Barack Obama, Most Powerful Person of the Year

On the heels of being named Time's "Person of the Year," Barack Obama has been named Newsweek's most powerful member of the global elite: "The Story of Power":

The beginning of 2009, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, is a good time to consider the nature of power, and of the powerful, because the world is being reordered in so many ways—broadly by what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest," the emergence of powers such as India, China and Brazil, and specifically by the global recession. The cultural, political and economic consequences of the financial meltdown cannot be overestimated. Unthinking trust in unfettered markets has evaporated, and the concern appears to be more than a temporary fit of worry that will pass when things start to get better. The demise of titans on Wall Street has elevated bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and Beijing and Brussels. And there is one politician in particular whose exercise of power will affect all of us for years to come: the president-elect, whose victory in November and transition—accompanied by the virtual disappearance of President Bush—have marked a resurgence of confidence in America. A senior European diplomat recently marveled to me about the American capacity to change course with rapidity and apparent ease: the shift from Bush to Obama —from the scion of one of America's noblest families to the child of a brief marriage between a young Kansan and a Kenyan academic, who proceeded to see his son exactly once—was simply astonishing ....

In Latin the word for power is imperium, which is largely evocative of the state, and we tend to think of power in political terms—that is, in terms of our relation to one another in the public sphere (power dynamics within families are usually confined to the private sphere, except when those families play political roles—see the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons). Very roughly, political power in America has moved from being the monopoly of the landed elite from the 18th-century Revolutionary era through the 19th-century Age of Jackson, when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. In the 20th century, women and, at long last, African-Americans were included in the mainstream. Now, in the 21st century, the world is turning over yet again. The political energy in the country is being harnessed by a younger and more diverse group than it has been in ages past. This does not mean the millennium is at hand, but it does mean that the face of power is changing.

Read the whole thing here.

Interestingly, it's frankly indisputable that Barack Obama's the most powerful person in the world. Obama will be, of course, the President of the United States, and for all the talk of America's relative interanational decline, it goes without saying that Obama wouldn't be powerful at all if he wasn't representing the American people and the American political system, which remains the light and power of freedom and morality in the conscience of humankind.

Here's Newsweek's top 50 of the world's most powerful people:

1: Barack Obama
2: Hu Jintao
3: Nicolas Sarkozy
4-5-6: Economic Triumvirate
7: Gordon Brown
8: Angela Merkel
9: Vladimir Putin
10: Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud
11: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
12: Kim Jong Il
13-14: The Clintons
15: Timothy Geithner
16: Gen. David Petraeus
17: Sonia Gandhi
18: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
19: Warren Buffett
20: Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani
21: Nuri al-Maliki
22-23: The Philanthropists
24: Nancy Pelosi
25: Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
26: Mike Duke
27: Rahm Emanuel
28: Eric Schmidt
29: Jamie Dimon
30-31: Friends of Barack
32: Dominique Strauss-Kahn
33: Rex Tillerson
34: Steve Jobs
35: John Lasseter
36: Michael Bloomberg
37: Pope Benedict XVI
38: Katsuaki Watanabe
39: Rupert Murdoch
40: Jeff Bezos
41: Shahrukh Khan
42: Osama bin Laden
43: Hassan Nasrallah
44: Dr. Margaret Chan
45: Carlos Slim Helú
46: The Dalai Lama
47: Oprah Winfrey
48: Amr Khaled
49: E. A. Adeboye
50: Jim Rogers

It's personally bothersome that Newsweek's editors would "honor" Osama bin Laden as among the world's most powerful people. Osama's a has-been who's currently nowhere to be found.

But note too how Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, makes the cut at #11, and Hassan Nasrallah ranks #43. There's a little "axis of evil rankings" for you.

Maybe New Yorker or some other pop culture rag will come out with a "Moral Relativism Rankings of the Year."

Screw You Glenn Greenwald

I haven't bothered a Glenn Greenwald takedown as of late, and frankly I'm not ballsy enough to do it as well as Robert Stacy McCain, "Thank you, Glenn Greenwald."

Apparently the master sockpuppet called out "The Other McCain" as a "desperate" Bush warmonger and was quickly repaid the favor with both barrels:

This is amusing. Greenwald is demanding war crimes prosecution of Bush administration officials and yet I am "desperate"? Frankly, I don't even give a damn. If I turned on the TV sometime next year to see Paul Wolfowitz in the dock at the Hague, I'd shrug in mute acceptance, and if I blogged about it, would do so in an insouciant way.

But that's never going to happen, which is why I can merrily mock Greenwald's frothing outrage. Nothing, not even a New York Times editorial, can turn this madness of the fanatical fringe into a "mainstream" project. The Democrats would never allow it, no more than they would allow Obama to withdraw too precipitously from Iraq.

The political winds have blown, and the system has encompassed that wind, directing it toward the recent resurgence of the Democratic Party, and smart Democrats know that the surest way to lose that favorable breeze would be to overplay their hand by pandering to the monstrous appetites of Greenwald and his ilk. Obama, Pelosi and Reid will all answer this idiotic demand in the only way it deserves to be answered: Fuck you, Glenn Greenwald.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you Robert Stacy McCain.

Jules Crittenden: The Wisdom of Our Forefathers

Jules Crittenden provides a straight-up defense of Bush-era American government and foreign policy, in response to another round of Andrew Sullivan's hysterical ravings:

In the United States I’ve been living in, the president very politely sought and received authorization from Congress to run this nation’s wars; asked for and received billions of dollars in multiple appropriations from Congress to finance this nation’s wars; consulted Congress on interrogation techniques and had Democrats urging him not to pussyfoot around; and when the going got tough and popular opinion wavered, stood alone as a strong executive, pushing forward to fight and win while the legislative branch dithered, wrung its hands, and did what legislative branches and weak executives do, which is cater to popular whims, ineffectively. Thank God for the wisdom of our forefathers and a Constitution that has allowed us to survive so many assaults from so many enemies, foreign and domestic, and remain free for more than two centuries.

Check the link for the Sullivan takedowns.

Matt Yglesias, Jennifer Palmieri, and the Third Way

People aren't getting some of the key issues in the public smackdown of Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress. It turns out that Yglesias, who is as far left as possible without being formally identified as communist, was smacked down by Jennifer Palmieri, who is the interim chief at the Center for American Progress.

It turns out that Yglesias wrote a post recently on the Third Way, a centrist Washington Democratic policy shop, in which he offered an ultimately unwelcomed turn of phase. Here's the key quote (in bold italicized text), in the context of the the full paragraph, which most of Yglesias' defenders are leaving out:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullsh*t. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago [emphasis added].

Well, it turns out the Palmieri didn't like this at all, so she logged into Yglesias' blog at Think Progress to write this:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

This is a D.C. Democratic-insiders' squabble. The Politico reports that Palmieri might be tapped as an Obama administration assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. So let's break it down:

1) Palmieri's a hack. Who would want to work with her - much less under her - with a demonstrated leadership like that?

2) Palmieri's even more of a hack if she doesn't realize that Yglesias' views above are entirely representative of the organization she currently heads. Maybe she doesn't actually read Think Progress, one of the most disastrous "progressive" blogging outfits on the web. Or if she does, she's down with the filth and spew eminating there, and she only makes a stink of things when her hat's in the ring at the Pentagon. Either way, once again, she's not a very good manager, and the country certainly doesn't need that kind of waffling, self-serving "expertise" on defense policy, unless such abject caving to political pressure is the style of policy leadership and diplomacy expected at Obama's Defense Department.

3) Take a look at Yglesias' post, in any case: If Third Way's positions resemble the practical meaning of the term (Britain's Tony Blair, President Bush's greatest ally on the Iraq war, was a well-known leading advocate of "third way" ideological centrism), he's either living in an isolated pocket of the hard-left blogosphere, or he's truly lost his mind. Sure, the netroots left can raise a big stink on many issues, and these folks get a lot of media coverage for all their blustery talk and self-exaltation. But they are not mainstream. Hillary Clinton dissed them, Joseph Lieberman dissed them, and Barack Obama's now repudiating them (think Rick Warren). This is smart politics (or, on Warren, brilliant Machiavellianism, but that's an aside). Talking "bullsh*t" on one of D.C.'s insider think tanks is hardly the worst offense one might find coming out of the fever swamps of the online Democratic Party base. The considerable outrage among the commenters at Yglesias' post, and well as the support Yglesias is getting from fellow bloggers, only confirms that deep split between the activist base of the party and the top operatives who will have to actually govern.

Remember the debate about a "center-right nation? Stuff like this demonstrates it better than ever. It's actually funny, however, that both Yglesias' original post and then Palmieri's subsequent smackdown reveal that no one involved in this debate's got a shred of class.

Forget Marriage, Gay or Not ... Kill Tradition Altogether

Bob Ostertag, in "Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue," is brutally honest in revealing the subterranean agenda that girds the left's blitzkreig assault on tradition - from marriage itself (which will no longer have original meaning once homosexuals enjoy the same right of union that's by both nature and tradition only available to one man and one woman) to the entire Western ethical system based in Judeo-Christian morality:

Through years of queer demonstrations, meetings, readings and dinner table conversations, about gay bashing, police violence, job discrimination, housing discrimination, health care discrimination, immigration discrimination, family ostracism, teen suicide, AIDS profiteering, sodomy laws, and much more, I never once heard anyone identify the fact that they couldn't get married as being a major concern. And then, out of the blue, gay marriage suddenly became the litmus test by which we measure our allies. We have now come to the point that many unthinkingly equate opposition to gay marriage with homophobia.

Rick Warren is now the flash point, the one all our political allies, even Barack Obama, are supposed to denounce because he doesn't pass gay marriage the litmus test.

I disagree with Rick Warren on many things. To start with, he believes that 2000 years ago God sent his only Son to die on a cross so that mankind would not perish but have everlasting life. To me, that's weird. I don't know how to even begin to address an idea that far out. And he believes that everyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell. He doesn't single out gays and lesbians in particular. To me, the weirdest thing there is not that he thinks queers will go to hell, but that he believes in hell at all. But mainline Protestants believe in hell too. So do Catholics, who also add purgatory and limbo.

Steve Waldman, founder of Belief.net (where you find the most thoughtful exchanges on present day religion), did an extended interview with Warren which has been hyped all over the blogosphere as an example of why we should all be screaming for Obama to disinvite Warren from the inaugural. The quote that got all the attention was when Warren said gay marriage would be on a par with marriage for incest, pedophilia and polygamy. And yes, I think that's off-base. Not up there are the scale of the whole God-sent-his-only-Son-to-die-on-a-cross bit, but weird nonetheless.

I thought this was satirical at first, but it's not.

Read the whole thing. It's a tricky argument. On the one hand, Ostertag amounts a vicious atheist attack on marriage traditionalists and those of religious faith. But on the other hand he suggests he'd be perfectly willing to work with "progressive" evangelicals who want to tackle "more important" problems, like global warming, which just "can't wait."

Note though that Ostertag conflates the whole of pro-marriage traditionalism into a faith-based pigeonhole. And that's the trick: There are powerful secular arguments against same-sex marriage, so when leftists take issue with the spiritual proponents of traditionalism, they work to attack the larger edifice of Western culture and tradition that's been the basis for the American political culture, the rise of capitalism (the Protestant work ethic), and the natural law rationalism that grew out of the Enlightement and sustains modern democratic institutions.

The religious argument against gay marriage is a good one. But those who take that approach will be bogged down in defending against anti-Christianist assaults, not to mention the debate over "religious rites" versus "civil rights." And while religion ultimately provides what is in essence the supreme power of universal reason, debating gay marriage on religious grounds puts people of faith in a position of endlessy rebutting spurious allegations of congregational bigotry.

It's too bad that things have come to this, but those who respect traditional values are in a sense fighting a secular creed, an atheistic faith that would banish universal good from the public square altogether. It's this underlying secular humanist agenda that will destroy all that's best about our culture, not just heterosexual marriage traditionalism alone, but the entire moral firmament beneath it.

Purging the Neocons

It turns out there's a pretty nasty purge of the neocons taking place at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the main conservative think tank providing intellectual backing for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Jacob Heilbrunn has the scoop:

The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka.

There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction. Both Muravchik and Gerecht are serious intellectuals who have published prolifically ....

Muravchik has been at AEI for two decades. Gerecht has been there for a much briefer period, but he has written extensively and provocatively on intelligence matters. Gerecht is currently at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, along with the Hudson Institute, where Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby and Douglas J. Feith are fellows, seems to functioning as something of a safe haven for neocons.

What do these developments actually add up to? They undoubtedly signal a splintering taking place in the neocon world. Pletka has been closely identified with neocon positions on Iraq and Iran. But now there is tremendous hostility toward her among neocons, who allege that, as a former staffer for Jesse Helms, who embodied more traditional Republican foreign-policy precepts, she is out to extirpate neocon influence at AEI. In this version of events, Muravchik was ousted for not being a true Republican. It would be very unfortunate if that were the real cause. What the conservative movement needs is ferment, not an ideological straitjacket—something that neocons have themselves sometimes tried to enforce.

The neocon movement will survive these changes. It will continue to stir up debate. Its real misfortune was to be able to exert power in the Bush administration, where officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Feith made a hash of things. The notion of a liberated Iraq being the first freedom domino to fall in the greater Middle East was always a pipe dream. The strength of the neocons is to generate ideas, but whether they should actually be implemented is often another matter.

Interestingly, some of those same neocons Heilbrunn mentions - like Reuel Marc Gerecht, in his earlier essay, "A New Middle East, After All" - predict a much more substantial legacy for the Bush administration and its vital agenda of combining American exceptionalism and power in the Mideast.

Also interesting is the notion that neoconservatives - who remain ripe with ideas, while others routinely lament how the broader conservative movement has run out of steam - would be better off not "actually implementing" their intellectual product. Keep in mind that Republicans did not lose the White House because of neoconservative ideas. Alan Greenspan and the Democratic expansion of subprime lending through Fannie and Freddie have taken a lion's share of credit on the collapse of markets. Indeed, the war in Iraq was hardly an issue at all throughout the second half of 2008. Meanwhile the New York Times has recently been making the case that Democrats deserve credit for victory in the war! That's hardly a repudiation of neoconservative ideas.

Heilbrunn's right of course in noting that neocons will survive, and they'll even prosper. Already we're seeing a push for a greater U.S. role in preventing humanitarian crises, and the eventual endorsement of the robust exertion of military power for such missions will take a page right from the neocon playbook. Of course, democracy promotion was never isolated to neconservative thought. Power and purpose always has a role in American foreign policy. It's the stress on the assumed "unilateralism" of this administration, and the "reckless" disregard for the constitution, that's gotten the left all riled up. Don't forget that Bill Clinton never had Security Council support for the airwar over Kosovo, and Janet Reno's Justice Department purged 93 federal prosecutors in 1993, a mass firing that makes the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' actions look like a summer picnic.

The neocon genie's yet to work it's all of its magic yet, and stuffing the movement back in the bottle is not as good an idea as some might think.

Iraq and the Political Scientists

Daniel Drezner provides a link to a Matthew Yglesias essay, which is one of the more interesting recent commentaries I've seen on Iraq: "Political Science at War."

Yglesias takes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to task for a recent CNN interview, where she was asked if she had any regrets on the administration's foreign policy:

I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq ...

Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that this different Iraq under democratic leadership.

The key is the stress on her identity as "a political scientist." In response, Yglesias not only excoriates Rice, but goes on to denounce the entire media/neocon think tank commentariat which backed the build-up in Iraq. To make his case, he relies on survey data from international relations experts in political science, who were almost uniformly opposed the intervention. Here's the key passage from Yglesias:

My colleague Ryan Powers reminds us that, in fact, many of the leading lights of the international relations subfield of political science tried to warn the country against the invasion of Iraq. There was also this interesting article that surveyed opinion among IR scholars in Foreign Policy magazine several years ago ....

One of the most annoying habits of the press and the DC conventional wisdom more generally has been a persistent habit of ignoring these facts in favor of the rhetoric of “seriousness” that casts war opponents as a much of ignorant hippies and foul-mouthed bloggers who, at best, were right about Iraq by accident or something. But the vast majority of credentialed experts in Middle East regional studies, and the vast majority of credentialed experts in international relations have always been extremely skeptical of the adventure in Iraq. The main supporters of the war have been politicians, magazine and newspaper pundits, and a smallish group of heavily politicized think tank-based experts and “experts” who, for whatever reason, are granted privileged access to the media over people in a better position to offer genuinely independent analysis. I think many political observers watching the debate unfold in 2002-2003 would have gotten the impression that most experts were more-or-less backing the president on Iraq. But while it’s certainly true that most op-ed columnist and most Brookings fellows were behind Bush, the broader group of political scientists who specialize in these issues has always taken the opposite view.

If you check out Yglesias' post, which has a graph of opinion on Iraq within the foreign policy professoriate, the views therein break down reasonably close to the classic left-right split among the general population. Of course, since most political scientists are liberal or moderate, it's natural that a majority of professors would be "against the invasion."

Methodologically, Yglesias' "evidence" for a just opposition to Iraq is, well, embarrassingly biased. I'm no "hot shot" scholar of international relations, and I don't expect to be. But had I been contacted I would have indicated my backing of the deployment. Indeed, my support of the intervention hasn't flinched in nearly six years of warfare. Now that the U.S. has prevailed in what might be called the major anti-insurgency phase of the last couple of years, the left now has the burden of justifying its long stab-in-the-back policy of cut-and-run, which would have abandoned our troops in the field and turned the Iraqi people over to the region's terrorist predators and their backers in Iran.

My disseration advisor, Professor Michael Gordon, a great teacher and tremendous scholar, is retired now. He writes a blog off and on, and while he was very critical of the handling of the war, his writing at the time demonstrated intellectual and moral clarity on the international politics surrounding the run-up to the deployment. Here's what he wrote in a post from 2004:

Despite the errors, bungling, and other problems of the Bush administration, I stand by the intervention in Iraq, [and] believe it will still work out generally well - [and I believe], too, that the repercussions of that in the Middle East will redound to our benefit in the years and decades to come.

Professor Gordon's post is a bit dated on some of his observations, but his basic hunch is accurate, that despite the initial difficulties and incompetence, the fight was worth it and that our engagement would end up creating a positive force for the future of the Middle East.

Despite naysayers, Iraq is on its way to stabilizing its democracy, a free regime which will stand as a regional balance against the region's rogue authoritarian regimes of proliferation and massive human rights violations. As we've seen now, many on the American left have thrown their hands up over Iraq - frustrated that we've actually won - and have now turned instead to mount their nihilist campaign of outrage against the deployment in Afghanistan.

Yglesias is one of these folks. The left, including much of the interational relations academy, took a bath on the long-term outlook in Iraq. No war will be worth it for those marinated in an ideology of weak-kneed internationalism and hostility to American power.

Don't forget to read Drezner's criticisms of Yglesias, which focuses on Secretary Rice and the poliical science angle.

Thinking About Presidential Hatred

I rarely, if ever, rebut commentaries appearing at "The Moderate Voice."

A blog whose very name constitutes a fundamental lie lacks the a priori legitimacy to be taken for much serious consideration. But publisher Joe Gandelman's poorly-written essay this morning cries out for a response. The piece, "Birth of the Professional Obama Haters," argues that the emerging partisan opposition to Barack Obama represents a "harbinger" of an unprecedented campaign of demonization of a presidential administration:

Every President has had his contingent of seemingly professional haters, sometimes stemming from policy but sometimes stemming from the need to market an opposition persona, increase readership or an audience, or rally partisan followers to do battle to halt specific polices. The degree of hatred varies in both its intensity and justification.

Democrat Bill Clinton had his big share of professional Clinton haters (both prominent and not so prominent would say things such as “He’s not MY President…”) and Democrats decried it and some Republicans defended it. Then came Republican George Bush who got his share of haters, then Republicans decried it (the most typical defense was to try and go on the offense and lump those who’d strongly criticize the President on policy with the professional Bush haters as suffering from “Bush derangement syndrome” — a tidy way to try to discredit all critics suggesting they were all unreasonable and not having legitimate grounds for strong criticism) and some Democrats who decried the lack of respect for Clinton defended it.

But here in December 2008 we ‘re seeing a special kind of political hatred — way early in the game. President Elect Barack Obama has not put his fanny in the Oval Office chair for one second yet, and there is an intensity now among some Republican conservatives to push ... hot buttons — a probable haringer [sic] of what is likely to come. Amid reports that the economy is not just bad but is on the brink of tanking, their emphasis is not on policy but overt or slightly disguised overt political demonization. Using whatever they feel can stick to rally their audience and/or readership.

Believe it or not, they’re still beating the now-thinly-disguised drum over Obama’s middle name “Hussein.” Which they wouldn’t do if it had been Walker or even Schwartz. Isn’t it time to call THIS detailed in this post for what it is? It’s politics of hate couched in (barely) plausible deniability.

One example focusing on the right's resistance to a president-elect with an Islamic middle name is hardly an "unprecedented" display of political hatred. Note, too, the mention of how George W. Bush got "his share" of haters. You think?

I've been down the road of comparative demonization before. As intense as things have been over the last year, throughout the primaries and now the presidential transition, nothing even compares to the attacks we've long seen on President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the "evil" neocon imperialist warmongers, and the "Christianist" social conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Has anyone seen Barack Obama burned in effigy? Can anyone point me to a prominent conservative who has called for the death of Barack Obama? Last July, of course, Spencer Ackerman called for the execution of President Bush following war crimes tribunals at the Hague, and he's hardly the first.

One can't attend an antiwar rally without untold signs, banners, and figurative displays attacking the president in the most filthy language imaginable, calling for impeachment, or exhorting protesters to shoot him and hang him up by a tree. At a fifth anniversary protest against the Iraq war this year, one protester hoisted a sign reading, "Bush Is a Lousy F**K and WE HATE HIM."

Demonization of the Bush administration began well before G.W. Bush "put his fanny in the Oval Office chair." We had weeks of unbridled hatred during the Florida recount in 2000, and it's been non-stop "BusHitler" ever since.

Barack Obama will be my president. He is, of course, a documented liar and a Machiavellian sleezeball. I don't have to like him, but I will support him in a time of existential crisis, and I pray that he demonstrates one ounce of the courage and presidential leadership that Bush 43 has shown these past eight years.

[Endnote: Gandelman's quotation above was edited for punctuation, and he's got that dangling dependent clause that's bugging me: "Which they wouldn't do if it had been Walker..." I know blogging is an informal medium, and all of us make our ample share of typos and so forth, but the folks at "The Moderate Voice" are professional journalists - the bleedin' wankers ought to damn well proofread!]

Parallels to Totalitarianism

I generally avoid comparisons between the American democracy and pre-World War II Germany, but Politeia features a thought-provoking essay that hits extremely close to home, in every sense: "A U.S. Weimar Rep? Red Flags (III): the Lessons":

In the USA since the 1960s many traditional American ideas, values and attitudes have been eroded, and capitalism is being replaced by mixed economies. Religion and morality has less influence on behavior; there is a trend from individualism toward collectivism, relativism and socialism; there is greater acceptance of subjective ideas; there is greater catering to the fears and emotions of factions; and factions are becoming more alienated. These changes have parallels in Germany of the 1930s. A key parallel is the replacement of rational thought with feelings and emotions. Another is how the vast majority of people simply absorb the thoughts presented by the educational establishment, the media, and the entertainment pop culture.

This is the third in a series, "A U.S. Weimar Republic? Red Flags: Our Republic" (click here and here for further reading).

My sense is that we're more likely to see Leninist-style vanguard proletarianism. See, for example, my earlier essay, "The Ideological Foundations of the Obama Phenomenon."

(Note: Neither Germany nor Russia experienced the long cultural development toward pragmatism and rationalism that marks the Anglo-American historical model. This is another reason why I generally avoid comparisons between the U.S. and 20th century totalitarianism. That said, we're at such an extraordinary period in history, it pays to rethink our models of development and socialization of culture.)

Gay Backlash Overwhelms Presidential Transition

I watched Rachel Maddow's show last night. Not only is she funny, but she's a heckuva lot prettier than Keith Olbermann. Plus watching her show reveals just how much influence nihilist left bloggers have on the mainstream Democratic Party agenda - a point to keep in mind when leftists dismiss the policy impact of hardline bloggers like Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and their rotten ilk.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In discussing the Obama/Warren invocation controversy, Maddow made the case against Warren for his "bigotry" and "hatred," citing John Aravosis at AmericaBlog. At issue is Warren's apparent exclusion of "unrepentant" gays from the ministry of Saddleback Church. Aravosis links to Warren's home page in a post, "Rick Warren Explicitly Bans "Unrepentant" Gays From Membership in His Church."

Now, citing Aravosis raises an interesting quandary: While the "unrepentant" gay issue is troublesome from the perspective of inclusion, Maddow's citation of Aravosis is equally so. As Rick Moran demonstrated during the primaries, Aravosis, last June, stooped to the lowest of the low in attacking John McCain's qualifications for the presidency, arguing that "Getting shot down, tortured, and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience."

While Aravosis is far from a credible source - and his comments on McCain are beyond the pale - he has a point about Warren's position on gays at church; and it's here where folks might rightly ask themselves where they're located on the issue of civil rights for gay Americans. While Warren, as a pastor of a private church, may by rights exclude gay members from his congregation, his practice gives ammunition to his secular and anti-Christianist attackers.

And all of this brings up an interesting thought: What if Barack Obama had it all figured out? What if the President-Elect, realizing Warren's religious fundamentalism might be offputting to many folks of faith who might otherwise hold more welcoming thoughts for homosexuals, people who might be less likely to compare gays to pedophiles or incest lovers, and who might, in fact, realize that same-sex marriage can be firmly opposed on both secular and religious grounds, and thus such demonization of gays is gratuitous and unproductive to the traditionalist case ... what if he picked Warren anyway, on the likely chance of instigating a backlash beyond the radical gay base? Sure, Warren could go on to give the inaugural invocation, but by then Obama, seeing partisan division and distress spread across the land, would have a ready excuse to backpeddle, to renounce his relationship to the "purpose driven" pastor and his ministry of exclusion, and then come out in favor of gay marriage. That's where all of this is headed ultimately, so Obama could have devised a brilliantly underhanded ploy of plausible deniability.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has done his own about face. He's announced that the state will seek to overturn Proposition 8 at the California Supreme Court, arguing that "the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification."

Looking at this from the sidelines one would think that, heck, forget majority rule. Tyranny of the majority must be so bad that any aggressive minority can have its way, traditionalism, objective right, and constitutional processes be damned.

But that's the way things are going in this country. We've got a president-elect who squeezed under the media radar with a free pass. We've got the Democratic-left which lies and distorts the truth to fit any purpose, folks who can demonize John McCain for his patriotism in captivity on the one hand, and then turn around and argue in favor radical gay rights activists who adopt the same tactics of totalitarianian intolerance of McCain's captors in Hanoi.

It doesn't make sense, but that's the world we live in right now. Sometimes I think it's best to just let things play out. The traditional majority's not dead, and by no means without power. The radical left, with its allies in Washington and Sacramento, will overplay their hand, and as the economy trundles through the current cyclical downturn, the political pendulum will swing back to more conservative traditionalism. Folks on the right might as well hunker down for a while, clinging to their guns and religion after all, and let the storm pass. Socialism's been tried before and in every instance it's failed. There's no reason to expect the current era to be triumphant over the long haul. And thank God for that.

Holiday Snow, Southern California

We'll likely see a "White Christmas" in Southern California this year.

The snow level was down to 2000 feet during this week's storms. Snow blanketed the local foothills beneath Saddleback Mountain, not far from my home. Pictured above are the San Gabriel Mountains, seen from Bolsa Chica State Ecological Reserve.

I often go down to the beach on Christmas, so this is a beautiful change. Here's wishing readers a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Photo Credit, "Storm Leaves a Blanket of Snow Across Southland," Los Angeles Times.

Gay Rights Extremists Open Lobbying Front at U.N.

Get a load of this: "In a First, Gay Rights Are Pressed at the U.N.":

An unprecedented declaration seeking to decriminalize homosexuality won the support of 66 countries in the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, but opponents criticized it as an attempt to legitimize pedophilia and other “deplorable acts.”

The United States refused to support the nonbinding measure, as did Russia, China, the Roman Catholic Church and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Holy See’s observer mission issued a statement saying that the declaration “challenges existing human rights norms.”

The declaration, sponsored by France with broad support in Europe and Latin America, condemned human rights violations based on homophobia, saying such measures run counter to the universal declaration of human rights.

Anyone familiar with the workings of the U.N. recognizes that the protection of "rights" at that organization is nothing less than a despicable farce. The real purpose of this declaration is revealed further down in the piece:

Ms. Yade [the French state secretary for human rights] and the Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, said at a news conference that they were “disappointed” that the United States failed to support the declaration. Human rights activists went further. “The Bush administration is trying to come up with Christmas presents for the religious right so it will be remembered,” said Scott Long, a director at Human Rights Watch.

There you have it. Gay rights activists hope to use this U.N. declaration as another wedge to break down traditional values and resitance to gay marriage rights in the U.S. federal system.

The Human Rights Campaign [HRC] has "the backstory" on the French sponsorship of the declaration at the U.N. Note, of course, that the HRC is the lead pressure group on the extremist left that's now raising an outcry over Barack Obama's selection of Pastor Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation.

The left's radical gay agenda is all coming together, as I've noted previously (see, "Gay Radicalism Key to Left's Agenda Under Obama"). The radical gay rights lobby is up in arms over Obama's sensitivity to the moderate middle of the American electorate. But they also know that Obama has pledged to restore American trust in and reliance on international institutions. So, by going to the U.N. and raising a big public relations battle on the issue, the episode represents a chance for homosexual activists to "multilateralize" the push for gay marriage rights, providing one more avenue for activists to intimidate cultural traditionalists.

Meanwhile, criminal states like Iran, which has been identified as among the leading violators of human rights by the U.S. State Department, get a blind eye from the U.N.'s Human Rights Council.

If this new declaration at the U.N. is to have any legitimacy, U.S. gay rights groups and Western NGOs should be protesting the refusal of a majority of the members states of the U.N. General Assemby, who refused to endorse the resolution, rather than the U.S., where gay Americans enjoy unpredented rights and liberties under American constitutional law.

Libby Spencer's Bleg

Libby Spencer, my long-time nemesis at The Impolitic and Newshoggers, has posted what appears to be a bleg, "Ow, ow, ow...."

Ms. Libby writes that "I managed to fall down last night and twisted my foot." The injury's apparently so painful that she was nearly reduced to crawling to the little girls' room. Ms. Libby continues:

I had to drop my health insurance months ago so I can't go get it checked out since I'm already almost $8000 in debt for medical bills. I really need to keep what's left of my credit limit in case the car breaks down. I can't believe it's all that serious anyway. I think it would hurt more if I broke something and the internet doctor sites say the treatment is rest and ice in any event so I'm going to try that for a day or two and see if it helps.

I wish I had some crutches. Ironically, most of my life I've always had a set of crutches around since I've broken toes occassionally and then they just take up room for years on end. Now that I really could use a pair, I don't have any.

Oy. What a life. I can't wait for my luck to turn.

A range of thoughts come to mind upon reading this.

First of all, this is nowhere near an adequate bleg. Ms. Libby's got a link to Pay Pal in her sidebar, so maybe her longtime readers know to throw a few quarters in the cup, and it turns out that she does make cash pleas on occasion, here for example:

If you've ever felt inclined to donate a few bucks to the blog, now would be a good time to hit the "Make a Donation" button at the top of the sidebar. If you don't want to use paypal, you can email me for a land address. If you can't donate money, any advice would be welcome in either the comment section or by email as well. Kind thoughts would also be greatly appreciated.

Chartitable readers at American Power can click on the "email me" link above to help.

Otherwise, I'm pretty well miffed at why a woman of Ms. Libby's maturity would drop health insurance. Perhaps, as her previous posts have indicated, she's out of work and is just scraping by. Or, maybe Ms. Libby's saving money in hopes of the advent of universal health care under the Barack Obama administration next year, although given the success of past efforts to that effect, that's not a possibility on which I'd hold my breath.

I do know why she's not going to the emergency room (see, "Who Needs Health Insurance?).

Here's wishing Ms. Libby a healed ankle and a nice weekend, in any case.

Pakistan's Jihad

Reuel Marc Gerecht, at the Weekly Standard, warns that Palistan's holy warriors could be the world's most dangerous:

Pakistani militant groups have grown up in a philosophically sophisticated environment of Islamic militancy. Where once Lashkar was, more or less, a region-specific terrorist organization (focused on Jammu and Kashmir), its appetite for action is growing. All Islamic fundamentalist organizations, if they turn toward jihad, have the potential for a global mission. (Western-imposed borders on the historic Islamic community, the umma, are an insult to God; the enemy, the Judeo-Christian West, is everywhere and thus can be struck everywhere.)

It's a good bet that Lashkar and other Pakistani holy-warrior organizations will in the not too distant future operationally reach beyond the Indian subcontinent. With al Qaeda now permanently headquartered in Pakistan, it's not hard to imagine the organization and its Arab Sunni core being absorbed by a group like Lashkar. Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, which is America's best frontline defense against Pakistani jihadists who carry British passports--and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, at home and abroad, carry such passports, which make travel to the United States easy--gives the impression that we may have already reached the absorption point. These Pakistani jihadist groups are larger than al Qaeda ever was, and their size is a distinct intelligence vulnerability, especially if the Pakistani intelligence agency is ever willing to move aggressively against them and the larger religious movements that they feed on.

Nonetheless, it seems that al Qaeda may be on the verge of a big growth spurt in the subcontinent. In the Arab world, the birthplace of modern Islamic holy war, al Qaeda's prospects have dimmed. Odds are Osama bin Laden has lost the "decisive battle" in Mesopotamia, and with it, eventually, the battle for hearts and minds among Arabs.

Operations inevitably follow philosophy. As the jihadist philosophy expands in Pakistan and likely into India's 150 million-strong Muslim population, so will operations. Hezbollah became an extremely deadly organization precisely because it drank so deeply from revolutionary Iran's global call to rally the world's Muslims against the United States. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad Organization of Ayman al-Zawahiri became something to fear when its objectives transcended the Nile valley. Operational competence goes up as Islamic holy warriors look over the horizon. Global missions draw global talent. Even without weapons of mass destruction, these terrorists could bring on a terrible clash between India and Pakistan.

We will have to wait anxiously to discover whether Pakistan's Islamist intellectuals and holy warriors can go where an Arab-run al Qaeda has been unable to reach - into the laboratories and minds of men with sky-high IQs. European and American intelligence and security services ought to be increasingly attentive to the possibility that the Pakistani jihadist call will have more appeal and try to monitor those Pakistanis who could make all the difference in the acquisition of nuclear and chemical weapons.

Still, Pakistan may follow the examples of Iraq, Egypt, and Algeria, where all the Islamist savagery finally undid the sympathy of large parts of the population for holy warriors. Jihadists inevitably become infatuated with killing, making their understanding of God's wrath just a bit too much to swallow, even for Muslims who loathe the West. Until that happens, though, we will have to strengthen our intelligence capacities and continue to act preemptively against terrorist plots, and to hope that the Pakistani military, a forceful, proud, and hierarchical institution, will itself act against men who don't recognize its authority - and who blow up women and children.

Be sure to check out Gerecht's recent piece on the likihood that the Obama adiministration will revive the outsourcing of extrajudicial rendition of terrorist suspects to countries not shy about enhanced interrogation techniques.

If the left is angy now, over the Warren invocation, wait until the Obama Justice Department sends a few captured Pakistani militants to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.

Paul Weyrich Dies, Gay Activists Ecstatic

Paul Weyrich, a central figure in the modern conservative movement, passed away yesterday in northern Virginia.

This morning's Los Angeles Times features a thoughtful obituary, "Paul Weyrich, Religious Conservative and Ex-President of Heritage Foundation, Dies at 66."

It turns out that Weyrich, who suffered from multiple illnesses, and who lost both his legs to amputation in 2005, continued to write commentaries up to the time of his death. He published an essay yesterday at Townhall, "The Next Conservatism, A Serious Agenda for the Future." In 1979, Weyrich coined the notion of the "moral majority" during a discussion with the Rev. Jerry Falwell:

Falwell "turned to his people and said, 'That's the name of our organization,' " Weyrich recalled in an interview last year with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel."

One can see why Weyrich's passing would be a cause for celebration on the left.

It happens whenever a conservative icon passes away. Yesterday, at Pam's House Blend, gay activists cheered the death of Weyrich in classic fashion:

- "Good Riddance ... At least Falwell won't be lonely in hell."

- "I know it's poor taste to speak ill of the dead, but I truly believe that the world has lost nothing with Weyrich's passing and probably experienced a net gain. Hopefully, if there is a hereafter, he gets judged the way he so harshly judged others."

- "You're only supposed to say good things about the dead? Okay. He'd dead. Good."

- "He shall not be missed ... A truly evil, hateful wingnut."

- "YAY ... And the world is a tiny bit better today."

- "Young too ... He was only 66 y.o."

- "He died too late, ... Like 65 years too late, IMO."

- "I was always taught to respect the dead, but ... Seriously, I'm not shedding any tears over this scumbag. Good riddance, ya toad."

The thread reveals a couple of commenters trying to be respectful, and the remarks here are mild compares to the left's demonization of Jesse Helms when he passed away earlier this year.

If you missed it earlier, check out Ben Johnson's essay on the left's secular demonology, where he writes:

Leftists lack the religious grounding to recognize everyone as a divine soul and a tradition that teaches them to “hate the sin but love the sinner.

Rewriting Josef Stalin's Legacy

The Chicago Tribune offers a great account of Russian historical revisionism on the legacy of Joseph Stalin, perhaps the modern world's most brutal tyrant:

Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens, has been undergoing a makeover of sorts in recent years. Russian authorities have reshaped the Georgia-born dictator's image into that of a misunderstood, demonized leader who did what he had to do to mold the Soviet Union into the superpower it became.

In Russian classrooms, history teachers are guided by a new, government-approved textbook, Alexander Filippov's "Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006," which hails Stalin as an efficient manager who had to resort to extreme measures to modernize the lumbering Soviet agrarian economy.

There were, writes Filippov, "rational reasons behind the use of violence in order to ensure maximum efficiency."

A museum commemorating Stalin as a national hero opened in 2006 in the southern city of Volgograd. The following year, a 40-episode television drama broadcast on a state-controlled network whitewashed Stalin's crimes and portrayed him as Russia's savior.

When he was president, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sought to shift the nation's focus away from Stalin's legacy of brutality. Meeting with history teachers in 2007, Putin acknowledged that Russian history "did contain some problematic pages. But so did other states' histories.

"We have fewer of them than other countries, and they were less terrible than in other nations," Putin continued. "We can't allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us."

The battle over how Stalin should be remembered remains one of Russia's most divisive topics of debate. For many Russians, Stalin's achievements far outweigh his crimes. He is seen as the wartime leader who saved the Motherland from Nazi Germany in World War II and engineered the country's ascent as a global powerhouse.

For many others, that ascent was made using millions of Russians' lives as grist. Historians estimate that Stalin's decrees led to the deaths of as many as 20 million people, either from famine, execution, incarceration in labor camps or during mass deportations.

In reading this I'm reminded of one of the most memorable essays I read as an undergraduate, during my training in Soviet poltics and foreign policy: Nina Andreyeva's, "I Cannot Forego My Principles." Andreyeva was a schoolteacher in Leningrad who emerged as a spokeswoman for great Russian nationalism during the Gorbachev reforms of the late-1980s. Her essay is remarkable especially for its shaming incredulity and unabashed nationalism. I've looked unsuccessfully for a copy of the essay online, although this passage from Philip Boobbyer's, Conscience, Dissent and Reform, captures the essence of Stalinist rehabilitation.

Gay Radicalism Key to Left's Agenda Under Obama

As regular readers know, the next stage of the left's agenda emerged on November 5th, the day after the election when Democrats saw the historic victory of the country's first black president. Obama's win was nevertheless regarded as "bittersweet" for many, as voters in California also passed Proposition 8, which restored marriage traditionalism to the state's constitution.

Since then, we've seen a non-stop campaign of intimidation and show trials against the "bigots" and "homophobes" who exercised their rights by contributing to and voting on the passage of the initiative. We've already seen a lot of grumbling on the left during the Obama transition, of course. Leftists have been boiling with resentment over the "lack of representation" by "progressives" in the cabinet, as we've seen according to story after story in the press. But Barack Obama's selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver an invocation at the inaugural is probably the best indicator of the all-or-nothing battle the left has begun to wage even before the new Democratic regime is installed.

For the second day in a row, Memeorandum has been flooded with blog posts and essays decrying the Warren pick. Sarah Posner, at the Nation, gets right to the nub of the matter:

Now it has officially gone too far: Democrats, in their zeal to appear friendly to evangelical voters, have chosen celebrity preacher and best-selling author Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration.

There was no doubt that Obama, like every president before him, would pick a Christian minister to perform this sacred duty. But Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics. Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Warren has done a masterful job at marketing himself as a "new" kind of evangelical with a "broader agenda" than just fighting abortion rights and gay marriage. He dispatches members of his congregation to Africa to perform AIDS relief and has positioned himself as a great crusader for bringing his "purpose-driven" pabulum to the world.

Faith in Public Life, a nonprofit cultivated by the Center for American Progress, was so wowed by Warren that it co-sponsored a presidential forum in August at Warren's Saddleback Church. There, his "broader agenda" included asking Obama whether he believed that life began at conception (which Warren believes, he says, based on the Bible, not science) and to ruminate on the nature of evil. (As for Pastor Rick, he believes the Bible dictates that the US government "punish evildoers," as in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) ....

Warren protests that he's not a homophobe; it's just that two dudes marrying, in his mind, is indistinguishable from an adult marrying a child, a brother marrying his sister, or polygamy. He thinks his AIDS relief efforts represent an elevated form of Christianity over those non-evangelical do-gooders whom he compares to "Marxists" because they're more interested in good works than salvation. The rejection of the "social justice" gospel in favor of the salvation-focused evangelicalism that has come to dominate the definition of "Christian" lies at the heart of the religious right agenda to marginalize liberalism and harness its political power.

Warren represents the absolute worst of the Democrats' religious outreach, a right-winger masquerading as a do-gooder anointed as the arbiter of what it means to be faithful. Obama's religious outreach was intended, supposedly, to make religious voters more comfortable with him and feel included in the Democratic Party. But that outreach now has come at the expense of other people's comfort and inclusion, at an event meant to mark a turning point away from divisive politics.

Everyone from the lowest of the 9th tier bloggers to the biggest headliners on the web has weighed in on the debate.

And while it's probably too late for gay activists and their radical backers to get Obama to change his mind on Warren, the episode will be used as a stepping stone to an even higher stage of secular radicalism under the coming political order: the total eradication of religion in public life. Steve Benen sponsors that meme:

This is the wrong fight: The real problem isn't with who will give the invocation, but rather, the fact that there's going to be an invocation in the first place. We had 144 years of presidential inaugurations, dating back to George Washington, in which there was no invocation and no benediction. This shouldn't be a fight over which pastor delivers the prayer; this should be a fight over the official prayer itself.

This is the face of our enemies, folks, that's right ... the enemy of American traditionalism and values of faith and decency. The gay activists and their nihilist proponents are positioning for a battle of the highest stakes, and they'll take no prisoners. Where once this country was considered "one nation under God," now were a people divided between those who may find guidance from above and those who would hand down retribution on people who dare even seek such spiritual solace.

Caroline Kennedy and the Family Dynasty

The recent media attention to Caroline Kennedy, who is lobbying for an appointment to the U.S. Senate, is not that big of a deal to me. She's certainly under-qualified, but I'm one of those who remains fascinated by the Kennedy mystique, and seeing Caroline in power in Washington will likely give many Americans a warm sense of nostalgia in a period of tumultuous socioeconomic change.

Caroline's by no means assured an appointment, of course, despite all her glamour and name recognition. As John Fund reports, New York Governor David Paterson, himself recently appointed to office upon the fall of Eliot Spitzer, has a powerful incentive to appoint New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to replace Hillary Clinton. By sending Cuomo to Washington, Paterson would remove one of his top rivals in home state politics.

Today's Los Angeles Times offers an interesting take on all of this, focusing on New York's dynasty politics. Recall, for example, that Cuomo is a former in-law to Caroline, having once been married to Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Caroline's late uncle.

In any case, I like this section from the Times article:

The joke in the U.S. Capitol this week is that a primal scream echoing through the hallways is from the senior senator from New York, Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat with a voracious appetite for attention even by the self-promotional standards of Washington. He was first overshadowed when the former president's wife waltzed in to New York to win her Senate seat in 2000. And now he may again be eclipsed by the supernova of the 51-year-old Kennedy, even though it's unclear, as one graybeard of New York politics put it, whether "she can cut the mustard."

This is a woman who long avoided the public -- a seemingly shy princess of Camelot who moved with her reclusive mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and younger brother, John Jr., to Manhattan's Upper East Side a year after her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. She later graduated from Radcliffe College at Harvard University and Columbia Law School; she married Edwin Schlossberg but never officially changed her name. She wrote and edited books and became a fixture not only at the openings of the American Ballet Theatre but also on the walk to school with her daughters and at her son's basketball scrimmages in sweaty public school gyms.

Kennedy has always been close to Uncle Ted, the iconic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy from Massachusetts, who walked her down the aisle and whom she reportedly speaks to several times a week.

But she only began stepping out as a high-profile political surrogate earlier this year after delivering a timely endorsement of Obama over Clinton.

"She always asked campaign staff on the ground how she could make the most out of her appearances, and apparently she did," said Joel Benenson, a former New York political writer and the lead pollster for the Obama campaign.

Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist close to the Kennedy family for decades, said Caroline Kennedy needed to get her children launched (two of the three are in college) before she was ready to move into a more public chapter of her life.

Citing her inherent intelligence and leadership at the Harvard University Institute of Politics and John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Shrum said: "She'd be a terrific senator. Caroline has always been interested in politics and public life."

Still, it is one thing for Kennedy to be treated as an admired flower under glass and quite another to be the target of pesky political observers and covetous rivals.

Despite the collective swooning over Kennedy this week, it's far from certain that she is a shoo-in to become the next senator from New York. (More back story: Her uncle Bobby, who was also assassinated, once had the same job.)

See more analysis at Memeorandum (here and here).

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Making Teen Pregnancy Easy

Here's a troubling story on girls having babies, "Too Young for This: They're Having Babies. Are We Helping?:

Teenage pregnancy has been bright on American radar screens for the past year: TV teen starlet Jamie Lynn Spears's pregnancy caused a minor media storm last December. The pregnant-teen movie "Juno" won Oscar nods. And there was Bristol Palin, daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, bringing the issue front and center during the recent presidential campaign. But I've been observing the phenomenon up close for a couple of years now, and the picture I see is more troubling than any of those high-profile pregnancies make it seem.

The somber statistics about teen motherhood are the reason the day-care center, run by the local nonprofit Campagna Center, was opened in T.C. Williams two years ago. The idea is to keep the girls in school, let them get their diplomas and help them avoid the kind of fate described earlier. I've been a teacher for more than 30 years, and I want the best for my students and to help them succeed in every way possible. I know that these girls need support. But I can't help thinking we're going at this all wrong.

On the surface, Alexandria seems to be striving to stem teen pregnancy. Every high school student is required to take a "family life" course that teaches about birth control, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy. The Adolescent Health Center, a clinic providing birth control, was built a few blocks from the school. The city-run Campaign on Adolescent Pregnancy sponsors workshops for parents and teens. But none of this coalesces to hit the teens with the message that getting pregnant is a disaster. And within the school, apart from the family life class, the attitude is laissez-faire, as if teachers and administrators are afraid to address the issue for fear of offending the students who have children.

Once a girl gets pregnant, though, the school leaps in to do everything for her. But I wonder: Is it possible that all this assistance -- with little or no comment about the kids' actions -- has the unintended effect of actually encouraging them to get pregnant? Are we making it easier for girls to make a bad choice and helping them avoid the truth about the consequences?

And for many, it does seem to be a choice. "There's a myth that these pregnancies are accidental," says school nurse Nancy Runton. "But many of them aren't. I've known girls who've made 'I'll get pregnant if you get pregnant' pacts. It's a status thing. These girls go around school telling each other how beautiful they look pregnant, how cute their tummies look."

Read the whole thing, here.

Local health agencies provide birth control shots ("DMPA/Depo-Provera every three months") ...and the parents of the girls are cool with it:

The fact is, says Robert Wolverton, medical director of the teen health clinic, most of these girls and their families see no problem with being unmarried and having a child at 16 or 17."

Gay Activists Go Ballistic on Warren Invocation

Barack Obama has asked Pastor Rick Warren to deliver a religious invocation at the presidential inauguration. Perhaps this is an effort by Obama to "transcend partisanship" and end "the politics of division," or some other mushy sentiment to that effect.

I'm a little disappointed in Warren, actually. In the end Obama will satisfy the radical gay rights constituency by pushing all the big homosexual demands, eventually caving on gay marriage as well; in turn, getting chummy with folks like Warren won't help much on the conservative side, especially as Obama's administration proceeds to dismantle the right's substantial achievements on the pro-life agenda over the past three decades.

Already, as the Politico reports, gay rights groups are flipping their wigs over the announcement:

Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to perform the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.

Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

The rapid, angry reaction from a range of gay activists comes as the gay rights movement looks for an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Last summer gay groups complained, but were rebuffed by Obama, when an “ex-gay” singer led Obama’s rallies in South Carolina. And many were shocked last month when voters approved the California ban.

Folks should read some of the full responses themselves, for example, the Human Rights Campaign, which states:

Our loss in California over the passage of Proposition 8 which stripped loving, committed same-sex couples of their given legal right to marry is the greatest loss our community has faced in 40 years. And by inviting Rick Warren to your inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have a place at your table.

There's lots more unhinged gay outrage at Memeorandum.

This is the next battle of the renewed culture war unleashed by Yes on 8 in California. Gay rights groups will not rest until they browbeat and intimidate all sides, ultimately forcing Obama to capitulate on homosexual marriage and God only knows what else.

I don't see the upside for anyone here, neither Obama in the short run nor Rick Warren altogether; but there's no doubt the gay-haters are thrilled by another chance to launch a new wave of intolerance against mainstream Americans.

American Military Power is Not Going Away

Robert Kaplan offers an excellent response to the renewed debate on American relative international decline, "A Gentler Hegemony":

Near the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had almost 600 ships; it is down to 280. But in aggregate tonnage that is still more than the next 17 navies combined. Our military secures the global commons to the benefit of all nations. Without the U.S. Navy, the seas would be unsafe for merchant shipping, which, in an era of globalization, accounts for 90 percent of world trade. We may not be able to control events on land in the Middle East, but our Navy and Air Force control all entry and exit points to the region. The multinational anti-piracy patrols that have taken shape in the Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden have done so under the aegis of the U.S. Navy. Sure the economic crisis will affect shipbuilding, meaning the decline in the number of our ships will continue, and there will come a point where quantity affects quality. But this will be an exceedingly gradual transition, which we will assuage by leveraging naval allies such as India and Japan.

Then there are the dozens of training deployments around the world that the U.S. military, particularly Army Special Forces, conducts in any given week. We are all over Africa, Asia and Latin America with these small missions that increase America's diplomatic throw-weight without running the risk of getting us bogged down. Aside from Iraq and Afghanistan, our military posture around the world is generally light, lethal and highly mobile. We have been quietly reducing land forces in South Korea while compensating with a more effective air and naval presence. In Colombia, platoon-size numbers of Green Berets have been instrumental in fighting narco-terrorists; in Algeria, such training teams have helped improve our relationship with that formerly radical Arab country. Such stripped-down American military deployments garner no headlines, but they are a formula that works.

The Marines, after becoming virtually desert forces since 2001, will return to their expeditionary roots aboard amphibious ships in the Greater Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. American military power is not going away. But instead of being in-your-face, it will lurk just over the horizon. And that will make all the difference.

In sum, we may no longer be at Charles Krauthammer's "Unipolar Moment," but neither have we become Sweden. Declinism of the sort being preached will go immediately out of fashion at the world's next humanitarian catastrophe, when the very people enraged at the U.S. military because of Iraq will demand that it lead a coalition to save lives. We might have intervened in Darfur had we not been bogged down in Iraq; after Cyclone Nargis, our ships would have provided large-scale relief, had Burma's military government allowed them to proceed. As world population rises, and with vast urban areas with tottering infrastructures in the most environmentally and seismically fragile zones, the opportunities for U.S. military-led disaster relief will be legion. The American military remains a force for good, a fact that will become self-evident in the crises to come.