Month: December 2008

Reihan responds to both Ramesh Ponnuru and Rod Dreher:

Both agree that upper-middle-class soft libertarians are not the “ducks” Republicans should be hunting. I agree with both of them, but with a small caveat. Like Ramesh and Rod, I think the Republican should be the more culturally conservative party. But, as I think both of them would agree, cultural conservatism is a moving target.

But this is a critical distinction, no? For Oakeshottian-Burkean conservatives, culture is always moving. For Straussian-Christianists, the truth underpinning social mores is eternal and unchangeable. In my view, that’s the core divide within conservatism right now. That”s why the GOP has been unable to embrace civil unions for gay couples. It’s the obvious pragmatic compromise, but any compromise to a changing society is impossible for God’s law.

I reiterate what I wrote two decades ago. In a sane world, it would be conservatives who were insisting that gays get married and liberals who’d be backing civil unions. But religion has mutated those mutanda. Only a handful – like David Brooks – have not let prejudice cloud their thinking.

But, as his supporters like yours truly have long insisted, he is no panacea in foreign policy. Alex Massie questions the limits of a renewed US-European relationship:

It would be lovely to think that Obama can bring a new period of transatlantic harmony. But it just isn’t the case that American interests are necessarily the same as European interests. The Security Card trumped everything during the Cold War but these are changed times. And there were, in any case, always more differences than seemed the case then too, these days they’re much clearer to see.

(Hat tip: Clive Davis)

Yes, it’s a guide to Hitler emoticons!

Unhappy Hitler: //:-=(

Stoned Hitler: //8-=)

In the debate over torture and prisoner abuse as government policy, the resistance of so many in the military, CIA, FBI and elsewhere in the government to the war crimes of the Bush administration has been an inspiration. One of the more inspiring figures to me is Darren Vandeveld. Vandeveld is a devout Pennsylvania Catholic and patriot who joined up after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa before becoming a military lawyer at Gitmo. Assigned to the camp, and believing the president’s assurance that the commander-in-chief treated all prisoners humanely, Vandeveld described himself as a "true believer." But then he saw the truth:

It was one case in particular, that of a young Afghan called Mohammed Jawad, which caused most concern. Mr Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle. Col Vandeveld says that in a locker he found indisputable evidence that Mr Jawad had been mistreated. After Mr Jawad had tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall at Guantanamo, Col Vandeveld says that psychologists who assisted interrogators advised taking advantage of Mr Jawad’s vulnerability by subjecting him to specialist interrogation techniques known as "fear up". He was also placed, Col Vandeveld says, into what was known as the "frequent flyer" programme in which he was moved from cell to cell every few hours, with the aim of preventing him sleeping properly, and securing a confession.

A devout Catholic, Col Vandeveld found himself deeply troubled by what he discovered.

After consulting with a priest, he quit.

I should confess that behind my passion on this subject is a core religious conviction – that all human beings have dignity in the eyes of God and that treating any human being in this way is an absolute moral evil.

I have not made my argument on religious grounds because I believe in the separation of religion and politics and made my case in language that anyone – believer and non-believer – can engage equally. But it is my faith that informs my view on this. I may not be a Christianist; I do not believe in making explicit religious arguments in the public square; but I am a Christian and I do have core moral beliefs. There is great relief is seeing a fellow Catholic, unlike the theocons and the Bush apologists, who sees this the same way. And inspiring to see him throw away his career for it. This, in my view, is what this age demands of Christians. If we cannot resist perpetrating the torture once deployed against our savior, what will we resist?

The front-page piece in the NYT today on Obama’s thorny task in staffing the CIA, after seven years of its violation of the Geneva Conventions, is revealing in many ways. Like many in the MSM, the NYT cannot bring itself to describe the techniques that the CIA has used as "torture." And yet we know that the CIA has tortured prisoners under the plain legal definition of torture, and we know that this was the whole point of giving the CIA explicit legislative permission for this in 2006. No doubt some of the techniques only rise to the level of abuse and not the "severe" mental or physical pain and suffering standard for torture. But we know that many go and have consistently gone beyond this under Bush and Cheney – and that that line was deliberately blurred or rendered meaningless by a hired gun like John Yoo. The reason many of us opposed John Brennan was because of his documented ambivalence about exactly this: the use of abuse and torture as weapons in interrogation and his enmeshment with George Tenet when Tenet authorized war crimes. The NYT, however, did not cite the actual reasons we opposed him or the quotes that disturbed us, and explains it as a function of "the left". The piece also allows Brennan to characterize himself as an opponent of abuse and torture, when the record clearly shows something much more ambiguous.

In fact, the only time the word "torture" is used in the NYT piece is to describe techniques practised by other countries. This is an important point because it shows how the NYT is now actively deceiving its readers about this matter. Here is the NYT’s locution on waterboarding, a torture technique used for centuries:

the near-drowning tactic considered by many legal authorities to be torture.

Can the NYT cite one legal authority (John Yoo does not count) that says waterboarding is not torture?

Can they cite one instance in American legal history in which is was not so defined? If not, why this absurd avoidance of the truth in the paper of record? For one instance – in Mississsippi in 1926 – check this case out. If a Southern court in the 1920s took it as a given that waterboarding was torture, why is it in dispute in 2008? As for all those lefties, the NYT itself notes:

On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals are to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military’s noncoercive interrogation rules…

This group will include Paul D. Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces for the Army in 2003 and 2004. Since when is that general or all his peers or the countless members of the CIA, military and FBI who were horrified by what Cheney and Bush did members of the Democratic party "left"?

This is the strategy of the torture defenders: render this debate once again a red-blue, right-left ding-dong, culture war struggle. It isn’t. It’s a foundational, moral and constitutional issue that transcends all those categories. And the NYT does its readers a disservice in occluding that.

Jonah Lehrer recalls:

This isn’t the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting.

For example, D.C. would be bound by his brain to memorize the entire Divine Comedy of Dante after a single reading. Audiences would scream out random numbers 100 digits long and he would effortlessly recount them. The only requirement of this man’s insatiable memory was that he be given 3 or 4 seconds to visualize each item during the learning process. These images came to D.C. automatically.

Eventually, D.C.’s memory overwhelmed him. He. struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry – though they clung to his brain like Velcro – were incomprehensible. He couldn’t even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person’s voice "when it changes its intonation…and it does that 20 or 30 times a day."

Of all the idiotic things that Bill Kristol has said, this has to be one of the dumbest. We currently have around 150,000 troops occupying Iraq. By coopting the Sunni tribes, engaging in serious counter-insurgency, dividing Baghdad into walled sectarian enclaves, and exploiting exhaustion, we are no longer hosting a murderous civil war. But we have not left; there is no stable state to fill the security vacuum that will be created by our departure, and violence remains a daily occurrence. Read Totten yesterday to get a glimpse of the eerie lull that we are now in.

There is no stable national political settlement, no real integration of the Sunni forces into the Shiite national government, and a great deal of unease and fear. 21 people were killed by bombs yesterday, including children, and Mosul and Kirkuk remain explosive. And that’s while the occupation is in force. To argue that this has been "won" is therefore absurd. Rove, of course, perpetuates the same meme:

Mr. Rove was incredulous at Mr. Jenkins’ assertion that the Vietnam War was better managed than the Iraq war. "We ended Vietnam in defeat, for which the families of 55,000 fallen heroes had reason to ask themselves if their sacrifices had been made in vain," Mr. Rove said.

How does Rove know that when US troops withdraw, the same nightmare that engulfed Vietnam will not engulf Iraq? He doesn’t. What he and Kristol are doing is declaring victory for Bush prematurely so they can attack Obama for throwing that victory away. It’s always the same with them. It’s about spin, not reality. When the US has withdrawn and Iraq has not disintegrated or exploded, let them declare victory. I will gladly echo them. Until then: stop the partisan spinning.

Senator DeMint vents at DC’s new visitor center:

Visitors will enter reading a large engraving that states, ‘We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.’ This is an intentional misrepresentation of our nation’s real history, and an offensive refusal to honor America’s God-given blessings.

The quote is from Rufus Choate, whose deep enmeshment in the atheist far left can be viewed in his Wiki bio. The man could recite large chunks of the Bible and Pilgrims Progress by heart by the age of six. But he was an American, and didn’t regard the civic sphere as a church. For that, he is now suspect.

John Carney worries about the NIMBY resistance to Obama’s infrastructure projects:

The first thing Obama’s economic advisers should be doing is scouting out far off places where no one who matters will object to a nosiy and disruptive infrastructure project. Hmmmm.

Don’t swing the baby while drunk. Apart from that, carry on.