Here‘s some grist for James‘ mill:

John Redwood, the right-wing frontbencher who supported Mr Cameron as leader, told The Independent on Sunday that Mr Cameron will begin to set out policies in keeping with “some of our eternal values [bold mine-DL] like ‘yes to lower taxes’

I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism [bold mine-DL]. ~Flemming Rose

This is every bit as absurd describing someone’s criticisms of Islam as an expression of “racism.”  Race is not the main issue for either side.  Race isn’t the subject at all.  This is an example of invoking “racist” as others invoke “fascist”–it is a descriptor that has long ceased to have any content besides meaning “really bad.”  “Islamism” might be less worrisome if it were explicitly racist and insisted that only people from a certain ethnicity or nationality were “real” Muslims, since this would limit its potential reach quite a lot, but, of course, such an idea is pretty much entirely at odds with Islamic tradition. 

As it happens, I sympathise with many of Rose’s views on removing limits on free speech, and I, like so many others last year, argued that his paper was perfectly within its rights to print the cartoons that it printed.  It was gratifying that my Danish cousins resisted attempts to intimidate them into silence.  But this blather about racism suggests that even now Rose is unclear on what the question really is, which is a bit shocking given his personal, central role in such a prominent controversy.

Watch McCain pander:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, that’s a decision the American people would have to make, but personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.

Watch him completely abase himself:

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

Whenever I hear the claim that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” much less that the Constitution “established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” I have to wonder what people are thinking when they say these things.  In McCain’s case, it’s easy: he’s repeating what he thinks primary voters want to hear.  Never in his entire career, so far as I know, has McCain ever held forth on America as a Christian nation.  It would never have occurred to him.  The people who champion this or related ideas have been his adversaries within the GOP. 

It is true that America derives her religious culture from European Christianity, and it is true that Americans have been overwhelmingly Christian all along.  I think this religious heritage should be defended and extolled.  It is an integral part of American cultural identity.  What I really don’t understand is the need to make up these myths that the Republic is founded on “Christian principles” or that you can somehow find this claim in the Constitution.  First of all, these myths are unnecessary.  Second, it is an example of the mistaken drive to locate national and cultural identity in our political institutions and key political texts, when those identities really must be defined in other ways if we are not going to reduce them to ciphers or subordinates part of some political creedalism.

Via Yglesias, I see that Perlstein has a good review of revisionist books on Vietnam.  Not that it will matter to Perlstein, who cannot recognise a basically sympathetic, if perhaps poorly phrased, argument when he sees one, but I happen to find the nationalist habit of revisionism in support of policies of ever-greater militarism and slaughter to be as abhorrent as he does.  His review also succeeds in drawing attention to the revisionists’ comfort with mass killing when it is being done by the ‘right’ people for the ‘right’ reasons, which should help put the crocodile tears many of the same people conveniently shed over the victims of the Cambodian genocide in perspective.

The young whippersnapper Matt Zeitlin makes a good point in his reply to my latest round of Obama-bashing:

The million or more deaths from Malaria each year, millions of people infected by preventable water borne diseases and the approximately one billion people in extreme poverty doesn’t negatively impact our national security, strictly defined, as much as say the ungoverned tribal regions of Western Pakistan being lousy with Taliban and Al-Qaida.  And, if you talk privately to most people who say that extreme poverty of “tropical diseases” are threats to America’s national security, they’ll –after enough drinks — probably admit that they’re playing fast and loose with what “national security” means.  The reason people do this, however, is that America tends to act in the international arena when it thinks that the action will make us safer — and when we do act, we act big.  This is why NGOs, activist and academics in work in the areas of development and international public health have re-tuned their message — governments are more likely to listen if you’re presenting something that’s not just killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but is a threat to the US.

Zeitlin is right that our government tends not to act overseas unless it sees an international problem as a potential security threat (or at least as a cause of later security threats).  I suppose it’s understandable that people who want the U.S. government to take some action on a variety of international woes would try to cast those problems as threats to the United States.  It also doesn’t make Obama’s apparent inability to prioritise real security threats over high-minded concerns for the well-being of foreign peoples any less troubling.  If he doesn’t believe that public health problems in other countries affect our national security, he is trying to play the public, and if he does believe it he is very confused about what our national security interests include.  

It also doesn’t make these claims any more  true, and it seems to me that this sort of “dishonest altruism,” as Zeitlin calls it, will come back to hurt any cause that attempts to frame itself as an aid to national security.  This seems to be a more likely danger for such “altruism” in the wake of an administration that tried to justify anything and everything that it did under the banner of national security and antiterrorism.  If activists and academics cannot make the substantive case that there is some sufficiently good reason for our government to act on this or that question of development or public health by itself, it is implausible that they will be able to win any sustainable support or action from the government by tying themselves into knots to come up a national security rationale.   

It’s also all very well to talk about global interdependency, but this is just another way to spin intervening in someone else’s business as part of our self-interest.  What this kind of thinking will lead to in practice is not a U.S. government engaged in ever-greater levels of international cooperation, as I imagine many people would like to see, but instead one that uses every kind of international problem as a pretext for meddling and intruding on other states’ internal affairs.  Setting a standard of national security interest limits government action overseas to some extent, though we have already seen how expansively “national security” can be defined by ambitious policymakers (especially when it is joined to talk of “values”).  If the definition of national security is permitted to be inflated even more by extending it to climate change or health epidemics or education, there will be no end to the occasions for U.S. meddling.  If future interventions do for combating epidemics what the invasion of Iraq has done for regional stability and nonproliferation, we should be very worried about anyone who wants the U.S. government to take an active interest in the question.  (As the last few years have shown, government is equally incompetent on both sides of the ocean.)         

This convenient invocation of security is worth bearing in mind when some people begin hyperventilating about certain liberal claims that climate change is a greater security threat than terrorism.  This has been a favourite punching bag of some folks on the right, who will, in the same breath, very seriously say that we are in the middle of WWIV against the “existential threat” of Islamofascism.  In fact, climate change doesn’t represent that much of a security threat, but then (and here’s the kicker) the threat of terrorism has also been vastly overblown.  The climate change activists who are now talking in terms of national security are simply seeing the terrorism alarmists and raising them with some extra exaggeration.  “The threat you worry about isn’t existential, but the one I worry about really is!”  This is accompanied by vocal critics on the opposing side: “The threat you describe hardly even exists!”  Terrorism alarmism and climate change alarmism both overwhelmingly benefit the state at our expense.  They continue to exist because each kind of alarmism has a dedicated constituency that is quite happy to yield to the state’s demands in order to, in one way or another, “save the world.”

Wisdom from the matrimonial banquet scene: “Tell them about your degrees and your family, that is very important, but don’t mention your father’s glaucoma.”

My earlier remarks on the matrimonial banquet phenomenon are here.

The whole point of the American Revolution was to establish a country without anyone to run it [bold mine-DL].  We don’t want or need a president who is inclined to run things. We need a President who leads and inspires. Fred, with his non-managerial background, is the only candidate of either party who seems to get this. ~Peter  Mulhern

The whole point?  I rather thought the “point,” so to speak, was to preserve the self-government and constitutional rights of the several colonies.  Liberty and independence and all that.  Evidently, the “whole point” was to make sure that nobody was “running the country.”  Thompson certainly is an incarnation of the hallowed principle of non-management.  No one would suspect that he was going to “run” anything and more observers than ever are becoming convinced that he won’t even do much when it comes to running for President.  His diffidence is an example to us all. 

Mulhern continues:

Fred Thompson isn’t Ronald Reagan. But he can restore the Republican Party to Reagan’s default settings. He can make the GOP once again the party of the American Revolution and distinguish it sharply from the party of the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions [bold mine-DL].

Of course, the GOP isn’t the party of “the American Revolution.”  No modern party can lay claim to that, since both modern parties are founded on the repudiation of some significant part of the original constitutional arrangement created after the Revolution (see Lincoln, FDR).  And goodness knows I don’t like the GOP, but I think they probably still have a little ways to go before they can be accused of blurring the lines with the ChiComs and Castro.  Now, the Jacobins might be a different story….I can almost see Thompson’s bumper sticker now: “Vote Thompson: He’s Not Like Robespierre!”  Or “Vote Thompson: He Will Never Expropriate Your Farm!”  (That’s the job of development corporations, after all.)  

After having shown that Thompson would be a lax manager (probably the last thing the government needs after eight years of cronyism and incompetence) and a non-communist (always a plus), Mulhern then takes satisfaction that, supposedly alone among his rivals, Thompson is the only candidate who will really attack Iran.  Apparently Podhoretz signed up with the wrong team.  Thompson rattles that sabre like nobody’s business, and this, we are told, is what makes him the superior candidate rather than an unfortunate and embarrassing old man with nothing credible to say. 

Then there is this:

How many politicians can talk about Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in terms which indicate that he has both read and understood it?

I don’t know how many could do that, but then I don’t know how many could have actually absorbed the lessons of The Conservative Mind and endorsed such hideously imprudent and unwise foreign policy decisions as Thompson has over the past few years. 

This was news to me:

Try to wrap your mind around the reality that coming off like an old coot having a conversation as he whittles next to the pot-bellied stove down at the country store is an excellent way to attract most American voters.

So that’s going to be the new hallmark of the Thompson campaign–a pot-bellied stove to replace his pickup truck.  But will he have it painted red?

Thompson ’08!

In a move sure to make me question the soundness of my judgement, George Will has come to a similar observation as I did a few weeks ago:

In his second Inaugural address, the president said: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” You have said: “In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.”

Well. Given that the goals of liberty and security can both generate foreign policy overreaching, and given the similarity between your formulation and Bush’s, should people who are dismayed by Bush’s universalizing imperative be wary of yours? Does not yours require interventions in Darfur — where you say “rolling genocide” is occurring — the Congo and similar situations?

Well, maybe not Congo.  But there are ailing Indonesian chickens that desperately need our help.

“There is blood on the steps of Pakistan’s Supreme Court,” said Ahsan. “The people of Pakistan have a right to protest, yet they have been brutally attacked. This whole situation is as noxious as the tear gas itself.”

————

The crackdown on the protest came just two days after the Supreme Court, lead by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, ruled that the government had no right to blockade streets leading into the capital, nor could it prevent protests or stop the free-flow of traffic past government buildings.

————

“We are looking at an obscene and unnecessary show of excessive force,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia Researcher for Human Rights Watch, who had come to observe the protests. “This has been wanton brutality against a professional group that is struggling to uphold the rule of law.” ~Time

While the world’s attention these days is focused, with good reason, on the crackdown in Burma, far more geopolitically significant troubles are erupting once again in Pakistan.  Musharraf has, of course, continued to pursue re-election after the amnesty for Sharif was summarily withdrawn, and the prospects for any kind of negotiated transfer or departure of Musharraf from the scene are now very poor.  With this latest ruling that he is eligible to run for another term as president backing him up, Musharraf’s intransigence will drag Pakistan over the edge of a cliff.  What Musharraf and his government are doing is different from the actions of the junta in Burma only in degree, but not in kind.  The comparison was not lost on the lawyers being assaulted:

“It’s just a shade short of Burma,” said one bedraggled lawyer, echoing an earlier statement by Ahsan. “Yeah,” said his companion. “But here they are attacking lawyers in suits instead of monks in saffron.”

And, of course, the regime doing the attacking is considered too valuable and useful to too many major powers for them to say or do anything.  It is vitally important that Washington come to realise that Musharraf is far more of a liability for the stability of Pakistan, and thus for U.S. interests in the region, than he is an asset.  Our association with his increasingly brutal and destructive rule can only drag our reputation further into the mud and make cooperation with any future post-Musharraf government that much more difficult.  Washington needs to consider how it will sustain the ties with Pakistan once Musharraf is no longer there.  It seems increasingly likely that Musharraf has overreached so often and exhausted all goodwill that he cannot long remain in office.  It is also crucial to understand that the policies that Washington has urged Musharraf to pursue have contributed to the current predicament.  To throw Pakistan into turmoil to save Kabul is not a good exchange.  Wouldn’t it be useful if we had an accomplished professional diplomat serving in Islamabad right about now…wherever did he go?