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Obviously, the big political story about the midterm elections today has been the huge Republican advantage in Gallup’s generic ballot poll. If this is right and holds true come November, everything I have been saying about the midterms will have been very badly wrong. If Republicans won the midterm vote by ten points or more, [...]
Filed under: politics
My colleague Sheya, director of PalinTV, presented Mrs. Palin with the ArtScroll edition of Perek Shira, a commentary on the song of celebration sung by Jewish women during the exodus from Egypt. Mrs. Palin received the Hebrew volume with obvious delight; she has used the biblical Book of Esther as bedtime reading material for her [...]
Filed under: culture, ecumenism, foreign policy, religion
Ross: To the extent that this theological chasm can be bridged, though, the obvious place to fling out a rope bridge is the question of America’s providential purpose, since both Mormonism and evangelicalism (especially in their more populist manifestations) often incline toward highly-theologized readings of American history, the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence and [...]
Filed under: Christianity, politics, religion
Convinced that his popularity was eternal, Obama responded by saying, yes, but there’s a “big difference” between 1994 and 2010, and that big difference is, “you’ve got me.” The funny thing is, Obama might have been right. Because things might be much worse for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 1994 – and the [...]
Filed under: politics
Frum wrote a particularly unflattering defense of Romney a couple days ago (via Appel), in which he said more or less that Romney was not a very convincing liar: This editorial in fact sums up the Romney problem in a nutshell. By any conventional measure, here is an outstandingly qualified GOP presidential candidate. He’s proved [...]
Ross has an interesting response to my earlier posts on Rauf and the mosque controversy. He writes: The harder question, and the one that’s on the table in the case of Feisal Abdul Rauf, is how we should judge American Muslim leaders when they talk about regimes and movements in the Islamic world that are [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, Islam, politics
Ross: But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with [...]
Conor Friedersdorf points to an odd passage from David Pryce-Jones: Mark Steyn is a humorous writer, but he has a serious purpose, namely to point out that the Western world has Islamist enemies who wish it ill. We could deal with those Islamists except for one thing: A large segment of our fashionable opinion-makers, so [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, Islam, politics
Ross: It’s also important to note that the ideological critique of Catholic immigration wasn’t necessarily crazy. The 19th-century Vatican really did have a very public problem with liberalism and democracy, and it wasn’t unreasonable for Protestant Americans to worry about Catholicism’s ability to conform itself to democratic pluralism. The parallel to the debate over Islam [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, Islam, politics