The Dish

A movement finds its artform. (The artist is Jorge Terrones.)

(Yes, I know Zell Miller is not a Republican. He’s a Dixiecrat with a passion for shooting things and a blind eye for torture. Which, in 2006, means he’s a Republican.)

A reader writes:

I think you’re still missing the point on the regulation of Catholic adoption agencies in the UK.

The question isn’t, "Where do they get their funding?" – it’s "Where did they get the babies?" Presumably the stork didn’t drop them off at the convent. (And if that’s what the nuns are claiming, then the matter needs to be investigated further.) None of these kids was born under the legal guardianship of the Church or its agencies. That guardianship is presumably assigned by British law on the theory that Catholic charities (among others) will do a good job of looking after the children’s best interests. But if the charities turn down potential adoptive parents on spurious grounds, they aren’t doing that.

The issue is how spurious the grounds are. They are spurious by any objective measure of parenting skills; but the Church has a right to uphold bigotry as part of its theology. In fact, it’s almost obsessed with doing so – at the expense of its deeper, moral obligations. The state can and should withdraw support for such bigotry, but the Church still has a right, in my view, to maintain its stance of stigmatization and discrimination against homosexuals.

The Mahdi Army is not surrendering in terror, as Instapundit ludicrously implies. They’re calculating and waiting. From the Washington Post today:

Sadr’s followers say publicly that they embrace the new Baghdad security plan and are willing to support the Iraqi government’s efforts to impose the rule of law in this chaotic city. But some Iraqi and U.S. officials said they are concerned that the stance is a pose and that Shiite militias intend to lie low only until U.S. forces withdraw.

"There’s absolutely no reason to believe that these groups have changed their tune in any significant way" since the 2004 battles, said a U.S. official in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity. "You could make an argument that there’s just a level of exhaustion that’s set in, but I find that not believable."

A more likely scenario is that the militia leaders believe they can "win the whole thing" if they are not too damaged by the time the United States withdraws, the official said …

Maliki is aware of concerns that the militias may be biding their time rather than sincerely taking peaceful steps, his aide said. "This is a classic insurgency tactic, to hide when the troops are around and then reappear when the troops are gone," the aide said. "This is very much understood by the government and by the prime minister, and measures are being taken to make it a failure."

Those measures are not, however, specified. Hmmm.

Here is the text delivered by Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning:

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A reader says it’s really simple:

He is just an ordinary man of average, intelligence, not there’s anything wrong with that. He doesn’t have a lot of interests. He’s not very deep. He doesn’t worry or ponder too much about life. He is sort of a simple guy, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Now, he is at the center of high pressure, high stakes, power politics. He controls trillions of dollars; he is waging a complicated war that is not going well, which was planned and orchestrated on lies, which he must justify and explain. Now, it is all coming undone. The spotlight is on him. He must speak. He must think. He must lead. It is very difficult for him. Sometimes, I feel pangs of hate for him, for what he is doing for our country. Other times, I think, "poor guy." That’s what’s wrong with him.

Mexico City, Mexico, 6.10 pm.

The contrast between his linguistic bumbling today and his verbal facility and acumen ten years’ ago is somewhat mystifying. I don’t buy the "pre-senile dementia" theory. Is he exhausted? Have five years of war worn him down? Or has he decided that obfuscation is a better strategy than clarity? Anyway, here are some clips. They contrast the earlier best with the current worst. But the contrast is a little too great to be dismissed as a function of clever editing.

Some readers have objected to my post yesterday. They argue that the Catholic adoption agencies in Britain receive government money, and if they do, it is not a denial of religious liberty for the government to attach conditions to that money. I’m not completely clear on the precise financing of Catholic adoption charities in Britain, but if that’s the case, it does indeed change the dynamic. It’s the same issue as the Boy Scouts. I’m all for their right as a private association to discriminate against gays, but not if they are the recipient of government aid and privilege. The always-insightful Arthur Silber had a very good treatment of this issue on his blog a couple of years back which a reader pointed me toward. Enjoy.

Glenn Greenwald has written a lengthy review of my book. I’m grateful for it and share his amazement that Rich Lowry can actually say the following with a straight face:

In recent years, we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its utter disinterest [sic] in the reforms that America needs. And at the same time, we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party and, more importantly, fail to take the steps – until perhaps now – fail to take the steps to win a major foreign war …

So we need to figure out a way how to make conservative policy and principles appealing and relevant again to the American public, and we need to do it together.

What you mean "we"? Doubtless, Lowry will be able to scour his own writings and magazine to find some evidence of his own token opposition to Bush’s attack on conservatism and mismanagement of a vital war over the past four years. But the record is also clear that Lowry never faltered in backing this president and the current Republican party whenever it mattered –  long after the grotesque abuse of conservatism had became obvious, and long after the shambolic war-management was exposed.

Greenwald also wants to argue, however, that my own version of "conservatism" has never existed in America, and has no relationship to the conservative movement in reality. Money quote:

Sullivan’s principal argument that the Bush presidency never adhered to conservative principles is true enough, but the same can be said of the entire American conservative political movement. That is why they bred and elevated George Bush for six years, and suddenly "realized" that he was "not a conservative" only once political expediency required it.

Greenwald points to Reagan’s deficit spending, his courting of the Christianist right, the law-breaking of Iran-Contra as fore-runners of Bush "conservatism." Money quote:

The pornography-obsessed Ed Meese and the utter lawlessness of the Iran-contra scandal were merely the Reagan precursors to the Bush excesses which Sullivan finds so "anti-conservative." The Bush presidency is an extension, an outgrowth, of the roots of political conservatism in this country, not a betrayal of them.

Greenwald has a point, but it is by no means a slam-dunk. His strongest arguments are on Iran-Contra and the deficit. I remember Iran-Contra well, because I was a young geek at TNR and witnessed the fervent debates in the magazine at the time. My view was that the Iran-Contra deal was wrong, illegal and stupid (and wrote editorials on those lines). I was pro-contra, but not in favor of illegal executive shenanigans to fund them. Yes, some conservatives were far too comfortable with executive law-breaking back then. But many weren’t. And to reduce Reagan’s Cold War coup de grace to the Iran-Contra affair is to miss the point. The defeat and peaceful implosion of the Soviet union remains an achievement – fusing the passion of Reagan with the prudence of the first Bush – that conservatives remain rightly proud of.

On Reagan’s deficits, the bulk of it was due to ramped up defense spending – spending that, after the suddent defeat of the Soviets, helped pay for itself in the 1990s. Still, I differed even then, and was more of a Thatcherite, believing in fiscal rectitude as the mark of responsible government. There were many conservatives in that position. The first Bush did a great deal to shore up that legacy, and Gingrich-Clinton helped it along in the mid-1990s. None of this compares to the staggering increase in both defense-related and non-defense discretionary spending under Bush and the Congress in Bush’s presidency. Reagan opposed Medicare, period. Bush put it on steroids. Can you imagine Reagan saying, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move?" Can you imagine him federalizing education policy and increasing education spending by over 100 percent in four years? Can you imagine him signing a transportation bill with over 6,000 earmarks in it? Inconceivable.

Reagan did play to the religious right. But it was a minor variation in a larger piece of music. The man won 49 states, red, blue and everything in between. California was in his column twice. He never abandoned the libertarian aspects of the conservative coalition; and his appeal to evangelicals was largely about resisting the tide of judicial over-reach, and reassuring them that they too would be "left alone." The notion of constructing a Republican party on the foundation of Dixie and appealing on explicitly religious grounds as a "born-again" president was not Reagan’s cup of tea. It was more Carter than Reagan, in fact – which is why it is unsurprising that a key Bush intellectual, Michael Gerson, was once a fervent Carter supporter.

It may be that my idealized form of conservatism – small government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, strong defense – is not to be found in pristine condition in history. I concede that upfront in the book. It may be that my Thatcherite lineage and English origins made me miss some important and darker aspects of American conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s. But it may also be that conservatism was a victim of its own success – and subsequently went on an avoidable over-reach that many conservatives are only now regretting.

Conservatism, in other words, could have gone in many directions in the new century. That it embraced bigger and bigger government, massive entitlement growth, indefinite infringement of habeas corpus, legalization of torture, massive long-term debt, federal trampling of states’ rights, pork-barrel corruption and half-assed, half-baked war-making was not inevitable, and not indistinguishable from other, far more coherent paths in the conservative past.

Bush and his allies made a choice to betray conservatism. And they have come to regret it sooner than they might have thought.

(Photos: Getty Agency.)

The truly bizarre story in the NYT today about Jacques Chirac’s interview do-over prompts a couple of responses. One is that, once again, the French are wimping out on deterrence in the Middle East. But the other is that Chirac, like any self-respecting Parisian, is always more lucid after a decent bottle of wine:

The president had a different demeanor during the two encounters.

In the first interview, which took place in the late morning, he appeared distracted at times, grasping for names and dates and relying on advisers to fill in the blanks. His hands shook slightly. When he spoke about climate change, he read from prepared talking points printed in large letters and highlighted in yellow and pink.

By contrast, in the second interview, which came just after lunch, he appeared both confident and comfortable with the subject matter.

It must have come from one of the better cellars.