Quote of the Day

Coulter_3

 "Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too."

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don’t understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an assertion that contains no more than fifteen words…

Shall I be fair? Coulter was trained as a lawyer, and she does have an understanding of the rules of evidence… If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite," – Chistopher Hitchens, on Ann Coulter.

Hewitt vs a Heretic

Hugh Hewitt has published a transcript of his "interview" with me yesterday. Here are some of his questions:

"Are you a Christian?"

"Do you believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead?"

"Do you consider yourself under the authority of Benedict, or before him, John Paul II?"

You can read my answers in the transcript. This was not an interview. It was an inquisition. I was having none of it, and refused to acquiesce in his attempt to hijack an interview. But when I tried to challenge him back, he wouldn’t answer. Money quote:

AS: How are you, as a Christian, able to support torture, Hugh?

HH: Now I want to go back … again …

AS: Again, you’re not answering.

HH: We’ll have … I’m not going to be interviewed … I’m interviewing you, because I did a lot of work to get ready for this interview, not to debate you. I want to know about your book.

AS: You can’t answer. You refuse to answer these questions.

HH: Has any…you are a proponent.

AS: How do you support the abrogation of habeas corpus, and the imposition of torture in America? That’s a very profound question. And why are you ducking it?

HH: Well, actually, as Justice Marshall said, it‚Äôs a very important question, and it’s also not a very difficult one. I don’t do either of those things. So that’s the end of it.

Really? This is what he wrote today:

The left hates Bush for a variety of reasons, chief among them that it is easy in this age when nothing is easy. It is safe to scream "torture" in an era when threats that boggle the mind are in fact pressing.

So it would appear that Hewitt does believe the use of torture is justified because of the stakes, but he refuses to say it outright because he knows that a true Christian could never say such a thing, without being exposed as someone who is actually the enemy of the teachings of Jesus. Or he has the exquisite moral position of a Glenn Reynolds who is simply anti-anti-torture – but, boy, is he opposed to one crank blogger’s "outing" of Republicans. Torture is a minor issue compared with that.

Then there are Hewitt’s readers and listeners. On Townhall.com, where he blogs, I have now been called a "Commiequeerbigocrap" and "homosexual sexual pervert". I just got an email from one of his listeners that wrote the following:

Your refusal to accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and your suggestion (from ignorance?) that our Lord’s death was not part of His plan have convinced my wife and I – who sat through the whole wetched hour – to vote a straight Republican ticket.

To clarify, I simply stated that the Gospels tell us that on the cross itself, as Jesus’ last words, he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" His last words were of doubt, doubt that God was not there – the doubt these fanatics want to expunge from true faith. But notice that they are voting Republican entirely on religious fundamentalist grounds. They prove the whole point of my book of how true conservatism has been subverted and destroyed by religious fanaticism, enabled by apparatchiks like Hewitt. And then, of course, what they really think. From an email from a Hewitt fan today:

Why were you so obnoxious on Hugh Hewitt?
Is it because you’re gay and dying of AIDS?

Read the transcript. It speaks volumes.

“Uncovered Meat”

That’s how one Muslim cleric in Australia describes women who do not wear the full Muslim chador, or are immodestly dressed. At the core of this kind of Islam is the notion of women as mere objects to men – and of men as sexual predators who cannot control their own desires. And that it is indeed incompatible with modern Western notions of basic equality and self-government.

Burke and Balance

A reader writes:

You almost got it right, when you said this:

"And I might add that this balancing act as a whole – sometimes favoring reformed liberalism, sometimes favoring chastened conservatism – might itself be called conservative in a philosophical sense because it rests on a prudential judgment as to what is right at any particular moment in a particular time and place. I.e. it is not a fixed ideology. It is about prudence or practical judgment. Which is, at root, a conservative insight."

Might? There is no might. It most certainly is conservative, and the idea of balance, prudence, and practical judgment comes from Edmund Burke himself. It’s all in the last paragraph of "Reflections on the Revolution in France":

"I have little to recommend my opinions but long observation and much impartiality. They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness; and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the Burke_8 tenour of his life. They come from one, almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others; from one in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever been kindled, but by what he considered as tyranny; and who snatches from his share in the endeavours which are used by good men to discredit opulent oppression, the hours he has employed on your affairs; and who in so doing persuades himself he has not departed from his usual office: they come from one who desires honours, distinctions, and emoluments, but little; and who expects them not at all; who has no contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy; who shuns contention, though he will hazard an opinion: from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end; and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise."

It is indeed the duty of the conservative to go to the other side if his side is the one marching towards tyranny. Principled, rather than partisan, conservatives will vote Democrat or abstain this fall.

The President for Torture

I cannot help but notice this casual aside in the Woodward book, a book that deserves its massive sales, because it exposes the incompetence, recklessness, and sheer brutality of the men who now run this country:

The Saudis had arrested and detained some key al Qaeda suspects immediately before and after 9/11. The president told Bandar, "If we get somebody and we can’t get them to cooperate, we’ll hand them over to you." … Though the Saudis denied it, the CIA believed the Saudis tortured terrorist suspects to make them talk. In the immediate wake of 9/11 Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained.

What’s striking both in Bush’s and Cheney’s attitude is that it never even occurs to them that there is a moral issue here. It’s a "no-brainer." Here we are on the outside having impassioned debates about the rights and wrongs of abuse and torture of detainees and these two most powerful men simply assume it’s fine. Their only concern is that they can find a legal euphemism in order to lie about it and pretend it isn’t happening. And remember who their base is: Christians. Orwell could not have invented this.