Category: The Dish

The GOP is still spending like, er, Republicans.

It’s a great site, appropriately named, devoted to matters of faith. My Q and A can be found here.

"There’s something painfully ironic about Trent Lott being named ‘minority whip,’" – Robert A. George.

Not really a music video, just a classic ’80s genre: the movie montage. If only our current war could be won in a workout:

A reader protests:

You disavow prescribing a political program in your book. You just elucidate principles and guiding lights for policy makers. However, politics is a contact sport. Limbaugh and his fellow travelers are promoting a political program. They have to be team players. They have to hold their tongue when the coaches (President Bush, Hastert, etc.) call dumb plays. They are cheerleaders who are exhorting their listeners to beat the Democrats and the Left in America. Anyone with experience in teams (corporate, athletic, military) that actually function effectively with coordinated action knows that the individual must subordinate his will to the team’s goals. It’s childish to call a team member a lackey or a hypocrite for sticking with his teammates and refusing to publicly criticize the coaches even if he doesn’t like the plays being called.

So cut them some slack. Of course, they cannot engage you on the same level with the same intellectual openness that you demand. That would compromise their mission and their livelihood. Pick on someone in your own league who doesn’t get dirty in the arena of political combat. Yes, to form a Republican majority means forming coalitions with religious conservatives, spendthrift Northeasterners, and libertarian Westerners. It’s messy. It’s seldom coherent. I’m frustrated, but I understand.

I sense that part of the frustration motivating the intemperate remarks in Jonah’s review of your book springs from your failure to recognize this division of political labor. If you recognized this division of labor, then maybe you could more charitable toward your critics.

The reader has a point. I really have few truly partisan instincts. Maybe that’s because I grew up as a Tory, not a Republican, and so don’t have American partisanship in my blood. Maybe it’s just my generally non-joiner personality. I chose to be a writer rather than a politician for a reason. I can be more honest as a writer. And my people skills are limited. In the book, I do indeed tackle serious arguments by non-partisan thinkers. On my blog, I’m free to tackle anything someone writes.

I’ll concede this, as well. If Goldberg, Hewitt and Limbaugh simply declared that they were Republicans, working within and for a political party, my reader’s point would hold water. But they want both to claim such an allegiance and yet also speak for something called "conservatism." My point is a basic one: in most periods, this finessing between party and principle is a difficult task. But today, when the GOP has abandoned the most basic conservative principles, it’s impossible.

I can understand their frustration. I can understand their anger at someone exposing their cognitive dissonance and spin. But it really is their problem, not mine. The job of a writer is not to express "charity" toward other ideas or players. It is to express one’s own views as honestly as one can. I don’t know what else I am supposed to do. If that upsets some, too bad. I have enough friends already.

A reader sees Lincoln as the model for how the two deep human impulses can properly interact in a statesman:

Lincoln pursued relentlessly a war that left half a million of his countrymen dead and half the country in ruins. He did this first to preserve American democracy and then to abolish slavery. Thus he would seem to fit Jonah Goldberg’s model of a leader who, like FDR and King, realized that "evil is rarely defeated by people who are unsure they are right."

But Lincoln always tempered his personal convictions with Socratic doubt and scientific skepticism. Despite his almost religious attachment to the Union he still wrote of it with scientific detachment, describing it as "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…" and the war an experiment "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

When he wrote "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," slavery is presented as the worst of wrongs, but only if right and wrong have meaning. He thinks they do, but he must consider the possibility that they do not.

Everything about Lincoln’s words and action speak of a man deeply convinced that slavery is wrong and an affront to God. Yet he also knows, because he is a man who thinks as well as acts, that the conviction that one is right and that one knows God’s will more often has been a curse than a blessing. One must act on one’s convictions, especially if one is the President, but one must also remember how fallible they can be. Hence, when he sums up the great conflict for which he, more than anyone else bore responsibility, it contained not only conviction and justification but also, for himself and his countrymen, reminders of the need for doubt even as one acts:

"Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in …"

In the Guardian, alas. The hard left’s dislike of liberty runs deep. And, yes, it’s possible to be dismayed at the conduct of the war in Iraq and yet still be glad that Saddam is no longer in power.

A reader writes:

Thanks for your observation regarding Mr. Savage’s comments. They are nearly prescient. Just last night, I was listening to Mr. Savage while I was working in my shop, and I had the same thought: Substitute Jew for homosexual (or liberal) in his diatribe(s) and you have the ravings of Hitler.

I used to think of myself as a conservative. I don’t know where these people came from, but after listening to rabid radio for a while I have become totally turned off on "conservatism’s" message. They are so hateful. I don’t understand their objective, but it certainly turned me away from any support for the Republicans and as such it appears counterproductive. Now, I only listen occasionally in order to know the enemy.

From a supportive, healthy heterosexual in Montana.

There is something deeply Orwellian about the current state of the right. If you ask them what they’re for, you tend to get platitudes. But ask them what they’re against and their eyes and keyboards light up. (This is true on the far left, of course, as well. But the ideological rigor mortis on the right is particularly striking right now). On the Hill, you have the nemeses of Pelosi, Rangel and Frank, the same trio, repeated endlessly. Is it really an accident that they have picked a woman, a black and a gay? Naah. What is Sean Hannity’s mojo? Try this for size:

"To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…"

As for the vitriol thrown in my direction, I may be becoming a useful Emmanuel Goldstein figure for the "movement." Here’s the latest Two Minutes Hate from JPod.

In the WSJ no less!

"Ignore 99% of what [Ryan] Sager says and writes. He’s a Kevin Phillips in the making," РBryan Preston, pulling a Jonah on policing conservative debate.

Even Preston’s own readers ignore him. Sager responds here.