The GOP has unveiled the convention logo for next year:

Apparently the GOP is going to try to destroy 2008 before 2008 can destroy them.  They’re taking Giuliani’s message to heart–stay on offense! 

Is the message of this logo that the Republican Party is drunk (the stars)?  Depressed (hence the blue)?  Insane?  Perhaps the message is that the party’s being chopped to pieces, or gradually erased from existence and disappearing into the background?

Past GOP convention logos have never been what anyone would confuse with aesthetically pleasing, but no recent one has been quite so ridiculous.  Consider ’04:

While it does appear as if the elephant is possibly threatening to step on the Statue of Liberty’s head, the elephant itself appears quite normal.

2000 was a year of a tame, sane blue elephant, which was nonetheless trampling on the flag:

While the year itself loomed overhead, the ’96 convention had a much more subdued, reasonable-looking elephant.

I wasn’t able to find images for 1992 in Houston or for the 1988 New Orleans convention logo, but I did find this description for ’88:

It consists of the stylized three-star elephant used by the Republican National Committee since 1968, with its back reshaped to represent the Superdome where the Republican delegates will gather next August.

It doesn’t sound that great, but almost anything would be better than the blue rampaging freak of nature on display this time.

And those changes have brought us success, in local elections we have taken Plymouth, we have taken Lincoln, we took Chester, we took the council right here in Blackpool and as William reminded us in that great speech on Sunday we are back in the North of England, a force to be reckoned with in every part of our country.  ~David Cameron

Except Scotland.  Or maybe this was an intentional oversight?

Update: Alex Massie adds several solid observations on this point, and has more about the speech in an earlier post.

Here is a sentence from the introduction to the brand new Crisis of the Oikoumene:

Loyalty to the Empire that endured until the Monothelite crisis–involving a development on Monophysite Christology–prevented the [Three Chapters] schism from making a lasting mark on the African church.

Can I just tell you how troubling these lines about monotheletism are?  Every year there is some book that comes out about Orthodoxy, Christology, ecumenical councils or Byzantium and inevitably somewhere in such a book you will find a description of monotheletism like the one above.  It’s just not accurate, and yet it gets repeated on a regular basis.  I may have more to say about the book at Cliopatria in the coming weeks.  Christology buffs, stay tuned.  

Update: On the other hand, Richard Price’s chapter explaining the origins of the Three Chapters controversy is absolutely superb and definitely required reading for anyone interested in the question of the authority of Chalcedon and its supposed ‘Nestorianising’ tendencies on account of the reinstatements of Theodoret and Ibas.  I have rarely seen a scholarly treatment of this aspect of the controversy handled so carefully and thoughtfully.  Well worth the wait.

The Post‘s list of foreign policy advisors for the main candidates is fairly disturbing, albeit unsurprising stuff.  We have known about many of the big names associated with the leading candidates for a while now.  Edwards and Romney have assembled teams of people who are not nearly as well known.  That’s no guarantee that these advisors are any better at guiding foreign policy, but prominent screw-ups and known warmongers are mostly conspicuous by their absence from the Edwards and Romney camps. 

Also, Romney seems to have a peculiarly strong focus on Latin America policy at the moment: 10 of his 26 advisors belong to his Latin America policy group, and virtually all of the others are dedicated to counter-terrorism.  Judging by his current advisors, you’d get the impression that Romney believes Latin America to be the most important region in the world.

By continuing to use such terms as “Burma” and “Rangoon,” we refuse to be spooked. ~David Warren

I don’t mean to be a broken record on this.  By all means, condemn and denounce the junta, and expose its crimes to the world, but let’s stop pretending that we keep calling it Burma out of deep conviction.  Myanmar has been the Burmese name of the country since independence, so it is hardly “spooky” to apply that name to English usage.   The continued use of Burma and Rangoon and so forth simply means that English-speakers are using the same names they have used for a very long time.  Using these names is not a protest–certainly not an effective one–but a convenience and a habit.  The logic of this sort of argument is that continued use of a traditional colonial name for a place is a declaration of opposition to the current regime, in which case we had all better start talking about Rhodesia again instead of Zimbabwe, lest we taint ourselves with some supposed nominal obeisance to Mugabe. 

P.S. Warren’s calls for military strikes are typical and foolish.  Throwing the country into chaos and unleashing internecine conflict hardly seem desirable alternatives; cheap talk about having a ready-made opposition government is the same kind of recklessness that did so much to make Iraq the mess that it is today.

Longtime baseball fans know what the Mendoza line is (we won’t explain here) but what we mean here is that there may be a “Ron Paul line”: those candidates who couldn’t outraise Paul this quarter (he apparently took in approx. $2.4 million) ought to do some soul searching? So who couldn’t outraise Paul this quarter? Dodd, Biden? Huckabee? Every other GOPer not in the top four? ~Chuck Todd

In the event, Rep. Paul took in twice as much as Todd expected, which raises the bar even higher for the rest of the GOP field.  Hunter and Tancredo have vowed to stay in through the caucuses, but where do their supporters go when they drop out?  Ironically, Paul is alone among the others in being a reliable opponent of illegal immigration and trade deals such as NAFTA, which would make him the logical choice for these voters…if the war did not divide him so sharply from the majority of Republicans.

Update: Huckabee managed to bring in a whopping $1 million.  Ambinder ponders the significance:

There must be, within the Republican Party, a vein of anti-war libertarian sentiment. It is longer and deeper than many of us had suspected. The Paul movement is probably one part Buchanan bridage and one part fiscal hawk. It is clearly active in ways that most of us haven’t adequately understood? Paul may be in a position to be a giant killer now. Imagine if he finishes second or third in New Hampshire ….

Well, some thirty percent or so of Republicans have been opposed to the war for some time now, and there was always a small but hardy contingent of antiwar Republicans and conservatives.  It appears that they have begun mobilising.  Might it be enough to drag other candidates towards somewhat less crazy foreign policy views?

For the third quarter, Ron Paul has raised just over $5 million, improving on last quarter’s numbers and giving him a respectable chance to compete in the early states.

But McCain was precisely correct to say that Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking that led men like Madison, Jefferson and Adams to believe in individual autonomy [bold mine-DL].

These men were critical of some aspects of Christianity. But to deny that Christian principles were a powerful force behind the founding of this nation, from the impulse to flee Europe to the justification for war to the guiding principles at the Constitutional Convention [bold mine-DL], is to deny historical reality. 

The political thinking of the Founders was profoundly shaped by Christian teaching. Pointing that out would hardly be controversial were not so many people irrationally afraid of religion in general and Christianity in particular. But as John Adams said, men “may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”  ~ New Hampshire Union-Leader

That first paragraph is remarkable.  Naturally, I don’t agree.  Far more overreaching than anything McCain said, which was ridiculous mostly because it was McCain saying it, the editorial maintains that “Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking.”  To which I respond: “what part of the Enlightenment do we mean?”  I have been known to refer very broadly and negatively to “the Enlightenment,” when I am really objecting principally to political and social theories of Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau, and I have been reminded on a few occasions that it is worth keeping in mind the differences between Enlightenment thinkers.  Here this is especially worth doing. 

Leibniz, for example, was probably the closest to matching the image of an Aufklaerer who also respected what the editorial calls “Judeo-Christian values” (which is still pretty far removed from being “profoundly shaped by Christian teaching”), but he was an early figure and not representative of the kind of thought that influenced the Founding generation.  Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government, which had a great influence on 18th century colonial political thought, is a weighty tome replete with references to Scripture, but it is not so much “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” as it is Whig political philosophy trying to shield itself against Filmer with the Bible.  It is difficult to say that Harrington and Bolingbroke, significant for us because of their influence on Montesqieu and the later Country tradition, were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” beyond the reality that they belonged to Christian confessions and lived in a culture that was steeped in Christianity.  In my modern Greek history class, I could also say that Moisiodax and Korais were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching”–profoundly influenced, that is, to run away from that teaching when it conflicted with their philosophical and political programs.  In general, wherever people have been “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” they have had no time for prattle about natural rights, the social contract and “individual autonomy.”  It seems right and good to me that they should respond in this way.  Understandably, Christians try to construct some preeminent place for Christianity in the story of “the Founding,” which has itself been given quasi-mystical status by nationalist historians and ideologues, because they have come to recognise that it is only through having a claim to being a key part of “the Founding” that they will be permitted to have any real role in a system dominated by Americanist/proposition nation ideology.  The problem lies not so much with attempts to baptise “the Founding” as with the distorted and ideological treatment of the early republican period by later nationalist politicians and historians.  If Americanism and American identity itself are to be defined by political propositions, as the adherents of the proposition nation view would have it, it becomes necessary for people to interpret “the Founding” in a such a way that their beliefs are discovered as the ultimate sources of those propositions.    

As a recent instructor of mine was fond of saying, let’s take this step by step.  It makes sense to describe America as a Christian nation in the following ways:

1) Anglo-American culture, what Russell Kirk referred to as our “British culture,” owes an enormous debt to European Christianity and is inconceivable without it.  North American colonial societies were and are derived from European and Christian civilisation and ultimately belong to that civilisation.  Christianity was a public religion and was, at the state level, an established religion in one form or another in many of the colonies, and this arrangement prevailed for many decades after independence.  Those who think they have found justification in the early republican period for their drive to push religion into the corner and isolate it from public life don’t know what they’re talking about.   

2) It is not possible to understand the evolution of America’s “language of liberty” without referring back to the 17th century religiously-charged constitutional struggles of the British Isles.  In this sense, our constitutional inheritance, which was at the heart of the War for Independence, depended on and derived from precedents that were set during a civil war that had both political and religious dimensions. 

However, the constitutional settlement that emerged out of these conflicts involved to a very large extent the complete abandonment of all political theology.  Any endorsement of ideas of “individual autonomy” would represent a significant departure from “Christian principles.”  “Judeo-Christian values,” fairly meaningless phrase that it is in this formulation, do not lead anyone to believe in individual autonomy.  On the contrary, whether in the Old Testament or the New, what we call individual autonomy is what Scripture defines as sin and pride.  Scripture is brimming with commands for social obligation, fraternity, charity, self-sacrifice and the corporate unity of the People of God.  Traditional Christian social teaching does not recognise an idea of “individual autonomy.”  Unity in the Body of Christ does not obliterate distinctions and personality, but it does preclude autonomy of any kind.  Enlightenment social theories along these lines were considered–and were–subversive because they contradicted the Christian teaching that allegedly so profoundly influenced the thought of Jefferson (!).  It should be enough that Jefferson was a great proponent of decentralism and liberty; we should not need to remake him into a crypto-theologian to appreciate his contribution to our country.  

It is correct to observe that Christian respect for the dignity and integrity of the human person and scholastic arguments on natural law paved the way for later applications of these reflections in political and legal reform.  It is true, as studies of the rhetoric of the Revolution have shown, that the use of originally religious language of covenants, which had already been introduced into political discourse during the English civil war, shaped broader popular understanding of the patriot cause more than did familiarity with Lockean contractual theory.  It is true that the broad mass of the population of the colonies was made up of professing Christians.  In this sense, the people constituted a nation of Christians.  To the extent that they still do, they may be called a Christian nation.  As Dr. Fleming said on this subject:

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians.

Apparently, Cameron has given a speech at Blackpool that has impressedmany and even awedsome of his audience.  He had no text or cues or podium, and worked from a few notecards.  The prospect of a general election this year seems to agree with Cameron.  In any case, the swirling rumours of just a few days ago that Cameron was headed for a fall, which I assumed to be true, show just how many people in his party underestimated his campaign skills.  The Cameroons have always struck me as a ridiculous bunch, and I remain skeptical that they can win an election, but as of right now this is probably the most competitive–and least demoralised–the Tories have been in ten years.

Exit Strategiesis the very good foreign policy blog of Dan McCarthy, Jim Antle and Richard Spencer.  If you’ve been reading their blog, you’ll know that Jim Antle was talking about the Ogonowski Phenomenon before anyoneelse, and he was also explaining why Ogonowski is not likely to succeed.  Ogonowski seems to be a very strong candidate, but it is unlikely that he will be able to overcome the many natural barriers that a Republican in Massachusetts faces, especially in what is likely to be another cycle of hemorrhaging for the House GOP.

Richard Spencer has a new post talking about Prof. Bacevich’s forthcoming cover article for TACon Gen. Petraeus.