Category: The Dish

Urbana, Illinois, 5.30 pm.

Fighting over a label like "conservative" can be silly and pointless. Fighting over core principles and arguments in a political tradition – especially one I think has been highjacked by one extremist faction – is not. Conservatism has become a very broad church, and I think it’s a tribute to its intellectual vitality that it contains so many different varieties today. Why cannot we all be called conservatives of different stripes? Here’s a distinction that makes some sense to me:

I personally divide the spectrum up into "Conservatives," which are all those pro-big-Government (when the government is interfering with private non-Christianist morals), pro-Christianist, pro-Bush folks, and "conservatives," who are folks like yourself and, on a lot of issues (smaller government, balanced budget, strong military, government out of my personal life) me. Just how I personally keep tabs, is all. Ponnuru is a Conservative; you are a conservative. Mark Levin is a Conservative; George Will is (mostly) a conservative.

In my next book, I specifically foreswear any ambition to describe the politics I favor as the only legitimate form of conservatism. I merely argue that it is one legitimate form. The most coherent and persuasive one, to my mind. But not the only one.

It’s from Pete Hoekstra, as loyal a lapdog as this administration could hope for in the Congress. And yet even he has now lost patience with King George. Money quote from his leaked letter:

"I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed. If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies."

Eventually, even the most loyal Republicans will discover that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal treats them all with contempt, the same contempt they have for limited government, the constitution, and the rule of law. Hoekstra asks a salient question, however. What else don’t we know about what these pseudo-monarchs are up to?

A stimulating podcast debate about (IMHO) the greatest political philosopher of the last century here. I met one of the discussants, Ian Tregenza, at the recent Oakeshott conference. He knows his Oakeshott cold.

If you haven’t read Ron Suskind’s "The One Percent Doctrine," I recommend it. As the CIA’s brief against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, it’s hard to beat. The central idea – that Cheney believes that the US should treat a one percent chance of a terrorist getting a WMD as a 100 percent certainty – helps explain the way in which the administration analyzed the Iraq intelligence data (and ignored all the caveats). But it makes a mockery of the response to Kim Jong Il. The doctrine has either been abandoned or modified – as my corporate overlords are now rightly noticing. As usual, however, we know only what our king and his consort deign to tell us. My Sunday Times take on the surreal dissonance between the approaches to Iraq and NoKo can be read here.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Times.)

My first essay arguing for marriage rights for gay couples was in response to a New York City decision legalizing domestic partnerships. I was concerned that marriage-lite institutions would indeed undermine marriage as a social institution, and suggested that since the gay issue was not going away, the most appropriate conservative response was to back gay marriage. It still is. But the fundamentalist approach is to ban it – and the current GOP is not conservative, but fundamentalist-authoritarian. Anyway, here’s the latest twist in the debate:

Memo to Boston Globe gay and lesbian Guild employees: Get married or lose your domestic partner benefits. Globe staffers have been told that health and dental benefits for gay employees’ domestic partners are being discontinued. Gay couples who want to keep their benefits must marry by Jan. 1. A memo sent to the Globe’s Boston Newspaper Guild members, and obtained by the Herald, states that Massachusetts gay Guild employees can extend their benefits to their partners only if they marry.

And so the socially conservative impulse behind gay marriage is revealed – and proven in practice. This is the real slippery slope: of gay people sliding into integration and responsibility. And that’s what many alleged conservatives want to prevent.

An amazing rendition of a Gospel song, "So Amazing," by a remarkable college high school freshman, Jordan Booker. If you need some spiritual uplift this Sunday morning, you could hardly do better.

We get caught up in abstract debates. But here’s a riveting first-hand narrative of the astonishing risks and dangers so many face in order to become Americans.

A reader writes:

I regularly take part on a discussion group that is dominated by intelligent conservatives in the engineering fields – particularly automotive. Their ability to put on the blinders is incredible. Imagine a guy with an amazing IQ. A guy who can design practically every part on a motorcycle or manufacturing robot while discussing upper division economics and the folly of the allied strategy at Galipoli. Now bring up Bush and/or Iraq, and this guy is reduced to being a mouthpiece for NRO. The biting wit and piercing insight displayed in so many other arenas goes by the wayside.

This is the intellectual disconnect in the conservative movement right now. Dogma and opportunism has supplanted integrity and critical thinking.

It cannot continue indefinitely. When people such as yourself  "have no conservative credibility" rifts are created that will only get larger. Conservatives must ask themselves: "Is it more important to support our leaders although they have gone astray, and thus present a united front against creeping liberalism? Or is it better to oppose those whose actions are insupportable, regardless of party affiliation?"

It’s a difficult question, but one I’m familiar with. As probably the only regular reader of the National Review at Berkeley High School in the late 70s, I am drawn to certain aspects of each ideological camp – as you are. I would hope that there is enough  flexibility and integrity amongst the conservative intelligensia to adopt nuanced views and fight for what’s right, regardless of the source. Unfortunately, I fear that is not the case, that voices such as your own will continue to operate from the fringes, and your "purity" will continue to be questioned by either side.

An update on a story I recently linked to:

Some of you may know that the Iraqi national coach and the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 players were murdered recently – the newspaper reports said it was because they wore shorts in public. This, according to Haider [Abbud, a political/cultural advisor who is with the NATO training mission in Iraq], is false. They were killed because one of the players, who hailed from a town that is a hotbed of the insurgency, was approached and asked to drive a car bomb and detonate it in a neighborhood said to be frequented by Americans.

The player refused, partly because there were no longer foreigners in that neighborhood, just Iraqis. So the insurgents changed their plans and killed the tennis players instead. "It had nothing to do with wearing shorts," Haider told me. "These guys were very traditional and correct about things like that."

We need to be more aware of the hideous blackmail being played against ordinary Iraqis by the Jihadists, and others empowered by the anarchy Rumsfeld unleashed.