Category: The Dish

Today, I’m starting a week of book club emails about "The Conservative Soul," featuring the smartest reader critiques, as promised. Here’s one reader:

My only criticism of your line of argument is your view of Reagan. Undoubtedly, he was a prime example of the sort of limited-government, pragmatic, grown-up conservatism you advocate; but I think it’s scarcely deniable that the Christian right first became active politically under him. Indeed, their efforts contributed to Reagan’s election success, and their support did find in-roads into his policy (his neglect of the AIDS epidemic, for example). In many ways Reagan is very far from Burkean and Oakeshottian conservatism – far away from Goldwater, even – not the least in his appeasement and empowerment of Christian fundamentalists, making them into a political force for the first time in American history, etc.

And something tells me that Burke wouldn’t have endorsed Reagan’s particular brand of Cold War conservatism; I mean, I’d like to think that Edmund Burke would have lambasted Iran-Contra, not cheered it on. As Conor Cruise O’Brien states in his great "thematic biography" of Burke – conservatism as a synthesis of evangelical Christianity, military patriotism, and unchecked free-market values is something Burke would hardly have endorsed.

Reagan did indeed presage some of the worst aspects of today’s degenerate Republicanism. His deficit spending, his subversion of constitutionalism in Iran-Contra, his coded appeal to Southern bigotry when beginning his campaign, and his dithering on the HIV epidemic are all fore-runners of later abuse. But they were mild in comparison to Bush.

Reagan would never have signed the biggest increase in entitlement spending since LBJ; Reagan’s domestic spending record was far better than Bush’s; Reagan raised taxes when he felt it necessary; he reformed the tax system in his second term; he vetoed pork; his Supreme Court nominees were diverse; he would never have gone to war in the reckless, unplanned way the Bush administration did in Iraq; and his foreign policy was a blend of deep conviction but also pragmatism, as he reached out to an imploding Soviet Union in his final years. Even on Iran-Contra, he eventually fessed up, and apologized. You can see the seeds of future conservative self-destruction and hubris, but Reagan’s record, to my mind, is on balance, a conservative one in the best sense. His undoing of excessive government control of the economy and his defeat of the Soviet Union dwarf everything else.

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction," – Pascal, Pensees.

(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by Georges Gobet/Getty.)

The only politician with greater powers of denial than the president appears to be his 2004 opponent, the worst politician in Washington, John Kerry.

It doesn’t get more comprehensive than this:

Your suspicion of Charles Krauthammer’s pre-war arguments is not justified. Some reasons:

1) Mr. Krauthammer has discussed the dangers of WMD and terrorism for a very long time and has done so when many pundits and foreign policy experts focused on other issues (the economy, China etc.) In his famous essay on America’s "Unipolar Moment", he foresaw the importance of these two issues at a time when the Cold War had only just ended. He has brought up the WMD issue again and again, and Iraq was – naturally – one of the countries he was always most concerned about. Why, after being honestly concerned for years, should he suddenly have stopped to believe in the danger – while still proposing a war that he no longer deemed necessary for security reasons? That would make no sense whatsoever.

2) Mr. Krauthammer is an outspoken man, and he is a convinced unilateralist. Should he consider war against a certain country as necessary in view of important American interests, I am sure he will say so, and without much ado. I really don’t have the impression that he is a man who needs false justifications to argue for what he believes to be in the best interest of America.

3) Mr. Krauthammer is a proponent of what he calls "democratic realism". While that technically makes him a neoconservative, the "realist" element has dominated most of his positions for the most time. He has never been an extreme "idealist" or "moral crusader". The war in Iraq made sense for a "democratic realist" only if there was a strategic reason for it. Iraq’s importance for the regional balance of power may have been part of that logic, but I don’t believe for a second that it would have been enough to make Mr. Krauthammer a proponent of this war, if not for the danger of WMDs. As for ousting Saddam and democratizing Iraq – Krauthammer is way too much of a "realist" to support a war of such importance for "idealistic" reasons alone.

4) Why (and how) should Mr. Krauthammer of all people have known what countless foreign governments, international agencies, former members of the Clinton administration, independent analysts and even Saddam himself did not know or even deem possible at the time? And what good reason is there to believe, keeping in mind this administration’s problems with security leaks, that Mr. Krauthammer would be perhaps the only person to know about the government’s deceptions to this very day?

5) There also remains the question of why the administration should have used the WMD argument if they knew it to be a lie. There was no way this would not have been found out afterwards, and it should have been clear that this could only hurt American credibility. The only way to prevent this would have been to carefully plant some WMDs in Iraq, which obviously didn’t happen either. And IF the administration had decided to use a pretense for war, it would have been a much smarter idea to trumpet some more alleged evidence of Saddam’s links to the attacks of 9/11. They would have been easier to fake and much harder to disprove than the claims of Iraqi WMDs, they would have created an even greater sense of urgency and they would not have allowed for a negotiated solution or inspections of any kind, making war much more probable.

6) Simple common sense: Regarding the overall accomplishments of the Bush administration’s foreign policy: Is it more plausible that the WMD rationale was a careful, politically smart and successful attempt at deceiving the whole world – or that is was one more example of sheer incompetence?

Those are just some reasons that come to my mind why I don’t believe that the Bush administration, much less Charles Krauthammer, intentionally lied about the existence of WMD. Is it impossible that they did? No. But I’d much rather go with Occam’s razor.

Incompetence is indeed perhaps the most plausible answer. I’m going to re-read parts of "Fiasco" and "State of Denial" to sum up my worries with more detail. The Krauthammer omission (which could have been an oversight) is trivial compared with the underlying issue. An invasion plan without a serious contingency plan for finding and securing WMD sites cannot be described as an "oversight." Given the risk posed to U.S. troops, it’s not just incompetence either. It’s criminal incompetence or outright deception. Stay tuned …

I’ll be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today at 2 pm Eastern, discussing the battle for the conservative soul.

 A reader writes:

It has been said of you that you hate well. While your latest post is not hateful, it has the threatening swagger of a certain type of teenage boy. Your penchant for personalized bile comes across anytime you discuss B16. It’s not Hitchens-like, but it is showing signs of going in that vector.

Another comments:

Your comments under the pic of the Pope and his assistant are beyond the pale. Only someone gay or gay-friendly would make such remarks.There’s not only no evidence to suggest that the Pope is anything but chaste and celibate, it’s such bad taste to even bring it up.

My position on the priesthood is what the Church’s used to be: if you’re a good priest and keep your vows, it’s irrelevant whether you’re gay or straight. The gender of the people you’re not having sex with is a non-issue. But this is not Benedict’s position. He was the one who altered the church’s policy from one that simply insisted on priestly celibacy, gay or straight, to one that specifically excludes even celibate gay men from the priesthood, regardless of their skills or gifts or vocation. I’m just following Benedict’s rules. It’s a little hard for him to complain if they boomerang back on him.

(Photo: Vatican Press Pool/Catholic Press Photo.)

Remember when Bush promised more fiscal responsibility in his re-election campaign? Federal spending grew by 9 percent in FY 2006, compared with consumer price inflation of 1.3 percent. The president sure knows how to expand government’s power, reach and incompetence. And his attack on conservatism grows deeper.

East Grinstead, England (my home town), 3 pm.

A TPM reader gives some perspective on the war criminal we have as president:

I served in the Air Force from 1982 to 1988. I was an airborne linguist and, as such, was required to go through survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. This was a school that officers and enlisted men alike were required to attend…anyone who might end up in a hostile situation or behind enemy lines–or a POW. That was in January of 1984. Part of survival school was training in interrogation resistance and how to handle oneself in the event of capture by enemy forces.

What does that have to do with Meese’s remarks, you might ask? Simply this: Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn’t respect the Geneva Conventions." There were no demonstrations; it was considered too traumatic.

I’m not making this up. The military trainers at our Survival School had nothing but contempt for techniques like this, and we were taught that they were international criminal offenses… And every last one of us who has completed this training knows that waterboarding is torture, pure and simple.

Not under Bush it isn’t.

The new HHS appointee for family planning authored this (PDF) power-point on how too much sex causes brain damage. He believes that even married couples should not use contraception. If you want to know where theo-conservatism goes next, the war on contraception is clearly a major priority; and Keroack is the kind of guy the Christianists want controlling your sex life.