The Dish

"To see what is in front of our nose needs a constant struggle," – George Orwell.

Goldblog makes a phone call:

I called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Dr. Thomas Ice. The Pre-Trib Center is one of the preeminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for literal Bible prophecy, and especially for pre-millenial dispensationalism, a complicated belief system that concerns the conditions that must obtain on Earth before Jesus can return (“Pre-Trib” is short for “pre-tribulation.”) [Ice said,] “Over forty percent of the world’s Jews now live in Israel. What Sarah Palin probably believes is that this is the first regathering,” when the Jews all migrate to Israel.

“This is a condition for the second regathering, the regathering in belief, when the Jewish nation is converted. Then there will be the battle of Armageddon, because remember, Satan wants to wipe out the Jews to prevent the Second Coming, but Jesus comes to rescue the beleaguered Jews. We believe that the Jews are going to be converted so that they can call on Jesus to rescue them from Satan.”

And people wonder why she wants more Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Or why we read sentences like this in the press:

She quizzed [Billy Graham] on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

The fear on my part is that if the neocons lose the conservative elite on the Middle East (as the objective evidence keeps piling in), they will double-down by throwing in their lot even more comprehensively with the Palin “Bring-On-Armageddon” crowd. The only thing worse than the pathological anti-Semitism of the Islamists is the pathological philo-Semitism of the Christianists that ends with the real elimination of Jewish people from the face of the earth – through mass conversion to evangelical Christianity.

Tyler Cowen counters Yglesias:

As I understand it, the apparently fiscally responsible portions of the bill come from a) eventual cuts in Medicare spending, and b) rising taxes on some health insurance plans and they come later of course.  Few Congressional representatives are willing to do these things today, so should we predict they will be done in the future?  (The same problem plagues Waxman-Markey, by the way, so these back and forth rhetorical debates are becoming quite common.)  In my view, policies structured in this manner are simply another way of doing deficit spending.

Martha Stewart is asked about Palin.

"[O]ur strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection," – Pericles.

Greenwald fisks the Republican meme – "trials in a real court would lead to the disclosure of classified information that would help the Terrorists":

To see how false this claim is, all anyone ever had to was look at the Classified Information Procedures Act, a short and crystal clear 1980 law that not only permits, but requires, federal courts to undertake extreme measures to ensure the concealment of classified information, even including concealment from the defendant himself.

Andrew Bacevich and David Frum discuss whether Afghanistan is a rational place to invest a huge amount of money and lives at this point in world history.

A reader writes:

I disagree with your reader who says Palin is a bullshitter.  I kind of like bullshitters.  I consider someone like Bill Clinton to be a bullshitter.  Kind of smooth, kind of  full of one's self.  In my mind, Palin is a disturbed individual who does not live in a world where truth as a concept is relevant or even extant.  She is wholly a creation of the media because she has a sexy quality to her good looks (especially in an industry – politics – that has few beauties).  Her only cleverness is that she uses her child with Down's Syndrome as the entire basis of her being as a politician. Sorry to put it so crudely, but that is the thing that the hard right loves about her. (In fact, she recounts how she considered abortion but decided against it.  As a mother, I find that little story so disgusting. Why would a mother ever openly discuss that they thought about aborting her child? Or her defender, Bernie Goldberg, implying that a liberal would abort a Down's Syndrome child. Even more disgusting.) 

Some people who are not on the hard right like her for other reasons – especially because she is a working mother of five. They relate to her, and I think that is valid. 

What is missing is that she has no substance.  She is an empty vessel.  In our reality show, 24-hour news cycle world, one can be an empty vessel and still be wildly popular as a reality star, a politician, or whatever.  No one questions beyond the surface, and indeed it is politically incorrect to even imply that she is not bright.  If you are Kate Gosselin, then I have no problem with you being wildly popular and stupid (not that Kate is stupid).  If you want to lead my country, then I do have problems with you being popular and stupid.  (And, honestly, I am sick to no end of having leaders that are so dumb that the stock observation made about them is that they are not as dumb as we think.) 

So, for anyone who thinks you or others are wasting their time dissecting this woman and her "views," then I have one number for them.  46.  That is the percentage of voters that wanted Sarah Palin to be President of the United States.  What would that number be today?  With a media that has gone nearly wholesale against Obama, with a progressive movement that is enabling Palinites through relentless and often self-righteous fault-finding, with an almost silent group of Obama defenders, with a reality show obsessed culture, it is plausible that the 46 % could add the paltry 5% it needs to rule the world. 

Doesn't that chill you to the bone?

Apologies for the typo: the name of this remarkable fellow was Chuang Tzu or Zuangzi depending on your mode of translating Chinese names into English. I’ve long known of him via Oakeshott but had never really pondered the deep similarities between their thought before reading an unpublished paper by Chor-yung Cheung, an Oakeshott scholar from Hong Kong, at a recent Oakeshott conference. A light bulb went off as well when I realized that Chuang Tzu was also one of Thomas Merton’s favorite writers. Merton wrote his own versions of several of Chuang Tzu’s stories, parables and anecdotes. From a review:

Merton sees Chuang Tzu as his kindred spirit. Merton and Chuang Tzu both were hermits to some extent, and both spiritual philosophers of sorts, perhaps with Merton heavier on the spiritual side and Chuang Tzu more the philosopher. The content of their philosophies is similar, too. Merton assures us that his book “is not a new apologetic subtlety (or indeed a work of jesuitical sleight of hand) in which Christian rabbits will suddenly appear by magic out of a Taoist hat.” Yet Merton’s paraphrase demonstrates how Chuang Tzu’s writings closely resemble the apophatic thought of some Christian theologians and mystics that Merton writes about elsewhere.

Merton points out that Chuang Tzu’s Taoism is not “the popular, degenerate amalgam of superstition, alchemy, magic, and health-culture which Taoism later became.” Instead, Chuang Tzu’s Taoism values an inner unity, a hiddenness of the true man, and a practical asceticism that Merton also finds in Christian mysticism. Merton believes that Chuang Tzu’s gift of “unknowing” is similar to Christian contemplation. A Chuang Tzu disciple loses his self-conscious “knowledge” and gains an inner “unknowing” by which he lives through Tao. The disciple in one Chuang Tzu story, for instance, prepares for the gift of unknowing through a patient emptying of desires, otherwise known as a “fasting of the heart,” much as Merton’s contemplative must go through John of the Cross’ Night of Sense, when the will grows tired of desire and reasoning.

The gift of unknowing – what Oakeshott would try to capture in his theory of aesthetics as well as of practical life – is perhaps best put in this classic Chuang Tzu tale that was central to Oakeshott’s understanding of how human beings actually do what we do, and live how we live, irrespective of modern rationalism’s claim to have captured all human knowledge in theory:

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. 

The wheelwright P’ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, “This book Your Grace is reading—may I venture to ask whose words are in it?”

“The words of the sages,” said the duke.

“Are the sages still alive?”

“Dead long ago,” said the duke.

“In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!”

“Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?” said Duke Huan. “If you have some explanation, well and good.  If not, it’s your life!”

Wheelwright P’ien said,

“I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won’t take hold. But if they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. Not too gentle, not too hard—you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can’t put it into words, and yet there’s a knack to it somehow. I can’t teach [explain] it to my son, and he can’t learn it from me. So I’ve gone along for seventy years and at my age I’m still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but chaff and dregs of the men of old.”

Once you have understood this story, you have understood the core philosophical principle of conservatism.