Key Latina for Obama; key pro-lifer for McCain.
Now This Is A Woman Politician
From County Kerry, naturally. And somehow I don’t think she’d play the victim card on the campaign trail:
In her later years visiting foreign journalists mused about how the wild, tribal frontier, where women are in purdah and even goatherds carry Kalashnikovs, was an unlikely place to find an elderly Irish widow serving afternoon tea. The area has lately become a stronghold for the Taliban, and is generally out of bounds to foreigners.
Jennifer died on January 12. Her funeral procession was attended by thousands of burly, turbaned Pathans (many of them allied to the Taliban) who raised cheers of "Mummy Jennifer!" in her honour as the cortège passed through a shuttered Pishin.
She was buried at the Qazis’ ancestral burial ground near the tomb of the family Sufi saint, Sheikh Farid Baba.
President Pervez Musharraf telephoned Jennifer’s son, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, to offer his condolences for the death of a woman who, in one of her last interviews, said: "Mummy has had her innings."
Play, Pause, And Explain
The hideous, slow distortion of our basic moral values by the Bush administration cannot be allowed to prevail:
When Mike McConnell says “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways…I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning” he is asking us to look at the trees and not the forest. We know waterboarding is torture and we desperately want to believe that our leaders haven’t directed it. We approach our leaders predisposed to believe anything that will put the conscience at ease – we want to believe we’re the good guys. Therefore we are entirely willing to let our leaders play, pause and explain. (Play) waterboarding is really bad (pause) but it can be done lots of different ways and probably some of them aren’t torture and you can bet your bottom dollar that THOSE are the varieties of it we use. He invites us to mentally pause the tape over and over again while he explains the non-torturous nature of each drop.
A war crime is a war crime is a war crime. Prosecute them.
Asking For It
So they did taunt the tiger.
Pacifying Baghdad
It’s hard to know what else we can expect Petraeus to do. Some of the violence has obviously been displaced to other areas, but that doesn’t detract from the achievement. Increasingly, progress is now up to the Iraqis. Quite whether that’s a good or a worrying sign we shall soon find out.
Huckabee And Reconstructionism
Hugh Hewitt – who insists that amending the constitution to ban all abortion and strip gay couples of all legal protections are "mainstream conservative positions" – also claims, contra Bainbridge, that
Professor B’s tortured string of cites never delivers anything remotely connecting Huck to "reconstructionism," and implying otherwise is just imagination.
Check out Brink Lindsey’s post here. In December, Huckabee had a non-imaginary fundraiser in the Dallas home of one Dr. Steven Hotze, who was on the host committee. Hotze is a major reconstructionist. Here’s a quote from a section of a manifesto signed by Hotze in 1986:
We affirm that the Bible is not only God’s statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible.
Reconstructionists want to amend the Constitution to bring it in line with Biblical precepts. Sound familiar? since Huckabee has used almost identical language, this isn’t guilt by association. It is context for what Huckabee means – and the signals he is sending to the hard-core Christianists he is appealing to in South Carolina and elsewhere. Here’s a clip from Rick Scarborough, another hist committee member at Hotze fundraiser, and a self-described "Christocrat:"
Scarborough fought Huckabee in the Baptist wars of the last decade. But their differences do not obscure their commonalities. Once you have dedicated your life to fundamentalist religion, once you have insisted that nothing – let alone politics – can be independent of absolute Biblical judgment, documents like the Constitution are indeed secondary. They have to be amended to be brought into line with the authoritative truth. Nothing can interfere with that authority – nothing.
I don’t think people have really understood the logical consequences of the fundamentalist psyche. There is nothing more antithetical to the principles underlying traditional conservatism. Eventually, the complacent Republicans will realize the tiger they are riding. Huckabee is charming. The charming ones are often the most dangerous.
“The Visionary Minimalist”
Cass Sunstein on Obama:
"’Visionary minimalist’ may sound like an oxymoron, but in fact–and this is the key point–Obama’s promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism. He is unifying, and therefore able to think ambitiously, because he insists that Americans are not different "types" who should see each other as adversaries engaged in some kind of culture war. Above all, Obama rejects identity politics. He participates in, and helps create, anti-identity politics. He does so by emphasizing that most people have diverse roles, loyalties, positions, and concerns, and that the familiar divisions are hopelessly inadequate ways of capturing people’s self-understandings, or their hopes for their nation. Insisting that ordinary Americans "don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal," Obama asks politicians "to catch up with them." Many independents and Republicans have shown a keen interest in him precisely because he always sees, almost always respects, and not infrequently accepts their deepest commitments."
Image Of The Day
This was sent to me and I cannot confirm it independently but it’s of a helicopter rescue mission in Afghanistan. Sometimes we forget what amazing people we have in the military – people with skills and balls most of us cannot even imagine. Whatever our differences about strategy and policy, I really don’t see any evidence that the vast majority don’t respect – even revere – the troops who are out there. I don’t mean this as a typical look-at-me-I’m-a-patriot-Fox-News kind of gesture. But these kids are astonishing.
So Farewell, Then, Mr Wham-O
Richard Knerr, RIP, inventer of hula-hoops,
Superball, so bouncy it seemed to defy gravity; Slip ‘N Slide and its giggle-inducing cousin the Water Wiggle; and Silly String, which was much harder to get out of hair than advertised.
Skeptical Of Obama
Change: fine. A new generation: fine. A new politics: fine. It is all fine, and it is all contentless. Inspiration without content is a prelude to alienation. Newness is the oldest pitch in American politics. And I am a little sick of hope. ("I do not believe in miracles," says Herodias in Wilde’s play. "I have seen too many.") Also I have a queasy recollection of 1975 and the electrifying emergence of Jimmy Carter out of nowhere, in all his progressive pristinity, in a country made torpid by a war and an era of low politics. Why not the best? Skepticism is bad form in a bandwagoning moment. Yet I have a few doubts.
This kind of skepticism is entirely a good thing, I’d say. The one unfair critique is that Obama lacks policy substance. His campaign is laden with policy substance. Oodles of it. More, I wager, than Leon’s interest would ever bear.
