Should Steele Quit? Part II

I haven't been all that interested in the Michael Steele controversy, to tell the truth, mainly because I don't consider national party chairs as all that important as political actors.

Oh sure, the out-party needs leadership, and right now that's the GOP. But campaign finance reform curtailed the main source of power for the national party committees up through the 2004 election, and that was the "soft money" loophole which was closed by McCain-Feingold. The DNC and the RNC are just plain old party committees now, not huge money-laundering operations as they had been in the past, especially during the Bill Clinton years.

The other type of activities important to the parties - candidate recruitment, polling and research, and planning for the quadrennial national party conventions - are not glamorous duties, and can be performed by obscure party hacks who've worked their way up to prominence from behind the scence. Jim Nicholson is a good example. He wound up as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, after a stint as Ambassador to the Holy See. An unusual case on the Democratic side was failed 2004 presidential hopeful Howard Dean. If the former Vermont governor really deserves credit for an effective "50-state strategy," he didn't get it from the incoming Obama administration, and especially "Rahm the Knife." If anyone earned a cabinet post in the incoming administration, Dean was primus inter pares, and especially as the HHS portfolio is concerned. It's a thankless post, the party chairmanship.

So, maybe all of the backlash facing Steele now is just one more sign of how low down is the current GOP. Outside of party operatives and the Beltway establishment, Rush Limbaugh really is the genuine leader of the conservative movement. Perhaps Steele sees the party chairmanship as a launchpad to higher office, so he's got a stake in making the position prominent and successful. But he's getting off to a really bad start.

Steele's interview at GQ certainly can't be helping his cause. I just skimmed it, but he's advocating affirmative action for "non-whites" as of that's something the GOP should be supporting! And his comments on abortion are just a disaster for himself and the party. Even if Steele attempts to "back out" of his comments later in the inteview, the whole thing comes off as an attempt to move the party to the center to attract "progressive Republicans," whatever that is.

I think Mike Huckabee is right on when he says:

Since 1980, our party has been steadfast and principled in believing in the dignity and worth of every human life. We have supported a Constitutional amendment to protect life and the party has taken the position that no one individual has the supreme right to own another person in totality including the right to take that life. For Chairman Steele to even infer that taking a life is totally left up to the individual is not only a reversal of Republican policy and principle, but it's a violation of the most basic of human rights - the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I can't recall a national party chairman having been removed from the post, and I don't know what's happening with the latest rumors on Steele's possible sacking. I do think Steele's not well-suited to the job, and if he can't get his act together quickly, the national committee should cut him loose and hire a trusted and nondescript GOP functionary to take over during the rebuilding process. American politics is candidate-centered. I can't see how wasting so much time on unproductive debates helps Republicans reorganize. If right-wing media spokesmen like Mike Huckabee and Rush Limbaugh continue to hammer Steele over the next few days, the national committee should consider make it clear that the jig is up.

See also, "Should Steele Quit?."

Rule 5 Rescue: Helen Mirren

Well, I wasn't planning a "Rule 5 Rescue" entry this week, but I'm pleased to see Dana Pico's put up a fabulous picture of Helen Mirren as his introductory contribution to the genre (see, "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year").

I've enjoyed Helen Mirren's movies a for a long time. I took my mom to see Calendar Girls when it was in theaters in 2004, and I saw The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover back in 1989 or so, and that was an interesting but unusual movie.

I'll tell you though, seeing Helen Mirren in a bikini has engendered a newfound appreciation of Ms. Mirren's skills.

Don't miss Dana Pico's blog, Common Sense Political Thought, for some hard-hitting conservative commentary (and now apparently some hot chicks!).

Toward Political Godlessness

National Journal's cover story this week is "The Godless Rise as a Political Force."

The trend seems self-evident to me, as we're entering into the age of full-blown secular collectivism under the Obama administration. But the National Journal piece reveals some interesting notions among the politically Godless: For one, they believe President Obama has expressed his Christian beliefs as a "cloak for political expediency."

Here's more:

In January, shortly before Obama's inauguration, the national leadership of the Secular Coalition for America -- an umbrella lobbying group for leading atheist, humanist, and related groups -- gathered at the Holiday Inn Capitol in Washington to talk strategy for the post-Bush era. A National Journal reporter was allowed to sit in on a portion of the session and ask a few questions, and afterward stayed around to chat with the leaders during a luncheon break ....

Seated around a horseshoe table were leaders of the American Humanist Association ("being good without a god since 1941"); the Atheist Alliance International ("a positive voice for atheism!"); the Internet Infidels ("a drop of reason in a pool of confusion"); and the Secular Student Alliance ("Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment"). Others at the table included the Freedom From Religion Foundation, headed by Dan Barker, a former Christian evangelical preacher now known for his musical CD Friendly Neighborhood Atheist; and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, headed by Jason Torpy, a retired Army captain who served in Iraq ....

For the Age of Obama, part of the strategy is reminding the president of his roots. The American Humanist Association bought an ad in the January 20 special inauguration section of The Washington Post congratulating Obama and calling him "living proof that family values without religion build character." The ad featured a snippet from Obama's best-seller, The Audacity of Hope: "I was not raised in a religious household.... Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, [my mother] worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work."

Also in the book, in a passage not quoted in the ad, Obama refers to his mother's "professed secularism," writing that "for my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness." Obama has also said, as he did on February 5 at the National Prayer Breakfast, that his Muslim-born father "became an atheist."

Leaders of the Humanist Association felt gratified when the Obama transition team named Jonathan D. Moreno, a prominent bioethicist, as a reviewer of policies of the President's Council on Bioethics. Moreno has written for the association's magazine, The Humanist, and he is generally regarded in nontheist circles as one of their own. "He is our key guy," said Appignani, the Florida mogul, who is the leading bankroller of the American Humanist Association as well as the funding source, through his foundation, for the Appignani Humanist Center for Bioethics at the United Nations, a think tank devoted to issues such as end-of-life care.

What's more, the remodeled White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will not only be about the community work of faith-based groups, Obama said at the February 5 prayer breakfast; it will also reserve a place for "a secular group advising families facing foreclosure."

Yes, Obama has professed faith in Jesus Christ, which he arrived at as an adult, and has made high-profile efforts to reach out to the religious vote, as symbolized by his inviting Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration. Activists have no real proof that Obama, whatever his mother's beliefs, is not a sincere Christian, but they are accustomed to seeing hypocrisy on the part of elected officials on the God issue. They reckon that things will change only when their movement gets bigger and is perceived as more consequential. "What we need to do is organize better," Silverman said. "Then the politicians will follow."

From my perspective, the president's actions speak louder than words.

This administration has already shown its disregard for human life, and its economic program so far is shaping up to be the most serious threat to political liberty this country has ever known.

It's interersting how the activists of the Secular Coaltion are more honest than other groups on the nihilist lef. So I take their endorsement of Obama as a good measure of this administration Godlessness.

God have mercy on this nation.

Left Stays Classy on Laura Ingraham

Laura Ingraham has apparently dissed Meghan McCain for being full-figured, and Think Progress has the audio:

In a mocking faux-Valley Girl voice, Ingraham made fun of McCain’s body, joking that she didn’t get a “role in the Real World” because “they don’t like plus-sized models” ...

I saw Ms. McCain this morning on Fox & Friends and she looked great, so perhaps Ingraham's smackdown is a little (well-deserved) snarky-payback for the "progressive Republican's" slam on Ann Coulter. It's not that big of a deal to me, in any case, although I thought I'd highlight the very first commenter at Think Progress, who hopes Ingraham gets a recurrence of cancer:

I hope Ingraham gets a plus-sized tumor recurrence. What a ugly disgusting excuse for a “human”.

You know, I hammer leftists as hard as anyone out there, but I treat people with respect nevertheless, and I certianly don't wish death and destruction upon them. Conservatives are better people than leftists, as I've pointed out many times. This comment here is a dime a dozen, and folks who want to claim equivalence are just as bad.

Related: "Laura Ingraham Recovering from Cancer Surgery."

The Left's Douthat Pushback

I noted previously that Ross Douthat's appointment to the New York Times would hardly mean we'd have "a Buckley-esque voice at the op-eds."

Well, it turns out folks on the left aren't seeing things that way:

During his college years at Harvard, Douthat was a prolific writer. He was a columnist for The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily newspaper, and climbed to the rank of president of the conservative Harvard Salient in 2001.

One of the appeals of Douthat’s new perch, at least for progressives, is that he will not hew as closely to conservative orthodoxy as did his predecessor, Kristol. But Douthat’s college writing shows that, when it came to conservatism’s “meat-and-potatoes” issues, he was far from a maverick. In fact, when opining on the “culture war” and, after September 11, terrorism, he held predictably boilerplate conservative views. While Douthat has certainly produced more recent work that allows his ideology to speak for itself, it’s nonetheless useful to see where he stood at a pivotal point in American politics.

Douthat on culture:

“There is a tendency among ’90s conservatives to adopt a bunker mentality, to insist that the forces of moral degeneration are winning the culture war and that the apocalypse is imminent. But there is a wider world out beyond the Charles and Sunset Boulevard, a place where as many people go to church as did in the halcyon 1950s, a place where everyone owns a gun and ‘conservative’ is not a dirty word. It is a place with its problems, including a debased popular culture and a distressing tendency to elect men like Bill Clinton. But it is not the conservative-hating Gomorrah that some right-wingers like to imagine.”

-The Salient, March 3, 1999

“Today, everything is available, to everyone, at any time. Every deviant desire, dark fantasy and sordid dream can be realized, at a reasonable price. Forget ‘normalizing homosexuality’—something the Right has been worrying over since the advent of gay liberation. Today, the Internet and DirecTV are normalizing everything, from group sex to bestiality to darker things that decency forbids mentioning. And as for pedophilia—why, any erotic website worth its salt promises links to images of the ‘barely legal,’ ‘young teen sluts,’ and all the rest. Today, Nabokov’s Humbert would need not be a tragic figure; instead, he could have spent his years ensconced in front of a glowing computer screen, with a thousand Lolitas for his delectation.”

-The Crimson, October 30, 2000

You can see why the secular collectivists might get upset. Indeed, check out this nugget on Douthat from Amanda Marcotte:

The New York Times hired Ross Douthat as their new columnist. Which means it’s officially easier for a virgin to get such a plum job than a feminist, at least a female feminist. (Bob Herbert, we still love you!)

But that’s unfair, Amanda!, you might say. Why so harsh on virgins? And this is true---I shouldn’t implicate all virgins or suggest that being a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t be an insightful writer. I would caution against the problem of people who don’t play the game making the rules, and my beef with Douthat over the years is that he’s a wild misogynist, an anti-choice nut who flirts with hostility to contraception, and a panty-sniffer who is willing to engage in misinformation campaigns against those who disagree that sexually active people are evil. I have no doubt he’ll use his perch at the NY Times to do the same.

Douthat's married, of course, but a little detail like that's not going to deter Marcotte from her campaign of excoration.

Creeping Socialization ... of Kisses?

Henry Farrell's got a long post dismissing claims that the Obama administration's economic policies are turning the U.S. toward the European state-socialist model.

As Henry notes at the post, Obama's policies "aren’t going to set the US on a different national trajectory, let alone make it ‘French’ or ‘European.’ Some of us might like to see this happen, but it isn’t going to, even given the ideological trauma that the US is undergoing."

Now, I don't have time right now to disabuse Henry of this notion that the U.S. is not becoming more like Europe during the current crisis (things seemed overdetermined, actually, and it's not just in the economic realm), although if the convergence can be measured in other ways, perhaps the "socialization of kisses" might be in interesting place to start. Henry's co-blogger, Maria, has this about the changing norms of social kissing:

I do a fair bit of cheek-kissing and hugging, both socially and at work, probably more than most but not unusually so (I haven’t had any complaints yet). It’s really come in amongst the anglo-saxons in the past decade or so. Time was when only the French did cheek-kissing when they met. Perhaps as the result of many forlorn French exchange summers, or maybe just aping our more sophisticated Continental neighbours, the Irish and British middle classes began to do single-cheek kissing in the eighties and nineties.

I kiss a French person once on each cheek (twice if they’re a close friend or family friend), three times in total for a Belgian or Dutch person, and just one single-cheeked peck for a fellow anglo-saxon. In the last few years, a new variation has crept in. Married men who kiss me – just a peck – on the lips.

From the comments, Jacob Christensen responds:

First [socialized] health care and now kissing. It looks like the French really are trying to turn the US into the 101st département.

Next thing, you’ll be making wine ...

Well, if "just a peck – on the lips" accompanies traditional European-style "welfare-state unemployment," maybe convergence might not be such a bad thing after all?

Eagle Recovered

Professor Robert Lieber at Georgetown University is the editor of "the eagle" series of books on U.S. foreign policy. The most recent volume is Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century, and previous iterations have included Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy, and Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World.

I was reminded of Lieber's edited collection last night while visiting Perri Nelson's weblog, which features the most fascinating series of photographs on the near-death experience of this eagle:

It turns out two eagles fighting for the same prey collided in mid-air and the eagle above was knocked out briefly and almost drowned in the water. But he pulled himself up and shook himself off atop of this tree, and before flying off into the air, he tightened up his feathers in a pose that's quintessentially American. Here is the caption from the photographer:

The bedraggled Eagle circled me once - then lit atop a nearby fir tree. He had a six-foot wingspread and looked mighty angry. I was concerned that I might be his next target, but he was so exhausted he just stared at me. Then I wondered if he would topple to the ground. As he tried to dry his feathers, it seemed to me that this beleaguered Eagle symbolized America in its current trials ....

My half-hour wait was rewarded with this marvelous sight. He flew away, almost good as new. May America recover as well.

Magnificent. View the whole series of ten photographs, here.

See also Lieber's recent article debunking the latest theories of American decline, "Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set."

California Voters Sharply Divided on Gay Marriage

A new survey from the Field Research Corporation finds Californians deeply split on same-sex marriage and Proposition 8, which if upheld by the California Supreme Court will define marriage in the state as between one man and one woman. According to the poll:

The latest statewide Field Poll conducted February 20 ... asked voters how they would react if a new constitutional amendment were placed on the ballot to allow same-sex marriages in the state.

The results reveal a voting public that remains sharply divided both overall and across political, demographic and regional lines. If a new constitutional amendment about same-sex marriage qualified for the ballot, 48% of the state’s registered voters say they would vote Yes to permit such marriages, 47% would vote No to oppose them and 5% are undecided.

As was true with regard to the vote on Prop. 8 last year, there are large differences in voter preferences by party, political ideology, age, marital status, gender, religion and region of residence.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an analysis of the survey, "Field Poll Finds Voters Still Split on Marriage."

Most observers expect the Court to sustain the will of the voters, and hence activists on both sides of the issue are gearing up for the next round of electoral politics.

National Journal has a recent piece on the controversy, "Proposition 8's Embers Smolder" (behind a subscription firewall), and this passage from the conclusion provides an excellent glimpse into the ideological thinking of the left's gay marriage activists:

Gay-marriage opponents say that this fight would go away if homosexuals would be satisfied with civil unions. Such unions have been offered as a compromise in California and other states, Maggie Gallagher said, but gay-rights advocates increasingly oppose them as an apartheid-like demotion of gay and lesbian relationships. This rejection, she said, is a predictable consequence of the effort to apply the “bigot” label in law to those who see child-rearing at the center of marriage. “This leads not to live-and-let-live tolerance, which is most people’s goal, but the use of the law to repress people’s views and to marginalize people who disagree with you ... in a zero-sum clash,” Gallagher insisted.

“The word ‘marriage’ needs to be used to describe all relationships of two people who are loving and committed to each other,” countered [activist Sara Beth Brooks] Brooks. “To deny that semantic attachment to our relationships is the exact same thing as denying an African-American person the right to attend the same schools as a white person.” “I could support some version of partnership benefits, but not if they’re going to endanger marriage,” Gallagher replied. “I don’t know how you persuade young men and young women that children need a mother and a father if that idea is viewed as racist.”

I have written much about this. Gay activists will not be content with a compromise on civil unions (such as that offered by Blankenhorn and Rauch) because the fight for gay marriage constitutes a larger struggle of existential symbolism: Nothing less than full marriage equality will be found acceptable for a rights group that is perceived to still face pernicious social stigmas posing even more entrenched barriers to inclusion than those faced by previously disadvantaged groups.

See my recent essay for more on this, ""No Faggots, Dykes or Trannies"?", for a taste of both the vitriol and the hypocrisy on the issue emanating from the left.

As for the poll numbers, we'll likely see similar findings in upcoming polls, but a lot depends on question wording as well as the quality of the sample. When gay marriage hits the ballot box again, say, in 2010 or 2012, the strength of the respective "ground games" may decide the race. But as I've noted many times here, if the hard-left activists become increasingly and outwardly belligerent toward people of faith and tradition (which is highly likely), a significant backlash may shift some of the polling numbers in the direction of social conservatism.

Russia's Legalized Murder

St. Blogustine points us in the direction of David Kinsella and Anna Sirota's, Killing Girls, a film on the moral epidemic of abortion in Russia:

According to Matt at the post:

The film follows three teenage girls in Russia from the time they enter the abortion clinic until after they leave, delving into their circumstances for being pregnant, their reasons for having late-term, labor induced abortions, and the state of moral decay in today's Russia that would result in such an alarming trend (80% of today's Russian women have between 2 and 10 abortions in their lifetimes).

With Russia's dramatic demographic decline, this type of moral obliteration is more than disheartening, it's a nation-killer. See, "The Vanishing Russians: A Declining Population Threatens Russia’s Future."

New York Times Hires Ross Douthat

This is the obligatory* Ross-Douthat-at-the-New-York-Times post.

The newspaper's announcement is here, via Memeorandum, where there's a lot of commentary on the news.

I first want to wish Douthat congratulations. I've been familiar with his work since the publication of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. The Atlantic piece based on the book, "The Truth About Harvard," is must reading for those in college teaching. His appointment to the Times at (roughly) the age of 30 is one of the most astounding stories of journalistic accomplishment in the high-tech media age.

I'm also currently wading through Douthat's more recent book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The book, and Douthat's analytical repertoire, is wonky conservative pragmatism. My feeling is that Douthat's frankly just a lot-smarter-version of David Brooks, so while the Times' editorial page will have a new towering intellect, they won't have a Buckley-esque voice at the op-eds (although thank God they didn't hire Daniel Larison).

**********

*Allahpundit's traffic-churning posts are almost always entitled "obligatory."

Reach-Around Blogging!

I want to assure readers that I haven't transmogrified into an Andrew Sullivan myrmidon like the guys over at Ordinary Gentlemen!

Oh, gosh no. Don't worry, I haven't gone crazy with all my links to Robert Stacy McCain. The thing is, Stacy - "The Hustler" I call him - has been blazing a blogging trail with all of his traffic-building innovations first outlined in his game-changing post, "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year." The fact is, I've just been applying some of the strategies outlined therein, and dag nabbit, they work! Traffic is up considerable around here. Why, just today John Hawkins linked American Power as "blog of the day" from Conservative Grapevine. So, extending TrogloPundit's testimonial to the entire "million hits" program, "It works! R.S. McCain is a genius!"

I mean, I've got to admit, I had no idea breast blogging was so popular! That's right, even the sweet young conservative hotties dig it, like Suzanna Logan and Monique Stuart! And these upstarts are getting noticed!

But almost as much fun as Rule 5 hotness is Rule 4 blogging ("make some enemies"). Indeed, Dan Collins is a great admirer my own Rule 4 work, and TBogg gives me lots of opportunities to hone my craft! And I'm just getting started, I'm telling you! I've already gotten both Robert Farley and Dave Noon to say "No mas!," although Scott Lemieux's certainly making a bid to get into the ring. Others searching for material need look no further than Down With Tyranny!

In any case, I need to respond to Stacy's repudiation of Barack Obama's economic program (not to mention David Brooks' "National Greatness"), for "Meghan and 'Progressive Republicans'").

So, until then, head on over to Cheat Seeking Missiles or Mark Goluskin's for some great conservative commentary!

Oh, I almost forgot, Blazing Cat Fur, is, well, blazing!

Stupid is as Stupid Does, TBogg

Considering how secular collectivists love to attack alleged false equivalencies, it might be worth highlighting TBogg's post this morning on Camille Paglia's take on Rush Limbaugh.

Paglia's getting some attention for calling out the Obama administration for an "embarrassing series of flubs" in its first few weeks. These "flubs" include the ill-advised attacks on the conservative talk-radio king. TBogg suggests Paglia's got it all wrong:

I'll explain this slowly: the White House wants to hang Rush Limbaugh around the necks of Republicans. Republicans can't repudiate anything that Rush says without having to kiss his ass later. Outside of the mouth-breathers who fill the bleak and lonely hours of their unexamined lives listening to a drug-addled sex-tourist serial groom, most people in America don't like Rush. This is a bad thing for Republicans. It's guilt by association and it's the same thing that the Republicans tried to do with Obama and Bill Ayers ... except that nobody knew or cared who Bill Ayers was because he wasn't on the radio telling African-Americans to "take the bone out of your nose" or making fun of Michael J. Fox.

Well, I'll explain something slowly to TBogg: Hello? ... That's a false association between Rush Limbaugh and Bill Ayers. Most people with half a brain can morally differentiate between an addiction to prescription painkillers (and "serial groomhood") and participation in a declared "state of war" against the United States government - a campaign of terror seeking the mass destruction of life and property that but for sheer ineptitude wasn't worse than it was. What is more, conservatives don't have to hang Bill Ayers around Barack Obama's neck. Ayers and Obama were palling around together, and had not the media become "The One's" press spokesman last year, we might not be debating whether the U.S. is on the verge of European-style state socialism.

Stupid is as stupid does, TBogg.

Leftists love terrorist chic, obviously, since only an airhead would equate Rush Limbaugh with a man who had "no regrets" and "wished he'd done" more to maim and murder Americans in a campaign of terrorist hatred. And remember, this is the guy who today's media-newspeakers pass off as a "serious and respected" education leader.

Remember Madrid: March 11, 2004

Barcepundit commemorates the fifth anniversary of the Madrid train bombings with a simply-stated enumeration of the names of the dead.

Jules Crittenden reminds us of the importance of March 11:

The attack was a victory for Islamic terrorism, which succeeded in changing a government and its foreign policy. The attacks tipped the balance in a close election just days later amid recriminations over the government’s initial focus on its other domestic terrorist problem, ETA. Spain, under its new socialist government, shortly afterward withdrew its troops from Iraq.

When I think of the Madrid bombings, I'm always reminded of the above picture of terror's deadly destruction, and I disabuse the antiwar idiots that "it couldn't happen here."

More photos, here.

Barack Obama's Opening Drive

Camille Paglia get's snarky on Barack Obama's amateur fumbles in the opening drive of his administration:

Free Barack!

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons - his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.

Read the whole thing here.

A picture of Ms. Paglia is here (accompanied by a flirting reference to Paglia's Rule 5 possiblities).

How about Elizabeth Drew? Is she Rule 5 material? I ask because Ms. Drew's got a new essay up at the New York Review, "The Thirty Days of Barack Obama." She's liberal, but I always enjoy reading her essays. This passage on the early GOP opposition to the administration is worth quoting:

The House Republicans, greatly reduced by the 2006 and 2008 elections, were now as a whole more conservative than they've been in a generation—moderate Republicans having been reduced to a mere dozen or so. There were signs from the outset that the Republicans had no intention of cooperating with Obama. Lacking the leverage to affect policy, or the votes sufficient to defeat Obama's stimulus plan, they could do what they wanted, however short-sighted, without being saddled with responsibility for killing it. Moreover, they concluded from their losses in 2008 that they hadn't been conservative enough; they had come under a great deal of criticism for having presided over too much spending. The House has been particularly polarized for decades: when each party gains the majority, it takes revenge for having been, as they see it, mistreated by the other. Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushing the bill through the House, it was easy for Republican leaders to get their followers worked up against it. Emotion —over issues, over procedure—plays a larger part in parliamentary politics than people may realize.

Almost all the House Republicans come from conservative districts and hold safe seats. And in the House and the Senate, Republicans could, and did, resort to the often successful ruse of saying that they voted against the bill not because they were against what it's trying to do—heavens no—but because it wasn't good enough. The Republicans believed that they were taking no great gamble in opposing the stimulus bill: they figured—perhaps mistakenly—that since the 2010 election was far off, their votes would likely be forgotten. (The Democrats are already running ads against some of them.) They also figured that if the economy began to recover by then, Obama would get all the credit anyway. So, two hours before the new president was to go to the exceptional length of traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republicans to discuss the stimulus bill, Minority Leader John Boehner sent word to his ranks to oppose it.

Drew's the ultimate Washington insider, and she provides a glimpse into the inner workings of West Wing (President Obama "restlessly roams" the White House, checking in with staffers to see how things are going; and he's a delegator, which means "the boys" are running the place, like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor David Axelrod).

I'll have more later ...

Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, and "Social Justice" Education

I've got a couple of related education items to share with readers.

First, El Marco has e-mailed his latest photo-journalism essay, "Ward Churchill Trial in Denver - Education is the Motor Force of Revolution." I know this is hardly new, but I'm still blown away at these neo-Stalinist idiots parading around at protests - and now the Churchill trial - with the most hare-brained anti-capitalilst paraphernalia imaginable.

Be sure to check out the cool blog keeping track of the trial, Race to the Botttom: Ward Churchill - First Amendment Suit.

Our second item is the new essay at Pajamas by Mary Grabar, "Teachers: They’re All Bill Ayers Now."

Ms. Grabar discussses the popularity across the academy of "social justice education," and notes how at many of his campus lectures, Bill Ayers is billed as “leader in the educational reform movements for over forty years.” Ayers is scheduled to give a talk at Pennsylvania’s Millersville University on March 19, and the local write-up of the campus backlash against the visit describes Ayers as "a university professor and a member of Chicago's intellectual establishment."

And how's that working out for the education of our future teachers? Citing Ayers' latest book, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Ms. Graber describes the work as "a pastiche of self-promoting observations on the classroom, the need to inform children about “social justice,” like-minded radicals, and complaints about conservatives."

The leftist intelligentsia no doubt eats it up. Adds Grabar:

... it seems that education colleges are churning out teachers more concerned with being “agents of social change” than the three “R”s. Little wonder, then, that Ayers’ book is being reissued as a graphic novel. Little wonder that student groups sponsored Ayers’ visit on March 5 to the University of Colorado to speak in defense of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, who was fired for plagiarism and not for calling 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns.” We can thank their teachers for planting in their heads notions about “social change” that would lead to their ignorantly calling the event “Forbidden Education and the Rise of NeoMcCarthyism.”

You got that right, and click here for a look at more on the "social justice curriculum.

The Coming Persecution

There's a lot of talk online this morning on the fate of religious observance in the United States.

I'll have more on this below, but what's striking from a political perspective is how giddily the collapse of evangelism is welcomed by the secular-progressive left. Andrew Sullivan, in particular, has a number of posts up cheering all of this, for example, "The Young and the Godless," and "A Coming Evangelical Collapse?"

Sullivan blames these trends on ... wait for it! ... "Christianism," of course.

Pamela Leavey also strikes up the band at the news:

I’ll be glad to see the Evangelicals have far less say in the politics of our country. Already with Obama’s lift on Bush’s stem cell research ban, we’re seeing the movement of a more secular America, which is the way it should be in my opinion.

This is in response to Michael Spencer on the collapse of evangelism, at the Christian Science Monitor (via Memeorandum). Spencer explains some of the causes:

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

Robert Stacy McCain adds this on Bible teaching, from his own experience:

When I was a kid growing up in the Baptist church, "Sword Drill" was a big event.

"Sword Drill" took its name from Ephesians 6:17, where Christians are commanded to employ "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." So us kids were literally drilled in Bible memorization. I was by no means a good student, but some of it took, and the constant repetition of Bible study engrained in my mind - as I am sure it did with others - a solid core of biblical knowledge. It also developed a mindset that the Bible was an authoritative source.

Suzanna Logan has more on this, and her piece gets to the heart of just what it is the secular left hates about evangelical observanc:

As William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, told Lou Dobbs, "The three most dreaded words are 'thou shalt not.'” He goes on to say it’s not that these people (who claim not to be religious in the survey) are atheists, it’s just that they don’t want to be told what to do with their lives. Newsflash: you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Anyone who wants to “believe in God” without accepting that there are some “shall” and “shall nots” that go along with the territory is like a person who knows he has a million dollars in the bank but refuses to use it because he doesn’t want his life to change for the better ....

I daresay if churches would begin to work a little more “thou shalt not” into their Sunday morning sessions, there would be a night and day (or would it be heaven and hell?) difference in our churches.

MacRanger worries little over increasing secularization, for a reckoning is coming, and there is comfort and reassurance of Goodness in faith:

As we believe Christ was and is God, we believe that he will return one day and right this planet, whether people believe it or not, or even like it or not and rule. We who have trusted in his name will rule with Him, indeed the Bible tells us that we will judge the nations and even angels. The point is that in the end - through Christ - we win, because He wins. It’s as sure as the dawn.

Read the rest of MacRanger. He predicts a persecution.. And there'll be a reckoning in the church, a purge of "the false believers, those who say they are, but are not."

Debating Chas Freeman

If readers aren't up on the controversy over the Obama adminisration's appointment of Chas Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, Jake Tapper's got a good roundup on the topic. And Ben Smith updates with the latest news on the "outreach" by Freeman allies to wavering congressional members.

But the best I've seen on all this yet is Sister Toldjah's post, "Rebuttals to the “Chas Freeman is a Realist” Arguments." Notice ST's smackdown of Freeman apologist Andrew Sullivan:

The issue of Chas Freeman has become so contentious that it has seen staunch conservatives like myself agreeing, in part, with staunch liberals like Jon Chait and Marty Peretz in terms of their disappointment with the Obama administration over this decision. But, as expected, inevitably there would be diehard Obama supporters like Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall who would link to every piece they could in defense of Chas Freeman supposedly being a victim of some sort of “vast neocon conspiracy” (who knew that liberals like Chait and Peretz were “neocons”?) while passionately writing that Freeman was/is a “realist” and “free thinker” - the kind we “really need” as the head of the NIC. Oh really?

Not so fast, writes Martin Kramer in two separate pieces (here and here) about Freeman’s alleged “realism” that you should consider must-reads. It puts an exclamation point on all you’ve read about Freeman so far from those who oppose his selection. There are some liberals who would travel to the ends of the Earth to defend the Obama administration, but fortunately more than just a couple oppose Freeman and aren’t going to stay silent about it (like that mega-neocon Senator Chuck Schumer).

As a sidenote, I found this paragraph from Sullivan’s defense to be quite amusing:

I repeat: if there are serious financial conflicts of interest, Freeman should withdraw. I also find some of Freeman’s realist statements, even as contrarian, a little too brutal for my taste. But I also believe that someone whose views push the envelope against recent US policy in the Middle East is an important asset for the United States right now. And I find the hysterical bullying of this man to be repulsive.

Right. Reasonable questioning by liberals and conservatives as to whether or not the man the Obama admin has picked to serve in one of the most critical intelligence positions in America is “bullying.” But being creepily obsessive about whether or not Trig Palin was/is “really” Sarah Palin’s son or Bristol Palin’s, and hypocritically bullying John McCain over a POW story he’s told about a cross in the sand a million times over is apparently a-ok to Sully.

Got it.

Gay Culture and Political Correctness

James Webb, of Brainrage, has asked of me repeatedly: "I'm just curious as to your views on gay marriage if one of your own boys wanted the same rights that many gays are now denied by yourself and others of your ilk."

I've yet to respond to such questioning because of the implicit reverse-bigotry of the underlying assumption: "Donald, you're a homophobe and I'd like to see how you'd handle it if one of your own kids came out as homosexual"?

Putting aside James' obnoxiousness, the short answer is that my kids are free to do as they please on matters of love and marriage; and if they choose or find that they are gay, I'll love them just as much as I do now, and I'll support them in whatever they want to do. I will do this - as my current political inclination insists - without changing my views on same-sex marriage as a social institution, because, as I've suggested repeatedly, I don't consider gay marriage a civil right and I'm bothered by the idea that a tiny minority of the U.S. population can use the politics of grievance to bully a traditional majority into changing a longstanding cultural and religious practice that is the basis for social stability and spiritual unity. My logic is explained in more detail in my recent essay, ""No Faggots, Dykes or Trannies"?"

I raise the issue tonight in light of the controversy surrounding Rod Dreher's comments today on the tragic small-town murder story at Dallas Morning News.

I WANT TO BE AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE HERE: Dreher screwed up big time in writing this post. He essentially posed a moral trade-off between murder and bisexuality, an unconscionable lapse, since the taking of human life is morally incomparable in its criminal depravity. Tom Maguire, at Just One Minute, rightly called out Dreher for his infelicity, if not outright stupidity. I reject Dreher's comparison - his COMPARISON - altogether, so again, I WANT THE POINT TO BE AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE!

My interest here is the response to Dreher across the leftosphere, and what this response tells us about the left's politics of grievance and political correctness. Dreher began by rightly noting the "Horrible story in today's Dallas Morning News." The dad who survived the attack lamented his daughter's alleged participation in the killings, while adding that in her peer group it is "was almost cool to be bisexual." But Dreher then suggests that "the killings aren't what shocked me about this story. What got me was ... there's a bisexual culture ... among the teenagers?"

And there you go: That set off the attacks from the left-wing blogs. Note that even in a separate context, Dreher would have been attacked as a troglodyte by the gay-rights hordes for criticizing "bisexual culture." But by admitting his prejudices in the context of the killings opened him to a mercilessly opportunistic (denial-of-service) assault by Andrew Sullivan as "clinical."

Amanda Marcotte joined the lynch mob, excoriating Dreher, saying "I suspect that Dreher, in his heart of hearts, thinks that you spend more time in hell for violating patriarchal gender roles than for killing."

What is it with people and gender roles, anyway? But besides that, Marcotte herself is notorious for politically incorrect attacks on the Roman Church's abortion policies, saying at one point, "the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics." Thus, for Marcotte, it's unacceptable for Rod Dreher to repudiate a culture of bisexuality in the context of a murder story, but she's completely fine with attacking the Catholic Church's pro-life stance when those very policies would in fact save lives!

But for the full pallette of left-wing, politically-correct grievance-mongering, check out Lawyers, Guns and Money's attack on Dreher:

The nature of the typical experience of non-heterosexual adolescents in our schools and our society is hardly a secret. The ostracization and bullying of those suspected to be non-heterosexual takes an enormous pyschological toll, and has life and death consequences, as evidenced higher rates of depression and suicide amongst non-heterosexual youth. They typically live in fear: fear that something is horribly wrong with them, fear of being rejected by their friends and family, and fear of violence. But: in one small town, at least for some non-heterosexual youth, there's a chance this status quo might be changing. For anyone whose moral worldview contains any compassion, changes to this horrific status quo are a sign of hope. For Dreher, it's the precise opposite.

Lord knows that the U.S. is far from overcoming homophobia, but Dreher's not advocating violence against gays. He's worried about the moral decline of society, and he vows at his post that he's "not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it." Dreher's crime here is his naiveity, even stupidity, for not realizing he'd be excoriated not just for offering these views, but for offering them in the most indefensible way, in a situation of human tragedy all around.

Dreher is not wrong, however to worry about the moral safety of his own kids. And if he believes that a "culture of bisexuality" goes against his values and his family's measure of what's morally right, he's entitled to those views. Unfortunately, Dreher was so hammered by the demon trolls at his post, he offered three updates to his essay and backtracked as far as he could, while still failing to actually save much face in the process.

So note something here: This is how the left wins. This is the culture of demonization that has grown to such a scale of heinous enormity that people of good faith and values are afraid to openly discuss their beliefs. Traditionalists will be targeted and blackballed, which is all the more funny since leftists don't make MORALLY PURSUASIVE aguments. They BULLY and make FALSE HISTORICAL anologies to the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow, while gays and lesbians today are a protected class under U.S. constitutional law. (But remember, the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee gays the right to marry, much less a right to be free from other forms of discrimination. And while the Supreme Court, in fact, has recently interpreted the 14th Amendment as prohibiting disparate treatment against gays, it has yet to decide a gay marriage case; and no one can argue that such a right would be envisioned in a jurisprudence of original intent.)

So, back to James Webb: The possibility of my boys coming out as gay will have little affect on my substantive positions on gay rights. I love my kids, and I'll be there for them if life takes them down that road. But I also love people, irrespective of sexual orientation. Arguing in favor of a traditional conception of marriage does not make me a bigot. Even poor old Rod Dreher doesn't come off as one. He just had the unfortunate chance to be caught in the crosshairs of a nihilist-left hypocritcal jihad against moral conservatism.

Progressive Republicans

Meghan McCain is in the news today with her essay and comments on Ann Coulter.

Ms. McCain minces no words, saying, "I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time."

Ann Coulter, of course, is a right-wing shock jock (or "gyno-jock," if that's more politically-correct), and Ms. McCain's attack on her is clearly a strawman.

But the slam on Coulter is the peripheral issue here: What's important is Ms. McCain's message on today's GOP. She argues, for example, that "President Obama has successfully established himself as the hippest politician around," and "being a Republican is about as edgy as Donny Osmond."

Ouch! And furthermore:

I consider myself a progressive Republican ....

I’m often criticized for not being a “real” Republican, and I have been called a RINO—Republican In Name Only—in the past. Many say I am not “conservative enough,” which is something that I am proud of. It is no secret that I disagree with many of the old-school Republican ways of thinking. One of the biggest issues from which I seem to drift from the party base is in my support of gay marriage. I am often criticized for previously voting for John Kerry and my support of stem-cell research. For the record, I am also extremely pro-military and a big supporter of the surge and the Iraq war ....

I am sure most extreme conservatives and extreme liberals would find me a confusing, walking contradiction. But I assure you, there are many people out there just like me who represent a new, younger generation of Republicans. It took me almost two years of campaigning across this country and hanging out, on a daily basis, with some of the most famous and most intelligent Republicans to fall in love with the Republican Party. If it took that much time and exposure for me to join the party, how can GOP leaders possibly expect to reach young supporters by staying the course they have been on these past eight years?

Coming from the daugther of the 2008 GOP nominee, this critique should be given some consideration. This meme is also important in the context of Ms. McCain's earlier argument that Republicans are simply not as tech-savvy in info-mobilization and mass-technology politics.

Certainly, to me, the notion of "progressive Republcans" is a contraction in terms. Even Edmund Burke said conservatives must adapt to change, but change must follow tradition and presumption, and society can't change for change's sake. I get this feeling from Ms. McCain and others that they favor progressive policies as a matter of electoral expedience - even "hipness" - not according to whether such change best advances and protects humankind's most imporant spiritual and material interests. Does "progressive conservatism" truly extend and preserve freedom? Does this new GOP paradigm get back to the constitutional roots of limited government? Indeed, can the Republican Party survive as an electoral alternative if it simply apes the popularity and social mores of the current party-in-power, a true progressive apparatus that's likely to destroy America's historic foundations of individualism and egalitarianism in the private sphere?

There are a number of commentators making a similar case to Meghan McCain's (some more intellectually honest than others, ahem...). On top of that, we've got the news today that Nancy Reagan is backing President Obama's stem-cell policy. We also have the story that the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christian has dropped substantially over the last generation. I'm sure I could find other examples of cultural and generational changes that are likely to pose problems for the GOP in terms of forming stable, long-term winning coalitions.

I'm waiting to hear back from Robert Stacy McCain about all of this. McCain's been making the case that Barack Obama's economic policies will fail, and Republicans will be positioned sooner rather than later for a return to power, in Congress and perhaps the executive. But a lasting Republican electoral model needs to be more than about protecting the interests of "economic man." The roots of conservatism are found in traditions and institutions that limit governmental power and unlock the potential of the individual.

All this talk about "progressive Republicans" is unappealing, if not a little worrying. Ann Coulter's publicity gimmicks are the least of the conservative movement's problems problems right now.

Constitutional Conservatism

Peter Berkowitz offers his advice for the divided partisans of today's political right, in his essay, "Constitutional Conservatism":

A constitutional conservatism puts liberty first and teaches the indispensableness of moderation in securing, preserving, and extending its blessings. The American Constitution that it seeks to conserve presupposes natural freedom and equality; draws legitimacy from democratic consent while protecting individual rights from invasion by popular majorities; defines government’s proper responsibilities while providing it with the incentives and tools to perform them effectively; welcomes a diverse array of voluntary associations in part to prevent any one from dominating; assumes the primacy of self-interest but also the capacity to rise above it through the exercise of virtue; reflects and at the same time refines popular will through a complex scheme of representation; and disperses and blends power among three distinct branches of government as well as among federal and state governments to provide checks and balances. The Constitution and the nation that has prospered under it for 220 years demonstrate that conserving and enlarging freedom and democracy in America depend on weaving together rival interests and competing goods ....

The principles are familiar: individual freedom and individual responsibility, limited but energetic government, economic opportunity, and strong national defense. They derive support from Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, as well as from Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and, in his most representative moments, John Stuart Mill — outstanding contributors to the conservative side of the larger liberal tradition. They are embedded in the Constitution and flow out of the political ideas from which it was fashioned. In the 1950s, they animated William F. Buckley Jr.’s critique of higher education in America in God & Man at Yale, an opening salvo in the making of the modern conservative movement. In the 1960s, they were central to Frank Meyer’s celebrated fusion of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, and they formed the backbone of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency. In the 1980s, they inspired Ronald Reagan’s consolidation of conservatism. In the 1990s, they fueled Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution.” And even though George W. Bush’s tumultuous eight years in the White House have left conservatives in disarray, these principles informed both his conception of compassionate conservatism and his aspiration to make the spread of liberty and democracy a crucial element of American foreign policy.

The article's worth a careful read, here.

I was impressed by how much Barry Goldwater's conservative vision animates Berkowitz's "constitutional conservatism." That vision melds political liberty and traditional morality as a guiding ethical program for society. Beyond this, Berkowitz's piece offers a good review of the conservative canon. He offers two bold statements for movement activists today: One, big government is here to stay, and that the right should stress "limited" goverment rather than "smaller" government as a winning tactic; second, and more controversially, Berkowitz suggests the right should reconcile to the sexual revolution, that, for example, premarital sex and institutionalized divorce are facts of contemporary American life, and conservatives court danger with an obssession toward rolling back the clock in this social arena.

Berkowitz provides a point-by-point manifesto at the conclusion. One point that's interesting is how the article essentially offers an endorsement of neoconservatism without actually mentioning neoconservtism. That is to say, the right can assume as a doctrinal notion that a strong and outward national security policy is the basis for the preservation of liberty and moral order at home. The discussion of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan illusrates that both libertarian politics and moral society depend on robust national security policies and leadership in the international realm.

The debate for conservatives is found then, essentially, outside of a forward, free-trading national security orientation; it is instead the search, on the one hand, for a proposed domestic governance model that can reconcile the rejuvenated demands for small-government activism amid the accession to power of a Democratic Party regime intent on the largest peacetime expansion of the state in American history. Backed by some polling data, the country's progressive left will be tempted to transform Democratic power into a patriarchal state-universalism, with government action, in virtually every sector of American life, sold as a public good necessitated by monumental market failure; there is also the call by Berkowitz, on the other hand, for a conservatism that accedes ground in the culture wars to accomodate a changing society while at the same time not abdicating personal liberty as a priority of a constitutionally decent and ethically vigorous political system.

As a nuanced intellectual argument, I can anticipate some strong reactions to Berkowitz, especially from small-g conservatives. Robert Stacy McCain, for example, has been hammering the commentators on the right who enabled a "national greatness" mindset that accelerated the growth of big government under GOP administrations. On this question I have lined up in agreeement with Berkowitz, although the evidence that government today can be trusted to preserve good government - limited government - in a time of crisis has been notably absent in the trillion dollar bailuot-mania currently the rage today. In this sense, a "rollback agenda" on the right actually might be good politics against a Democratic majority dismissive of any notions of limitations on state power.

And that brings me to the second avenue of Berkowitz's constitutional conservatism, the social sphere of sexual politics and the family. As he notes, "conservatives can and should continue to make the case for the traditional understanding of marriage with children at the center," but he then goes on to say that conservatives "should refrain from using government to enforce the traditional understanding."

This seems self-defeating, for the notion of a absolute social libertarianism in the family sphere provides an opening for the left to advance its secular-progressive agenda, which posits traditional family structures as archiac modes of hierarchy and domination (and in turn offers an alternative "multi-culti" family model that harms both individuals and society).

Despite all of this, Berkowitz makes good use of the various strands of conservative doctrine, and today's right-wing partisans would be wise to start shifting the debate on the Republican future to the realm of ideas and action instead of debating movement rock stars and the politics of "personalist" rivalry.