Are Conservatives More Implicit in the Egregious Sins of America?

Most conservative bloggers are familiar with the left's standards of moral relativism.

But how about comparative guilt? Should conservatives feel more historically guilty than leftists? Can we measure comparative culpabilities - for injustices like gender oppression, Japanese internment, or slavery most of all - between the two major ideological traditions in American history?

The folks at Daily Kos think so:

White guilt is the natural - and correct - emotion to feel when as a white person - hell as an American - one is confronted by America's original sin. For I, and all my white brethren, are the recipients, the beneficiaries of hegemonic system. My privilege - America's privilege - has been paid for through the blood and oppression of other peoples. This doesn't mean I ought to go flogging myself all the time (shame). It does mean that I ought to be aware and work to change the system as it is now. It means I ought to try to solve the problems that still haunt those on whose backs this country was made great.

When I call myself an American, I don't get to cherry-pick which parts of America's identity I bring along. For slavery is as much a part of America as The Emancipation Proclamation. Japanese Internment as much as the Bill of Rights. Guantanamo Bay as much as The Berlin Airlifts. So, by calling myself American, I give myself to a country that both enables some of the best opportunities for social change and justice in the world and requires deep guilt.

Rosenbaum points out that Conservatives are just as implicit - if not more so (their movement, historically) - in the egregious sins of America, yet they are the ones who reject guilt, and, thus reject awareness of America's sometimes dark past. The modern conservative incarnation has embraced the narrative of American Exceptionalism - America is always right. And, in so doing, have absolved themselves of guilt. In doing so, they have washed away any chance of seeing America for what it is. Great. Imperfect...

Ignoring guilt is only cause for more of the same. Perhaps, Conservatives glorify America, not solely out of patriotism (however warped it may be), but out of a desire to easily absolve themselves of the guilt that liberals must recognize. Guilt isn't a comfortable thing, after all. It's the easy way out, sticking one's head in the sand.

The reference is to Ron Rosembaum, "In Praise of Liberal Guilt: It's Not Wrong to Favor Obama Because of Race," who asks:

Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it's shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America's virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America's sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue. (I've run out of metaphors, but you get the picture.)

What to make of all this talk of guilt and complicity?

Rosenbaum wants to make this a partisan question, so it's no surprise the Kos folks take up the banner. Considering how Markos Moulitsas claims his community's the mainstream future of progressive politics and the Democratic Party, I'm not surprised that this meme of liberal superiority on comparative complicity is taking root.

The problem? It's a scam.

When we talk about conservatives today compared to those of earlier era, we're not talking about static categories: We can't just hop in Michael J. Fox's DeLorean and zip back to 1619, to the dockside at the harbor in Virginia, waiting to off-load our fresh human cargo from West Africa. Who was conservative back then? Abolitionism was not a formal movement in the United States until the 18th and 19th centuries, and even those who had moral qualms about racial hierarchies in the 17th century certainly were outliers in a system of cultural acceptance of racial difference.

We can quibble with it, but the folks we venerate today, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, were slaveowners. Yes, it's been our original sin, but Americans realized at that time - at the time of the founding, in 1787 - the contradictions of the American creed. We cannot have a country established on the principle that all men are created equal while simultaneously maintaining an economic and social system of human chattel bondage. We've sought to overcome this stain throughout the length of our history, and if we want to label one side more guilty than the other, let's be fair: President Lincoln was no abolitionist, but his movement for a national greatness Republican Party did more to restore equality under the law than anything the Democrats did for 100 years following the assassination of the 16th president.

We did see, though, through the late-19th and 20th centuries, the building of a high tide of liberal guilt. Let me count the ways: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Guinn v. United States (1915), Executive Order 9981, Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock, Arkansas (Eishenhower's Executive Order 10730, Desegregation of Central High School, 1957), the 24th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Executive Order 10925, Executive Order 11246, the War on Poverty, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Philadelpha Plan, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ...

I imagine I could go on, but my enumeration of actions toward equality and justice goes back, right there, over a full century in marking the agonizing, fitfull, and violent efforts at actualizing the promise of the American dream for all citizens - and that's the result of the EXPLICIT recognition of our moral failures as a people. And folks want to talk about guilt?

We no longer have slavery, Jim Crow, and the stigma of an American apartheid because we have worked so long and so hard to overcome.

But it's frankly never enough. That's why we have race hustlers arguing that we were all wrong about Martin Luther King: The slain civil rights leader disabused himself of the vision that one day we'd be able to live where all of God's children might realize conditions of mutual equality, love, and respect. Nope, we have to dig down, root out King's insecurities and doubts, the frustrations of a slowing of change, to the impatience of adjusting to the very revolution he, Dr. King, had brought about by his irrepressible reminder that we hadn't live up to our moral requirement. Nope, according the race grievance masters like Michael Eric Dyson, Dr. King became "darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion."

So this is what we get? Instead of standing in awe at the edge of the great racial chasm, where the dawn is about to break on a new era of racial equality, with an eloquent young politician who has lived America's promise of diversity, inclusion, and opportunity, we get racial recrimination?

In response to Rosenbaum we see white conservatives pundits wringing their hands, trying to get out from the sting of opprobruim, by admitting - God help us! - shame for our past injustices.
Well, damn, you'd think a few conservative folks had just murderously beat the teeth out of some black youth whistling at a leggy Southern white housewife!

So, what to think? Are the Kos guilt mongerers right?

Well, no. We can reverse the arrows of discrimination nowadays. The "hegemonic" system that's oppressing society today is the Democratic Party's racial recrimination program, and the conservatives are down home on the plantation, serving remorseful penance for the "accumulated disadvantages" of 400 years of complicity in oppression.

This is not going away either, I'll note, this system of racial recrimination. It's not going away because the president we're very likely to elect does not repudiate the callous, egregious politics of racial resentment.

Despite spurious calls to "end identity politics" (including at Daily Kos, of all places) today's Democratic Party maintains power on the back of that guilt-ridden ideology.

It's time to put that nastiness to bed, and get on with the real job of strengthening traditional values of hard work and strong families, of educational achievement and professional accomplishment. Rather than play the comparative guilt game, let's restore the power of American individualism and pull out of this funk we're having, getting back to the nation's business of living out our dream up on that hill one of of which one of our more optimisitic presidents spoke.

Democrats Confident on November Victory

Gallup reports that 6 in 10 Democrats feel confident on winning in November:

Democrats are much more confident that their party will win the November presidential election than are Republicans.

A new Gallup Panel survey, conducted May 19-21, finds 61% of Democrats saying they are confident their party will win the election, including 35% who are "very confident." Meanwhile, only 39% of Republicans are confident, with only 13% saying they are very confident.

Thus, rank-and-file Republicans are aware the party faces an uphill battle in retaining the White House given the problems in the economy, an ongoing and unpopular war, and an incumbent Republican president with some of the lowest job approval ratings in Gallup Poll history.

While Republicans generally agree that their odds of winning are long, a majority (58%) believe that likely presidential nominee John McCain gives the GOP the best chance of any of this year's Republican candidates of winning the election.

Maybe some of that "conservative loathing of McCain" has died down a bit.

"And You Wonder Why US soldiers Are Being Blown Up on a Daily Basis..."

This is just in, from Little Green Footballs:

In order to stop this war, and any future American Wars of Aggression, those considering enlisting in the armed forces need to be stopped before they sign on the dotted line. They need to be shown that this is a choice with extreme consequences; that they will come home changed for the worse, physically, mentally or both; they need to be shown that patriotism, bravado, the youthful myth of immortality and the promise of $50,000 will not save them; they need to be shown that wars of aggression are NOT noble causes and that those who“give” their lives are not doing so for their country but for the greed of a few men in government and corporations.

Those who have come back from Iraq have learned all of the above the hard way. No one needs to follow in their footsteps. No one, given the chance, would choose to come back forgotten by their government and damaged for life - which is what happens when you fight to defend a lie instead of your country. Those in our government who sent these men and women off under the false banner of patriotism should be held accountable for their thoughtless and selfish actions.

And you wonder why US soldiers are being blown up on a daily basis, justify the means and keep killing innocent Iraqi civilians...

Actually, I don't wonder why Americans are being "blown up on a daily basis," but that's not the purpose of these comments, via the Huffington Post.

Obama Won't Visit Iraq

Barack Obama has rejected John McCain's offer of a joint visit to Iraq, and some have suggested, "Obama Too Scared to Visit Troops in Baghdad".

But here's this from Allahpundit:

If they’re worried about the military giving them a dog-and-pony show, the answer isn’t to decline the trip but to counterpropose a more comprehensive trip than even McCain’s suggesting and turn it into a real fact-finding mission. Don’t spend two hours looking at charts with Petraeus. Take four or five days; go to Basra and Mosul. If they simply can’t suspend campaigning for that long, send a joint team of advisors from both sides. He won’t do it because he’s afraid of what he might hear, which goes back to a point I’ve been making ever since the Jamil Hussein saga: The left would have you believe Iraq hawks can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going badly, but the opposite has always been more nearly true. For purposes of the Narrative, it’s doves who can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going better, as if to acknowledge that the surge has helped to improve security or that the Iraqi army is performing better than expected lately or that plenty of Shiites are tired of Sadr’s crap would be to validate neoconservatism or somehow tacitly rubber-stamp an invasion of Iran. So how about it, Barry? Break the mold. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of grim news in the briefings too to help take the sting out of the reports of progress. Exit question: How on earth did we arrive at an election scenario where the hawk is trying to bait the dove into talking about Iraq?

Break the mold? That'll be the day.

In the meanwhile, just ignore the fearmongering.

Requiem For an Academic World of Inquiry

Alan Charles Kors offers a requiem for the university as a world of inquiry and enlightening dissent from orthodoxy, in his essay, "On the Sadness of Higher Education."

This paragraph offers a pause for reflection:

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I'd taken on the history of Europe in the 20th century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the left, returned the midterms to the hundred-plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we'd saddened and embarrassed him. "I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions," he explained, "but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear." He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: "I'm going to assign the book I disagree with most about the 20th century. I'm not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world." I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life.

It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don't want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

I'm like this, as I get so many students who are of the idealistic sort. I try to have them think through issues from both sides, especially in my elective courses in comparative politics and international relations.

But note here too:

There also has been ... a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels. Those who want to understand critically the degradations that have occurred should look at, for starters, the stunning works of Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, editors, "Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent"; John Ellis, "Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities"; and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science."

I agree, and I noted so much in my entry, "Republicans on the Fringe in Academe."

That entry, by the way, was ridiculed by the author of an academic article entitled, "The Erotic Adventures of Stacy Koon in the ‘Rodney King Affair.’" The same author also wrote a blog post, "How to Write an Editorial about Higher Education," slamming Robert Maranto's essay suggesting that "professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate."

Hey, can't we all just get along?

'Cause I Want to Know...

Sometime back, when I posted George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" as part of my "lightening up" series, one of my oppositional commenters, Fauxmaxbaer, remarked:

"I must say I find it a bit ironic to see his songs featured at a site that has the attitude towards war that this one does."

I imagine these reflections originate in the notion that neoconservatives are "bloodthirsty war lovers."

I'm not, but for perspective I wanted to share my blog buddy Pat's comments on his love of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who he says is his #1 group:

The Number 1 group on my all time list is CCR ... this is their Anti-War protest song Fortunate Son .... Hell, I'm pro-war (against Islamic trash anyway), but I like this one anyway ... let's face it some of these guys played to the mindless kiddie liberals even back then ... John Fogerty was/is talented, he is just another tool when it comes to his political views.

Is it that simple? Can we say that artists of the era just got caught up in the time, in the movement, churning out antiwar anthems like "Fortunate Son" like they were just one more throwaway pop hit for the vinyl industry music machine?

There may have been some of that, but of all people, rockers have been the conscience for the country's comfortable classes, and the sirens for our disadvantaged.

John Fogerty wasn't my generation, really. I love some of CCR's music, though, so please enjoy one of my favorites from the band's collection, "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?":

Besides listening to popular radio as a kid, my experiences as a rock-and-roller pretty much date to the late 1970s, when I was in high school - when I went through a dramatic phase of enjoying arena rockers like Boston and Van Halen, and then later to new wave, punk rock, and rockabilly.

I've posted once previously on The Clash, so readers might prepare for some more of that good stuff from the earlier, punky days.

So, what explains it then? How can we can love music that seems at odds with our contemporary ideological and political stands? Well, we were all kids once, and you just don't quit listening to your earlier guitar heroes just because you've learned that the antiwar, environmental, or social idealism is often (if not ultimately) hackneyed, hypocritical, naïve, and misplaced.

The music stays with you ... it's your history, and your lust of life!

Hillary's Endurance: The End of the Line for the Democrats?

Does Hillary Clinton really have a case for staying in the race? It's all about ego now, right? The math and the momentum are now beyond her, and the most compelling news stories this week discuss how diminished she'll be if she returns to the Senate (no power, no platform).

I'm not sure, but as I've said all along, the longer Hillary stays in the race, the better.

Josh Patashnik made an interesting argument the other day:

... what's become clear at the end of this primary season is that neither Democratic candidate's appeal is as wide as Democrats would prefer. It's difficult to project what will happen in November from primary results or even general-election polling at this stage, so any such speculation should be taken with a major grain of salt. I think it's fair to say, though, that in general Obama appears to have a problem with working-class whites east of Illinois, and Clinton appears to have a problem with Westerners and more upscale independent-minded voters. This pattern has been remarkably consistent since the beginning of the primary season. My suspicion is that these weaknesses basically cancel each other out, which is why you see both candidates sporting approximately equal-sized small leads over John McCain in national polls.

But note John Sides, a GWU political scientist and blogger at the Monkey Cage, who suggests that the Democrats won't be all that divided come autumn (via LAT):

Pundits seem to be converging on a new conventional wisdom: that the drawn-out and extraordinarily competitive Democratic presidential primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has cleaved the party in two.Many voters insist that they will not support any Democratic candidate in the general election except their original favorite, according to exit polls, and that has caused party elders to fret about whether the eventual nominee will be able to unify the party and defeat presumptive GOP nominee John McCain....

Both parties can rest easy. Despite ugly battles and policy differences that sometimes seem intractable, the reality is that presidential campaigns tend to unify each party behind its nominee. Political scientists call this phenomenon the "reinforcement effect." It was described in 1940 in the first major study of a presidential campaign. The study's authors -- Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet -- noted that voters tended to "join the fold to which they belong," with Democrats gravitating to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Republicans to Wendell Willkie. These voters were not blindly following whichever shepherds their parties nominated, the study concluded. Rather, their partisan loyalties reflected their underlying values, and the parties' nominees solidified their support by emphasizing these same values as the campaign unfolded....

But what about those Clinton supporters who say they won't vote for Obama in November...?

What about those white working-class voters Obama has had trouble attracting? Will they rejoin the Democratic fold in November?

They probably will because class differences have not divided Democrats in recent elections. For instance, in the 2004 election, 86% of white Democrats without a college degree voted for Kerry, as did 92% of those with a college degree. White Democratic voters who made less than $50,000 a year were just as loyal to their presidential candidate as those who earned more, according to the National Election Pool's exit poll. Democrats were largely unified across class boundaries despite Republican attempts to portray Kerry as an effete cosmopolitan out of touch with "real" Americans.

But if Obama, an African American, wins the nomination, as is expected, race could make the 2008 election different from previous presidential contests. There are certainly some white Democrats who won't vote for a black for president. An imperfect indicator is those Democratic primary voters who supported Clinton and said race was a factor in their decision. In the Kentucky primary exit poll, this group constituted 17% of all Democratic voters.

Nevertheless, in the voting booth, partisan loyalties may prove more powerful than racial prejudice. Benjamin Highton, a political science professor at UC Davis, studied 357 contested House races in the 1996 and 1998 elections. He found that white voters were no more or less likely to support black candidates than white ones. Prejudice against blacks still exists in many forms, but it does not guarantee that large numbers of Democratic voters will abandon an African American nominee for his white Republican opponent.

Actually, a lot depends on the campaign itself:

The trouble is that Mr Obama's efforts to suppress the race issue are doomed to failure ... The Republican political machine, which demonstrated its mastery of the arts of character assassination in the two Bush presidential contests, will have no compunction in exploiting the Wright relationship and portraying Mr Obama as an anti-American in the general election, even if the Clinton campaign and the media observe a self-denying ordinance on the race and patriotism issues, as they broadly have so far.

The certainty of a no-holds-barred attacks by the Republicans brings us to the potentially most tragic aspect of this election. If ever there was an election the Democrats ought to win this is the one. Yet on the basis of the primary results so far, they are all too likely to lose it. Mr Obama may be marginally ahead of Mrs Clinton in the popular vote but the Democrats seem to have forgotten that all the votes cast so far have been by their own supporters. In the general election their candidate will have to win over Republicans and right-leaning floating voters. Most of the evidence so far suggests that the Repulicans will find it much easier to frighten voters about the prospect of a President Obama than a President Clinton.

In that case, Obama might in fact be better off pushing for an early Hillary exit, before the remaining primaries. This year's going to make '88's Atwater-style politics look like the county fair, by the time the no-holds-barred GOP 527s get into the action.

The way MoveOn's going after the GOP already, I wouldn't blame them.

See also, "The Last Straw? The Netroots' Patience is at An End."

The Left's World War II History Gap

It looks like Barack Obama's disastrous ignorance of European World War II history's turning out to be the big story of the day!

As Allahpundit notes, there are gaffes, and then there are gaffes!!

See it here via YouTube:

Here's more on Obama's Auschwitz magnitude:

In the annals of the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama's Auschwitz moment may yet become the stuff of legend.

For months, the Republican National Committee, grumbling John McCain staffers and an array of conservative bloggers have tried to label Obama as a serial exaggerator and an heir to Al Gore, who Republicans successfully tarred in 2000 as someone who claimed to have discovered Love Canal and invented the Internet.

It just wasn't sticking.

Now, they think they've caught him red handed.

Obama didn't mince words in the story of his uncle yesterday in New Mexico. As he spoke of the need to provide combat veterans better health care, especially better mental health care, Obama let loose a three-Pinocchio doozy:

"I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps," Obama said, slowly and methodically. "And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn't leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren't the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain."

That may be a fact, the RNC noted gleefully - but only if Obama's uncle served in the Red Army of Joseph Stalin, which liberated Auschwitz Jan. 27, 1945.

The Obama campaign says the mistake was not as horrific as it might seem. His uncle was there at the liberation of Buchenwald. Obama just confused the names of the concentration camps.

World War II's giving some less prominent lefties fits as well.

Dr. Biobrain, who's a master-of-disaster debating denialist extraordinaire, noted this about Kevin James's recent appeasement idiocy on the Chris Matthews' show:

This guy's like 45 years old, a lawyer, and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, and didn't know the first thing about why Neville Chamberlain is infamous. And that's fine. Not everyone is a history buff. Not everyone cares about this stuff. I'm no snob to think that everyone needs to know what I know. But...if you're going to be insisting that somebody is doing "the exact same thing" as Chamberlain, you really should have some sort of fucking clue of what it was that Chamberlain did, beyond "appeasing" Hitler.

...it was obvious that he not only didn't have a clue what Chamberlain did wrong, he didn't even know what the word "appeasement" means. And that's why this is important....

Chris Matthews' point was entirely right, because what Obama is suggesting is NOTHING like what Chamberlain did ... Appeasement means you give in to your enemy's demands in the hope that it satisfies them and they'll be nice.

Isn't that sweet! They'll be nice!

Give Dr. Biobrain a gold star and a happy face sticker! No wait! He even wins the teacher's best-student reward, "Gotcha being good"!!

Maybe old Adolph might like a nice cup of Old Earl Grey! Perhaps a truffle? Maybe then he'll be "nice" and decide not to swallow up Czechoslovakia's industrial heartland and the Sudetenland's strategic buffer zone, the most protected embattlement of all the peripheral powers in all of Eastern Europe!

We're saved! Peace in our time!

Dr. Biobrain (in addition to being a confused, foul-mouthed post-modern subjectivist) is an Obama alternate delegate (last I heard) ... so, hey, perhaps he might land a patronage post at Foggy Bottom next January?

Undersecretary for State for Arms Control? Yo, Mahmoud! About those operational nuclear enrichment or reprocessing facilities ... bro, you can have 'em ... we just want you to be happy! Weehh!!

J-PAC: Debating J-Street, the American Jewish Peacenik Lobby

Jamie Kirchick's got an interesting piece on "J Street," a new American-Jewish lobby that claims to better represent the American Jewish diaspora than does AIPAC:

Consider the plight of the American Jewish peacenik. With Hamas in control of Gaza, Ehud Olmert under investigation, and the West Bank government of Mahmoud Abbas shaky as ever, a negotiated deal between Israelis and Palestinians doesn't exactly appear imminent. Meanwhile, closer to home, the likely Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, has said he won't negotiate with Hamas. Under these grim circumstances, what's a Peace Now type to do?

Enter J Street, a new lobbying group and political action committee that says it will represent the interests of liberal American Jews. The organization derives its name from the fact that Washington's road system, in which horizontal streets are named after letters of the alphabet, contains no J Street--the grid goes directly from I to K. Just as there is no J Street on the city's map, the group's founders maintain that the perspectives of liberal Jews are not adequately represented among Washington's pro-Israel lobbyists. "It is time for the broad, sensible mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews and their allies to challenge those on the extreme right who claim to speak for all American Jews in the national debate about Israel and the Middle East--and who, through the use of fear and intimidation, have cut off reasonable debate on the topic," declared J Street founder and former Clinton administration official Jeremy Ben-Ami in a recent piece for The Forward. The group, according to its website, favors "diplomatic solutions over military ones, including in Iran; multilateral over unilateral approaches to conflict resolution; and dialogue over confrontation with a wide range of countries and actors when conflicts do arise." Perhaps most controversially, its founder favors negotiating with Hamas. "Should there be attempts to engage Hamas and to find dialogue with them? Yes, " Ben-Ami said last month. One of the other brains behind the group, Daniel Levy, a British-born Israeli citizen and former adviser to Knesset member Yossi Beilin of the left-wing Meretz Party, has been a vociferous advocate of negotiating with the terrorist group.

The genesis of J Street lies in the allegedly right-wing agenda of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - king of pro-Israel lobbies with 100,000 members and an annual operating budget of $60 million. "I'm not with AIPAC; I do not support AIPAC," prominent New York lawyer and J Street Advisory Council member Victor Kovner said in a press conference call last month. (Other members of the council include Robert Malley, a former Clinton administration peace negotiator who has defended Yasser Arafat's rejection of Clinton's 2000 Camp David peace proposal; Moveon.org founder Eli Pariser; and journalist Eric Alterman.)

Note that Robert Malley's the former Barack Obama advisor who recently resigned his post over controversial direct contacts with Hamas, and MoveOn's the radical online advocacy group that compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler and smeared General David Petraeus as a traitor.

Here's more from Kirchick:

The movers and shakers behind the organization allege that American Jews, whose political orientation is overwhelmingly liberal, are not accurately represented by AIPAC and other long-established pro-Israel groups...

Some J Street supporters point to a 2007 survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which found that 58 percent of American Jews identify as Democrats (only 15 percent classify themselves as Republicans) and that Jews overwhelmingly trust Democrats on the Iraq war, terrorism, and the economy. "Within the U.S. Jewish community, there's [a gap between] the hawkish views expressed by leaders and 'pro-Israel' activists and the more dovish opinions of much of the community," Gershom Gorenberg, one of the group's intellectual mavens, recently wrote on The American Prospect's website. But the real gap, it turns out, is between the miniscule group of writers and activists involved with J Street and the majority of American Jews. It's true that American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal on most issues; the problem for J Street is that Israel simply isn't one of those issues. According to the same AJC survey cited by J Street supporters, nearly three-quarters of American Jews do not believe that Israel can "achieve peace with a Hamas-led, Palestinian government," as J Street's founder advocates. What's more, 55 percent believe that negotiations between Olmert and Abbas "cannot lead to peace in the foreseeable future." And a whopping 82 percent agree with the following statement: "The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel."

A perusal of J Street's list of supporters further undermines its pretensions to mainstream credibility. One of the most prominent Israelis involved with the group is Avrum Burg, former speaker of the Knesset. A member of a distinguished Israeli political family, he set off a political scandal last year when, in an interview with Ha'aretz, he claimed that "to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end"; he has also compared contemporary Israel to pre-Nazi Germany. Naomi Chazan is a former Knesset member from the left-wing Meretz Party, which has just five seats (out of 120) in the Knesset. Henry Siegman, a former Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, accused Israeli leaders of having the U.S. government "in their pockets," and claimed (absurdly) that the 2000 intifada "was not planned by Arafat, but a spontaneous eruption of Palestinian anger."

Hmm, J-Street supporters comparing Israel to South Africa under apartheid? Yo, Jimmy Carter, bro!

No wonder Spencer Ackerman denounces Kirchick as "a talentless neoconservative," refuses to provide a link to Kirchick's TNR piece, and boosts Jeremy Ben-Ami, who flails away with such intellectual piddle as this:

"The 2007 American Jewish Committee survey finds that a plurality (46% - 43%) of American Jews favor establishment of a Palestinian state "in the current situation" using the words of the survey."

Dude, we be singin', I got de' margin-o'-error blues...!!

I can see why Ackerman dogged Kirchick on the link love! Geez, I'd be embarrassed to be pumping up Ben-Ami too.

AIPAC's got no worries! Man!!

American Preponderance in the Muslim World

President Bush, in his speech to a Joint Session of Congress following 9/11, declared:

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country....

The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies....

Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

The president's speech engendered a huge academic, political, and religious debate on "why do they hate us?"

Is it truly our values, our way of life, our liberty that causes global Islamic anti-Americanism? It's no doubt some of that, particularly as Western values holding the essential equality of women threaten the foundations of gender apartheid in Muslim authoritarian regimes, and so forth

But Muslim anti-Americanism's more complicated than that. Which is why the new survey data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project on Muslim views of the United States is extremely interesting.

Andrew Kohut and Richard Wike summarize the findings at the National Interest, and this section in particular caught my attention:

To a large extent, America is disliked in the Muslim world because of its power—and especially because of how it is perceived to be using it. Unrivaled since the end of the cold war and on the offensive since the 9/11 attacks, the United States is seen as a menacing giant, using its considerable strength without regard for others.

What's noteworthy is that when opposition to U.S. policy is broached in terms of power - it's not so much the Bush adminstration, but American preponderance that repels.

To take it further, if Americans elect Barack Obama in the fall, will global anti-Americanism decline? Will the Islamic world open its arms to a new president, one whose father was Muslim, and one who has proclaimed the goal of direct talks with our enemies without precondition.

Well, no actually. On religious grounds alone, Obama's seen as a Muslim apostate, and he's thus likely to cause extreme alienation among some Muslims who consider the Illinois Senator heretical for choosing Christianity over Islam. (It's not clear, moreover, for all the bluster and controversy, that Obama would actually enter into talks with our enemies, at least uncondiontionally, given the backlash to the candidate's views.)

But more importantly, U.S. power, for all the renewed talk about America's relative decline, will continue to cause unease among Muslim populations around the world. Sure, other issues are at play, like perceptions of a global religious struggle, the alleged Western threat to Islamic values, and not to mention inequalities in global wealth and economic mobility.

But as the survey shows, American power is key. The Islamic jihad against the U.S. really saw its most successful assault on the United States on September 11. Yet the desire to balance America's hegemonic power in Muslim populations preceded the Bush administration and it will continue long after the 2008 election.

These are some facts that the kumbaya advocates on the liberal internationalist left might do well to think about.

Neocons for Obama?

I thought the far-left was schizophrenic!

Now we have news that an erstwhile neoconservative has endorsed Barack Obama?

Francis Fukuyama, a registered Republican and a central figure in the rise of neoconservatism in the 1980s, widens his break with the movement by endorsing Barack Obama for president. Of Republicans, Fukuyama says, "Their two big things are fear of [terrorism] and fear of immigrants - that's not an agenda." He describes Obama as "the only one of the candidates who can escape the polarization" of American politics. Fukuyama's support should help Obama win over the critical swing voting bloc of political science graduate students.

Well, we already know that paleocons are for Obama, so with Fukuyama's switch the fervid antiwar base is getting some "end of history" enlargement!

MoveOn.org Escalates Attacks on McCain

I've written quite a bit about the hard-left's shift to electoral politics as the means for launching the revolution (most recently, here).

A central faction within the radical electoral coalition is MoveOn.org. The group's launched a new round of attacks again John McCain and his top advisors, topped off with this ad slurring Charlie Black:

Marc Ambinder's commented on this, saying Black's earlier lobbying days were conducted above-board, within the U.S. framework, and with the knowledge of the federal government:

Say this for Mr. Black: he has been forthcoming about his associations.

He told me, as he has told other reporters, that his firm ran every potential foreign client by the State Department and/or the White House in whatever administration was in power and asked whether the scope of the work fit with American foreign policy goals.

"A lot of times it wasn't [within the scope], and we didn't do it," he said.

Black allowed that "in some cases, it went bad."

When Black took on Ferdinand Marcos as a client, the president of the Phillipines was democratically elected. "When he tried to steal the election, Reagan pulled the plug and we resigned the account the same day." Marcos, among other crimes, authorized the arrest of political opponents and was a kleptocrat.

On Mobuto Sese Seko, Black says that the State Department was encourarging him to hold parliamentary elections and his firm advised Sese Seko on how to conduct such elections. The election took place; Sese Seko didn't like the election results and he cancelled the election results and we quit." Sese Seko became a dictator.

Other examples cited by MoveOn and other critics: Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi and Ahmad Chalabi.

As Black points out, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly -- now BKSH and Associates, is a bipartisan firm; it's CEO, R. Scott Pastrick, is a former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a supporter of Hillary Clinton's. (It's now owned by Burston Marsteller, which, of course, is run by Mark Penn.)

I asked Black about McCain's new conflict of interest policy.

" I think it's mostly a clarification. McCain has had pretty high standards, always. I don't know of anyone who worked on the campaign who would have gone and tried to lobby Mccain and his staff."

The campaign supports Mr. Black -- aides say that he's an integral part of the team and will not be going anywhere anytime soon.

And Black insists that his lobbying days are over. "I'm a retired lobbyist," he says.

Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was a bipartisan firm, eh? Well, it certainly helps to get the facts out there.

Tigerhawk identifies MoveOn as the poisonous soul of the contemporary radical antiwar coalition. The new ad's goal is not to "fire Charlie Black," but to further the left's demonic delegitimization campaign against the GOP.

Barack Obama: The "Perfect Frontman" for the Radical Left

Readers might have noticed that I've got a far left-wing anti-rationalist who's become obsessed with my writing. It's Repsac3, who's known for his moral equivalence in mounting his repeated challenges to any and all arguments identifying the manifest anti-Semitism and nihilism of the leftosphere.

Being the good guy that I am, I initiated a blogging series to address some of Reppy's concerns, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

If you've had a chance to read some of the comments at the posts, you'll recall that Reppy's basic rebuttal is "you call anyone a radical with whom you disagree" - and that's, of course, in response to my offering compelling arguments and rigorous definitional foundations, based in academic scholarship, on the accepted ideological constitutionalism of political radicalism (more on that here).

Well it turns out that others have also noticed the neo-Stalinist foundations of Obama's "progressive coalition."

Take a look at The Partisan Report's, "Obama, The Perfect Front Man for Old Radicals and the New Left":

Those who have suffered through Reagan, the Republican Revolution, and the liberal-lite of Clinton’s White House years, now see a chance of socialism within their grasp. Obama is the first serious Marxist candidate to have ever made it this far and he is not short on support for the cause.

Partisan Report links to Kyle-Anne Shiver at National Review, who notes:

Whether it’s Billy Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden or Jane Fonda, or any of the other lesser-knowns, 60s Marxist radicals are lining up behind Obama.

Obama’s young worshippers think they see something altogether new, a unique persona, seemingly magically transported to this moment in history to help them finally be the ones to net the elusive butterfly of socialism’s never-realized promise.

The kids think they see something new. But do they?

Sixties’ radicals see their as yet unfulfilled yearning for socialist utopia in a well-groomed, glittery, establishment-approved package.

The college kids today, flocking to Obama rallies, don’t look much like we did, with our tie-dyed shirts and frayed bellbottoms, our waist-length hair or wild Afros. And they seem to see Obama as the antithesis of 60s’ madness, with a been-there-done-that-want-something-new kind of thirst, a quest for which youth has always been known.

Obama is clean-cut. He talks unity, not subversion. He promises equal outcomes without resorting to violence to get them. He endorses marriage and fidelity for himself, without condeming other lifestyle choices. He speaks in highbrow English, rather than the 60s revolutionary slogans:

Kill the Pigs
Smash Monogamy
Violence is as American as cherry pie
If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down

Obama’s followers make high-tech videos, mindlessly chanting, “Yes, we can” instead of making bombs to blow up government buildings, or holding up armored trucks and killing police officers.

This new generation seems to have the opportunity to do now with mere votes what their predecessors tried and failed to do through violence. We can finally seal the deal on the real revolution — democratically. Obama, the Closer, is at hand.

Obama can "seal the deal" democratically?

That's virtually the identical argument I've made:

So, while the exact degree and nature of Obama's support among the various hardline organizations is uncertain, we know without a doubt, from Hayden's essay, that many on the contemporary left see the Obama campaign as the electoral vehicle to operationalize their program for radical, revolutionary change.

As they say, Reppy, don't just take my word for it.

Americans Liberated Auschwitz, Obama Claims

I'm trying to get some work done today, tabulating final course grades, for example, and working on the summer syllabus, but this story's just too good not to share with readers.

Purple Avenger reports that Barack Obama, in trying to pump up of family's miltary credentials, claimed that his uncle was part of the liberation armies the freed the Auschwitz concentration camp:

In one of his more egregious and easily demonstrated lies, made even more so by the day he decided to let it loose on, Obama has rewritten WWII history such that the allies liberated Auschwitz.

...Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz...

Auschwitz of course is in Poland. It was liberated by the Red Army on Jan 27 1945. Poland, on most maps is usually placed to the east of Germany, although we may need to investigate the geography textbooks the Messiah used as a child...

The Allies were wrapping up the battle of the bulge in late January of 1945 -- the Rhine crossings were still well into the future when Auschwitz was liberated. The first, the Remagen railway bridge which was discovered intact, was crossed on March 7 1945.

Of course it goes without saying that the media has thus far failed to call the Messiah on this apparently obviously outrageous lie. Unless Obama's "uncle" was serving in the Red Army, its a pretty safe bet he was many hundreds of miles from Auschwitz on its day of liberation.

What's worse, an "obviously outrageous lie" or Obama's demonstrable ignorance on a crucible of 20th-century history?

The right blogosphere's all over this, and thank goodness!

When Barack Obama thinks that meeting with hostile foes "without preconditions" is good foreign policy, it's evident the lessons of history have been lost on the Illinois Senator:

How woefully ignorant is the Democratic front-runner on matters of national security, international relations and the intractable conflicts that have plagued [American foreign policy] for decades?

Dreadfully ignorant, it appears, as is becoming more clear by the day.

Barack Obama, the Radical Left, and Memorial Day

Amy Proctor notes that Barack Obama, at his commencement address at Wesleyan University on Sunday, did not mention the military when making the call for public service:

CNN correspondents thought it “strange” that Barack Obama’s Memorial Day commencement speech at Wesleyan University didn’t mention the military. Obama, who replaced the ailing Ted Kennedy as commencement speaker, encouraged graduates to serve, but not in the military. CNN correspondent Bill Schneider took notice:

BLITZER: On this Memorial Day weekend, we’re remembering U.S. troops who have fallen in America’s various wars.

We’re also assessing right now what we just heard from Senator Barack Obama....

BLITZER: He graduated from Harvard Law School, was editor of the Law Review. He could have gone to a Wall Street firm and made a ton of money or some other law firm. But instead he decided to become an organizer in the South Side of Chicago. He tells that story.

SCHNEIDER: He does. And it’s a place he never lived and he devoted himself to community service and now to national service. There was something, however, strange with this speech that could I point out. He talked about how to serve your community and your country. He talked about rebuilding places like New Orleans, about fighting poverty, energy, education. All the ways in which these young people could serve. But on Memorial Day weekend, I didn’t see anyplace in his prepared remarks — he hasn’t finished speaking — he didn’t say anything about military service. I thought that was strange on Memorial Day weekend.

BLITZER: Yes, you would think that on this Memorial Day weekend he’d be referring to that.

SCHNEIDER: He made one reference to the military and it’s interesting. He said, “at a time of war,” this is in his prepared remarks. “At a time of war, we need you to work for peace.” As far as I can tell in the prepared remarks, that’s the closest he comes to mentioning anything military.

Here's the YouTube:

I noticed this problem in the New York Times article on Obama's speech:

Mr. Obama implored the 737 undergraduates and 100 graduate students to change the country and the world through service to others ... Mr. Obama urged them to help rebuild New Orleans, volunteer at a local soup kitchen or help end the situation in Darfur, and to remember that change will come, though not immediately.

“It’s because you have an obligation to yourself, because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation,” Mr. Obama said. “Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story.”

That "next great chapter" more likely includes joining the "Peace Corps" than the U.S. Army.

But Obama's spiel not only deliberately omits recognition of our service personnel, it deliberately disrespects them by turning them into victims caught in the maw of the adminstration's war machine.

As John at Powerline indicates, Obama not only offered an incorrect commemoration ("On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes - and I see many of them in the audience here..."), he portrayed our veterans as victims:

What was really offensive about Obama's New Mexico appearance ... was [his] tribute to America's war dead. He continued with a town hall-style question and answer period that cast veterans in the only role with which the Democrats are comfortable - victims - and sought to politicize the holiday.

As regular readers know, I often spend a couple of hours, every national holiday, making the rounds to the bloggers on my blog roll offering good wishes for a wonderful day.

Yesterday, I visited perhaps 40 or 50 conservative bloggers, and not one - not one right-wing blogger - had a bad word for the administration, the war, and especially the troops. Nope, click the links of just about any pro-victory blogs and you'll likely see a beautiful photograph of an American soldier saluting, or of the Stars and Stripes waving in full glory. You might find a wonderful commemorative poem, or some personal reflections on the loss of a loved one, a father or a husband who fought in one of America's great wars.

You do not find this on left wing blogs. I know we're not supposed to talk in generalities, but lefties use the Memorial Day holiday to excoriate the administration and to attack our troops. If they remember war at all, it's not this war, which is evil, it's earlier wars - the "good wars" like World War II - and even then these are mainly looked on as a time of sacrifice for the civilian homeland, not a when the nation beat back an existential threat to our survival.

There are too many to cite, but note TBogg, who exploited the death of Casey Sheehan - who re-upped for a second tour in Iraq of his own volition - to portray our fighting men and women as victims:

When Casey Sheehan grew up he fought in an unnecessary war that these men started.

He died in that war along with 4081 other Americans all of whom were once someone's child, father, mother, brother, or sister.

Enjoy your backyard barbeque burgers today gentlemen....

That's a fairly representative Memorial Day post from the radical left (to be fair, I did see one nihilist administration-basher who called a Memorial Day truce, here).

The evil neocons have allegedly raped the country, violently impressing our "innocent young" into the chains of the Bush/Cheney war machine.

There are many more of these as you cruise around the radical left blogosphere, but my stomach's starting to go sour.

My thanks go out once more to our veterans and their families, as well as to all the everyday citizens who choose to remember the fallen with the proper dignity and respect.

Iraq Residents Tired of Militia Violence

As the U.S. military surge in Iraq has progressed over the last year, antiwar types continue to devise new metrics with which to "measure" an alleged "absence of progress": aggregate casualties for 2007 (not the dramatically reduced numbers for the end of year), the total costs of the war (including the toll at home to returning veterans, which panders to public sentiments on "unfairness"), as well as the "inevitable" sectarian violence that will never improve enough for the U.S. to claim victory - hence Iraq is an "endless" war.

Cernig at Newshoggers is one of the biggest proponents of the sectarianism's-not-declining meme, but he's followed closely by alleged anti-Semitic Juan Cole, who also has a post up denouncing the continued U.S. presence in country.

But as I've shown recently, we're continuing to see real progress in the country (with drastically reduced levels of violence), and as the Los Angeles Times reports, were seeing "Iraqis Losing Patience With Militiamen":

Four summers ago, when militiamen loyal to hard-line Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr were battling U.S. forces in the holy city of Najaf, Mohammed Lami was among them.

"I had faith. I believed in something," Lami said of his days hoisting a gun for Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. "Now, I will never fight with them.

"Lami is no fan of U.S. troops, but after fleeing Baghdad's Sadr City district with his family last month, when militiamen arrived on his street to plant a bomb, he is no fan of the Mahdi Army either. Nor are many others living in Sadr City, the 32-year-old said. Weeks of fighting between militiamen and Iraqi and U.S. forces, with residents caught in the middle, has chipped away at the Sadr movement's grass-roots popularity, Lami said....

"People are fed up with them because of their extremism and the problems they are causing," said Rafid Majid, a merchant in central Baghdad. Like many others interviewed across the capital, he said the good deeds the group performs no longer were enough to make up for the hardships endured by ordinary Iraqis who just want to go to work and keep their families safe.

The Sadrists claim the residents on Iraqi street are with them, but the Times's piece suggests otherwise:

Lawmakers from Sadr's movement blame the United States and Iraqi forces for the bloodshed that began after the government launched an offensive against Shiite militias in Basra. Sadr representatives insist that, if anything, support has soared as people come to sympathize with the Sadr loyalists.

"Even some Iraqi people who were not sympathizing with us before have now started to feel and identify with the oppression on the Sadr people. It has become clear to them that we are being targeted," said Liqa Yaseen, a parliament member representing the Sadr movement.

But interviews with dozens of Iraqis living in Sadr City and other Shiite militia strongholds in Baghdad suggest otherwise. So do anecdotes from U.S. troops who have met with Sadr City residents and local leaders and who say there has been a shift in the things they hear.

"After March 25 was the first time I had anyone tell us, 'Go in and wipe them out,' " said Sgt. Erik Olson, who spends most of his time visiting residents of Sadr City's Jamila neighborhood gathering "atmospherics," the military's word for figuring out what locals are thinking.

It isn't surprising that people on the front lines of the standoff would lose patience with the warring sides. Their homes and streets have become battlegrounds, making it impossible at times to go to the market, the hospital or work. Military and militia snipers fire from rooftops. Militiamen launch mortar shells and rockets from residential streets. U.S. aircraft respond with devastating airstrikes that often cause casualties and damage beyond their targets.

It's a public relations problem that even some Mahdi Army members acknowledge, and a fragile truce reached by Sadr and the Iraqi government this month, which allowed Iraqi troops to deploy into Sadr City, suggested that at least privately, Sadr's political wing recognized the need to back down from the fighting.

While some on the left will endlessly deny that the U.S. and Iraqis are genuinely making progress, some surrender hawks see the decline in violence as the key to implement their plans for a precipitous withdrawal:

It seemed to me back in late 2004 that the looming elections in January 2005 would be a good opportunity to declare victory and go home on a relatively upbeat note. Instead, the president decided that we needed to stay in order to forestall civil war and ethnic cleansing. Then came several years of civil war and ethnic cleansing. Now we're looking at another spate of good news. So why not take the opportunity to leave?

See that?

Leaving in 2005, when sectarian violence skyrocketed - soon leading to massive ethnic cleansing by Shiite death squads - would have been a good time to leave on an "upbeat note."

Yeah, that's real upbeat? Anything that permits the withdrawal of American forces is on the up side - good news, bad news, it doesn't matter ... the lefties will spin it any old way, as long as Americans high-tail it out of there ignominously.

Happy Memorial Day!

Here's to wishing everyone a safe and warm Memorial Day Holiday!

Photo Credit: "Memorial Day Activities Focus on World War II," Army Public Affairs.

Great Success: Iraq Violence Plunges to Four-Year Low

The Los Angeles Times reports that violence in Iraq has declined to the lowest point in four years:

The U.S. military said Sunday that the number of attacks by militants in the last week dropped to a level not seen in Iraq since March 2004.

About 300 violent incidents were recorded in the seven-day period that ended Friday, down from a weekly high of nearly 1,600 in mid-June last year, according to a chart provided by the military.

The announcement appeared aimed at allaying fears that an uprising by militiamen loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr could unravel security gains since 28,500 additional American troops were deployed in Iraq in a buildup that reached its height in June.

Navy Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, a military spokesman, credited the decrease to a series of operations launched by the Iraqi government in the last two months to extend control over parts of the country that have been under the sway of armed Sunni Arab and Shiite militants. They include crackdowns in the southern oil hub of Basra, the northern city of Mosul and Baghdad's Sadr City district.

The late March operation in Basra triggered a fierce backlash by Sadr's militiamen in Sadr City and across the overwhelmingly Shiite south, drawing in British and American forces.

The number of attacks nationwide rose to about 850 in the week that the Basra crackdown began, according to the military's chart. The figure has ebbed and flowed since then.

Read the whole thing. The military's reporting is cautious, noting where significant security challenges remain.

Still, I can just hear all of the lefties protest. Check Spencer Ackerman, Newshoggers (it's already happening, here), or Matthew Yglesias, where I'll bet you'll see posts ripping apart the military assessments as "lies" or as abjectly denialist about the "imminent" sectarianism that will rip the country apart.

Don't believe it.

For the hard left's antiwar nihilists, war - any war - is a fiction, a right-wing manufacture to keep the racist military-industrial fascists in power.

For more on that, unsurprisingly, see Comments for Left Field, "The Right’s Neurotic Addiction to War."

Photo Credit: "Children jump and run as Iraqi troops arrive in their neighborhood to distribute food rations in the impoverished Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad. Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shiite bastion of Sadr City three days ago for the first time in eight weeks, without resistance from militias who have fought deadly street battles with US forces," Los Angeles Times.

Racial Resentment and the Making of the President, 2008

As I've noted many times, campaign '08's doing more for race relations than any other event in the last couple of decades. Where Bill Clinton wanted to have a "national conversation on race," his wife's campaign - targeting voters in Appalachia or in reflecting on the presidential politics of political assassinations - is lightyears ahead in terms of opening up the country's scars from earlier eras of slavery and Jim Crow.

Survey data aren't going to be helpful. Whereas the Washington Post reported positively on race and polling trends last year, "Race, Gender Less Relevant in '08," events on the ground and in the media indicate that long periods of racial accommodation, healing, and equal opportunity can be blown apart by crass political opportunism and race-baiting by all parties.

What's so interesting, of course, is that most of the patterns of racial reaction are seen in the Democratic Party ranks. While counterintuitive, these trends are the natural end result of a political party movement built on increasing power by manipulating racial identity, grievance, and guilt. Why would such racial demonization of political enemies abate when the fighting's among candidates within the party's own presumed "big tent"?

So it's interesting to see the angst of racial recrimination in this week's cover story at Newsweek, "A Memo to Senator Obama":

Race is a difficult subject to talk and write about. Although the blogosphere is rarely shy, mainstream journalists often tread lightly for fear of giving offense or indulging in stereotypes. Political candidates sometimes slyly play the race card, but rarely overtly. Not eager to call attention to race as an issue, the Obama campaign plays it down as a factor in the election. But if an Obama adviser were writing an honest memo to the candidate, here's how it might read:

The good news is that you have all but won the nomination. The bad news, if we are willing to face reality, is that the country—some parts of it, anyway—may not be ready to elect a black president of the United States. It is hard to get a precise fix on the problem. Voters generally deny to pollsters that race is a factor in casting their votes, but when they step into the privacy of the polling booth, their prejudices can sometimes emerge. Probably only a tiny fraction of voters are outright racist. But race is not irrelevant to many others, black or white; exit polls vary greatly by state, but show that 10 to 30 percent of primary voters considered race as they voted (if white, those voters broke overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton; if African-American, they voted for you).

NEWSWEEK pollsters recently created a "Racial Resentment Index" to measure the impact of race on the 2008 election. White voters were asked a series of 10 questions about a variety of race-related topics, including racial preferences in hiring, interracial marriage—and what they have "in common" with African-Americans. About a third of these voters scored "high" on this index; 29 percent of all white Democrats did. Overwhelmingly, these Democrats are the ones most likely to defect to John McCain in the fall. (Among "High RR" white Democratic voters, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Clinton leads McCain by 77 percent to 18 percent, while you win by only 51 percent to 33 percent.) Many Democratic voters in West Virginia interviewed by a NEWSWEEK reporter on primary night, May 13, did not hide their animus toward you as a kind of exotic alien. Menina Parsons, 45, said she will not vote for Obama in the general election because "I don't think he's real. I don't think he's American."

Some commentators have said that your problem is not with race—it's with geography. The Daily Kos Web site recently posted a map that makes the point: the majority of counties in which more than 65 percent of whites voted for Clinton closely track Appalachia—the mountainous region running from New York into the Deep South, where voters tend to be somewhat less well-off and less well educated than in other parts of the country. These same commentators note that you have done well in other mostly white, rural states like Wisconsin, Iowa and Oregon. That's all true, and it's important not to exaggerate the scale of the problem.

But Appalachia is a big place, encompassing 13 states: southwestern New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. You cannot afford to lose all those states and still win in November. Other pollsters have suggested that the race factor is at least noticeable in a much wider swath of rural America, where 60 million voters reside. One recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of rural voters in battleground states showed that you are trailing McCain by 9 points (and that Clinton runs even with him). Dee Davis, president of a Kentucky-based advocacy group called the Center for Rural Strategies, points out in a recent article on Salon.com that in June 2004, John Kerry trailed George W. Bush by the same 9-point margin in the same rural battlegrounds.

Note this section from the article, which I think's more important than the racial composition of the candidate:

The Internet has been a sluice for lies and distortions about your religion and background. It is widely and falsely rumored that you are Muslim (in the NEWSWEEK Poll, 11 percent of voters believe you are); that you chose to be sworn in to the Senate using a Qur'an rather than a Bible, and that you refuse to place your hand over your heart for the singing of the national anthem because, you are imagined to have said, "the anthem conveys a warlike message." As a recent post on Politico.com points out, there is a "Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama" making the Web rounds, helpfully illustrated by pictures of your dark-complexioned relatives dressed in African garb. The message is not subtle: it says that Barack Obama is not a "real American."

You must confront this slur, with more force than you have shown so far. If you do not, you will be defined by your enemies and the Web, a dangerous combination. You movingly told your life story in a book that's become a best seller. And lately, you have wisely taken to often wearing an American-flag lapel pin. It would help to be seen venerating your white mother and grandparents as well as your black father. Your mother is a sympathetic figure, fighting to raise a child out of poverty. It is a good thing that this summer you are scheduled to go to the grave site of your grandfather, a World War II vet whose coffin was draped with the American flag when he died in 1992. Voters need to know that he, much more than your father who lived far away, was the man who raised you. Voters need to know that you are definitely not John Kerry, who was raised to wealth and privilege, an Ivy Leaguer educated, for a time, at a French boarding school.

The piece concludes by identifying Obama's biggest challenge: Making himself known to poor and working-class white Americans, making himself a candidate for all citizens, not just Ivy League or coastal elites, not just minorities who get lucrative affirmative-action set-asides, not just cultural snobs who think the American flag is coequal to the swastika.

From my own experience studying and teaching and living black politics, I can say that old-fashioned Jim Crow racial resentment is found in a small minority of the American population. It's still there, sure, and I've related personal stories to that effect, but these views are a tiny part of today's national identity.

In my view, to even ask if "Is America Ready for a Black President" only serves more to perpetuate racial divisions than eradicate them.

For Barack Obama, it's his character and questions of integrity, his divisive political and religious associations, and his far-left political agenda that are the greatest impediments to his accession to the White House.

We should repudiate crass racial appeals this election season, but pointing out Obama's political liabilities on cultural questions, or on his politicial radicalism, is not racist. Indeed, the GOP would be foolish not to take into consideration Democratic liabilities with traditional white (conservative) constituencies.

Photo Credit: Newsweek