The Dish

Many emails responding to my musings earlier today. Thanks. We’ll be publishing several on the Letters Page. They mainly argue that, whatever Kerry says now, his record suggests he cannot be trusted. That’s Sebastian Mallaby’s point today. So we’re left with a trust issue, and that’s subjective and hard. Here’s a cogent response:

I can kind of see what you’re saying regarding forcing the Democrat hand by passing on the baton but my feeling is that it’s too early. There is still too much opportunistic mileage in fence sitting – which is exactly what is not needed at this stage. Complete and utter resolve to win is needed – and don’t think (I know you don’t) that any (Old) European ‘power’ will join Kerry. The die is cast – and those involved now (as ever) will be those involved to the bitter end. If you were Al Qaeda, etc. what would you think if Kerry won – or rather Bush was thrown out? Good news or bad news? It would put a spring in the step of any Jihadist.
I truly believe that, whilst terrorism won’t ever go away, complete resolve from those countries willing to confront it will prevail in the not too distant future. I disagree with your correspondent from the US Army who is in Iraq. I do think that the end is in sight – but slowing down now (at least for enemy morale – and morale wins wars) would send the wrong signal. More, much more, of the same is needed now (at least the threat of it) not self doubt.
I am a life-long Tory and if the Tories don’t stop carping and trying to make political capital out of this war then I will vote for Blair (first and only time I hope).
This is far too important and so more easily winnable than most people seem to think – but iron resolve is the key.

Indeed, there are some hopeful signs in the South but still trouble among the Sunnis. Can we win in Iraq? Dumb question. We have to. And the very necessity may be what keeps Kerry in line. Still, we can’t know this for certain … and so we come back to trust.

IT’S SPENDING, STUPID: Here’s another angle:

I’m tired of everyone saying essentially “its the Iraq war stupid”. Kerry’s and Bush’s position are essentially equal and Bush’s numbers on handling terrorism are continually better than Kerry’s. What many are forgetting is that a consevative governor from Texas has essentially the same fiscal irresponsibility factor as does a senator from Massachusetts. Imagine how close this race would be if Bush could just blast Kerry’s domestic fiscal policies over and over and over.. It would be Bush vs Dukakis II. Which is why Bush is soft-peddling his attacks on Kerry’s fiscal history. I can’t believe I’m even considering voting for a senator from Massachusetts because his fiscal credibility is higher than an incumbent Republican…

Me neither. But the GOP is now the Big Government party. And its deficit-mongering will mean higher taxes in the not-so-distant future. You have to believe that the terror gap between Kerry and Bush is simply massive to acquiesce in Bush’s domestic policies: fiscal insanity, social intolerance, and creeping theocracy. Bush has moved the GOP toward being the political wing of fundamentalist evangelicalism. If you’re not born-again, you increasingly do not belong there. In four more years, heaven knows what he will have accomplished. But, then, many of you think the difference in foreign policy is so great nothing else matters. That’s the calculation. You have to weigh the damage Bush is doing domestically with the damage Kerry might do internationally. I’m still weighing.

SULLY, HITCH AND RUSSERT: Here’s a transcript of our recent discussion.

BUSH AND GAYS: An account of the betrayal and the bitterness. For more than a decade, many of us fought long and hard to bring gays into the Republican fold, to defend the GOP, to advance conservative ideas in the gay community. Bush reversed all of it. Bush has done to gays nationally what Pete Wilson did for immigrants in California.

“Yesterday was a huge defeat for the Taliban. The Taliban didn’t show,” – Lt. Gen. David Barno, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Yep, democracy is to the theocrats and terrorists what light is to darkness. And it’s worth repeating again and again: without the United States, Afghans would still be laboring under an unspeakable terrorist-controlled tyranny. Whatever happens in America’s own election, no one can ever take this legacy away from this president.

One of the central questions in this election is simply: can John Kerry be trusted to fight the war on terror? Worrying about this is what keeps me from making the jump to supporting him. I’m a believer in the notion that we are at war, that you cannot ignore state sponsors of terrorism, and that the 1990s approach obviously failed. Bush rightly shifted our direction toward regime change rather than police work, something long overdue. But when you look ahead, it’s more difficult to see where the differences between Kerry and Bush would actually lie. Bush, after all, doesn’t deny the importance of police work or nation-building in the war (indeed, at this point, they’re the bulk of his policy). And Kerry has no option but to acquiesce in regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the future policy mix is bound to be somewhat similar. More to the point: I don’t see a huge difference between Bush’s and Kerry’s approaches to North Korea and Iran. In some respects, Kerry even seems tougher on Saudi Arabia than Bush is. In Iraq, Bush declared last Friday night that Kerry’s plan was a carbon copy of his own. Why, then, would Kerry be such a risk?

BUSH AS BAD COP: Kerry also brings some obvious advantages. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has committed any successor to a process of lengthy and difficult nation-building. If that truly is the major task of the next few years, wouldn’t it be better to have people who have experience in nation-building and who actually believe in it (like Holbrooke), rather than people like Rummy and Cheney who clearly disdain it and keep under-funding and under-manning it? One of the advantages of being a democracy in wartime is that we can shift leaders and tactics as circumstances permit. Think of this strategy as a bad-cop-good-cop routine in a war against an elusive enemy. Bush has scared the living daylights out of our foes, removed two dictatorships and regained the initiative against Jihadism (all very, very good). But it’s in America’s interests also to show that we can reach out to moderate Muslims, placate the Europeans, and expand the anti-terror alliance. Why wouldn’t a Kerry administration be effective in that respect? As long as it is seen as a shift in tactics, rather than an exercise in appeasement, I don’t see the major downside. We’re fighting two wars: one against the terror-masters in Jihadist regimes, and another in world and Muslim opinion against the ideology of Islamo-fascism. Bush has done well in the former and not-so-well in the latter. A hammer clad in a little Kerry velvet might not be so bad a weapon in the coming four years.

KERRY AS GOOD COP: The major objection to this, of course, is that Kerry simply cannot be trusted. He won’t simply change tactics in the war; he’ll change direction. His long record of appeasing America’s enemies certainly suggests as much. And I don’t blame anyone who thinks that’s enough evidence and votes for Bush as a result. But it behooves fair-minded people also to listen to what Kerry has actually said in this campaign: that he won’t relent against terrorism. He isn’t Howard Dean. And 9/11 has changed things – even within the Democratic party. Moreover, the war on terror, if we are going to succeed in the long run, has to be a bipartisan affair. By far the most worrying legacy of the Bush years is the sense that this is a Republican war: that one party owns it and that our partisan battles will define it. Simply put: that’s bad for the country and bad for the war. Electing Kerry would force the Democrats to take responsibility for a war that is theirs’ as well. It would deny the Deaniac-Mooreish wing a perpetual chance to whine and pretend that we are not threatened, or to entertain such excrescences as the notion that president Bush is as big a threat as al Qaeda or Saddam. It would call their bluff and force the Democrats to get serious again about defending this country. Maybe I’m naive in hoping this could happen. But it is not an inappropriate hope. And it is offered in the broader belief that we can win this war – united rather than divided.

That, I suspect, will become the conventional wisdom, however crude Bill Safire’s spin. Why? Because Kerry persuaded independents and undecideds. Bush just rallied his base. But don’t take my word for it. MysteryPollster crunches the numbers and finds the data persuasive.

When the president said he wasn’t going to appoint justices who would write a decision like Dred Scott, I was puzzled. I didn’t know slavery was still a live issue. But I was reassured, I guess, that Bush wasn’t intending to put pro-slavery jurists on the court. But I was missing something. It seems it was a coded reference to repealing Roe vs Wade.

KERRY’S BIG MO: My latest Sunday Times column, now posted.

THREE CHEERS FOR GRIDLOCK: Why divided government works – especially in fiscal matters.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “I feel we’re going to be here for years and years and years. I don’t think anything is going to get better; I think it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We’re going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence … We’re always going to be here. We’re never going to leave.” – Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J., in the Washington Post.

“It’s in the Bible. It should be in the constitution.” – an Ohio conservative on why marriage for gays should be banned everywhere.

FRIENDSHIP, AGAIN: “Friendship can be exploitive and predatory, a strange symbiosis of quiet underwater carnage, though I’ve seldom seen one stay that way, Yet friends are partly for quarrelling with. Most of us need to squabble occasionally to tap off our toxins, and friends permit us to without inflammatory consequences. We can be a trifle mean, or stumble into a brief tailspin, and be forgiven. Knowing our knotty nuttiness, our self-destructive lonely spells, they let us phone a bit too much and don’t require us to specify just how tricky we feel. Friends are for jitters as well as barbecues.” – from Edward Hoagand’s essay, “Running Mates,” in “Tigers & Ice, Reflections on Nature and Life.”

SORRY: No Inside Dish this weekend. I’ve been too wiped out from the tour.

Someone who cannot be dismissed as a lefty, former congressman Bob Barr, seems extremely uneasy in backing Bush this time around:

Bush’s problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.
History’s a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don’t take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do.
Hmmm. Who’s the Libertarian candidate again?

For Barr, it’s fiscal insanity, immigration and civil liberties. But he’s also against the FMA.

“In the whole history of Afghanistan this is the first time we come and choose our leader in democratic process and free condition. I feel very proud and I feel very happy,” – an Afghan voter yesterday. Whatever else you feel about president Bush’s war leadership, this amazing event is a result of his policies, and belongs to his legacy. More important, of course, it gives this Islamic nation a taste of what the future can bring. Forget the nit-picking. This is a huge step forward in the war.

Josh Chafetz reflects on where he is in this race. Bottom line: “Undecided … but leaning more towards Kerry than I was before.” That’s where I am. Josh’s arguments are very close to my own thoughts as well. I cannot support Bush but I’m amazed I’m this close to considering favoring Kerry as president. I’m not there yet. Don’t rush me. But after two debates, I feel far more comfortable with the thought of him as commander-in-chief than I once thought possible.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I started reading your work about a year ago on the suggestion of a friend because I was convinced that the actions of the Bush Administration were making life impossible for a fair-minded and intelligent Conservatives. Obviously, there is a great deal of cognitive dissonance in leaving the Party that brought you to this point. But defending the Bush Administration has forced any Conservative thinker who is fairminded and intelligent into either turning himself into rhetorical knots or altogether ignoring reality. (For a classic example of both, see David Brooks’ column today–for him to look at the Duelfer report and conclude that “[Saddam] was on the verge of greatness” requires delusions nearly on the level of Hussein’s: Hussein’s vaunted army lost the country in three weeks without getting a single plane off the ground; he had neither stores of WMD’s nor the programs in place to create them; Saddam Hussein was about as close to greatness as an imaginative kid playing battleship.)

It has been refreshing to see you come to the conclusion that you cannot be Conservative, intelligent and fair minded and continue to support this administration. In fact, at the risk of being melodramatic, it renews my faith in the idea that a fairminded struggle with ideas can result in progress, rather than further entrenchment at the expense of logic, fairness and reality.

So much of Conservative ideology is already part and parcel of the current political millieu on both sides of the aisle–a faith in American power, free market ideology, personal responsibility–that a Conservative can vote for John Kerry without sacrificing his ideals. (After all, it was Bill Clinton who led Welfare Reform and the formation of NAFTA, two actions that were absolute anathema to the Left. He also balanced the budget … remember when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?)”

“Conservatives like myself suspect [Bush] has a hard time articulating a conservative message because he isn’t authentically conservative.” – Zach Wendling, Hoosier Review. Amen.