Thomas Friedman: Double-Reverse Chickendove

Jules Crittenden's got a killer take-down of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a post today at Forward Movement.

Friedman's bummed out over U.S. progress in Iraq. He's sad that congressional Democrats have finally acquiesced to the reality of victory on the ground (or at least publically, while they squeeze-in on the side their underhanded Armenian genocide votes to sabotage Turkish support for the mission).

Here's what Friedman says:

Boy, am I glad we finally got out of Iraq. It was so painful waking up every morning and reading the news from there. It’s just such a relief to have it out of mind and behind us.

Huh? Say what? You say we’re still there? But how could that be — nobody in Washington is talking about it anymore?

I don’t know whether it was the sheer agony of the debate over Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony, or the fact that the surge really has dampened casualties, or the failure by Democrats to force an Iraq withdrawal through Congress, or the fact that all the leading Democratic presidential contenders have signaled that they will not precipitously withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, but the air has gone out of the Iraq debate.

That is too bad. Neglect is not benign when it comes to Iraq — because Iraq is not healthy. Iraq is like a cancer patient who was also running a high fever from an infection (Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia). The military surge has brought down the fever, but the patient still has cancer (civil war). And we still don’t know how to treat it. Surgery? Chemotherapy? Natural healers? Euthanasia?

To the extent that the surge has worked militarily, it is largely because of what Iraqis have done by themselves for themselves — Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders rising up against pro-Qaeda Sunni elements, taking back control of their villages and towns, and aligning themselves with U.S. forces to do so. Some Shiites are now doing the same.

There has been no equivalent surprise, though, in Iraqi politics, yet. If you see that — if you see Iraqi politicians surprising you by doing things they’ve never done before, like forging a self-sustaining political compromise and building the fabric of a unified country, then you can allow yourself some optimism.

So far, though, too many of Iraq’s leaders continue to act their part — looking out for themselves, their clans, their hometowns, their militias and their sects, and using the Iraqi treasury and ministries as looting grounds for personal or sectarian gains.

As a result, what you have today is more of a spotty truce, with U.S. soldiers still caught in the middle. That is a quiet strategy, not an exit strategy.

Now, here's Crittenden on Friedman's claim of an "unhealthy," "cancerous," "feverish" Iraq:

Actually, Iraq is more like a tortured, politically traumatized nation of 25 million people desperate for a chance in life, after decades of being cynically abused by everyone from Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda to the Iranian mullahs, a plague of viruses that have infected the entire region. The cure? Determined, patient counter-insurgency in Iraq. Airstrikes targeting Iran’s capability to project trouble. A long war. Diplomacy with honest partners, when they emerge.

And here's Crittenden on Friedman's outburst, "to the extent that the surge has worked militarily," the Iraqis have done it themselves:

Now that’s supporting the troops. Apparently Friedman missed the part about the Iraqis recognizing the Americans aren’t leaving, that Americans can fight and won’t quit, that the Americans, as they have bled, are actually trying to help them, while al-Qaeda was just bleeding them. That the American “strong horse” represents their interests. That the Americans represent order and prosperity, and will leave when Iraq is on that path. That al-Qaeda represents chaos, death and violently enforced Sharia. Clearly the Americans had nothing to do with this uprising.

This is interesting. It dovetails with the line some in Washington and the news media have been pushing: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a homegrown organization, all Iraqi anti-invader resistance, no links to bin Laden. The same people will tell you that al-Qaeda in Iraq, now that it’s on the ropes, never really was that big a deal. Not the enemy. That’s just Bush trying to hoodwink America with a new version of the old Saddam hearts al-Qaeda thing four years later.

Friedman bemoans the fact that Iraqi politicians have not yet followed their people. In fact, some have made moves in that direction, but they’ve turned out by and large to be every bit as self-interested, gutless, ineffective and divisive as … American politicans. Friedman bemoans that fact that Washington isn’t bickering about Iraq anymore. He observes that after a summer of squawking about it, a year spent doing everything they can to undermine it, the Democrats are spent. They failed, in the face of logic, hope, achievement. They and their candidates have had to recognize that America prefers to win and sees a chance to do that. He neglects to observe that it hasn’t stopped the House speaker from running a cynical campaign to derail supply lines into Iraq with an Armenian genocide resolution … a bid to unsupport the troops and usher in a new Iraqi genocide. And if Friedman is patient, he’ll get all the Iraq bickering he wants soon enough. Bush needs more money for his war.

The politics aside, there is something particularly loathsome about Friedman’s snide screed this morning.

I know that Friedman travels a lot, talks to a lot people. He’s visited war. Thirty years ago he spent some time in Beirut, and he’s been to Baghdad, met with the big players. But I’m not sure he’s travelled enough to make the arguments he’s making and crack wise about it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Has this guy spent any time in combat with American troops? If not, then he hasn’t met enough big players. Hasn’t sweated enough. Hasn’t counted his last hours and minutes enough. Hasn’t come under enough fire. Hasn’t seen enough bits of people lying around afterward.

People who talk up war without going get slapped with chickenhawk slurs. Clearly Friedman’s no chickenhawk, at least not anymore. Chickenhawk slurs are slapped on people who support war and haven’t gone. ”Chickenhawk” gets tossed around by people who don’t feel the need to lift a finger in support of the peace they profess to love. Not a human shield among them.

Friedman presents us with something different. The double-reverse chickendove. War supporter turned surrender enthusiast makes ironic funny about how painful this war has been for him. The terrible barrage of headlines, slogging through all those long, bitter thumbsuckers. News is hell. But apparently, he hasn’t been reading it.

Now that is a takedown!

The End of the Antiwar Movement?

Eli Lake, a reporter and columnist for the New York Sun, argues that the antiwar movement has run its course:

The People. United. Can in fact be defeated. Well not exactly, but this must be what America's anti-war movement is thinking as Congress and the president iron out the funding for the war with no danger of the Democrats attaching a withdrawal date to the bill. The Dems don't have the votes.

It's enough to deflate the spirits of our nation's most hardened pacifists. Take Medea Benjamin, the leader of Code Pink, an association of mainly senior citizen women who dress up and shout slogans at Congressional war hearings. In an interview in the current issue of Mother Jones, Ms. Benjamin said that she doubted that the troops would be withdrawn even within a year's time. "Well, I think it's kind of silly to talk about it because it's just not going to happen," she said. Code Pink now is hoping to end the war by the end of 2008.

It's an extraordinary statement for the leader of an organization that produced a YouTube ad last month featuring women in pink jockey outfits riding Democratic leaders of Congress like they were horses. The narrator tells the viewer: "With your help we can dominate Congress with peacemakers and finally end this illegal, immoral and unconstitutional occupation." Apparently the plan for peacemaker domination has run into some snags.

As the Hill newspaper reported on October 19, the legislative representative of American Against Escalation in Iraq, John Bruhns, a former Army Sergeant who participated in the 2003 invasion, has left the organization. "I feel I've done all I can," he told the newspaper. "I can't continue to attack members of Congress to pass legislation that isn't going to get passed."

Mr. Bruhns had worked on something the anti-war movement called "Iraq Summer," an initiative aimed at getting 50 Republicans to break with the president on the war. That goal seemed plausible in July when the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, was threatening to vote with Democrats on withdrawal dates. But in September Mr. Warner said that arguing for some troops to come home by Christmas barely changed the ayes and nays in the senate.

The anti-war movement has not even managed to get any of the big three Democrats running for president to embrace their goal of an immediate withdrawal. Gone are John Edwards' rhetorical excesses of the spring, promising not to leave even Marines to guard the new American embassy in Baghdad.

Today Mr. Edwards, like Senators Obama and Clinton, concede that in their administration there will still be some troops in Iraq in 2009, probably between 50,000 and 70,000. Also, the Democratic party's professional agitators must know that Mrs. Clinton will sprout wings and talons and screech for the blood of every Iranian terrorist as soon as she receives her party's nomination, faster than you can say, "Sistah Souljah."

Read the whole thing.

I agree Hillary will morph into a foreign policy hawk when she wraps up the nomination. But if Lake's argument is accurate, she has no business flip-flopping on the war in the first place.

I'm also not convinced the antiwar forces will go away any time soon. Iraq's what unites them, but the broader War on Terror will always have its activists shouting for "a million Mogadishus."

I do agree that they're impotent to stop the war with Bush in the White House, but I wouldn't discount the potential for the MoveOn types to cause a lot of problems for American foreign policy down the road, especially under a Democratic administration. Which is all the more reason to marginalize them even further now.

Baby Boosters! Big Money Bundlers Seeking Underage Contributors

The Washington Post reports on the new fundraising tactic of bundling campaign contributions from children:

Although campaign finance laws set a limit of $2,300 per donor per campaign, they do not explicitly bar donors based on age. And young donors abound in the fundraising reports filed by presidential contenders this year.

A supporter of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), Susan Henken of Dover, Mass., wrote her own $2,300 check, and her 13-year-old son, Samuel, and 15-year-old daughter, Julia, each wrote $2,300 checks, for example. Samuel used money from his bar mitzvah and money he earned "dog sitting," and Julia used babysitting money to make the contributions, their mother said. "My children like to donate to a lot of causes. That's just how it is in my house," Henken said.

Just how much campaign cash is coming from children is uncertain -- the FEC does not require donors to provide their age. But the amount written by those identifying themselves as students on contribution forms has risen dramatically this year, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. During the first six months of the 2000 presidential campaign, students gave $338,464. In 2004, that rose to $538,936.

This year, the amount has nearly quadrupled, to $1,967,111.

"What's driving it is a desire by maxed-out donors to max out on their maxing out," said Fred Wertheimer, president of campaign finance reform organization Democracy 21, who sought, unsuccessfully, to outlaw child donations five years ago. "More often than not, you're dealing with people who are simply trying to circumvent the limits of what they can give."

Congress tried to outlaw political contributions from those under age 18 as part of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002, but the Supreme Court struck down that provision as an infringement on the constitutional rights of minors. With that ruling in mind, the Federal Election Commission wrote new regulations two years ago that tried to balance what it considered a legitimate desire among some children to make political contributions against the possibility that parents would seek to pad their donations by funneling money through children.

The regulations established a three-step test to determine whether a contribution is acceptable: It must be made with the child's money, the parent cannot reimburse the child for making the donation and the contribution has to be knowing and voluntary.

That last part of the test is the one that would seem to rule out a 2-year-old, said Michael E. Toner, a former FEC chairman who helped draft the rules. "If they are 16 or 17, they're clearly old enough to know what they're doing, as compared to someone who is, say, 10 years old. . . . I don't know any 2-year-old who is capable of making that kind of decision."

Well, certainly babies are not going to be toting up the maximum contribution for their presidential election prospects!

But the bigger picture here is that limitations on personal campaign contributions are too restrictive, and they infringe on the right to freedom of expression under the First Amendment. Families would not be making contributions in their children's names if they weren't limited in how much they could contribute to their favored candidates.

This point should be a boon for those thinking about new legal challenges to the financing regime. It's clear that there's a desire to provide greater financial support to the candidates among partisans on both sides of the political spectrum. Fred Wertheimer 's case for restricting campaign giving is looking weaker all the time.

See also my argument in defense of big money bundling, which cites the recent Wall Street Journal story on current trends in campaign financing.

Borking the Constitution

Today's the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Senate's rejection of Robert Bork as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The failure to confirm Bork held enormous implications for the future of constitutional intrepretation, according to Gary McDowell in today's Wall Street Journal:

To many at the time (and still today) it was inconceivable that a man of Mr. Bork's professional accomplishments and personal character could be found unacceptable for a seat on the Court. Warren Burger summed it up for many when he described Mr. Bork as simply the best qualified nominee in the former chief justice's own professional lifetime--a span of years that included the appointments of such judicial luminaries as Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. Such praise was no empty exaggeration.

A former Yale law professor and U.S. Solicitor General, Mr. Bork was, at the time of his nomination, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. When he was a circuit court judge, Mr. Bork's opinions not only were never overruled on appeal, but on several occasions his dissents were adopted by the Supreme Court as its majority view.
In an earlier day such an appointment would have been celebrated as adding breadth, depth and luster to the highest bench. Instead, the nominee faced a mauling by those who set out not only to destroy him personally but to discredit all that he stood for as a jurist.

It was immediately clear that the unprecedented vote of 58-42 against his confirmation reflected something far more historic and fundamental than an ordinary partisan standoff. The confrontation in fact had been one of the most cataclysmic and divisive events in American domestic politics during the second half of the 20th century. The reason was that Mr. Bork's opponents succeeded in making the fight over his nomination into a contest over the future of the Constitution.

Read the whole thing.

McDowell illustrates Bork's commitment to originalist restraint with his discussion of Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut (the landmark cases at the forefront of an emerging "transcendental" jurisprudence of the left, which, McDowell suggests, has grown increasingly disconnected from historical interpretations of the constitutional groundings of liberty).

Islamofascism

Christopher Hitchens defended the terminology of "Islamofascism" in an article yesterday over at Slate.

The notion of Islamofascism is denounced by left-wing activists, whose grumblings are building in response to "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week," a series of gatherings at college campuses around the nation to promote greater awareness of radical indoctrination and propaganda in America's classrooms. (See Little Green Footballs on the online "pro-Islamofascism petition" being circulated by members of the leftist-Islamist axis at UC Irvine.)

Hitchens asks if the Islamist ideology of Osama bin Laden can be appropriately compared with fascism:

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

Hitchens does a good job in defending Islamofascist terminology as a description of our current ideological nemesis.

Yet, I would also point readers to Ladan and Roya Boroumand's, "Terror, Islam, and Democracy," from the Journal of Democracy (April 2002):

The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906-49). Banna was not a theologian by training. Deeply influenced by Egyptian nationalism, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal of counteracting Western influences.

By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revolutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had begun by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also had a youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a paramilitary organization whose slogan "action, obedience, silence" echoed the "believe, obey, fight" motto of the Italian Fascists. Banna's ideas were at odds with those of the traditional ulema (theologians), and he warned his followers as early as 1943 to expect "the severest opposition" from the traditional religious establishment.

From the Fascists-and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively "transformative" or "purifying" revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins-Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form. Although few in the West may remember it today, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the aestheticization of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom, and faith in "the propaganda of the deed" shaped the antiliberal ethos of both the far right and elements of the far left earlier in the twentieth century. Following Banna, today's Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shi'ite Islam.

The Boroumands' piece is an excellent reference on the ideological origins of the current Islamofascist threat.

For some discussion of the etymological and linguistic justifications for Islamofascist terminology, see the articles from William Safire and Stephen Schwartz.

California Burning

I think to myself every year: The rest of the county's got floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, but in California we get fires.

It happens every October, when the dry weather system and the Santa Ana winds develop across the region. Fires breakout in the crackily dry tinder of the foothills and mountains across the state; many are set by arsonists.

This morning's Los Angeles Times reports on yesterday's developments across the state:

Wind-whipped firestorms destroyed more than 700 homes and businesses in Southern California on Monday, the second day of its onslaught, and more than half a million people in San Diego County were told to evacuate their homes.

The gale-force winds turned hillside canyons into giant blowtorches from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Although the worst damage was around San Diego and Lake Arrowhead, dangerous fires also threatened Malibu, parts of Orange and Ventura counties, and the Agua Dulce area near Santa Clarita.

Late Monday night, new blazes were menacing homes near Stevenson Ranch and in Soledad Canyon in northern Los Angeles County. The Soledad Canyon fire burned multiple mobile homes and evacuations were underway, fire officials said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling it "a tragic time for California," declared a state of emergency in seven counties and redeployed California National Guard members from the border to support firefighters. Schwarzenegger stressed how much California officials have learned since the devastating wildfires of October 2003, which raged over much of the same terrain.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that any hard-earned knowledge was no match for natural forces overrunning the ability of firefighters to control them.

"The issue this time is not preparedness," said San Diego City Council President Scott Peters. "It's that the event is so overwhelming."

For the Times' complete story gallery on the fires, click here.

One of the local blazes, in Irvine, was not far from my home. My wife came downstairs Sunday night and said "I smell smoke." The smell from the smoke was so strong that she thought something in our house was on fire. I had seen some early news reports of the fires breaking out, and I told my wife, who looked out the door to see thick black billows in the sky.

I had no idea how close some of the blazes were to my neighborhood. Huge clouds of black smoke rose up down the road yesterday when I dropped my oldest son off at school. I told him to take it easy, stay inside, and go to the nurse if he couldn't breathe.

I want to thank Goat from Goat's Barnyard for sending an e-mail yesterday to check on me. We're doing fine. Thank God there have been no fatalities in the fire disasters.

Progress in Iraq: The Complexity and the Reality

Michael's Yon's latest dispatch from Iraq is available. The piece is a clear-headed report on Iraq's national transformation (towards, well, nationhood). Yon's particularly forceful in arguing the tragedy of American public opinion's disconnect from reality on the ground, which results largely from the media's inattention and poor coverage of progress in battle:

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

Read the whole thing. Yon provides a nice overview, with bibliographic links, to the media's institutional weaknesses in reporting the war.

Yon has become the most important freelance combat journalist of this generation. His reporting is a gift to the American people.

But If You Want Money For People With Minds That Hate...

I often listen to The Beatles' "Revolution" during my weekday's drivetime. I love the hammering guitar introduction, but I'm always intrigued by the song's lyrics: Is "Revolution" John Lennon's anti-"Imagine" anthem?

Here's the YouTube:

:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

How about this for a counter-bumper sticker slogan, from "Revolution" (lyrics here):

You say you got a real solution
Well you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well you know
We're all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait
Don't you know it's gonna be alright
Alright Alright Alright

John Lennon's dead...long live John Lennon!

The Strangeness of Libertarianism

Michael Kinsley praises libertarianism in his current essay at Time. The background is the contrast between the Democrats and Republicans and their competing conceptions of government, and their lukewarm support among large sectors of the electorate:

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don't. And if you don't, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe "foreign entanglements," and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America's help. They don't care--or at least they don't think the government should care--about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it's the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they're not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical--eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they're fine with that. It's a free country.

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money's on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul--one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby--raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don't need society--nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

I respect Kinsley. But come on, a $5 million haul for Ron Paul in the FEC's 3rd quarter reporting is not a sign that libertarianism's becoming increasingly powerful.

In truth, Paul's appeal is strong among any and all of the whacked-out loons whose Bush-hatred knows no bounds. There's no consistency here: From paleoconservatives to Stalinists, the most hardened Bush-bashing anti-victory types have joined together in the most unprincipled outburst of blame-America-firstism we've seen in a generation. Paul's candidacy even gained the sympathy of antiwar Democrats Dennis Kucinich and John Murtha earlier this year.

It's strange, frankly, but that's politics (new readers should see American Power's initial post for a penetrating ideological antidote to the strange defeatism of libertarianism).

**********

UPDATE (via Memeorandum): Andrew Sullivan says the rise of libertarianism indicates we might be on "the verge of a real realignment" and such background forces are perhaps "the harbingers of a new politics."

Victory is Within Reach

Michael Ledeen, in the Wall Street Journal, argues victory's close at hand in Iraq:

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Read the whole thing. Ledeen points out that military success is being joined by political reconciliation, which is what all the antiwar types have been demanding. Where are their cheers at our progress?

John McCain and American Foreign Policy

I've been eagerly awaiting John McCain's contribution to the Foreign Affairs Campaign 2008 series, and I'm not disappointed. I've long considered McCain the most qualified candidate among both parties, especially on national security. Here's McCain's statement on the contemporary international challenges facing the United States:

Defeating radical Islamist extremists is the national security challenge of our time. Iraq is this war's central front, according to our commander there, General David Petraeus, and according to our enemies, including al Qaeda's leadership.

The recent years of mismanagement and failure in Iraq demonstrate that America should go to war only with sufficient troop levels and with a realistic and comprehensive plan for success. We did not do so in Iraq, and our country and the people of Iraq have paid a dear price. Only after four years of conflict did the United States adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, backed by increased force levels, that gives us a realistic chance of success. We cannot get those years back, and now the only responsible action for any presidential candidate is to look forward and outline the strategic posture in Iraq that is most likely to protect U.S. national interests.

So long as we can succeed in Iraq -- and I believe that we can -- we must succeed. The consequences of failure would be horrific: a historic loss at the hands of Islamist extremists who, after having defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq, will believe that the world is going their way and that anything is possible; a failed state in the heart of the Middle East providing sanctuary for terrorists; a civil war that could quickly develop into a regional conflict and even genocide; a decisive end to the prospect of a modern democracy in Iraq, for which large Iraqi majorities have repeatedly voted; and an invitation for Iran to dominate Iraq and the region even more.

Whether success grows closer or more distant over the coming months, it is clear that Iraq will be a central issue for the next U.S. president. Democratic candidates have promised to withdraw U.S. troops and "end the war" by fiat, regardless of the consequences. To make such decisions based on the political winds at home, rather than on the realities in the theater, is to court disaster. The war in Iraq cannot be wished away, and it is a miscalculation of historic magnitude to believe that the consequences of failure will be limited to one administration or one party. This is an American war, and its outcome will touch every one of our citizens for years to come.

McCain offers some interesting propasals. For example, he backs the formation of a new international organization of the world's leading democracies. He notes that such a body wouldn't replace the United Nations, but founded on a common set of interests, it would act with more dispatch toward global problems. McCain also speaks to strengthening America's existing great power alliances in Europe and East Asia. Here are his comments on America's alliance partnerships and East Asian security:

Power in the world today is moving east; the Asia-Pacific region is on the rise. If we grasp the opportunities present in the unfolding world, this century can become safe and both American and Asian, both prosperous and free....

North Korea's totalitarian regime and impoverished society buck these trends. It is unclear today whether North Korea is truly committed to verifiable denuclearization and a full accounting of all its nuclear materials and facilities, two steps that are necessary before any lasting diplomatic agreement can be reached. Future talks must take into account North Korea's ballistic missile programs, its abduction of Japanese citizens, and its support for terrorism and proliferation.

The key to meeting this and other challenges in a changing Asia is increasing cooperation with our allies. The linchpin to the region's promise is continued American engagement. I welcome Japan's international leadership and emergence as a global power, encourage its admirable "values-based diplomacy," and support its bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council. As president, I will tend carefully to our ever-stronger alliance with Australia, whose troops are fighting shoulder to shoulder with ours in Afghanistan and Iraq. I will seek to rebuild our frayed partnership with South Korea by emphasizing economic and security cooperation and will cement our growing partnership with India.

Read the whole thing. McCain is concise and to the point. To his credit, he doesn't propose an unending array of policy propsals designed to involve the U.S. in every possible international problem of the day, unlike Hillary Clinton in her Foreign Affairs essay from the series.

Note something important here, though: I don't back McCain's suggestion that we need to repair our image around the world. This is an apparent buckling to negative public attitudes regarding the U.S. internationally, not to mention antiwar opinion in the U.S. Here you can see how McCain trumpets America's traditional moral leadership, while simultaneously calling for renewal:

We are a special nation, the closest thing to a "shining city on a hill" ever to have existed. But it is incumbent on us to restore our mantle as a global leader, reestablish our moral credibility, and rebuild those damaged relationships that once brought so much good to so many places.

McCain's absolutely correct to situate contemporary American foreign policy in our robust history of promoting human dignity, progress, and universal values. He's made the point eloquently many times. But we don't need to make apologies for acting in our interests on Iraq in 2003, or on issues issues such as global warming or missile defense. Our interests are legimate. Leave the apologies (and appeasement) to the Democrats.

McCain understands the dangers facing the U.S. amid the present correlation of world forces. Sure, we might face some challenges of image-building, but I think the point's more a matter of good public relations rather than wholesale policy change. Indeed, international opinion in the advanced industrial democracies has rebounded from earlier lows following 2003. I believe continued success in Iraq will work to further consolidate these gains in the years ahead. Thus, we must not slacken our commitment to defeating the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. I propose that John McCain provides the best set of skills to further these objectives.

See the other essays in the Foreign Affairs series, in the order they first appeared: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, and Hillary Clinton.

See also my post yesterday making the case for a second look at McCain's candidacy.

Bobby Jindal Wins Governorship of Louisiana

Bobby Jindal, a GOP Member of the House of Representatives, won the governorship of Louisiana on Saturday, taking 53 percent of the vote in a crowded field, avoiding an election runoff. The Washington Post has the story:

Rep. Bobby Jindal (R) became the nation's first Indian American governor Saturday, outpolling 11 rivals in Louisiana and drawing enough votes to avoid a runoff election next month.

With about 90 percent of the state's nearly 4,000 precincts reporting, Jindal had 53 percent of the vote. His nearest competitor, state Sen. Walter J. Boasso (D), had 18 percent.

Louisiana holds an open gubernatorial election, with candidates of all parties competing. By drawing at least 50 percent of the vote, Jindal avoided a Nov. 17 runoff race with Boasso.

"Let's give our homeland, the great state of Louisiana, a fresh start," Jindal said to a cheering crowd at his victory party, according to the Associated Press.

Jindal, 36, was making his second attempt to become Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction. The last one was P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served briefly between 1872 and 1873, at a time when many white voters were disenfranchised.

I frankly haven't been following state-level politics all that much, but the GOP's success in the Louisiana election and elsewhere holds some important implications for 2008. Angevin13, over at The Oxford Medievalist, provides some analytical perspective:

First, powerhouse Niki Tsongas defeats her no-name Republican opponent in uber-liberal Massachusetts by only 6 percentage points, [and] now a Republican wins the Louisiana governorship, largely as a rebuke of the incompetence of the previous Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco.

So much for that 2008 anti-Bush, anti-GOP landslide we keep hearing about. And so much for an MSM that does little else than carry water for the Democrats. If the MSM were interested in news, the fact that the Oxford-educated, Roman Catholic-converted, Republican son of Hindu immigrants just won the Louisiana gubernatorial election as the first non-white candidate in Louisiana since Reconstruction would be major news.

The 2008 elections, Presidential, Congressional, and Gubernatorial, will all be about one thing: competence. Who's got it, who doesn't. The electorate is fed up with the B.S. The elections won't be about Bush, and it will be a mistake to portray them that way. Despite conventional wisdom, which says a Democratic cakewalk is on order, the Democrats are in trouble, since they have little else to offer besides some good anti-Bush soundbites. Not that the Republicans don't have anything to worry about, it's just that the situation is not as dire as the media would wish it and make it.

Hey, I'm feeling better about next year already!

Rejecting Rudy: Social Conservatives May Bolt From GOP

This morning's Los Angeles Times reports that social conservatives will break with the GOP if Rudy Giuliani wins the GOP presidential nomination:

With some leading social conservatives threatening to boycott the Republican Party if Rudolph W. Giuliani wins the presidential nomination, the former New York City mayor sought Saturday to assure activists in this crucial GOP voting bloc that they have "absolutely nothing to fear from me."

Giuliani told more than 2,000 evangelical activists that despite his support for abortion rights and other liberal views, Christians would have a voice in his administration, and that, though he has not always been comfortable discussing it in public, faith "is at the core of who I am."

"I come to you today as I would if I were your president, with an open mind and an open heart," Giuliani said. "And all I ask is that you do the same."

Although Giuliani was interrupted several times by applause and some stood to clap as he concluded his 40-minute address, it was clear that he remained a distrusted figure among those gathered here from across the country.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical organization and primary sponsor of the annual Values Voter Summit, called Giuliani's speech sincere but said he could not ignore the difference of opinion on abortion.

"It's not something that can be paved over easily," Perkins said, adding that he had not changed his mind about looking elsewhere for a candidate should Giuliani win the GOP nomination. "My position remains the same, as I think it does for a number of pro-life conservatives -- that we draw a line that we will not cross in supporting a pro-abortion-rights candidate."

Read the whole thing. The piece points out that Giuliani may have a tough time winning caucuses and primaries dominated by voters skeptical of the former New York mayor's views on bedrock conservative issues. At Saturday's Values Voters Convention, Giulani sought to clarify his record:

Giuliani offered a laundry list of issues that he said showed "shared goals" with religious conservatives, such as his support for school choice and his opposition to the procedure that critics call "partial-birth" abortion. He pledged to veto any effort to roll back limits on public funding for abortions, and to appoint judges like conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

He reminded the audience that he fought pornography and prostitution in New York and that he took on the Brooklyn Museum of Art when, in 1999, it scheduled an exhibition featuring a painting of the Virgin Mary that included splotches of elephant dung. "It was just another example of the double standard that exists for people of faith," he said.

Giuliani referred obliquely to his troubled family life.

"You and I know that I'm not a perfect person," he said. "I've made mistakes in my life, but I've always done the best that I could to try to learn from them. . . . I feel my faith deeply, although maybe more privately than some because of the way I was brought up or for other reasons."

Conference participants later said they appreciated Giuliani's attendance but were not necessarily moved to support him -- at least not in the primaries.

Giuliani would do well to further publicize his strong credentials on the bulk of issues important to the GOP's evangelical base. Regarding Giuliani's New York record, Jennifer Rubin, in an American Spectator article last February, noted:

Pundits of all political persuasions have been chattering about whether Rudy Giuliani, whose name is invariably modified by the description "social liberal," can overcome the objections of many religious conservatives to win the Republican nomination....

If the definition of "social conservative" is merely a checklist of several hot button issues, specifically abortion and gay rights, Giuliani is certainly to the left of his principal rivals. He might give assurances to appoint strict constructionist judges and might stipulate that his support of civil unions is not the same as support for gay marriage. However, on these issues he is unlikely to win the hearts of single-issue voters who care passionately about a candidate's beliefs and not just the likely outcomes of a candidate's policies.

But the commentators and consultants may have gotten the questions wrong. The better, at least the more interesting, question is whether Giuliani can establish a new description of what it means to be "socially conservative." Perhaps to be socially conservative means something more than just fidelity to pro-life and anti-gay marriage positions. Giuliani has a convincing argument that he is an ethical or cultural conservative who in the end will protect the values that most conservative Republicans hold dear. What does this mean? It means that he sees the world as a battle between good and evil, and politics as a struggle between decent hard working people and elites who have too little respect for their values -- public safety, respect for religion and public virtue.

Read Rubin's whole piece. Giuliani's the guy who removed porn shops from Times Square, vigorously defended New York's aggressive policing against cries of "racism," kicked Yassir Arafat out of the Lincoln Center, and argued that fatherhood's "the best social program for ending poverty."

McCain Deserves a Second Look

Kate O'Beirne has a great article up today at the National Review on John McCain's presidential prospects. She argues that McCain might in fact be the most formidable candidate in the GOP presidential field. Check it out:

While Hillary Clinton is looking like a sure bet for her party’s nomination, only the reckless would wager their own money on the likely Republican nominee. With the presence of Fred Thompson and the absence of Newt Gingrich, the GOP field is now complete — and completely without a conventional frontrunner. Its fluidity has prompted a second look by the rank and file: Republicans seeking to keep their party’s base intact, while appealing to independents in order to have a shot at defeating Hillary, are taking another look at John McCain.

A veteran GOP congressional aide who has been a critic of McCain, most recently on the issue of immigration, recently surprised himself by concluding that the Arizona senator would be the best general-election candidate. This strategist seeks a nominee who will unify and energize the base, who has the potential to win, and who makes fellow Republicans competitive. He notes that McCain is pro-life and strong on national security, and has long been in favor of fiscal restraint. In addition to unifying social, economic, and national-security conservatives, he argues, McCain has a maverick image that can appeal to the independent voters who abandoned the GOP in droves in 2006.

O'Beirne performs some nice comparative analysis on the top candidates' poll standings, and it turns out that despite popular perceptions, McCain runs just as well against Hillary Clinton in head-to-head matchups as does Rudy Giuliani (Giuliani's general election electability is a main reason many Republicans say they'll back him). Here's more:

McCain is a conservative whose heterodox views on campaign-finance reform and immigration are shared by the more liberal Giuliani. With the defeat of the “comprehensive” immigration bill he championed, McCain recognizes that the public demands concrete enforcement measures — and he now pledges to secure the border before pressing for the legalization of illegal aliens. (He will, of course, have to convince conservatives that he is a genuinely reformed reformer committed to an “enforcement first” agenda.)

Finally, McCain is in a long-term, stable second marriage and talks to all his children, although not as frequently as he would like. One son is a midshipman at the Naval Academy and another is an enlisted Marine serving in Iraq.

Should Republicans reject the false choices being offered — and make a considered choice based on the man and the merits — a second look could give John McCain a second chance.

McCain remains my candidate for the GOP nomination. Throughout the year I've stated my credentials as a national security voter, and McCain's knowledge and resolve on American national security can't be matched by any of the other top contenders. While O'Beirne doesn't stress it, the improved situation in Iraq may also help McCain look more and more like like a winner.

Iowa and New Hampshire More Important Than Ever

I posted earlier this week on the Iowa GOP's decision to push their party caucuses up to January 3, a date marking the earliest start to the presidential nomination contest in post-1972 history. Beyond citing the research of William Mayer - perhaps the country's top expert on the politics of presidential nominations - I didn't really elaborate on the practical significance of this year's extremely frontloaded primary season.

Thus, I'm pleased to report that Mark Barabak and Dan Morain's article today has a great analysis of the implications of this year's unprecedented early balloting:

For months, politicians in big states like California, Florida and Michigan have griped about their lack of influence in the 2008 presidential race, pushing up their primaries to try to diminish the sway of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Now, thanks to those efforts, Iowa and New Hampshire appear more important than ever.

The reasons are illustrated in the latest campaign fundraising reports, issued this week. The figures show a presidential contest that has effectively split into two financial tiers. One consists of Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, who are swimming in campaign cash. The other consists of everybody else in the race.

Despite the competitive nature of the contest, fundraising has proved more difficult than many presidential candidates anticipated, particularly on the Republican side. Candidates face pressure to score an early victory in Iowa or New Hampshire -- the two states adamant about voting first -- and then hope to quickly replenish their campaign treasuries to compete in the rapid succession of contests that follow.

Failing that, the also-rans, Democratic and Republican, will probably have to pack up their campaigns and quit before the vast majority of voters even have a chance to weigh in.

"Iowa and New Hampshire are everything," said Scott Reed, an unaffiliated GOP strategist, echoing the words of other political analysts. "They'll be like a slingshot for whoever wins and does well."

Read the whole thing.

This need for big, early money is probably the most important implication of the frontloaded calendar, and frankly I'm endlessly fascinated by current developments in presidential campaign finance (my defense of the big money campaign regime is here).

In 2004, President Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry raised $274 million and $253 million respectively (and that was just for the primaries, as both candidates accepted public funding for the general election). Total receipts are expected to exceed that this year, and Barabak and Morain have a nice graphic on the money totals for the current candidates' presidential campaign war chests (click here to see the graphic). Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have raised about $80 million apiece. On the GOP side, Mitt Romney's the most prodigious fundraiser, at $61 million, and Rudy Giulani's holding the second spot with about $47 million.

The lower-tiered candidates will certainly be hard-pressed to remain competitive as their war chests dwindle come January. The main thing to watch, though, will be how much each of the major-party nominees raise and spend in the general election. 2008's expected to be the most expensive campaign ever. But what matters most is how well the GOP does in funding their party's standard-bearer.

Personally, I'm expecting a tight race in money and polling, but in the battle of ideas the GOP will win hands down.

Blog Watch: Digby's Hullabaloo

With this entry, the "Blog Watch" series comes to American Power. As regular readers may recall, the original goal of Blog Watch was to comment on political blogs that raised:

...significant questions involving style, analysis, and ideological orientation. I'm particularly interested in dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers.

So far, as things have developed, I've challenged not just antiwar ideology, but the whole mindless nihilism associated with the endless hard-left attacks on the Bush administration and all things Republican (my earlier entries in the series are here, here, and here).

That effort continues with today's dissection and rebuttal of Digby's Hullabaloo. Hullabaloo's a vile yet influential leftist blog (Digby's posts are regularly cited by some of the top Bush-bashers of the left-blogosphere). I have on occassion waded into the dark comment threads there, which feature all of the classic characteristics familiar to the paranoid hate-addled hordes of the radical set. Most of Hullabaloo's posts are written by Digby, whose biography at The Huffington Post notes:

"Digby" has been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a writer whose political and cultural observations have entertained and informed the blogosphere since 2002. They can currently be found at http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.laweekly.com/.

(Yawn here.)

Hullabaloo's a group blog, however. That slippery wannabe international relations blogger Glenn Greenwald did a guest gig at Hullabaloo some time back (my jaws clench and hackles rise at the mere mention of Greenwald, but I've made mincemeat of him elsewhere). One current Hullabaloo co-blogger is Tristero, which is the pseudonym for Richard Einhorn, a modern classical composer by profession. Tristero should probably stick to music, as his foreign policy analysis is nothing more than boilerplate antiwar hatred of the Bush adminstration's forward international policy.

In one of his recent posts Tristero claims Turkey was readying an incursion into Northern Iraq, despite news reports indicating that Turkish plans were merely preliminary, against the wishes of the United States government, and that strikes against Kurdish rebels in Iraq were nowhere near forthcoming. But such facts didn't stop Tristero from launching this outlandish diatribe against the administration:

As far as I can tell, this article contains no information to support the assertion that "a Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq" is unlikely and plenty of reasons to worry about the opposite. Anyone familiar with the situation care to explain? Juan Cole mentions it, with a slightly less optimistic take on the situation than the Times provides, but does not offer an opinion as to how likely it or unlikely a military incursion by Turkey could be.

A personal note: Once, I had a long private talk with an American deputy ambassador who had been stationed in Iraq during 2004. I brought up my concerns about Turkey and the Kurds and, with the kind of flattery ambassadors learn to dispense on a moment's notice, he expressed surprise that I, a mere musician, knew enough to ask questions about it. I, too, was surprised, but I was surprised that he thought the questions were that esoteric.

The unpredictable effects - except that I knew they would be the bad kind of unpredictable - of destabilizing Iraq on its neighbors were among the many reasons I thought the Bush/Iraq invasion was major league cuckoo. By 2004, however, I had come to the genuinely terrifying conclusion that I, a mere musician, and my colleagues for the past year, a bunch of loudmouth bloggers who refused to accord any respect to those who believed in "the triumph of hope over experience," understood the world far better than America's political and media leaders. That may sound like a boast but really it's not. It highlights how profoundly incompetent, claustrophobic, and twisted American political discourse had become, and still is.

It chills me to the bone to realize that Walter Russell Mead, an old friend who has since gone on to acquire an enormous reputation in international affairs, got Bush/Iraq wrong and I got it right. There is something profoundly out of whack in this country for something like that to be true. But it is. And it wasn't just a lucky guess on my part; I wasn't guessing. Nor was it an excusable mistake on Walter's part, not only because it wasn't simply one mistake, but because it was an inexcusable cluster of serious mistakes for anyone to make who claims expertise in foreign policy.

The citation of Juan Cole is odd, since Cole fails to support Tristero's main point. Perhaps Tristero thought that bandying about Cole's name would lend some credence to his argument, although Cole's radical views have long been marginalized (Cole's reputation in the historical profession is controversal, and his application for a post at Yale University was rejected on the grounds of anti-Americanism and shoddy scholarship). But what's more interesting is all of Tristero's unwarranted assertions of superior foreign policy knowledge. Tristero's post is dated October 10, and this is just weeks after General David Petraeus testified to Congress on America's military success in Iraq, a performance that has been greeted by a growing sense that events in Iraq have improved dramatically.

But such views are par for the course over at Hullabaloo. In a characteristic post, Digby dismisses mainstream policy discourse as mere "incoherence" :

Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.

As an example of this, Digby attacks Mitt Romney, and she cites his (objectively sensible) views in this YouTube as "complete nonsense":

Also, after the recent commanding debate performances by Rudy Giuliani, Digby pulls up some partisan hack piece at Slate calling Rudy a liar, and then argues:

I don't think Rudy cares about facts any more than George W. Bush does, and undoubtedly doesn't know them in the first place. After all, Bush lied repeatedly during both of his presidential campaigns, just as he's doing now when he claims that SCHIP will allow rich people to steal from the taxpayers. (Like he thinks that's a bad thing.) They just make things up because they don't care to know the truth ... and it doesn't matter....

In any case, the bar has been set very low for GOP presidents. Yet they seem to be able to set it lower each time. If Giuliani wins we will not only have an idiot for president we will have a dangerously unstable idiot for president who is even more arrogant and malevolent than the one we have now. I have a sneaking feeling "competence" is going to be the least of our problems.

That's it? A couple of factual discrepancies over New York City tax policies during the 1990s and you have the basis for a complete smear of the entire GOP establishment as a bunch of liars! "Bush lied, people died!" Haven't we heard that before? It's so simplistic, and it would be just a matter of odd fascination if it weren't for the fact that these innacuracies go over as mainstream analysis in contemporary left-wing policy circles.

But I truly understood the true nature of Digby's hard-left ideological project after reading her denunciation of Bill Cosby's appearance last weekend on Meet the Press. Digby mounts her attack on Cosby with another volley of the "gibberish" line, laced with extreme exaggeration for effect:

I just suffered through one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I watched Bill Cosby ramble on like he was drunk, dominating the conversation, for nearly an hour on Meet The Press, most of the time speaking pure gibberish.

(Imagine him doing it in his patented Fat Albert voice as well...)

The context for Cosby's Meet the Press appearance is the release of his new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, which is coauthored by Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a well-respected child psychiatrist who specializes in African American issues. The book argues for a closer look at black American culture in an effort to find solutions to the current African American crisis.

Now, I watched the show, so I can attest to the real reason Digby attacks Cosby as incoherent: Cosby argues that the contemporary black family is dysfunctional - especially families of lower socioeconomic attainment - and these families have failed to provide the model of stability and responsibility that is the necessary prerequisite for success in life, educationally, professionally, and socially. Digby cites this passage from the interview transcripts to illustrate Cosby's alleged gibberish:

MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.[...]

MR. COSBY: ...in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.

Cosby's been been at the forefront of a recent movement to pinpoint the causes of the contemporary African American crisis at the level of the family. His speech at the NAACP's 50th commemoration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision sparked a vigorous debate in the black community over institutional versus individual factors in the crisis of poverty and crime among black youth today.

Cosby wasn't speaking gibberish last Sunday on Meet the Press. Indeed, his comments were far from incoherent. A written transript - like that provided by Meet the Press - can't do justice to the syncopated down-home patterns of Cosby's speech.

I listened with ease as Cosby spoke truth to the pathologies of contemporary black America. He speaks with the voice of the traditional black elder sage who's been down with the brothers in the 'hood and knows "what dey got t'do" to rise up from the depths of danger and despair. Cosby's voice is the powerful trumpet of contemporary black conservatism, a movement which doesn't discount America's history of institution racism. Instead, black conservatives focus on educational excellence as a means of advancement within the society. They stress neighborhood safety and security, and most of all they denounce the endless cries of "racism" which cast blacks as the "victims" of an irredeemable racial caste system that locks them in the dire straights of socioeconomic inferiority. Black conservatives look within, to the heart and soul of the indiviual, for answers to the problem of black uplift.

And this is why Cosby's attacked mercilessly by Digby ("it's all gibberish"), as well as the entire class of left-wing victimologists. The conservative position on individual responsibility challenges the enduring shibboleths of the radical sociology on race. This nihilist ideology (which inherently offers no compelling policy alternatives) is anathema to the future chances of America's black youth, and the entire anti-Bush, anti-traditionalist project mounted at Digby's Hullaballoo holds disastrous implications for the future of American public policy.

So, as we see here and elsewhere, conservatives have a continuing interest and responsibility to challenge and rebut this radical left-wing dogma. The stakes are incrediby high: For although the radicals propose absolutely nothing of reason and hope, such "discourse" is becoming all too common within the broader tide of leftism that gaining traction in the poltical system. All conservatives need to join together to beat back this antiwar, multicultural, statist onslaught chipping away at our common political decency and vitality.

See also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice, Firedoglake, and Glenn Greenwald.

Neoconservative Rebirth

Jacob Heilbrunn's column today argues that the neoconservative movement is regrouping with the appointment of John Podhoretz at the new editor of Commentary Magazine:

For several years, the conventional wisdom has been that neoconservatism is on the skids. Vice President Dick Cheney has been sidelined while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flexes her diplomatic muscles, and old neocon standbys such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have largely disappeared from view. But the movement isn't dead yet. As shown by the announcement this week of former New York Post editorial page editor John Podhoretz's appointment to head the flagship neoconservative journal Commentary, the movement may be battered, but it is not going away. If anything, it is regrouping.

At the moment, the future of neoconservatism hangs on its unspoken system of dynastic succession, in which the top posts of the movement are handed off to the sons of its leaders. A second generation is taking over from the first to lead the crusade against the liberal traitors at home and the terrorists abroad.

Like William Kristol, who edits the influential right-wing journal the Weekly Standard, Podhoretz is the son of neoconservative eminences. Kristol's father, Irving, was editor of the old neocon journal the Public Interest and helped create the movement's network in Washington; his mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a conservative cultural critic and prominent advocate of Victorian morality.

In Podhoretz's case, his mother, Midge Decter, is a trustee of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and has written several books decrying feminism. His brother-in-law, Elliot Abrams, who played a leading role in the Iran-Contra affair, is a staffer on the National Security Council responsible for the Mideast and democratization programs.
But in this galaxy of notables, it is Podhoretz's father, Norman, who looms largest. Norman, now 77, is the patriarch of the neocon movement. An advisor to presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, a prominent advocate of bombing Iran, author of the bestselling book "World War IV" and himself the editor of Commentary for four decades, he exemplifies the intensely intellectual and combative first generation of neoconservatives.

A scholarship student at Columbia University who resented what he called the "WASP patriciate," Norman Podhoretz studied under the literary scholar Lionel Trilling and initially made his name by denouncing Jack Kerouac and the Beat movement in the late 1950s. His mentor at Commentary was Elliot Cohen, a former Trotskyist turned virulent anti-communist. After Cohen committed suicide in 1959, Podhoretz was named editor at age 30.

At first, Podhoretz turned against such mentors as Trilling and embraced the left. His memoir, "Making It," made matters worse by revealing his lust for success. The snobbish New York intelligentsia snubbed him.

But in the late 1960s, Podhoretz took yet another turn. Disgusted by what he viewed as the anti-Americanism of the antiwar movement, he moved sharply to the right. Under his leadership, Commentary defended Israel, denounced the Soviet Union and opposed affirmative action. Its articles helped Daniel Patrick Moynihan and then Jeane Kirkpatrick become U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. Podhoretz was riding high.

For the hawkish Podhoretz, who had been raised on the Cold War and had written articles about Mikhail Gorbachev with such titles as "The Fantasy of Soviet Collapse," the end of the Soviet Union came as a shock. The neocons were reduced to gadflies as President Clinton won two terms in the 1990s.

With 9/11, Podhoretz and the neocon movement were revitalized. But it is the sons who will carry forth the standard in coming years.

John Podhoretz will undoubtedly seek to update his magazine, which has lost many of its readers. The younger Podhoretz epitomizes the ethos of the new generation; he has spent much of his time as a critic of pop culture, writing about films and television. If his father wrote books with such titles as "Ex-Friends" - about intellectual grandees such as Hannah Arendt - John Podhoretz's memoir, "Hell of a Ride," was about watching the antics of interns working for George H.W. Bush. Unlike his father's generation, John Podhoretz's has never really rebelled. As a result, it is not made up of disaffected liberals but of people who have been attracted to the right from the beginning. They have never flirted with the left but have been groomed to battle it.

And so Podhoretz has been tapped to continue the war against liberalism and to rejuvenate the magazine that played such a key role in the history of neoconservatism. After the debacle of the Iraq war, it will be a stiff challenge. Unless, of course, Giuliani wins the presidency. Then all bets are off, and an article in Commentary may once again be the ticket to a United Nations appointment, not to mention a Cabinet post.

While John Podhoretz may have been groomed under the aegis of his father, I would argue a whole new generation of 9/11 neoconservatives - born of the outrage against the left's demonization of the United States in the early Bush years - will grow and prosper in the years ahead.

Neoconservatism offers a compelling alternative to the nihilism of the contemporary left, and the moral clarity of the movement - in both domestic and international life - provides a vital foundation for the conservative policy agenda going forward.

For Commentary's announcement of Podhoretz's appointment as editor, click here.

Plus, be sure to see my initial post at American Power, which provides a nice primer on the power of neoconservative ideals.

See also, Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion."