The Dish

Drudge is a leading indicator on the populist right just as George Will is a leading indicator on what now passes for the intellectual right. Before too long, the GOP will, in my view, come back to the conservative idea that we should withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq as soon as we responsibly can, even at some risk. You cannot return to limited government without unwinding the empire. The neocons will fight very hard and try to find some pliable hood-ornament to maintain their Christianist base for neo-imperial expansion. Watching these forces fight will be fascinating. Hagel could take on the neocons; maybe Huntsman. Ron Paul's conservatism is not dead. It's one of the few signs of life out there.

Reihan has an exchange with Sam Tanenhaus over Sam's new book. It's worth reading in full. No one loves Reihan more than I do but in my view he is far too sanguine about the malign intentions of a cynic like Rove and far too soft on the rank paucity of responsible thinking on the mainstream right in recent times. His last book was flawed in my view in the same way, however imaginative it was trying to be. No viable conservatism will emerge from ignoring the cynics and crooks who got us into this mess or from giving the decomposing corpse of the Dixie rump emergency CPR.

And does Reihan truly, really believe that Karl Rove, for Pete's sake, was trying to avoid gay-baiting his way to victory in 2004 – when he strategized a polarizing, brutalizing gay marriage ban in the one state that he needed to win and that alone gave him victory? Here is Reihan:

Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I'm sure he found distasteful. President Bush himself could barely stomach talking about the issue. Yet talk about it he did, in deference to the need to press every advantage.

Rove thought this was a distraction? From his realignment? Does Reihan recall the kind of politics Rove cut his teeth on in the South? Gay-baiting was one critical part of his strategy for realignment. It was designed not just to rally evangelicals but to win over a segment of African-Americans and Hispanics. And distasteful?

Has Rove ever said anything that could conceivably reflect that fact? Has he ever uttered a single word in public that even suggested empathy with and support for gay citizens of any kind – or has he always implied that they are a threat to "real Americans" and to the family itself? Has he ever said a word in public that suggested he knew or cared about gay people or even acknowledged that we exist?

At the very beginning of Bush's term, Rove told those gay Republicans who had helped Bush win that the only thing that mattered to him was there were more votes in gay-bashing than in standing up to the bigots in his base. It was all about running the numbers. To his credit, he said that to their face, just as he told me to my face that he had no concern whatever about debt or spending, because he didn't think people voted on those issues. And once he thought he could polarize the country even further around an issue like this, he went for it. Reihan thinks this was all done terribly reluctantly because Rove had no choice but to follow the masses. To which I can only respond Judge Judy-style: don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

And, yes, Bush, despite being personally compassionate and understanding of gay men and women and hiring them from the very bottom to the very top of his administration (on the condition that they remain closeted at all times), went along. He endorsed marginalizing gays as second class citizens in the very federal constitution "in deference to the need to press every advantage." And in so doing, he never even acknowledged in any way our existence or dignity or humanity. He never met with a single one of us or our representatives in eight years in office. He never used the word itself in a formal speech. He never even referred in public to the pain and suffering that his policy would entail, to the immense hurt a tiny minority would feel if they were singled out in their own constitution as sub-human. This "uniter-not-a-divider" was indifferent to a policy that would have written a beleaguered and tiny minority out of their own country. But he had to do this "in deference to the need to press every advantage." To my mind, this makes him worse than Rove: at least Rove was a proud cynic; Bush couldn't take even that responsibility. I know all this pains Reihan and I know his heart and brilliant mind are in the right place. But he's being far too generous to the GOP elites.

But to his credit, Reihan is now saying what needs to be said:

The historical reality I have in mind is that we're living in straitened economic circumstances, that we face an unemployment crisis that might last a decade or more, and that American workers don't have the skills they need to flourish. Over the past decade, spending by state governments has increased at a rate of 6 percent a year, far outstripping economic growth. This is not sustainable. What I want most from the political right is a commitment to truth-telling: In the next few years, we will have to cut spending and raise taxes across all levels of government. In normal times, this isn't a winning political formula, but it might be in a crisis.

I have always believed that truth-telling is a conservative virtue in good times and bad. If it can only happen in a crisis, we end up in the state we're in.

Here's Sam Tanenhaus's reply.

The Anonymous Liberal counters Greenwald:

[L]et's keep the pressure on Obama to do the right thing and support better policies, but in doing so, let's not lose sight of the fact that the primary criticism of the Bush administration was not that its terrorism policies were bad (though they were), but that they were illegal. Cheneyism, at its core, has little to do with policy and everything to do with process. It is exemplified by contempt for the rule of law and a willingness to disregard even clear legal constraints on executive power. So far at least, I have not seen evidence of that mentality in the Obama administration's approach to terrorism policy.

One of the more puzzling aspects relates to Eric Holder and his Justice Department. Although they ostensibly reviewed all these cases, they decided to stick to the unsupported position of the Bush Justice Department to the end. The Holder Justice Department, which has denied it would proceed on torture-induced evidence, did exactly that. One lesson from the al-Rabiah case is this. The Obama Justice Department has very little interest in justice for the detainees at Gitmo, but an obsession with guarding the dark secrets of their predecessors.

David Leonhardt offers a fair profile. Bruce did not sacrifice his principles or his intellect during the Rove years and was all but ostracized as a result. He didn't have my independence from the conservative movement and so had to face down much worse than I did in confronting the accelerating catastrophe of the Bush-Cheney years. But he at least has the knowledge that he was right all along. Odd that neither Bruce nor I were featured in the recent WaPo piece about conservative intellectuals who swam against the tide in the Bush years. I know our books were ignored by the right, but that doesn't mean they weren't out there or serious intellectual contributions to the debate. (And if you watch the video above, you can see that I was a tea-partier on spending and debt when Bush was in office and am giving Obama a break in this recession solely because his inheritance was basically impossible. Compare that with these current populists who backed Bush to the hilt as he bankrupted this country and are now up in arms at a president who has been in office for a few months, dealing with the wreckage in a global recession. And I'm regarded as the liberal!)

Maybe Hayward simply never heard of "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How To Get It Back" or "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy", because the Rovian cocoon shut them out of the discourse. But they stand up pretty well in retrospect and revealed that not all conservative thinkers sold their souls to Karl Rove.

Bruce, moreover, is still thinking. Tireless and ballsy, he's now a conservative in favor a a sales tax hike once the economy recovers, as I reluctantly am. Leonhardt:

One of the country’s two political parties has no answer to an enormous economic issue — the fact that the federal government cannot pay for its obligations. This lack of engagement is a problem, just as it was a problem when Democrats were saying that welfare was working, teachers’ unions were always right and stagflation couldn’t happen.

For now, there is little reason to think the Republicans are on the verge of a Clinton-like reform. But it is hard to see how they can ultimately stick to their current platform. At some point, the government will have to figure out how to pay for the baby boomers’ retirement. “Trends that can’t continue,” as Mr. Bartlett says, “don’t.”

Do yourself a favor and read Bruce's new book that David reviews. And know that Bruce is one of those conservatives who actually put principle over access to power. If you're a liberal looking for a real conservative to debate and read, you won't go far wrong with Bruce.

Another installment of my chat with TNC.

Earlier this week Ben Smith moderated a debate between Betsy McCaughey and Anthony Weiner. Smith:

Some of McCaughey's claims have been substantially debunked, or don't match up with the current legislation. Others are broader conservative health care critiques. In either case, she's nowhere near the player she was in 1994 — in part perhaps because she's seen as a partisan, not an honest broker, and that's due in no small part to the relentless, effective assault from the left, a refighting of the last war that ensures they won't lose that battle, at least.

One element of the debate's substance also interested me: McCaughey made the case that American health care spending is not excessive, and that Americans spend more because we "earn more" and want more and better health care. It's a case the organized health industry wouldn't dare make for itself in the face of demands from Congress that it cut costs, and one that leads her to argue that the best way to deal with what she sees as the only crisis — a number of uninsured she puts a bit over 10 million — is simply to spend $500 billion insuring them.

His view, as expressed to Newsmax:

Look, the shine came off of George Bush for me pretty quickly after 9/11. We started to not fight a war to win the war. Wars are horrible, ugly — it’s killing people. The idea is kill them faster than they can kill you, and kill them at such a rate that it takes their breath away and they put their guns down and say OK, OK, enough. That’s what it is about. We weren’t doing that, and now, we’re in this long, drawn-out war.

So he must surely support leaving Afghanistan immediately, right? Or does he believe we should be killing Jihadists "at such a rate that it takes their breath away and they put their guns down and say OK, OK, enough." So he opposes McChrystal and Petraeus? Or is asking these kinds of actual serious question beside the point with him?

I picked up a copy of Newsmax in the airport last week.

Interesting, if somewhat bizarre, stuff. Clearly leaning toward isolationism. But as an emblem of what now passes for "conservatism" in America: incoherent, paranoid and a strange mix of optimistic boosterism about anything American and total disgust at the modernity America has fomented. As I said: weird. These people don't think; all they do is feel. And they have no idea what they're for, just looking for people and symbols to hate and blame. Sad, really.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who looks at that party and shudders. The rest of them tend to be … Democratic voters.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 11.30 am

I said my piece about this on this blog a while back. I do not think it's professional to air the specifics of internal battles after the fact, and I take full responsibility for being the editor of the magazine that published the piece. I accepted an award for it. I stood behind it. In my view, it had many interesting points and as an intellectual exercize in contemplating the full possible consequences of Hillary Clinton's proposal, it was provocative and well worth running. But its premise that these potential consequences were indisputably in the bill in that kind of detail was simply wrong; and I failed to correct that, although all I can say is that I tried.  One key paragraph – critical to framing the piece so it was not a declaration of fact but an assertion of what might happen if worst came to worst – became a battlefield with her for days; and all I can say is, I lost. I guess I could have quit. Maybe I should have. I decided I would run the piece but follow it with as much dissent and criticism as possible. I did discover that she was completely resistant to rational give-and-take. It was her way or the highway. 

I ensured that TNR ran a long and detailed rebuttal; and I also ensured, as a conservative steward of a liberal magazine, that we editorialized in favor of the Cooper plan for universal healthcare, which we did consistently. During that period, I also commissioned and ran dozens of pieces explaining the healthcare debate from the Clinton point of view.

Again, I take responsibility.

I was the editor; I threatened to quit on another occasion; it was my call; and I took credit for its impact; and did not criticize her (and praised her tenacity) subsequently. No one else is responsible. In retrospect, it was not my finest hour. I think there was a fascinating and provocative piece in there – and I always viewed The New Republic not as a tablet of liberal stone, but as a place where liberalism should be unafraid of challenges to it, and where lazy liberalism needed to be given a work-out. I enjoyed driving many liberals a little crazy in the untraditional, experimental – and often conservative and libertarian – pieces I commissioned (although I did not originally contact or commission McCaughey). Yes, that was when I was as popular with mainstream liberals as I am with mainstream conservatives today.

But look: it was one piece in a magazine. It's being treated as if it were a turning point in history. Please. There's one reason the Clinton healthcare bill failed and it isn't Betsy McCaughey. It's Hillary Clinton.