Month: April 2009

Abortion Wars

Marc reports that Dawn Johnsen's confirmation is in question because of her time as a former counsel to NARAL:

…the White House wants to see her confirmed, but they are not going to expend more than a certain amount of energy to see her through.  Senior officials discussed Johnsen's nomination on a conference call yesterday evening. The opposition to Johnsen, an outspoken opponent of torture and the politicalization of the Justice Department, was at first denoted by references to her legal views. There were hints that the White House somehow was using the OLC memos as a cudgel to force Republicans to confirm Johnsen. That turned out not to be true. Johnsen may be the last Democratic victim of the abortion wars.

The most prolific and passionate opponent of the nomination of Harold Koh, is Ed Whelan.

Infectious Ignorance

Ta-Nehisi confronts Peggy Noonan:

The job of journalists is to challenge the government and to challenge their readers and viewers. What sort of journalist tells his readers that some things must be mysterious? What sort of writer tells her readers, and viewers, essentially, to not ask too many questions? We have a fine era, when otherwise respected, intelligent, and well-read people step on a national stage and endorse national ignorance. What a mess.

Noonan's more measured, if still misguided, column is here.

Walking And Chewing Gum

John Judis doesn’t have time to enforce the rule of law:

 I have a nagging worry that the eagerness of some Democrats in Congress and some activist organizations to press for what would be months and even years of inquiries and investigations into Bush-era war crimes is due in part to an eagerness to divert themselves, and us,  from the seemingly insoluble problems we face in the present, which require every minute of attention from the White House and Congress. The past can wait.

The rule of law is never a past issue. It is always present. But I see no reason why a mature democracy cannot both investigate its own failures while addressing its current problems.

Taking Away Their Only Argument

Timothy Kincaid looks at the religious protections written into the Connecticut marriage equality law:

The language adopted by the State of Connecticut seems reasonable to me. It exempts churches, religious societies and other religious non-profits from “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges” if the refusal is based on their objection to a marriage which is “in violation of their religious beliefs and faith”. It also exempts religious fraternal benefit societies (eg. the Knights of Columbus) to deny membership and insurance benefits. The third provision would exempt religious organizations from recognizing marriages for purposes of adoption, foster care and other social services provided that they don’t receive public funds for those services.

I have no objection to these provisions and I dare say that most gay folk are just fine with them as well. In fact, I don’t see them as any additional protection than was already guaranteed by the US Constitution.

What else you got, Maggie?

How Obama Could Lose In 2012

Reihan Salam imagines the Democrats' doomsday scenario:

There may well be good reasons for Obama’s itchy intervention-finger, but there’s a real danger that we’ll be left with zombie banks, zombie industries, and a zombie economy that limps along, bleeding jobs and growth for years. Think of this as removing a Band-Aid really, really, really slowly.

What happens next?

Honestly, what happens next is even scarier. The Establishment—the academic and policy elite, Wall Street, famous sexy people—are more invested in Obama than they’ve been in any president in decades. If Obama fails, a whole system will go down with him. The Republicans will win by default, and they’ll have learned nothing from over a decade of borderline-imbecilic unforced errors.

Trust me, I hope I’m wrong about all of this.

The Post-Modern Right

ROVEMASKBillPugliano:Getty A reader writes:

Thanks for your post, “What Cheney Did to Conservatism” I think is more appropriate to point out what conservativism has done to Cheney — that is, a kind of conservatism.  Your essay brought to mind Karl Rove’s distinction between “those who make history” and those who study what the makers of history have done, “the reality-based community.”  Packed into Rove’s distinction are hints of Hegelian and Nietzsche ideas. Indeed, modern Hegelian ideas have reemerged with Alexandre Kojeve, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. I would guess that you are quite familiar with this. 

I spent some time reading in Wikipedia and then went back to the website of Shadia Drury.  And once again, I presume you have heard her name and probably read some of her material. In particular, I read her essay, Gurus of the Right, a review of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein. This quote caught my eye:

“What kind of politics does this sort of duplicity suggest? In my view, it is the basis of postmodern politics–a politics that dispenses with truth.

Hannah Arendt once said that totalitarianism was the triumph of politics over truth. But she never imagined that this sort of politics would become business as usual. She never imagined that postmodern thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Michel Foucault would see no conflict between truth and power. Truth, especially moral truth, or what is usually called values, is but a function of power. The powerful are those who are able to make their values triumph. They are the ones who decide what is to be admired and what is to be despised.”

In short, I am suggesting that another kind of conservatism has supplanted and is even hostile to objective truth and the rule of law. Indeed, this strand of conservatism, I would argue, has deeply influenced Cheney and much of modern conservatism. 

And so, why did no one resisting the White House?  It was not a matter of conscience; it never occurred to them.

(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty.)