Not Just Walter Reed

The gag order I mentioned yesterday seems to be widening:

James Crawley, a military reporter with MediaGeneral and MRE president, said today’s revelation by Army Times that Walter Reed patients had been barred from speaking with reporters is not the first case of tightened restrictions. In recent months, he says several MRE members have reported similar crackdowns. What’s worse, many of the denials are apparently in reaction to the potential negativity of a planned story.

"It is starting to look like it is becoming a policy in some areas where they are not allowing reporters on the base unless it is an absolutely positively good news story," said Crawley. "The military is making it harder and harder to do stories on bases, as far as doing man on the street interviews."

A Pentagon spokesman contacted by E&P had no immediate comment.

The Far Right Void

Novak diagnoses the great irony of contemporary Republican politics: the machine that Bush and Rove built has no candidate. And the moderate candidates that are now the front-runners are busy sliming each other as liberals. Money quote:

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) attracting right-wingers nationwide to Washington this weekend, Citizens United will distribute a 23-page attack on McCain. "He’s no Ronald Reagan," it begins, and concludes: "John McCain is not a conservative." (McCain is the only announced Republican presidential hopeful not scheduled to speak at CPAC.) Simultaneously, McCain operatives are putting out material that depicts Giuliani riding into City Hall on the shoulders of the New York Liberal Party as a throwback to the old Tammany Hall Democratic machine.

Will a viable alternative run? Why not Santorum? These contradictions need heightening, if the Republicans truly are going to leave their recent past behind – or embrace it more thoroughly.

Quote for the Day

"As the church meditates on the passion of Jesus during Lent, the torture of prisoners by U.S.-approved methods (‘coercive interrogation’) should not be far from our minds. It is still being done in our name, to enhance national security. Apart from the debate over whether torture is ‘effective’ or not, Christ’s words, amplified by his own graphic suffering, mandate an end to this reprehensible brutality: "You did it to me," – Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University in New York City, in the Jesuit magazine, America.

Derb Goes There

Here’s a classic ramble from John Derbyshire, and it wouldn’t be published in most magazines, for the very reasons the old codger elaborates on here. I find Derbyshire’s easy acquiescence in the uglier parts of human nature pretty depressing. But acknowledging the uglier parts of human nature – and not pretending we can ever abolish them – is the beginning of political wisdom. In some ways, the first paragraph below is a very good summary of what one might call empirical conservatism. In brief: deal with reality. Over to Derb:

The beginning of wisdom is to look at humanity as it is, with its arms and legs, its eyes and tongues, its livers and kidneys, and its brains organized into modules, in some way like I sketched above, those modules busily processing information — information about light and temperature, visual and aural information, and above all (for we are social animals) social information.

I may choose, freely choose, to treat my fellow human beings well or badly; but my interactions with them are governed by my brain, which has evolved with the ability to do some things but not others. Utter indifference to group identity is a thing the brain cannot do. The denial of human nature gets us nowhere.

Whatever we think of Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jews and their “group evolutionary strategy,” he is at least talking about a real human personality, one that I recognize when I look at myself and other people. It’s a personality that is aware of belonging to groups, that vies for status in those groups and that nurses negative feelings of various degrees to at least some other groups. Even when it wishes no harm to any other group, if given the choice between advancing the interests of a group it belongs to, versus advancing the interests of a group it does not belong to, will choose the former action nine times out of ten.

That is humanity as I know it, and as the great novelists and dramatists have portrayed it, and as the human sciences are beginning to uncover it in fine detail through such disciplines as evolutionary history. The bloodless, deracinated, group-indifferent, “blank slate,” omnisympathetic creature promoted by the merchants of Political Correctness is one I do not recognize as human. Those merchants are human, though, for all they seek to deny it. Their lofty pretensions to have risen high above us grubby group-identifying lesser beings strike me as just another form, a particularly obnoxious form, of in-group status-striving.

The Mormon Question

Mormonsgeorgefreygetty

A reader expresses something that deserves an airing:

I’ve for a while read with interest as you’ve followed Romney closely. I particularly enjoyed watching you discover the oddities of his religion awhile back (the whole "undies affair"). His policies and flip-flops aside, I am, like Jake Weisberg, tempted to toss him aside as a viable candidate simply because of his religion. As much as it makes me feel like a bigot, I can’t help it. On paper, anyone who would call himself a Mormon is divorced from reality and reason. I must admit that I have atheistic biases, but even if I didn’t, Mormonism still stands with Scientology.

On the other hand is my personal experience. I have never met a Mormon I did not both like and respect. They have all been academically respectable and generally more worldly and accepting than your average religious type. They have been immensely and genuinely friendly and helpful. Responsible, upstanding, well-meaning individuals. I must admit that even as a liberal, atheist, drinking, pot-smoking guy, I have always enjoyed their company and valued their friendship.

But always in the back of my mind there is a voice: "This guy is a delusional lunatic." We’re fine with one another in the public, social world, but in our inside, private worlds, we could not be more different. I’m not sure where to go from there.

I think we leave it in the inside private world. Look: I believe that a man rose from the dead two millennia ago. Why am I not also "a delusional lunatic"? Cultic practices can be anathematized in a liberal democracy. Not religion.

But that makes it all the more important that religious people also respect the boundary between an inside, private world and an outside, social and political one. I know the boundaries can get fuzzy. Our faith will always inform our politics. But we have to insist on a space, a moment, a gap, between that private faith and public politics. That gap makes a secular democracy possible and political conversation feasible. Romney’s candidacy should stand or fall on his secular qualifications for a secular office. The tragedy is: Karl Rove and George W. Bush have made this a great deal harder in today’s G.O.P.

(Photo: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings with 21,000 other Mormons during the fourth session of the 174th Semi-Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the Conference Center in April 4, 2004 in Salt Lake City, Utah. By George Frey/Getty Images)