There’s only one non-democracy in our neighborhood: that’s Cuba. And I strongly believe the people of Cuba ought to live in a free society. It’s in our interests that Cuba become free and it’s in the interests of the Cuban people that they don’t have to live under an antiquated form of government — that has just been repressive.

So we’ll continue to press for freedom on the island of Cuba. One day, the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away (laughter) — no, no, no — then, the question is, what will be the approach of the U.S. government? My attitude is, is that we need to use the opportunity to call the world together to promote democracy as the alternative to the form of government they have been living with.

You’ll see an interesting debate. Some will say, all that matters is stability, which in my judgment would just simply reinforce the followers of the current regime. I think we ought to be pressing hard for democracy. ~President Bush

That’s an interesting slip-up, since it means that Bush acknowledges that even democracies that vote for preposterous demagogues are still democracies.  Rick “Gathering Storm” Santorum and friends will be disappointed by this lack of farsighted moral clarity in facing down the Boliviano-Venezuelan threat.     

It never ceases to amaze how Mr. Bush thinks that saying he “strongly believes” in something is an argument in its favour.  If I “strongly believe” that I am able to transmute one element into another, does that make it true?  If I close my eyes and repeat the phrase, “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks!”, does that mean that the spooks are real?  Mr. Bush has a bad habit of stating his ideal preferences and backing them up with policies that are absolutely the last policies one would choose to achieve the goals he has set out.  You want a free Cuba?  Try trading with them and opening up their society through travel, exchange, and communication.  End the sanctions.  Let the natural intercourse between the southern U.S. and Cuba, which was commonplace in the pre-Castro days, resume.  The Cuban regime will break down just as every officially communist regime eventually breaks down or redefines itself when exposed to increased commerce and exchange.  End the ridiculous restrictions on American travel to Cuba.  End the pointless ethnic lobby-driven punishment of Cuba.  Indeed, before long Castro will be gone and Washington will have to engage with the Cuban government without the old dictator in control.  This could be a great opportunity for changing course on Cuba policy, or it could be an occasion to spend another decade or two cutting off our two countries from the mutually beneficial relationship that ought to exist between close neighbours. 

I understand the emigre hostility to the Castro regime.  I share their contempt for the man and what he has done to Cuba.  The best way to destroy his legacy and see a day when Cuba is genuinely free is to stop artificially propping up the party regime through sanctions.  Sanctions are a dictator’s best friend–they give him something to blame for bad conditions, they provide a plausible foreign threat and they serve as a reason to rally around a government people might otherwise despise.  End the sanctions, and you will be a lot closer to seeing a free and democratic Cuba than if you perpetuated the tired policies left over from the Cold War.  

Viva Cuba libre.

You are the America we love. ~Nicolas Sarkozy to Barbara Streisand (Time, June 29, 2007)

Via John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Review

I know the French have strange tastes when it comes to American entertainers, but things like this might convince me that the Francophobes had a point.

And so for the sake of our own security, for the sake of the security of the United States of America, the United States must stand with millions of moms and dads throughout the Middle East [bold mine-DL] who want a future of dignity and peace, and we must help them defeat a common enemy. ~President Bush

Via USC Center on Public Diplomacy

Here we have public diplomacy as boilerplate stump speech.

Americans are a naturally optimistic nation; and the younger they are, the more hope they have: 31% of the underthirties even believe the chaotic occupation of Iraq has made the US safer. Fewer than one in five believe it has made the US less safe, and 38% believe that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do, compared with 35% of all adults. If you want to find the most antiwar part of the population, you need to look at senior citizens, not the young. ~Andrew Sullivan

Of course, these results would tend to confirm my view that “optimistic” is just a brief way of saying “not paying much attention” or “not knowing very much.”  These results might be said to embody “the folly of youth” in statistical form.  These results also reinforce just how much I am totally unlike the people in my age group.  I am pessimistic, antiwar and conservative–it doesn’t get much more atypical than that.

Sullivan points to some other interesting items:

A solid 43% of the underthirties, moreover, believe being gay is a choice, compared with only 34% of the general population.

This is rather remarkable, since it seems to me that this is the socialconservative view of homosexuality and one that tends to align with opposition to homosexuality.  It is the essentialists who claim that there is something so predetermined about sexuality that choice is almost beside the point, and it is curious that the generation that is supposed to be more accepting of homosexuality thinks of it as a “choice.”  Perhaps most of them think of it as a choice no different from any others, but a belief that it is something voluntary and chosen makes their attitudes towards it much more malleable than if they believed that it was some ineluctable product of nature.

There’s bad news for Obama for the under-30 set:

Seventy-four per cent said that most people they know [bold mine-DL] would not vote for a president who had ever used cocaine.

The old “most people they know” response is a good indication of what the respondents actually believe.  No one would want to appear puritanical and rule out voting for a former coke user, but lots of people are perfectly happy to say that all their friends are very much against such people.  This seems counterintuitive to me.  It seemed to me that people my age would be even less concerned about a candidate’s drug use than their parents (and it is still possible that they may be marginally less concerned), but that is a huge number of people who would refuse to vote for a candidate simply because of such a habit.  Don’t get me wrong–I think this is an unusually healthy sign for the future.  It is nonetheless slightly surprising.

Until Iraq, I really thought I understood what a “civil war” was. Or, more accurately, I understood that a great variety of intrastate conflagrations could be rightfully termed “civil war”. The American Civil War was a civil war. In a different sense, Bosnia and Rwanda were civil wars marked by hideous power imbalances. ~Brian Beutler

Part of the confusion about whether we should call the Iraqi civil war a civil war or not (I think we should, since at bottom that’s what it is) stems from just this sort of broad, lazy definition of civil war.  This isn’t really Mr. Beutler’s fault–a lot of people don’t define it properly, and almost everyone thinks that our “Civil War” was a civil war.  After all, that’s what they were taught in school, and that’s what most scholars call it.  Iraq war supporters have taken advantage of this confusion and used it to argue, more  or less, that the lack of an organised Army of Northern Anbar marching in columns with drummer boys and flags proves that Iraq is not in the grips of civil war, as if Iraqi Sunni insurgents were interested in anything other than retaking power in Baghdad.  It is the foreigners (and some of the Kurds) who want to split up Iraq–most of the Iraqis may not “think” of themselves principally as Iraqis, as Lugar said, but that does not mean that they do not want their own group to control all of Iraq, or as much of it as they can manage.  A lack of shared identity or a lack of a shared interpretation of national identity is usually a prerequisite to civil war; it does not necessarily entail partition or separation. 

Sometimes, for the sake of brevity and communication, I still use the phrase Civil War to refer to the War of Secession, but this is not an accurate name.  I use the translation of the French name (guerre de la Secession) because the French, God bless them, do not have the hang-ups of Unionist historiography compelling them to use language that legitimises the mythical of the eternal Union.  The only way that a war between states that had left the Union and those that remained in the United States could be classified as a civil war is if the seceding states sought to conquer and subjugate the other states (which would make secession seem a strange move) or if “the Union” was not actually a union but a consolidated state inside of which a war was raging between citizens of that same state.  Neither of these was the case, so I submit that “the Civil War” was not any such thing.  It was a war of secession in which the anti-secessionist forces won.  A similar point might be made about the wars in what was Yugoslavia: they were wars of secession from different polities.  Strangely enough, we do not call colonial wars for independence “civil wars”–our War for Independence is not called “the British civil war” on either side of the Atlantic, and the Dutch rebellion against Spain is not called the “Habsburg civil war” (and it would be ridiculous if it were).  From a certain French perspective, the war in Algeria was a kind of French civil war, inasmuch as the French regarded Algeria as an integral part of France by that time, but it wasn’t really a civil war, either.  Many people in the press referred to the North Yemeni invasion of the newly-constituted Democratic Republic of Yemen (a successor to the Marxist South Yemen) as civil war, but it was the suppression of separatism pure and simple.

As I have said before, and as I will probably say again before it’s all over, a civil war is, as the name implied, a war fought between citizens of the same polity.  The Roman civil wars are a good standard to which can compare other wars to test whether they are being fought between fellow citizens or not; the English, Spanish and Russian civil wars were likewise genuine civil wars.  Citizens of seceding states who want to create a new confederation of states might reasonably be defined, from the perspective of the union from which they seceded, as rebels of a sort, but they are not  fellow citizens with the people they are fighting.  Also, they are not interested in seizing control of the government of the union from which they have separated.  Both of those conditions would probably be necessary for such a war to be correctly labeled a civil war.

The “blog rating” system, using the categories of the MPAA, provides some amusement, though its standards are so rigorous that all but the most fastidious would be likely to have some number of objectionable words in them.  For instance, National Review‘s The Corner received an NC-17 rating.  Meanwhile, Eunomia and The American Scene both received G ratings.

Bird has, as Slate‘s Josh Levin makes clear, always been ambitious and willing to enter dark emotional territory. That’s very much to Bird’s credit, and that willingness to not condescend can make for great kid’s movies. ~Reihan Salam

Reihan is talking about the director of Ratatouille, the new animated feature that is apparently brilliantly made and which is also boring children from here to Miami.  My Scene colleague Alan Jacobs discusses it at some length here.  My Scene colleague Matt Frost adds his thoughts here. 

Rats!

My remarks are on the willingness of people making children’s movies to refuse to condescend.  Speaking of animated rodents, I have to tell you that The Secret of NIMHwas one of my favourites growing up (and it was probably one of your favourites, too).  Talk about not being afraid to “enter dark emotional territory”!  It was, if the critics are to be believed today, the Ratatouille of its day, and it was also a memorable production that could enchant children without being a waste of time for parents.  NIMH would be the standard by which I would judge any animated picture, and the few more recent offerings I have had some reason to see (usually because I was visiting with some of my younger cousins) typically don’t measure up that well.

This just in: Fred Thompson is a superficial and media-driven candidate.  Whowouldeverhaveguessed?

Here was the best part from the news report:

“He looks good onstage, but I don’t know if he has the gravitas,” said Kathleen Williamson, a conservative Roman Catholic from North Weare. “It seems like he’s trying to win over conservatives, but I’m still not sure he has the credentials. I’m worried he’s trying to get by on his celebrity.”

Ms. Williamson should be worried–his non-campaign campaign to date is nothing other than getting by on his celebrity.  The scary thing is that this seems to pull 15-20% of the Republican primary vote without Fred even having to lift a finger.

Fascinating what-ifs all, but mostly irrelevant. Immigration reform was defeated by a conservative revolt that spread to the wider public. Senate opponents, gloating over their success in killing the bill, were essentially correct in insisting the American people had rejected immigration reform. ~Fred Barnes, “Things Fall Apart”

You can hear the sound of Barnes’ disappointment.  What we saw this past week was what occurs when representative government basically functions properly.  It is a strange and marvelous thing, rarely seen anymore.  We can be sure that the establishment has suffered only a temporary loss of control here.  Barnes does not quite go to Broderian or Gersonian depths in lamenting the failure of “centrism,” but he shows thinly veiled contempt for Senators who helped kill the bill because they are running for re-election or another office.  Imagine that–elected representatives responding to their constituents! 

In other words, the people have already rejected the bill now and most of the Senators in evenly divided states were afraid that they, too, would be rejected if they supported the bill.  They were all probably right.  Domenici is our senior Senator and has never had much difficulty winning re-election, and even he was evidently feeling the heat.  Bingaman, our Democratic junior Senator, isn’t even up for re-election next year and he voted nay on cloture, raising the number of Democrats who helped junk the bill to 16 (including the Independent Sanders).  People who don’t understand New Mexican politics may be confused by this, but they should remember that we have one of the poorest states that is also most adversely impacted by the ineffective security at the border and one which can hardly afford the extra strains on state services that illegal immigration already imposes.  Plus, opposition to illegal immigration in central and southern New Mexico among Republican voters is quite strong, despite the perpetual minority status of Republicans in New Mexico that would theoretically put pressure on Republicans to move towards the “center” (i.e., towards the left).  Anyone running for statewide office back home would be inciting some strong opposition if he supported this bill, and both Senators apparently got that message. 

Almost one-third of the Democratic caucus turned against the bill, and they have some common characteristics: they come entirely from purple states (Webb, McCaskill) and red states (Landrieu, Tester), which is predictable but significant.  Many were elected on economic populist platforms, and some evidently saw elements of the bill that conflicted with their populism.  The awful guest-worker provisions were likely what turned them against the bill, as well they should have.  Sherrod Brownwas among those voting no.  Had the Democrats tried to whip the bill and force their members at least to vote for cloture, the tactic might not have worked, but there were enough Republicans siding with the Majority Leader that it would have passed easily had the Democrats not been so significantly divided.  For the record, 12 Republicans voted with Harry Reid on cloture, including the unexpected names of Judd Gregg and Richard Lugar.  Lugar just handily won re-election and apparently thinks he can tell his constituents to take a hike, but Gregg is up for re-election next year in 2010.  Perhaps Gregg thinks the massive blue wave swallowing New Hampshire last year was a sign that he needed to go with the majority’s leadership, but my guess is that he will eventually suffer on account of this vote.  New Hampshire voters may have thrown out the Republican bums in ’06, but that does not necessarily mean that they wanted their Senators voting in support of this bill–Sununu seems to have understood this.    

I have to say that this is a better initial outcome than I could have anticipated after the outcome of the midterms.  There had been the disturbing thought that holding Bush and the GOP accountable would simply lead to the empowerment of the worst policies and instincts of this administration in domestic policy.  Admittedly, the gain on a change in Iraq policy has been minimal, but the cost in immigration legislation has fortunately been negligible so far.  The presence of 15 Democratic Senators who opposed the progress of this bill is somewhat reassuring, in that it suggests that there may be a cloture-proof bloc in the Senate opposed to any such omnibus bills in the next Congress as well.  On immigration, there appears to be a solid group of moderate-cum-populist Democrats who were significantly opposed to so-called “comprehensive reform” (Webb, Tester, Dorgan, McCaskill, Brown).  Four of these are newly elected Senators, and it is not at all certain that all of the Republicans they defeated (Allen, Burns, Talent, and DeWine respectively) would have been as reliable in opposing the bill as they proved to be.  Some might have been, but DeWine would likely have been a yea vote.  Surprisingly, the results of the ’06 Senate elections seem to have made amnesty slightly less likely, at least for the moment.

These Are My People

Via Marc Ambinder

Nice touch with the pink.