Now, I’m no great religious scholar, but it doesn’t take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alonein the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord. ~David Plotz

Just so.  Well, that and a warning not to breed with the Nephilim (who were all wiped out, I suppose, which makes it a moot point).  It is also the main scriptural counterargument against all secular and atheist whingeing (that one’s for you, Mr. Massie) in the area of theodicy.  If God willed the annihilation of all life on earth, save those in the Ark, who can take seriously complaints against God based on “bad things happening to good people”?  First of all, it throws into doubt the “good people” part of the equation, since the righteous folks were on the boat.  The story of the Flood teaches that when calamities strike the world, the world as a whole may very well deserve what it is getting and God may even have willed these things for the chastisement of man for his edification.  What’s more, that this is an expression of God’s love, not the absence of it.  This is a hard saying, but it is true.   

This is why Evan Almighty is not really an “appalling effort to pander to religious moviegoers,” in that it isn’t pandering to religious people to get them to come see the movie, but rather tries to appeal to people already going to the movies with some minimally religious message.  It sounds like an appalling effort to milk the vague sentimental Herrgott piety of the broad middle of barely religious Americans for some money, while teaching that the “family that dwells on a large wooden boat together stays together, because it is surrounded by floodwaters.” 

Religious moviegoers of the sort Mr. Plotz is imagining are the people who went to see The Passion not in spite of the sufferings of Christ depicted therein but because of them, because they do not want to see their religion stripped of its most powerful and terrifying moments.  Those are the moments that strengthen faith.  If you want campy feel-good stories about togetherness, you can go watch The Smurfs.  Evan Almighty may bring in a lot of money, but if it does my guess is that it won’t primarily be busloads of evangelicals who put it there.  It will be people who would like to have some nice nods towards religion in their entertainment and would like a religion that doesn’t demand too much, provided that we are all really nice people who are concerned about all the little furry creatures.  As an Orthodox priest once said to us one Sunday, “We are not called to be nice.  We are called to be perfect.”  Anything that confuses niceness with perfection is, in my view, a stumblingblock to real faith.  But perhaps Mr. Plotz and I are actually in agreement about this, since he says:

If I were a believing man, movies like Evan would make me long for the days when Hollywood just ignored God.  

From all descriptions I have read, it sounds as if it is moved by the same spirit that inspires Democratic “outreach” efforts to evangelicals and has many of the same characteristics: clumsy, embarrassing and painful to watch.  Evan Almighty sounds like a movie that would satisfy a fairly mildly religious Episcopalian who thinks that if only religion could be about the love and the togetherness and the via media (always the via media) there would be no more problems, at least not with religion.  Let there be nothing severe or harsh or (Heaven forefend!) judgemental in religion–that would seem to be the shlocky religiosity to which Evan Almighty may be appealing.  Maybe that describes more Christians in this country than I would like to think.  For all our sakes, I hope not.

But whereas Oh, God was charmingly irreverent—a religiously themed movie even an atheist could love—Evan Almighty bears the stamp of the Bush era. Its politics may be nominally green (the Lord’s ultimate goal is to stop environmentally harmful legislation), but its approach to revelation is strictly constructionist. ~Dana Stevens

Question: is there any movie that has been released in the last year that Dana Stevens did not think bore the “stamp of the Bush era” (and in a bad way) or possessed some other sinister conservative message?  Knocked Upis a product of focus groups and pro-life political correctness, and 300 was “a mythic ode of righteous bellicosity” that prompted her to write:

But Leonidas is not above playing the tyrant himself. When a messenger from Xerxes arrives bearing news Leonidas doesn’t like, he hurls the man, against all protocol, down a convenient bottomless well in the center of town. “This is blasphemy! This is madness!” says the messenger, pleading for his life. “This is Sparta,” Leonidas replies. So, if Spartan law is defined by “whatever Leonidas wants,” what are the 300 fighting for, anyway? And why does that sound depressingly familiar?

So, as far as these recent movies are concerned, the answer to my question would seem to be no. 

Judging from her assessment of the movie, the problem with the story and all its Biblical literalism isn’t so much the nature of the story or even the Biblical literalism as such, but that the movie isn’t funny.  It sets up what could be a terrific farce, but then fails to deliver. 

What really seems to bother Ms. Stevens about the politics of the movie is that, according to her description, it isn’t so much drearily Bushian as it is idiotically saccharine because “[t]rees will be hugged, parks saved, unscrupulous legislators vanquished—and one man will learn to spend more time with his family.”  It sounds like a cross between an old Captain Planet episode and Spanglish.  Admittedly, that sounds pretty horrible (Spanglish being the movie that managed to make Adam Sandler entirely unamusing), but it sounds nothing like a movie that “bears the stamp of the Bush era.”  On the contrary, from what she says about its banality, conventional wisdom and triteness, it has the feel of an Obama speech, complete with the “quiet laughter” it provokes.   

There seems to be a pattern in her movie reviews where Ms. Stevens manages to find something politically perverse about movies she regards as terrible, rather than simply acknowledging them as films that are superficial or fail in their execution.  The rest of the time, she feels obliged to find some political flaw in movies that she enjoyed in spite of herself.   

On a different subject, speaking of George Bush, movies starring Morgan Freeman as God and Oh, God, I was reminded of this.

[In 1992, t]he country was tired of the partisan bickering in Washington and didn’t see a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties. ~Edward Rollins

That is probably mostly true.  There wasn’t a “dime’s worth” of difference then, and there’s probably not even a nickel’s worth today.  What is so bizarre about the would-be Bloomberg or Unity ’08 campaigns is that both are premised on the strange view that the two parties are radically at odds and farther apart from each other than ever as they allegedly race to opposite extremes.  Independent candidacies flourish when they cast the major parties as an indistinguishable, self-interested blob that gives people no real choices on major policies.  They also flourish when they offer a clear alternative, not congealed, reheated slop that combines the worst of both existing options.  Were he to run (and he isn’t going to), Bloomberg would be likely to serve up the latter, and not even $500 million or however much cash he could throw at the electorate would make them want to swallow it.  He might get a decent 10 or even 15% as a protest vote, but that would be all.  His positive platform would have to be able to address what the major parties have missed, and as of right now there is no reason to think that he even understands what those things are.  As Ambinder pointed out, he is prone to saying absurd things like this:

“I’m particularly upset that the big issues of the time keep getting pushed to the back and we focus on small things that probably only inside the Beltway are important,” he said. “When you talk to people around this country, they care about who’s going to pay their Social Security, they care about who’s going to pay their medical care, they care about immigration, about our reputation overseas.” Nobody is willing to talk about those things,” he said about the issues.

This seems to make Bloomberg into the Tim Rutten of presidential candidates: other people may be talking about a subject, but it doesn’t fit his preconceived notions of the way the world is and therefore it is obvious that nobody is saying anything.

Stuff just doesn’t get that kind of reaction unless you feel guilty about err something, like say maybe selling out your country for political gain? ~ “Howie”

Never mind for the moment that knowingly making scurrilous and false statements about your political opponents is actually wrong in itself, because it is dishonest.

I would think pro-war chauvinists would know more about this, since their position is the essence of selling out the country out of loyalty to the policies of the state and a particular administration.  Do jingoes really believe that forcefully responding to disgusting and false insults reveals a guilty conscience?  By this sort of thinking, a stirring defense of a man’s innocence during a trial is actually an admission of his deep corruption and guilt.  “The lady doth protest too much” is not a very reasonable rule for political argument.  If it were, every time someone made an impassioned objection against a mischaracterisation of his view it would be tantamount to admitting that the mischaracterisation was right on.  This is…oh, what’s the right word?  Stupid? 

I guess this would mean that if war opponents started routinely accusing jingoes of a lack of patriotism and treason, they would blithely ignore it in the knowledge that they aren’t traitors.  They would only object to the charge if it was actually true.  No wonder these people believe what Bush tells them.

But don’t those officers understand that the only real front is the home front, and the only serious battle the PR fight? Compared to the MSM and the Democrats, Al Qaeda poses only a trivial threat to our precious bodily fluids… ~Robert Farley

Farley is commenting on this report and the complaints of officers about the public comments by top commanders prior to the offensive.  While Gen. Odierno does his best to play down these complaints, they have some substance.  The story continues:

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said. 

Not to dwell on the obvious too much, but “the fact we have a problem in Diyala Province” is more or less a direct result of the “surge” taking place in Baghdad.  Certainly those targeted by the “surge” in Baghdad and who have since moved into Diyala Province would have been aware, well before any public remarks were made, that there would eventually be a “surge” directed at them where they are…since they had been the targets of the “surge” in Baghdad.  This presents a basic, frequently predicted difficulty: if the targets of the “surge” are frequently leaving a place before each offensive, the securing of that place will be temporary at best and leads to other areas becoming new bases for insurgents.  This seems to be uncannily like the situation during the “hold, clear and build” months in 2006.  I also remember someone remarking years back on the clearing of Fallujah being like sweeping and spreading hot embers around so they will catch fire to many more places, which seems to be what is happening today.  Someone will still really have to explain to me how this “surge” represents anything new in terms of military tactics that differ significantly from 2004. 

I know the official line–now we’re really, really serious about training the Iraqi military and the Iraqis really have to make political progress.  Those remain the two critical pieces of the puzzle, and neither one of them is happening at anywhere near a satisfactory pace.  This sticks the military with a basically impossible task of chasing insurgents around the country with too few men in the hopes of conjuring some level of stability that will somehow facilitate a political settlement that none of the major factions seems terribly interested in creating under any circumstances.  It is therefore difficult for me to understand why it is boo-worthy when Clinton said that the Iraqis were failing to do what needed to be done on their end.  In some sense it is a cop-out for our political class as a way of avoiding their own responsibility, and it is certainly unfair, as I have said many times, to have expected Iraqis to have magically conjured up a functioning representative government with absolutely no relevant experience or political tradition on which they can rely.  That doesn’t make Iraqi failure to achieve certain levels of political cooperation and military effectiveness any less real.  It isn’t as if Iraqis have perversely desired failure, but they have been presented with a wrecked country, few resources and little relevant expertise and told by the people who helped destroy the country, “Here, you fix this–pronto!”

Here is a testy exchange between Spencer Ackerman and Eli Lake (warning: some profanity).  Suffice it to say, it seems to me that advocating still more democracy in Iraq as a way of enforcing “accountability” on Maliki is quite a bad idea, because the confessional lines have already been drawn and another round of elections would probably tend to empower even more radical elements than the ones currently in office.  Speaking about “the Iraqi people” as if such a collective group existed any longer, if it ever really existed as a national group at any point, also suggests something of a disconnect from the how people in Iraq are organising politically and how they would organise politically.  Once the main national institutions were gutted or disbanded, it is not clear how elections could have produced anything other than sectarian and ethnic fragmentation, since it was principally the institutions of the state that constituted “the Iraqi nation” and compelled different groups to belong to some common identity.  Given their druthers, whether or not most Iraqis would choose civil war as such (and most civil wars are not chosen by majorities, but are thrust upon people by political leaders), the different groups in Iraq might very well choose some sort of political separation rather than reconciliation within the same polity.  This is not just because the last few years have sharpened the divides and not just because elections have politicised religious and ethnic identity, but because there is no common national identity that can plausibly serve as the basis for political unity to which all groups wish to subscribe.

IN THE MAIL: Col. Buzz Patterson’s War Crimes: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror.

I don’t think that the left wants to lose the war on terror, exactly — they just want Bush to lose the war on terror. I suspect, however, that Patterson’s theme is one that we’ll hear more in the future, especially if things go badly in Iraq [bold mine-DL]. ~Instapundit

Via Drum and Yglesias

Drum and Yglesias both noted the absurdity of the conditional phrase at the end of Reynolds’ post.  Something neither of them remarked on is the sheer gall of the book title that Reynolds lists here.  Note that he qualifies the second part of the subtitle, but not the first, which suggests that he has no strong disagreement with that part.  I would expect raving war supporters to believe that their critics want to “lose the war on terror” (except when, a la Romney, they want to accuse those critics of not even believing that it exists), but the idea that the people who are not in charge of the administration are on a campaign to “destroy our military” at the very time when the current administration is quite actively destroying our military with an open-ended, desultory military campaign is so contemptible and propagandistic that it surprises me that someone else has not already made this observation.  Perhaps progressives are so used to being browbeaten as anti-military that they no longer even bother to respond to such charges, or or perhaps they regard such things as beneath contempt and not worth answering, or perhaps they are themselves squeamish about trying to make arguments in which they play the role of superior supporters of the military.  In any case, if ever there was a charge that deserves some fierce pushback it would be this one.

And when people ask – and some do – whether America is ready for a woman president, I’m tempted to ask: Ready how exactly? Among the countries that have had women presidents would be, uh, Pakistan. ~Mike Littwin

I could think of worse comparisons, I suppose.  Ms. Bhutto’s rise to power as prime minister was not entirely unlike the one that Clinton is trying to replicate, inasmuch as neither one of them could have plausibly come anywhere near holding executive power had it not been for their husbands.  Ms. Bhutto’s first tenure also ended abruptly with the intervention of the military and then her second was brought to an end because of charges of corruption against her government, so perhaps talking about Pakistan is not the best way to discuss this question.  From the perspective of those who would like to see a woman as President, it certainly doesn’t conjure up a large number of desirable comparisons.   

Liberia and Bangladesh have also entered the glorious ranks of nations that have elected women as heads of government before America, as have India, Israel, Britain and now Germany.  Don’t forget the Philippines–they’ve already had two women presidents.  We could make a list and see what sort of countries have broken through that particular barrier and then consider whether “Let’s be more like Pakistan!” is a winning slogan.

Mr. Littwin’s trenchant analysis continues:

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found a shocking result – that only 72 percent said they would vote for a qualified Mormon nominee. The number was 88 percent for a woman and 94 percent for a black.

Shocking!  Admittedly, when I first saw the numbers from that infamous Rasmussen poll seven months ago, I was stunned at the depth of anti-Mormon feeling.  I had assumed that it would be significant, but not quite so overwhelming as the 43% refusal to vote for a Mormon.  To discover that almost one out of every two American likely voters was so opposed to Mormonism that it prevented them from voting for one was rather surprising.  Today, months and months later, this is no longer shocking. 

Religious identity does seem to matter more to religious voters than it did forty years ago, because there are more political issues that engage religious voters today and make a candidate’s religious convictions a matter of concern for voters where they may have seemed less relevant in the past.  Additionally, the less common ordinary church-going religiosity becomes in the country as a whole and the more secular and indeed anti-Christian much of American culture becomes, the more important a certain type of religious identity will become to those who see increasing secularism as a threat.  This seems counterintuitive–rising secularism should, one might think, encourage greater political ecumenism among religious conservatives, but inasmuch as combating secularism means affirming a certain kind of religious identity (be it Christian or the more PC, meaningless designation of “Judeo-Christian”) there will be built-in limits to the possibilities of building alliances with non-Christian religious conservatives.  Mormonism straddles the line, to the extent that Mormons may call themselves Christians but not be accepted by most other Christians as co-religionists, so the controversy over Mormon candidates will probably be greater than that over much more clearly non-Christian candidates. 

Then Mr. Littwin moralises:

Suddenly, this election looks like a test – of tolerance. I wonder how we’d look to ourselves if we failed.

I resent this sort of not-so-subtle moral blackmail.  The rhetoric about “tolerance” only means anything if female and minority candidates are actually judged primarily according to their qualifications and policy proposals.  Otherwise, we will be acknowledging that we have actively chosen inferior individual candidates out of a desire to not give the impression that we think female and minority candidates are inherently inferior.  In other words, if Democrats “fail” by choosing Edwards and the Republicans “fail” by choosing, say, Fred Thompson instead of Romney or Giuliani, Mr. Littwin seems to be implying that these outcomes would have to be explained as the result of prejudice.  Mr. Littwin seems to be saying that the two primary electorates have to choose the “right” (i.e., female or minority) candidates or else they will have “failed” to be sufficiently tolerant.  This confirms that when people talk about “tolerance,” they mean, “You had better do what I say.”  Such “tolerance” is always set by default against whichever groups are or are considered to be the majority or the powerful.  “Failure” to give special consideration to someone outside those groups is deemed to be intolerance, rather than prudential judgement of the person’s ability, when allegedly the purpose of encouraging “tolerance” is to require that people give full consideration to a person’s ability without taking into account his majority or minority, in-group/out-group status.  In practice, “tolerance” is usually not the latter, but a scheme designed simply to transfer power from supposed in-groups to supposed out-groups.  It really exists for no other purpose.  

If we judged candidates purely on their merits, not only would Obama not be a “top tier” contender, but he wouldn’t have even declared for President, because he certainly lacks experience and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of policy proposals (and what policies he has proposed are rather terrible). 

Now, I’m not so naive as to believe that voters choose candidates based on anything as esoteric as experience or smart policies (where would George Bush be today if we did that?), but if we grant that identity politics is an unavoidable part of the democratic process (and it is), which can both harm and help women and minorities running for office, then we had better avoid cheap talk about the public’s intolerance when they “fail” to choose the “right” (i.e., female or minority) candidate in the primaries. 

It is close to certain that neither Clinton nor Obama would be where they are today in the polls if they did not have the advantages of being a woman and a black man respectively, as these are advantages with Democratic voters and are part of what gives these candidates their appeal and their edge.  (These things also help them with white and male voters who wish to demonstrate their political identity as progressive sorts through their support for female and minority candidates.)  To some extent, this gives them a certain appeal and an advantage with certain core Democratic constituencies that the others simply can’t duplicate.  Once they run in a general election, the things that have been advantages for them so far will be less obviously helpful and may prove to be a drag on the Democratic ticket in some parts of the country, which means that identity politics cuts both ways.  This is obvious, but apparently bears repeating.  This might be true even without Clinton’s (largely invented) reputation as a far-left liberal and Obama’s record of being just that kind of liberal. 

This result is a “failure” only in the sense that democratic politics is always a failure of the public to choose rationally the best qualified and most informed candidates, which is a central flaw in democracy itself.  Voters very often choose according to what they think their self-interest requires, but how they understand self-interest may be tied up with ideas of advancing “one of their own” to a position of power; there is a strong belief in democratic societies that you are best represented in government by “one of your own” who will in turn support your interests.  This is a question of being able to trust a candidate, and it is simply easier, as a matter of human nature, for people to trust those with whom they are better able to relate and identify.  That is the irrationality and folly of democracy.  That is also why it has an enduring appeal, even though it will consistently produce inferior government performance.  If Mr. Littwin has no argument with the way we select those who govern us, he really ought to leave the moral hectoring to someone else.

The way for the Democrats to win, I say, is to follow the JFK model – in which a young, apparently idealistic and relentlessly forward-looking candidate offsets a tired (or, in the case of George W. Bush, wearisome) Republican administration.

This is how Bill Clinton won. It’s, of course, how Kennedy won. ~Mike Littwin

Actually, Kennedy barely won in an election that was almost certainly stolen by voter fraud in two states (Chicago, Chicago, that tottlin’ town…) and Clinton won thanks to a smartly targeted presidential race that appealed to disenchanted middle-class voters with a “centrist” economic platform and the presence of Ross Perot.  Now it’s possible that dissatisfaction with the incumbent was such that Clinton might have managed to win narrowly anyway, but the presence of Perot in the race made his victory secure.  All of the prattling about a “boy from Hope” was secondary or tertiary, if not actually irrelevant.  Arguably, it was Kennedy’s persona and performance that made the election reasonably stealable, but that is hardly what I would call a winning electoral model.  Other rather noticeable differences between Kennedy and Clinton on the one hand and Obama on the other is that the former had some considerable experience in government and Kennedy’s name had been put forward as a vice-presidential candidate in 1956.  In 2004, as we all know, Obama was running in his first federal election.  If you want young, idealistic and experienced…well, you’ll be looking for quite a while, because there is no such animal in Washington these days.

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney. ~ABC News

The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, President Bush’s office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn’t specifically say so, Bush’s order was not meant to apply to the vice president’s office or the president’s office, a White House spokesman said. ~The Los Angeles Times 

Via Bradford Plummer

The original executive order reportedly said, “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government.”  Apparently, Messrs. Bush and Cheney are also claiming that they are not part of the United States government, or they may be admitting that they are actively rejecting democratic principles.  Either way, it doesn’t seem as if this is the sort of thing that a smart administration would do.  Corrupt and power-hungry?  Sure.  But smart?  Not so much.