless peers) sharply away from the party the YR represent.

My older son, now 25, finds the Christianist base of the party risible and pathetic. He and his friends abhor the moral and ethical vacuum at the center of the Republican Party; they sneer at the mendacity of the Administration; they shudder at the prospect of the deficit they will have to pay; they believe that the Republicans have made more dangerous the world in which they will raise their children.   

Based on what I hear from these young people, I wonder less that the the Republicans have lost support among those under 30 and more that they have any support at all.

Here’s an interview with Bryan Ferry:

Interviewer: Do you have a German work ethic?

Ferry: I want to be able to look back on a life in which I have accomplished things. That’s why I call my West London studio… actually, wait a minute. I can’t tell that to a German…

Interviewer: Fürherbunker?

Ferry: You caught me there. Normally I always make out to German journalists that I call my studio the HQ. That’s less objectionable. But the way in which the Nazis stage-managed and presented themselves, my gentlemen! I’m talking about Leni Riefenstahl films and Albert Speer’s buildings and the mass rallies and the flags – simply fantastic. Really lovely.

A reader writes:

My apolitical husband, a man who only reads the sports page and is registered to vote as an ‘Independent,’ just finished both Obama books and has declared himself for Obama. This is the first time in his life he has ever shown any interest in any political candidate. This is unheard of. There is something afoot.

I agree.

A website!

By a whisker, his listeners are better informed about the news than NPR’s (if you add the high and moderate knowledge numbers together).

If you want a heart-breaking glimpse into the incompetence of president Bush and vice-president Cheney, and the viciousness of the enemy they are losing to, just take a look at what U.S. troops are dealing with in Baquba, Iraq. Because of insufficient troops and hapless war-management, we have spent four years helping Islamist terrorists develop skills, financing and tactics that are the equal of any insurgent army in the world. And the number of troops we have sent is just enough to keep losing and yet also train Islamist thugs and butchers. We should start thinking of vast tracts of Iraq as terror-training camps unwittingly set up by the president. Here’s the murderous stew this president’s policy has spawned:

Despite recent seizures of stockpiles, the insurgents have a ready supply of artillery shells and material to make bombs, the biggest killer of American troops here. Some bombs destroy American vehicles. Some are used to booby-trap houses to crash down on Americans. Some are used in larger battle plans: Before overrunning an Iraqi Army outpost south of Baquba, guerrillas laid bombs on the road that Iraqi and American forces would later use to try to rescue the outpost. The minefield blocked the reinforcements, and the Iraqi soldiers at the outpost fled.

The guerrillas seem increasingly well organized and trained. An insurgent force trying to overrun an American outpost in southern Baquba was repelled only after American soldiers fired more than 2,000 Coke-bottle-size rounds from Bradley fighting vehicles and 13,000 rounds from M-240 machine guns.

"They were firing from every direction, trying to get us to concentrate on one spot while the other guys were maneuvering," said Cpl. Bill McGrath, who said the M-240 barrels glowed cherry red and had to be swapped out a half-dozen times. "These were well-trained military types, not like the guys who shoot tanks with AK-47s. A lot of these guys we never saw. We’d just see muzzle flashes."

The tactics reflect the skill and resolve of the insurgency here, soldiers say. "To say the guys we are fighting are any less smarter than me, that would be crazy," said Lt. Col. Morris Goins, commander of the 1-12 Combined Arms Battalion.

The only safe space in Baquba is an outpost housing U.S. soldiers who are also being killed at a higher rate in Baquba than elsewhere in the "country." The soldiers, like most soldiers, have a reality-based name for their outpost. They call it Disneyland. It would describe the White House right now as well.

(Photo: Iraqis search for missing relatives among the bodies of victims of violence outside the morgue of a hospital in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, 03 December 2006, as sixteen Iraqis were killed in acts of violence in the city. By Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty.)

Is conservatism about academic and professional excellence or is it about promoting a religious ideology, regardless of skills and ability? Under Bush, Cheney and Rove, it has become much more of the latter than the former. This email to Jonah Goldberg strikes me as rooted in the conservatism I used to know and support:

Call me an elitist, but if we are going to have devout Christians in the Justice department, I would prefer they went to Chicago or Stanford Law. I think there is something to be said about high LSAT scores and going to one of the best schools in the country. And I have never bought the canard that there are no conservatives at the best law schools. Robert, Alito, Scalia? Bill Maher had a great point on his show the other night. The lawyer Monica Goodling hired went to a real law school.

Of course, Mickey Kaus feels the need to defend the far-right. Mickey now spends his energies primarily defending the furthest extremes of right-wing culture. He’s not pro-Christianist hacks, of course. He’s just against anyone who might be against them. As a Democrat of course. A Tom-Tancredo-Ann-Coulter kind of Democrat.

Has anyone done a study on Hollywood Derangement Syndrome? It occurs when usually sensible people live and breathe among smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous Hollywood lefties … and become defenders of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales just to stay balanced. I can think of a few victims.

A veteran of the department speaks:

I was [in the Justice Department] again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General’s Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft’s Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Then Gonzales arrived – and the graduating class of Pat Robertson’s law school.

He’s over them.