Romney’s Long Road To ’12, Ctd

A reader writes:

I think Chait and Ambinder both have it backwards.  If Obamacare continues to increase Obama's cred with voters, Romney will then *embrace* the similarities to Romneycare and try to co-opt the glow.  It would be a crowning flip-flop (or flop-flip?) to cap his political career.  I wouldn't put it past him, would you?

Ed Kilgore counters Ambinder point by point. Daniel Gross suggests that Romney missed a key opportunity to run Obamacare. I still think my boss James Bennet's summary of Romney is the best one: he aims to please.

Freedom, Happiness And Israel

The Gallup map posted below is fascinating for many reasons – what's up with Turkmenistan? – but two things leap out at me. The Dutch and the Scandinavians have something sorted out. And look at Israel and her neighbors. The contrast is staggering. Israelis are thriving at a 62 percent margin – Canadian levels (above the US and UK). Right next door in one of the less hideous autocracies is Jordan, with an index of 30 percent. Egypt and Iraq clock in around 10 percent – Zimbabwe levels.

Israel is a beacon in the region – and the world. Which is why it is so worth saving from itself and some of its neighboring regimes. (Yes, Iran is 19 percent – below Saudi Arabia).

Two Things To Agree On, Ctd

PZ Myers adds to my list and quips:

I could go on and on, listing lots of things that I think are foolish and reprehensible, and declaring that those who hold those views are not True Christians. Unfortunately, I think that it all means that there aren't any Christians anywhere, and they're all damned dirty Christianists. I can't tell them apart from the Christians!

I'm afraid the Hutarees were Christian, real-live testifyin' preachifyin' Jebus-lovin' Bible-readin' Christians. They weren't Andrew Sullivan's preferred version of Christian, but then, a weird gay Catholic has about as much authority to define who gets to be Christian as an obnoxious and flamingly anti-religious atheist.

Well I defer to PZ on the spectrum of weirdness, but he ignores my central distinction between Christianity and Christianism.

Christianity flees power as Jesus did; Christianism seeks it above everything else. And there is nothing more powerful than killing others, except for torturing them. Hence my distinction, which I make from no authority. I merely think that declaring a homeless, apolitical, non-violent hippie in first century Palestine as someone who would bless a twenty-first century terrorist militia in North America is a bit of a stretch.

Suing The Vatican

A class-action suit filed from Kentucky in 2004 is attracting new attention:

The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children. … "They will not be able to depose the pope," said Joseph Dellapenna, a professor at Villanova University Law School an author of "Suing Foreign Governments and their Corporations." "But lower level officials could very well be deposed and there could be subpoenas for documents as part of discovery," he said.

If the Vatican's response continues in the same vein of the last week, they have no idea what's about to hit them. Hitch wants the Pope to face charges:

This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.

Letting DADT Wither On The Vine?

HRC poop bags

Suzy Khimm gets a hold of some new guidelines that went unmentioned by Gates last week:

[T]he Pentagon now requires that "a preponderance" of evidence be provided to warrant a dismissal. Investigators can no longer use a service member's decision "not to discuss the matter" against him or her. And investigators are also now expected to consider the source of evidence against a service member and the circumstances in which it's received. For instance, a source may be considered unreliable if he or she has a "prior history of conflict" with target of the investigation or "a motive to seek revenge against or cause personal or professional harm" to the service member in question.

Basically, it seems to me that this is an attempt to reverse the way in which DADT was used in the Clinton and Bush years to intensify expulsion and persecution of gay service-members. So it's a return to the promise in 1993 that  the gay ban will slowly wither like an old chestnut on the vine, as it were. We should not mistake this for repeal but we should not mistake it for nothing either. It is a highly unsatisfying piece of Obama pragmatism. 

What it means, I suspect, is that Obama will finish his first term with the military ban in place but he will make the argument that he has made it practically obsolescent, and has persuaded the brass to stop harassment. The data will either prove or disprove that in due course, but the stigma against gay service-members will remain until it becomes utterly ridiculous.

This is not what Obama clearly promised in the campaign and since the law won't be repealed before next January, and the Congress, even on historical norms, will be more Republican, i.e. more anti-gay, after November, it will remain on the books indefinitely. 

And HRC will sell this to the gay community as yet another triumph for its 20 million member lobbying organization. Which is perhaps the only good reason to buy their civil rights doggie poop-bags.