It’s remarkable how fairly unimpressive columns can generate more serious commentary.  Yglesias joins in, making some of the right points on the origins of the GOP, though he neglects the importance of the “Know-Nothings” and the American Party in the 1850s as one of the significant sources of later Republican supporters.  The American Party served as a kind of way station between the dying Whigs and the rising Republicans for antislavery Whigs.  In the end, though, the only way a third party has ever succeeded in becoming a major national party is by gaining most of the supporters of one of the two major established parties.  The new party has to have a clear rationale for existing.  Needless to say, this is as far removed from the entirely personality-driven Bloomberg-Hagel craze and Unity ’08’s Broderistic fetish of bipartisanship as can be imagined. 

It is also worth noting that Broderism (or the “centrism” of “moderates”) is the very antithesis of what has always motivated third-party politics in this country.  Where third-party supporters (and I have been one in the last two presidential elections, for whatever that’s worth) want to have more representative government that reflects the diversity of political views in this country, adherents of Broderism find even the mild disagreements between the two established parties to be unsettling and painful.  Were Broderists ever exposed directly to the rough-and-tumble chaos of a proportional representative political system, they might become seriously ill.  Where third-party supporters would like to heighten differences over important policy questions and sharpen debates, because we think policy arguments have meaning and the right policy choices are more important than comity among members of the political class, the Broderists would like to mute disagreement and muddy the waters.  In our view, the major parties are virtually indistinguishable in practice in so many of their general views about policy, while the Broderists imagine that the two parties shout at each other across a deep and wide chasm. 

It isn’t that the Broderists and “centrists” haven’t got an agenda exactly, but that it seems to be an agenda culled from the worst aspects of both sides of the spectrum.  It is by combining the worst of both worlds that the political class creates the consensus, and it is the consensus that determines the limits of permissible debate.  (As a side note, I would add that this is most especially true in the foreign policy establishment, which has an even more narrow range of permissible views.) 

Take the immigration bill, since the “failure” of immigration “reform” is something that troubles Bloomberg, Hagel and Broder.  It might very well trouble them, since they all tend to favour more liberal immigration policies and pro-corporate immigration policies, and the defeated bill was the embodiment of both.  The bill would have undermined U.S. sovereignty and exploited immigrant labour, but because this nasty compromise could initially command a consensus in the Senate it was deemed to be “reform.”  For the Broderist, any legislative achievement would seem to be better than none, provided that it has “broad, bipartisan support,” to use an old phrase.  The merits of the policy are less important than the breadth of support it can command, and there is nothing more damning that can be said of a policy than that it is divisive or was approved on a party-line vote. 

After four years of war in Iraq–a war approved on a bipartisan basis–we might reconsider the virtues of bipartisan collaboration and unity.  If we had a more fierce opposition party, divided government might even at some point produce more sane policy decisions rather than mere stalemate.  The last thing we need is more tame opposition to the majority, or more deference of the legislature to the executive.  We have a government of divided powers and an adversarial party system, so we might as well try to use them for their proper purposes of checking power and preventing usurpation.  Of course, Broderism is simply a symptom of a political culture that tells us that government is here to provide us with services and to “get things done,” rather than to meddle as little as possible in our affairs.

Today, President Bush maintains that the nation is in a war against terrorism — what Pentagon officials call “the long war” — in which civilization itself is at stake. Yet six years into this war, the armed forces — not just the Army, but also the Air Force, Navy and Marines — have changed almost nothing about the way their promotional systems and their entire bureaucracies operate. ~Fred Kaplan

Kaplan’s article is an interesting read, but I think the juxtaposition of WWII and the current fight Kaplan makes here doesn’t really reveal what he wants it to reveal.  He is right that there have not been significant changes in military procedures over the past many years, but this is more of a revelation of how overblown and exaggerated the scope and scale of the conflict have been.  It is tempting to put everything down to administration and bureaucratic incompetence, and there may be a lot of that, but I think the failure to make so many of the necessary changes to the military, as well as failures in upgrading port security, protection of infrastructure, disaster response, and, obviously, border security, tells us that no one is making these things a priority.  Why don’t they?  Because the “existential” threat they are meant to guard againt is mostly so much hot air emanating from warmongering politicians.  Almost six years ago, the propagandists said that “everything had changed,” but there have been impressive continuities of bad policy, mediocre decisionmaking, institutional structures and bureaucratic procedures.  Unconservative in almost every other way, the administration has at least managed to preserve the same flawed hegemonist goals and the same misguided obsessions with certain Near Eastern regimes that previous administrations have shared.  

There is one of two reasons for this: either no one knows how to make the proper changes, or changes are considered unnecessary.  If the latter, perhaps it is because there is not really a “long war” to be fought, but instead the “long war” serves as a rhetorical umbrella to justify whatever it is that hegemonists thought needed to be done anyway.  Call it the “long pretext.”

Since he presumably understands that the “Swift-boating” of various Democratic candidates was the product of rank dishonesty and distortion, Tom Friedman seems to be upset that the administration does not make lying about Bin Laden’s connections to the war in Iraq a more prominent, central feature of its propaganda effort.  Friedman should gve the administration some credit.  They are going to war with the dishonest spin they have.  They have been trying to deceive the public about the effectiveness of the “surge” (which does not seem to be working, if death tolls from sectarian killings and bombing fatalities are any measure).  They have been regularly deceiving the public about recent successes by attributing the “Awakening” to the “surge,” when it was a reaction against the excesses and brutality of  the “Islamic State” types and the new tribal “allies” in Anbar were not that long ago supposed to be targets of the “surge.”  They invoke Al Qaeda with amazing regularity.  It is amazing, as anything remotely related to Al Qaeda is an extremely small part of the mess in Iraq and has little to do with what would happen in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.  Friedman wants them to do more of this spinning.  He wants the administration to be engage in even more dishonest spin, if such a thing can be imagined. 

Friedman tries to get in on the act:

Bin Laden has created a situation in which the U.S. occupation in Iraq is viewed as entirely “illegitimate” and therefore any violence there by Sunni jihadists against Americans or Iraqi civilians is considered entirely legitimate “resistance.” 

Actually, Bin Laden has done very little to make the occupation seem illegitimate.  The insurgents who are not with the “Islamic State of Iraq,” which would be most of them, view the occupation as inherently illegitimate and have done for years, because they have somehow concluded that our government invaded their country.  They didn’t need Bin Laden or anyone else to tell them this.  The main trouble with winning a “P.R. war against Bin Laden” (as Friedman calls it) is that the tactics of the “Islamic State of Iraq” have already been alienating the people who have suffered from them–we don’t need to persuade Iraqis to view the perpetrators of those attacks negatively.  However, as much as they might loathe those perpetrators, they aren’t going to fall in love with the occupation, and they aren’t going to blame their plight on Bin Laden.

This is probably well-known to more advanced students of both languages, and is so obvious that I feel silly for not noticing it earlier, but if someone told me about this before I had forgotten it.  Armenian seems to have borrowed the root of their words relating to translation (targmanut’yun, targmanich, targmanel) from Arabic or, more likely, Syriac, given the strong cultural and commercial ties between classical/medieval Armenia and Syria.  In Arabic, the word for translation is tarjama, so the connection between that or some variant of it and targmanel is clear enough, since anel means “to do” and the gim in Armenian is equivalent to the jim in Arabic.

A friend of mine has just given me a boatload of Armenian books and books about Armenian history and literature, including the Matyan Voghbergutyan (Book of Lamentation), often known simply as Narek after the monastery where its author, the late tenth and early eleventh century churchman Grigor Narekatsi, one of the great Armenian medieval writers, resided.  I also received a copy of the English translation.  Narekatsi’s poem is one of the greatest written works of Armenian Christian spirituality, a work of repentance and profound sorrow over sin.  Consider these lines from the second lament:

I am the forsaken tabernacle on the verge of collapse;
The broken lock on a door;
The voiced edifice soiled anew;
The forlorn fitting inheritance;
The forgotten house built by God,
As foretold by Moses, David and Jeremiah. 

Until now, I had not looked closely at the original.  I will certainly try to make some time to work on this.

We already know that Reihan doesn’t like Ramachandra Guha’s new book, so what would he make of his utterly bizarre op-ed (via Chapati Mystery) from a couple weeks ago?  His op-ed told me that Mr. Guha does not much care for Punjabi landlords or crowds of Pakistani Muslims.  Very enlightening.

It may not be a shock to find that Obama, who vows to change the way Washington works, plans no such change when it comes to how Washington works on Cuba. But it does suggest that the only place to find Obama and audacity in close proximity is on the cover of his book. ~Steve Chapman

Oh, I don’t know.  Obama’s been fairly bold in making foreign policy statements that strain credulity and upset the establishment (along with baffling or horrifying most informed citizens), so we shouldn’t dismiss his capacity for daring.  The problem with his proposed changes to Cuba policy, as Mr. Chapman notes, is that they are tepid and unremarkable, but this isn’t necessarily a measure of Obama’s lack of boldness in general.  It is a reflection of just howconventional the ideas of the great bringer of change, transformer of politics and unifier of all things usually are when they relate to foreign policy.  When he takes risks or attempts to blaze a trail, he makes mistakes, and when he sticks to his script his excessive interventionist biases force him to adopt much of the worst in the status quo.

Steve Clemons also notes that Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSA under President Carter, has endorsed Obama.  I hope Obama has a good damage control team.  Needless to say, my view of the strategic genius of Brzezinski is not the one Steve Clemons holds.

Substituting for Sullivan, Steve Clemons, one of the more interesting foreign policy realists out there, has pointed out that everyone’s favourite, Michael O’Hanlon, is under contract with Al-Hurra (which literally means “the free one”).  Al-Hurra is the Arabic-language U.S. propaganda information service, which O’Hanlon serves in both a producing and commentary capacity. 

This is the same service, incidentally, that has made headlines for being managed by officials who (you guessed it) don’t know Arabic, which has led to the unwitting broadcast of terrorist messages on the network.  Your tax dollars at work.

In the course of giving his devastating reply to Derbyshire’s review of his book Religion of Peace?, Robert Spencer reminds us once again of a crucial point regarding Christianity and immigration:

In reality, Christianity has no inherent connection at all with open-borders insanity and globalization. No less prominent a Christian than St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the mainstream Christian view when he said that “after his duties towards God, man owes most to his parents and his country. One’s duties towards one’s parents include one’s obligations towards one’s relatives, because these latter have sprung from [or are connected by ties of blood with] one’s parents…and the services due to one’s country have for their object all one’s fellow-countrymen and all the friends of one’s fatherland.” An open-borders globalist? Not quite.

It is telling that many of those who either cite the Gospel as the source for rejecting national loyalties and/or supporting immigration or invoke the Lord to justify the importation and exploitation of poor labourers are not themselves professing Christians.  Of course, the absurdity of justifying the exploitation of labourers in the name of Christian fraternity ought to be obvious, but we live in dark times where even the simplest things are obscured.  This quote also brings us back to the question of the relationship between Christianity and patriotism.

It has also never been clear to me where anyone came across the idea that orthodox Christianity endorses or encourages egalitarianism or rootless cosmopolitanism.  (There have been many modern Christians who have understood their religion in this way, but their egalitarian and cosmopolitan views are typically matched by their departure from orthodoxy more generally.)  The teachings in the Gospels and Epistles presuppose social hierarchy and patriarchal authority, and their authors literally cannot conceive of a world in which civic and family obligations are weak or non-existent, much less do they advocate for such a view.  If Christianity is “universal” in that it is for the salvation of all, it nonetheless does not obliterate natural loyalties and affinities to particular places and peoples.  Being willing to leave all your earthly relations for the sake of following God is a measure of the devotion the believer has and his desire to put God first–it does not abrogate his obligations to his kith and kin.  Indeed, to be a good and faithful servant, the Christian must not only show mercy to those who seek it from him, but he must also discharge his duties to those to whom he is obliged and related.  The Apostle exhorts: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (I Tim. 5:8) 

For more on this, I recommend Dr. Fleming’sThe Morality of Everyday Life.  

Cross-posted at WWWTW