Am I only the only blogger/writer/person with a pulse in America who has never watched a single episode of The Sopranos?  It seems to be the case.  However, I have been unable to avoid the avalanche of post-series finale commentary, which seems to be literally everywhere.  From all of this I have gleaned that David Chase is very clever, the show was apparently well done and I have absolutely zero interest in watching it in the future.  Michael gives his impressions here.

On of the less-appreciated aspects of Christopher Hitchens’ writing is that he’s a sucker for the underdog. ~Alex Massie

Provided that he finds the top dog in any given scenario to be even more worthy of his loathing, and provided that the underdog does not believe in God very seriously.  He also seems to be rather more sympathetic if the so-called underdog’s name is Paul Wolfowitz.  These days, you can almost hear him saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your hotel heiresses yearning to breathe free.”  For his hat trick of decrying the cruel injustices of the world, he need only pen an apology for Scooter Libby.  As the end of this latest column suggests, where he connects Judge Walton’s sarcastic rebuke to the esteemed worthies filing an amicus brief in Libby’s case to the “creepy populism” he is lamenting earlier, he seems perfectly willing to do so.

Texas employers say: give us indentured labour, or else!

It hits all the usual pro-immigration notes: it is condescending, laughable and focuses exclusively on the benefits of exploiting cheap labour.  (There are never any costs from mass immigration in the pro-immigration view.)  There is no sappy talk about bringing people “out of the shadows” here.  The message is as blunt as it is appalling: “we” need our poor working underclass to make life comfortable for you.   

Via Common Reader

Rep. Paul can find success by framing his noninterventionism not as a corrective for America’s sins, past or present, but as the way forward to restoring America’s independence and sovereignty. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Politico

Michael makes a good point that this is the sort of rhetoric that will appeal viscerally to American nationalists, who constitute a significant, perhaps dominant, part of the GOP coalition.  The nationalists in question should be understood here as those Americans whose concern is with the preservation and defense of the actual nation, and not those abstract nationalists who think that America is only as good or as meaningful or as worthy of loyalty as the ideas that it embodies.  They are the “Jacksonians,” the people who despise Bush on immigration–because his immigration proposal seems to threaten the nation–just as much as they support him on the “war on terror” (which they think “defends” the nation).  This actual nation would be the nation of American citizens, not the mythical proposition nation or “nation of immigrants” (as nonsensical and anti-assimilationist a phrase as can be found).  The problem with such an appeal, while it may be possible, is that nationalist audiences are not known for their interest in self-criticism and reflection, to put it mildly, and they have a bad habit of valorising every war their government has waged because they cultivate a strong attachment to those who “serve our country.”  Noninterventionist foreign policy requires a certain amount of self-criticism (even if it only involves saying, “our government was short-sighted and stupid,” which should be easy for everyone to accept) and a willingness to question the identification between implementing state policies and serving the country. 

Once that identification has been made, the nationalist instinct of saying, “my country right or wrong,” becomes a reflexive endorsement of government actions: “my state, right or wrong.”  In a putatively representative political system, it is even more difficult for nationalists to perceive sharp differences between the people and the country on one side and the government on the other.  Democracy encourages one of the worst traits of nationalism by reinforcing this (false) sense of identity of government, country and people.  It is difficult for a small government conservative or libertarian to speak in an idiom that would be comprehensible to those who follow this line of thought, since that conservative or libertarian rejects key assumptions of this audience.  Ron Paul frequently argues for noninterventionist foreign policy by pointing to the damage to constitutional liberties that war and empire cause.  He is entirely right about this, but like most libertarian and small-government appeals it tends to fall on deaf ears.  When voters are given the choice between policies that allow more liberty or those that promise more government power, they almost always choose the latter, because most are convinced in a very confused way that vesting more power in “their” government means that they, the voters, and the nation as a whole have more power to cope with this or that problem.  Nationalists have a hard time believing that weakening the state and stripping it of many of its powers will benefit the nation, because, perversely, most of them see the rollback of the state as a challenge to and an attack upon American sovereignty.  (Don’t even get me started on the free-trading, pro-immigration, pro-corporate internationalists who have the gall to complain that opponents of free trade agreements and mass immigration are in favour of “big government” in the form of border control and tariffs, as if they were dyed-in-the-wool libertarians!)

Independence and sovereignty are clearly good things.  They are not only entirely consistent with constitutionalism, but inextricably bound up with adherence to our fundamental law.  Find someone who supports global trade organisations, global regulatory institutions or global hegemony and you will find someone who more or less despises and loathes the idea of a federal government of limited, delegated powers.  You will find someone who is willing to cede the proper functions of the federal government to international bodies while scrapping limits on the executive for the sake of projecting power around the world.  The Constitution gets in the globalists’ way, and so they ignore or violate it as it suits them.  

Independence and sovereignty are things that Ron Paul consistently supports and defends, whether on immigration, foreign policy or even on trade (he is against NAFTA and the WTO, at least partly for what I assume are constitutionalist and pro-sovereignty reasons).  Indeed, in these areas he is a much more reliable defender of American sovereignty and independence than many of his colleagues who speak in the nationalist idiom but often serve, whether wittingly or not, globalist goals.

Ron Paul on The Colbert Report.

My guess is that the very last people who will admit they were staggeringly, horribly, catastrophically wrong about Iraq are the neocon or Blair-groupie journos.  Even though Blair has admitted the situation in Iraq is a ‘disaster’ (without accepting responsibility for having caused it, natch) and even if he were later to hold up his hands and say, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m a pretty straight kind of guy, but Alastair messed with that dossier’, the journos would still be cleaving to their original line that the invasion was wholly justified, maybe not on the original grounds that Saddam was about to nuke or gas us all, but on new grounds they’ve just made up.  They will be the last to say that they were wrong.  David Aaronovitch wrote in 2003 that he would never vote Labour again if no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; but somehow he has been able to extricate himself from this sticky little wicket (it would take too long and be wholly pointless to explain quite how).  I suppose it’s all because the journalists are less answerable to history and public opinion than their political heroes and more vulnerable to attacks of grand hubris. ~Rod Liddle

They are often also among the first to jump off the bandwagon and declare, complete with shocked and bewildered expression, that if they had any idea that the government would have made such a mess of things they would never have supported the war in the first place.  They’re remarkably adaptable and yet strangely inflexible people–they bear no responsibility for the policies they push in the public square, but they have this profound sense of their own righteousness because they advocated for high-minded wars of liberation.

Albanian separatists both in Montenegro and in Macedonia, where military hostilities took place as recently as 2001, will be encouraged. Serbia will face further disintegration: Albanians in the south of the country are keen to be included in a new Kosovo, while Hungarian demands for self-determination in Vojvodina are also likely to intensify.  Far from being concerned about this fragmentation, Washington encourages it. “Liberating” Kosovo from direct Belgrade control, achieved by the illegal 1999 bombardment of the rump Yugoslavia, has already brought rich pickings for US companies in the shape of the privatization of socially owned assets. Even more important, it has enabled the construction of Camp Bondsteel, the US’s biggest “from scratch” military base since the Vietnam war, which jealously guards the route of the trans-Balkan Ambo pipeline, and guarantees western control of Caspian Sea oil supplies. ~Neil Clark (via Srdja Trifkovic)

This soundsfamiliar.

In the poll, Bush’s approval rating is at just 29 percent. It’s a drop of six points since April, and it represents his lowest mark ever on this question in the NBC/Journal poll.

Democratic pollster Jay Campbell, who works with Hart, attributes this decline to Republicans. Back in April, 75 percent of Republicans approved of Bush’s job performance, compared with 21 percent who disapproved. Now, only 62 percent of Republican approve, versus 32 percent who disapprove. ~MSNBC

This may be putting things a bit on the low side, but even Rasmussen, which has a solid reputation and has routinely shown Bush at higher levels of approval, has him at 33% and shows Republican support beginning to weaken.  The weakening of GOP support in the Rasmussen poll (the May ’07 average for GOP approval of Bush is 72%) is not as dramatic a drop as this poll claims to have found, but the movement is real. 

David Corn and Jim Pinkerton have a fun conversation at bloggingheads on immigration, Bush’s Europe trip, foreign policy and the ’08 race.  If you have time, I think the whole thing is worth listening to.  Those who wonder about the merits of diavlogs should watch this conversation to see how it is done.

Not only that, but they had better make the case that the leftwing Democrat likely to be nominated represents the failed status quo: the bureaucracies that are failing, the social policies that are failing, the high tax policies that are failing and the weakness around the world that has failed so badly in protecting the U.S. [bold mine-DL] ~Newt Gingrich

This would be quite a feat, since the GOP controlled both the legislative and executive branches for the past six years.  Any failures of bureaucracy, social policy and tax policy and any U.S. weaknesses around the world would be primarily the responsibility of the GOP.  That doesn’t mean that the Democrats would necessarily have any solutions, either, and they could still theoretically be even worse than these jokers have been.  Even so, it seems to me that the first step towards Republicans’ embracing their inner Sarkozy cannot be the standard reiteration of all the old criticisms of Democrats recycled from the ’90s.  That would mean that someone like Romney could not simply talk about “innovation and transformation,” but actually demonstrate some sort of innovative thinking, which his tired stump speeches berating European-style welfare states, Hillary Clinton and France do not show.