Month: November 2009

Levi keeps mentioning some dreadful secret. It’s gonna be an interesting couple of weeks, isn’t it?

Weigel doesn't think Palin needs to worry about HarperCollins making money off her book:

In the end, will it matter for Palin? I don’t think so. If Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption” could top the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, surely Palin will top it for at least one week. Palin’s book merely needs to produce juicy gossip and place her in potentially competitive 2012 states to be a “hit,” and it’ll do all of that. Early reports claim that the book skimps on policy, which is the one area commentators and possible 2012 rivals always say she needs more polish, but they don’t really mean it. The more interesting measure of Palinmania might be whether she can pull tie-in books like Matt Continetti’s “The Persecution of Sarah Palin” onto the bestseller list.

Matt Cooper wonders if Dobbs' leaving CNN could leave him available for a third party challenge in 2012. I think there is an obvious space for a third party, anti-illegal immigrant, anti-free trade, populist candidate for "real America." The Dobbs crowd is also not as fixated on the religious and social issues, the way the GOP now is, which would give it much more appeal to fiscally troubled independents. And it would destroy the current GOP, especially if populist figures like Beck signed up.

And it would mean an Obama electoral college landslide. American politics is in flux again, isn't it?

Marty Beckerman, like many others in his generation and older, is a recovering Republican:

I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

And at this point, the GOP are addicts. Because the addiction to outrage is easier than a commitment to actual conservative solutions to our current, actual problems. And I don't mean mere recitation of conservative dogma, a recourse to cliches such as "big government", or a binary left-vs-right paradigm that is blind to actual policy. I mean grappling with actual solutions to health insurance cruelty and expense, to climate change which is real, to Islamist terror that doesn't make global polarization worse.

This also strikes very close to home:

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming

an extremist happened over time.

One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.

The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads — or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all — is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.

This is called thinking. And if more people – on both sides – were prepared to acknowledge their own shifts of view and to explain and examine exactly why they have changed with the times, our public discourse would be immeasurably improved.

The finale is pretty astounding:

(Hat tip: Laughing Squid)

Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs:

The main reason I can’t march along with the right wing blogosphere any more, not to put too fine a point on it, is that most of them have succumbed to Obama Derangement Syndrome. One “nontroversy” after another, followed by the outrage of the day, followed by conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, all delivered in breathless, angry prose that’s just wearying and depressing to read.

It’s not just the economic issues either. I’ve never been on board with the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment radical religious right. Once I began making my opinions known on issues like creationism and abortion, I realized that there just wasn’t very much in common with many of the bloggers on the right. And then, when most of them decided to fall in and support a blogger like Robert Stacy McCain, who has neo-Nazi friends, has written articles for the openly white supremacist website American Renaissance, and has made numerous openly racist statements on the record … well, I was extremely disappointed to see it, but unfortunately not surprised.

McCain’s views are, strictly speaking, fascist in tone and intent. His open declaration that he would be open to the genocide of Palestinians is depraved. That he remains in the polite company of the bloggy right is a sign of just how degenerate much of it has become.

(Hat tip: Drum)

Andrew Sprung rounds up conflicting Afghan surge reports.

Ackerman has some fascinating details on this morning's NSC conference in the White House.

I suspect Eikenberry has given Obama the opening he needs to leave Afghanistan and refuse to commit more young Americans to the defense of a corrupt government and the prosecution of an unending war that no longer serves a core national interest for the US. If Obama does that, it will take enormous courage. It will reveal a strength of character and judgment that America and the world now need.

One other intuition: Obama has recently clearly been pondering the dreadful responsibility of sending soldiers to war. From the decision to witness the return of coffins at Dover to the un-scheduled solitary trip to Arlington and this week's emotionally cathartic ceremony at Fort Hood: these events, it seems to me, would concentrate any serious, ethical president's mind.

And I suspect Bob Gates is not that far apart from the minimalist position.

Another good sign: an LDS apostle is quoted as backing the Salt Lake City anti-discrimination laws, and there's a real chance that this model could go state-wide:

Even an LDS apostle — continuing the string of stunners –thinks Salt Lake City's ordinances could be a model. "Anything good is shareable," Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said in an interview Wednesday, referring to Salt Lake City's new policy aimed at protecting gay and transgender residents from discrimination. He praised the efforts of Mormon officials and gay-rights leaders who sat down to discuss the issue before the church's endorsement. "Everybody ought to have the freedom to frame the statutes the way they want," he said. "But at least the process and the good will and working at it, certainly that could be modeled anywhere and even elements of the statute."

Kudos to both the Mormon church leadership and to the gay rights groups in the state. They're offering the rest of us a model for grappling with this – a model that does not deny our differences but seeks common ground where we can. I also see the influence of former governor Jon Huntsman, a Mormon Republican who went further than the LDS and backed civil unions for gay couples in his state.

Someone has decided to offer an open hand. A civil rights movement should never spurn such a good faith effort. We should build on it, and see if we cannot ask other churches to follow the same model.

This blog is coming to you from me on an airplane. I'm traveling to Waco, Texas, to attend the fifth Michael Oakeshott Association Conference, which this year also explores the thought of Voegelin and Strauss. Yes, I know: self-parody alert. But on the airplane I just found out they have in-flight wifi. So here I am, thousands of feet up in the air, broadcasting live to anyone with a modem anywhere on the planet.

Yep: this new millennium has its moments.