Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I am tempted to agree with your reader and declare you naive about what constitutes true conservatism. I have avoided yielding to that temptation, though, and your reader’s argument helps me to explain why.

First, though, I should disclose that I disagree with you on approximately half of what you write, and find many of your writings on Islam to be severely lacking in the intellectual humility that you display even when discussing subjects on which you are considerably better informed. Having said that, I disagree with your reader on the notion that you are naive when it comes to conservatism. The idea that:

All this crap you complain about now – this is the real conservatism. This is the conservative id, broken through the conservative super-ego and run rampant.

strikes me, based on my admittedly limited readings of Freud, as flawed. If we are to psychoanalyze conservatism as if it were a person, then the "real conservatism" is no more exclusive to the id than the "real" me is. Each of us is the sum (or perhaps more than the sum) of the interplay or conflict between the different aspects of our psyche: the id, the super-ego, and so on.

For all I know (and I have no way of knowing for certain), at the id-level, your feelings on Muslims, religion, and race may be no different than those of Mark Steyn, Sam Harris, and John Derbyshire, respectively. Yet even if this were to be proven as true, this would not make you the same as any of those people. We are more than our fundamentals; we are also what we make of those fundamentals. This was an important part of my interpretation of your book, with its emphasis on a conservatism rooted in tradition (contingency) but not bound by it.

The refusal to surrender conservatism to its worst elements (whether they are a majority or a minority) is not naive, no more so than is the refusal to surrender liberalism to unprincipled relativists, or Islam to violent fanatics. Being naive would be to deny the existence of those elements, which any reading of your blog would demonstrate that you do not. And of course "the strains we see in this current mess" (again, conservative, liberal, Islamist, or otherwise) can be traced back into history; where else would they come from? It is precisely because nothing can come from nothing that we cannot simply "reject it, and go on." Any attempted solutions will also have to be rooted in history and tradition. This may be a daunting task for each of us in our respective areas (political, ideological, or religious), but it would be naive to think that it can or should be avoided.

Put better than I could.

Sawtooths, Idaho, 9 am.

A reader reminds me that Bob Novak, the extremely well-connnected Beltway journalist, agreed with the very well-connected Republican apparatchik, Dinesh D’Souza, about the real motivation for war against Iraq among the top officials in the Bush administration. More impressively, he reported it before the invasion:

I can’t imagine that anybody would say, We’re going to war because there are 11 empty warheads, probably left over from 10 years ago. These warheads are not the nuclear weapons we’ve been warned about. They travel about 12 miles.

But this is being used as a pretext for a decision that’s already been made at high levels of the U.S. government to change the government in Iraq. It has nothing to do with, boy, we’re — we are really worried about these little chemical warheads that’s going to cause a holocaust in the Middle East.

Most disturbing thing is that Secretary of State Powell, a lot of people were relying on to keep some sanity, played the good soldier this week and said that at the end of the month, there would be more evidence. If there’s more, if there’s evidence, why not put it out now? …

the last thing that the hawks inside the administration, and their friends outside the administration, want is a coup d’etat that would replace Saddam Hussein. They want a war as a manifestation of U.S. power in the world and as a sign that the United States is capable of changing the balance of power and the political map of the Middle East.

There’s no question that the last thing they want is Saddam Hussein put on a plane and taken away …

Talking to a senior official, and he said to me, he said, Well, if we don’t hit in Iraq, where are we going to hit? And they – it’s a desire that the United States, the superpower, is going to manifest its authority to the rest of the world.

Listen, I just feel that this potential – this war, I just trust it comes off easily. But I have trepidation that it won’t be easy, and there’s going to be a terrible consequences from it.

My italics. Which "senior official" told Novak that this was the real rationale? Cheney maybe? One more piece of evidence that the key players knew the WMD evidence was weak and pushed it anyway.

"I’m in it to win it," – Senator Hillary Clinton, announcing her candidacy in January.

"This race is not about winning, because winning isn’t enough nowadays. Winning without dignity, winning it without honor, winning without authenticity and truth is not winning at all, and we’re not in it for that," – Michelle Obama, making the case for her husband last week.

Totally gay, according to this still-tingling viewer:

I caught 300 last night and thought I’d pass on my thoughts.

It is a deeply silly and deeply beautiful film. It’s most silly when it’s trying to be a movie, and it’s most beautiful when it’s trying to be a graphic novel.  Fortunately, it mostly just tries to be a graphic novel. But, ah, the men Andrew. All those beautiful, beautiful men dancing around in briefs and capes.  It almost brought me to tears. It is perhaps the gayest movie that I’ve ever seen that wasn’t porn.

Those who try to deconstruct the movie into a statement on the current war, or who say that it is racist or (most glaringly wrong) anti-gay are utterly missing the point. Everyone (perhaps excluding the Queen) in the film is gay. You have the butch gym queens of Sparta (I mean can any chisled man run around in speedos and a cape and call himself straight?), and the pierced, shaved, and bejeweled bar queens of Persia. It’s gay-on-gay violence, pure and simple. If I were to cast this film in any way (and it really is far too silly for this sort of analysis), I’d say it was portraying the libertarian, buffed and bearded Sullivanistas taking on the effete, decadent elites of the HRC. The movie is clearly on the side of the Sullivanista/Spartans, and so am I.

Here’s to speedos, capes, and libertarian principles!

Sure, but no speedos!

(Photo: Moviegoers in Sparta, some 200 kilometres south of Athens, enter a screening of ‘300’, the new Hollywood epic chronicling the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BCE, 07 March 2007. The Peloponnese town played host to an honourary premiere of the movie. By Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty.)

Some photos to cheer you up – at a right angle.

Sunday viewing:

The National Security Archive has posted all the court documents here. Enjoy.

It’s an absolutely riveting segment on Hannity and Colmes, where Sean Hannity is exposed as someone who preens as an orthodox Catholic in public, and is subsequently called a hypocrite by a theocon priest. Hannity, you see, supports legal, accessible birth control, as I do. By so doing, Hannity has dissented from the Catholic hierarchy’s view of sex: that it must invariably be open to procreation. And that very doctrine is the sole reed on which the entire edifice of the Church’s opposition to gay relationships stands: not that gays are incapable of love, but that we are barred sex, because such sex cannot be procreative. That’s why the Church (until its recent calumnies against "intrinsic disorders") could always claim it wasn’t homophobic. They were simply saying: hey, it’s the same rule for straights, guys. Pity that means you can’t have any sex – but they have to only have procreative sex with one other person their entire life. That’s not so easy either.

So Hannity’s position and my position are identical. And I feel his pain as a dissident Catholic. But, of course, I support legal birth control for straight couples, and he opposes even civil unions for gay couples. I’ve got his back but he … well, let’s leave that metaphor right there, shall we? The good news is: Finally, a right-wing Catholic is hoist by his own theocon petard. And notice how Hannity doesn’t really engage the theology, as I have tried to do. He just hurls the sex abuse crisis back in the priest’s face. Class-act, Hannity. Every time.

Still, the exchange does seem to me to open all sorts of possibilities for the theocons. Why not ask of all allegedly Catholic politicians: do they support legal access to birth control, and do they use it? If Benedict wants to enforce total public orthodoxy on issues important to Catholicism, he should be consistent. He should demand obedience not just on abortion, but gays and contraception as well. I have a feeling a lot of Catholic conservatives are going to find themselves seeing the bright side of secularism all of a sudden. Which leads to a fascinating question: will the Catholic hierarchy treat Giuliani the way they treated Kerry? And will the theocon right react the same way?

Stupid poetic justice, as Homer would say.

Has the image of the Republican party finally jumped the shark? My take is here in the Sunday Times. Money quote:

Scandals come and go in politics. In second terms for presidents, they invariably happen. The last two two-term presidents had crippling scandals knock them sideways in their final years. Reagan had Iran-contra. Clinton had Lewinsky. They still managed to achieve things — especially Reagan. But what’s happening now in Washington feels both superficially less riveting and more damaging.

Think of it as a perfect storm of many, many scandals, meeting over the increasingly warm political water of the Iraq war and becoming something potentially more lethal. In many ways the entire future of American conservatism is at stake.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)