Month: June 2007

Romney’s spokesman seems to be suggesting he’ll maintaining the truthy standards of the Bush administration.

The rationale:

I don’t want to see another Republican President any more than the next Democrat. But I do want to see a Republican nominee who stands up for civil rights, who speaks sensibly about America’s place in the world, who insists on the rule of law and rejects the exceptionalism and emergency powers advocated by every other GOP candidate. I want to see the Republican party rally around a voice that is not encouraging them to tear apart the Constitution in fear of terrorism. I want to see a Republican nominee who will enable the American people to experience a campaign of hope and ideas, not of fear and McCarthyism.

A reader writes:

You asked:

"How did we get so much dumber in fifty years? And, yes, I am not exempting myself from this assessment. I guess we panicked, didn’t we?"

Hogwash. Pearl Harbor wasn’t cause for panic? Or the fact that the Nazis had taken over most of Europe? Or that Communism was seen as a viable alternative to liberal democracy in many parts of the world?

The difference, Andrew, is that in 1943 there were still serious ideological and strategic competitors to liberal democracy and the United States. To succeed against these enemies it required a national mobilization and the application of America’s best minds to the cause of winning the war and the Cold War that followed. Competition of this type necessarily forces a great power like the United States to be smarter and more rational when it uses military power or, in Darwinian fashion, it will be selected out of the international system.

Fascism and Communism were terrible things, but competition with these systems forced us to be better, smarter, and tougher. A side effect of our current military hegemony is that we have become something of a lazy monopolist. We demand more from our allies and give up less in return. We are free to indulge in ideological fantasies and engage in self-delusion because there is no real competitor out there to take advantage when we do so. We become arrogant because, like all monopolists, we can’t imagine our monopoly ever being taken away from us.

Mass-murder in the middle of New York City didn’t help either.

Rarely have I sat through fourteen minutes of an interview and learned less about a major candidate. But check it out for yourself. Here he is on Iraq:

"We must take every opportunity that we have and to exhaust every reasonable hope we have to not lose that."

On taxes, I’m with him. But he has no proposals to cut entitlement spending to the degree that we must to keep taxes low. He says Goldwater is his idol. So why isn’t Bush his nemesis? No one has destroyed Goldwater’s legacy as effectively as Bush has. Thompson seems charming if you need someone to while away a long evening – and you’ll have to remind him of what’s recently been in the news. But he also seems bored. And remarkably free of any specific ideas to run on.

A brutal counter-blast against Hitch’s best-selling anti-theist screed appears in the new "Commonweal". Money quote:

Hitchens’s claim that the God of Moses "never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all" is preposterous, given the Torah’s injunctions about forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, or openness to strangers, or the prophets’ exhortations to mercy, justice, and beating swords into ploughshares. He rightly contends that the crimes of Nazism and Communism do not mitigate the felonies of religion; indeed, he writes, "one might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that." True, but that sense of dignity is inseparable from standards by which the religious can identify and condemn atrocities done in their name – standards that fascists and Stalinists never recognized, let alone applied.

Doctrines of racial purity lead inexorably to repression, ethnic cleansing, or genocide; acceptance of "historical necessity" inevitably sanctions "the necessary murder," as Auden later regretted putting it. There is nothing even remotely comparable in these secular ideologies to the command to love one’s enemies. Those Christians down the ages who tried to prevent the crimes of their horrifically errant brethren did so because they believed – often at the cost of their lives or fortunes – that the human person was the imago Dei, a conviction they derived from Christian theology.

I haven’t yet read the book, but I hope Hitch did not merely dismiss Augustine as "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus."

Ten reasons to appreciate Zoloft.

A reader dug up what would surely be Abraham Simpson’s acceptance speech were he to do us all a favor and run for president. He certainly seems more clued in to current events than, say, Fred Thompson. The Onion would have to endorse, I suspect:

The realists are striking back against the president’s war for democracy and against Islamism. Is he pursuing a complete contradiction? Long-term, you can see the logic in principle. In the short run, in the actual Middle East, Jim Baker’s prejudice in favor of "consensual authoritarianism" seem to have the weight of the recent evidence behind it:

The reason democracy is losing the competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.  We musn’t be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combating terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don’t threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don’t seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

And who are the net exporters of insecurity? These are states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren’t democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they’ve actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don’t provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats.  What’s discouraging is that this isn’t true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It’s true, for now, in all if them.

By fostering radical insecurity as well as a formal democratic process in Iraq, we may well have poisoned its reputation for the foreseeable future. And, alas, no Gersonian rhetoric from the president will undo the chaos Rumsfeld deliberately created. In simpler terms:

Baghdad is not Bonn, Beirut is not Warsaw, and Tehran is not Prague.

Burke would understand.

A reader writes:

The ease with which the Bush administration generally, and its spokespeople in particular, lies still manages to astonish me, even after six and a half years. Take a look at this story from Reuters about the theft of Bush’s watch in Albania:

Albanian police say the reports of President Bush’s watch being stolen while greeting the crowd in Tirana are untrue. However, video from the presidential visit shows that while he began to work the crowd with a timepiece on his left arm, within seconds it was gone. "The story is untrue and the president did not lose his watch," a spokesman for the embassy in Tirana said.

The article is accompanied by footage clearly showing that the watch was stolen, yet a spokesman for the U.S. embassy echoed the statements of the Albanian police (who are clearly embarrassed by the episode).

I don’t know which possibility is most frightening: 1) that the administration has so little respect for the intelligence of the American public that it thinks it can get away with saying literally anything, no matter how untrue, and no matter how strong the evidence against it; 2) that the administration knows that 70% of the American public won’t believe them, but only cares about the 30% that will believe them; or 3) that the administration actually believes its own lies.

Personally, I think it’s all three:  they started out believing their own lies, then moved on to thinking that they could say anything whether it was true or not, and have now reached the point where they only care about the 30% of the American public who will always believe whatever they say.

"Mr. Lago is the mayor of this scenic Swedish town of 60,000 people [Sodertalje], which last year took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire United States…" – NYT today. Hey, since his college days, someone else has always had to clean up after Bush’s messes.