Lieberman-McCain Reax

Some bloggy reax: Larison (blech), Scott Johnson (yay!), Brody (hmmm), Jim Johnson (grrr), and Rick Moran:

This would almost certainly put McCain within striking distance of a shocking victory – a win that may very well deliver a crushing blow to the Romney campaign.

In my dreams. Reding:

McCain has some real momentum behind him now, and as 2003 demonstrated, the guy who’s languishing in the single digits can become the frontrunner overnight.

Uncle Jimbo:

National Security, Smaller Government and Judges are my issues. Both McCain and Lieberman are very solid on National Security, and I don’t know that either would be too bad on the other two as well. The fun would be how this would mess with the Congress. They could play both ends against the middle and just the total disruption of the status quo would be healthy for our democracy.

Lindsay Graham In September

TPM takes stock. This one’s a beaut:

"What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues — oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections — in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state."

That was September 2. There has been no progress on oil revenues, de-Baathification or provincial elections. All that has happened, so far as I can tell, is that competence from the beefed-up US military presence has managed to prevent a full-scale civil war from tearing the place apart. And that presence is about to be beefed down. So what say you now, Senator?

Buchananism Rebooted

Heilemann on Huckabee:

Huckabee’s brand of populism isn’t nearly as strident (read lunatic) as Buchanan’s. But to describe it as watery doesn’t do it justice. Huckabee’s posture on matters of taxing, trading, and even faith represent something shrewder: Buchananism minus the bombast, the paranoia, the out-front efforts to court the clenched-fist-and-camouflage crowd. And in this regard, the message and the messenger are the same—which could well make them more formidable, and no less disconcerting, than Buchanan and his gospel were in 1996.

Ron Paul For The Republican Nomination

Ronpaulscottolsongetty

By now, readers will know who I favor in the Democratic race. Here’s my most considered case. But what of the GOP? For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live libertarian from Texas. But picking a candidate is always a mix of policy and character, of pragmatism and principle. And what these two mavericks share, to my mind, is a modicum of integrity. At one end of the character scale, you have the sickening sight of Mitt Romney, a hollow shell of cynicism and salesmanship, recrafted to appeal to a base he studied the way Bain consultants assess a company. Paul and McCain are at the other end. They have both said things to GOP audiences that they knew would offend. They have stuck with their positions despite unpopularity. They’re not saints, but they believe what they say. Both have also taken a stand against the cancerous and deeply un-American torture and detention regime constructed by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. In my book, that counts. I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time – the great question of the last six years – Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain’s position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense. Let’s be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror – at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East – we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency? 

McCain, for all his many virtues, still doesn’t get this. Paul does.

Paul, moreover, supports the only rational response: a withdrawal, as speedily and prudently as possible. McCain, along with Lieberman, still seems to believe that expending even more billions of dollars to prop up and enable a fast-devolving, ethnically toxic, religiously nutty region is somehow in American interests. Given the enormous challenges of the terror war, the huge debt we are piling up, the exhaustion of the military, the moral and financial corruption that has its white-hot center in Mesopotamia, I do not believe that an endless military, economic and political commitment to Iraq makes sense. It only makes sense if we are determined to occupy the Middle East indefinitely to secure oil supplies. But the rational response to oil dependence is not to entrench it, but to try and move away from it. Institutionalizing a bank-breaking, morale-busting Middle East empire isn’t the way to go.

But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites’ enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever – no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.

He’s the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds. And in a primary campaign where the very future of conservatism is at stake, that cannot be ignored. In fact, it demands support.

Go Ron Paul!

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty.)

Vive La Resistance

"I am reminded of a comment once made by a former university professor.  In the 1950s colleges were quite conservative places.  Kooky, weirdo beatnik Marxist professors weren’t hired, much to their indignation.  Eventually, though, the political tide turned and these individuals began making their way onto the faculty.  Then, as they got tenure, they began to hire only people like themselves. As such, today we find a complete reversal of the zeitgeist—leftist kooky professors are the norm, whereas libertarians and conservatives are a distinct minority.

The inmates have taken over the asylum.  And, unfortunately, the exact same thing has happened to the conservative movement.  It’s gone topsy-turvy, from a party which respected religion to a party defined by religion.  And until the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the world are gone, the religious buffoons in this country (i.e. Huckabee voters) will continue to run the party and sully the good name of conservatism," – Lee at Right-Thinking.com.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"You mean: who the hell does this "uppity negro" think he is? Even I picked up on that one."

Oh come ON. Whatever your opinion of Bill and the Rose interview, there was nothing in the exchange that in any way suggested a specifically racial slant to Clinton’s argument. Nothing. Point out one thing Clinton wouldn’t plausibly have argued if his wife’s challenger was white but equally "inexperienced". If a Clinton supporter read gender discrimination into an attack on her in the way you’re reading race into Bill’s swipe at Obama, you’d be crying foul immediately.

There’s a case to be made against the Clinton campaign, but your arguments are sometimes really ridiculous – to the point that the enormity of the bias against her undermines the credibility of some entirely legitimate criticisms that can be leveled against her.  I loved your argument for Obama, but this kind of thing is precisely what sways her half-hearted supporters to become whole-hearted defenders.

Mitt Romney’s Multicultural Cop-Out

I have to say it’s been a long time since I read an essay as ornerily brilliant as Kenneth Anderson’s in the current Weekly Standard. It will offend a lot of people – for all the right reasons. It’s a liberal (in the old sense) critique of Huckabee’s bigotry, Romney’s cynicism, leftist multiculturalism and Hitchensian atheism. And yes, it’s a defense of good-old liberalism: the notion that there is a critical distinction between the private and public spheres, that religious doctrines, in so far as they directly impinge upon public policy, are not beyond rational inspection, but that prudence (remember that virtue?) requires a civic balancing act between religious intolerance and the mindless multiculturalism that embraces all religions as equally valid. The essay is too complex and multi-faceted to summarize too quickly but this is the point that resonated with me most:

The firm demand of the state for conformity to neutral standards is what–contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists–provides the grounds of liberal toleration. There are many reasons, but the simplest is this: Taken together, the demands of religious groups for ever stronger and expansive special accommodations must eventually result in profound and antagonistic standoffs and conflicts. Indeed, we have gone too far with special accommodations for religions that depart from neutral governance.

The Christianists on the right and the multiculturalists on the left have combined to tarnish, destroy and delegitimize this notion of neutral governance. It may be difficult, extremely difficult, to achieve it in a pluralist modern world. But if we give up even trying to find a neutral, rational discourse in tackling our problems and engaging our politics, we will have entered down a path that will, in the end, extinguish liberal democracy.

I fear we are already far-gone, which is partly why I am drawn to Obama because he seems uniquely able to embody this old liberal balance. Forging a path between religious doctrine and identity politics is, to my mind, the great challenge we now face. (It is the subtext of my book, "Virtually Normal," which tried, and clearly failed, to chart a new politics of reason and public neutrality with respect to homosexuality.) That’s why it is such a relief to finally hear some words of caution from the right with respect to religious politics – and the bullshit Romney shoveled as a way both to disown it and exploit it at the same time.

I’m sorry it took the Huckabee-Romney spat to wake them up. But at least a few are finally opening their eyes.

Cosmo For Malkins

Conservatism really is about a total ideology and life-style these days. Check out this pitch for a calendar with Star Parker as a cover-model:

Instead of, say, Paris Hilton gracing the cover in all her vacant glory, you see Star Parker or Michelle Malkin modeling the latest professional styles. And rather than being bombarded with teasers like “50 ways to make him want you,” your eyes are drawn to “10 policy positions that will make him crazy.” That would be worth your four dollars.

Readers are hereby invited to send in the top ten policy positions likely to make a man lust for Phyllis Shlafly.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"The president says: ‘The homeowners deserve our help.’ But why ‘deserve’? The principles of "compassionate conservatism" are opaque, but they might involve liberalism’s premise that Americans are so easily victimized they must be regarded as wards of government" – George Will, rightly berating Clinton and Bush. Obama, alas, is no better.