Accountability and the Right

Rod Dreher is unimpressed by recent epiphanies:

So yes, by all means let’s turn our backs on this failed presidency, and save what we can, while we can. But let’s not kid ourselves: Bush has failed conservatives, yes, but we have also failed ourselves. It doesn’t take much courage to stand up for conservative principle to a president as weak as this one has become. It would have taken real courage to stand up for conservative principle in 2002, 2003, 2004, even early 2005. How many did? I know I didn’t — not until Katrina and Miers, which came late in 2005.

If we’re looking to blame someone for the failure of Republican government and the conservative crack-up, look to the White House, yes, and look to the late, unlamented Republican Congress. But also look to the conservative talk show hosts, the conservative columnists, and finally, in the mirror. The only way we’re going to rebuild after the present and coming political shattering is through honest reckoning, and taking responsibility for what we’ve done. It is tempting to blame Bush for everything. But it’s not fair, and it’s not honest. Bush is today who he always was. The difference is we conservatives pretty much loved the guy – when he was a winner."

Carpe Diem

Every day in America is a special day. No, this isn’t an excerpt from a Romney speech. That would be:

"Fabulous. America. Faith. Faith. Faith. America. God. Faith. Gosh. God. Fabulous. America. Great. America. Strong. Strong. Faith. Strong. Family. God. Faith. America. Strong. Fabulous. Tagg!"

It’s a statement of fact, as Melissa Lafsky notes. Today, June 1, is, for example, Pen Pal Day, Kentucky Statehood Day and Leave The Office Early Day. Hey, where do you think you’re going?

Reason, Left and Right

Mark Hoofnagle notes:

It’s important to remember both the left and the right have anti-scientific tendencies, the left’s just tend to be less religious, less world-threatening and more woo-based. My brother recently told me about moving to California, "they don’t believe in Jesus here, just bullshit" in reference to the woo-based beliefs of large portions of the population. The risk of unscientific tendencies is when people with potential to become cranks see a scientific theory as a threat to some overvalued idea they hold dear. Sometimes the over-valued idea isn’t even a bad quality, it can be compassion – but taken to an extreme. If the left starts to see global warming policy as a money-grab by the elites, expect to see more left wing crankery and climate denial based on conspiratorial beliefs about carbon markets.

Just stick to the data, as best you can. I prefer hoo with my woo, personally.

Gore and the Media

Gorescottgriesgetty

Is the MSM back to its old tricks with respect to covering Gore? Paul McLeary thinks so:

[Dana] Milbank gives us an account of a recent speech by Gore that reads almost like a parody of everything we read about the candidate back in ’00.

Milbank said that during the speech, Gore "waxed esoteric," "waxed erudite," and "waxed informed," as if these might be bad things to have happen during a speech. Milbank then quotes several audience members who gush over how smart Gore is, concluding that "therein lies a problem for the Gore ’08 bubble." Can’t be too smart, now, or else you’ll look like an egghead, right?

… Making this point in his own way, Milbank says that "the crowd loved it. But would the ‘average American?’"

When reporters at places like the Post start acting like they know what’s up with the "average American," we’re headed for trouble. Milbank is trafficking in a portrayal of Gore that was almost entirely invented by the press, and, given that seven years later the press appears unable to move beyond that caricature, perhaps we’ll all be better off if Gore doesn’t run.

A couple of thoughts. I’m not unsympathetic to many of Gore’s points in his new book. But have you read it? It’s a multiple-page-sigh at the idiocy of his fellow humans. He comes off as a total jerk, when he’s not being a monumental bore. And if you’re a grown-up politician trying to get better press, it might not be the best idea to blame the media for everything that’s wrong in American democracy. It’s also a stupid argument. The notion that Americans became collectively unhinged after the O.J. Simpson trial, that it’s only been in the last decade or so that news has been chased out of American consciousness by celebrity, Hollywod and scandal, is so loopy and ahistorical it reads like a college thesis – which, of course, it once was. Really, I try and give the guy a chance. He’s not wrong about everything. He’s right about the Bush administration’s constitutional excesses, torture, war-bungling and the dreck that passes for news on a lot of cable channels. He deserves mad props on climate change. But there really is something about Al Gore. It took real talent to throw the 2000 election away. He’s still got it. 

Defining Secularism

Ross makes an essential point:

There are two strains of secularism, I would argue, which are usually intertwined but philosophically distinct: A soft secularism that argues for a legal separation of church and politics – no school prayer, no federal funds for churches, etc – and a hard secularism that militates for a complete separation of religion and politics, and shades easily into hostility toward organized religion in a general. But neither form precludes private belief in the supernatural. A perfectly "secular" society would be defined not by universal atheism, but by a religion-free politics in the short run, and probably a long-run "decoupling," as Razib puts it, of supernatural beliefs from religious institutions.

The conflation of secularism with atheism in the popular vernacular is one of the more corrosive abuses of the English language today. It is perfectly possible to be devoutly religious and aggressively secular. Yes, that combo is rarer than it was, but its possibility is a lynchpin of liberal democracy.