The Dish

They still can’t quite express the building anger across the country:

These days, the Republicans are stuck in neutral, because it’s their own guy who has fought the wrong war and emboldened our enemies. Which gives the Democrats a rare opportunity to lash out at GOP national security failures, to aim for the gut and engage the emotions.

But that is not what Democrats do.

They are cerebral by nature. They dislike emotional appeals. They fear that if they get too pugnacious, some voters might get mad …

Since when was it the opposition’s job to be the responsible party in wartime? I guess since the president turned out to be indifferent to the consequences of his own actions.

It’s Mike Huckabee: a big spending, Wilsonian, Christianist interventionist. I wonder why Mike Gerson isn’t writing his speeches.

"That’s ten hours of video-game time I just sacrificed to politics." Another American testifies to the strange appeal of Ron Paul. I feel it too:

The president liked the latest Kristol piece. Another reason to be irritated is this malign polyp of punditry:

"I’ve been pretty consistent, pretty upfront and straightforward about my views," [Kristol] says in his downtown office. "I had the same views when they were reasonably popular as I do now when they’re unpopular. It would really be pathetic to adjust one’s analysis based on public opinion."

Yes, it would. But the inference that this is what others are doing is the usual passive-aggressive smear. One can indeed adjust one’s analysis based on public opinion. One can also do so based on the facts. And any sane observer of the events in Iraq will have concluded, as even Charles Krauthammer has, that the prospects for putting the country back together are extremely dim in the foreseeable future. And yet where is Charles’ mea culpa? Where is Kristol’s? They were key architects of this fasco but they glide seamlessly from defending its maximalist goals to new bench-marks and new criteria with nary a hiccup of introspection. This is not a sign of a serious intellectual movement. It is a sign of an ideological fixation.

Not to have ever accounted for the massive gap between neoconservative ideology and its impact on the Middle East these past five years is a mark of intellectual irresponsibility. Has Kristol ever expressed even a scintilla of regret for a policy that was based on an untruth and has caused so much misery and death? Has he ever stated his own responsibility for a war and an administration with this record? Au contraire. His response to the empirical collapse of his own intellectual project is simply to accuse his critics of attacking the troops. We all make mistakes; we can articulate things for good motives only to find them dashed on the shores of implementation. But to express nothing but criticism of Rumsfeld, to exhibit absolutely no reflection or humility in the face of a concept so flawed and a project so steeped in the blood of innocent people, to respond to such a chastening experience with more partisan attacks is a sign not of a set of ideas, but of a rigid ideology. If conservatism exists as a coherent philosophy, it is its opposite.

A skirmish in the Christianist primary. Brownback attacks; Romney defends. Who can be most anti-gay? It’s only July. They’re just warming up.

Redwood City, California, 10.55 am.

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Big crowds, growing enthusiasm from disgruntled conservatives and the occasional bongo-drummer:

Maria Brathe, 64, drove from Greeneville, Tenn., to hear Paul.

Brathe, who described herself as a disabled former FBI internal affairs employee, said "the government took taxes from me my entire life and gave me the shaft. I want a man of honor in the White House."

Will Pitts, 38, of Jacksonville, Fla., owner of a construction and real estate company, shrugged off Paul’s low standing in the polls, saying, "The campaign is growing" because of its message of free enterprise and returning to the states responsibilities usurped by Washington.

Mark Hipshire, 46, an information technologist with the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a Ron Paul button on his shirt and yard sign under his arm, said his candidate "is a man of principles than align with mine. I’m a conservative, but I can’t go along with the conservatives in Washington."

Greer’s Chris Lawton, a Paul organizer, said he was attracted to Paul by "his message of freedom and liberty and getting us back to our constitutional roots."

Slightly lighter posting the past couple of days as I try and get my lungs to work. A friend pointed out to me once that an unhealthy number of metaphors I used in my book, "Love Undetectable" were related to breathing. I had no conscious idea. But when I thought about it, the whole oxygen thing has been part of the way I look at the world for as long as I can remember. The novel of Orwell’s I had a particular fondness for as a teen was "Coming Up For Air." The word I tended to use for most relationships gone awry in the past was "suffocating." When I first came up with some kind of analogy for the coming out experience, the most accurate I could find was "lung-filling." Yep, it’s all about the lungs.

I’ve had asthma for as long as I can remember. As a small child, I was incapacitated for stretches at a time. They gave you this little machine to suck powder out of, and I’d rattle away through the nights, hoping to be able to breathe confidently enough to fall asleep, scraping the encrusted white goo off the roof of my mouth every twenty minutes or so. It’s a scary thing as a kid to think that if you went to sleep, you might stop breathing. If I didn’t really make an effort, I was afraid I’d be headed to Jesus a little ahead of schedule. I’d panic some times, as asthmatic kids do, which only makes it worse. My dad would have to pick me up, and rub my head till I calmed down and could inhale again. In the last few years, of course, I discovered I was actually failing to breathe while I was asleep, but now my CPAP machine pumps the air in nightly.

The only big drawback to living on a wharf right next to the water is that the air is beyond damp a lot of the time. The towels are rarely bone-dry. Some nights and mornings, you can see the sea-mist almost settling in over the sofa. And so my asthma kicks in pretty badly. If I get some kind of cold or Cape Cod Crud,  my pathetic pulmonary system seizes up, the asthma swoops in, and I’m screwed for a couple of weeks. You learn to be patient then, to live with say, 60, 70 percent lung-capacity, to slow down and accept that a deep breath will only mean a spasm that won’t quit. When I got HIV, the only consolation was that I’d be out of here pretty quickly once pneumonia set in. It would be a swift departure, which is how I want it. But now that fate is far off, and boring old bronchitis just crouches on my chest like a massive toad of irritation. As I get better, and it’s coming slowly, I’m often test-coughing a little, just to see if we’re clear again. Not yet. But the feeling when you finally make it back to fully oxygenated life is unlike anything. It’s a cliche, as all the New Agers will tell you. But a simple breath, all the way in and all the way out, with no rattle or complication, is one of life’s deepest pleasures. You don’t know it till you don’t have it.

(Photo: Cameron Spencer/Getty.)

"I’m into leather." "Annie Hall."

Fallows:

The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they’re not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration – well, they’re sane.

He’s talking about the coolest French classical liberal on the planet, Veronique.