History keeps offering up surprises, sometimes unpleasant ones:
Remember all those theories about how the emergence of an urban middle-classes is a force for democratisation, because the bourgeoise will demand political rights? Well, in Thailand the precise opposite is happening. The urban middle-classes are rising up and demanding that democracy be rescinded.
Next up: China?
A good point:
Where is the statement expressing outrage from the NRA that a humble American gun owner like Plaxico, who was just trying to protect himself and his family by carrying a hand gun, is being mercilessly persecuted by The Man and his Draconian gun control laws?
Shouldn’t Glenn Reynolds be outraged as well? I mean: if you cannot take a loaded gun into a nightclub in your sweat pants with impunity, isn’t America as we know it finished?
Derb defends secular conservatism:
There are many people like us: people who cherish limited government, fiscal restraint, personal liberty, free enterprise, self-support, patriotic defense of the homeland and its borders, love of the Constitution, respect for established ways of doing things, pride in Western Civilization, etc., and yet who cannot swallow stories about the Sky Father and the Afterlife, miraculous births and revivifications. What does the one set of things have to do with the other? We are secular conservatives. What else are we? Figments of our own imaginations?
Careful, Derb. Your magazine has become a central pillar of theoconservatism.
Yglesias quips:
It would have surprised me — a lot — if two years ago you’d told me that conservatives would be hailing Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State as a great ideological victory for the American right.
And that, of course, is another indicator of their enduring dumbness. Having lionized Clinton as an Iron Lady, how will they turn around and call her a terror-loving commie as soon as she presides over the withdrawal from Iraq? Quietly, as is his wont, Obama is running rings around them.
Hitch informs me that the change in name to Mumbai is a function of Hindu chauvinism:
When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor’s Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it—after a Hindu goddess—Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta’s work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay’s hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")
I wasn’t aware of this but now that I am, the Dish will refer to Mumbai by its previous name.
Publius is worried by the emotions unleashed by the Mumbai atrocities:
I fear we could be on the brink of WWI-style situation where we lose control of events. In the run-up to WWI, even though everyone knew on some level that nationalistic overreaction would lead to even more horrible outcomes, the internal politics drove them all past the point of no return. Events ultimately spiraled out of control, and the 20th Century never fully recovered. I don’t have any answers – but the rising anger in India is arguably the most urgent issue on Earth at the moment. So I hope someone does.
Less than expected:
About 130 million Americans voted, up from 122 million four years ago. Still, turnout fell short of the 140 million voters many experts had forecast. With a little more than 61 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, the 2008 results also didn’t match the record 63.8 percent turnout rate that helped propel President John F. Kennedy to victory in 1960.
And the now-established consensus is that Obama did very well in getting out his vote; but his 7 point margin of victory was largely accomplished by former Republican voters staying home. More evidence of Rove’s historic achievement: the destruction of the Republican brand.
It may turn out to be the critical one for the new administration:
Mr. Gates … noted that, since the election, the United States and Iraq have reached a strategic-and-security accord calling for the complete withdrawal of American forces within three years. As for the 16-month goal, Mr. Gates said, “I’m less concerned about that timetable.” … Mr. Gates left open the possibility that his stay at the Pentagon might be longer than expected, given his holdover status. “The president-elect and I agreed that this would be open-ended, and so there is no time frame,” Mr. Gates said.
Obama is intent on co-opting the realist right for the Democratic party in foreign affairs. It’s as shrewd a strategy as it is politically lethal. And exactly what I expected. With any luck, it will prompt eventually a reform on the right in response. Buh-bye, Kristol and Kagan? I fear the GOP will need another electoral drubbing before it gets that message.
(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty.)
Obama is basking in very high approval ratings as the countdown to reality continues – more than Bush or Clinton in the transition period. 80 percent like the Gates pick. 69 percent like the Clinton selection.
A reader writes:
You say that the Supreme Court "backed" California’s medical marijuana law. That is misleading in that it implies that the Court has considered the merits of the case or the decision below. Denial of cert has absolutely no substantive connotation.
The Wikipedia entry (certiorari) is pretty accurate:
"Conversely, the legal effect of the Supreme Court’s denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari is commonly misunderstood as meaning that the Supreme Court approves the decision of a lower court. However, such a denial "imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times." Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70 (1995)."
This is why, after Lawrence v Texas, when the Court declined to review a case allowing a state to ban gay adoption, you can’t say that the Court agrees that gay adoption bans are OK. They just decided not to consider the issue yet, probably waiting for a split among Circuits that they can resolve.
The Dish 