So Chris Orr really doesn’t like The Happening.  No, that doesn’t quite capture it: he glories in how supremely horrible it is.  This is very much in line with other reviews of it that I have read, most of which have been in the vein of “I wonder if Shyamalan will ever find the place where he left his talent?  It’s probably still sittng in some Pennsylvania farm town even as we speak.”  I have to wonder if Shyamalan wasn’t already tempting fate more than a little to have it released on Friday the 13th, but from everything reviewers have said about it there would have been no day auspicious and lucky enough to save this clunker.  I say all of this as a confirmed Shyamalan fan, one of those few people who thought there were a few interesting parts to Signs and who thought that the premise of The Village was mildly interesting.  Shyamalan’s interest in the peculiarities of places and his constant attachment to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania countryside kept intriguing me even when the stories and the Big Ideas they were supposed to be expressing became increasingly hard to take.  Even after I saw The Village, I kept hoping that there had been some terrible mix-up, but then I saw Lady in the Water and my hope died like a badly-wounded narf in an apartment complex.  The Happening is the result of failing to pay attention to anything anyone said about why Lady in the Water was an awful movie and was also the result of the insistence of “writer-director M. Night Shyamalan” to keep writing his own scripts.  The last few years of following Shyamalan has been like watching the arc of George Lucas’ creative career, but without the really impressive first decade.

I scored 5 out of 7 on Der Spiegel’s German citizenship quiz (via Sullivan), which is pretty bad since I studied German for six years and probably ought to have known all of the answers.  If these questions are representative of the difficulty level of the test, it’s not clear to me why the citizenship test is at all controversial.  The questions seem to be concerned with basic civics and understanding of German law and politics, which is what you would expect citizens to need to know, and for anyone actually living in Germany they shouldn’t be very challenging at all.  Happily, I am a bit more up on my American civics.

Gingrich needs to go back to proposing space-based air traffic control and Census Bureau change we can believe in, so he will stop saying these things:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal “would be far and away the best candidate” to appear on the Republican presidential ticket with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

The good news for McCain is that Gingrich’s imprimaturon an idea these days means that it is almost by definition impractical or absurd, which should make it much easier for McCain to avoid the blunder of choosing Jindal.  Jindal could be a good choice…in another sixteen years or so.  Fortunately, Jindal keeps making it quite clear that he wants to stay in Louisiana, as well he should. 

Beyond being an unwise choice in itself, the whiff of desperation that choosing Jindal would give off would badly undermine McCain’s campaign more than just about anything else.  Like a Webb choice for Obama, a Jindal choice for McCain would draw attention to all of the presumed liabilities that the VP choice is supposedly going to offset.  McCain’s age and lack of polish in speaking are obvious, and there’s no hiding either one, but it makes no sense to have people dwell on these factors, especially when the age factor will make voters even more concerned that the VP nominee can take over if necessary at any time.  At 37 and one year into his first term as governor, Jindal simply doesn’t fit the bill at the present time, and leading Republicans should be pushing other selections if they must speculate about the choice.

On the main blog, Michael seems to be challening Yglesias to a duel:

Yet Yglesias has the stones to frame Iraq as an isolated freakout? A one-off after decades of uninterrupted, unimpeachable successes of the establishment.

As I noted last week, there is a powerful need among internationalists, whether they are realists or liberal internationalists, to treat the war in Iraq as an entirely radical departure from what the establishment was willing to do before, even though many realists and liberal internationalists (including, well, Yglesias) were perfectly willing to go along with the invasion or at least keep their reservations to themselves.  This makes it easier for them to attribute their own blunders to the post-9/11 atmosphere rather than acknowledge something essentially flawed in their assumptions about U.S. interference in other states’ affairs.  The “establishment” was on board with the war, or unwilling to stop it, because invading Iraq was not fundamentally different from the other wars that it had endorsed or tacitly accepted.  Indeed, the formal case for the war flowed out of the bipartisan consensus in Washington about Iraq that had been established in the early ’90s and had gone largely unchallenged except from the margins of the political spectrum. 

In his list, Michael forgets to include what may be the most appropriate comparison and what is also one of the most forgotten aggressive wars of the last twenty years: our unjustified invasion of friendly disagreement with Panama in late 1989, which was carried out for the express purpose of cleaning up President Bush’s CIA legacy regime change.  Toppling Hussein was ultimately just a much larger-scale version of Get Noriega, and it was so uncontroversial (in Washington) that it has all but fallen down the memory hole. 

Troparion 

Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, Who hast revealed the fisherman as most wise By sending down upon them the Holy Spirit; Through them Thou didst draw the world into Thy net. O Lover of Man, Glory to Thee!

Kontakion 

When the Most High came down and confused the tongues, He divided the nations; But when He distributed the tongues of fire, He called all to unity. Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the all-holy Spirit!

As the Belarussian nun who was visiting us yesterday said to me, “Happy Pentecost!” 

She mentioned that a British priest had visited their convent, and they had enjoyed a “small Pentecost” because the two priests had served in their respective languages.  Of course, almost all Orthodox churches here in the U.S. use multiple languages in services, so we are fortunate to have these small Pentecosts every week.

Sullivan:

But an expansion of troop presence in the tens of thousands deep into the Arab heartland is a huge shift – the first real shift since the end of the Cold War [bold mine-DL]. And that makes this election a very profound one in many ways: it’s about the direction of the US – the meaning of the US – in a post-Cold War world. A permanent Iraq presence really does mean an imperial future for the US – revealed nakedly for what it is.

Replace Iraq with Saudi Arabia, rewind seventeen years and you could say exactly the same thing, because the “huge shift” occurred in the early ’90s and meaningful political resistance to that shift was never very great.  There seems to be a great need to act as if the invasion of Iraq marks a radical departure from the interventionism of the ’90s and the prolonged military presence in the Gulf, when it would have been unthinkable without both for a number of reasons.  Without the presence in the Gulf, the embargo of Iraq and the ten-year air war against Iraq, it is difficult to imagine what else would have so motivated predominantly Saudi terrorists to strike at the U.S., but more directly it is impossible to imagine anyone believing Iraq to pose a threat to the U.S. had we not spent an entire decade treating Iraq as a bombing range and viewing its government as our principal foe in the world.   

That is another thing about mission creep and empire-building: it can always be described in the beginning as an act of defense (even if interventionist or hostile policies that helped pave the way for an attack had been in place long before).  Even if you take the initial claim of self-defense to be true, it is the persistence in maintaining control or a military presence in places where none is needed any longer that separates empires from other powers.  That is why in a very meaningful way our involvement in WWI had no meaningfully imperialistic overtones to it; it was a bad idea, but it was not a case of imperialism of any kind because all of our forces came home once the war was over.  Indeed, the problem with our involvement with WWI was its crusading anti-imperialism directed at other states. 

Rome eventually dismembered Pontus in response to an attack on Roman citizens in Asia, and it occupied Egypt when the latter took sides in the civil wars, but then the Romans never left.  Their empire expanded by fits and starts, and often they acquired new provinces through some wars that could fairly be described as defensive (as well as some that were cases of out-and-out aggression), but it was above all the decision to remain and oversee these new lands, whether through intermediaries or directly, that made them what everyone acknowledges to be an empire.

James’ observation is correct, but aside from being another occasion to say that popular opinion is no guide to making good policy I would add that the frequent comparisons made between a long-term presence in Iraq and other long-term presences in Korea, Germany and elsewhere makes for an exceptionally good reason to leave Iraq immediately.  It is clear that people easily become accustomed to the idea of long-term presences in other countries, which is why they should not be given the time to get accustomed to the idea.  The long-term deployments in Korea, Germany and elsewhere, whatever legitimate and appropriate purpose they once served, are no longer necessary.  A long-term presence in Iraq is not now and never will be necessary, so whether or not “the American people” will accept it misses the point: they have continued to accept long-term deployments and alliances long after these became obsolete, which suggests that the people’s willingness to accept outdated and unnecessary policies should not be a factor in embarking on a genuinely foolish and costly course of action. 

Washington made the choice to undertake the “huge shift” without any real consultation or consent from the people in 1991, and so we remained in the Gulf and around the world.  Leaving Iraq would be a first step to correcting that error.

The distinguishing characteristic of Hyde Park’s political history – the feature that sets it apart from every other neighborhood in the city – is its longstanding defiance of the Chicago machine. ~Thomas Frank

That must be why Obama, true son of Hyde Park, is deeply opposed to the Chicago machine.  Oh, wait, that’s completely untrue:

Obama the reformer is backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Daley boys. He is spoken for by Daley’s own spokesman, David Axelrod.  He was launched into his U.S. Senate by machine power broker and state Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd).

As I have made clear already, I think the Hyde Park-bashing attack is ridiculous, but any notion that Obama gets to take credit for Hyde Park residents’ opposition to machine politics in Chicago is even more so.  Did the WSJ give Frank a regular column deliberately as a way to embarrass the left, or was it just a happy accident?

The age and party affiliation table from the latest Pew survey shows the demographics of party identification in great detail.  Pay attention especially to the marriage gap in the very bottom of that table: among 18-29 year olds, where the greatest gap between the two parties is to be found (58-33 D/R overall), there is essentially no gap among married people (44-43), but among the unmarried it remains a vast 30-point difference that benefits the Democrats (61-31).  As the overall number suggests, there are far more unmarried than married 18-29 year olds and significantly more than there have been in previous generations.  This is consistent with what others have been finding, and helps confirm one of the basic structural reasons why the GOP continues to have as much support as it still does and why its future in its current form is extremely bleak.

Jim Antle notes that he fits the Obamacon profile pretty well, and I have to say that the same goes for me, except for the small problem that neither of us supports Obama’s election.  You’d think that a paleo in Hyde Park would be the quintessential Obamacon, but that is not so.  A repeal or amending of the PATRIOT Act is not likely forthcoming under an Obama administration, when he voted to reauthorise the Act in 2006.  Jim’s reservations about Obama’s position on Iraq and mine are very similar.  Here is Jim’s point:

Second, given that Obama’s proposed Iraq exit is conditional upon there being no “security vacuum filled with terrorism, chaos, ethnic cleansing and genocide that could engulf large swaths of the Middle East and endanger America,” he might not actually end the war in any meaningful sense. 

As I speculated a few months ago:

Indeed, this is another case where Obama’s instinct for interventionism will probably prevent withdrawal from Iraq, or will require an immediate re-deployment for the sake of “stopping genocide.”  A hardened realist might wash his, our, hands of Iraq and refuse to be drawn back in; Obama’s foreign policy-as-moral preening would demand another intervention.  Immediately the political debate would be inverted, as progressives suddenly discovered the virtues of interventionist warfare once again and Republicans would be outraged at the “distraction” from our real security threats.     

Discussing Bruce Bartlett’s article on the “rise” of the Obamacons, which I suppose must go beyond a trend and consitutes an entire movement of at least eleven people, Jim writes:

Finally, there isn’t much evidence that Obamacons exist in large numbers at the grassroots level. Most polls show McCain winning twice as much Democratic support as Obama wins Republican support. In past elections, it has tended to be the least conservative Republicans who have voted Democratic. Bloggers, columnists, academics, and other conservative elites are important, perhaps more so than the average voter. But if Obamacons are men (and women) without a country, their “rise” won’t have much impact on the election.

What is notable is how concentrated the Obamacon phenomenon is among bloggers, columnists, academics and conservative elites.  Or perhaps a better way to put it is “limited to” these people, since there is no groundswell of pro-Obama sentiment on the right.  As Jim suggests here, the “Obamacan” (i.e., Republicans for Obama) phenomenon is more electorally significant, and yet is ultimately not much greater than typical levels of crossover voting for the Democratic nominee.  Where Kerry got 7%, Obama typically gets 10%.  As I’m sure others have noted, there are fewer self-described Republicans out there, so there are a lot of former Republicans, some of whom may be supporting Obama, thus increasing his numbers among independents.  The reason why the Obamacon phenomenon is so small is that it requires a tremendous act of imagination and equally tremendous trust in a major party politician for a conservative to rationalise supporting a Democratic candidate for President, and most people haven’t the time or inclination for either one.