The Dish

I’m struck by how many emailers concur with my correspondent yesterday. Here are a couple of typical ones:

Yes it could well be Gore in ’08. There are many reasons but the most powerful is his statesman’s status. He has a unique, unassailable position in having won 2000 but lost in the Supreme Court, and his wilderness years have strengthened and matured him, allowed him to speak his mind forthrightly and without calculation. After all, what further could anyone do politically to Al Gore that he has not already suffered?

Personally, I found his recent speeches absolutely electrifying; I was truly stunned by his transformation. He has become America’s conscience, and is warm, articulate and impassioned. He has gone through the valley of tears and what did not break him has strengthened and transformed him – I will use that word again. In comparison, Hillary’s politcal calculations look tawdry and obvious.

Another heartland Democrat agrees:

Hillary’s problems are beyond her weakness with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party – which I would argue isn’t so much its base as its activism – as is her high negative Q ratings and the persistent reluctance of voters to elect a woman president. (This is the elephant in the living room, the thing nobody wants to talk about but which lurks in the subconscious of the American psyche.) Gore has a somewhat "softer" image than Hillary, is considered far more likeable – which he has enhanced over the past five years – and still harkens back to the "good ol days" of the Clinton Administration (which recent polls, to nobody’s surprise except Bush loyalists, indicate Americans in retrospect preferred).
Here in the Heartland, which so many of the East Coast pundits seem to ignore so easily – yet historically proves to be the bellwether for voting trends – Gore plays considerably better than Hillary. Rank and file Democrats, including Yellow-dog Democrats such as myself, will still vote for Hillary – but I think most of us would prefer Gore.

Josh Marshall gets it as well. Check out Gore’s SNL appearance here. Review here. My own preference for Bush over Gore in 2000 was primarily because I feared Gore would increase government spending and regulation too much. Yeah: I know. Gore’s credibility on the environment – a growing issue – his history of foreign policy hawkishness but opposition to the Iraq war, and his general association with what has become Clinton era nostalgia, do indeed make him an interesting possibility. Then there’s just the karma. If we’re looking to heal the wound of 2000, who better?

"It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," – a senior federal law enforcement official, to ABC News.

The government is now apparently tracking calls made by reporters to sources to stop and prevent leaking. So a program designed to monitor potential terrorists has swiftly become one able to monitor journalists. Why am I unsurprised? Josh makes the obvious but vital point here. The issue is not just whether something is legal; it’s whether it’s open to abuse.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the rise of Christianism has been the attempt to coopt the armed forces. We have already seen what happened at the Air Force Academy, where Christianists corralled individuals, Christian and otherwise, into public praying along the lines of the religious right. We have seen a top army general publicly depicting the war on Islamist terrorism as a fight between Christ and Muhammed. We have another general sending out campaign pamphlets from his work computer, urging the election of Christianists to Congress. No one objects to private and voluntary prayer groups that allow servicemembers a choice as to how they collectively pray. But in public meetings, where everyone is present, the prayers should indeed be non-sectarian, inclusive, perhaps ideally be a moment of silence, as current military rules insist. That’s what the Christianists object to. They seek to impose their faith as the public one for all Americans, and have slipped such a provision into the military appropriations bill. The National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces opposes it. Others do too:

Among the provision’s opponents is the chief of Navy chaplains, Rear Adm. Louis V. Iasiello, a Roman Catholic priest.
"The language ignores and negates the primary duties of the chaplain to support the religious needs of the entire crew" and "will, in the end, marginalize chaplains and degrade their use and effectiveness," Iasiello wrote in a letter to a committee member.

Still, the Christianists forge ahead, controlling the majority political party, and seeing their opponents as opposing Christianity itself. The ironies are acute. We are currently attempting to construct an Iraqi army that has nothing to do with sectarian or religious loyalties. At the same time, Christianists are trying to turn the U.S. military into their own sectarian force. The religious neutrality of the military is integral to a free and secular society. That’s why the Christianists have taken it on in America; it’s why the Islamists oppose it in Iraq; and that’s why they both have to be stopped.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali faces deportation from Holland for lying on her asylum form over a decade ago. She claimed she was fleeing an arranged marriage, when in fact she was merely fleeing the constrictions of Somalia. AEI is lucky to have her. A former illegal immigrant? A person devoted to freedom of speech? A person of color willing to criticize other persons of color? Sounds like an American to me.

"One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this [NSA] meta-data-[gathering] is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn’t like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you’ll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself," – Matt Yglesias, American Prospect. Apart from that, American liberty is alive and well.

I’m not quite done yet. Here’s one point worth dealing with. It’s the notion that everyone has a religion, whether they call it that or not – including "secular humanism" – and that trying to curtail Christianity or Islam or any other faith from direct application to political life and civil law creates a double-standard. People can bring their secular worldviews into politics, but Christians cannot bring their religious doctrines. No fair, many argue. In fact, these rules are actively discriminatory against Christian fundamentalists. Hence the so-called "war on Christianity."

This argument is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of religion. The difference between a world-view, based on empirical evidence or reason or personal experience and open to debate, and a religion, based on an inerrant text or revelation or church authority and closed to doubt, is that the religion demands to be taken much more seriously. It insists on its own divine authority – as it must – and that authority cannot be held hostage to the results of a political conversation or debate or election. It rests on God Almighty. By definition, therefore, the conflation of our politics with the will of God makes political discourse largely impossible, because we don’t all believe in the same God or even in God at all. And so the introduction of religious authority into politics makes all our political dealings inseparable from profound differences over the deepest things – the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of God, and so on.

Politics, as we have come to understand it in the West, cannot operate on those grounds. It did once. And Europe was filled with the smoke from the burning flesh of heretics. The decision to remove such profound issues from politics was definitive of the West’s emergence from the dark ages, and it is integral to any understanding of the American experiment in limited government and individual liberty. The absolute demands of fundamentalist faith make the West’s tradition of civil compromise impossible; and they constantly push the boundaries of what is acceptable to God, as religious purists outdo each other in proving their righteousness – whether it be keeping comatose patients alive for decades or defining a zygote as a full human person. Hence our politics has degenerated into a "culture war." Wars are what happens when politics become impossible. And that is the corrosive effect of Christianism; and why it must be resisted – for the sake of American discourse and for the sake of a vibrant, humble apolitical Christianity.

A reader predicts:

Thanks again for another fine column … but it will be Gore in ’08, not Hillary. Hillary is like the guy in the gym who only works the upper body and has the biggest arms, chest and shoulders, but his legs (his base, if you will) are weak. Just like the top heavy gym stud who can easily be beaten by a quick blow to his legs, Hillary (who has really bad legs!) can be toppled too.
Feingold (the Dean of ’08) will hit Hillary hard and undercut her liberal support-supposedly her rock solid base. Now, I can hear you scream at your screen, "that’s just what Hillary wants – a candidate that makes her look less liberal!"
Yeah … but once Feingold exposes that Hillary has been wrong on so many issues Dems care about (Iraq, civil liberties, Iraq, attacking Bush), she’ll be reduced to normal size for others to take on. Gore can sit back and watch Feingold do the dirty work and get in as Hillary weakens.
Gore’s big advantages: he’s been right on the issues, he retains stature among Democrats, and, surprisingly, he’ll appear fresh from being away so long. Other than SNL last night, when was the last time you saw Gore on TV (and if you didn’t see Gore on SNL…go to Crooksandliars.com for a very good laugh!)?
Gore-Warner is the winning ticket in ’08.

I’d dismiss this if a very canny Republican hadn’t said exactly the same thing to me the other night. I still cannot see it. But in politics, anything can happen, I suppose.

(Photo: Frederick M Brown/Getty).

Garance has an update, and some friendly advice for liberal pundits unused to the rough and ready world of the blogosphere.

It was sad, if understandable, to read the encomiums to the late John Kenneth Galbraith penned by those still influential in liberal and Democratic circles at the time of his death last month. And yet this man was so wrong about so much for so long and with such disdain for the empirical refutation of his theories that he deserves little in retrospect but our pity. He represents the highwater mark of hubris for technocratic liberal triumphalism, as well as its fathomless self-regard and supercilious intolerance of other ways of thinking. Clive Crook gets it right:

He appeared to believe that the sensible thing would be to find more brilliant men like himself, difficult though this would be, and to put them in charge. This approach to managing the economy would become more desirable over time, not less, because economic growth would otherwise mean the increasing accrual of power to corporate interests. The countervailing power of the state would need to grow in response – just the opposite of what modern economic orthodoxy (based on all that specious math) called for.

Modern liberals’ continued attachment to men like Galbraith, rather like their inability to concede that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were Communist traitors and spies, is an impediment to a revived liberalism. Because the truth matters. And Galbraith was on the wrong side of the truth for most of his life. This was a man who was still impressed by the Soviet Union in 1984. The only response to a person like that is sadness mixed with contempt.

Update: Brad DeLong has a (predictably) different take on Galbraith here.

(Hat tip: Tom). (Time cover, February 1968, by Frank Lerner.)

A liberal reader explains why he’s open to a McCain candidacy – and it’s not because McCain is a liberal:

The people bashing you for what you’ve written about McCain are wrong to suggest that McCain will turn out to be another Bush.

I have a lot of problems with Bush, and I’m a liberal. But they’re not problems that are rooted in his conservatism.  I’m on the left, but if a conservative wins, then those are the rules, that’s the outcome, and I can live with it.  I believe in democracy.
My problems with Bush come from his contempt for our system and our values.  He’s a guy who looks for reasons to torture people, and for legal excuses to cover him after he does. He doesn’t believe in checks and balances, or in any restraints on executive power. He doesn’t think search warrants or judicial supervision is a good thing. He doesn’t think Congress should have any role in oversight.

Those aren’t conservative postions. They don’t really have much connection to anything in the American political tradition. They express a kind of ignorance of, or perhaps even a contempt for, what’s made this country great.

McCain is a conservative, and in normal times, I’d oppose him.  To give you an example of a policy on which I disagree strongly with him, I’d toss out the recent bankruptcy law. I think that was terrible, that it hurts working poor people. McCain was a big supporter of it. I don’t have any illusions about him on those kinds of issues.

But I believe that McCain believes the same sorts of things about the way our government should be structured that most everyone else does. I think he understands the roles of the various branches. I don’t think we’d have the torture, or the signing statements, or the warrantless surveillance under McCain.

Bushism has inflicted terrible damage. It’s eaten away at many of our core institutions and our core values. And that has to be put right. If our next president continues on as Bush has, it becomes bigger than one man, or one administration. It becomes the new status quo.

I would love to see a Democrat win. Or rather, I would love to see a Democrat who is good enough to win. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think the GOP primary will decide who our next president is. And as far as I’m concerned, McCain is the pick of the litter. Not because he agrees with me on any of the issues that are normally in play; he doesn’t. But because he seems honest and competent, and because he seems to understand the difference between right and wrong. He seems to understand the things in the Federalist papers – how the various branches of the government are supposed to fit together.

We have to be realistic about where we are. A president who won’t torture people would be a big improvement. I don’t need a president who will implement European-style social-democratic policies. I’d like to see that, but it’s not going to happen.

I just want a President who will follow the law.

That would, indeed, be an improvement.