The American Conservative

Earlier this month, Peter Hitchens flew to America for a debate with his brother Christopher. There is something facile and cheap about the “Hitchens vs Hitchens” pantomine–Peter Hitchens is uncomfortably aware of it–but the discussion is nonetheless very interesting.

If inclined, you can watch all the clips here.

I’m sure there’s a downside, but it is kind of awesome that Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy Newsday. There are very few genuinely ambitious 77 year olds out there. Of course Rupert’s politics, to the extent they can be intuited from what appears on Fox News, are pretty dreadful. But as I remember from my Postie days, he’s super smart, able to process the implications of business choices far faster than most top executives. And fearless. Years ago he knew nothing about the internet, at one point asking me about my little AOL account. “Can you track a stock portfolio on it?” Yes sir, you can. Now he owns, what, MySpace and who knows what else.

If he can finesse the purchase of Newsday, he will own three of five New York City papers, and three of the nation’s top ten. This could well seem an unhealthy concentration of editorial control in the hands of one person. But even Rupert won’t live forever. That raises the interesting question–who will inherit the Murdoch properties? The betting favorite is his son James, now the head of News Corps European and Asian divisions.

James seems a bit of a rebel, a Harvard drop-out with interest in film who started a rap music label in the 1990′s. Judging from this very concerned story in New York Sun, he at least at one time had very un-Rupert like views on the Mideast. During a 2002 dinner with his father and Tony Blair, James reportedly said his father’s Mideast views were were “f——- nonsense” . When Rupert said he didn’t see what the Palestinians problem was, James said “‘it was that they were kicked out of their f—— homes and had nowhere to f——- live.’”

This is, to say the least, a different view of the Israel-Palestine situation than that now presented in the Journal’s or NY Post’s editorial pages. Personal and family ownership of the media can have curious and unanticipated consequences.

Some of my friends in the reality-based community who have been celebrating the alleged resurgence of foreign policy realism in Washington, in the forms of Robert Gates and Condi Rice, and have been expressing confidence that a U.S. military confrontation with Iran will not take place before the elections in November. I’ve been very skeptical and have continued to insist that a confrontation with Iran before November is more likely than not, either as a result of an Israeli strike against Iran/Osirak Redux? or a Persian Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

I think that the Petraeus nomination of to lead Central Command and reports from Israel suggest that we’re going to have a “surpise” or “surprises” re U.S./Iran/Israel which is (are) going to help John McCain in his race against either Barck Obama or Hillary Clinton. And depending on the date of the “surprise(s),” it (they) could also play into the hand of Hillary as she tries to convince the Superdelegates to select her as the Democratic presidential candidate.

In any case, it’s not surprising that President Bush is confident that when it comes to Iran and Iran and his successor, “We’ll fix it so he’ll be locked in.” From that perspective, Bush is the realist.

Being a typewriter iMac agrarian, I don’t have experience raising chickens but I do sympathize with Lanz’s point about what is and is not acceptable in suburbia. When I lived in Port Townsend, Washington I remember hearing the occasional rooster crow while walking to work and nobody seemed to mind.

P.S. Is this a great blog or what? You won’t see this subject debated at the Corner.

Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.  The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau’s opening of a full investigation.  One source reports that the National Security Agency was provided with Yosef Yagur’s current phone number and address and was able to obtain corroborating information on the case by tapping the phone.   Yagur, who is now retired and living in Israel, was Kadish’s case officer, handling the cases of both him and Jonathan Pollard.  Before the anonymous leak of information, the FBI had no idea that Kadish had been a spy for Israel.  Now it is investigating a number of US citizens, including an individual who held very senior security positions in the Clinton and Bush White Houses. 

The leak of the information at the present time is believed to be linked to proposed closed congressional hearings at the end of this month in which the White House had planned to use several Israeli intelligence officers to provide evidence on the alleged Syrian nuclear program that was bombed on September 6, 2007.  It is now unlikely that Israeli intelligence officers will allow themselves to be questioned because they would almost certainly be asked about Israeli spying on the US.  Vice President Dick Cheney and Olmert had apparently planned on using the congressional briefings as a launch pad to intensify diplomatic and military pressure against both Syria and Iran.  It is believed that the “doves” in the Olmert administration who leaked the information are seeking to make a military confrontation more difficult and are hoping that negotiations, particularly with Syria, will instead take place.  The revelation of more Israeli spying will also make it more difficult for Jonathan Pollard to be released from prison.  There has been speculation that President Bush would pardon him before leaving office as a favor to Israel and the neocons. 

My maternal grandfather was a farmer—the kind with calloused hands who depended on the land for a living. With apologies to Clark, the romance of raising chickens would have been lost on him. Housing them in the yard of a townhouse in metro D.C.? Crazy.

In his autobiography, Mostly on the Edge, Karl Hess denounced the excesses of “self-reliant independence, of decentralism carried to any extreme,” calling it “an idealized form of hermitism.” He reprinted a letter he wrote to Jeffrey Hart in July 1990:

This letter, an apology, is long overdue even though possibly beyond your caring or memory. Nonetheless, I beg your patience and your attention to it.

Some years ago, when I spoke at Dartmouth, you and I got into a crazy sort of shouting match over the division of labor. We exchanged rather acrid letters on the subject also.

In that exchange, I shortly came to realize, you were absolutely correct and I was absolutely trendy, ideological, and wrong…

The center of our small storm in the lecture hall was your insistence that you would prefer not to go to the trouble of learning how to and then making your carbon-composite tennis racket.

My position, being mind-tossed by visions of people, in their own communities, being able to do everything, was that you not only could but should make your own tennis racket.

As with many wholly ideological exercises, I did not care to grasp the essential fact of the matter which was that I couldn’t make the tennis racket either. Moreover, being a welder at that time, I soon realized that I could not generate my own acetylene or oxygen in sufficient quantities to be significant for my work. Still, I must admit, as an ideologue, that I resisted the realization as much as possible…

When my aorta did burst, requiring an entire squad of surgeons and attendants to remove my heart and re-line and stitch up the offending artery, I had nearly terminal proof that the division of labor is one of the most sensible arrangements humans have contrived.

I now have a more Jeffersonian approach to the matter. I would like to be able to do everything. I try to do what I can but I more sensibly now reserve my strength and time for things I do better than growing vegetables or making your tennis racket…

Like Kelley, I’m not sure what to make of Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania. We’ll probably have to wait for the reactions from those superdelegates. Unless the Democrats want to commit electoral suicide, they need to conclude this race sooner than later.

In any case, some of the results of the exit polls on CNN and CNBC suggest that Iraq didn’t seem to play a major issue in the campaign. But Simon Jenkins in a report from Washington in the British Guardian provides a very original commentary on the impact of the Iraq War, etc. on the election campaign, arguing that the War is the conceptual framework for this presidential race:

Americans still do not travel abroad, and rely on television news for their knowledge of foreign places, which they continue to regard with bizarre suspicion. Hence a world view is lumped in with defence and security in a collective paranoia. And a candidate’s stance on foreign policy is a proxy for his or her character.

To this the candidates must pander. Hence Clinton emphasises her “role” in Kosovo and her “mis-remembered” landing in Bosnia under fire. Obama stresses his links to three world continents and a seminal visit as a young man to Karachi. McCain trumps them by having been tortured by the Vietnamese, a sanctification whose only drawback is that it recalls his age (71).

All must appear trigger happy. McCain may distance himself from the unilateralism of George Bush and remark that Americans must show “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (in Bush’s America the remark was worth reporting). But his team is penetrated by such neocons as Robert Kagan and John Bolton, on the basis that “if we can’t beat him, we can persuade him”. The only thing to be said with confidence about McCain is that his position on everything is uncertain.

Desperate not to be outflanked on defence, Clinton said yesterday that she would “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran bombed Israel. Last week she offered an astonishing nuclear-shield guarantee for neighbours of a nuclear Tehran. Obama duly chided her as “Annie Oakley with a gun”. Yet he has tended to follow her positions with a ready me-tooism, as on Tibet. He offered to bomb Pakistan terrorist hideouts on the basis that even if that country’s President Musharraf “won’t act, we will”. He wanted two more brigades sent to Afghanistan.

I find his analysis of Obama’s dilemmas very, very sensible:

Enthusiasts for Obama, more plentiful beyond America’s shores than within them, regard him as the most plausible candidate to pilot America to a new and more internationalist haven than this. He has spoken of an endgame to America’s hostile relations with the Muslim world and dismisses democratic nation-building in Iraq as “a bunch of happy talk”. He says simply: “We cannot bend the world to our will.”

This may be true, but it is increasingly dangerous for Obama. His handling of foreign policy has been naive and reactive. His weakness is that he seems unknown, not quite American, exotic, elitist, intelligent. He can write his own books, but can he hack his own war?

Hence Clinton’s notorious “red-phone-at-3am” advertisement – implying that a black man with a foreign name could not be trusted with the nation’s defence – was so lethal, especially her aside that “as far as I know” he is “not a Muslim”. It is why, were Obama to emerge from this week’s still uncertain events as the Democratic candidate, the smart money in Washington is still on McCain to win a dirty election.

At a distance I continue to find Obama one of the most exciting and potentially able men to run for the American presidency in a generation. His capacity to transform America’s self-image and world image is colossal. But to do so he must confront America atavistic love affair with war, and that will be hard.

As we wait to see not whether Hillary Clinton has won this primary, but whether she won enough to shut Obama down (is that more than five? Ten? I can’t quite keep up with the tongue-waggers), it’s fun to look at the breakdown of the exit polling. To me, what jumps out is Clinton’s continued negatives, and at first glance, how much race might have played played a role here.

First off, 67 percent of voters feel that Barack Obama is “trustworthy,” while only 54 percent believe Clinton deserves that label. Two-thirds feel her negative attacks went too far, compared to 49 percent who said the same about Obama. These numbers are pretty much in line with previous primaries. (Though it would be interesting to find out what kind of impact Clinton’s late-breaking “Osama ad” had on the electorate, seeing that some 10 percent claim to have made their decision about who to vote for in the last 24 hours).

As for race, it seems, looking at the numbers, Obama wasn’t the right one for the majority of Pennsylvania voters who said race was an important factor in their voting (almost 20 percent) on Monday:

From CNN: Twenty percent of Pennsylvania Democrats said the race of a candidate played an important role in determining their vote. Clinton won those voters by nearly 20 percentage points, 59 percent to 41 percent.

Twenty percent of voters in neighboring Ohio, which voted last month, also said race helped decide their vote – and went for Clinton by 20 percentage points, 59-39.

Sixty percent of white voters went for Clinton in PA, while over 92 percent of African Americans went for Obama.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how this will play on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” but it looks like the “elitist” tag Joe Scarborough and others have tried to press on Obama for the last few weeks may have missed its mark. CNN asked, was there fall-out from “Bitter Gate”? Sixty-six percent said Hillary Clinton was “in touch” with “people like them,” while 65 percent said the same about Obama. To be fair, Clinton trounced Obama among gun owners and self-described church-goers, and that was expected.

I’m sure Scarborough and others were poised to pin this Obama loss on Rev. Wright and his unfortunate remarks about guns and god — and perhaps they still will – but I’m hearing the new storyline: that Obama outspent Clinton 3 to 1 (Clinton already mentioned it like three times in her speech) and can’t “seem to close the deal,” with a subhed (perhaps with an acknowledgment of the aforementioned negative indicators) that voters see Clinton as a “real fighter” and that Democrats, looking at what happened to John Kerry in 2004, don’t want to get ambushed in the general election again. There’s something about nice guys finishing last …

UPDATE — The NYT, which endorsed Clinton previously, has already weighed in on Clinton’s tactics, and the emerging “he outspent me” narrative:

It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Christopher Hitchens’ recent column on Zimbabwe reveals, once again, that Hitchens has remained true to his Marxist roots.  He begins by praising South Africa’s unions for refusing to unload arms shipments for Zimbabwe, writing that this made him “remember very piercingly how good it sometimes felt to be a socialist,” then praises Karl Marx, and ends up commenting that the South African unions that are the object of his praise “have a long record of allegiance to old-line communism,” and that it may be “an old-style red-labor-union tactic” that topples the “capitalist dictator” Mugabe.  In between, he pauses to suggest that Mugabe turned to the dark side as a result of his “old-school missionary Catholicism,” never mentioning the opposition of Zimbabwe’s Catholic bishops to Mugabe’s tyranny. 

Marx good, God bad, in the Hitchensian universe, which worldview does not prevent him from being accepted with open arms by the neocons.   If only Hitchens had studied Divini Redemptoris as assiduously as Das Kapital, he might not be so surprised when a Marxist dictator like Mugabe ends up as a brutal tyrant.

CNBC and CNN are projecting that Hillary is certainly not out, and will probably win in Pennsylvannia. It will be interesting to see whether her comments on Iran helped her among voters. In a way, she has embraced a tougher position on Iran than McCain’s (who only wants to bomb Iran).