State of the Union
The Great Divorce
Michael Brendan Dougherty really hit one out of the park with this article linked by TAC, disassociating himself—if that term is strong enough—from movement conservatism. There are so many great parts that it is hard to summarize, but here are a few high points:
You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:
1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting—whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics—is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we’re supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.
Or:
2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers. . .
The only thing you’re really good at is preserving the conservative movement. And that project bored me to tears. . .
But, we’re done. I tried to “improve you,” from my associate editor perch at a dissenting conservative magazine. Now? I wish you would go away. You’re an obstacle, taking every civic impulse of your audience and turning it into rotten populism. You turn every bit of goodwill and honest anxiety into a sleazy direct-mail fundraiser.
About ten years ago—before Bush—I knew that I was different from movement conservatives, but I figured I at least had a little in common with them. I have long since given up on that illusion. Conservative politicians can’t govern and the intellectuals and activists in the movement don’t seem to care. I noticed several years ago that the animating feature of the Bush administration was their contempt for reality. It took me a few years to realize that the pretty much the whole Republican party and conservative movement are as reality-challenged as Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld.
On a related issue, I’ve seen some people remarking on an ABC News/Washington Post poll question that featured a strong majority (58%) in favor of “smaller government with fewer services.” This filled Freeman Hunt and Glenn Reynolds with glee, but it’s meaningless without specifics. Do these people want to end the American Empire or abolish Social Security and Medicare? Perhaps they want to put Yellowstone up on the auction block, or get rid of the EPA. If you read the very next question, you see that a majority opposes “legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use” even though that would be a small step toward “smaller government with fewer services.”
Dump Bernanke & Audit the Fed
How much damage can one man inflict and still be treated like a saint and savior in Washington?
Ben Bernanke’s career answers that question. The Establishment media has rallied around the current Fed chairman as if his reign was the triumph of wisdom and goodness – instead of a debacle of bursting bubbles and ruined lives.
Even though the Federal Reserve is supposedly independent [insert guffaw here] – Bernanke will not be permitted to continue in his job unless the Senate votes this week to grant him another term.
Sen. Russell Feingold, Sen. Barbara Boxer, and Sen. Byron Dorgan announced last week that they will vote against another term for Bernanke. Unfortunately, I doubt that most Republican senators will have the courage or gumption of these Democrats on this vote.
The Senate will be voting on Bernanke while having little or no idea what the Federal Reserve has done in recent years. That is why Congress must pass Ron Paul’s legislation to Audit the Fed.
These are only first steps, but they would be a giant leap back in the direction of fiscal sanity. The Federal Reserve has been bankrolling the war machine in this country for decades, and a loss for the Fed would make it more difficult to use a charge card for the current or next war.
Roe at 37
A story in today’s Washington Post reveals more about what’s wrong with the pro-life movement than anyone may have realized. William Wan reports:
Many at the rally cited the election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as sign of a shifting momentum to conservative causes like their own.
“Any people from Massachusetts here today?” asked U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of several members of congress who spoke a the rally on the Mall. “Thank you Massachusetts. Thank you for helping us kill the anti-life bill,” he said referring to the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that will be broken once Brown is sworn in.
In other words, many at the March for Life are celebrating the election of a politician, Scott Brown, who believes Roe should remain the law of the land. He happens to oppose one particular bill that would make abortion more readily available. That’s important, and there’s something to be said for political realism. But this takes incrementalism to a whole new level, where it’s pro-life to be pro-Roe as long as you have an “R” next to your name.
The right-to-life movement has been impaled on the horns of a dilemma for 37 years. Republican politicians and conservative movement hacks have long wanted pro-lifers to keep their mouths shut and loyally vote for the party that throws them table scraps. Pro-lifers who want to be realistic think they have to settle for this, even to the point, apparently, of valorizing the pro-Roe Scott Brown. The pro-lifers who commit themselves to principle over partisanship, on the other hand, all too often run down the blind alleys of third-party politics (which isn’t politics at all, but is to politics what “Dungeons and Dragons” is to medieval history) and New Left-style protest theater. (The March for Life itself, of course, is modeled on the civil-rights and antiwar marches of the 1960s, whose successes are vastly exaggerated — if marches could end wars, we wouldn’t be in Iraq today.) Each side is feckless enough to serve as the other’s justification: the quietists, third partiers, and protesters can say, quite rightly, that the incrementalists will never overturn Roe. The incrementalists, on the other hand, can say just as correctly that their critics’ methods can’t even achieve the smallest victories, like enacting parental-consent laws.
If you want to be politically effective, you will probably have to use a major party — but you have to use it, not let it use you. Unfortunately, the people who have the purest motives, who are most habitually inclined to trust the honorable intentions of others, wind up as fodder for the likes of Scott Brown once they get involved in the bloodletting that is politics.
Has Obama Lost White America?
If Republicans will study the returns from Massachusetts, then review the returns from Virginia and New Jersey, light will fall upon the path to victory over Barack Obama in 2012.
Obama defeated John McCain by winning the black vote 24 to one, the Hispanic vote two to one and taking a larger share of the white vote, 44 percent, than did John Kerry or Al Gore. As the white vote was three-fourths of the national turnout, Obama coasted to victory.
Now consider Massachusetts. In the 2008 election, no less than 79 percent of the voters were white, and Obama carried them by 20 points, winning the state 62 to 36.
How did Scott Brown turn that 26-point deficit into a six-point victory? By winning the white vote as massively as did Obama. While there are no exit polls to prove it, we do have exit polls from Virginia and New Jersey, which tend to corroborate it.
Bob McDonnell won the Virginia governor’s race by 17, while McCain lost Virginia by six. As McDonnell did equally poorly with African-Americans, losing the black vote 90 to nine, while McCain’s lost it 92 to eight, what explains his Virginia landslide?
The white vote. McDonnell won Virginia’s white vote 68 to 32, though his opponent was a downstate Democrat more conservative than the Northern Virginia candidates he beat in the primary.
In New Jersey, same story. McCain won 8 percent of the black vote. Gov. Chris Christie won 8 percent of the black vote. How did Christie turn a McCain loss of New Jersey by 16 points into a five-point victory? Read More…
Romneyism
So who won the special election for the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat Tuesday? It wasn’t the former nude Cosmopolitan model, (in case you didn’t know) new-Senator elect Scott Brown. It was the “phantom menance” lurking in the shadows, who’s campaign shaped him and may very well shape the GOP primaries in 2012, former Bay State governor Mitt Romney.
Daily Kos had set up the map of the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race and as turned out, the race followed almost exactly along the Romney model i.e. win the suburban areas to west, southeast and north of Boston and win them by decisive margins to offset Democrat strongholds in and around Boston and western Massachusetts. Scott Brown also won the Romney way, using a charismatic campaign techniques and attacks upon the Democrat “machine” in the state to attract soft partisan (Not independent. If they were truly independent then the Dems wouldn’t control the entire state) voters to his standard. He was also fortunate to run against the same kind of Democrat candidate: a Michael Dukakis-like, good-government type who holds statewide office but who can’t fire up the party’s liberal base in the state, is looked upon with contempt by the ethnic pols who run the legislature and whose personal political skills are so inept that they leave regular voters cold. Substitute Martha Coakley with Scott Harshbarger and Shannon O”Brien and it’s the same thing.
But beyond style and sex appeal (a quality Brown certainly gives sorely-lacking GOP), one gets the impression that Romneyism is a governing ideology all of its own. Just read Sen. Brown’s position on abortion for example from his own website.
Treat That Home Invader Gently
I have been following with some astonishment a story from the UK which has received extensive coverage in the British media, mostly coming from an outraged public critical of the punishment meted out to the two victims of a home invasion. This is today’s BBC report, lightly edited:
A businessman who was jailed for permanently injuring an intruder who attacked him and his family has been freed by the Court of Appeal. Munir Hussain 53, was sentenced to 30 months for grievous bodily harm with intent after he hit Walid Salem with a cricket bat on 3 September 2008. Hussain and his family had been tied up by three intruders at their home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. His jail sentence is now 12 months suspended for two years. These is also a supervision requirement for the two years. Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, who was sitting with two other judges in London, said he had shown “mercy” to Hussain. His brother, 35-year-old Tokeer Hussain, who was also jailed for causing grievous bodily harm with intent, had his 39-month jail term reduced to two years.
The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act provides that homeowners who use reasonable force to protect themselves against intruders, and use no more force than is absolutely necessary, should not be prosecuted. However, there are additional factors. The homeowner should be acting instinctively, fear for their own safety or the safety of others, or act in order to make a lawful arrest (or prevent someone who is lawfully detained from escaping). The law does not protect those who set upon a fleeing criminal or who lie in wait to attack them. This would amount to people taking the law into their own hands. The Lord Chief Justice made it clear that the Hussain case was ‘exceptional’, and that the ‘call for mercy’ had to be answered. Hussain and his brother, who were both described as being at the heart of their community, were imprisoned in December after being found guilty at Reading Crown Court. The court heard Hussain and his wife and children returned from their local mosque to find intruders wearing balaclavas in their home. They were tied up but the businessman escaped and enlisted his brother to help chase the offenders down the street, bringing one of them to the ground. The pair left Salem with a permanent brain injury after hitting him with a cricket bat. The force of the blow was so hard that it broke the bat into three pieces. Lord Judge said: “This trial had nothing to do with the right of the householder to defend themselves or their families or their homes. “The burglary was over and the burglars had gone. No one was in any further danger from them.” The decision to free Hussain comes one day after judges rejected his appeal against his conviction.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said people who put themselves in danger to tackle criminals should be celebrated as “heroes”. Courageous members of the public “make our society worthwhile”, he said as part of a widening political debate about the rights of people to use force to defend themselves.
From New Orleans to Port-au-Prince
The superficial breaking news coverage of the earthquake is finally wearing off, and questions are being asked. The most poignant – where is the relief for Haiti?
Emerging reports indicate a massive troop and medical presence – at the Port-au-Prince airport. But disturbing images – coming in seemingly by the hour — suggest that large swaths of the capital and the smaller cities outside have yet to see any aid, including food, water or rescue assistance, since the quake last week. Tensions are roiling, according to reports, not only over the lack of humanitarian relief, but over a perceived “bottleneck” at the airport due to US control of the airspace (apparently a new agreement will circumvent that) and the increasing hype over violence (or lack thereof) among the hundreds of thousands of desperate survivors amid the rubble.
Despite widespread accounts of self-policing, and a relative lack of violence, UN officials are saying that “security” is keeping them from getting help out to where it is needed. “Security is the key now in order for us to be able to put our feet on the ground,” said Vincenzo Pugliese, a U.N. spokesman. He said a lack of security has limited peacekeepers’ access “to the operational theater” — the city beyond the U.N. compound’s walls.
Amy Goodman of liberal Pacifica’s Democracy Now! is on the ground in Haiti and she says the UN is leaving tens of thousands of people without food and water because of this supposed “lack of security.” She reported from Leogane, the epicenter of the quake, outside Port-au-Prince, this morning. She said there has been virtually no sign of aid.
“They are getting almost no help,” she said. “The UN itself made the statement about security. We walked freely from one place to another. The people are desperate but definitely peaceful. All they ask for — they ask for food and water. They ask for search and rescue equipment … and to be told the UN is concerned about security before they get aid – that is a grave concern to people.”
The mainstream news has been juicing up the specter of rioting and looting since the first reporter touched down on Port-au-Prince a week ago. Luckily, they have been disappointed, on the most part. But now, seven days later, extreme hunger and overall desperation are setting in, and the sporadic reports of violence and looting (if that is what you call it when traumatized people, starving, living among the sight and stench of dead relatives, watching their babies and children waste away, start grabbing food from a collapsed grocery store) are apparently enough for some to justify the low expectations of the Haitian population.
One woman told The Washington Post – which apparently needed something to bolster the headline, “Haiti earthquake relief is stifled by chaos in Port-au-Prince” — that she “heard” about food arriving in the capital city, and a subsequent riot when the aid ran out.
“I have been here every day. I heard they gave away some food but there was a riot,” said Jean Marie Magarette, who was camping with her mother, sister and four children. “If you tell me they have been giving out food, I will believe you, but we have been on this spot since the day of the earthquake, and we have not seen anyone give away anything but water.” Read More…
America’s Right Turn
Whether or not Republican Scott Brown captures the Senate seat in Massachusetts today, his surging and successful campaign is a fire bell in the night for the Party of Government.
For Brown has run as an independent, an outsider, a protest candidate. His principal target: the health care reform bill that is the altarpiece of the Barack Obama presidency and lifetime achievement of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
For a full year, Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the leading acolytes of their party and media auxiliaries have been selling this plan as a historic Democratic reform to rival the Civil Rights Act and Social Security.
Yet in this Kennedy compound, the only state to be carried by George McGovern, people want to take this bill out to the crossroads at midnight and kill it. Brown made this race competitive by promising to bring the wooden stake to drive through its heart.
How Democratic is Massachusetts?
Democratic registration is three times that of the Republicans. The party controls both houses of the legislature by huge margins, and holds every statewide office, both U.S. Senate seats and all 10 U.S. House seats. Massachusetts is a Democrat fiefdom, a one-party state.
Independents, however, outnumber Democrats, an indication of the growing disillusionment with both national parties in America
What, then, is the message out of Massachusetts?
For Democrats, the only good news is they got this wake-up call in January. They are on notice now that if they push their health care reform plan to passage and attempt to ride to victory on Democratic registration this fall, they could be vulnerable in almost every state. Read More…
The Not-So-Conservative Politics of Scott Brown
This post is somewhat in line with Sean’s post from Saturday, but, I think there can be a different reading of Scott Brown’s conservative pedigree or lack there of.
Boris Shor, an Assistant-Professor at the University of Chicago, has created a fascinating, and telling, break down of Scott Brown’s votes and political stances in the Massachusetts legislature. Normally, I do not give much thought to the bare bones statistical analysis of politicians and their voting strategies. Statistics are good for a foundation of understanding, but ultimately, as Benjamin Disraeli said (I may be butchering this but this is to the best of my recollection):
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I’m skeptical. After several courses on political and statistical analysis, one develops the sense that numbers are just fun little tools to make lies into truths. But enough of my curmudgeonry towards the mathematics. What Shor has compiled, and revealed is really incredible, but also, the conclusion is extremely important for how conservative activists should approach candidates in the future. Shor states:
Brown is attracting very positive national and state Republican and conservative attention. On the other hand, State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava attracted very negative attention from conservatives in her special election campaign for the 23rd Congressional District of New York.
Brown is actually a liberal Republican who is to be found to the left of Dede Scozzafava! So why, then, the enthusiasm gap in support for the two? This post documents this assertion, and then answers this puzzle.
Shor continues:
Citing my ongoing research on ideology in state legislatures in an earlier blog post, I made some waves by arguing that Scozzafava was actually a conservative Republican in a particular context. That context was the New York State legislature, where Republicans are exceedingly liberal relative to the rest of the country. In fact, she was actually located slightly to the right of the average Republican in the legislature. Despite this, there was a firestorm of opposition to her, leading to an insurgent challenge by Doug Hoffman under the Conservative Party label and her subsequent withdrawal from the campaign.
And in regards to Brown:
Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country!
Gitmo Murders & Pentagon Coverup?
Scott Horton of Harper’s has a great piece online on how three detainees at Gitmo were killed during interrogations. The military responded with an elaborate coverup that claimed the three men committed suicide as an “act of asymmetrical warfare.”
The military’s story has been blow to bits in large part by former Gitmo guards who have courageously put themselves at risk by coming forward with the truth.
Horton, a lawyer, has done some of the best and most courageous writing on the torture scandal. He is one of the most credible critics of Bush era abuses.
I assume there will be far more revelations coming out in the coming weeks and months on this case.