Frankly, I can imagine a number of other reasons why Kristol would prefer a liberal to Pat Buchanan even though both are staunchly pro-life. ~Wlady Pleszczynski

Well, this is true up to a point, though describing Kristol as “staunchly pro-life” rather greatly exaggerates how important life issues are to him. This is why Jim was correct when he said, “I do recall Bill Kristol saying he’d vote for a New Republic liberal on Iraq over a non-squishy pro-lifer,” because that is exactly what Kristol said:

I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives [bold mine-DL].

If I wanted to be more polemical, I could dwell on that last sentence for a while, but why bother? Kristol there is stating what everyone knows about his politics. Circa 2004, a “New Republic liberal” on Iraq was pro-war, and that fit Kerry quite well. It is quite clear that Kristol is saying that foreign policy trumps social issues when he is deciding whom he should support, which has obviously been true regarding the candidates The Weekly Standard has supported in the past and continues to be true today. More to the point, and coming back to the beginning of this debate, if Ross is a “squishy” pro-lifer as he described himself, Kristol is as limp as a wet noodle. If we are to believe that Kristol is “staunchly pro-life,” that would make Ross a relative hard-line fanatic on the subject, which would be misleading in both cases.

The amusing thing about New Majority is that it styles itself as representing creative and new conservative ideas, but routinely churns out some of the most hidebound conventional stuff imaginable on many of the policies where the conventional position has badly damaged the reputation of conservatism and the GOP. Take, for example, John Gardner’s complaint that Obama has signed the omnibus appropriations bill that contains a provision that “revents implementation of a provision in NAFTA that permits properly licensed Mexican trucking companies from operating throughout the United States.” This is the sort of thing pro-sovereignty conservatives have been insisting onfor years, and in the end it comes from the Obama administration and a Democratic majority in Congress. At least those reform conservatives who are indifferent to border security and controlling illegal immigration are being consistent in their hostility to this rule, but why anyone else would want to oppose a provision that improves border security and highway safety will have to remain a mystery.

Brendan O’Neill’s article in the new TAC offers an interesting critique of an odd trend among quite a few prominent “pro-Israel” advocates in recent years, which is to define Israel and its importance to the West more or less in terms that make it a crusader state for “Enlightenment values.” As O’Neill says, this puts absurdly great pressure on Israel that no state should have to bear. Worse, it badly distorts the admirers’ understanding of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors:

What is going on here? How can a conflict that looks to many reasonable people like a long-running national and political clash be described as a grand battle for mankind? In effect, Israel is cynically, and lazily, being turned into a proxy army for a faction in the Western Culture Wars that has lost its ability to defend Enlightenment values on their own terms or even to define and face up to the central problem of anti-Enlightenment tendencies today.

Another article would be needed to work through the problems with the admirers’ prior assumptions about the importance of “Enlightenment values” as such, but that is for another time. Even if it were true that Israel is what these admirers (idolaters?) claim, the idea that Israel is a front-line state of civilization creates at least three bad habits among Westerners. O’Neill discusses at least two of these in the article, but I hope to elaborate on them a bit more. One such habit is that if we believe that Israeli policies are helping to save the civilized world from barbarism, many of us will want to overlook misguided, counterproductive and inhumane policies for fear of undermining the civilizational bulwark. Variations on the “we had to destroy the village to save it” rationalization will be offered, except ironically this time the “village” in question will be “Enlightenment values.” Second, it would be a form of outsourcing the work of defense that, if needed, we ought to be providing for ourselves, and this outsourcing would be fundamentally unfair to Israel.

Third, it would create an opportunity to focus our energies not on the practicable but difficult work of cultural renewal at home, but rather on cheering on and defending the actions of the front-line state in an epic battle far away in which we can assert our virtue by taking the right side. It is a grim kind of escapism for those previously engaged in culture wars at home, which then ends up negatively affecting how the escapists view their own domestic political debates. In the end, they come to view otherwise natural allies in combating various cultural ills as their enemies and even as fifth columnists working for the “barbarians” because the latter do not embrace the sort of blind, full-throated support for Israel that these admirers have. The front-line state will have to compromise the “values” it is supposedly defending, while the “hinterland” or metropolitan states of the West will gradually lose them through internal cultural changes. So, on its proponents’ own terms even if it were true, the front-line idea would lead to very bad habits and outcomes. The larger problem with it, of course, is that it is sheer fantasy.

One highly undesirable consequence of defining Israel as this front-line state is that it reinforces the tendency in America to ignore Near Eastern Christians and to endorse policies that, while nominally “pro-Israel,” are directly harmful to the survival and flourishing of Christian communities in the region. This is also one of the serious problems in stressing “Enlightenment values” as the thing that Israel is defending, since drawing the line this way would exclude many Arab Christians and would probably even categorize them as part of the threat, but it also shows how selectively these admirers are willing to defend the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to which they will sometimes refer as well. Obviously, at that point the entire argument becomes even more ridiculous and the fantasy of the front-line state idea becomes completely unsustainable, or at least you would think so.

Furthermore, conceiving of differences between civilizations in terms of fronts with clearly-delineated lines and all the associated war metaphors, while dramatic and rhetorically powerful, seems to be basically misleading and encourages seeking military solutions to cultural differences that are not going to be “solved” at all, but which can become more radicalized and the source of additional conflict. If certain “values” are weakening in the West, they are not going to become stronger by endorsing entirely unrelated military and security policies in a foreign country, and they are almost certainly not going to be built up through the West’s militarizing of abiding cultural and religious differences with other parts of the world. Finally, besides being an occasion for self-congratulation and creating moral blind spots for ourselves, building up these constructs of civilization vs. barbarism abstracts political conflicts in the Near East even more when their solutions, if any exist, are going to be found in paying close attention to specific details about individual conflicts. Negotiating over territory, settlements, water rights and other technical details is already tremendously difficult without freighting every concession or proposal with the full weight of Western civilization’s fate, which would make negotiation impossible. Indeed, one gets the impression that this is half the reason for framing the issue in this way.

Speaking for the BubbleHeads*, Pethokoukis:

So what is Stewart suggesting, that we “workers” just save insane gobs of money that we squirrel away into low-yielding savings accounts and rely on those savings and Social Security for our retirement?

I’m not sure if Pethokoukis is kidding, but it seems as if he really doesn’t understand anything Stewart was saying on the show. What Stewart was objecting to was the promotion of unrealistic expectations of large, quick returns on investment. At one point, Cramer tries to push back against Stewart by citing the period 1999-2007 as a time when these sorts of returns were considered normal, as if referring back to the artificially propped-up bubble fed by the Fed helps his cause, when what it does is drive home Stewart’s point. Hence Stewart’s constant refrains about “two markets.” In one market, Stewart was arguing, long-term investors, including my family and friends and probably a lot of you reading this, were conditioned to invest in equities on the assumption that they were not unduly exposing themselves to unacceptably high risk, while in the other financial institutions and their cheerleaders were creating instruments that greatly increased risks to everyone participating in the market and caused significant losses to the responsible, long-term investors through no fault of the latter or even of most of the companies in which they were/are invested. At no point did Stewart say or imply that people should not invest in the stock market. He did dare to suggest that work should matter (and he might have added that complicated financial instruments that are so impenetrably opaque that Soros and Buffett wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole are inherently unsound and dangerous), which does not necessarily mean that he rejects investing. Americans might have benefited had he made an argument for saving (as a protection against exactly the sort of sudden and severe declines in the market that we have been seeing for the last many months), but that was not the matter under discussion.

* In honor of his attack on any critic of the TARP as a “MellonHead.”

As Joe mentioned yesterday, a lot of conservatives are down on the New York Times’ choice of Ross Douthat as the latest edition to their opinion page. Liberal praise for Douthat’s “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society” probably won’t help matters. ~Jim Antle

That last sentence speak volumes. What better time than now to have a prominent conservative voice offering “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society” in a major national newspaper? What sort of sane conservatism can exist that doesn’t already have a “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society”? What does it say about all these conservatives who are so “down” on Ross that they would find this healthy skepticism to be a reason to disapprove of him? Nothing good, I’ll wager.

Quite a lot has already been said about the abortion remarks from Michael Steele’s calamitously confused GQ interview, but I would just make a few basic points: the tendency in conservative rhetoric for the last 20-30 years to outdo liberals in their advocacy of “choice” is badly flawed enough as it is, but it becomes absurd in the hands of a politician who seems not to have thought about the substance of policy or any philosophical arguments related to the matters under discussion. Ross discusses the problem of substance-free rising leaders in the GOP here. Steele’s zig-zagging between a federalist position on abortion (it should be the states’ “choice”), a status quo position (it is an individual choice) and the party platform position (federalism, no! HLA, si!) is dizzying, but what I find interesting is that Steele is receiving the third degree on this from conservative bloggers over this. For the most part, bloggers on the left are just pointing and laughing. When Palin demonstrated similar cluelessness on this very issue, the impulse on the right then was to ignore or justify her ignorance and say, “Oh yeah, what about Biden’s answer?”

Steele does not have the benefit of a verbose, mistake-prone counterpart to distract us, but even if he did the reaction to Steele would have been nothing like the response to Palin. In other words, Steele’s blunders on substance are treated as badly damaging and activists insist that they require immediate correction, while Palin’s blunders were spun as imaginatively and desperately as any politician’s answers have ever been spun. This is a bigger problem than pushing unprepared leaders into the spotlight–it is a clear preference for one kind of style, namely the combative pseudo-populist act, over whatever style Steele has at the expense of any consideration of the merits of what these leaders say. The takeaway is that Steele is being ripped apart for making statements that are not terribly different from Palin’s campaign statements on the very same issues, and somehow she is still considered a rising star by the very activists who are ripping Steele.

Greg Djerejian breaks silence to weigh in on the Freeman controversy in a thoughtful post well worth reading, and also explains what will be keeping him away from writing in the near future. It is happy news for him with the birth of a new child, but it is our loss that we will not have his insights in the months to come. Congratulations to him, and good luck to him in his MBA program.

Faced with a party that is preoccupied with symbolism and obsessed with fighting earmarks, Patrick Ruffini proposes the embrace of a GOP-backed earmark ban as a symbol of Republican seriousness. By itself, this would not be all that remarkable. Raging against earmarks is just about the only thing Republicans know how to do these days, so I suppose it makes sense to stick to what you know, but what is worse is that Ruffini is justifying this as an obvious political winner. This is just not true.

Not only do most people not know or care about earmarks in general, they are often quite fond of earmarks that go to their districts. Ron Paul sometimes gets in trouble with pundits who like to point out that he requests earmarks for his district as part of his role as their representative, but in many of those cases it is hard to see why, for example, shoring up a sea wall in Galveston, which is an area vulnerable to storm surge during hurricane season, is such a terrible or wasteful thing. Indeed, even if you are a strict constructionist, it is not so far out to think that the federal government might even have some proper role in providing for coastal defenses against natural disasters. It is also difficult to understand why representatives should not do what they can to get their constituents a share of the money that the government has taken from them. This is probably the only time members of Congress do anything remotely close to serving the interests of their constituents, and it has become the object of Republican ridicule and scorn for several years now. The problem is not that Republicans in Congress say one thing and do another, although that hardly helps, but that they think the problem is their continued use of earmarking and not their inane rhetoric about eliminating earmarks.

Not only is an anti-earmark crusade irrelevant electorally, but it could actually be directly harmful to House members when they are facing re-election. As has been pointed out elsewhere, a minority party has nothing much to show for itself at election-time if its members cannot at least bring home some bacon. If the GOP cannot soften the blow of their general fascination with austerity economics by pointing to projects they are bringing to their districts, some of their members are going to be in real danger of being voted out. If the DCCC recruits as smartly and effectively as they have in past cycles, promoting fiscally conservative Blue Dog candidates against pro-austerity incumbents, there are seats that the GOP thinks are safe that may not prove to be.

This was an odd thing to read, but it got me to thinking how well my opinion pieces for my college newspaper would hold up almost ten years later. For the most part, my post-Kosovo non-interventionism was already there, and I think I made pretty good arguments against drug war meddling in Colombia, so many of the themes in my writing were already taking shape, but there were some columns that I did in the wake of the 2000 recount that would probably make me want to beat my head against the wall. There was also my last op-ed written for the paper in the weeks following 9/11 that was simply horribly stupid in its naivete and optimism, and I would like to be able to take back large parts of it.