Where is the Political Middle?

With Barack Obama appointing establishment Democrats to key posts in his upcoming administration, leftists are braying that "progressivism" has been abandoned: Obama was a centrist all along, don't you know, and forget about hopes for a truly left-wing ideological agenda after the inauguration.

Glenn Greenwald published an e-mail from Digby, where she actually cheers the economic crisis as helping promote the left-wing agenda, the only thing truly pushing U.S. towards socialism:

The villagers and the right made it very clear what they required of Obama - bipartisanship, technocratic competence and center-right orthodoxy. Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything. So, we have the great symbolic victory of the first black president (and that's not nothing, by the way) who is also a bipartisan, centrist technocrat. Surprise.

There are things to applaud about the cabinet picks -- Clinton is a global superstar who, along with Barack himself, signals to the world that the US is no longer being run by incompetent, extremist, political fringe dwellers. Holder seems to be genuinely against torture and hostile to the concept of the imperial presidency. Gaithner is a smart guy who has the trust of the Big Money Boyz, which may end up being useful considering the enormous and risky economic challenges ahead. Emmanuel is someone who is not afraid to wield a knife and if we're lucky he might just wield it from time to time against a Republican or a right wing Democrat. Napolitano seems to have a deft political touch with difficult issues like immigration which is going to be a battleground at DHS. And on and on.

None of them are liberals, but then Obama said repeatedly that he wasn't ideological, that he cared about "what works." I don't know why people didn't believe that. He's a technocrat who wants to "solve problems" and "change politics." The first may actually end up producing the kind of ideological shift liberals desire simply because of the dire set of circumstances greeting the new administration. (Hooray for the new depression!) The second was always an empty fantasy - politics is just another word for human nature, and that hasn't changed since we were dancing around the fire outside our caves.

If you want to press for a cabinet appointment at this late date who might bring some ideological ballast, I would guess that labor and energy are where the action is. It would be really helpful to have somebody from the left in the room when the wonks start dryly parceling out the compromises on the economy and climate change. But basically, we are going to be dealing with an administration whose raison d'etre is to make government "work." That's essentially a progressive goal and one that nobody can really argue with. But he never said he would make government "work" for a liberal agenda. Liberals just assumed that.

Now, Big Tent Democrat has a different take. He's not too worried about any lurch to the right. Indeed, putting all these establishment types in office will simply be a way to reposition progressivism as the new political center:

By default, President-Elect Obama gets to define what the middle is. I believe he will define progressivism as the middle. If that is called "Center-Right," so much the better. Consider what that makes Extreme Republicanism (out of the mainstream of political thought instead of occupying the White House) and what that makes the formerly loony Left (the respectable Left flank.) Role reversal. This is a good thing.

I'm putting my money on Big Tent's prediction. Digby's a loon, not to mention Greenwald. But Big Tent's already been attacked as a traitor to the neo-Marxist vision of today's radical left, so for him to suggest the possibility of a new "progressive middle" is a major concession.

And that's the key: Establishment Democrats are just that, part of the governmental establishment. If they've had to tack to the political center, meaning a genuinely moderate-to-conservative balance point, that's because other political actors and the American public required it. Now with unified Democratic control of Congress and the executive come January, we'll see the greatest political liberation on the left since the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Nolan Finley, at the Detroit News, puts things in perspective:

As they await his ascension, Republicans are reassuring themselves that President-elect Barack Obama, worried about winning re-election in four years, will shake off a lifetime of liberal allegiance and govern the nation from the middle.

They're delusional. Little that Obama has said or done since Election Day supports that theory. Rather, there's every indication that Obama will enthusiastically lead the liberals who now firmly control Washington in enacting a far-left agenda.

Take as proof last week's unwarranted dumping of Dearborn's John Dingell as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The libs scored their first major victory by replacing the moderate Dingell with environmental extremist Henry Waxman of California, and Obama didn't intervene.

That's because his own views on the environment fall closer to Waxman's than to Dingell's. He's already promised to rescind the executive order opening Utah's promising oil shale fields to exploration and will fully undo the domestic oil production expansion Democrats reluctantly agreed to before the election.

Since the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, most Democrats who've won office have done so by dodging the liberal label and declaring themselves pro-growth moderates. Even true liberals eschewed that word, insisting that they be called "progressives."

And while Obama hasn't embraced the liberal label, he has endorsed the ideology.

Listen to what he's saying. On the economy, he's calling for a stimulus package that will create jobs through massive government spending on new projects and programs, rather than by cutting taxes and improving the business climate. Start packing, Adam Smith; welcome home, John Maynard Keynes.

Also on his early schedule is a promise to push through the Freedom of Choice Act, which will exempt abortion from all reasonable regulation by the states.

Big Labor has been assured he'll fight to make it easier to organize workers and harder to adopt free trade agreements.

Finley basically makes the case the Obama's early appointments are window dressing for the true leftist agenda being hatched under the radar.

I simply see the positioning of top moderates as bringing to power the establishment Democrats who have thus far been frustrated by checks and balances and public approbation.

When we see Obama call for tax increases on incomes as low as $31,000, when we see global warming legislation elevated to holy writ to save the world, when non-uniformed terrorist killers at Guantanamo are affored public defenders, and when spending programs from public works to welfare entitlments are expanded to the highest levels since the War on Poverty, we'll know just how progressive this new administration really is.

Of course, Greenwald and Digby still won't be satisfied until we nationalize the economy and dismantle the military.

Contraceptives for 12 Year-Olds?

Here's Mark in Irvine, in the comments from my post on the latest left-wing backlash to Sarah Palin, "Save Turkeys, Kill Fetuses: The Left's Response to Sarah Palin":

If you are concerned about abortion (as I am) you can help reduce the number of abortions by promoting universal sex education and availability of contraception NO QUESTIONS ASKED for all people of reproductive age. It won't eliminate abortion, but the more people who know how to avoid pregnancy, the more pregnancies will be avoided, and the fewer people will be in the "market" for abortion.

Think about that: "People of all reproductive age" includes girls at 12 year-old and younger (see, "When Little Girls Become Women: Early Onset of Puberty in Girls").

I simply can't fathom why anyone would want make contraceptives available to adolescents, unless people have completely given up on the notion of delaying pregnancy until adulthood.

Early pregnancy is one of the greatest indicators of life-long poverty for woman. The phenomenon imposes tremendous material and moral costs on socity, and reducing such pregnancies has been considered a national priority. Here's this from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy:

Teen pregnancy is closely linked to a host of other critical social issues — poverty and income, overall child well-being, out-of-wedlock births, responsible fatherhood, health issues, education, child welfare, and other risky behavior. There are also substantial public costs associated with adolescent childbearing. Consequently, teen pregnancy should be viewed not only as a reproductive health issue, but as one that works to improve all of these measures. Simply put, if more children in this country were born to parents who are ready and able to care for them, we would see a significant reduction in a host of social problems afflicting children in the United States, from school failure and crime to child abuse and neglect.

Access to contraceptives is one alternative to preventing teenage pregnancy.

On top of any list of remedies should be adolescent education in sexual abstinence, and, frankly, the restoration strong family traditions that encourage young people to delay sexual gratification until marriage (and if marriage is passe, then until after high school).

The fact the Mark in Irvine doesn't mention any other possible preventative measures perhaps reflects how much traditional values are spurned among those on the left of the political spectrum.

Candace Gingrich: A Letter to Her Brother

Candace Gingrich, the half-sister of former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and an activist with the Human Rights Campaign, has published a "Letter to My Brother" at the Huffington Post. After ridiculing her brother for "bashing" gay marriage protesters demonstrating against Proposition 8, she says this:

Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you're so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you're sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.

This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever - and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don't roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 - the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That's an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.

These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward. Even older Americans are turning their backs on the politics of fear and demagoguery that you and your cronies have perfected over the years.

This is a movement of the people that you most fear. It's a movement of progress - and your words on FOX News only show how truly desperate you are to maintain control of a world that is changing before your very eyes.

Then again, we've seen these tactics before. We know how much the right likes to play political and cultural hardball, and then turn around and accuse us of lashing out first. You give a pass to a religious group - one that looks down upon minorities and women - when they use their money and membership roles to roll back the rights of others, and then you label us "fascists" when we fight back. You belittle the relationships of gay and lesbian couples, and yet somehow neglect to explain who anointed you the protector of "traditional" marriage. And, of course, you've also mastered taking the foolish actions of a few people and then indicting an entire population based on those mistakes. I fail to see how any of these patterns coincide with the values of "historic Christianity" you claim to champion.

Again, nothing new here. This is just more of the blatant hypocrisy we're used to hearing.

What really worries me is that you are always willing to use LGBT Americans as political weapons to further your ambitions. That's really so '90s, Newt. In this day and age, it's embarrassing to watch you talk like that. You should be more afraid of the new political climate in America, because, there is no place for you in it.

In other words, stop being a hater, big bro.

I have commented on most of the points raised by Candace previously (but see here and here, for samples), so I'll just say a couple of more things.

One, I genuinely don't think Proposition 8 was a campaign "based on hate" - the "hate" meme is the wedge device deployed by the left to delegitimize real concerns that the gay agenda has moved too far too fast. Such demonization is the stock-in-trade of people like Andrew Sullivan.

The voters in this state are rightly concerned with the fact that a four-member majority on the California Supreme Court would overturn the will of a 61 percent popular majority that banned gay marriages in Proposition 22 in 2000. Candace conveniently spins the hate of her allies, which is truly undemocratic and counterproductive to whatever compromises might be necessary for political accommodation.

Also interesting is this thesis that the views of young voters are the wave of the future. Candace assumes, first, that the youth vote is a monolithic pro-same-sex marriage cohort. But one of the most counterintuitive results of the November 4th vote in California was the huge majority of black voters who turned out in favor of the initiative, many of whom were apparently young and active in social justice issues facing the black community.

Further, survey data cast doubt on the meme of a hegemonic pro-gay-marriage youth wave. For example, a Pew Forum poll from April of this year found less than a majority of people under thirty (49 percent) favoring gay marriage. One of the key points raised by the Pew study is that the majority of Americans opposed to same-sex marriage is "stable" - that is, in the five years since Massachusetts approved gay marriages in that state public views on the issue have remained generally set.

Note, secondly, that the surge of young voters this year may very well be epiphenomenal, an artifact of Barack Obama's historic candidacy and the unpopularity of the current GOP administration. With the college-age cohort the least engaged demographic in American politics, it's safe to say that the gains in youth participation this year could erode as the novelty of Democratic power wears off (for a related scholarly argument to this effect, see W. Lance Bennett, "Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age").

What is clear is that Candace - who is apparently an active member of the radical LGBT activist community - is comfortable practicing the very politics she's quick to denounce - for example, defending radical gay allies who have indeed "lashed out," often violently, at those who have exercized their First Amendment rights to political participation.

California leads the nation in civil rights protections for gay Americans. For the same-sex marriage movement, the essential question is not equality before the law (gay marriage is not a federally-recognized civil right) but rather an overthrow of traditional culture, resulting in the establishment of a regime of secular humanism in which moral values based in faith, history, and tradition will be banished from the public sphere. The new order will amount to a cultural freedom of anything-goes licentiousness and irresponsiblity for one's actions, a secular polity of "rights" on demand.

This is what the fight over Prop 8 is about.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

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What Lieberman Tells Us About Center-Right "Repudiation"

Jamie Kirchick's got an awesome piece today on the failure of the Netroots to destroy Joseph Lieberman's tenure in the Democratic Senate caucus. The whole essay is a marvel, but I particularly like the concluding section, which throws cold water on all the leftist claims that America as a "center-right" nation has been repudiated:

In the wake of Obama's historic victory - he is the first Democrat to win a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter and has seemingly reconfigured the electoral map by picking up states that Bush won just four years ago - many liberals have been quick to claim that the Democratic triumph means that we're now living in a liberal country.

They should take a deep breath before reaching such conclusions. Only 22% of voters this year consider themselves "liberal" while 34% call themselves "conservative," numbers roughly unchanged from four years ago. And as Doug Schoen pointed out in this space, it was moderates, not liberals, who played the decisive role in electing Barack Obama President. Obama knows this, which is why he has repudiated the Netroots time and time again, on issues ranging from Iraq withdrawal to FISA reform. Equally important, he rejected the hyperventilating wing of the party tonally, as evidenced by the calm and systematic way he ran his campaign.

The week before Tuesday's meeting, Obama let it be known that he bore "no grudge" against Lieberman. Setting a positive tone so early after a hard-fought election, he is already making good on his promise to, if not end, then at least lessen the "petty partisanship" he decried in the campaign. Among the positive outcomes of this week's abject lesson in letting bygones be bygones, it is reassuring to see that the leadership of the Democratic Party isn't as petty, vindictive and small as its left-wing supporters.

Maybe Dave "Pseudo-Fascism" Neiwert will get the memo?

Save Turkeys, Kill Fetuses: The Left's Response to Sarah Palin

Via Jill Stanek, here's the comment from Voices Carry on the left's "Turkeygate" attacks on Sarah Palin:

The hot YouTube clip of the day is Sarah Palin's interview with the turkey getting slaughtered in the background. Palin doesn't flinch. In fact, prior to the interview she was apparently asked if she wanted a different backdrop behind her and she said "no worries." I love it.

Even funnier is how [the] media protects us from the horror by blocking out the gory part and forewarning us to get the kids out of the room quickly.

Here's the bigger picture ... no shock and horror, ever, from liberals or the media regarding the dismembering of unborn children, but the sight of a turkey in a kill cone is appalling. Something's wrong when we have empathy for turkeys but are indifferent to the plight of the unborn.

Oh, the moral clarity!

I love it! I really do!

Sarah Palin is as genuine as you can get. How many millions of Americans will not eat turkey next Thursday after seeing this video of Governor Palin? Or, how many of those same Americans - a great many of whom supported Barack Obama - will continue to give the left's abortion-on-demand policies a pass after seeing the video above?

There's some pre-Thanksgiving food-for-thought.

See also, "Why Obama Really Voted For Infanticide."

The "Center-Right" Pushback on the Left

I'm getting a kick out of how much radical left bloggers are outraged at the notion of a "center-right" nation, a point of fact conservatives have been quick to offer upon the election of Barack Obama to the presidency on November 4th.

As Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council summarized after the vote:

Look, America is a center-right nation. Barack Obama and the policies he reflects are not reflective of the nation. I think he offered, you know, what he called change, and Americans were ready for change. You know, Republicans have not governed well, and America was looking for a new path, and Barack Obama offered that. Now, his success is going to depend on whether or not he can govern as a moderate, as he campaigned, or whether he is going to be a liberal, as his record would indicate.

Perkins' point is objectively true.

The conditions in the United States at the founding of the country differed dramatically from the history of feudal development in the European continental democracies, where the original theories of socialism originated and where political systems prior to the Industrial Revolution evolved from the Middle Ages into highly-authoritarian, statist govermental institutions.

Perhaps the most important determinant of America's anti-socialist path was the nation's development in the absence of a feudal legacy. There was no aristocratic or monarchical authority in the American colonies in the 18th century. Gordon Wood, for example, in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, noted how the essential economic and political equality of the average American - from the city merchant to the frontier explorer - mitigated any nascent agitation emerging from some oppressed lumpenproletariat we might envision in a Charles Dickens novel. The American man saw unbounded opportunity, and the rugged individualist ethic trumped class-based indentifications, and thus worked against the support for a militant trade sector that might lead to a revolt against the capitalist classes. With abundant land and raw materials, the normal "crisis of capitalism" expected in the Marxist model could be delayed indefinitely.

So here we are today, and the left now sees American capitalism - and the GOP "oppressor" class - as repudiated by the election of a (surreptiously) far-left Democratic candidate. Prominent lefty bloggers hope to delegitimize any suggestion that the country's political culture is founded in a frontier heritage of inherently center-right invidualism, with its suspicion of concentrated, centralized governmental authority.

Dave Neiwert, for example, argues this today:

If anyone were betting on it, I would happily wager that the right-wing talking point that "this is still a center-right nation" was being ginned up and distributed to every conservative talking head on the planet within 24 hours of Barack Obama's election victory, if not before.

I mean, it's coming out of the mouths of nearly every single right-wing pundit who's managed airtime since Nov. 5. It started the next day, and has only gained volume since.

And of course, it's so risibly false that it really tells us much more about conservatives and their grip on reality than anything else....

Of course, this is just the latest wingnut meme. It tells us, though, that the Republicans' longtime operating motto - "If you can't beat 'em with brains, baffle 'em with bulls**t" - is very much still with us.

Wingnut, eh?

The fact is that anyone who disagrees with the hegemonic discourse of the left is a "wingut." The leftist don't argue logically or consider facts or history. They excoriate and intimidate those who would utter heresy against their postmodern talking points.

Is Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek (a prominently left-wing journalistic establishment) a "wingnut"?

Hardly.

Meacham recently laid out a historically grounded case for an enduring American political culture of centrism, where he warned Barack Obama and the Democrats of over-interpreting the election as a "mandate" for radical change: "It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue: America Remains a Center-Right Nation — A Fact Rhat a President Obama Would Forget at His Peril":

So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."

Instead of calling people who make this argument "wingnuts," folks on the left would be taken more seriously if they made the case that the old consensus in favor of free markets and individualist groundings has been shattered.

It most likely has not, and the fact that Barack Obama has already shifted to the right of the political spectrum, hoping to gain popular legitimacy beyond the Democratic Party's hard-left faithful, is a powerful illustration of America's rightward tug.

Blocking Obama's Health Plan is Key to GOP's Survival?

You've got to hand it to James Pethokoukis. He's got a canny ability to get a grip on the hot issues of the day like few others.

So it is with his new piece, "How Tom Daschle Might Kill Conservatism," which includes this provocative passage:

Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."

You know, while I'd need to read the research Pethokoukis cites, given our current economic predicament, I could see huge numbers of voters finding attraction with a statist/redistributionist policy agenda of the Democratic Party for years to come, especially if Barack Obama proves to be smart in office, and actually passes some landmark legislation. Indeed, such an outcome, bolstered by some electoral endurance for Obama's demographic coalition, would confirm that we've indeed had a genuine realignment.

If there's any good news in this it's that Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain in 1979. So, using this same timeline offered by Pethokoukis, the GOP will be the country's minority party for just 35 years.

Sweet!

Progressivism as the Radical Left

I have long noted that "the progressive netroots," as our political antagonists on the other side like to call themselves, are today's radicals, the ideological descendents of the New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s (people like Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground terrorists).

Today's progressives have very little in common with the true early-20th progressive reformers, such as Governor Hiram Johnson of California, who brought direct democracy to the state's voters in 1911.

I often get smeared as "wingnut" by some reality-challenged bloggers (for example, here and here) for making this argument, because the left today can't stand being identified for what they truly are. So it's with pleasure that I share Michael Lind's new piece, calling on progressives to end their charade: "Is it OK to Be Liberal Again, Instead of Progressive?":

If you were a progressive in the '60s and '70s, you were likely to think that Truman and Johnson were warmongering "corporate liberals" under the control of the "military-industrial complex" and that the Democrats and Republicans were indistinguishable. For the moderate and conservative Democrats of the DLC to call themselves the new progressives was the equivalent of moderate, secular Republicans calling themselves the new fundamentalists.

At least the far-left progressives were honest. They genuinely despised the mid-century American liberals, whom they viewed simply as another species of bourgeois imperialists. This is another one of the reasons I dislike the term "progressive" ... Why share a label with anyone who romanticized Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro?

Actually, because so few Americans identify "progressives" with this strain of left-wing extremism, it's unlikely that today's left will abandon the term.

I imagine there's still some kind of positive glow associated with the idea of a political movement that supports "progress." That's the last thing today's leftists want, however. They want a new (old) New Deal/Great Society combo, complete with WPA-style government spending programs, taxes on the rich (those making $250,000, which was about $35,000 in 1960, for comparison, but folks at that income level back then didn't think they were "rich"), and the endorsement of blame-America-first ideology at the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment (in that respect, thank goodness we might see Hillary Clinton taking over Foggy Bottom).

Daniel Halper at Pajamas Media argues that Barack Obama's already thrown the Democratic Party's hard-left contingents under the bus. Yet, given the tantrum-prone propensity of the progressive hordes, the president-elect may find their endless harangues a bit overwhelming at some point.

Moving on Up! Obama Girls to Attend Elite Private D.C. School

Barack and Michelle Obama have chosen the Sidwell Friends School, an elite private academy, for their daughters' education in Washington, D.C.

The Politico reports that the decision disappointed public education advocates:

Some education advocates had hoped that the soon-to-be first family would choose to send their daughters to a public school, and some reports suggested that Lafayette Elementary, a high-performing public school, was in the running.

Indeed, research on Layfayette academic success found no difference in the college placement rates between students who attended private or public high schools after leaving Lafayette.

According to the Swamp's story:

... a spokeswoman for Michelle Obama, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, says the Obamas focused on what's the best fit for 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha.

I wonder how the Obamas determined what was the "best fit" for their daughters?

Probably not too many crack houses up in the Sidwell neighborhood.

Not only that, the Obamas' kids will follow an elite alumni, including Chelsea Clinton, Albert Gore III, Julie and Tricia Nixon, Nancy Reagan, and Archibald Roosevelt (son of Theodore), as well as Charlie Gibson of ABC News (and previously Princeton University),

Well, I guess the Obamas, like the Jeffersons, are "moving on up," hope and change be damned!

Domestic Partnership and the Incommensurability of Language

The State of California is widely acknowledged to have among the most expansive equal protection guarantees afforded to gay citizens in the country.

As a Brookings Institution report concluded last May, following the California Supreme Court's ruling to overturn the state's ban on gay marriage:

California has a domestic partnership law, which grants same-sex couples virtually all of the rights and obligations of marriage, making the current dispute one of nomenclature over the use of the word "marriage," not about the substance of marriage rights.

Here is the language of Section 297.5. (a) of the California Family Code

Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses.

All along, the debate has been one of the social construction of rights and power. This a battle of interpretation and language. Andrew Sullivan noted yesterday that equal protection for domestic partners isn't enough ... he's determined to fight a war of discourse, beating tradition and reason into submission until he gets his way:

We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law. And we certainly cannot do so arbitrarily, to the sole detriment of only one group in society - homosexuals.

To read this is to see the postmodern language project in action. Sullivan's post is entitled, incommensurably, "Modernity, Faith, and Marriage."

The majoritarian acceptance of gay marriage will be a postmodern triumph, not a modern one. Sullivan should at least square his theories with prevailing modes of discourse.

Hezbollah Youth

While the story is troubling, the picture itself gives me shudders.

Hezbollah's Mahdi Scouts look like a reincarnation of Germany's Hitler's Youth from the pre-World War II era. The training of Mahdi Scouts for Islamo-fascist hegemony replicates the Nazi regimen of creating "Ayran supermen" who were prepared as leaders for the "Thousand Year Reich" during the Nazi era.

The Times notes that Hezbollah's "Mahdi Scouts have a reputation of being a feeder for Hezbollah's armed wing."

In World War II, crack troops comprised of Hitler Youth cadres fought with "ferocity" against British and Canadian forces during the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Here's this from the Times article:

Hezbollah’s influence on Lebanese youth is very difficult to quantify because of the party’s extreme secrecy and the general absence of reliable statistics in the country. It is clear that the Shiite religious schools, in which Hezbollah exercises a dominant influence, have grown over the past two decades from a mere handful into a major national network. Other, less visible avenues may be equally important, like the growing number of clerics associated with the movement.

Hezbollah and its allies have also adapted and expanded religious rituals involving children, starting at ever-earlier ages. Women, who play a more prominent role in Hezbollah than they do in most other radical Islamic groups, are especially important in creating what is often called “the jihad atmosphere” among children.

Gay Marriage Activists Undermine Their Own Cause

There's a lot of interesting commentary tonight on the gay marriage debate.

Andrew Sullivan has new, windblown essay that is positively infuriating, frankly: "Modernity, Faith, And Marriage" (Pete Abel's got the link if you want it):

If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own "objective disorder" to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.

"Rod" is Rod Dreher, to whom Sullivan is responding. I want to comment on Dreher's piece in a later post.

What I find interesting and problematic is Sullivan's declaration of the death of conservatism by nothing other than fiat: His argument is a sophisticated version of the temper tantrum-demonstrations we've seen following the passage of Proposition 8 on November 4th.

Sullivan's assumption, stated in his "never again" declamations, is that success of the gay marriage movement is inevitable. The position, of course, is not only intellectually dishonest, but is radical secular propaganda: This idea of a teleological endpoint, of course, is the universal good of God's grace over mankind. To argue that conservatives must abandon that is like saying that a heart must stop beating. Sullivan appeals to death, because he can't argue straight to existential values, for he reject morals if that suits his utility-maximizing purpose.

Sullivan also can't make up his mind, for example, where tonight he says:

I have nothing against the voluntary and peaceful activities of any religious group, and regard these organizations as some of the greatest strengths of America.

But recall what he said just the other day, of the Mormon Church, which provided financial backing for Proposition 8:

... when they use their money and power to target my family, to break it up, to demean it and marginalize it, to strip me and my husband of our civil rights, then they have started a war.

Sullivan's a gasbag, frankly, and he's torn between sinister poles of outward belligerence and surreptitious persuasion.

I'll have more on this later, at least because of Sullivan's delusions of victory (recall that three states passed initiatives confirming marriage as between one man and one woman, so all this talk of inevitability is itself unhinged from fact).

In the meanwhile, readers should read this essay from Lucy Caldwell at the Harvard Crimson (alternative link here):

The push for same-sex marriage is a rally for additional rights. While this characterization of the movement strikes most gay rights activists as harsh, it is a useful distinction to be made when devising ways to advance the cause effectively. Yet gay rights advocates have not taken the appropriate cues from their defeats earlier this month, as reflected in their continued ignorance of their opponents’ thoughts and motives. They seem unable to face that democracy has spoken, and it has said “no” on same-sex marriage.

One major problem with the gay rights movement is that it simultaneously champions democratic government and rejects it. The movement views marriage as a civic institution rather than a religious one (this is one distinction between marriages and civil unions), but only so long as government functions from a pro-gay marriage position. Once the cogs of government have turned to an anti-gay marriage slant, gay rights activists cease to be tolerant of the democratic process. Cue the banners decrying opponents as hateful and intolerant. Is this unfortunate divide what activists seek? Certainly that sort of culture of separatist intolerance is what arises when advocates take this approach.

And it is this very same-marriage authoritarianism that dooms the movement for the near future (who knows what happens in the long term?).

Sullivan's already noted this, but he's now changing his tune, blowing off the movement's violence and intimidation as aberrations, as part of his cognitive dissonance.

I can't say I'm as optimistic as Ms. Caldwell, especially with an activist judiciary caving to the radical secular humanist agenda. But given the outrageous behavior of the gay marriage H8ers so far, there's certainly a strong possibility of a crushing implosion on the activist left.

Ackerman Wants Bush Dead, Not to Mention a New Counterinsurgency Plan

I've received an e-mail notification from the Center for Independent Media directing me to Spencer Ackerman's new piece at the Washington Independent, "Recasting the War on Terrorism: A Progressive Coalition Wants Obama to Be More Than the Anti-Bush."

First thoughts?

Well, no shit Sherlock, if you'll pardon the expression. I don't normally resort to urban slang, but since Ackerman's a wannabe punk hipster with a supremely disgusting repertoire of profanity, so I'm sure readers will understand.

For the substantive record, Ackerman should be known by his words, for example this passage from July:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like. But the age of empire is over. The same hubris that led Bush into the Iraq disaster led him to miscalculate, again and again, over how to entrench it. But now he is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

I wrote of Ackerman's post at the time:

This is the highest stage of moral relativist anti-Americanism, topped-off with a flourish of abject secular demonology.

And given our potty-mouthed Flophouse freak's piece today, delivered to me via my blog profile contact-information (the editors really need to check my archives before sending stuff out to American Power), I have no reason to suspect Ackerman's abandoned his nihilism. He writes, for example:

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded security apparatus, and spending on defense far outpacing outlays on domestic programs, even during a crisis-plagued economy.

Yet while liberals have spent much of this time opposing the Bush administration’s agenda, many of their proposals for Obama go beyond merely rolling back President George W. Bush’s policies — withdrawing from Iraq, shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention complex, abolishing torture — to offer new areas of emphasis, like stabilizing Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace and a re-envisioned balance between security and liberty.

Through white papers delivered to the Obama transition team, new reports and interviews with reporters, this loose affiliation of progressives is saying it has a real opportunity to recast the U.S. effort against terrorism in fundamental ways.

Consistent with the broader progressive agenda of achieving global security through multilateral cooperation, economic development and respect for human rights, the past few days have seen a series of proposals urging rejection of the Bush administration’s militarism. To the degree these various progressive groups have a concerted goal, it’s to influence the transition with specific liberal ideas for new directions in the war on terrorism.

You can see why one might hardly be dumbstruck in reading this, given the quadrillions of bytes of BDS spewed over the last eight years of the current adminstration.

But more than that, MSM reporting is even highlighting the building leftist backlash to Obama's centrism. For example, today's Los Angeles Times reports that the antiwar left is worried that Obama's selling out the antiwar surrender enthusiasts to the "people who supported the war from the beginning," a reference to folks like Senator Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The left wants nothing less than the utter emasculation of American power, with increasing "multilateralism" the buzzword for legitimizing the extreme globalist internationalism of the contemporary left. The flaky imprimatur of the "Washington Independent" does nothing to sanitize the disastrously relativist agenda of Ackerman's "loose affiliation of progressives."

The truth is we're losing in Afghanistan right now because of the weak-kneed nature of the current multinational force. As Michael Yon wrote last week, de facto victory is at hand in Iraq, notwithstanding the likelihood of the odd deadenders mounting spasms of nihilist mayhem on the Iraqi people. But Afghanistan needs an infusion of resolve, not a progressive coalition of the sniveling:

A new president will soon begin to make critical decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis at home, and countless other matters. While the Iraq war began, then boiled, and finally cooled before President-elect Obama will be sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the Afghanistan-Pakistan spectacle is just getting started. He was always a fierce opponent of our involvement in Iraq. And, as with so many Democrats in the Senate, he argued frequently, during the campaign, that we should have been focused on Afghanistan all along, because it is the real incubator of the international terrorist threat. Timing being everything, our new president will get his wish. Afghanistan now moves to center stage. The conflicts in Afghanistan and between Afghanistan and Pakistan have the simmering potential to overshadow anything we’ve seen in Iraq. Here are a few things I hope he understands:

Our enemies are winning. The enemies know it. We know it. Who are they? The Taliban, with its deep local roots, is enemy number one. Al-Qaeda is hanging around to make trouble. Some Paks, who don’t want to see a thriving Pushtun state on their border, are our enemies. They fund and shelter the Taliban even though we rely on them to help us defeat it. Nothing is straightforward in this part of the world. We have other enemies in Afghanistan who hate the Taliban.

Most of our allies are not very helpful. With the exception of the British, Canadians, Dutch, and a few others such as the Aussies, we are not fighting this with an “A-team” of international allies. With a few exceptions, our allies on the ground are comprised of several dozen countries that mostly refuse to fight. The bulk of NATO amounts to little more than a “Taliban piñata.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is proving nearly worthless and provides no credible threat to armed opposition groups (AOGs) in Afghanistan. Most of the NATO member countries seem to break out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of “Taliban.” They piled in when the war looked easy and largely humanitarian. But now that it’s getting harder and more dangerous, they would like to pile out.

To ensure that we have influence over the outcome, we need more soldiers in Afghanistan, and fast. They need to be U.S. forces, British, Canadian, and Aussie; we cannot depend on NATO in general and they don’t know how to fight anyway. Unless President-elect Obama knows some kind of magic spell, he will not be able to persuade most NATO countries to do the right thing. Springtime 2009 will likely bring very heavy fighting in Afghanistan. We will not have credible negotiating positions while we remain outgunned by a bunch of old rifles and dinged-up RPGs.

Yon pinpoints the resources needed to finish the job: more firepower and the will to use it - something not likely to be realized with the progressives' mushy calls to "legitimize" a beefed up deployment through the utopian defense bureaucracies of "NATO countries."

The leftists will continue to wet their shorts as long as the coming Obama administration makes concessions to the realities of military power.

The fact that the same people who pushed for an American defeat in Iraq are now hoping to "multilateralize" the deployment in Afghanistan shows that Obama is indeed moving right, and this in turn is one of the most reassuring signs that Obama's earlier campaign pledges were largely junk fodder for the masses, and that perhaps he's actually shortened the daylight between his ill-considered antiwar nonsense and the precepts of actual foreign policy responsibility.

That same responsibility, of course, is something of which Spencer Ackerman knows nothing.

Texas Fred Would Beat Wife Over Nigerian Scam!

Folks may remember my old nemesis Texas Fred. Well Old Freddy indicates that he'd beat his own wife if she got caught in one of those Nigerian e-mail scams, like Janella Spears of Sweet Home, Oregon:

I have NEVER believed in hitting a woman, but Janella, if you were MY wife, I would seriously be thinking of all kinds of creative new ways to make you hurt! I am sorry if that offends anyone but this is one of those STUPID PEOPLE things! I HATE stupid people! There are, as I am fond of saying, people in this world that would literally DIE if breathing were not a reflex action, and this woman is one of them.

These Nigerian email scams have been well documented for a long time, in the news, in the papers, on the blogs, through email notification, all the various media sources have done their part in making the public aware. Apparently, someone didn’t get the memo!

Fred's a liar, of course. Recall that Texas Fred, who sells himself as a genuine "Southern Gentleman," viciously attacked Amy Proctor in the comments at his blog when she disagreed with his traitorous rants on the Iraq war:

Amy, you do know that you can go to the hospital and have a bit of ‘day surgery’ don’t you?? They can cut the Hypocritical BITCH right out of you, you know the one I am talking about?? The one that seeks to infringe on the free speech of others??
And ya really outta think about it too...

Texas Fred's spewing today in response to a Fox News report, "Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam."

It's an interesting story, as we all get loads of these scam letters in our inbox's.

But it's especially interesting when we see one big fat Southern redneck admitting he'd beat his own sweet Bertha! Texas Fred is a bad man, a faux conservative with no morals whatsover. He's begged so many bloggers to join his redneck blogrolls it's pathetic, and then he turns around and backstabs anyone who vaguely disagrees with him after they've joined! Wow! As Amy indicates:

Texas Fred claims his blog’s mission is to “piss off as many lefty/libbers as I possibly can, each and every day, it’s my mission in life” and describes himself as a “Conservative libertarian ....

In reality his message is hostile to Conservative values and positions, particularly when it comes to the war on terror, Iraq and President Bush.

A real jerk, in other words.

Rep. Linda Sanchez, Expecting Baby, Plans to Marry

I've met Congresswoman Linda Sanchez on a couple of occasions. She represents the 39th congressional district in Washington, and she was reelected to office this month with a 70 percent majority.

It turns out that Representative Sanchez is pregnant, which is a little awkward, as she is unmarried:

California Congresswoman Linda Sanchez is pregnant. Ordinarily, this would not make headlines, except to the Sanchez family and maybe in a newsletter to the 39th Congressional District in southeast L.A. County, which just elected her to her fourth term. It's no big deal nowadays when members of Congress give birth. The first was Mrs. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, 35 years ago.

What makes Sanchez's pregnancy news is that she is not married to the baby's father -- not yet, anyway.

You're practically the first to know. Even her sister and fellow congresswoman, Loretta Sanchez, didn't know until a few days ago.

The baby's father and Sanchez's "unofficially engaged" beau of a year and a half is Jim Sullivan, a government and PR consultant and the divorced father of three boys.

Washington is a back-fence-gossip kind of town, and Sanchez expects there to be some fuss and bother.

"I don't know how it'll be received," she said. "I hope people will recognize that to be able to plan that in your life -- I don't think that marriage and childbirth are black and white. There are certain instances in which you have to do things in reverse order."

Twenty years ago, it simply wouldn't have been possible -- pregnant, single and a member of Congress? Oh, the scandal! But Hester Prynne has morphed into Juno MacGuff, the culture wars have been fought to a truce of exhaustion, and "unwed mother" has been recast as "single mom."

Read the whole thing, here.

Sanchez boasts a very active student internship program, and I routinely recommend students to apply for the program.

I must say though that this is quite unusual. Times have changed, certainly, but the fact that this is not likely to be scandalous tells quite a bit about the changing nature of political culture and social norms.

EHarmony Bullied to Offer Same-Sex Dating Services

If folks don't think that the gay marriage movement is about radically transforming America's traditional culture, think about the implications of EHarmony's decision to offer same-sex dating services to gays:

The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.

EHarmony -- known for the mild-mannered television and radio advertisements by its founder, psychologist Neil Clark Warren -- not only must implement the new policy by March 31 but also must give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.

Note that EHarmony broke no laws and decided to settle rather than face years of litigation from unruly same-sex activists that just gotta have it!

Robert Stacy McCain sent me the link to his artcle, "Gay Rights, Gay Rage," which is worth quoting at length, especially the notion on the left that there's a "right" to everything. Robert picks up on the theme in the wake of the No on H8 protests in Los Angeles following the passage of Proposition 8:

As the California activists spewed their fury -- allegedly vandalizing Mormon temples, making terroristic threats toward Catholics, and hurling racial epithets at African-Americans (who voted 3-to-1 in favor of Prop 8, according to exit polls) -- their vitriolic rage highlighted how the progressive rhetoric of "rights" undermines and destabilizes political consensus.

The late historian Christopher Lasch was the first to identify (and Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon later examined in depth) how "rights talk" insinuated itself into American culture as a dominant mode of political discourse in the decades following World War II. Because Americans are taught to think of "rights" as something sacred in our civic religion, those accused of violating "rights" are easily demonized, while those who advocate "rights" are sanctified.

Seizing on the triumphant narrative of the black civil-rights movement, liberals adopted the habit of framing political debates in terms of minority "rights" versus majority "discrimination." That this tactic involves a species of moral and emotional blackmail should be obvious. To disagree with a liberal, to oppose his latest policy proposal, is to invite comparisons to Bull Connor and Orval Faubus, so long as the liberal can make "rights" the basis of his argument. (Witness, for example, how Keith Olbermann addressed himself to Proposition 8 supporters, casting their position as morally equivalent to segregation and slavery.)

"Rights talk" allowed liberals a means of preemptively delegitimizing their opponents and thereby to avoid arguing about policy in terms of necessity, utility and efficacy. If all legal and political conflicts are about "rights," there is no need to argue about the specific consequences of laws and policies. Merely determine which side of the controversy represents "rights" and the debate ends there.

The gay rage in California can be traced directly to the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which voided a Texas sodomy law because, as Justice Anthony Kennedy declared, "our laws and traditions in the past half century…show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex."

The Lawrence ruling was the culmination of what Justice Antonin Scalia called "a 17-year crusade" to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (which had upheld Georgia's sodomy statute) and, as Scalia noted in his dissent, the Court's "emerging awareness" argument was a disingenuous way to avoid actually declaring a "fundamental right" to sodomy. The legal effect was the same, however, and Lawrence was repeatedly cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision five months later mandating the legalization of gay marriage in that state.

If homosexuality is a right, and denying legal recognition to same-sex marriage is a violation of that right, then the rage of gay activists against their opponents is entirely justified. Proposition 8 does not deny tolerance, safety and freedom to gays and lesbians, whose right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is as secure in California as anywhere in the world.

Tolerance, safety and freedom are not the same as equality, however, and equality is the freight that liberals seek to smuggle into arguments via "rights talk." Gay activists do not construe their "rights" in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to -- entirely analogous to and fungible with -- traditional marriage.

Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are "endowed by their Creator" with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists' indignant demand for equality.

In a Spectacle of Wealth and Poverty...

The Department of Agriculture reported yesterday that the number of children experiencing hunger increased by 50 percent from 2007. Perhaps the Obama administration's economic policies will help those families least able to succeed in the economy.

In the meantime, please enjoy Natalie Merchant's "Carnival," where she sings:

Have I been blind
Have I been lost
Inside my self and
My own mind
Hypnotized
Mesmerized
By what my eyes have seen?

Yes on 8 Campaign Awaits Court Ruling, Rejects Recall

The California Supreme Court has agreed to review Proposition 8, the state ballot measure making marriage available only to one man and one woman.

I have just received a memo for distribution from the leadership of Protect Marriage and the Yes on 8 Campaign. The memo states that initiative sponsors will await the outcome of the Court's judicial review, and they oppose any efforts to begin campaigning for a recall of the justices of the court:

"Our position is the Court will uphold Prop 8 even if some may disagree with the policy it embodies. There should be no discussion of a recall at this point and nobody associated with the campaign should even hint that such a thing is being discussed. It is NOT being discussed. We are discussing defending Prop 8 and, if necessary, doing the work necessary to be ready for a future initiative battle if the other side chooses to seek to legalize same sex marriage."

As noted here in previous entries, the Court is well aware of the threat of a recall, and the intensity of the controversy on both sides of the debate means a majority of the Court is likely to defer to the will of the voters, to avoid prolonging the battle (Justice Joyce Kennard voted to deny a court review of the initiative). And the Los Angeles Times reports that "Supporters of the Proposition 8" are warning of a recall of any of the justices who vote to overturn the measure.

Just exactly who those "supporters" are remains key, as the official Yes on 8 campaign has opposed counter-demonstrations against the No on H8 protests, and now indicates it is frowning on recall mobilization prior to a decision from the judicial branch.

Michelle Obama at Slave Auction

There's no other way for me to conceptualize this other than the kind of physical examination of black chattel by white traders at a slave auction: Erin Aubry Kaplan's discussion of Michelle Obama's bottom represents one of the lowest, most explicitly race-conscious - and hence racist - essays imaginable.

The piece, "First Lady Got Back," is written from the perspective of one black woman admiring another, but for the life of me I can't fathom the rationale for publishing an essay like this at a major journal at time when the country is supposed to be transcending. There is no decency here, and no class. This part is especially revealing in its degradation of Mrs. Obama:

From the ocean of nastiness and confusion that defined this campaign from the beginning, Michelle rose up like Venus on the waves, keeping her coif above water and cruising the coattails of history to present us with a brand-new beauty norm before we knew it was even happening.

Actually, it took me and a lot of other similarly configured black women by surprise. So anxious and indignant were we about Michelle getting attacked for saying anything about America that conservatives could turn into mud, we hardly looked south of her neck. I noted her business suits and the fact she hardly ever wore pants (unlike Hillary). As I gradually relaxed, as Michelle strode onto more stages and people started focusing on her clothes and presence instead of her patriotism, it dawned on me -- good God, she has a butt! "Obama’s baby (mama) got back," wrote one feminist blogger. "OMG, her butt is humongous!" went a typical comment on one African-American online forum, and while it isn't humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay. Try as Michelle might to cover it with those Mamie Eisenhower skirts and sheath dresses meant to reassure mainstream voters, the butt would not be denied.

As America fretted about Obama's exoticism and he sought to calm the waters with speeches about unity and common experience, Michelle's body was sending a different message: To hell with biracialism! Compromise, bipartisanship? Don't think so. Here was one clear signifier of blackness that couldn't be tamed, muted or otherwise made invisible. It emerged right before our eyes, in the midst of our growing uncertainty about everything, and we were too bogged down in the daily campaign madness to notice. The one clear predictor of success that the pundits, despite all their fancy maps, charts and holograms, missed completely? Michelle's butt.

Lord knows, it's time the butt got some respect. Ever since slavery, it's been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho's, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they're certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who happens to be black. If a white conservative columnist published this at, say, the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard, the Democratic-left would be up in arms with yet another cry of racism!

My first thought when getting to the section about Mrs. Obama's "solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay" was thinking that here's what the slave traders would be saying, back in 1830, if the president-elect's wife was stripped naked and slathered in oil, tied to a post up on a "stage" while an auctioneer made the case for a strong "field nigger" with "solid hindquarters" and sharp muscle tone conducive to long, stooped hours picking cotton, with the added bonus of a "near-burble" skin to withstand the searing midday sun.

Anyone who's read classic novels like Jubilee or Uncle Tom's Cabin has some recollection of the dehumanizing nature of the chattel slave markets.

Erin Aubrey Kaplan should know better.

Captain Ed's got more.

Daschle to Lead Health and Human Services

The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama has appointed former Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle to lead the Department of Health and Human Services:

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen his close confidant and former Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle to serve as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to several sources close to the transition.

Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, will also reportedly be given a policy portfolio that stretches beyond the department in order to help shepherd health-care reform legislation in 2009.

He will oversee a department of nearly 65,000 employees spread across 11 operating divisions with a budget this year of $707.7 billion. If he is confirmed by the Senate, his responsibilities will include the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the Food and Drug Administration, public health programs and government research at the National Institutes of Health.

More significantly, Daschle has positioned himself as Obama's central adviser on efforts to dramatically expand health-care coverage next year, while at the same time lowering costs. During the campaign, Obama promised to reduce the average family's medical bill by $2,500.

There are certain to be questions surrounding Daschle's wife, Linda, a registered federal lobbyist with the firm Baker Donelson. During Daschle's 2004 re-election campaign, Republicans sought to paint the Democrat as the ultimate Washington insider, using some of his wife's lobbying clients as evidence that the Senator was more worried about Washington than South Dakota.

The Republican National Committee quickly pounced on Daschle's post-Senate activities in a statement released this afternoon.

"Barack Obama is filling his Administration with long-time Washington insiders," said RNC spokesman Alex Conant. "Since losing his Senate seat, Tom Daschle has worked for a major lobbying firm. For voters hoping to see new faces and fewer lobbyist-connections in government, Daschle's nomination will be another disappointment."

Daschle is not a lobbyist, although his firm--Alston & Bird--does have a lobbying arm.

For Daschle, the post at HHS is a political rebirth of sorts following a devastating defeat for re-election in 2004. Daschle, then the Senate Minority Leader, was defeated by Sen. John Thune, who two years earlier had lost a tightly contested race against Sen. Tim Johnson.

Daschle was one of Obama's earliest supporters and a number of Daschle-trained operatives -- field guru Steve Hildebrand, political mind Jennifer O'Malley and communications guru Dan Pfeiffer -- held senior roles in Obama's presidential campaign.

Daschle was initially rumored to be in the running for White House chief of staff but following Rep. Rahm Emanuel's (Ill.) ascension to that post became a leading candidate for HHS.

Daschle, 59, is a co-author of the book "Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis," in which he recommends creating an entity modeled after the Federal Reserve Board oversee health care in the United States.

I always thought Dashcle was a good guy. He seemed to have the public interest at heart in his governing style. I can't recall anything particularly controversial about him, beyond the criticism of his wife's lobbying ties.

I can say that the attacks on Obama for appointing top Washington advisors are fair, but frankly, the president-elect's more likely to hit the ground running with a seasoned team of operatives, and thus he's way more likely to avoid the drastic screw-ups that marred Bill Clinton's first year in office. People to this day criticize Clinton for bringing Thomas "Mack" McLarty to Washington, because he was an outsider to the nation's capital and didn't serve the new administration well.

Obama may have pulled off the best bait-and-switch in the history of presidential campaigns: Run on a ticket of hope, change, and reform, then upon taking office govern like a crooked big-city boss with ruthless advisors who know where all the skeletons are buried and who know how to leverage patronage to maximum and merciless political advantage.