Soft on Our Enemies

I mentioned earlier that I've been reading Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. His last chapter on "The Soviet Menace" is the longest in the book. It starts with an existential warning that the U.S. was losing the Cold War (at the time, 1960): "Our enemies have understood the nature of the conflict, and we have not. They are determined to win the conflict, and we are not." Goldwater explains this as a largely a function of the unseriousness among many in the American elite who incompletely perceived the mortal nature of Moscow's threat to American security and world order.

In any case, much is different today, but there are eerie echoes between Goldwater's tocsin and the West's approach to the global Islamist challenge, especially among the global collectivist-left (many of whom are literally in bed with our enemies).

I'll have more on the U.S. homefront in upcoming posts. For example, I want to share my thoughts on Jamie Glazov's new book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

In the meanwhile, Con Coughlin has a chilling report out of Britain at the London Telegraph, "Britain is Fighting a War – And We Are Too Soft on Our Enemies":

It's not just soldiers who win wars. Governments also have a crucial role to play – and to judge by the response of most Western governments to the threat we face from radical Islamism, we are simply not competing on equal terms with the enemy.

No one can claim that we in Britain don't understand the nature of the threat we face. In recent months, there has been a succession of reports highlighting the increasingly pernicious influence British Islamists are having on the Nato-led campaign to bring stability to Afghanistan.

After senior officers confirmed last year that British Muslims were fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, it was revealed that RAF Nimrod surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio stations were surprised to hear insurgents speaking in strong Yorkshire or Midlands accents.

More recently, officers based at the main military base at Lashkar Gah revealed that they had found British-made components in roadside bombs used to attack coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, sent to Helmand by Muslim sympathisers in Britain. This week three British Muslims, part of a terrorist cell whose leader was convicted of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier on video, were jailed at the Old Bailey for supplying equipment to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The active involvement of radical British Muslims in the Afghan insurgency has led senior officers to claim that they are engaged in a "surreal mini-civil war" in Afghanistan. And yet, for all the compelling evidence that British-based Islamist radicals are actively participating in a jihad against Britain and its coalition allies, the Government, together with those who have opposed our involvement in the War on Terror from the start, seems determined to give the Islamist radicals the benefit of the doubt.

Read the whole thing, here.

I'm reminded of Snooper's warnings for today's domestic enemies. And I'm not reassured by the new administration in Washington, which seems not unlike many of those back in the '50s, identified by Goldwater, who "never believed deeply that the Communists" were in earnest.

A Morality of Rational Self-Interest

The left's pushback against the "going Galt" phenomenon seems to have peaked, but the fact is, we're likely just now seeing the beginning of a larger philosophical debate on morality, rationalism, and self-interest.

Today's Wall Street Journal features a piece by Yaron Brooks, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, who notes, that the "fight for a morality of rational self-interest" explains the rising popularity of Ayn Rand's books and ideas.

But I particularly like Edward Cline's piece this afternoon, "On The Left-Wing Reaction to John Galt, Ayn Rand, and Tea Parties":

The world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True, politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

Meghan McCain: "Quit Making Fun of My Weight, Laura Ingraham"

Look, I'm too heavy right now. I've gained at least 20 pounds in the last couple of years from blogging and drinking more, and exercizing less. It's as simple as that. As a former top competitive skateboarder, and more recently a fitness junky, I know exactly what I have to do to get back in shape. I may have mentioned it here before, but I'll be 50 in a couple of years, and at some point I'd like to do some serious training. I'm getting a lot of fulfillment from blogging right now, though, and I'm healthy, so I try not to kid myself about turning into the next Jack LaLanne.

In any case, I mention this so readers know that I'm not making fun of Meghan McCain (and so the lefties know I'm not a "sizist"). It's that I just couldn't stop laughing now when I checked Hot Air's headlines and found "Meghan McCain: Quit Making Fun of My Weight, Laura Ingraham," which is Allah's mocking title to Ms. McCain's new post up at The Daily Beast:

I have been teased about my weight and body figure since I was in middle school, and I decided a very long time ago to embrace what God gave me and live my life positively, attempting to set an example for other girls who may suffer with body image issues. I have nothing to hide: I am a size eight and fluctuated up to a size ten during the campaign. It’s ridiculous to even have this conversation because I am not overweight in the least and have a natural body weight.

But even if I were overweight, it would be ridiculous. I expected substantive criticism from conservative pundits for my views, particularly my recent criticism of Ann Coulter. That is the nature of political discourse, and my intent was to generate discussion about the current problems facing the Republican party. Unfortunately, even though Ms. Ingraham is more than twenty years older than I and has been a political pundit for longer, almost, than I have been alive, she responded in a form that was embarrassing to herself and to any woman listening to her radio program who was not a size zero.

Read the whole thing at the link.

I noted previously how I thought Ms. McCain looked great the other morning, when I saw her on Fox & Friends. But she's complaining about "image-oriented bullying" in her essay, and it's hard not to see this as mostly a whiney rant from someone less experienced at political hardball than her main critics, especially Laura Ingraham. I sympathize, in any case. I'd be kidding if I said that some of the nasty attacks around here didn't get under my skin once in a while.

That said, I did get a good snicker out of Allahpundit's ribbing of Ms. McCain.

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P.S. I also wanted to get a post up on this before "The Other McCain." He's been hammering his "kissin' cousin" for her "progressive Republicanism," so folks might want to check over there for a post that (five-will-get-you-ten) will not be as politically correct as this one!

Core Values Conservatism

I've been meaning to get back to the topic of the (bleak?) future of conservatism.

Robert Stacy McCain responded to some of my recent essays in his post, "Meghan and 'Progressive Republicans'." And now Ross Douthout's new essay is discussing "The Case For Small Government," which is a commentary on Charles Murray's recent lecture to the American Enterprise Institutute, "The Happiness of the People." Douthat disagrees with Murray's economistic foundations for conservatism's future. That is to say, Douthat suggests we look past a "costs and benefits" approach to ideological rejuvenation on the right. There should be, for example, more to the debate than questions of "how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it."

I'm simplifying here, so be sure to check out both Douthat and Murray, but I think the question of "how big should the welfare state be" is a good one for elaborating some of the issues I've raised, and for addressing the direction that Robert Stacy McCain's been taking the discussion.

Now, McCain's taking on the earlier advocacy on the right for a "national greatness conservatism," and in particular he's hammering David Brooks, who's been in the news lately as an Obama administration lackey. McCain's right, of course, and the Brookes and Meghan McCains of the party might as well join up with the Democrats, for if we adopt the "moderate" programs these folks are pushing, we might as well have a one-party Democratic state.

But I want to return to my earlier discussion of "Constitutional Conservatism," which draws on the recent essay by Peter Berkowitz at Policy Review. Recall the two key themes Berkowitz offered as a way to move conservatism foward: (1) big government is here to stay, and the right needs to vigorously advocate limiting the growth of government, rather than speaking of a rollback to a "small" state, and (2) the sexual revolution is permanent, and the folks on the right need to recognize the reality and accommodate themselves to the facts.

Robert Stacy McCain has focused on the economic dimensions of the Obama administration's neo-socialist program, and McCain's privileged "economic liberty and limited government" at the expense of an activist program on the right for social conservatism (or so it seems to me).

Now, that's fine, and McCain makes a powerful and moral case for a political economy of liberty. Part of this theme, however, is that George W. Bush was not conservative, and while that's true (as the administration expanded big government in the domestic realm with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, among other things), the Bush administration's attempt to promote an "opportunity society" has either been forgotten by those disgusted with the last eight years of GOP power, or simply not taken as seriously as it should be as a way to get back on track. So, I think folks on the right need to be more clear about what they're saying: Are we just saying "no" to the Obama administration's power grab - a good thing in itself - or are we offering a realistic limited government agenda that is principled but pragmatic - and by pragmatism, I don't mean the David Brooks spineless variety.

So, in my estimation, we need more specifics: The discussion above should not be construed to rule out actually reducing the size of government in some areas. How about returning to calls to eliminate whole cabinet departments? Commerce and Education can go, as far as I'm concerned, and whatever regulatory or policy programs and institutions in place in those agencies can be downsized - especially in the education realm - and transferred to other departments. I'm sure a few other cabinets might be eliminated, say, Homeland Security, which was simply the creation of a war-on-terrorism bureaucratic gargantuan that fared poorly in its biggest test on the Gulf Coast in 2005. Thus, by all means, let's think about not only better economic policies that preserve liberty (low taxes), but we should also return to the ideas of Barry Goldwater, who in fact offered a plan to downsize the federal state in his classic manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative. So yes, limit governmental power, and reduce bureaucracy where we can, but be specific and not ideologically dogmatic. Perhaps 50 years ago we could have reduced the size of government by 10 percent annually, in the process of shifting to state-centered federalism. But I'm not confident that such a program is likely today. Again, conservatives might achieve some key reductions as outlined above, but on the whole we need to be stressing liminting government, and especially restraining the continued growth of government as that being promised by the political logic and program of today's secular collectivists.

I'm neoconservative, of course, and McCain's right to remind us that popular excoriations of the neoconservative agenda are mostly, in fact, demonic caricatures of the paradigm. Such demonization is popular with the America-bashing left, and the attacks have actually been successful in delegitimizing the neoconservative movement as a (perceived) viable foundation for moving forward on the right. That's regrettable, naturally, since much of the conservative successes during the Reagan years were in the social realm of families and values, and such traditionalist policies have their ideational foundations in the hot-house fermentation of neoconservatism's attacks on the left's social degenerations.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, in a recent op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, provided a needed reminder that the "neocons" have been the leaders in promoting personal responsibility and social traditionalism. I think Schoenfeld's naive to suggest that President Obama will return to his earlier intimations of "New Democrat" policy sensibilities. The fact is that the GOP's the right home for an agenda that takes personal responsiblity and morals seriously, and it's frankly not at all difficult to meld a new conservative ideological agenda that combines economic liberty with social values (see, for example, Richard Land's recent piece on this, "Stay Faithful to Core Values").

Thus, let me be clear: I do not discount the need for an economic agenda promoting liberty. Lord knows the Obama administration's going to use every opportunity it gets to expand government, and the "economic crisis" has worked wonders for both progressive fortunes and the left's destruction of freedom. What I do affirm is that conservatives will be better off seeking to limit government's expansion by acknowledging, as Berkowitz does, that "the era of big government is here to stay," and the folks on the right "should retire talk of small government and concentrate on limiting government."

I do not fully agree with Berkowitz on his social policy recommendations, however. He suggests, for example, that the right "should refrain from using government to enforce the traditional understanding" of society's norms and institutions. While we ought not expand government to "enforce" traditionalism, conservative politics and the conservative policy agenda must advocate for the restoration of values as the basis for a good social order.

One of the most important messages in Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative is that man is not simply an "economic creature." That is to say, liberty is not just a matter of limiting the state for the preservation of economic freedom. Full measure of human liberty is both economic and spiritual, and hence to talk of constitutional originalism, as does Robert Stacy McCain at his post, is to recognize that the Founders' limitations on state power were designed to preserve the inherent natural rights of man, and these include life, liberty, and property; and the notion of life is considered here in the most robust sense as not just the preservation of the body itself, but further in the fullfillment of God's capacity in man as a spiritual being. As Goldwater notes, conservatives have "learned that economic and spiritual aspects of man's nature are inextricably entwined." We cannot separate one from the other, so while I do not disagree with Robert Stacy McCain, I'm looking for a conservatism that takes social values as essential to the premise of limited government and constitutional liberalism (that is, "hard classical liberalism," in the libertarian sense).

All of this is to say that we need to advance virtue without "paternalistic assistance from government laws, rules, and regulations," to borrow directly from the thoughts of Jason Pappas. We will need some version of this model if the GOP is to remain a conservative party. How all the various factions can work things out to form a viable electoral coalition remains to be seen, but I'm convinced that both classically liberal conservatives and social traditionalists will combine to make the core alliance that will drive the Republicans back to power.

Courtney Friel, Political Scientist

This entry goes to show that hot bikini-blogging is more than shameless link-whoring for Robert Stacy McCain's weekend babe-linking roundup. Sure, the traffic's great, of course, but I actually wanted to report on the versatility of political science as an academic major. That's right, it turns out that Courtney Friel, who is an entertainment reporter at Fox News, earned a degree in political science from San Diego State University.

Now, not everyone will look as good as Courtney Friel in a bikini, so an added bonus for women seeking careers in political science - especially at the graduate level - is that that the discipline boasts some of the very best in radical feminist scholarship!

For example, check out Cynthia Enloe's Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. As the book blurb book indicates, at Professor Enloe's homepage:

Written by one of the world's leading feminist scholars, this masterful and provocative book takes seriously women's desires to be patriotic yet feminine and men's fears of being feminized as a strategy to explain how militarism is being globalized and thus what it will take to roll back militarized societies and assumptions.

Hmm, "men's fears of being feminized"? Does that include worries over the social acceptability of knitting? I'm going to leave that one to Repsac3: "The Real Scurge of Gay Marriage..."

Of course, some of my testosterone-addled readers might rather want to visit the beautiful hot totties at Theo Spark's!

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UPDATE: Theo Spark links!

McCain! You are a genius!

Extreme Energy Reach-Around Post

Do you drink "6 Hour Power" energy boosters? Have you seen their too-sexy-for-my-caffeine commercials? Instapundit has the link to "THE MOST SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT TV AD EVER?" A quick check over at "6 Hour Power" suggests that this stuff is potent: "Feel it Fast. Energy That Lasts. No Crash."

Sounds even better than the finest Peruvian flake, but legal.

In any case, I simply wanted to get a few links up for some "Rule 5" and "Full-Metal Reach-Around" blogging before I hit the sack (although not with this "Early Bedtime Totty").

I've been meaning to send readers over to see my loyal commenter, Philippe, who's got a lovely picture of Megan Fox in a bikini, in celebration of "International Women's Day." Well, I'll drink to that!

And Ann Hataway's always worth a link as well!

Also, The Top Scrooge gives us a sultry Eva Longoria. And Jimmy's entry featuring the super hot Christina Hendricks deserves a lot of play!

And keep in mind that women love babe-blogging, and Monique Stewart proves the point in overdrive with the hottest Pamela Anderson upper-torso picture I've ever seen! And "hunk-blogging's" got potential, as Sister Toldjah demonstrates with an impressive early post on Hugh Jackman.

I'll still waiting for Dana's follow-up entry, but if you missed Helen Mirren in a bikini, get yourself over Common Sense Political Sense on the double! Perhaps my ace commenter Dave from Dave's Place can hop on the lovely-ladies bandwagon!

And did you know that Jessica "Let's Take a Closer Look at Those Breasts" Valenti is getting married? Dana's co-blogger Sharon's got the scoop, with get-a-bowl-of-popcorn material from Amanda Marcotte and the feminist-hypocrites at Pandagon.

I'll have more tomorrow, dear readers ...

Jon Stewart Attacks Jim Cramer (and Markets)

Well, since most everyone relies on Memeorandum these days for the hot/buzz stories of the day, here's my obligatory* post on Jon Stewart's "takedown" yesterday of financial shock-jock Jim Cramer on the Daily Show.

By the looks of things, conservatives are afraid to touch this story, but James Pethokoukis has the best post on Stewart's ideological underpinnings:

There was a lively exchange last night on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and CNBC's Jim Cramer, in which Stewart hammered Cramer and the network for being subservient to Wall Street and not alerting viewers to the coming meltdown. Cramer and the network can defend themselves, but what became clear to me is that Stewart really doesn't believe in the idea of a stock market where individuals can go to invest their money and build wealth over the long term. This, I think, is a revealing quote:

Isn't that part of the problem, selling this idea that you don't have to do anything? Anytime you sell people the idea that, sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie ...

So what is Stewart suggesting, that we "workers" just save insane gobs of money that we squirrel away into low-yielding savings accounts and rely on those savings and Social Security for our retirement? Even plenty of Democrats believe that, which is why many are pushing universal savings accounts. Now, of course, investors tend to be more conservative than folks without investment portfolios. So maybe that is what really bugs the liberal Stewart, as well as those Dems who want to get rid of 401(k) plans.

More at the link.

Megan McArdle's worth a read too: "Ultimately, I find Stewart disturbing because in some sense he's doing exactly what Cramer is - making powerful statements, and then when he gets called on him, retreating into the claim that well, you can't really expect him to act as if he were being taken seriously."

*Obligatory posts made famous by Allahpundit at Hot Air.

America's Academic Tragedy

FrontPage Magazine has published the introduction to David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin's new book, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.

Horowitz wrote the introduction to the book, and he cites UC Santa Cruz's Community Studies Department as an example of how far literal revolutionary indoctrination has taken over the academy:

The Santa Cruz catalog, for example, describes a seminar offered by its “Community Studies Department” as follows: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”

This is the outline of a political agenda, not the description of a scholarly inquiry. Moroever, the sectarian character of this course reflects far more than the misguided pedagogy of an aberrant instructor. University faculty are credentialed, hired and promoted by committees composed of faculty peers. To create an academic course requires the approval of the tenured leaders of an academic department who have been hired and then promoted by other senior faculty. To survive and flourish as a department its curriculum must be recognized and approved by professional associations that are national in scope. Consequently, the fact that a course in how to organize a revolution is taught by a tenured professor, that an academic department has signed off on its particulars, and that one of the nation’s distinguished academic institutions is granting degree credits to students who take it, speaks volumes about the contemporary university and what it has come to regard as an appropriate academic course of study.

After some additional discussion of the university's ideological curriculum, Horowitz explains what the book sets out to do:

One-Party Classroom analyzes courses at a dozen major universities whose curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking but to instill doctrines that are “politically correct.” This is not a claim that professors are “biased.” Bias is another term for “point of view,” which every professor naturally possesses and has a right to express. For the purposes of this study, professors whose courses follow traditional academic standards do not pose a problem regardless of their individual point of view. What concerns us is whether their courses adhere to the principles of scientific method and observe professional standards.

Thus, One-Party Classroom does not propose to hold professors responsible for their idiosyncratic opinions on controversial matters but focuses instead whether they understand and observe the academic standards of the modern research university and the principles of a professional education. The concern of this study is the growing number of activist instructors who routinely present their students with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.

I'm looking forward to reading the book, but I'll note, further, that even though many professors may not be "classroom activists," and many may generally adhere to the "academic standards of the modern university" through publication in mainstream journals and engagement in the central literary and social scientific debates, the modern professoriate in its very structure and identity shifts the educational agenda to the far left.

I find it interesting, for example, that Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, is a featured contributor to the collectivist blog Firedoglake; and his own group blog, Crooked Timber, advances a far left-wing agenda consistent with the ideological sectarianism Horowitz and Laskin identify in their book. Tellingly, as indicated by linking through from Henry's "Go Galt Go!" Facebook page, Henry's a Facebook friend to Juan Cole, the radical "blame-the-West" historian who was denied tenure at Yale in a rare example of an ideological extremist being even too much for a prestigious academic department (although no doubt the University of Michigan is thrilled to have him, see, "Juan Cole’s Jihad Against Israel").

Robert Farley and David Noon, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, are also interesting examples of the mainstreaming of hardline leftists in the academy. Farley is a professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, at the University of Kentucky. I've written about Farley many times. For example, my essay, "The Moral Abomination of Robert Farley," detailed Farley's complete contempt for the standards of academic professionalism, as well as the leftist ideological excrement that drives his disastrous anti-intellectualism. David Noon, who is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast, is just as bad as Farley, an "abominable academic wretch" who routinely spouts "ignorant anti-Americanism" as part of his nihilist repertoire excoriating American society and its traditions.

I could go on with examples just from my blogging, but one final and really depressing example, from my own specialty in international relations theory, is Stephen Walt. I finally read, late last year, Walt and John Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I found it quite disturbing for the same reasons that many supporters of Israel have outlined. But for this discussion, it's important to understand Walt's standing in the academy. As a professor of international relations, and former dean, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Walt is positioned literally at the top of the academic foreign policy community, and his voice is extremely influential among the hardline leftists working for the destruction of the Israeli state.

Walt was recently in the middle of the blogospheric controversy over Charles Freeman's failed appointment as the Obama administration's chair of the National Intelligence Committee. Jonathan Chait has written a number of essays on Walt over the last couple of weeks, for example, "Smear Itself: The Paranoia of Stephen Walt Rears its Ugly Head Once Again."

In one post, Chait described the "realist paradigm," of which Walt is one of the greatest modern proponents, as a "distinct ideological perspective that can be taken to rigid extremes." As such, in my estimation, the ostensibly academic objectivism to which Walt deploys realism ends up basically as a perniciouis yet sophisticated version and the Israel-bashing garbage commonly seen in the writings of Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan, which is to say Walt's program is really awful, if not outright dangerous.

As Chait explains further, at the post:

The method of Walt's argument is vastly more distrurbing than the substance. Walt is arguing that any Jewish-American who does not roughly share his views on Israel (which, of course, disqualifies the vast majority) is presumptively acting out of dual loyalty, is probably coordinating their actions in secret, and should thus be dismissed out of hand. I think Walt has come to this conclusion on the basis of his foreign policy worldview rather than out of animus against Jewish people. But it's a paranoid analysis whose consequence is to make the debate about Israel much more stupid and mired in attacks on motive.

You can see why Jews who do share Walt's beliefs about Israel policy find his methods useful - it disqualifies a vast swath of their ideological rivals from the conversation, and it elevates their role, as the special minority of good Jews who are able to see past the blinders of their ethnicity. Yet what Walt's promoting is an ugly and deeply illiberal form of discourse. Yes, there are people who shout "anti-Semite" at any criticism of Israel, but this doesn't justify errors of the opposite extreme.

And that "ugly and illiberal discourse," as Horowitz and Laskin uncover in their book, is precisely the same ideological agenda that's being foisted on students by the political radicals in the American academy today.

It's a disaster, but that's pretty much where things stand on the modern American college campus.

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Photo Credit: FrontPage Magazine.

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UPDATE: As a matter of housekeeping on this post, I should note that perhaps Facebook's list of "friends" updates automatically.

I've pointed out previously Henry's "friendship" with Juan Cole, but the anti-Israeli jihadist looks to have rotated off Henry's visible list of "friends" on his Facebook page. We do see, however, Jane Hamsher and Katha Pollitt currently listed as "Henry's friends." But if you check over to Henry's "complete" list of friends, we find Juan Cole's listing once again, as well as an interesting lineup of the players on the collectivist left, including Larissa Alexandrova, Eric Alterman, Lindsay Beyerstein, Duncan Black, Steve Clemons, Ezra Klein, Scott Lemieux, Marc Lynch, Amanda Marcotte, Josh Marshall, Matt Stoller, Jesse Taylor, and Matthew Yglesias.

How's that for a lilttle "socialist social-netorking"!

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."