It’s not quite as high as some of the earlier estimates, but given the state of some of his competition Ron Paul’s $2.4 million cash-on-hand looks pretty good.  ABC’s Political Radar blog reports:

Paul’s cash on hand puts him in third place in the Republican field [bold mine-DL] in that important metric, although he is well behind leader Rudy Giuliani, who has $18 million in the bank, and Mitt Romney, with $12 million.

Is it now permitted to regard him as a more serious candidate than “Smike Brownbuckabee“?

Whatever your feelings about the war, it must, surely, provide a moral justification for those Islamists intent upon unleashing murder upon our soil and, at the same time, inculcate a deep sense of confusion within our Muslim community. Seen objectively, the aggression instigated by our political leaders against Iraq is no less motivated by a utopian, millennialist vision of how-the-world-must-be than the violence perpetrated by those who wish us all to be better off under the benevolence of a world caliphate. Evangelical liberal fundamentalism has led to rather more deaths in the world just recently than its fundamentalist Islamist counterpart [bold mine-DL]: you might conclude that they are two sides of the same coin. This may seem to be an argument for cultural relativism of the worst kind; after all, we cleave to the values of liberal democracy because we know them to be right and thus worth fighting for — and, of course, imposing, at the point of a gun and a bomb, upon other people who may not yet have seen the light. Well, perhaps. But in which case it is difficult on objective grounds to adopt outraged expressions when those other people attempt to impose their equally implacable vision of how-the-world-must-be on us, at the point of a gun. ~Rod Liddle

Update: For the benefit of those unable to understand complex ideas, a brief comment on this quote.  The point here is obviously that Liddle does not endorse the “cultural relativism of the worst kind” (nor, for that matter, do I).  Instead, he holds up the similarities between our aggressive, ideologically-charged war in Iraq and the jihadis‘ ideologically charged war to drive home the point that our principles as Western, free peoples require us to do better and not engage in this sort of “armed doctrine” fanaticism.  This is especially the case because such fanaticism is a contradiction and repudiation of our principles as liberal democratic peoples.  Obviously.

Fill in the blanks:

____________ is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine _________ regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image.

No responsible leader in __________ desires conflict with __________.  But every leader has a responsibility to acknowledge the evidence that the ______ military has now put before us: The __________ government, by its actions, has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East.

_________ now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince _________ to change its behavior, including the immediate cessation of its training and equipping extremists who are killing our troops.

It’s not every day that New Mexico (or, more accurately, one of our representatives) is in the national news.  When we do make the national news, it is usually because our governor has done or said something really embarrassing (which happens only every other day) or LANL has lost another hard drive filled with top secret materials.  So it is refreshing that the wire services should be carrying a story about our senior Senator that does not involve any of this. 

As you have all probably heard by now, Domenici is the latest one of the greybeards, so to speak, in the Senate to begin declaring dissatisfaction with the present state of Iraq policy.  This is a long way from the 2000 convention and the New Mexico delegation’s cries of “viva Bush!”  Warner grumbled earlier in the year (before falling back into line for a little while), Lugar joined the chorus just at the end of last month, he was followed by Voinovich, and now Pete has sided with them.  Domenici’s defection, like Lugar’s, is important because turning against the war is not politically necessary for either of them in the same way that it probably was for, say, Gordon Smith or Norm Coleman.  Like Lugar’s view expressed in his recent speech, Domenici’s position is essentially, “The ISG was right.”  As an imaginative slogan of political rebellion, it leaves something to be desired.  As a foreign policy view, it is an improvement over the status quo.  As a sufficient change in the foreign policy thinking of leading Republicans, it is woefully lacking, but that is to be expected.   

Back home, Pete is fairly popular, which makes his decision to break with the White House a bit more interesting.  He cannot actually be worried about his re-election, and I don’t think concern about re-election is a major reason why he has done this.  New Mexicans never throw out an incumbent Senator, especially not one as widely liked as Domenici.  Domenici was instrumental in helping to keep the base open in Albuquerque, and as Budget Committee chairman for all those years New Mexico never went begging for its already disproportionate take from the Treasury.  He has even covered himself on immigration this time around, so there will be fewer defections from his Republican supporters than there would have been had he backed the amnesty bill.  His support for the war was one of the major problems anyone back home would have had with him, but even then his re-election was never in jeopardy because of this.  The Domenici and Lugar break with the administration is a result of the public return of Republican “realist” politicians to the forefront of the Congressional GOP–the Senate and House minority leadership is nowhere to be found in all of this.  Besides, the Democratic “bench” is extremely shallow.  Except for Tom Udall, currently representing NM-03, they have no one who could seriously attempt a run and hope to win.

Sometimes blogging is a really tiresome pastime.  I recently wrote in a recent post that Hegel was a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist,” which has the virtue of beingmoreorless accurate.  For instance, consider the following:

Hegel stresses the need to recognize that the realities of the modern state necessitate a strong public authority along with a populace that is free and unregimented [bold mine-DL]. The principle of government in the modern world is constitutional monarchy [bold mine-DL], the potentialities of which can be seen in Austria and Prussia.

There are all sorts of responses to Hegel’s position, and it might be interesting to pick up our copies of Philosophy of Right and sort through his arguments.  Denying that he held such a position, when it is the beginning of most discussions of Hegel’s political philosophy, seems to me to be an unsatisfactory response.  Repeating some caricature of Hegel’s position that you could have picked up in The Open Society And Its Enemies and pretending that this is the appropriate understanding of Hegel’s politics are not the methods likely to persuade anyone of Hegel’s terrible totalitarianism.

Rani Mukherjee from Paheli

Here she is in Kangana Re from Paheli.

Tomorrow we finish the equivalent of one nine-week quarter of elementary Arabic.  Subhan’allah.  It has not been as overwhelming as I expected, but it will be getting more demanding as we go forward.  My initial promises of no blogging were a bit premature, but they were not entirely false.  There is a class I have to start preparing for the fall, dissertation chapters to write, plus the column.  I will try to keep my different blog homes updated as and when I can, but I can make no guarantees about the regularity of posting. 

Regardless, go take a look at my first column (not online) in the July 2 TAC.

There are serious fissures within the American establishment on foreign policy, but everyone – from liberals like Feinstein to neoconservatives to realists – shares the premise that America needs to manage the politics of the Muslim world, by force when necessary, to prevent the emergence of radical regimes. ~Ross Douthat

Ross says he isn’t sure that the premise is wrong.  Let’s assume, for the moment, that this premise is right.  (I don’t really think it is, but I’ll leave that for later.)  If America “needs to manage the politics of the Muslim world…to prevent the rise of radical regimes,” a troublemaker from the fringes of insignificance might ask why it is that the government pursues those policies that have always seemed least likely to “prevent the rise of radical regimes.”  Between the application of the blunt-force trauma of military intervention and the sudden shock of democratisation, is there any way that radicalised politics and radicalised regimes would not be the outcome?  That is, if preventing the emergence of radical regimes is the goal, how much must we redefine “radical” to exclude the emerging regimes already in the region in order to maintain some sense that the goal is still practicable?  Further, are the distinctions between Maliki and Sadr in the argument to which Ross refers credible?  How much of a Shi’ite sectarian and fundamentalist member of a terrorist group (as Maliki was and is) do you have to be before you get labeled “radical”?  If Maliki’s radicalism does not disqualify him, the actual goal of the government would seem to be having a compliant “ally” in Baghdad.  However, if Maliki is also ineffective, he is not of much use as an “ally,” which raises the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?”  Considering how complicit the Maliki government has been in the past in Sadrist activities, it seems bizarre to draw a distinction in which a barely tolerable Maliki allegedly holds the line against undesirable Sadrism.

The same troublemaker might note at this point that a large part of our efforts for decades to control Near Eastern politics to our supposed advantage has had significant radicalising effects in their own right.  It may be that the consensus view that prevention of the emergence of radical regimes and a continued, prominent and military presence in the region are entirely incompatible.  Perhaps we can have constantly contested hegemony or we can have a Near East that lies beyond our control, but which also may be less prone to boil over with radical political movements, but we may not be able to have both.  The establishment seems to think that we must have both.  It seems improbable that we can attempt to maintain the degree of control that the establishment wants while enjoying the lack of radicalism that they would prefer–one entails the other, and, in the end, the latter severely weakens the former.  While this fellow is making all this trouble, the troublemaker could then add that there might be some small connection between the current predicament and the preoccupations of the broad foreign policy consensus in the establishment.  At some point, the establishment should probably come around to a new consensus that managing the internal politics of other countries is, rather like running a command economy, a futile and self-defeating exercise in attempting to plan and organise human behaviour according to this or that model.

My Scene colleague Cheryl Miller points to thesethreeitems.  Despite what seems like a perfectly crafted attempt to bait me into an extremely long response, I would make just a few points.  First, Ms. Grabar’s article was not “preposterous,” though it was weaker than it should have been.  Second, a Jane Austen Christianity is the Christianity of the safe, the unremarkable and the ordinary.  I do not claim that there is no need for such a thing or that it is unimportant, but the idea that it is actually more profound or more powerful than Dostoevsky’s vision seems, well, just silly. Third, no one who understands anything about Dostoevsky would say the following, as Tom West does:

Dostoevsky’s solution, for all its anti-European sentiment, seems to take its departure from the same post-Hegelian premise: only will, and not reason, can guide us.

The principal error of both Peter Verkhovensky (Demons) and Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment)is to place their trust in the power of the will and the willingness to overstep the boundaries of the law, both human and divine.  Plainly, for Dostoevsky will alone cannot guide us, and in Dostoevsky’s Orthodoxy–heavily influenced by the Slavophiles and indirectly by the Fathers–there is the understanding that will apart from or in opposition to God is death and isolation.  Willfulness against God is a mark of the demonic; it is at the heart of our ancestors’ rebellion in the Garden.  Further, it is the one-sidedness of reason alone, reason without faith, reason against God, that Dostoevsky, like the Slavophiles, repudiates when he critiques reason.  Likewise, no fair and accurate reading of The Grand Inquisitor could lead anyone to conclude the following about Dostoevsky:

For Dostoevsky, then, either we accept the absolute authority of the father and king and church, or we repudiate human reason and follow nothing but arbitrary will, personal or collective.    

Amazing.  This is totally wrong.  It is entirely backwards.  West claims to be reviewing a work by Joseph Frank, but the Frank works on Dostoevsky I have read would never have made such a claim.  In the story, who represents the (for Dostoevsky) unholy trinity of authority, miracle and bread?  The Grand Inquisitor.  Who represents a religion in harmony with human freedom in this story?  Christ.  Those who have read Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary cannot miss his frequent, polemical equations (in which he again echoes the Slavophiles) between socialism, Catholicism and rationalism.  The first two, in Dostoevsky’s view, both share a devotion to authority, miracle and bread.  Dostoevsky’s Christianity, his Orthodoxy, is the Orthodoxy in which Christ did not come down from the Cross because He so respected man’s freedom.  This is the same Dostoevsky who does not have Fr. Zosima’s body exuding the scent of myrrh after his death, because Dostoevsky does not wish to make faith an automatic response to a miracle, but a freely chosen embrace of the Incarnate Truth.  (A good argument can be made that Dostoevsky has gone too far in his opposition to both authority and miracle, since the Orthodox Church acknowledges the importance of both, but that is not at issue here.)  Dostoevsky’s vision is the one in which evil is the proof of human freedom–suffering will exist if man is to be free–and appeal to authority is the mark of a Christianity that seeks to supplant Christ.  His Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is another valuable source for understanding his priorities.  This was someone who did not discard the old scheme of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” but rather refused to let it be defined by liberals and socialists according to their lights.  Setting up Dostoevsky as some embodiment of the most ultra of reactionaries is satisfying to someone already intent on belittling traditionalism (so intent that he misses that Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn hold positions very close to one another in the end), but it does no justice to the complexity of Dostoevsky’s works and the mixture of his liberal background, his later Slavophile-inspired romantic conservative nationalism and renewed acceptance of Orthodoxy.

Happy Independence Day!  231 years ago today the Declaration of Independence (which had already been signed on July 2) was proclaimed in each of the new states, and the political bonds between the colonies and the Mother Country were severed. 

As I am short on time this year, I will direct you to last year’s Independence Day musings on the Declaration and what it means and does not mean to be American.