Month: January 2009

In the US, one of the striking aspects of the Republican rump is its insistence that one of only a handful of defining policies is its opposition to marriage rights for gays. Joe Carter recently argued that it was inconceivable that conservatives could support such a thing, or that a conservative case can be made for it. If that is true, then the British Tories are no longer conservative:

Nick Herbert, the Conservative party’s Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership.

The news leaked in the Telegraph society column. Think of a Republican cabinet with two openly gay and legally married men in it. I can dream, can’t I?

Accusations of political meddling in the case of Sherry Johnston, Palin’s daughter’s kinda-mother-in-law.

Noah Pollak unveils what he sees as the real goal of the Gaza invasion:

[I]t is intended to push Hamas off the territory it has been using near the Israeli border to launch rockets.

I’m not sure how that works in practice for more than a short time. I’ll respond to his just war questions later but wanted to link to this point first.

I think Glenn Greenwald – who has less fear than any journalist I know in Washington – is onto something important here:

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don’t really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

The inability on both sides to see Jews and Arabs as equally and indistinguishably human before they are Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the problem. In a contest between Israel’s flawed democracy and Hamas’s theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst". A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as "coercive interrogation" only when Americans do it to Muslims.

And when I read Michael Goldfarb, I become more and more aware of just how disgusting the McCain campaign was; and how lucky we are to have removed these thugs from office.

I have to say the online discussions of whether the "conservative" movement has the right institutions, think-tanks or online skills to compete with Obamania seems misplaced to me. You can have the best set of think-tanks in the world and still be useless in the face of a Republican administration determined to combine the worst foreign policy utopianism of the left with the worst social draconianism of the right. No conservative institution could or should have backed the Bush administration. In doing so for so long, they eviscerated their brand and destroyed their intellectual coherence. They richly deserve the wilderness they face.

Same goes for online journalism. However good your marketing or messaging, a pile of doo-doo is still a pile of doo-doo. Or as Julian helpfully summarizes,

Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills.

Enjoy.

An explanation:

In private, [John] and Kelly were always very practical and positive about Jett’s health. They put him on a detoxification programme and encouraged his love of the outdoors, of sports, swimming, cycling and hiking.

In public, John clearly adored his son and spoke of him in glowing terms but he was always wary of delving too deeply into the details of his illness. It was simply too painful a subject.

Even when people saw Jett and it was obvious something was wrong, John refused to talk about it. In fact, the only time John made any public comment was when it was suggested that his son was autistic, an allegation he strongly denied and which hurt him deeply.

The new Who is revealed. A little too much like Pater Davison for my taste. One assumes the hair will improve.

Peter Berkowitz proffers the following as a basis for conservative renewal:

– An economic program, health-care reform, energy policy and protection for the environment grounded in market-based solutions.

– A foreign policy that recognizes America’s vital national security interest in advancing liberty abroad but realistically calibrates undertakings to the nation’s limited knowledge and restricted resources.

– A commitment to homeland security that is as passionate about security as it is about law, and which is prepared to responsibly fashion the inevitable, painful trade-offs.

– A focus on reducing the number of abortions and increasing the number of adoptions.

– Efforts to keep the question of same-sex marriage out of the federal courts and subject to consideration by each state’s democratic process.

– Measures to combat illegal immigration that are emphatically pro-border security and pro-immigrant.

Some of this squares too many circles too easily. But it’s the right general approach, which means it is unlikely to find much favor in the Dixified rump of the GOP.