Month: March 2011

Daniel Larison cites Libya as proof that there isn't going to be an anti-war right anytime soon:

If ever there were a time for populist American nationalists who can’t stand Obama and claim to venerate and narrowly interpret the Constitution to protest, this would be it…

I didn’t expect a great outpouring of antiwar sentiment from Tea Party-aligned Republicans in Congress, but opposing the Libyan war is a fairly easy call. It doesn’t require a full embrace of Ron Paul’s foreign policy views. It just requires some minimal adherence to their professed beliefs. The Libyan war represents everything Tea Partiers are supposed to dislike about Obama and Washington, and it should offend their nationalist and constitutionalist sensibilities. The first real test to see what a “Tea Party foreign policy” might be is here, and with some honorable exceptions Tea Partiers and the members of Congress they have supported have proved that they are indistinguishable from the hawkish interventionists that have dominated the GOP’s foreign policy thinking for the last decade and more.

“I’d vote for @SarahPalinUSA in a nanosecond. (I’ve been saying the Oprah thing since ’08! Pop culture at Oprah level trumps politics!)” – Andrew Breitbart.

Exclusive footage:

You have the reality-based conservatives, from Frum to Bartlett and Parker. Then you have the unreconstructed neocons – Kristol, Krauthammer et al. Then the realists – Lugar, Gates, Powell. You have the libertarian non-interventionists – the Pauls, Johnson. Then those who might be called Christian nationalists – those who believe we are a sacred nation in a civilizational struggle against Islam and everything should be viewed from that perspective. It looks as if David Horowitz has left the neocons and become an anti-Islam nationalist. So he looks at the eruption in the Middle East and wants the dictators back:

Whatever I wrote about the war in support of the democracy agenda, inside I was never a 100% believer in the idea that democracy could be so easily implanted in so hostile a soil. I wanted to see Saddam toppled and a non-terrorist supporting government in its place. I would have settled for that and a large U.S. military base as well. But I allowed myself to get swept up in the Bush-led enthusiasm for a democratic revolution in the Middle East. I remained on board until the Beirut spring began to wither and got off when election results in Gaza came in and put a Nazi party into power. That spelled the end of my neo-conservative illusions.

It looks like we are headed for the same result in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood is poised to win the September elections. The reality is that a totalitarian Islam is the vibrant and increasingly dominant movement in the Arab world. Any elections likely to take place will be on the order of one man, one vote, one time. Neo-conservatives are now cheering on the Obama administration’s reckless intervention in Libya, as though the past ten years have taught them nothing.

Much of this is in flux, of course. But the contradictions of the Bush-Cheney era continue to reverberate. And if you want a classic pragmatic realist conservative in office, in foreign policy, it's hard to beat the Democrat right now. Even if he has just thrown some desert sand in our eyes.

If so, a truly staggering break from the pattern of 50 years of brutal repression.

Camille Paglia loved Elizabeth Taylor's body:

To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct. Let me give you an example. Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right" is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening — who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman — were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars — a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There's something almost android about the depictions of women currently being projected by Hollywood.

Kevin Sessums procured the following tidbit out of her about James Dean, which Kevin didn't publish at the time:

"I loved Jimmy. I'm going to tell you something, but it's off the record until I die. OK? When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During Giant we'd stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me."

Another tortured soul with whom she worked was Montgomery Clift. There was a quality to her AIDS activism that was not only warrior-like but also maternal, and I confessed to her myself that afternoon that it was as if she were turning to all of us who were HIV positive and saying, as she did to Clift, in A Place in the Sun, in the cinema's most famous closeup, "Tell Mama…"

She touched my hand and stopped me. She leaned forward. "Tell Mama all…" she finished the line for me with the most fervent of whispers.

(Photo: Flowers are placed on actress Elizabeth Taylor's Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 23, 2011 in Hollywood, California. By Michael Buckner/Getty Images.)

A new study has found results that confound the posturing of the Vatican and its politicized Republican supporters. Actual American Catholics are strikingly pro-gay:

Nearly three-­quarters of Catholics favor either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or allowing them to form civil unions (31%). Only 22% of Catholics say there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship. If marriage for gay couples is defined as a civil marriage “like you get at city hall,” Catholic support for allowing gay couples to marry increases by 28 points, from 43% to 71%.

Nearly three-­quarters (73%) of Catholics favor laws that would protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination in the workplace; Nearly 7­‐in­‐10 (69%) Catholics disagree that homosexual orientation can be changed; less than 1-in-4 (23%) believe that it can be changed.

A majority of Catholics (56%) believe that sexual relations between two adults of the same gender is not a sin. Among the general population, less than half (46%) believe it is not a sin (PRRI, Religion & Politics Tracking Survey, October 2010).

If a gay American marries someone from another country, they have to leave the US to be able to stay together, building a growing gay diaspora of Americans barred from their own soil if they want to live with the man or woman they love.

But with DOMA's constitutionality up in the air, we have the first example of an immigration judge deciding to adjourn the deportation of an Argentinian spouse of an American citizen. It probably won't hold, but it's a sign of shifting attitudes. The cruelty of forcing people to choose between their family and their country has no place in a decent society. Maybe at some point in the future, America will be as compassionate as the judge in this case.

"In my life I've voted Republican about 75% of the time. I voted for Obama because the only alternative was a cranky, not so bright old man and an attractive, perhaps intelligent but woefully ignorant woman. I favor small government, flat taxes, elimination of 99.7% of tax credits, and early term abortions, could not care less about gay marriage, and disfavor wandering aimlessly into wars. In most of these respects, Obama is far more liberal than I would like. I would love an excuse to vote against him in 2012. But he is a reasonable, intelligent, decent man with whose politics I disagree. When I look at Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, the tea parties, more of the ignorant woman, Huckabee, Gingrich et al., I'm disgusted," – a commenter at NRO.