The Dish

It’s deepening as the Christianist Family Research Council suspects a gay Republican cabal is secretly blocking the religious right agenda on Capitol Hill. (That’s when the gays take time out from molesting children and poisoning the water supply.)

Camden, London, 9 am.

A reader writes:

I have to thank you for showing me a rational conservatism. As a 24-year-old idealistic liberal, my only experience with conservatism has been today’s bigoted, overspending, corrupt bunch of cronies. While I know there’s a deep tradition behind it all – personified in the politicians of yesteryear who would today be considered wacko liberals – it is yet to be apparent to me. That conservatism seems to be dead, or at least in a long, deep slumber, and it is completely foreign to those of us just entering the political realm. We know only vitriol, from both sides. It leads one to apathy.

Second: your religion essay in last week’s Time. I became an atheist early and have yet to really question it. As an atheist, seeing the incredible hypocrisy surrounding today’s evangelicals can cause some serious feelings of disdain for the entire world of religion. But your essay reminds me of the moderate Christians, such as my own mother, who are courageous enough to question the dogma and realize that actions and inner spirituality are what matter to God. I am proud to share the responsibility of transforming this country with those individuals. A strong, guiding faith — rather than a blind, unquestioning one — is something I appreciate and even envy, and for those of you who can reconcile reason with religion, I say more power to you.

Anyone who reads my book will see, I hope, that my intent is not to criticize Christianity, but to redescribe it for people who have only known of it through the extremism of the religious right.

A young Baghdad blogger witnesses yet another sectarian murder of a family friend:

When my father returned from his work today and heard the news, he immediately went to the balcony and sat all by himself, saying nothing, looking at the sky, I was afraid to look at him, and I experienced a cold shudder of sadness and molten anger.

I do not know Tariq al-Hashimi personally or his family relatives, but I know my father, and I know the sort of people he hangs out with. In the place where I come from, a religious person meant a guy who knew his rights from his wrongs, a person you could trust, a person who could never lie or steal; my father never scolded me for my guitar-playing or forced me to wear certain things ever, and he has the sign of praying (a patch of changed skin on the forehead that results of much praying when the forehead touches the ground) on his face. The people who he hung out with were good, honest people, people you could really love, people of virtue. NOT the extremist, life-hating, vengeful caricatures Muslims have been cornered into, nor are they the pro-Baathist dictator scum Sunnis in Iraq have often been shoe-horned as.

Whenever I would go into a mosque and sit down after prayer I would feel the peace engulfing me, a calamity and understanding that becalms one outside the cyclone of life outside, the constant searching for meaning and answers … the tough-guy posturing and the struggle for bread.

But now these people are exterminated, exploited and destoryed in this meaningless Wahabi vs Rafidhi war.

Iraq was not hopeless threee years ago. It is edging toward collapse today.

I’ll be grilled on my book on the Michael Medved radio show this afternoon between 4 and 5 pm EST. Tomorrow, I’ll be on NPR’s "All Things Considered" and the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. This coming Thursday, I’ll be reading and signing books at the Barnes and Noble at 82d Street and Broadway at 7 pm. You buy one, I’ll sign it. I’ll keep posting media appearances and book signings as they come along. It’s always great to meet readers of the blog.

"If Iraq’s leaders stop squabbling and lead, and if Iraq’s soldiers and police fight resolutely for their constitutional state, we should be willing to stay "as long as it takes." But if they continue to wallow in ethnic and religious partisanship while doing as little as possible for their own country, we need to leave and let them face the consequences. Give them one more year. And that’s it," – Ralph Peters, one of the most vociferous original backers of the war in Iraq. 

We finally have a clinical term to describe the bizarre intransigence of the Bush administration:

Tolstoy Syndrome is a description of a behavior of humans who ignore the truth despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The behavior is named after a quote from Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910):

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life".

A related Tolstoy quote is

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

The perils of certainty. The remaining danger of Bush.

They had the Foley page story months ago, and decided not to run with it. Ken Silverstein explains why. He says it has nothing to do with partisan politics, although he got the emails from a "Democratic operative". They didn’t run with the story because they didn’t have enough evidence. No IMs.

Long-time readers will know that I still consider myself a conservative, even one who feels repelled by so much the current administration and Congress have been up to: higher levels of spending than any administration since FDR, a doubling of the debt owed by the next generation, infringing on states’ rights, politicizing the constitution, bungling the most important war of our time, having more time for Terri Schiavo than Hurricane Katrina, pork-barrel corruption, undermining habeas corpus, authorizing torture, cynically using religious faith for political purposes.

None of this, I believe, is authentically conservative. None of it is what I became a conservative to support. I know I am not alone in feeling like a refugee from a political tradition I once felt very much at home in.

My book is an attempt not to make bloggy quick points about all of this but to take a few steps back and ask the harder questions about how we got here, what conservatism can still mean, and to make a solid case for restoring conservative values to their pride of place: limited government, lower spending, individual responsibility, individual freedom, prudent foreign policy, a separation of religious faith from electoral politics, states’ rights, checks and balances, and balanced budgets. I want a return to the "leave-us-alone" coalition of Reagan and Goldwater.

In the next few days, I’ll be YouTubing short segments of my presentation at the Cato Institute last week, along with David Brook’s rebuttal, and our debate.

Here are the first few minutes. More to come:

A party man. His argument? The only one he now has: the Democrats would be worse. How worse? Has any Democratic Congress spent as much and as indiscriminately as this crew? Has any Democratic Congress shoveled out the pork the way these people have? Not since LBJ has a president waged such an incompetent, poorly planned and failing war. The tired, lame excuse that the Democrats would be worse has been used now election after election. It’s time to call these people’s bluff. If the Republicans do not get punished in this climate, they will absorb one lesson alone: keep doing what you’re doing. You can get away with anything. It’s not healthy for the country and it’s not healthy for the Republicans. Throw them out.