Queen Hillary, Empress of Mesopotamia

Hillarybust

My friend, David Brooks, does his best to reinforce the Hillary-Is-Inevitable consensus in Washington right now. He may regret this, though:

On "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Clinton could have vowed to vacate Iraq. Instead, she delivered hawkish mini-speeches that few Republicans would object to. She listed a series of threats and interests in the region and made it clear that she’d be willing to keep U.S. troops there to handle them.

Then we hear this from a right-wing reporter with access to Bush:

[Josh] Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that "even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there."

"Especially if it’s a Democrat," the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. "He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out."

If Clinton is that comfortable with a permanent occupation of Iraq at this point in the election cycle, how comfortable do you think she’s going to be next year? You think a politician so obsessed with gaining and wielding power is happy to relinquish any in the Middle East?

Patrick Ruffini draws the obvious conclusion:

Hillary is morphing into a George W. Bush Democrat. While that will draw heat from an increasingly desperate Obama, she will pay the price in the general election, not because she’s totally wrong, but because Democrat-inclined voters will smell something fishy about their gal acting like the one they’ve so long fantasized of kicking to the curb. And if she wins, the BushClintonBushClinton consensus will be back.

The conservative Washington Establishment is swooning for Hillary for a reason. The reason is an accommodation with what they see as the next source of power (surprise!); and the desire to see George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq legitimated and extended by a Democratic president (genuine surprise). Hillary is Bush’s ticket to posterity. On Iraq, she will be his legacy. They are not that dissimilar after all: both come from royal families, who have divvied up the White House for the past couple of decades. They may oppose one another; but they respect each other as equals in the neo-monarchy that is the current presidency. And so elite conservatives are falling over themselves to embrace a new Queen Hillary, with an empire reaching across Mesopotamia, a recently deposed court just waiting to return to the salons of DC, a consort happy to be co-president for another four years, and a back-channel to the other royal family. She’ll even have more powers than Clinton I, because Cheney has given her back various royal prerogatives: arrests without charges, torture, wire-tapping, and spy-ware on your Expedia account. Only the coronation awaits.

Vivat! Vivat! Vivat Regina! Unless, of course, the coronation is happening just a little too soon.

Catholicism, Sex and the Sixties

Charles Taylor explores Catholic understandings of sexuality through the centuries, and grapples with the conflicts of our own time. From Commonweal:

[W]e have to recognize that the moral landscape has changed. People who have been through the upheaval have to find forms that allow for long-term loving relations between equal partners who will in many cases also want to become parents and bring up their children in love and security. But these can’t be simply identical to the codes of the past, insofar as they were connected with the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues. It is a tragedy that the codes that churches want to urge on people still (at least seem to) suffer from one or more – and sometimes all – of these defects.

The inability is made the more irremediable by the unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics with certain models of the "natural," even in the medical sense. This not only makes them hard to redefine; it also hides from view how contingent and questionable this fusion is, how little it can be justified as intrinsically and essentially Christian.

Quote for the Day

"When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?" – Ezra Klein.

The trouble is: Ahmadinejad is not trying to dialogue with us. He’s trying to propagandize by using us. That’s a distinction. Inviting someone to speak is not necessary. It’s a choice. As it is, the event seems to have confirmed Ezra’s hopes. Bollinger did good. And the laughter was priceless. How many times do dictators get laughed at in their own countries?

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

Andrew, two things:

First, it is indeed true that Asians dominate Christian groups at elite US colleges. At Williams, my friends and I lived in a suite opposite six or seven Christian, Asian girls, very sweet and demure and renunciatory of things of This World: I know it bothered them living with four more or less Wild Men (like the figure of medieval popular mythology) who were constantly smoking pot, shouting, and carrying machetes (we used to play a game called Machete Ball, very wasteful and American; it’s pretty much baseball except one uses fruit for the balls and a machete for the bat — quite satisfying). Or rather, I do tend to think that along with the disapproval, there was a genuine amount of fear, which is not unreasonable.

So that statistic rings true.

Secondly, Harvard was not an evangelical institution in the 17th C., it was only in the 18th C., with the Great Awakening, that what we know as Evangelicals really came on the scene. The 17th Century types were much more grim and bloody-minded Calvinists, Cotton Mather style.

Sorry to be pedantic, but New England 17th and 18th C. History is my specialty.

That and machete ball.

The Online Revolution

Sy Hersh celebrates:

"There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ’93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded. So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff."