Pareene rounds up clips from Huckabee's first week as a network TV talk show host:
Because Mike Huckabee could very well be a GOP nominee for president (if Mitt Romney fails to properly restart after an operating system upgrade, or something), it is worthwhile to take a look at how he is building his name recognition, and making himself acceptable to Regular Daytime TV-Watching Americans.
A reader writes:
Your "Mental Health Break" posts are always a welcome diversion during my day. Here's a video that you might find amusing: a montage of scenes from "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." that highlights the unspoken attraction between Robert Vaughn and David McCallum.
Bernstein applauds Friedersdorf:
People like to believe that agency matters — that is, they constantly underemphasize structural factors such as the effect of the economy on elections or the difficulty in winning Congressional votes beyond a party's strength in Congress. When one's side doesn't win, it's easy to believe that either they didn't really want to win, or in the sports cliche, they didn't want to win badly enough. Yelling and screaming is a good way to avoid that particular accusation, even though rationally there's really no case that extreme demonstrations of emotion are likely to be helpful.
Here's the magazine's defense of the picture. And here's an excerpt from Aryn Baker's cover story on the woman depicted (it appears that the full story isn't online). Allahpundit:
The image is as stark an argument as you’re likely to see for continuing the war, which is why lefties naturally have been all day. Some offer legit complaints — instead of putting a mutilated girl on the cover to make the case for staying put, why not put a dead soldier on there to make the case for pulling out? — and some not so legit, like the idea that because this happened last year when U.S. troops were already in the field, it portends nothing about what’ll happen on a wider scale when we leave.
He adds:
Most of the bloggy links that I’ve seen today have gone to the piece at Time defending the decision to publish the photo, not the actual cover story about the catastrophic social backsliding to come once Islamist fanatics regain power (not to mention the inevitable retrenchment of Al Qaeda). Maybe a little too heavy on the distracting shock factor here?
Well, that's bound to happen when you don't put the full cover story online. But the cover image is a great visual for making the moral case for staying – something those of us who want to scale down the war effort must confront. Yglesias, alas, claims that "actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims":
It’s certainly true as Time’s emotionally manipulative new cover image indicates that the Taliban are terrible for women and that the more of Afghanistan they rule the worse things will be for women. That said, it’s extremely disingenuous to act as if continued American military engagement in Afghanistan is the key to preventing further cases of girls like Aisha from being maimed for violations of retrograde notions of gender norms.
We were not responsible for these evils when they were perpetrated for years before 9/11. And we are not responsible now. After ten years, I'd say the American soldier's burden in trying to alleviate the awful consequences of Jihadist rule is completed.
Ackerman flags a new Pew study (pdf) on Pakistan. A surprise:
"Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes.” Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley. But it’s not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they’re a bad or “very bad” thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people.
Ruth Graham reviews Speaking Up: The Sarah Palin Story, an upcoming children's book by Christian publisher Zondervan:
At one point, within the space of three paragraphs, Palin is compared favorably to Taylor Swift, the apostle Paul, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver—in that order. (It's a rare passage that can make evangelicals, music fans, sports nuts, and policy wonks all cry "blasphemy.") … Palin's 2002 loss in the race for Alaska lieutenant governor is chalked up to the fact that "during this run for office, her passion was surprisingly thin"—in other words, she never wanted to win that stupid election anyway. Bristol's unexpected pregnancy is not mentioned at all; a Zondervan acquisitions editor told the AP that, "We tried to stay away from the super-heavy stuff." …
Just as many critics and journalists pointed out that Going Rogue had some glaring inaccuracies, Speaking Up also plays loosely with the facts.
It includes Palin's preferred accounts of selling the Alaska governor's jet (at a loss to the state, as it turned out) and of stepping down halfway through her term as governor. Washburn writes that the "teleprompter failed" during Palin's 2008 convention speech, an account that has long been debunked. Her account of Palin's controversial firing of the head of a Wasilla museum is drawn entirely from a Web site called conservatives4palin.com. She writes that Barack Obama received 51 percent of the popular vote based on information on the wiki site Answers.com; the actual tally was 53 percent.
Is it any surprise that Zondervan is a division of HarperCollins?
Taegan wants to bring it back. I'll do my best to help.
C. Bradley Thompson calls neocons "epistemological relativists" and moral relativists in his new book on the subject:
Because the political good in their world is mutable and always changing, the neoconservatives do not want fixed principles to which they are beholden, nor do they strive to be morally or politically consistent. Their power and authority is generated and sustained by the illusion that the world is in a state of constant change and that it is governed by what Machiavelli called fortuna. The truth or falsity of an idea is, according to the neocons, determined by its usefulness in a particular situation and for particular people. What is true today, they argue, may not be true tomorrow if an idea or an action fails to work in new and different situations. In such a world, there can be no certainty, no absolutes, no fixed moral principles.
They are Nietzscheans posing as ancient Greeks. Tyler Cowen unpacks this a little. I just started on the book and am blown away by it. I knew much of it already but the careful, measured and cumulative explanation of its intellectual roots and political consequences makes it a must-read. Thompson, moreover, was trained as a Straussian and knows this world from the inside (as, to some extent, do I). It's a very polite, measured and thereby all the more devastating indictment. The Amazon reviewer notes:
What Thompson finds in his studies of neoconservatism is that neoconservatives do indeed have not only an ideology for our time — a financially sustainable welfare state at home and regime-building crusades abroad — but a full philosophy underlying that ideology. Thompson summarizes his conclusions about the nature of the neoconservative ideology: "The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church on Sunday, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtue, sacrifice themselves to the 'common good', obey the commands of the government, fight wars, and die for the State."
Such an ideology, Thompson shows, goes against the grain of Americanism as a stream of Jeffersonian ideas such as individualism and government serving only as a night watchman, not as a shepherd of our lives in a collective.
For students of the history of ideas, as much as for today's political activists, this book does the "heavy lifting" required to reveal the deepest nature — and therefore threat — of the neoconservative movement, which is still very much alive.
The struggle within conservatism is very much between this neoconservative model and the emphasis on freedom and limited government that classical liberalism upholds. It is a struggle between the lively skepticism of Oakeshott and the dark certainties of Strauss, between a genuine belief in the West and a dark suspicion that tyranny will always win against it. Until neoconservatism is defeated and discredited, in my view, conservatism in America will be unable to revive. This book is a critical part of that process of exposure. Do yourselves a favor and read it.
A cartoon that says it all:
The Bristol-Levi wedding may be off because Levi might have fathered another child with his ex during the period away from Bristol. Or not:
A source says that Johnston claims the baby isn't his, but that, "Levi is one of three possible fathers who were with Lanesia during the probable week of conception."
More here.
The Dish 