So, yes, libertarians should find a friendlier home in the GOP if their priority is pushing the traditional GOP agenda of low taxes and weaker regulation of the economy. But should this be their priority?

Over the same period that saw libertarian priorities in economics relatively ascendant, we have seen a distinctly negative trend in the growth of militarism and the national security state. In principle, this should worry libertarians as much as government intrusion in the economy. In practice, it should worry them more, for two reasons: first, the trend has been in the wrong direction for a while; second, while there are large organized interests fighting against government intrusion in the economy, there are no large organized interests similarly interested in fighting the growth of the national security state.

If what libertarians are interested in doing is shifting the national conversation, they could do the most good by organizing people who are not culturally liberal but who value freedom into opposition to military spending and the cult of national security. If Brink Lindsey and, say, Andrew Bacevich got together to say: listen: moving the national conversation on the security state security and our military posture matters more to freedom today than keeping taxes low, and matters more to each of us than stuff we disagree on like immigration and gay marriage – that would get noticed. Over time, commitments like that could have a real impact – opening up space in one or both parties for candidates to step outside the Washington consensus on these matters without fear of being trampled to death. ~Noah Millman

That would be a very healthy development, and it would get noticed, but Millman perhaps unintentionally reinforces Lindsey’s complaint against contemporary conservatives. Lindsey complains refers to the “it’s-always-1938-somewhere jingoism,” and he provides a litany of statist positions that dissident conservatives abhor no less than libertarians:

Notwithstanding the return of libertarian rhetoric, the right today is a fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian movement. It endorses the systematic use of torture. It defends unchecked presidential power over matters of national security. It excuses massive violations of Americans’ civil liberties committed in the name of fighting terrorism. It supports bloated military budgets, preventive war, and open-ended, nation-building occupations.

To the extent that a few conservative movement leaders have started criticizing some aspects of the security state (e.g., Keene, Norquist), this overstates things slightly, but only slightly. There are also some cultural conservatives who reject all of these things, and I count myself among them, but as we all know we are fairly unrepresentative. So libertarians have every reason to try building an anti-militarist, civil libertarian political alliance, but they lack politically influential partners among conservatives. I understand that Millman is talking about “shifting the national conversation,” so he takes for granted that the national conversation and especially the conversation among conservatives are very much oriented toward militarism and expansion of the security state. Lindsey doesn’t seem very interested in a long, hard, unpopular slog to reshape public opinion. After all, this is the same person who has spent so much time inflating the size and significance of the “libertarian vote” to make libertarians seem more relevant in electoral politics than they actually are. One of the main points Lindsey makes against contemporary conservatism is that it has become unpopular and its demographic base is declining in size and power over time:

God-and-country populism may still appeal to a large number of Americans (though certainly not a majority), but its future looks bleak.

Lindsey’s estimate of the staying power of what he calls “God-and-country populism” seems badly off. That “certainly not a majority” parenthetical remark seems unfounded. A cynical observer would point out that the only thing currently keeping the Republicans from collapsing as a national coalition is its embrace of “God-and-country populism.” The GOP’s exploitation of religious and patriotic sentiments is not what drags it down. It is the disastrous policy decisions Republicans have made abroad once it has exploited those sentiments to gain power that have resulted in its recent political downfall. Indeed, one of the reasons why “military spending and the cult of national security” are so difficult to challenge, much less roll back, is that it can reliably count on “God-and-country populism,” which easily commands the support of 55-60% of the population. Not only does Lindsey seem uninterested in changing that, but he simply assumes that “God-and-country populism” will gradually disappear as the country’s demographic make-up changes. It may find somewhat different expressions in the future, but it something enduring that anti-militarists have to contest and re-define if we want to see foreign and national security policies less injurious to American liberties.

One of my commenters alerted me to House Res. 1553, which states:

Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.

Naturally, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is among the resolution’s 46 co-sponsors. The National Iranian American Council has called on Minority Leader Boehner to reject the measure, but why would he bother? Two of his leadership colleagues, Mike Pence and Thaddeus McCotter, co-sponsored the resolution, and it has the support of other high-profile Republican members, including Paul Ryan and Dan Burton. That tells me that this is not just a product of hard-liners such as Michelle Bachmann and Peter Steve King, but that it expresses the views of a fairly broad-cross section of the Republican members in the House. I guess I can’t stop “nitpicking,” but this seems like an awfully strange resolution for an “antiwar” Republican to co-sponsor. It is also thoroughly depressing that Paul Ryan, one of the few credible figures in the conference when it comes to fiscal responsibility, is among the supporters of such a ludicrous measure.

Why is it ludicrous? Where do we start? First, Iran poses no nuclear threats of any kind at present, so the threat cannot possibly be immediate and it cannot possibly be existential. When there is no threat to eliminate, this resolution is simply an endorsement of unnecessary aggression by a U.S. ally. That aggression is directed against a regional power that could inflict significant damage on U.S. forces, bases and allies, including Israel, in any retaliatory strikes it would launch in response to an unprovoked attack against its nuclear facilities. That doesn’t begin to cover the harm such a conflict could cause to the global economy and the stability of the broader region. There is obviously no understanding among the resolution’s supporters of what an Israeli attack on Iran would do to American interests in the Near East, and there is apparently no awareness of the escalation by Hizbullah to which Israel would be exposed as a result.

What may be worse still is that Israel has less of a chance of successfully destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities than U.S. forces would have, and it is unlikely that a U.S. attack would do anything more than briefly delay Iran’s nuclear program. Even if we granted that Iran posed a “nuclear threat” to Israel, Israel could not eliminate it if it tried, so the resolution is little more than an invitation to senseless warfare that has no hope of accomplishing its objective. An attack on Iran would be a strategic disaster and it would be grossly unjust whether Israel or the U.S. launched it, but there is something especially unseemly about American hawks backing an Israeli attack. This allows them to pretend that they are “merely” affirming support for an ally and they can try to claim that they are not putting Americans in harm’s way. In reality, they are jeopardizing the safety of U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, and they are risking the security of Israel so that they may be seen as zealously “pro-Israel” here at home.

Earlier this month, Rep. Chaffetz voted against Afghanistan war funding. While expressing appropriate skepticism, Dan McCarthy wrote last week:

With Chaffetz voting against the Afghan War and Ann Coulter breaking with Bill Kristol, the Right’s foreign policy for the next decade is far from settled.

I have made my view of Chaffetz’s “antiwar” position pretty clear already, so I won’t rehearse that again, but I do find it a little odd that Dan gives Coulter any credit for her column bashing Kristol. Consider one of the main points Coulter makes in her column:

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Coulter cites the main foreign policy blunder of Bush’s Presidency as if it were the appropriate, correct course of action. Afghanistan was the one place where those of us with “some vague concept of America’s national interest” could at least see some justification for military action, and Coulter approves of the diversion away from that for the sake of an entirely unnecessary war against a government that posed no threat to the United States. One of the main reasons why there is still a U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the “minimal troops” available after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq were insufficient to prevent the regrouping of Taliban militias that threatened the “American-friendly government” established in Kabul.

Those “minimal troops” were also so spread out in the countryside that they had to rely heavily on air power to protect themselves against attack, which resulted in many civilian deaths, and that in turn created waves of “accidential” insurgents. All of this significantly compounded the security problems in the country, which the previous administration was mostly content to neglect. It is this same policy of neglect that created the poor security conditions in recent years that Coulter praises and wants the current administration to emulate. For his part, Chaffetz objects to the war in Afghanistan largely because U.S. forces have their “hands tied,” which means that he dislikes stricter rules of engagement that are designed to prevent civilian casualties.

It is hard to get around the reality that Coulter’s column is full of pro-Iraq war lies. For example, she writes:

Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

Surely if there was one thing that everyone could agree on by now, it is that most of the population was not particularly “pro-Western” as Coulter means it, and most of the educated professionals who could get away from the chaos created by the invasion fled the country en masse. The war for regime change that Coulter cannot stop defending gutted the Iraqi professional classes and robbed the country of many of its best-educated people, which is one of the reasons why Iraq is and will remain an economic basketcase. For that matter, decades of war and sanctions had significantly changed Iraqi society for the worse. So when Coulter says these things about Iraq, she is simply repeating standard pro-war propaganda c. 2002-03. Coulter calls for Bill Kristol’s resignation, but she is still reliably spouting the nonsense that he and so many other advocates of invasion were using to sell the war in Iraq. It’s as if she has put up a giant, blinking sign saying, “You cannot trust a word I say,” and everyone seems to have missed it.

I’m not trying to overlook opportunities for the antiwar right, and I don’t like being the constant naysayer who has to keep pointing out that Chaffetz, Coulter et al. cannot be taken seriously, but just judging by their own arguments they cannot be taken seriously. The “to hell with them” hawks may be up for grabs, but they are unlikely to be won over by people who don’t harbor irrational fears about Iran and who believe that the Iraq war was a strategic disaster for the United States, because these people remain very aggressive hawks who perceive threats where none exists.

When you have a House member who votes against funding for the war in Afghanistan, but would never dream of voting against Iraq war funding and wants the President to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities, you do not have someone coming to these conclusions based on anything resembling a sober understanding of the limits of American power or the national interest. At the very least, there has to be some honest accounting that overwhelming Republican and mainstream conservative support for the Iraq war was one of the worst mistakes they have made in decades, and there has to be some willingness to face up to the obvious lies that they embraced or happily repeated and recognize them as untrue. Simply turning Democratic rhetoric around and dubbing Iraq the “good war,” as Coulter has effectively done, merits contempt rather than sympathy.

Noah Millman correctly dismisses Frum’s case for the Israel alliance as a “Cold War relic.” There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union. If the “realist case for a strong relationship with Israel today revolves primarily around the claim that we have common enemies,” as Millman writes, it is not at all clear that there is much that supports this case. As dreadful as they are, Hamas and Hizbullah are not enemies of the United States, and we largely treat Iran as our enemy because our Gulf allies and Israel insist that we do. At present and in the future, the U.S. has many reasons to find a modus vivendi with Iran and to improve relations, not least because one of our most important regional allies, Turkey, has made improved relations with Iran a priority. The claim that “we have common enemies” is based in no small part on the conflation of all Islamic revolutionary, resistance and jihadist groups into one camp in which Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the IRGC are all placed regardless of their differences with one another or the threat they pose to U.S. interests. Meanwhile, the cold-eyed realist would not be overly concerned about Israeli policies in the territories unless the U.S. was seen as the enabler and supporter of the immiseration of Palestinians, but of course the U.S. is seen this way, it does damage America’s reputation throughout the region, and it is becoming a greater source of tension with our major allies in the region. There is nothing that the Israel alliance provides that merited taking Israel’s side against Turkey in the wake of the flotilla raid, but that is what Washington did even at the risk of permanently damaging the alliance with Turkey.

Millman also has a very reasonable conclusion:

In truth, I’m not sure what point is served by debating whether we should be “allied” with Israel. I’m not even sure what “ending” our alliance would mean, given that we don’t have any treaty obligations to them and we are hardly going to stop sharing intelligence or what have you. We’re allied with all sorts of countries with whom we have a variety of disputes – we don’t agree with everything our allies do or want to do, and sometimes we take a very hard line on their behavior. We were extremely forceful in getting the British and the French to withdraw from Suez in 1956. Heck, Pakistan is officially a major non-NATO ally and we’ve been dropping bombs on their territory! The real question is not whether America should continue to be Israel’s ally but whether America should be much tougher on its Israeli ally than it is, whether a tougher line would serve American interests or whether it would backfire.

Millman is basically right. We aren’t formally obligated by treaty commitments, so theoretically the alliance could “end” tomorrow if that is what Washington decided, but everyone realistically understands that some sort of alliance will remain for the foreseeable future. In many ways, the Israel alliance is like NATO: a once valuable and even necessary arrangement that served the security needs of all parties, but which now longer has much of a reason to exist. For the last twenty years, people in the U.S. and Israel have been trying to find a new reason for both the Israel alliance and NATO to continue, and each new model that has been tried has led to a dead end. Both of the alliances are largely obsolete, but neither is likely to end.

What does need to happen is to re-balance the relationship with Israel so that the political, diplomatic and financial costs of the alliance are matched by what the U.S. receives from it (which isn’t very much these days). At present, even the smallest moves in that direction are considered unspeakable betrayals. That is one reason why proponents of re-balancing the U.S.-Israel relationship are not interested in arguing for ending the alliance outright. It is difficult enough to argue for conditional reductions in economic aid that calling for a complete break would be rejected out of hand.

That is what makes Frum’s detour about Charles Freeman at the end of the same post especially ridiculous. Freeman outlined some of the costs that the alliance imposes on the U.S., and he may have understated the case, but he then made very modest recommendations for what the U.S. government should do to pressure Israel to halt settlements. My guess is that the “pathetically disproportionate” recommendations reflect Freeman’s understanding of what is politically possible here in the U.S. As it is, Freeman’s proposal to reduce economic aid to Israel to compel a halt to settlement activity is more than anyone in the administration or J Street is willing to advocate publicly. Had Freeman made a more radical proposal, Frum would not be congratulating him on his consistency or his boldness, but would instead be declaring him a lunatic.

Speaking of “Islamofascism,” Marc Lynch picks up on this recurring error in his very thorough review of Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals:

Many of the valuable debates that The Flight of the Intellectuals could have sparked are drowned out by Berman’s ludicrous efforts to construct an intellectual and organizational genealogy linking Nazi Germany and contemporary Islamism. His insistence on the usefulness of the concept of “Islamic fascism” — despite the fact that virtually all Muslims consider it a profound insult to their faith and identity — is one of the surest clues to his indifference to Muslim reality in favor of intellectual gamesmanship.

For the last three yearsat least, I have been railing against the complete stupidity of the term Islamofascism and all such related concepts. It is ludicrous to keep trying to tie modern Islamist movements to fascism, but there seems to be some sort of compulsion among anti-jihadists such as Berman to keep recycling this claim, if only to defy the “apologists” they think they are so brilliantly chastising. As I was suggesting in my 2007 column, the attempts to blur the differences between Islamists and then to link Islamists to Nazis are obviously not aimed at understanding the groups in question, but they are intended to vilify and tar all of them with ideological association with a movement everyone loathes. It is an exercise in propaganda and political mobilization instead of analysis, and so it is little surprise that the analysis written in support of it is so shoddy. Perhaps the most important thing the confusion between Islamism and fascism does is to grossly inflate the power and threat from Islamism to Western countries and to frame any remotely accommodating approach towards Muslim countries or Muslim communities in the West as “appeasement” and “surrender” on par with making concessions to Hitler.

Update: Thanks to commenter Norwegian Shooter for alerting me to this Lynch post that led me to his review.

Besides, does the most serious human being always win [bold mine-DL]? Did Al Gore? Did John Kerry?

Sarah Palin has something more than intellect. She has the ability to understand, connect with and energize her party.

And considering her likely opposition — Romney, Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee or Haley Barbour — tell me she has no chance. Go ahead and tell me. It’s enough to make one snicker. ~Roger Simon

It’s risky to make absolute statements about anything, and it’s even more perilous to make them about the possible outcome of a nomination contest that still won’t start for another 16 months, but I am fairly confident when I say that Palin has no chance of winning. There, I’ve told him.

I’ve gone over the reasons why she has no chance in as many ways as I can. There are structural reasons (the GOP does not reward insurgents and favors establishment-backed candidates) and organizational reasons (her organization remains minimal and insufficient). Her unpopularity with non-Republicans is enough to give even her most enthusiastic admirers pause, and many of her admirers don’t think she is qualified for the office. As I was suggesting recently, there is probably a higher bar to nominating a woman for President in the GOP than in the Democratic Party, and there would probably be resistance to using a presidential nomination for the sake of achieving a symbolic “first” by choosing a woman. On this point, I would add one more observation: Republicans have an excessive, some might say absurd, admiration for the office of the Presidency, and they are especially enamored of executive power in wartime, and nominating Palin for that office simply goes against too many of their presidential-cultist and militarist instincts that not even Palin’s own militarism will be enough to compensate.

Simon’s question about the “most serious human being” unintentionally points to the reason why Palin has no chance. In 2000, Republicans were presented with a Western “reform” governor with few real achievements to his name, minimal relevant experience, and no obvious qualifications for the position or expertise in any major areas of policy. He was publicly exuberant about his religiosity, practiced an “aw shucks” campaign style, littered his speeches and debates with colloquial language, and seemed not to be embarrassed that he knew little or nothing about most of the rest of the world. Like Palin, Bush was far from being stupid, but both of them seem to take delight in their lack of knowledge, as if it confirmed that their down-home facade was who they really are. Ten years ago, we were told by admiring pundits that voters weren’t interested in wonks or experts, but wanted someone who was “one of them.” Of course, Bush was the farthest thing from being “one of them” as he could be, but in his aggressive pursuit of mediocrity he managed to convince a surprisingly large number of people to entrust him with incredible power. When it became known that Bush liked to make decisions from his “gut,” this seemed to enthrall millions of people and put their minds at ease, as if “gut” decisions were more desirable because they were irrational. And, yes, he won election by slimmest of margins, and then he won one of the weakest re-election mandates in modern presidential history, and almost immediately Americans began to regret that outcome.

We have already given one obviously unqualified Western governor a chance to wreck the country in the last decade, and not even the Republican Party that continues to defend and like Bush is so clueless and self-destructive that it would go to the country with a female version of the disaster we just experienced. The other possible contenders Simon mentions are all flawed and unattractive in different ways, but none of them so fully embodies all of the flaws that made Bush such a poor President as Palin. Most of the public already knows this, and given a chance to choose anyone other than Palin the GOP will turn gratefully to one of the others so that they might have at least a fighting chance in two years.

Gingrich’s full statement (via Chait) is even more ludicrous than the initial reports made it sound. Gingrich begins:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.

Is New York in any way comparable to Saudi Arabia? To ask the question is to acknowledge that the two have nothing in common. Later Gingrich complains that non-Muslims cannot enter Mecca, as if the site of the World Trade Center and Mecca are in some way analogous, but since when do we in the U.S. argue that we should treat religious minorities only as well as religious minorities are treated in the most repressive countries? If we took this seriously and applied it thoroughly, not only would there be no mosque permitted in that part of lower Manhattan, but there would not be one permitted anywhere in the United States.

Naturally, Gingrich isn’t so far gone as to call for that, so he simply insists that it not be permitted in this location, which confirms that the random inclusion of Saudi Arabia in the debate is simply designed to score points and inflame passions rather than provide support for an argument. From what we know of the promoters behind this project, Saudis have little or nothing to do with it, but Gingrich is hoping to conflate anyone involved with this project with Saudis. He is relying on his audience to remember that most of the hijackers were Saudis, to generalize from those 15 Saudis to all Saudis, and to identify all Muslims with the most extreme adherents of the most extreme forms of Islam. The purpose of this is not to resist “an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization,” because our civilization is in no danger of being destroyed by any such offensive, but to rile up people here and convince them that all Muslims are out to get them, which will in turn make them more receptive to the agenda of growing the security and warfare state that Gingrich et al. favor.

Gingrich complains that the original name of the building, Cordoba House, is itself an insult. References to Cordoba can mean many things. For Western ecumenists, Ummayad Cordoba represented a high-point of convivencia and therefore served as a model of multi-religious co-existence. What is usually not mentioned is how the cultural and intellectual life there stagnated later under the Almoravids and Almohads, nor do many remember the Mozarabic Christian martyrs of the early centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, and Gingrich doesn’t mention any of this, either. Then again, Gingrich is not really interested here in historical accuracy or understanding. Cordoba has also represented for Arab nationalists one of the high points of Arab culture, and for pan-Islamists it represented one of the most far-flung parts of the briefly-united caliphate, and it is only this latter meaning that Gingrich chooses to give to the name of the organization and the building project. Gingrich simply assumes bad faith on the part of the promoters, and that determines the entirety of his argument.

What may be most striking in Gingrich’s statement is his claim that “they” (i.e., Muslims) are lecturing “us” about tolerance, but what is happening is that “we” are being held to “our” own standards. Perhaps the most irritating thing about the arguments Gingrich and Palin are making is that they do not want to critique the idea of religious tolerance, but they don’t want to face up to what it might mean in practice.

Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich on Wednesday announced his opposition to a planned mosque near ground zero, becoming the latest Republican leader to place the project on the national political stage. ~The New York Times

Whatever else one wants to say about the proposed Islamic center or the Cordoba Initiative, one thing that ought to be obvious right away is that this is a matter to be decided by New Yorkers, especially by the people who live in the immediate vicinity. The local community board supported this project almost unanimously, which should make the protestations of a politician parachuting in from the other side of the continent as irrelevant as they are ridiculous.

I do see how the building project might be seen as provocative at first, but it is actually quite hard to see how the project is an insult or such an “intolerable mistake” that it merits denunciations from national political figures who have zero connection to the place. Because of the 9/11 attacks at that location, many people seem intent on treating what happens there as something that affects the entire country, but it doesn’t. It is conventional to refer to it as “sacred ground,” as Palin does, but it is actually the site of an atrocity, not a place where miracles were performed or one where relics are laid to rest. Commemorating the people who were murdered there is right, but treating it as a locus sanctus with its own religious (or in this case anti-religious) significance is frankly very strange. Conservatives certainly don’t have to like an organization advised by the likes of Karen Armstrong, but they should be able to see that opposing this project doesn’t really make any sense.

As I said earlier this year:

The greatest danger all along has been that we would destroy or corrupt our institutions and our values out of an irrational exaggeration of the threat posed by jihadists, and that we would make this even worse through a widely shared blindness to the consequences of our national security and foreign policies. One reason anti-jihadist commentary has seemed less and less persuasive to me over the last decade is that anti-jihadists have done nothing to avoid these dangers and have done all that they could to make them worse.

Anti-jihadists keep making the same errors over and over. Instead of exploiting differences between jihadists and non-jihadists, among different kinds of Islamists, and between different groups of jihadists, anti-jihadists have been perfectly content to roll all of them into a single “Islamofascist” menace. That artificially inflates the strength of actual jihadist enemies by lending credibility to their propaganda, and as a result it makes jihadist causes more appealing. In this case, anti-jihadists are compounding their error by confusing the equivalent of Muslim ecumenists with hard-line Islamists. That is exactly what Gingrich does when he claims that the project is a “a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” in the face of demands from aggressive Islamists. It’s not just that anti-jihadists are conflating any and all Muslims together here, but they are vilifying as aggressors some of the least aggressive Muslims around.

It is telling that the best Palin can come up with to justify her opposition to the project is that the organization’s lead cleric, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, referred to U.S. policies as accessories to the crime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. That was not the most politic thing for a Muslim cleric to say at the time, but he was not saying that the “blame be placed on the innocents.” Rauf seems to have been saying that the U.S. government contributed to the chain of events that led to the attacks. To the extent that U.S. policies provoked blowback in the form of the attacks, he was basically correct. No less significant is the fact that Palin refers to the blockade of Gaza as justifiable in the same article in which she refers to the building project as intolerable. According to Palin, the immiseration of over a million people through deliberate economic warfare and collective punishment is perfectly all right, attempts to bring an end to that immiseration are wrong, and building a structure on legally purchased private property with the approval of the large majority of the area’s residents is intolerable. Perhaps the only thing worse than these warped judgments is the pretense that Palin is the voice of “common moral sense,” when she is actually representing the lowest common denominator of shameless demagoguery.

While I was traveling last week, I missed the spat that erupted between the Romney and Palin camps. Steve Kornacki reviews Romney’s track record competing against different women over the years, and he reasonably concludes that Romney comes off looking like a heel whenever he competes against a woman for political office. That seems fair enough, but what seems to have been lost in the discussion is that Romney defeated all of his women opponents. It is quite a leap from saying “Romney treats women opponents badly and wins every time” to saying “Romney cannot possibly defeat Palin,” but somehow Andrew gets there.

Of course, Kornacki acknowledges that Romney is undefeated against women, but thinks that the way that Romney defeated all of his rivals in the past could cost him in a presidential campaign. It could be that Romney treats Palin roughly and ends up looking so bad that he becomes radioactive to a huge majority of women voters in the fall, but what Romney’s record tells me is that he has no scruples about doing whatever is necessary to win a nomination or an election. There also seems to be the suggestion that it is Romney who is at a disadvantage in any intra-Republican contest in which gender becomes a significant issue. That is an odd thing to assume. Palin’s “Mama Grizzly” routine works well enough when the perceived attackers are coming from outside the GOP, but my guess is that it will fall flat and will come across as mere whining when she uses it to fend off Republican rivals.

Do we really think that most Republican primary voters are more likely to nominate a woman for President than Democratic voters were two years ago? Do we really think that Republicans would prefer the less qualified candidate because she is a woman? Wouldn’t many Republicans want Romney to succeed to prove that the GOP is not dominated by religious conservatives who will not support a Mormon candidate Wouldn’t that impulse to show religious tolerance overwhelm any impulse to promote Palin beyond her ability just to get credit for nominating the first woman nominee? If the 2012 nomination contest comes down to a head-to-head fight between Romney and Palin, there appears to be every reason to think that Romney prevails. Whether he emerges from that contest so sullied by his own tactics that he cannot win a general election is a very different question.