Month: June 2007

Agreed. I just wish he hadn’t danced with Karl Rove.

Mark Steyn praises Rudy Giuliani for endorsing New Hampshire’s state motto, "Live Free Or Die." I love the motto too. But isn’t it exactly the opposite of what today’s GOP stands for? The entire premise of Giuliani’s positions is that, after 9/11, we should not live free in case we die. Last night, he spoke of two risible plots by total losers with no capability of doing serious damage as grave threats to America’s survival. The Fort Dix goons and the JFK plotters are among the most pathetic, puny enemies this country has ever known. But Giuliani speaks of them as if they were the approach of global catastrophe – and he demands that Americans surrender their most precious liberties in order to remain safe from them. Live free or die? Giuliani’s motto is: Live Under My Protection Or Die.

He eagerly supports the suspension of habeas corpus, he enthusiastically supports the torture of anyone the president drags off the street as a designated "enemy combatant," he has raised no objections to the "unitary executive" theory of presidential power, and he has never expressed the slightest interest in civil liberties. Au contraire. In his time as mayor, I don’t recall a single incident in which Giuliani ever preferred freedom to security. The man tried to prevent people from jay-walking because it was not safe enough. You want your life micro-managed by government? Giuliani’s your guy. The logic of today’s GOP in the war on terror, moreover, is the inverse of New Hampshire’s. In every choice of liberty versus security, the GOP now prefers security, without even publicly acknowledging the costs. And yet Mark Steyn sees no irony here. Do they really not see that their rhetoric on liberty is utterly hollow? Or have they just persuaded themselves that because they’re the ones taking our freedoms away, we have nothing to be concerned about?

Ana notices:

8:23 PM Gilmore ALSO STANDING. Mitt Romney totally flummoxed, can’t remember what polling said about standing versus sitting.

8:31 PM Romney’s decided to stand. He’s not going to apologize about becoming pro-standing. He’s been standing, in his heart, for a long time. Really, he’s a lifelong stander. Small varmint standing, mostly.

Heh.

Chris Crain observes how polarizing Hillary Rodham Clinton is – both between constituencies and within them. Bottom line:

Did HRC rig things for Hillary, or is she truly out front on marriage, inching her way to a full-fledged endorsement? Well, the way the HRC questionnaire frames the issues does mask some important differences in ways that benefit Hillary the most.

The problem is that whatever they say, both HRC the candidate and HRC the organization are not trust-worthy. That’s why they understand each other.

My summary is here. My real-time reactions are here, here, here, here and here. Marc Ambinder’s wrap-up is here.

Jim Fallows marvels at the Manhattan Mussolini’s grasp of Iraq’s role in the war on terror. Last night Rudy said:

It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.

As Jim points out, if that’s true after all we’ve discovered these past few years, then why isn’t the following just as true:

It’s unthinkable that you would leave Osama bin Laden in charge of al Qaeda and be able to fight the war on terror.

Or don’t the Republicans want to go there?

It wasn’t because there were more Independents in the sample, we are now told.

Ross:

All things being equal, I would prefer a President who can reconcile his belief in the truth of Christianity with what seems to me to be the only conclusion that reason allows for at the moment – namely, the common ancestry of life on Earth.

Me too. But that’s not the party that Rove built, is it?

"I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber barron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme — whose highest claim is to reasonable prudence — the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication," – C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 3.

(Photo: Ahmadinejad by Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)

He sings, he smokes, he litters! But what a voice. And he has an unnerving resemblance to my old friend, Jeffrey Rosen.