All right, so the Dionne columnmight not have been the best evidence available, but Ogonowski’s opposition to illegal immigration and amnesty clearly helped his campaign rather than weakened it.  Cilizza writes:

He [Ogonowski] also found fertile ground by calling for a crackdown on illegal immigration and decrying Tsongas’ support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants as amnesty.

With that campaign strategy, Ogonowski may have provided Republicans a blueprint to follow in contested races next year. Congressional approval numbers are mired in the mid 20s while disapproval crests 60 percent in most recent national surveys. And, immigration is an issue that seems to cut across party lines with a call for the law to be enforced a potent political position.

Ogonowski had all sorts of liabilities–relatively little funding, low name recognition, competing in an adverse political climate–but his position on immigration wasn’t one of them.  The problem with Ogonowski’s S-CHIP position was that he effectively supported Bush’s veto of the legislation, which allowed him to be tarred as a Bush follower.  His explanation of his opposition to the bill in terms of immigration policy may well have been misleading and lame, but if he miscalculated politically here it was not in taking an anti-immigration position but in being opposed to a health care bill.

As a local news source also related:

Midway through the race he latched onto an issue – immigration reform – of great local interest [bold mine-DL] that also showed he is not in lockstep with national Republicans unpopular in Massachusetts.

“He tapped into one issue that is where the national party went astray,” Tarr said. “Immigration is a real issue. But rather than say he was in favor of amnesty, he said people have to play by the rules. And that clearly gave him a lot of appeal to voters in the Merrimack Valley.”

James Fallows makes some good observations about the influence of ethnic and interest group lobbies and the legitimacy of criticising the potentially adverse effects of their recommended policies on American interests.  He is correct that opposition to the genocide resolution doesn’t make someone anti-Armenian.  Then again, I would make a point of noting that no one who supports the resolution has made such a stupid charge.  That’s one place where there seems to be a significant difference in the treatment of different lobbies. 

Of course, the chief difference between the Armenian lobby, so called, and the Cuban and “pro-Israel” lobbies is that the latter two actually get concrete policies enacted that they want to see enacted in the face of the obvious costs and disadvantages those policies involve.  According to the harsher critics, the “pro-Israel” lobby has enough influence to propel America into regional wars or at least to acquiesce in Israel’s own excesses, helping to alienate us from most of the world and contributing to security threats to our own country.  The Armenians can’t even get a symbolic resolution through one side of Congress, the only consequence of which would be the irrational overreaction of one ally.  Does anyone really think that Armenian-Americans could effectively shape U.S. policy in the Caucasus or our relationship vis-a-vis Azerbaijan?  Could they get Washington to recognise Karabakh?  Of course not, and therein lies all the difference in the magnitude of the influence of different lobbying groups.

The supposed right of secession is a part of the imagined right of self-determination, a fantasy drawn from the absurd political theories of Locke and Rousseau and given immortality by Jefferson’s utterly fatuous platitudes with which he began the Declaration. Applied universally, it means Montenegro–backed by foreign interests–had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, the Brda region on the border with Serbia to secede from Montenegro, and any three-man pro-secession village to secede from the Brda, until the Russian Mafia owned every square inch of the county. To speak of rights, in such circumstances–that is, when American corporations are busily breaking up nations and federations into weak little entities they can exploit–is not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense. ~Thomas Fleming

So “Islamofascism Awareness Week” has started, and it’s already off to a great start…with one of the local College Republican chapters changing the name of the event.  They claim the change is meant to ease tensions with the local Muslim Student Association, but I think it’s just a convenient way to avoid deep embarrassment.  I can’t blame them–I wouldn’t want to be associated with an event with such an idiotic name, either. 

But Horowitz is there to remind us why it is necessary:

“It is to raise awareness that there are religious radicals who are obviously armed to the teeth who want to impose their religious law on everybody and who will kill anybody who gets in the way, who they regard as infidels,” he said.  

Because no one is aware of the problem, you see.  There have also been great costs incurred because of this ‘heroic’ work of raising awareness:

His efforts have spawned “a national McCarthy-like witch hunt of anyone who wants to discuss the oppression of women in Islam and the threat of radical Islam and the totalitarian movement in Islam,” Horowitz said.  

Who can forget the chilling scenes of the House Un-Islamofascist Activities Committee grilling the poor and defenseless Santorum: “Mr. Santorum, do you now want or have you ever wanted to discuss the oppression of women in Islam?”  Fortunately, the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali hasn’t been permitted to circulate (it’s been kept under wraps so completely that I don’t even know who she is–how could I?)–the witch hunts have made sure of that!   

What is the more specific purpose of the Awareness Week?  It is aimed at confronting “the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”  So it isn’t really very much about “raising awareness” about anything as it is an obvious effort at pushing pro-administration spin.  The phrasing they use is also a bit confused, since the “war on terror” is officially the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and presumably they do want to credit Mr. Bush with that response.  What they probably meant to say was that Bush didn’t “start” the war with jihadis, but that isn’t actually what they said. 

It would be eminently desirable if CAIR and other such groups were put under serious scrutiny, and it would also be excellent if the bogus charge of “Islamophobia” were challenged in a serious way.  But that isn’t what these activists are proposing to do.  They are pushing some petty partisan propaganda campaign under the cover of one of the most ignorant, meaningless words coined in my lifetime.  No wonder so many academics generally want nothing to do with conservatism, when this is the conservatism they encounter.

Another piece of evidence that Ogonowski managed to do as well as he did because of his position on immigration:

Midway through the race he latched onto an issue – immigration reform – of great local interest [bold mine-DL] that also showed he is not in lockstep with national Republicans unpopular in Massachusetts.

“He tapped into one issue that is where the national party went astray,” Tarr said. “Immigration is a real issue. But rather than say he was in favor of amnesty, he said people have to play by the rules. And that clearly gave him a lot of appeal to voters in the Merrimack Valley.

You never know what might happen when Republicans actually try to appeal to their constituents based on what they want.

Last week, Democrat Niki Tsongas won a special election with only 51 percent of the vote, in a Massachusetts district where John Kerry won 57 percent in 2004 and would have run much better in 2006. ~Michael Barone

Only 51 percent of the vote!  That is the exact same result that Deval Patrick had in this district in his gubernatorial race in 2006, which makes it questionable whether Kerry would have necessarily run that much better last year than he did three years ago.  Even so, 2006 was a normal general election, and last week’s big event was a special election with the usual low turnout that such affairs have. 

I have already said plenty about why this election result is not nearly as telling as everyone seems to think it is, but the idea that Tsongas badly underperformed in a supremely strong Democratic district ignores the other evidence that this district had consistently gone for Republican gubernatorial candidates in multiple elections prior to 2006.  The trend in that district has been towards the Democrats on the state level, going from being a Cellucci- and Romney-backing district to a narrowly Patrick-supporting one, and it stands to reason that this trend would be matched in federal voting as well.  In registration, the district is roughly equally independent and Democratic, and it is a more moderate district politically than some of the others in Massachusetts.  If Republicans were going to do well anywhere in Massachusetts, it would have been in the Fifth in a special election against an uninspired machine opponent.  As it was, the best they could do was 45%.  They will be hard pressed to match that result in a rematch in 2008. 

It’s true enough that history “doesn’t stand still,” but all signs still point to “history” being on a course to run over the GOP next fall.  Republicans can tell themselves comforting stories about the perfidies of MoveOn, the “success” of the “surge,” and crow about low approval ratings for Congress, but if the Turks invade Iraq and the national mood remains much as it is or worsens the political consequences for them will not be good.

Meanwhile, after our government has pathetically yielded to Turkish threats over the genocide resolution, Washington has utterly failed to take seriously enough Turkey’s genuine security concerns about the PKK, which have just become more acute with the latest attacks inside Turkey.  A Turkish invasion now seems very likely, which will do vastly greater damage to efforts to stabilise Iraq and will endanger our forces in Iraq far more than anything that might have resulted from Ankara following through on its threats over the resolution. 

Washington has yielded to moral blackmail and simultaneously failed to avert potential strategic disaster.  Mr. Bush has effectively been protecting PKK terrorists while lending cover to a policy of genocide denial.  He has not managed to shore up U.S.-Turkish relations, which his administration has done so much to ruin over the years, and has managed to take the most dishonourable and dangerous positions available to him.  The mind boggles at how the administration’s toleration of both terrorism and genocide denial can be confused with wise and prudent statecraft.

I gave up on the dreadful Florida GOP debate before they ever got to foreign policy, but apparently Tom Tancredo had the nerve to attack the genocide resolution at one point.  Nothing new there, you might think, except that Tancredo was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill.  He very quickly abandoned it once it became controversial.  Quoth Tancredo:

We can’t continue to go back to the dust bin of history to condemn actions by empires that no longer even exist.

It seems to me that this is what we do all the time.  We pore over the “dust bin” and dwell on the crimes of the Nazis and Soviets, and repeatedly, endlessly talk about those crimes and compare our present-day enemies with the perpetrators of these crimes.  Earlier this year, the President went to the Holocaust Museum and condemned the actions of an empire that no longer exists.  American politicians condemn the evils of Soviet communism as a matter of course, and are not concerned that this might hurt relations with the Russians.  Of course, there is usually an assumption that post-Soviet Russia is in significant ways still quite different from the old Soviet Union, which means that criticism of the latter need not extend to the modern successor state of the criminal regime. 

Yesterday I said in anotherpost:

I suspect, but I cannot definitely prove, that another element is a weird, unseemly desire to keep the Nazis in the public imagination as the fons et origo of genocidal killing (which would also have to conveniently ignore the genocide of the Ukrainians) to sustain the mythology surrounding the entire WWII period.

Part of my point here was to make the point that the mythology about WWII to some extent requires holding up the Nazis as uniquely and especially evil in some unprecedented way.  They must remain the ultimate villains to better reinforce the memory of WWII as the ‘Good War’.  Part of the novelty and uniqueness of Nazi evil, according to President Bush’s own description, is that the Nazis allegedly introduced state-planned genocide:

Yet in places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald, the world saw something new and terrible: the state-sanctioned extermination of a people — carried out with a chilling industrial efficiency of a so-called modern nation.

To argue that there was actually a precedent and a previous state-sanctioned, organised and planned extermination of a people is effectively to deny the newness and uniqueness of the Nazis’ crimes.  To acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide, then, endangers a key part of a certain narrative about WWII, because it means that there had already been something similar in nature to the Nazis’ genocidal killing.  For some bizarre reason, there really does seem to be a need on the part of Armenian genocide deniers to resist acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was the “first genocide of the 20th century,” which would at the very least make the Holocaust the second, as if some special or superior status were attached to being the first one.  The distinction is obviously chronological, not moral.  Later genocides do not matter less because they came after others, nor are earlier ones more significant.  However, the debate over this resolution seems to take it for granted that some are more important than others and some are more worthy of commemoration than others.

Interestingly, everyone got a big hand of applause, except for Tancredo.  Paul had trouble hearing his first question, which didn’t help a response where he’s going to be out of sync with most of the audience.  Romney is getting destroyed tonight.  McCain had some excellent cracks at Romney’s expense.  Huckabee takes an early lead by rising above the intra-party squabbling and makes his pro-life appeal.  Thompson is doing very poorly.  Tancredo complains that people aren’t paying attention to his “objective” conservative ratings.  Duncan Hunter starts blathering about the Bay of Pigs and El Salvador!

Ron Paul prefers aiding the poor rather than world empire.  Romney desperately avoids talking about MassCare.  Tancredo stands athwart the health care debate yelling, “No!”  Thompson realises that NLCB was a bad idea.  It only took six years.  Everyone talks about how much they loathe Clinton.  Huckabee mentions Islamofascism again.

Update: I was getting completely bored with the debate, and didn’t watch the rest.  Dan McCarthy had some good liveblogging commentary.  He really doesn’t like Huckabee (or the debate audience), and there isn’t any reason he should.

This will give Dave Weigel heartburn:

In Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional District–a collection of mill towns and affluent and blue-collar suburbs north of Boston–the surprise issue was illegal immigration. Ogonowski made it the centerpiece of an anti-Washington campaign. An Ogonowski news release, for example, accused Tsongas of being “committed to giving cheap college to illegals at taxpayer expense.”

I had been guessing that Ogonowski’s anti-immigration positions were probably doing him more good than harm.  It shouldn’t be surprising that such an issue could work to Ogonowski’s advantage, especially in a special election with fairly low turnout.  That doesn’t mean that Ogonowski’s position wouldn’t help him in a regular general election, but it does remind us once again not to put too much stock in what MA-05 tells us about the strength of the two parties or the importance of particular issues.  What many people seem to be concluding from this race (GOP is reviving, Dems are in danger) is probably wrong, and no one should be investing the closeness of the outcome with much significance.