Ross discusses Specter’s defection, describes the moderate and conservative reactions to it and then says:

This doesn’t mean that Republicans should be happy that their tent is shrinking toward political irrelevance. But more Lincoln Chafees and Olympia Snowes aren’t the answer. What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.

Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.

Ross is right that there is not really any comparable group in the GOP, but then it’s not clear what the agenda of such “centrists” would be and it isn’t at all likely that their interpretation of conservatism’s “deeper goals” would be seen as another way to pursue conservative ends. After all, are the main “deeper goals” of conservatism community and order with their related goods of social solidarity and broad, equitable distribution of wealth, or are they primarily individual autonomy and “growth,” or something else? How you prioritize these goals will inevitably define the agenda and reveal what you think conservatism means. It is likely that advocates of the first set of goals will tend to see advocates of the second set as badly misguided, if not actually something other than conservative, and vice versa.

Would a center-right equivalent of the neoliberals call for reform of the warfare state as the neoliberals did with the welfare state? After all, it is the foreign policy and national security elements of center-right policy thinking that are some of the most calcified, reflexive and tied to entrenched interests. They are also among the least popular in large swathes of the country–the same swathes where Republicans are dwindling in number. There is a growing number of domestic policy reform thinkers on the right, but to the extent that there are any who are interested in significantly changing and reducing the size of the warfare state it is typical that they are libertarians or hard-right conservatives, the very opposite of the supposedly reasonable and appealing “centrist.” The present “centrists” are the ones most wedded to the status quo on the size and use of the military and the U.S. role in the world. We certainly need a better sort of “centrist,” assuming such a thing is possible.

It is debatable whether any “centrism” is possible that does not end up in practice as a form of triangulation or a split-the-difference, worst-of-both-worlds muddle. As a rule, someone earns the name “centrist” in our political discourse by simply endorsing a major goal of the other party: McCain was granted this description by a once-fawning press corps because he backed campaign finance reform and later backed amnesty, and Lieberman’s hawkishness has earned him this title despite his otherwise left-liberal voting record. This occsasional, sometimes single-issue “centrism” is not really all that different from what the Northeastern moderates have done for decades, except that it is less frequent and therefore somehow more “principled” than the relatively more ideologically consistent moderate and liberal Republicans who are less reliable partisans. In effect, the “centrist” is someone who betrays the party on key issues, but votes with them the rest of the time, while the hated, “unprincipled” moderate is a less reliable vote for what might actually be more coherent reasons.

In practice, what pundits and journalists usually describe as “centrism” is capitulation to the other side on high-profile pieces of legislation by going against the grain of one’s own party in a melodramatic way and usually by backing the position that had won the approval of political establishment figures. What distinguishes a moderate Republican such as Specter from this kind of “centrist” is that Specter seems to have been largely unreliable on a number of issues, while a McCain was a reliable partisan on most things but would occasionally engage in his ad hoc bipartisan, self-serving troublemaking. The differences between Specter and McCain can probably best be explained by the different constituencies in Pennsylvania and Arizona: organized labor for some, defense contractors for others. Somehow McCain has been idolized as a man of high principle (and not just by friendly journalists but also by quite a few Republicans), when he was mostly a man of great ambition, and Specter is mostly treated as an unprincipled worm (and not just by hostile conservatives). It seems to me that both of them are something between those two, and the different reactions to them on the national stage are instructive in how arbitrary the line between principled “centrist” and unprincipled “moderate” is.

It is important to remember that “centrist” is a designation that refers to someone’s position within a party, which in effect means that on most things the “centrist” in one party is likely to have more in common with “centrists” in the other, at least on certain issues, and it is not very long before you are back in the world of “hacks and deal-makers,” because the “centrists” are in the best position to make the deals with relatively like-minded colleagues on the other side of the aisle. What kind of “centrist” do we imagine we will have in the future that will not fall into similar patterns? Indeed, isn’t the pattern of deal-making and bipartisan cooperation supposed to be one of the things that makes “centrists” desirable in a political coalition?

It seems to me that there is a very thin line between the “hacks and deal-makers” who are supposed to be despised and the serious “centrists” who would never permanently cross party lines for their own political ambition. However, as we know, out of little more than personal pique two of the most famous “centrists”–Joe Lieberman and John McCain–either broke with their party when denied re-nomination or seriously contemplated switching sides after being denied presidential nomination. In the end, long-term ambition prompted reconciliation with their respective parties, whereas in Specter’s case ambition dictated that he jump ship. Beyond that, the differences are minimal, which raises the question: is there such a thing as a principled “centrist” and what would such a creature look like?

Having looked over a Telegraph article that repeats the Butler Report’s damning assessment of the manipulation of pre-war intelligence and includes the public remarks of the former deputy chief of MI6, who said that Britain was “dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against out better judgment,” David Frum concludes that the only noteworthy thing to take away from the story is that Mr. Inkster made one passing negative comment on the current administration. The Telegraph article also included this item, which has significance for the U.S. response to the war in Georgia:

When it came to the conflict between Russia and Georgia last summer, he added, Britain was caught “completely flat footed” and used a strategy that “amounted to little more than moral indignation, which is not a strategy.”

Of course they were caught completely flat-footed, just as Washington was, and it was obvious that none of the Western governments that railed against the Russians’ moves had a strategy worth mentioning. I should think this would be one area where most everyone could agree regardless of views about the conflict. Meanwhile, instead of reflecting on or even pushing back against any of the important parts of the article that harm the pro-war case, Frum is reduced to Glenn Reynolds-like linkage without any comment.

Inkster’s remarks will hardly come as news to those of us on the antiwar side who have followed British commentary and public opinion since 2002. It was clear enough that Britain was being dragged into the war against its interests and against the resistance of a significant part of the governing party and the foreign policy establishment and a huge part of the electorate. Like most of the states in so-called “New Europe,” the government threw its support behind the war in defiance of what the British people wanted, which serves as a reminder of how thin and weak overseas support for the invasion really was.

Newt Gingrich continues his practice of writing counterfactual history:

When congressional Republicans forgot that their party was the party of taxpayers and government reformers, they lost control in 2006. When they accepted the Bush big-spending plans of 2008, they further lost ground.

This is utterly untrue, and I am doubtful Gingrich even believes these statements. Then again, I’m not sure which would be worse: that Gingrich is claiming something he knows to be untrue because he finds it useful, or that Gingrich actually believes something so far removed from reality. Whenever anyone wants to understand why I criticize the GOP’s recent discovery of fiscal restraint, it is because of this falsehood and the repetition of this falsehood as the central political lesson of the last few years. One cannot separate this embarrassing revisionism about the causes of Republican political woes from the general culture of mendacity that typified the years of unified Republican rule, and this is something that conservatives cannot afford to indulge even when it yields modest improvements in rhetoric and Congressional votes.

P.S. One of the unintended, counterproductive effects of the discovery of fiscal restraint and this accompanying myth about ’06 and ’08 is that advocates for this position will lose a significant part of their badly-needed credibility when this focus on fiscal restraint yields a poor (i.e., fewer pick-ups than 1978) result in 2010. The argument that deficit hawks and fiscal conservatives needed to be making for the last several months and years was that fiscal responsibility, reducing debt and curtailing spending are the necessary things to do even if it leads to electoral setbacks in the near term. Instead, they have been pushing these myths that lack of restraint lost them the majority and more seats in ’08, and have been selling their agenda in no small part on the political benefits to be reaped by pursuing it. When that fails to pay off, as it probably will fail (because the public did not rebel against excessive spending then and is not likely to reward restraint in the future), fiscal conservatives will find themselves in an untenable position of having spent the better part of at least two years deceiving themselves and failing to pay attention to their greatest weaknesses with the electorate. Having made fiscal restraint the centerpiece of their opposition agenda and having identified excessive spending as the reason why the GOP is in its current state, fiscal conservatives will have few political arguments to make when their meliorist rivals use continued Republican electoral weakness against them. Like Toomey’s kamikaze run in Pennsylvania, the fixation on fiscal restraint now is going to do more harm to the limited government cause than it is going to help it.

My best guess is that the Club for Growth has really put the fear of God into everyone, but maybe there’s more to it. ~Matt Yglesias

Surely that can’t be Yglesias’ best guess. Yglesias does raise the interesting point that the remaining House GOP members aren’t just conservatives in safe districts that have been gerrymandered to keep the representatives from facing any real competition. He mentions several Californian Republicans in the House who only narrowly won re-election. One might argue that the smart thing for representatives in evenly-divided districts to do would be to hedge their bets and occasionally side with the President most of their constituents voted for, but there are several other factors at work that really have nothing to do with the Club or other interest groups.

Take Dan Lungren, for example. Lungren re-entered the House in 2004 in the wake of the Club’s opposition to him in the primary (no doubt another example of the Club’s mastery of political tactics), so his fear of the Club is probably not very great. Their opposition to him was not rooted in objections to his positions on their agenda items, but on more basic political concerns about electability, in which they were proven entirely wrong. More recently, Lungren became the token leader of the anti-Boehner forces in the conference at the last leadership election after the ’08 drubbing, and thus positioned himself as someone hostile to the status quo inside the House GOP and therefore more in alignment with the most consistent opponents of continued government expansion. That is, Lungren effectively aligned himself with the members of the House GOP who could not be easily accused of succumbing to Bush on fiscal matters.

In practice, this means that Lungren has every incentive to position himself as a more consistent opponent of Obama’s policies than members of the current leadership. Because of the compromised record of House GOP leaders in conservative eyes, the pressure to resist Obama’s agenda is likely coming as much from the backbenchers as it is from an unimaginative House leadership. This is all a function of intra-conference and intra-California GOP politics. Outside interest groups may encourage Lungren to go in the direction he’s already been going, but they are not the reason why Lungren has done these things. Lungren has long been one of the champions of the conservative bloc in the California GOP dating back to his days as AG as a rival to Pete Wilson, so there is no real advantage for someone like Lungren to break with party leadership and accommodate the administration. The nature of the California state electorate is such that no Lungren-style Republican is electable at the state level any longer, so Lungren no longer has realistic chances of higher statewide office to serve as a brake on his instincts to resist the administration all the time. The survivors of ’06 and ’08 are probably more likely to take their escape from both anti-GOP waves as vindication, and they may now believe that the worst is over.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen writes:

I’m totally baffled by people who look to past atrocities for some sort of ethical guidance.

Well, quite so. One of the odd things about this is that it tends to make the atrocities even more central to the perception of the overall war effort than they might otherwise be. Instead of acknowledging them as wrongful excesses in an otherwise justified military campaign, which a reasonable person could easily do and leave it at that, the argument from war crimes has the strange effect of making the commission of war crimes seem absolutely essential to waging the war in question. While the defenders of these excesses may believe they are protecting the reputation of the government and the war it was fighting, they succeed mainly in affirming a double moral standard in judging wartime acts, thereby undermining the moral authority of the very cause they purport to be protecting against critics.

I would add that the recourse to past crimes to evade accountability for new crimes is a good argument in favor of enforcing strict accountability for crimes recently committed. If such crimes are permitted to go unpunished, their apologists will continue to work overtime to shape the debate in later years and decades in favor of the decisions leading up to those crimes, and the more time goes by the apologist will be able to fall back on one unassailable retort: “If this was a crime, why didn’t anyone in the government investigate and prosecute it as such?” Having warned against witch hunts and “criminalizing policy differences” in the beginning to intimidate the responsible institutions into inaction, the apologists will then remind the public that no charges were ever filed and no convictions were secured.

So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity. If we fail to hold past administration officials accountable, we not only make a joke out of the rule of law, but we ensure that no legal or institutional constraints will prevent a future administration from committing similar wrongdoing in a time of crisis.

Othershavealready covered this fairly well, but I suppose I should say something about Michael Goldfarb’spreoccupation with defending past war crimes. Julian Sanchez makes the important point regarding the nuclear strikes on Japan:

To the extent it’s a controversial claim, it’s controversial because we don’t like calling U.S. presidents war criminals, not because it’s a difficult question whether obliterating entire areas inhabited by large civilian populations with the flimsiest of military targets as a pretext should now be regarded as a war crime.

Sanchez is correct that it isn’t a difficult question as far as law and morality are concerned. War crimes are not justified or obviated by necessity–necessity is almost always the rationale governments use to explain why they committed war crimes. As Stewart’s pathetic backtracking shows, however, it continues to be a politically charged and risky thing for a prominent public figure to claim. Politically and as a matter of retaining viewers, Stewart may be right that acknowledging the nuclear bombings to be war crimes was “stupid,” since there is no upside or popularity in saying so publicly, but Stewart’s own recantation is a good example of how perverse and distorting the prevailing “judgment of history” can be. Judged by any consistent standard of treatment of non-combatants in wartime, mass incineration must surely rank as a far worse crime than the very serious crime of torturing prisoners.

Because the prevailing view of Harry Truman and his decisions at the present time happens to be favorable, we are all supposed to believe that the “judgment of history” has “vindicated” Truman. This is a nice way of saying that propaganda and hero worship have overcome moral reasoning, and time has caused the moral horror of even a significant part of the American right in the 1940s to fade from memory. This favorable view of Truman is inextricably tied up with the cult of the presidency, our depressing but all too human habit of praising bad wartime leaders at the expense of better peacetime executives, the mythologizing of WWII (and therefore the minimizing or justifying of any wrongdoing on the Allied side) and the implicit devaluing of Japanese civilian lives every defense of both fire-bombing and nuclear strikes includes. None of this seems to occur to the people who continue to glorify Truman and to use Truman as an example of how tainted, bad Presidents may yet be viewed as great successes by posterity. What Truman’s posthumous rehabilitation should tell us is that half-truths and falsehoods, if repeated often enough, can become widely accepted, and that virtually no American political leader, no matter how many blunders he made and no matter what criminal acts he ordered, is beyond redemption at the hands of later sympathetic people who find that leader’s decisions to be useful precedents for their own preferred course of action. The “judgment of history” has, for the time being, ruled in favor of Truman, and therefore challenging this judgment is something to be mocked.

Stewart might reflect on the truth that a “complicated decision in the context of a horrific war” could be applied to many crimes ordered and carried out by governments in wartime. If we aspire to hold America to a standard according to which “we don’t torture,” one might think the same concern for human dignity and justice would also require us to say, “We are America–we don’t incincerate civilians, and we certainly don’t do it en masse.” Or, rather, we know full well that this has been done in our name many times in the past (and certainly not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but we should also be able to say that this was wrong and should never be done again. Pro-life Christians who remind us of the Massacre of the Innocents to protest the terrible crimes committed against the unborn must be able to see the same Massacre in the gratuitous nuclear annihilation of the center of Japanese Christianity. It is when convenience and so-called necessity are most tempting that adhering to moral principle is the most difficult and the most crucial.

The love affair with war crimes that some on the mainstream righthavenever ceases to perplex me. When smaller wars have been waged in which civilian centers are being bombarded, we often hear from this crowd that the problem with Western nations today is that they lack the will to inflict the mass casualties inflicted during WWII bombing attacks, and when challenged about ongoing operations they will say, “Oh yeah, well what about Dresden and Tokyo?” To which I might respond, “Well, what about them? These were unspeakable crimes.”

Many of the same people who preach such insipidly simplistic and irrational messages about fighting and even “ending” evil will be the first to find refuge behind the “complicated” nature of wartime decisions. At least they will do so if it means that they can ignore the real moral complexity of these situations, in which all belligerents are capable of committing war crimes and ought to be held to the same standard. It is this latter point that is really quite simple: if the torture practices authorized by the last administration had been carried out against Americans, we would not hesitate to call them crimes and demand punishment for the guilty, and if the same kinds of bombings were done to our cities by foreign military forces we would not think twice about calling them war crimes. Acknowledging this should not be an occsasion for excessive self-flagellation, but it does have to be acknowledged. Perhaps even more corrupting and dangerous than the abuses of power and wartime excesses themselves is the willingness to minimize or approve of wrongful acts carried out by the government.

P.S. Here is an older post from John Schwenkler to remind us of what it is we’re talking about in this debate.

As tiresome as it is, this idea that Barack Obama, of all people, is not an adherent of American exceptionalism is strangely popular. Perhaps it helps some people sleep better at night–I don’t get it. Have these people already forgotten Obama’s Inaugural Address, which even Bill Kristol admitted was “unabashedly pro-American”? Maybe they haven’t, but they hope that you have. Here is Mark Davis in The Dallas Morning News:

Where is the curriculum that teaches that beyond our flaws, we have been the greatest society the world has known? We have built that legacy with a devotion to liberty and leadership unmatched in modern times. Yet we are led today by people who see the United States as merely the name between Ukraine and Uruguay on the United Nations lobby directory [bold mine-DL].

This other “curriculum” is force-fed to us daily, not least through op-eds, articles, books and talk shows that seem to tell us nothing else. Of course, it is also delivered to us in public speeches by the very politicians who are now being accused of lacking in exceptionalist zeal. Obama’s Inaugural is one example, and one could mine the archives of his campaign speeches for ridiculous flourishes of American exceptionalism, which is why I have always marveled at the easily disproven misrepresentation of Obama as anything other than an American exceptionalist.

Then again, compared to Mark Davis, who can be anything but a post-American tranzi wallowing in the mire of his own self-loathing? Consider Davis’ simply ridiculous declaration:

What we used to widely feel has been given a fitting name: American exceptionalism. It does not teach that we are without sin or that we cannot learn. It teaches that against the backdrop of history, no country has freed, fed or inspired more people than the United States. No nation has contributed more to science, culture or enlightened thought [bold mine-DL].

It is the last sentence that seems particularly galling, since our contributions to “science, culture and enlightened thought” have been by and large derivatives of European contributions, and for the most part our contributions have been built on the foundations laid by European nations. That doesn’t mean that we haven’t made a great many important contributions, but like the bizarre fetish of tallying uphow many of our soldiers have died for the freedom of other nations there is something unseemly, gawdy and arrogant in this constant call for others to recognize how magnificent and preeminent we are. It is this insufferable insistence on being first, best and supreme in everything that so many people find irritating, and not only in other countries. If the patriot never boasts of the largeness of his country, what does that make the American exceptionalist who can never shut up about how absolutely gigantic and awesome his country is?

Davis is not done:

Today, that magnificent view is dismissed as tired jingoism.

No, tired jingoism is dismissed as tired jingoism. The trouble is that some people seem to think that unless one signs off on every aspect of the tired jingoism, one is therefore automatically opposed to American exceptionalism. There are good reasons to push back against the idea of American exceptionalism, if only because it does seem to encourage tired jingoism far too often, but we should do this mainly to show that there is the possibility of an admiring respect that need not devolve into arrogant triumphalism that American exceptionalism tends to encourage.

Of course, having defined American exceptionalism in such an excessive way, Davis has all but guaranteed that fewer and fewer people will be interested in it. Confidence in America and respect for our actual, genuinely considerable accomplishments as a people are natural and worthy attitudes to have. Understanding the full scope of our history, neither airbrushing out the crimes nor dishonoring and forgetting our heroes, is the proper tribute we owe to our country and our ancestors. Exaggeration and bluster betray a lack of confidence in America, and strangely this lack of confidence seems concentrated among those most certain that mostly imaginary “declinists” are ruining everything. More humble confidence and less horror that our President is not engaged in stupid demonstrations of machismo might be the appropriate response to present realities.

P.S. For a necessary dose of sanity, here is Andrew Bacevich on “the American century.”

Update: A quote from an old column by a Canadian writer seems appropriate here:

Now, I don’t want to answer dogma with dogma. Strategic and national interests played major roles in the decisions of all combatants in the First and Second World Wars. They do in every war. It’s a messy world and the motives of nations are seldom simple and pure.

The sort of Americans who cheer for Fred Thompson would agree with that statement — as it applies to other countries. What they cannot seem to accept is that it applies to their country, too. For them, Americans are unique. The United States is unique. And what sets America and Americans apart is purity of heart.

“We are proud of that heritage,” Thompson said in Iowa after citing the mythology of America-the-liberator. “I don’t think we have anything to apologize for.”

Nothing to apologize for. Never did anything wrong in 231 years of history. Nothing.

This is infantile. And dangerous. A superpower that believes it is pure of heart and the light of the world will inevitably rush in where angels fear to tread. And then it will find itself wondering why the foreigners it so selflessly helps hate it so.

Noah Millman has an answer to the part of this post where I talk about collaborators:

I’m pretty sure he’s wrong, because that would make Konrad Adenauer a traitor.

As a general rule, I think my red line dividing patriots from traitors holds up quite well, and I would maintain as part of the general rule that it really doesn’t matter why the invader is there. One might be able to find rare occasions when the latter part of this rule doesn’t apply, but the rarity of it should tell us something. Collaborating with an invader is as clear an example of betrayal of one’s country as I can imagine, because whatever objections one may have to the regime or constitution prevailing in one’s country part of any patriotic duty is to oppose foreign invasion. The people who conspired with a foreign prince in 1688 to overthrow their king were traitors on every level; the people who resisted them were the opposite. We applaud the former because we largely share their politics, or at least we share more of their politics than we do those of James II, and so most of us approve of past treasonous acts when they are committed for the “right” reasons.

Venizelos turned against his king and plunged his country into an unnecessary war with the backing of foreign powers to advance a nationalist territorial agenda. I don’t see how anyone could fairly call him a patriot. He welcomed foreign troops into his country to force the abdication and exile of the legitimate head of state in a blatant power play to pursue his own agenda and the wartime goals of foreign empires. He was certainly a nationalist and a political liberal, who believed he was justified in his betrayals on the grounds of possibly regaining historically Greek territories and resisting the decisions of the monarch, but everything he did from 1916-1919 was nothing but an extended betrayal of his country facilitated by foreign backing. It requires the embrace of an ideology or at the very least a religious or confessional politics to make such betrayals seem like virtuous and noble acts.

I think it is telling that Noah has to resort to the fairly atypical example of post-WWII West Germany to make a counter-argument. It is much more common for collaborationist regimes to be like that of Quisling, Horthy and Rallis in the basic alignment of a relatively small clique of collaborationist politicians and officers with the occupier against a large part of the population, which is then subjected to reprisals and punishments by the occupying forces working in tandem with collaborationist security forces. Noah would presumably not say the same thing about Walter Ulbricht, but then that might be because Ulbricht is a far more typical example of someone collaborating with an invader (in this case because of ideological affinity) than Adenauer could have ever been. Part of this does depend on the specific circumstances of the Allied invasion of Germany and the postwar settlement, but this would require us to acknowledge the rather exceptional nature of this settlement that distinguishes it significantly from just about every other occupation regime, which I think weakens the force of Noah’s reply considerably.

I suspect that if we worked our way through all the relevant cases in the modern era from the French creation of satellite revolutionary regimes in the 1790s to today, the examples of collaborators who might still qualify as patriots would be exceedingly few and the exceptional nature of their cases would confirm the general rule. Quisling has entered our language as a shorthand to describe collaborators; Adenaueur’s career was one of only a few of its kind, and we do not usually come across collaborators who prompt us to say, “Oh, so-and-so is a real adenauer.”

I’m sorry, but I just find the idea of minaret-shaped candies extremely amusing. ~Reihan

Who wouldn’t?

On a more serious note, Reihan was recently venturing into the bizarre territory of public opinion about Obama’s religion:

But there’s something so forehead-slappingly strange about the notion that you can’t help but wonder how, even after 100 days in office, Obama retains this air of mystery. In October, before the election, the Pew Research Center found that only 51 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a Christian, while 12 percent were convinced that he was a Muslim. The good people at Pew asked the question again in March, and they found that the numbers had barely changed: 48 percent think Obama is a Christian and 11 percent think he’s a Muslim. The rest are unsure.

I share the forehead-slapping incomprehension, and I have said more than a few times when confronted with the idiocy of the Obama-is-Muslim nonsense, but I wish Reihan had kept the paragraph he quotes as part of the original item. This is the paragraph I mean:

So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta as an elementary schooler, Obama met some wily bearded imam who lured him into his roving Muslim-mobile with delicious minaret-shaped candies and converted him to radical Islam. Dazzled by his obvious intelligence, and convinced long before David Axelrod that Americans were itching to elect a half-Kenyan youth as president, he also sold young Obama on the idea of keeping his Islamic zealotry under wraps. That way he could transform America into a radical Islamic caliphate without anyone ever noticing.

This is, of course, brilliant, and it is a pity Reihan didn’t use it in the final version, since I think it conveys very effectively how absurd the fears of Obama’s Muslim connections are. After all, this would not merely be a case of taqiyya, but some kind of super turbo-charged taqiyya the likes of which no one has ever seen.