The Dish

A reader looks at what Obama has done to the Republicans:

The GOP has wedged itself into a position that is, essentially, bankrupt from a policy standpoint.  The party has been so focused on electoral gaming that it has managed to install a set of politicians who know little and care less about actually governing.  All they know and care about is getting elected.  In our existing climate, that no longer works – and faced with complex issues, with gray areas, that demand  they are simply out of their league.  Furthermore, and perhaps most interestingly, they have put together a set of competing coalitions and messages that simply does not allow them to move in any meaningful way on policy.  How do you balance the teabaggers and the fiscal conservatives?  How can you make meaningful budget cuts when what you need to cut are policies you put into place?  How can you be for personal responsibility and against gay marriage?  How can you espouse non-intervention and then the Iraq war?  How can you be for fiscal responsibility and support Medicare part D?

Finally, when you spend a year or more calling the president a socialist, you simply cannot cooperate with his policy, at all – even when significant pieces of that policy are, in fact, what you yourself have espoused (e.g.: allowing interstate health insurance competition, cost transparency within exchanges, etc.)

Just bankrupt, across the board.

The real conservative here is Obama, bizarrely enough.  And these nitwits don't see it.

To have Sarah Palin as the leader of the current GOP and McCain as her pathetic, bitter side-kick is about as fatal to the right's long-term goals as putting Cheney up in 2012. And ask yourself: how has the GOP managed this past year to reverse its disastrous slide among racial minorities? Without some outreach to blacks and Hispanics and Asians, the GOP is doomed. But the party that called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, that demonized a healthcare plan extremely popular among Hispanics, and that seems increasingly represented by the likes of Dobbs and Tancredo has only further isolated itself from the mainstream.

It was their choice, but Obama gave them the rope. And the higher they get on the fumes of tea-party revolt instead of crafting actual policies to address actual problems, the worse it will get for them. Sure, they may win a few seats and galvanize their base next fall. But for what? A protest is not a party and a cable propaganda outlet is not a government.

Robbie George got what can only be called a source-greaser puff-piece from David Kirkpatrick in the NYT Magazine last weekend. He must have been delighted. For those of you somewhat befuddled by George's argument about natural law, it behooves me to direct you to Chapter 3 of The Conservative Soul where I argue, point by point, against its absolutism and indifference to the actual facts of nature. Among those facts: human reproduction requires the deaths of countless human beings if you count fertilized embryos as fully human; death itself has no absolute clear line in science the harder you look for it; conception itself is very difficult to demarcate exactly at a moment in time; non-procreative sexual acts are endemic in nature and human nature, just as homosexual orientation is ubiquitous; and on and on. For an excellent account of how science, especially neuroscience has also exploded George's Aristotle-Hume axis, see John Culhane here.

But my deeper point is actually an agreement of sorts: there does seem something intuitively right about seeing our "nature" as some sort of guide to the way we should live our lives. But this is the beginning of an argument, not an end to it. What do we mean by nature? How do emotion and reason interact? How precise and universal can we be in adducing morals from something as diverse and varied as the fruits of natural selection? How can we be sure we aren't smuggling in all sorts of pre-existing views of what nature is and what morality is when we declare something "unnatural"? How does an argument that designates an entire sub-section of humankind as inherently immoral square with the goodness of God's creation or the morally neutral power of Darwin's theory?

On marriage, it seems to me that George is right about something: heterosexual intercourse within marriage that begets children is a vital, sacred, wondrous and central fact of human life. I've never doubted that. I've never even argued that the sacrament of matrimony in Catholic tradition could be anything but heterosexual. Where I differ most from George is how one approaches the diversity of nature around this central – and largely civil – human institution.

George is selectively flexible on this (for an online discussion, see Jon Rowe's post here). He can see oral sex, for example, as okay even if it is not procreative, as long as it is somehow integrated into the procreative, i.e. foreplay. He is even prepared to endorse the sex lives of the infertile or post-menopausal, although both groups obviously have no natural way to procreate by sex. Why? Because they are engaging in something he calls "procreative in form," as long as he is on top and rubber-free. If it looks like heterosexual procreation, even if it actually isn't, it's kosher. Maybe if a man and a man had sex with one dressed as a woman and retained rigid gender roles, they might squeak through George's "procreative in form" loophole. But one suspects the loophole is there not to express compassion for the straight but to retain an iron-clad exclusion for the gay.

If the whole thing sounds like convenient sophistry to you, you're not alone.

In fact, it is very hard to see what George's argument means unless it can be reduced to the idea that sex for the infertile is moral merely because they are heterosexual, and that sex and love for homosexuals is immoral merely because they are homosexuals.  So sexual orientation is the critical category here, not procreation or nature as it is actually found, and the result is to retain a stigma and legal discrimination against homosexuals – simply because they are what they are.

But what of gay existence in every culture, every place, every era of human history? What of same-sex orientation that is, as even the Vatican has conceded, innate? What of the prevalence of homosexuality across so many natural species? If anything looks like a natural fact of human nature, it is this resilient and fascinating drop-shadow on heterosexuality normativity. You'd think that Christian scholars would be intrigued to figure out the questions – what are homosexuals for? why did God create them? why did natural selection favor their persistence? And yet, for the new natural lawyers, these obvious questions never seem to arise. Because homosexuals are not objects for open-minded inquiry for these fellows; they are objects to maintain hostility toward. To advance this project, they have no interest in the new genetics of homosexuality, or the varieties of its expression across the ages, or the gayness of many saints and Popes; they just have a class of people to be categorized as "objectively disordered" and discriminated against for their own good.

It is this exceptionalism that exposes the core prejudice gussied up as reason that lies behind some, but not all, natural law reasoning. And it is this exceptionalism and hostility to the diversity of God's actual creation that strikes me as arrogant and wrong and un-Christian. It would be wrong and un-Christian if it merely applied these arcane ideas to everyone; but to infer that these arguments demand that a tiny minority of people must thereby be designated beneath civic dignity and family security makes this worse than un-Christian. It makes it evil.

Via Marty, Michael Ledeen's assessment of the situation in Iran:

The regime is frightened.  The supreme leader and his acolytes (Ahmadinejad is less and less visible.  Somebody should tell Diane Sawyer) are groping for a way to survive.  They seem not to realize that they died before Montazeri, and that nobody cares to mourn them. And so they stagger about, and find the worst possible gesture.  As the indispensable Banafsheh tells us:

On Monday evening Saeed Montazeri announced that the Montazeri family was forced to cancel the post-funeral sacrament as the Islamic regime’s forces had invaded the A’zam mosque where the observance was to be held. Saeed Montazeri also added that the Montazeri residence has now been surrounded by various revolutionary guards, members of the Basij, intelligence agents, members of special force, etc.

It is reminiscent of Gorbachev at his most inept, finding a way to be mean enough to enrage the people, but not tough enough to assert his power, thereby provoking that most dangerous of all mass reactions:  contempt for his person and his rule.

My own view is that 2009 has been an extraordinarily successful year for Obama. Since this is currently a minority view and will prompt a chorus of “In The Tank!”, allow me to explain. The substantive record is clear enough. Torture is ended, if Gitmo remains enormously difficult to close and rendition extremely hard to police. The unitary executive, claiming vast, dictatorial powers over American citizens, has been unwound. The legal inquiries that may well convict former Bush officials for war crimes are underway, and the trial of KSM will reveal the lawless sadism of the Cheney regime that did so much to sabotage our war on Jihadism. Military force against al Qaeda in Pakistan has been ratcheted up considerably, even at a civilian cost that remains morally troubling. The US has given notice that it intends to leave Afghanistan with a bang – a big surge, a shift in tactics, and a heavy batch of new troops. Iraq remains dodgy in the extreme, but at least March elections have been finally nailed down. Domestically, the new president has rescued the banks in a bail-out that has come in at $200 billion under budget; the economy has shifted from a tailspin to stablilization and some prospect of job growth next year; the Dow is at 10,500 a level no one would have predicted this time last year. A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and probably did more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen. Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is imminent – a goal sought by Democrats (and Nixon) for decades, impossible under the centrist Clinton, but won finally by a black liberal president. More progress has been made in unraveling the war on drugs this past year than in living memory. The transformation of California into a state where pot is now more available than in Amsterdam is as remarkable as the fact that such new sanity has spread across the country and is at historic highs, so to speak, in the opinion polls. On civil rights, civil marriage came to the nation’s capital city, which has a 60 percent black population. If that doesn’t help reverse some of the gloom from Prop 8 and Maine, what would? And, yes, the unspeakable ban on HIV-positive foreigners was finally lifted, bringing the US back to the center of the global effort to fight AIDS as it should be. Relations with Russia have improved immensely and may yield real gains in non-proliferation; Netanyahu has moved, however insincerely, toward a two-state solution; Iran’s coup regime remains far more vulnerable than a year ago, paralyzed in its diplomacy, terrified of its own people and constantly shaken by the ongoing revolution; Pakistan launched a major offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in its border area; global opinion of the US has been transformed; the Cairo speech and the Nobel acceptance speech helped explain exactly what Obama’s blend of ruthless realism for conflict-management truly means.  The Beltway cannot handle all this. And that’s why they continue to jump on every micro-talking-point and forget vast forests for a few failing saplings.

But when you consider the magnitude of shifting from one conservative era to one in which government simply has to be deployed to tackle deep structural problems, the achievement is as significant as his election year.

I remain, in other words, extremely bullish on the guy. There is a huge amount to come – finding a way to bring down long-term debt, ensuring health insurance reform stays on track and reformed constantly to control costs, turning the corner on non-carbon energy, reforming entitlements, finding a new revenue stream like a VAT, preventing Israel from attacking Iran, preventing Iran’s coup regime from going even roguer, withdrawing from an Iraq still teetering on new sectarian conflict, avoiding a second downturn, closing Gitmo for good, ending the gay ban in the military … well, you get the picture.

Change of this magnitude is extremely hard. That it is also frustrating, inadequate, compromised, flawed, and beset with bribes and trade-offs does not, in my mind, undermine it. Obama told us it would be like this – and it is. And those who backed him last year would do better, to my mind, if they appreciated the difficulty of this task and the diligence and civility that Obama has displayed in executing it.

Yes, we have. And yes, we still are the ones we’ve been waiting for – if we still care enough to swallow purism and pride and show up for the less emotionally satisfying grind of real, practical, incremental reform.

A reader writes:

Not all comic references to gays in the past were hostile. References to gay characters in the early '80's in mainstream comics (Marvel and DC) were practically nonexistent. The publishers were timid, the Comics Code was a weak but present barrier, and the medium was still focused on children, by and large. But despite this, It turns out Captain America had a gay friend.

His was Arnie Roth, a fellow WWII vet and childhood friend of Cap's. Roth had a 'roommate' named Michael, and the point was driven home that the two were lovers. At no time was Roth reduced to a stereotype.

At one point, none other than the Red Skull – a Nazi of the blackest dye – captures and mocks Roth for his homosexuality. Cap's response: 

"You're as good and decent a man as I’ve ever known! They can’t corrupt your love for Michael with their lies…They’re the pariahs! They’re the disease!”

This makes sense; while Captain America started out as an anti-Nazi trope in the '40's and headhunted Communists in the '50's, by the '70's, Marvel turned him into a broadly left-wing patriot who would still kick ass. He had reservations about Vietnam and partnered with a black superhero. This has been the case ever since. After 9/11 he emphasized not taking out American rage on all Muslims indiscriminately. And then kicked ass.

I'm straight. But with all the crap and lies that gets served up to kids in entertainment, it got my attention at age ten. After all, if the guy who punched out Hitler had no problem with gays, who was I to argue?

If you make one thing this Christmas ….

Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site does an expose on commie, homo, trannie themes buried in three White House Christmas tree ornaments. It's like McCarthyism revisited as farce.

"…merged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?what's punishment 4not purchasing mandated HC?" – Sarah Palin, leader of the GOP.

Megan calls Harry Reid's provision for the Independent Medicare Advisory Board "an unprecedented and troubling power grab."  She elaborates:

I do actually understand Reid's intent:  they are trying to set up an institution that can make binding cuts to medical services, which is difficult to do if that institution is subject to political pressure.  I quite agree that without such a provision, the institution is unlikely to work. But process matters.  What if your select commission runs amok?  Or what if 80-90% of Americans simply hate it and don't want it? It is neither practically nor ethically desirable to appoint a dictator.  Nor is any man so wise that he should be able to enshrine his preference into unchangeable law for all time.