Category: The Dish

Dale Carpenter makes it – calmly and brilliantly as ever. Ryan Sager argues for cultural federalism here. You have in this a classic example of the distinction between conservatism and fundamentalism. Conservatism seeks to govern society as it is and as it evolves. It allows for diversity and federalism and local rule. Instead of demonizing minorities, conservatives seek ways to integrate and include them and foster responsibility among them. Fundamentalists, in contrast, begin with an a priori religious deduction – homosexuality is Biblically or "naturally" wrong and homosexuals as such do not exist – and proceed to enforce that view on everyone. If constitutional procedures or principles of federalism get in the way of such doctrinal truth, then those procedures and principles must be abandoned. There is no extreme they will not seek, because God demands it. You saw that in the Terri Schiavo case, where the Christianist right abandoned even a pretense of believing in federalism or the rule of law. And you see it in the case of the FMA. This battle is not just about gays. It’s about the survival of limited government conservatism and inclusion within the Republican party.

It has been there from the start and it still, frankly, confounds me. We were told by the president that the Iraq war was the critical battle in the war on terror, an effort of enormous stakes that we couldn’t possibly lose. And then he went to war with half the troops necessary to win, with no plan for the aftermath, and refused to budge even when this became obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain. He says there is no greater friend or supporter of the troops, yet he sent them to do an impossible task, with insufficient numbers or support or even armor to accomplish the job. He said we face the equivalent of the Third World War and yet he has done nothing to increase the size of the military to meet the task. He said the invasion was to advance the principles of freedom and democracy, and yet he immediately abandoned those principles in our detention policy and has done more damage to the moral standing of the United States than anyone since the Vietnam war. He says he wants to build democracy, and yet he has gutted reconstruction funds, and withdrawn support for building democratic institutions. He said he will keep troops there until the job is done, and yet sustains a policy to draw down the troops as soon as possible.

There has always been a military solution to Iraq. There still is, as Fred Kagan recently showed in a long article in the Weekly Standard. It just required resources to achieve it, to pacify a post-totalitarian society, provide order and the context in which politics can happen. The American public would have approved the resources necessary, and made sacrifices if asked. And yet Bush has deliberately and by conscious choice allowed anarchy and terror to decimate Iraqi civil society. None of this helps the war; and none of it helps him. There are many times when I am simply baffled by the whole farce. Is he this stupid? Is he this blind? Or was this never a serious venture? Did Cheney and Rumsfeld never want to build a democracy in Iraq, just reduce it to rubble and chaos, while ensuring that Saddam could get no WMDs? Even now, I have no idea. But something here doesn’t add up. Incompetence doesn’t quite capture the enormity of the failure or the incoherence of the project. And so we stagger on, desperate for hope, but forced to confront the worst-managed war since Vietnam. Except the stakes are far, far higher than Vietnam. And the consequences of failure close to existential. I know that in part because Bush keeps telling us. Is he lying? Or is he just drowning in a job that he is simply unable to do?

She sees, I think, the degeneracy of the party she supports and the unseriousness of large swathes of the other party. In ordinary times, this might be par for the course. But when we face the fiscal crisis of a massive generational shift and the growing threat of Islamo-terrorism, it isn’t good enough. Part of me wants McCain to be defeated as a Republican nominee by the forces that have helped bring us to this point. Then we can have a centrist reformer who does not even have to lip-sync respect for the elements that have helped destroy a coherent conservatism and a united country. And he would be the most formidable third-party candidate in a very long time. And part of me sees him as the only way to rescue the Republicans from what they have become. It will be their choice. And it will be an interesting one.

Greg Gutfeld unveils a new feature to alert HuffPo readers before they stumble across something with which they might disagree. Of course, they could always just ignore all posts by Greg Gutfeld. But I digress …

"It makes me feel that the sound and smoke of explosions in Baghdad yesterday and today were not enough to wake up our politicians from their deep sleep," – Mohammed, frustrated, at Iraq The Model.

The Jesuits podcast. Thank God for the Jesuits.

Rick Santorum manages to come top of a crowded, mainly Republican, field.

As often, Ross Douthat makes a good point about where the Republican base is on the issue of immigration. But his anecdote makes me uneasy:

I was on Nantucket this weekend, where I went to the 7 PM Spanish-language mass on Nantucket (as did Teresa Heinz Kerry, who I had earlier spotted riding a tandem bicycle with her long-faced husband), and afterward my friends met me in the dusk outside, and as we stood there chatting a guy in a beat-up van cruised by, stuck his head out the window, and asked what was going on in the church.
"It’s the Spanish-language service," one of my friends said.
"Well, they oughta learn English already," the guy said, and drove off.

Ross uses this moment as an opportunity to lambaste McCain for not catering to the sentiments of the man in the pick-up truck. But are not those sentiments ugly? Does Ross believe the church should cease providing Spanish-speaking masses? Does he think the church is somehow wrong in this? It may be that McCain is wrong-headed on the immigration issue. But either you stand up to nativist prejudice or you don’t. This Ross seems to equate with "moral vanity". How about plain "morality"? Or inclusion? And what, remind me, is so wrong with that?

A reader makes this sharp observation:

When you linked to The Marketing of Evil, what caught my eye was the similarity between the subtext of this book and modern liberalism.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a man best described as "brilliantly wrong," burst on the scene with "The Affluent Society." TAS basically argued that the American people were well-meaning sheep. In their naivete, Americans would fall for any kind of slick advertising. JKG believed you could sell just about anything to the American people if you used enough bells and whistles. He wanted to show Americans the man behind the curtain so we would get on our knees, thank him for his wisdom and get behind increased government spending and excess at the hands of President Adlai Stevenson. That he was empirically wrong was of little consquence to him.

The Marketing of Evil doesn’t have the same goals as JKG. They would settle for Americans clamoring to overturn Roe, pretending gay people don’t exist and put the sexual revolution genie back in the bottle. But they don’t think the American people actually want Roe/gays/sexual freedom – we’re just naive sheep that follow the loudest bells, brightest colors and most pleasant whistles. And just like JKG, they will eventually be proven wrong – this is what the American people want. Americans may argue about how fast we are going "there," but our intellectual journeys aren’t the product of slick marketing. But just as JKG couldn’t comprehend why Americans favored a proven leader of men like Ike over the scholarly Adlai, the supporters of this tome cannot comprehend that America has chosen liberty over "traditional" morality.

A political movement is decadent when it starts describing the voters as duped sheep. And if the far right believes that Americans want to return to an era with gay people in the closet or jail, abortion banned, and contraception unavailable, they may soon be in for an electoral shock.

That is the term used by Michelle Malkin to describe her political opponents. I described it as a mark of incivility. A reader comments that I am missing the deeper resonance:

What is disturbing is when incivility moves to dehumanization. One need look no further than Rwanda to see the cockroach invective in play. The Hutus commonly referred to the Tutsis as "inyenzi," literally meaning cockroach. Though I’m certain that people like Malkin aren’t about to go on a machete waltz, the fact that political debate has devolved from disagreement to dehumanization is not a good sign. No good can come out of dehumanizing someone on the basis of politics. In my opinion it’s a sign of some kind of atavistic psychosis. Or, to put it better, as Cormac McCarthy said in Blood Meridian, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."

I wonder if Malkin would agree to withdraw the description, or issue some form of regret for it. We all occasionally say things we do not mean. Perhaps she will reconsider.