The Conservative Soul

A reader writes at 4 am this morning:

Yes, it’s the middle of the night and I should be sleeping, but I just finished your book and felt obliged to write (as a graduate student this is not that out of the ordinary for me).

Here, I think, is what many reviewers have missed. To read The Conservative Soul as a polemic, as a critique, as the musings of a man angered by what is happening only gets at a part – a small part – of what I saw in your book. To question the viability of what you wrote as a political project or as a set of doctrines is stupid. Beneath the political commentary was a discourse on a way of life, the essence of which was arrived at only through much struggle. Those who read your book "politically" – with an eye only to its ability to foster a political program – only betray their own lack of a conservative disposition, their inability to step back and wonder at this world, the mystery of our lives, and the truly important things such as friendship, love, and our relationship to God.

I too prefer present laughter to utopian bliss, and so perhaps most of all you should know your book helped me crack a smile as I continue to make my way through this world of pain and sorrow, joy and mystery.

Abandoning Stanley Kurtz

Even the conservative intellectuals who oppose marriage rights for all have now disowned the theories of Stanley Kurtz. David Blankenhorn is the latest to do so. Money quote:

"Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage causes the institution of marriage to get weaker."

Still, Blankenhorn soldiers on, trying to argue that there is a self-reinforcing correlation between support for marriage equality and opposition to traditional marriage. Dale Carpenter carefully pulls apart that much weaker attempt at problematizing gay marriage here.

What Rove Has Wrought?

I’m somewhat stunned by the ambivalence of many of my fellow Beltway pundits to  the seriousness of the charges in the U.S. Attorneys scandal. From the Chicago Tribune today:

"New Mexico’s David Iglesias got the boot after Republican lawmakers made it plain they were unhappy about his failure to seek indictments in an investigation of alleged Democratic corruption. John McKay of Washington state, who was also fired, had been chided by White House counsel Harriet Miers for not bringing charges of voter fraud in the aftermath of a governor’s race narrowly won by a Democrat."

The central question is whether the Bush administration has used the U.S. Attorneys as a systematic weapon in targeting the opposition party, rather than rooting out corruption and malfeasance wherever it appears. The natural inference from the evidence so far – and the conflicting stories from the administration – is that the eight fired attorneys were not being partisan enough.

But what is the actual pattern of prosecutions by U.S. Attorneys under the Bush administration? Here’s a month-old statistical study that seems to me to be worth wider examination. The authors of the study notice a fascinating wrinkle: there is not much partisan disparity in prosecutions at the state-wide or federal level, where the national press keeps tabs. But when you look at the local level, below the radar of the national media, you find something much more striking. If you remove Justice Department investigations of State-wide and federal elected officials from the tally, and look solely at investigations of local officials, you’re left with a stunning disparity:

From 2001 through 2006 the Bush Justice Department investigated elected Democratic office holders and office seekers locally (non-state-wide and non federal offices) at a rate more than seven times greater (nearly 85 percent to 12 percent) than they investigated local Republican elected office holders and seekers. This was so even though, throughout the nation, Democrat elected officials outnumber Republican elected officials at the rate of only 50 percent to 41 percent. Nine percent of elected officials are Independent/Other.

This strikes me as classic Rove. He works below the radar, using the U.S. Attorney system to throttle the opposition party, knowing that only local media will pick up on the local stories and that the pattern likely won’t emerge in the national media. Hence the panic from Gonzales when the media started pulling at the thread. Pull some more, guys. We may have deep, deep corruption of the justice system, all designed to foment unstoppable, uncheckable one-party rule.

Hicks

A reader writes:

You say that Hicks "knowingly aided a terrorist organization". How do you know this? How do any of us know what any of the Gitmo detainees are, or are not, guilty of? I wouldn’t take a detainee’s guilty plea as gospel. From what I can tell, Hicks is probably willing to admit to anything in exchange for the possibility of returning to Australia. Witnessing the denial of due process (and summarily sacking defendant’s counsel is a prime example of such denial), witnessing the utter lack of transparency of Gitmo’s legal machinations, what are to make of a defendant like Hicks and his pleas/statements? The system the Bush administration has set up at Gitmo self-devours any possibility of the legitimacy that normally flows from Anglo-American criminal procedure.

I don’t know whether to trust his confession. He’s in a kangaroo court system, where two of his three attorneys can be thrown out of the court on the same day for the pettiest of reasons. The judge is quite obviously biased. But there’s a mountain of reliable evidence that Hicks was mixed up with some very unsavory characters around the world. We’ll never know for sure, of course, because of the Orwellian system Bush and Cheney set up to torture, intimidate and psychologically brutalize "enemy combatants." Here’s another first-hand account of the bizarre goings-on in Gitmo’s "court" system.