There were a few bank robbers and counterfeiters. But more than anything, Thompson took on the state’s moonshiners and a local culture, rooted in Tennessee’s hills and hollows, that celebrated the independent whiskey maker’s battle against the government’s revenue agents. ~The Los Angeles Times

Via Alex Massie

In a just and fair world, this would be the death blow to Thompson’s campaign.  Running down still operators and home-made brew to get the government more revenue is a perfect symbol of the kind of petty government intrusiveness that Thompson supposedly opposes.  Who actually prosecutes moonshiners?  What is wrong with the man?

There was also this item from the story:

“It was a game,” said Merritt, the former U.S. attorney. “Gray [the judge] didn’t like these cases. He thought they were a waste of time, and he was right.”

I know just the man to tackle Thompson the Revenuer, and he’s almost as lazy as Thompson is:

I have no excuse.  There were warnings that the Elizabeth sequel was terrible, but I made the mistake of seeing for myself.  This is a perfect example of why movie reviewers are necessary.  You really should take Chris Orr’s word for it: it’s bad!  If anyone is tempted to go see it, just don’t.

When it isn’t painfully boring (which is most of the film), it’s sappy, and when it isn’t sappy it veers into some weird fusion of Patriot-esque speechmaking and retrojected values of liberal tolerance.  As Orr noted, the dialogue is often unpardonably lame.  At one point Elizabeth even gives a little talk on the evils of the Inquisition and England as the bastion of liberty of conscience and thought.  Since pretty much no one today likes the Inquisition, this is an easy way to make her the sympathetic champion of Freedom (her appearance before the assembled English soldiers does have a bit of the Gibsonian “they may take our lives…” element in it), but pretends as if “liberty of conscience” were some universal principle here rather than an invocation of Protestant polemic.  

The director, Shekhar Kumar, has stayed strangely faithful to the original Elizabeth‘s studious reproduction of Protestant and English nationalist historiography on film.  Indeed, in the sequel Kumar has ratcheted up the anti-Catholicism of the first movie.  You could just as easily call this Black Legend: The Movie or The Catholics Are Coming To Get You.   

The portrayal of Philip, were it done to an American or British historical figure, would throw certain people into fits of hysteria.  The treatment of Mary Stuart was hardly any better.  The take-home message seemed to be: “The dagoes and Scots are trying to take away your freedom, so you have to kill them.”     Since English historians have long wanted to ignore the fact that Philip II was also briefly Philip I of England, it would hardly bother many to show Philip, as the movie shows him, as some sort of decrepit, superstitious eunuch who is afraid of the sunlight and talks to himself, or whatever it was we were supposed to conclude about him.

This was also the king who sent a significant portion of the fleet that won at Lepanto over the Ottomans, and who was probably among the most accomplished, albeit flawed, monarchs of the early modern period.  Naturally, Elizabeth’s apologists and myth-makers have always had to tear him down to make their heroine appear more important than she was.  This movie is just one of the more recent and execrable efforts along these lines.   

The opening “historical” introduction manages to ignore completely the contemporary Dutch rebels, whose resistance to Philip’s rule was the reason for Philip’s wars in northwestern Europe.  “Only England stands against him,” the writers pompously tell us.  The Dutch role in defeating the Armada is also ignored.  The Golden Age is the English version of Fred Thompson bombast: England stands alone for freedom!  Never mind that the Dutch kept fighting and dying against the Spanish for another two decades after the Armada was defeated and that Spain’s bankruptcy was related to its constant continental warfare against France to protect the Milan road.  We mustn’t diminish the reputation of the most overrated monarch in English history. 

P.S. Even Mike Potemra agrees on the anti-Catholicism of the movie, so it must be pretty obvious.

Before it became a tourist trap for lunatics and sci-fi geeks, I used to live in Roswell when I was very young.  Unfortunately, after the “incident” became fodder for crackpots Roswell eventually decided to capitalise on its odd reputation, and a “museum” was opened up (followed by a painfully non-New Mexican show on the WB that seemed intent on reminding us just how far removed from New Mexico the show actually was).  Since taking the helm in Santa Fe, old Bill has made it something of a pet cause to “get to the bottom” of the “incident.”  He has continued in this fine tradition:

If he wins his bid for the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson may be just the man to get to the bottom of the 60-year-old Roswell UFO mystery.

My hunch is that Richardson is just trying to be his usual, crowd-pleasing, avuncular self in this case.  Even so, he does keep talking about it often enough that you begin to wonder whether he’s serious.

Via Djerejian, I see that Kakutani of The New York Times reviews Podhoretz’s World War IV:

Instead of trying to produce a reasoned argument for a forward-leaning foreign policy, he has served up a hectoring, often illogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering assertions (often made without any supporting evidence), a book that furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine, be they on the right or the left.

In other words, it’s a typical piece of modern neoconservative argumentation.

P.S.  It occurred to me after it showed up in the news that Mr. Bush made a very careless reference to “World War III,” which obviously was not part of the script.  As Podhoretz would tell us, WWIII has been over for some time, and now is WWIV, which means that Bush was actually meaning to warn us about the outbreak of WWV.

Looking at the relationship between the GOP and Arab-Americans, it is remarkable how much has changed in just seven years.  The time was when Candidate Bush was the one opposed to “secret evidence,” and he actually ended up getting 44.5% of the Arab-American vote in 2000.  He had Spence Abraham in his Cabinet.  The appeal to Arab-Americans was actually the only example of early Bush Era “minority” outreach that really worked come election-time.  Since most Arab-Americans are Christians from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant backgrounds, and many of them are middle-class, it was fairly natural that there would be a Republican constituency among them.  Fast forward to the present, post-Iraq, post-Lebanon, and it is fairly amazing that there still are sizeable numbers of Arab-American Republicans.  Of course, many Arab-Americans are thoroughly assimilated, and those inclined to vote Republican are probably less prone to think in identity politics terms about policy quiestions, but it can hardly have helped the image of the GOP to be the leading force in support of the invasion of one Arab country and the excessive, indiscriminate bombing of another. 

This year Steve Clemons reports on the Arab-American Institute’s National Leadership conference, finding that no leading presidential candidates appeared there in person, with only Ron Paul, Gravel, Kucinich and Richardson making appearances.  Here is another example where Ron Paul is keeping the Republican flag flying in communities where it would otherwise be missing.  Of course, it probably helps with this group to be a candidate who opposed both the PATRIOT Act and the invasion of Iraq.  The three leading Dems sent representatives and taped messages, but no leading GOP campaigns were represented (Michigan “native” son Romney had a few brochures available). 

Clemons finds this absence of the major candidates “outrageous,” and as these things go I suppose it is.  I think it is representative of a general disdain for Arabs and Americans of Arab descent, and it is a function of the ignorance about the Arab-Americans here that is just as appalling as the ignorance about the Christian communities in the Near East to which many of these Americans trace their descent.  In an odd dynamic, the very policies that are uprooting these communities in the Near East are bringing more Arab immigrants to America.  They are in turn going to be ignored by our political class here just as they were in the Near East, but I think this will ultimately be to the detriment of the party that adopts the most aggressive and hawkish policies in the Near East. 

Then again, if I were someone being advised by a Podhoretz or Pipes (Giuliani), a Liz Cheney (Thompson), or a Max Boot (McCain), I wouldn’t expect a favourable reaction to attending such a meeting, because if I were any one of these candidates I would end up saying things that the assembled audience would find either laughable or horrifying.  Romney could go on his riff on how “it’s about Shia and Sunni” and be laughed off the stage.  All of the leading GOP candidates hold policy views that I assume must be very offensive to large numbers of Arab-Americans, so this may be an instance, like McCain ducking CPAC, where the campaigns saw no upside and a lot of potential problems.  Of course, no one in serious contention for the GOP nomination wants to be associated with this event, because I suspect they fear it would hurt their fundraising and their public image with core voters.  I assume Tancredo and Hunter didn’t go as a matter of some principle or other.  Besides, Tancredo is on the record having said multiple times that we should threaten nuclear strikes on Mecca and Medina as a way of “deterring” nuclear terrorism.  Even though most of the audience at this gathering was probably not Muslim, the idea itself is so awful that it is hard to see Tancredo getting anything other than a hostile reception.

Clemons has an interesting observation on the proceedings:

The room seemed majority Republican — but one could feel the tectonic shift of the community to the Democrats — or to Ron Paul — and away from the Republican frontrunners in a number of cases.

This is natural.  When the leadership and leading representatives of a party choose to adopt destructive, wrong-headed policies that harm both Arab-Americans and Arabs, it is only a matter of time before that translates into political changes in domestic party affiliation and support.  At least Ron Paul offers the audience an alternative face of the Republican Party, even if it is one that most Republicans don’t like. 

Obviously there is going to be a vast difference between the influence and draw of AIPAC and the Arab-American Institute.  One can bestow great favours and inflict serious political damage on a candidate, while the other simply hasn’t the clout to do either.

The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been paying attention. ~Barack Obama

Granted, this isn’t how he functions.  The thing about the “politics of hope” rhetoric is that it was always nonsense.  The problem Obama has had is that he made such nonsense the core of his campaign.  His speeches and advertisements have stressed transcending the “smallness of our politics” and bridging “the divisions in Washington,” buying into one of the lamest diagnoses of our present predicament: that our government is actually riven by meaningful disagreement and policy debate.  Would that it were so!  It has been Obama who has led everyone to believe that the “new tone” means always taking the high road, and to date his idea of taking the high road has meant making no direct criticisms of his opponents.  Observers can be forgiven for associating his “hope” talk with his unwillingness to throw at least a few elbows. 

Maybe he doesn’t want everyone to sing Kumbaya, but when a key theme of the campaign is so amorphous and vacuous as his has been it is very easy for observers to interpret the happy talk about hope and unity in ways that Obama never intended it to be taken.  This is where Obama has failed.  He speaks generically about transformation, hope, unity and so on, and most of the time he quite deliberately avoids “drawing distinctions” with particular candidates, taking refuge in vague remarks about “some people” getting things wrong or circumlocutions like “there were those of us who showed poor judgement,” etc.  In his debate performances, he gives the impression of a seminar instructor trying to generate a discussion among his students rather than a candidate for office.  He seems to think that his political rivals are supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt and not turn his positions to their advantage, but then this is more evidence that he isn’t ready to compete in this arena.

On Thursday, a suicide car bomber hit a truck carrying Frontier Constabulary troops through a crowded area of Mingora, killing 19 soldiers and a civilian, and wounding 35.

The devastating attack underlined the worsening security situation in Pakistan, particularly in the conservative region near the border with Afghanistan where militants linked to the Taliban and al-Qaida increasingly hold sway. The rise of militancy in the region has shaken the authority of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in its war on terror. ~AP

Andy McCarthy throws a fit:

Can someone explain to me what is “conservative” about a revolutionary movement that seeks, by mass-murder, to overthrow the established order and set up a tyrannical sharia state?

First of all, McCarthy has read something that isn’t in the story.  The story refers to the “conservative region near the border with Afghanistan.”  As those even a little familiar with these Pashtun borderlands know, the society there is very conservative, certainly by the standards of local tribal customary practice and religion.  According to their traditions, they are the conservatives in Pakistan.  The story was not even describing the Taliban or Al Qaeda.  It was describing the region.  Perhaps McCarthy might argue that its customary conservatism or lack of it is irrelevant to the story and should not have been included, but a good argument can be made that it is precisely this local traditionalism and adherence to patterns of loyalty that take priority over ties to the state that make this region such a valuable area in which pro-Taliban and Al Qaida forces can operate.  Interestingly, later versions of the story have eliminated the designation “conservative” from the relevant sentence, though they have applied it to another, neighbouring region.

Another blow to the imagined Giuliani-Huckabee juggernaut: Club for Growth President Pat Toomey draws a line in the sand and declares Huckabee totally unacceptable as a veep nominee.  So a certain claim that Huckabee was “acceptable to all factions” wasn’t strictly accurate. 

It must be gratifying for the head of an organisation that doesn’t actually win many primary contests to throw its weight about in the ’08 race.  Who knows?  This may have some significant impact.  The spectacle of leading fiscal conservatives declaring Huckabee to be the political equivalent of a leper while the social conservatives hem and haw over whether or not they will actually reject Giuliani is an object lesson in the real priorities of the GOP and the conservative coalition.  When push comes to shove, keeping taxes down is a lot more important than protecting life, and the people who are concerned about the latter are supposed to suffer being ignored meekly and put up no resistance.  If you have ever raised tax once, even if it was to repair what were once Arkansas’ decrepit highways (and as someone who used to have to drive on them every year, let me tell you, they used to be really bad), you are an outcast.  That this gets everything entirely backwards with respect to the relative electoral strength of the different factions within the GOP is obvious: the social-cons bring in a lot more voters and put up with a lot more deviations from their preferred positions than economic conservatives ever have. 

Yet, not surprisingly, the party of corporations and the moneyed interest will sooner pay attention to the econo-cons and tell social conservatives to be quiet and play nice.  This may be the cycle when social conservatives have finally had enough.  Time will tell.

While catching up with my Rasmussen polling news, I came across an interesting July survey figure: 60% of Americans have a favourable opinion of Israel, and 26% have an unfavourable opinion.  The crosstabs of that survey offer some interesting data on where public support for Israel comes from.

More Republicans tend to have a favourable view (68%) than Democrats (58%).  That’s not so surprising.  Some big differences emerge between generations among men.  71% of men 40+ have a favourable view, compared with only 51% of men under 40.  Among women, favourable opinion of Israel is roughly the same: 53% for women 40+ and 56% for women under 40.  The groups with the highest unfavourable rating are 18-29 year olds at 35% vs. 55% favourable and 30-39 year olds at 32%.  Fav/Unfav ratings track income level pretty closely, so that among the lowest income groups unfavs are high (e.g., 38% among those earning less than $20K) and quite low among the wealthiest (12% among $100K+ earners).