Look, if we were at all serious about public diplomacy, we’d have had all our regional experts who speak Arabic flooding the airwaves apologizing for Condi’s immensely tone-deaf “birth pangs” comment during the Lebanon-Israeli war the summer before last, when the entire Islamic world was enraged by images of cluster munitions being littered willy-nilly through south Lebanon, not to mention the horrific incident at Qana. Or she would follow her predecessor Colin Powell’s recommendation to close Guantanamo without delay, by having a come to Jesus w/ the Decider about how the Cuban penal colony (along with the hooded man at Abu Ghraib) was overshadowing the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of America among many around the world.

These would be the makings of a serious public diplomacy effort, not this breezy, palsy-walsy festiveness with Cal [Ripken]. But what good does it do to scream on like this? You do public diplomacy with the public diplomacy team you have…. ~Greg Djerejian

Via Yglesias

I agree.  Then again, if we were serious about public diplomacy we would have a lot more regional experts who speak Arabic working for the government than we do right now.

Djerejian is responding to this unfortunate episode, catching Secretary Rice saying something especially silly:

I’ll bet he’s going to go out and find people who want to be Cal Ripken in…Pakistan, people who want to be Cal Ripken in Guatemala, people who want to be Cal Ripken in Europe, and that’s the wonderful thing about sports…it really transcends culture and it transcends identity.

That must be why we are all such avid soccer and cricket fans here, and hockey is wildly popular in Brazil.

The WSJ story on Giuliani’s London visit included this: 

“This is no time for defeatism and appeasement,” Mr. Giuliani said of Islamist terrorism, using Churchillian language of 1930s Europe. Shifting forward five decades, he added: “As Margaret Thatcher would have put it, this isn’t a time to go wobbly!”

He can really string those cliches together, can’t he?  (Of course, the word appeasement became a dirty word because it was used by Chamberlain and had less than optimal results as a policy.)  I wonder if Giuliani will ever be able to say anything about foreign policy without falling back on tired slogans, bluster and invoking the names of Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher.  Hang on, that sounds like someone else we know…

This bit from the story was remarkable:

“I don’t think of Sept. 11 as being my defining experience,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters before the speech. 

No, he just wants everyone else to think of it as his defining experience, and he just happens to mention it at every possible opportunity. 

Mr. Giuliani argues his foreign-policy experience is extensive, though perhaps easily overlooked because it is less traditional. 

“Less traditional” here means “non-existent.”  Romney has similarly grand foreign policy “experience”–he refused to give Khatami state police protection at Harvard–but even Romney has visited Iraq.  It’s amusing that Giuliani somehow thinks that going to London and making a speech constitute an example of gaining foreign policy experience.  He and Thompson really are more alike than either would like to admit. 

Giuliani also made sure to remind us that he is a crazy person:

Mr. Giuliani used his speech to call for expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, mentioning for the first time that he’d like to bring Israel into the alliance, which now includes European countries, Canada and the U.S. He also mentioned Japan, India, Singapore and Australia as potential candidates.

Bringing in Israel doesn’t strike me as a feasible option, but then I don’t think NATO should still exist.  But Singapore?  India?  Japan?  Does that mean if Pakistan and India get into a shooting war, NATO attacks Pakistan?  Giuliani does know where the Atlantic Ocean is, doesn’t he?  He was giving the Atlantic Bridge lecture, after all.  Why this doesn’t make him a laughingstock, I’ll never understand.

It is interesting to note in passing how much more Republicans love Margaret Thatcher than do many members of her own party.  The Tories are in the perpetual electoral bind that they’re in for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that they are about as competitive in the North as Michael Dukakis was in Utah.  The way Thatcher privatised industry in those areas is a large part of the reason why those regions are lost to Conservatives.

Update: James makes the right points about this NATO expansion nonsense.

Via Dan McCarthy, the Taft Club discusses the relationship between the right and the GOP.  The above quote refers, of course, to the Bush administration.  The moderator of the panel refers to the war as being obviously a “quagmire with no compelling rationale.”

Rudy Giuliani scored a coup in his White House campaign yesterday by meeting Gordon Brown at No 10, conferring with Tony Blair, receiving an award from Baroness Thatcher and wrapping himself in the legacy of Winston Churchill. ~The Daily Telegraph

It’s enough to make one violently ill.  We may forgive Baroness Thatcher, since she is advanced in years and has politely received other hopeless Republican candidates.  Otherwise, we have the spectacle of Giuliani meeting with two of the more loathsome politicians on the other side of the Atlantic.  For that matter, it is only in the warped world of the modern GOP that a photo-op with Tony Blair would be considered a boon. 

Update: The WSJ headline today is “Giuliani Visit to London Aims To Bolster Credentials”–how have we come to such a pass where Republican presidential hopefuls seem to feel obliged to make a pilgrimage to Britain?  How does visiting with British politicians bolster credentials?  As someone who follows British politics pretty closely, it seems to me that association with most of the people in politics could only drag a candidate down.  I have to confess that I don’t fully understand the Churchillophilia that grips so many on the right today, but admiration for Churchill has begun to change from being an annoying rhetorical tic and become almost a kind of requirement for office.  This kind of pilgrimage can only work by going Britain, since no aspiring candidate would dare visit any other country and seek the blessing of past or current political leaders.  We won’t be seeing anyone falling over himself to win Jose Maria Aznar’s approval.

“Safe and superficial.”

I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson is right about one thing (and one thing only): there is a stark opposition.  There is a short-term temptation for Republican candidates this year and next to pursue Hispanic votes in the general election through the shameless and misguided pandering of embracing Gerson’s preferred, horrible immigration policy, which, if enacted, would result in the guaranteed long-term destruction of the GOP as a competitive national party.  There is a temptation to treat Hispanic voters like idiots and pretend that liberalising immigration is their top priority (only slightly less condescending than the old Republican effort in the ’90s to try to build up support among Hispanics by supporting Puerto Rican statehood).  Of course, the reason why Hispanics do not tend to vote for Republicans and young Hispanics are even less likely to do so is that these voters do not support the various other, non-immigration policies championed by the GOP.  This is, in fact, why most immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats: Democrats propose policies on social services, education, welfare and the like that are more likely to benefit immigrants, or which are more likely to be in keeping with the political traditions they have brought with them from their old countries.  Additionally, Republicans cannot outdo Democrats in their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, since they have no enthusiasm for it.  They cannot be insistent on assimilation, which is what their constituents demand, while playing up to bilingualism or rhetoric about strength in diversity.  

Hispanic voters’ opinions on immigration policy are hardly monolithic.  The idea that capitulating to immigration liberalisation or amnesty will win over these voters assumes that actual Hispanic voters want such policies, when a sizeable number of them may prefer immigration restriction.  Gerson wants the GOP to do two incredibly stupid things at the same time: pander to Hispanics by adopting strongly pro-immigration views, thus alienating core constituencies of the party, and simultaneously insult the Hispanics with this pandering while ignoring any and all other policy issues that are the actual source of Hispanic alienation from the GOP.  It is a combination of substantively bad policy with an embarrassing attempt to employ the symbolic politics that both parties use to feign concern for this or that community.  It would be much more refreshing if pro-immigration Republicans could at least acknowledge that they support liberalisation and amnesty because it suits the interests of large businesses even though it means future doom for the GOP.

I know that you’ve waited patiently for another Bollywood-related post.  Believe it or not, it’s been over two months since I last wrote about anything of the kind.  So, here is a nice patriotic song from Veer-Zaara.  Razib Khan will be pleased that I have stopped fixating on Bengali actresses.

P.S. As a bonus, here is an old one from Gambler: Dil Aaj Shayar Hai.  Another classic, Aye Dil E Nadan, is here.  Along the patriotic lines of Aisa Des Hai Mera, here is Des Rangeela from Fanaa.

P.P.S.  While I’m at it, I can’t leave out a note about Armenian.  It will not be much of a surprise to find out that the two languages have virtually identical demonstratives meaning “this” (ays and aisa), but it is an interesting thing to note in passing.

A few pokes have made the structure wobble and sway, and if enough of us get together, we could push it all right over. ~Pharyngula

Via Sullivan

Yes, it’s not because atheist diatribes are feebly argued and pitiful that we ridicule and deride them, but because they are so powerful and threatening to the claims of faith.  That must be why atheism is taking the world by storm…oh, wait, it isn’t.  Of course these insults provoke religious people to indignant response, and especially because the arguments used are tendentious or inaccurate or intellectually sloppy (or all three together).  But this really is one of the weakest argument of them all.  It’s as if a man called your mother filthy names and then used your outraged response as proof that the accusations are true.

Then there is the old chestnut that any and all religion is a prop of tyrants and a license to abuse power.  I should have thought that this would have been revealed as absurd by the end of the twentieth century, but why would anything as trivial as empirically verifiable historical record disturb the comfortable and lazy habits of the atheist mind?  The Church at its best was historically the bane of arbitrary rulers and abuses of secular power, and even the most autocratic of Christian rulers would have never contemplated the mass slaughter of innocents that enlightened revolutionaries carried out.  Even in the worst persecutions of heretics (and I would note that one of the most ancient and most thoroughly Christianised polities, namely Byzantium, generally avoided any executions of heretics), it was typical that only recalcitrant heresiarchs would be punished.  Enlightened terror tries to wipe out entire communities, entire nations, for the “greater good” or “utopia” or some damned pseudo-scientific lie.  And, of course, plenty of enlightened atheists have accepted the political rationalisations of mass murder while they scoff at the punishment of heretics.  If the “New Atheists” want to play the game of “whose mentality is more likely to lead to tyranny and state-sanctioned killing?” they shall lose, and lose badly.

He goes on:

We can admire the scattered bits of rational architecture that have arisen from the flawed bases of religion … but what if all of humanity were building on the bedrock of naturalism and reason, instead of that quaking vapor of god-belief? We could reach so much higher!

Yes, as high as the tower of Babel…but then that didn’t go very well, did it?

Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can–to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible [bold mine-DL]. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson–and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs. ~David Gelernter 

Simply ridiculous.  What can I say?  Do Jews respect the Septuagint?  Are they unified behind the New Testament?  Jefferson “respected” the Bible the way that a butcher “respects” the carcass of an animal–he chopped up the New Testament and kept the bits of the Gospels that he thought were suitably “rational,” which leads me to note that my WWTW colleague Paul Cella has a good post on Gelernter’s latest.  Paul’s Marcion reference is very good, since Gelernter is a modern gnostic of sorts, and the reference to Marcion makes the comparison with Jefferson only too obvious.  If Marcionites, too, might be counted in the broad church of “Bible-respecting” folk, we can see just how utterly meaningless such respect is.   

Gelernter’s article is something amazing to behold.  It combines almost every hateful aspect of nationalism and every piece of degraded thinking shared by war supporters today.  It blithely confuses opponents of particular wars with adherents of doctrinaire pacifism, a view that virtually no one in this country holds today.  Anyone who opposes the war in Iraq knows all too well how idiotic it is to try to describe the leadership of the modern Democratic Party as pacifistic.  If they were, they might at least have the stomach to try to end this war outright, and, of course, they do not.  Gelernter sets a new standard for unintentional irony by damning globalism in the pages of The Weekly Standard, a flagship of globaloney if ever there was one.  There is, of course, the required mockery of France and the obligatory nod to Joe Lieberman, and every other intellectually lazy rhetorical move that we have come to expect from neoconservatives.  It is really quite dreadful.   

Consider this bit of Gelernter’s “reasoning”:

You might argue that World War II has nothing to do with Iraq; after all, the Japanese started the fight by attacking our fleet at Pearl Harbor. But even the Japanese never succeeded in slaughtering civilians on the U.S. mainland. And those who think that our war in Iraq has nothing to do with the 9/11 murderers, or their friends whose ultimate target is America, are living in Fantasyland.  

Actually, one might argue that WWII has nothing to do with Iraq because WWII ended over sixty years ago and was fought in entirely different parts of the world against radically different enemies.  As for living in a fantasy, I expect that Gelernter would know all about that by now. 

This is really a shame.  Some years ago I heard good things about Gelernter’s Drawing Life (perhaps I heard incorrectly?), and I imagined that because of his personal experience he would have to have been keenly aware of the dangers of ideological fanaticism and the glorification of violence as a means of change.  Apparently he has come to different conclusions.  

Gelernter’s article is just a rehashed version of his new book’s thesis as applied to the latest political controversy, in this case the fight over Petraeus’ testimony.  It confirms my impression that Gelernter’s book does not simply try to describe the idea of “Americanism.”  A description and analysis of the idea might not indicate any approval of the thing being described.  He might have written a book about Americanism describing the “Americanist heresy” and could have been quite hostile to it, but, of course, this is David Gelernter we’re talking about.  Far from opposing the heresy, he seems interested in becoming its latest heresiarch.  He is interested in championing his brand of Americanism quite actively, even if that means grossly distorting or oversimplifying American history, among other things, in the process.  It also seems to mean extolling the virtues of every military conflict of the last century, going out of his way to defend the merits of the most astonishingly futile of wars.  He manages to find words of praise for British intervention in WWI (!), which even one so belligerent as Niall Ferguson was sane enough to recognise as an unparalleled national disaster for Britain.  Perhaps if more leaders in 1914 had belonged to the mythical church of appeasement that Gelernter has invented in this latest exercise in lame, shabby Europe-bashing, European civilisation would not have come crashing down in an orgy of bloodshed–not that I expect him to care about the fate of European civilisation, since he seems to loathe Europeans so intensely.

From the book description of Americanism:

If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.

Conflating one’s country with nationalist ideology is bad enough, but to imagine that your ideological nation is itself the font of a “religion,” and that Americanism is “derived from the Bible” at that, is so perverse that words fail me.