2013 – Page 837

Small Government Theocons? Ctd

by Brendan James

A reader writes:

Concerning this post, I think you and Ed Kilgore are talking past each other. Ed’s talking about the Religious Right; you’re talking about “young evangelicals.” Not exactly the same thing—indeed, the young evangelicals you’re speaking of seem to be moving away from the Right, or at least modifying it to accommodate what is now clearly a cause as lost as keeping evangelicals from divorcing.

But if you focus on, say, the Tea Party, as Ed does, it’s apparent that the persistent efforts of some clueless pundits to characterize it as a “libertarian” movement miss the point. It’s not the deficit these people are concerned with; after all, where were they in the oughts? They’re concerned, as ever, with the federal government taking stuff away from deserving folk like themselves and giving it to undeserving folk like the poor, or the uninsured, or parasitic elites in academia, the bureaucracy, etc.

And for them this is a moral cause; that Obama is in the business of taking from the “right” people and giving to the “wrong” ones isn’t a policy disagreement, it’s proof of his moral perfidy. That they are utterly clueless about the federal budget and the fact that they are major beneficiaries of federal redistribution policies makes it all the easier for them to strike this self-righteous pose; there’s no “libertarianism” for them if it touches “their” Medicare. It really is the culture war by another means.

I understand this point, that libertarianism and Christianism are not a priori incompatible (even if it requires some slippery semantics) and so a rise in the former need not lead to perestroika. But the fact is that evangelicals are the core of the religious right, and if the next generation is becoming libertarian on social matters like marriage—we could talk about drugs as well—that’s a big problem for the old guard that organizes much of the base around cultural paranoia. If this generational shift continues, how small is the Christian Right’s tent going to shrink before they lack the clout Kilgore and the rest of us are worried about?

The UN’s Deadly Incompetence, Ctd

by Brendan James

Not long ago we posted on the UN’s cover-up of a cholera outbreak in Haiti, sparked by a peacekeeping mission in 2010. It turns out there was another outbreak on their watch, in Zimbabwe, which left 4,000 dead in 2008-09. A whistleblower in the UN tried to warn his superiors about the growing epidemic, but was fired by his chief officer, on behalf of that officer’s friends in Mugabe’s government. It was an election year, after all. Armin Rosen digs deeper:

The UN and [officer Agostinho] Zacarias’s chief responsibility should have been to Zimbawe’s embattled civilian population. Instead, both failed to live up to their obligations — even as they were conspiring against someone who had exceeded them. That campaign even seeped into the tribunal proceedings, as Zacarias and the UN made specious and unsupported claims in court that Tadonki had been accused of sexual harassment while based in Harare. It didn’t work, but the UN’s efforts are continuing even now: the UN has stated that it is appealing its own tribunal’s decision, and according to [lawyer Robert] Amsterdam, the World Body has taken the first procedural steps necessary to retry the case. At a March 6 press conference, a UN spokesperson refused to comment on the case — except to say that “judgments of the UN Dispute Tribunal are not final until they have been confirmed by the UN Appeals Tribunal,” and that “the Organization intends to file an appeal of this judgment.”

(Photo: A Zimbabwean cholera patient sits in his bed on February 27, 2009 at a hospital in Harare. By Desmond Kwande/AFP/Getty Images)

Sully Bait

by Chris Bodenner

Many readers are flagging this news – the formation of a PAC called the Bearded Entrepreneurs for the Advancement of a Responsible Democracy (BEARD). Money quote:

“It’s been 125 years since our last bearded President, Benjamin Harrison, was elected. We’re hoping that with our support, bearded individuals will shrug off over a century of political irrelevance and start running for office again.”

Update from a reader:

The news about the PAC has even more Sully Bait than I expected. If you go to Jonathan Sessions’ web site (he’s the founder of the PAC), and then go to his link about upgrading from IE, you’ll find his 404 page with a lovely picture of beagle puppies. What’s better than that?

Bearded beagle puppies?