The Dish

My review of DInesh D’Souza’s bold new vision for the right – globalized theoconservatism – is now posted at The New Republic. The Islamist-Christianist alliance has been christened. And it is being defended by D’Souza in a four-part series on National Review Online starting today! Far from being ostracized, D’Souza is being given a massive platform to promote his vision in the most established journal of American conservatism that now exists. So please, don’t tell me this guy isn’t part of mainstream conservatism. He is – although mercifully, many conservatives are fighting back.

In the U.S. attorneys scandal, you knew this would eventually emerge. The sudden removal and replacement of a U.S. attorney involved in looking into the Abramoff scandal? Here’s the story from the Boston Globe two years ago – and it all makes more sense today. (Hat tip: C&L.)

Are you sitting down? The Specter staffer who inserted the clause into the Patriot Act giving the president new power to by-pass the Senate in appointing U.S. Attorneys … was rewarded by becoming a U.S Attorney! Karen Tumulty has more here and here.

It’s always a little awkward listening to a military man speak about "morality". I recommend listening to the audio at the Chicago Tribune. One recalls Winston Churchill’s remark:

"Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash."

But, as always, it’s worth considering the argument. Pace makes a clear analogy in an attempt to argue that he is not being prejudiced toward a group, just punctilious in enforcing his view of morality. He says excluding openly gay servicemembers is morally equivalent to excluding servicemembers who commit adultery with the wives of other servicemembers. But those are two different issues, right? We’re not talking merely about gay servicemembers who have affairs with other servicemembers, are we? That would fall into the category of conduct obviously detrimental to morale and cohesion. We’re talking merely about gay servicemembers who may or may not have relationships or sex with people off-base or in their private lives. If the military threw out every straight servicemember who has ever had a sexual indiscretion or failing off-base or in their private lives, how many people would be left in the military? So the analogy falls apart upon inspection.

The question to ask Pace now is: why does he think a homosexual act is immoral? Is it because such a  sexual act cannot procreate, as the Catholic hierarchy argues? In which case, one expects contraception banned on all military bases. Is it because the Bible says so? In which case, we do not have a secular military, and all sorts of other Biblical injunctions need to be applied. So why is it immoral? This is not the first time that Pace has spoken on this subject. At Wharton Business School, he remarked last year that

"The U.S. military mission fundamentally rests on the trust, confidence and cooperation amongst its members. And the homosexual lifestyle does not comport with that kind of trust and confidence and therefore is not supported within the U.S. Military."

What on earth does he mean by that? That it is impossible to have confidence, trust or cooperation in someone who is openly gay? Or does he have some Kaus-like fantasies of what gay life is like that makes him think we’re all duplicitous or sexually predatory and therefore unqualified to be good servicemembers? What century is he living in?

I think, given the thousands of gay men and women now putting their lives on the line for their country, Pace must give an answer. Does he believe that U.S. Marine Eric Alva, who lost a leg for his country in Iraq, is someone who is not compatible with "the trust, confidence and cooperation" that Pace expects from his men and women? Pace has maligned large numbers of his own troops, and millions of other Americans as intrinsically immoral. At the next press conference, or Congressional hearing, he needs to be asked directly what the rational basis is for his "moral" test. He started this conversation. He now needs to continue it.

(Photo of Alva by Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty.)

"I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed. It will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don’t have replacements ready to roll immediately. I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments. [By sidestepping the confirmation process] we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House," – Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’s Chief of Staff.

We now know that a political purge of U.S. attorneys was directed by the president through the attorney-general, and was enabled by the Patriot Act. The alleged reason for removing the U.S. attorneys – which the administration took a while to come up with – is that the U.S. attorneys were insufficiently devoted to rooting out Democratic voters’ alleged voter fraud. (For a guide to this scam, see Josh Marshall’s long obsession, which now seems a little more justified and a lot less boring than it once did. For TPM’s full backfill on the U.S. Attorneys story, click here.)

It seems to me pretty obvious that they’ve been caught trying to rig the justice system to perpetuate Republican control of the House and Senate. It seems to me that this originates with the president and Karl Rove. And it seems more than obvious to me that Alberto Gonzales should resign. No attorney-general with this kind of cloud over him can faintly summon public confidence as a neutral enforcer of justice.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

They have – surprise! – not answered the question posed. I asked how many people had paid the suggested minimum membership fee of $35 in the last twelve months. They have responded with their own definitions of a "member" and a "supporter", definitions which were amended last June in the by-laws (after that Blade article came out). A "member" is defined by the Human Rights Campaign as anyone who has contributed as little as $5 – whether that means contributing $5 or buying a $5 magnet in one of their stores – over a two-year period. So it’s $2.50 minimum membership a year, and it includes people who didn’t even think they were becoming "members". (That’s up from $1 a year in 2005.) "Supporters" are defined as anyone who has ever "taken action," which means anyone who has ever given HRC his or her email address. No dues are required for this at all. So HRC tells me the following:

According to the descriptions above, we currently have 379,429 "members" and 353,402 "supporters" of HRC, coming to a grand membership total of over 730,000. (So, in fact, you were right: Our membership is not 650,000, it’s 732,831.)

Er: no. By HRC’s own definition, they have a "membership" of roughly 380,000 members over two years, if you define that by a minimum purchase of $2.50 a year. If you assume that membership stays even across years, that gives us 190,000 actual "members" in the last twelve months. I asked, of course, for how many had paid the $35 suggested membership fee on their website. Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to find out that number. Oh well.

So now for five simple questions with respect to the group, which they have graciously agreed to answer:

What do you regard as your three most significant legislative or organizational achievements in the last five years?

What percentage of the 2006 budget for all of HRC (both foundation and lobbying group) was taken up by fundraising, events, mortgage payments and administration?

What percentage was devoted to lobbying and organizing?

What are your goals for the 2007 – 2009 legislative session?

How many people are on your bi-partisan board and how many are registered Republicans?

I promise to post their response in full on this blog, without any comment from me, and ask them merely to be as succinct as possible. My sole aim is accountability and progress toward gay equality. There’s no doubt that many people at HRC do good work and are good people. But there’s also no doubt that many donors and gay rights supporters have serious questions about their efficiency, accountability, effectiveness and transparency. It helps HRC to clear these up.

Michael Hirschorn, who surfs pop-culture the way water-striders move over ponds, turns his beady eye toward the buzz generated by the "social networking" wave on the web. He’s underwhelmed:

As a fairly regular user of MySpace — an unbeatable tool for tapping into youth culture — I can vouch for both the intoxicating appeal of the experience and the strung-out, crispy, crawling-home-from-a-nightclub comedown that quickly follows. After a brief rush of ‘friend’-gathering — I know maybe half of them in real life — I now spend most of my time fending off the same type of spam that used to litter my dial-up AOL account, while ignoring endless ads for the True singles service. The random, out-of-the-blue friend request, one can bet, will soon reveal itself to be a proposition for lesbian Web-cam sex or a mortgage refi…

[MySpace] now is so large — 100 million-plus registered accounts — that it has almost come to be a proxy for the Internet itself. This is the problem with the social-media phenomenon. MySpace once enabled a remarkable social renaissance: Because of the site’s indefinable halo effect, you would answer e-mails you would normally never open, meet people you’d never suffer otherwise (‘Bill O’Reilly’ is one of my MySpace friends). It was, in fact, not unlike freshman year at college. But what’s remarkable soon becomes ordinary. MySpace remains cool — thanks to surprisingly deft stewardship by its new owner, News Corp. — but nothing is cool forever. And once the tantalizing pull of millions of people you could possibly be best friends with wears off, you’re left with some by now pretty ordinary functionality: blogging; instant messaging; photo, video, and audio uploads; networking tools. Thanks to the inexorable process of Web innovation, such stuff goes from ‘OMG’ to ‘Whatever’ in no time flat.

The cool kids are already moving on. And if Hirschorn knows anything, it’s where the cool kids are.

Here’s a challenging essay from TCS, arguing that true conservatism is really what many on the so-called left now actually favor. Money quote:

In 1957, the young political scientist Samuel Huntington, according to Mark Henrie, famously defined American conservatism, as an ideology seeking to "conserve and consolidate the progressive liberal tradition." Since America was founded on enlightenment liberalism, conservation of the status quo meant a vigorous defense of meritocracy, individual freedom and free markets. This stands in contrast to European conservatism, which was pushed forward by Agrarian landholders seeking to defend aristocracy from the radical concepts of democracy and capitalism.

Except that British conservatism in the age of Thatcher decisively broke with that tradition, and became a more American model. And American conservatism under Bush has retreated to a more pre-enlightenment, European model. Exhibit A: theoconservatism. I have no idea which party will represent the small-government, individual freedom model of post-modern society. I once thought that the Republicans would always have the edge in this fight against the statist left. Now, I’m not so sure. Which is why this election, and the many brands of liberalism and conservatism on offer is such a pivotal and fascinating one.

Huntington, New York, 5.30 pm.

At long last, a major, mainstream evangelical group has taken aim at the Bush administration’s torture policy:

The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed "boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible" in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

Human rights violations committed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks have made the country look hypocritical to the Muslim world, the document states. Christians have an obligation rooted in Scripture to help Americans "regain our moral clarity." …

The statement, "An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror," was drafted by 17 evangelical scholars, writers and activists who call themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group, announced late Sunday that it had endorsed the document…

Quoting a wide range of sources including the Bible, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the authors say the federal government has a moral obligation to follow international human rights treaties that the U.S. has endorsed.

"As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation’s actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms," the document says. "We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of these Christian moral convictions."

The NAE says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches. However, it does not include some of the best-known conservative Christian bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family.

So that’s the next obvious step; asking the SBC and James Dobson to take a similar stand. But this is good news. For more info on religious groups against torture, click here.