It’s even making a difference at the ballot box. Liberals have spent much of the past six years straining to cut into the GOP’s advantage among religious voters. But when the Democrats finally shattered the Republican majority in the 2006 midterms, it was their consolidation of the secular vote that helped put them over the top. Despite all their efforts to close the God gap, the Democrats managed barely any gains among frequent churchgoers last November—but their share of the vote among Americans who never attend church at all leaped to 67 percent, from 55 percent in 2002. ~Ross Douthat

This would suggest that, for all of Obama’s “righteous wind” and John Edwards’ “faith-belief,” the Democratic Party is geared to become more aggressively secularist in the coming years than it has been.

Nigeria has about ten times as many cell phone exchanges as it does landlines, and so Trippi worked with the campaign team to design a text message campaign. “The torch of democracy rests in your hands” [bold mine-DL] was one of their slogans. ~Marc Ambinder

That sounds painful. 

If Edwards is supposed to be damaged by Trippi’s former association with Abubakar?  Somehow I don’t see that sort of argument working out very well for Hillary Clinton’s campaign consultant.  That would be Mark Penn of the “Vote for Begin”/shill for corporations school of consultants.

It seems to me that if there is one place in this country where Romney’s “it’s about Shia and Sunni and a caliphate on top” ignorant belligerence will be received very poorly, it is in Iowa.  As many have observed, Iowa runs ahead of the country in antiwar sentiment.  Iowans generally don’t like interventionist wars, and most Iowa Republicans are fed up with Iraq.  Meanwhile, Romney’s foreign policy vision promises unending foreign conflict against any and every Muslim group whose name he can be trained to recite.  If there is any consistency between what Iowa Republicans say they want and how they vote (and there may not be), Romney should be in a lot of trouble.

It sounds like the name of a bad spy novel, but it is actually the interesting wrinkle in the ongoing tug-of-war between Washington and Moscow over the supposedly anti-Iranian missile defense shield.  Putin has noticed the small flaw in the anti-Iranian element of the defense system: it doesn’t defend Russia or many of the countries in southeastern Europe against this dire Iranian threat.  Why, it’s hardly fair to expose the longsuffering democrats of Kiev to all those mythical Iranian warheads, you can almost hear Vova saying now.  Rather than using this glaring “flaw” in the plan as an argument against the shield, he proposed–in the almost certain knowledge that Washington will never accept it–putting  the missile defense system in Azerbaijan instead.  Putin has backed off the more menacing rhetoric and turned the entire situation to his advantage.  That’s the problem with making up transparently absurd justifications for anti-Russian foreign policy moves: they are revealed for the deception that they are the moment the Russians pretend to take these justifications seriously.

 “This is a phenomenon in physics known as entrainment,” Kucinich tells the Brit. “A lower-vibration frequency will attune to the vibrations of a higher frequency. America can lift up the hopes of the people of the world, but we must do it from truth. Truth, I would say, is a higher vibration.” ~Eve Fairbanks

This is the funniest thing I’ve heard from Kucinich, God bless him, since he gave a rendition of “Sixteen Tons” at a civil rights gathering.

Bottom line: Mitt Romney is now the favorite to win the Iowa Caucuses in January, eight days before New Hampshire. ~Pat Buchanan

This is why Giuliani and McCain’s abandonment of Ames will probably be Romney’s undoing.  The pressure will be on Romney now to not only win decisively in Ames, but to win the caucuses in January by a similarly large margin.  Any failure to dominate in Iowa will be attributed to Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate (and these are legion) rather than to the strengths of his competitors.  If he goes into Ames against the equivalent of political midgets (at least as far as the media are concerned), he had better come away with much more than a Bushesque 31%.  In the absence of active competition from McCain and Giuliani, Romney needs to get 50 or 60%.  If Giuliani and McCain were to get much support at an event where they were not actively competing, that would also be a blow to Romney.  The ever-higher expectations that this scenario creates for Romney are probably going to harm his campaign more than a win at Ames will help.  The expectation that he will win the caucuses is also a significant burden.  Just as it is for Edwards, Iowa has become a must-win for Romney.  Anything less than a convincing first place finish will be received by the press and donors as a marginal defeat.  Meanwhile, the resources he will be compelled to commit to Iowa despite the lack of real competition are resources he will be unable to divert to compete against Giuliani in Florida, against McCain in New Hampshire and against the second-tier conservatives in South Carolina.  He has suddenly acquired the problems of a frontrunner without the attendant benefits in national name recognition and support.

Ross points to Prof. Coyne’s response to Brownback’s evolution op-ed:

What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician’s “spiritual truth”? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming.

Like Ross, I am unimpressed by this dilemma.  This is the sort of dilemma that one is supposed to solve by chucking out “spiritual truths” all together, if at all possible, or at least by reducing them to wan insignificance.  To take a different tack, what exactly is the “spiritual truth” about global warming?  Brownback himself, like Huckabee, actually takes an interest in climate change and conservation, so this laundry list of science-related policy questions on which conservatives are supposed to be buffoons seems particularly inappropriate in a response to Brownback.  There are evangelicals who believe climate change alarmists, and there are evangelicals, non-evangelicals and secular people who don’t buy into the alarmism at all and a whole range of people spread in between.  I missed the passage in the Book of Genesis where it said:

And, lo, God said unto Abraham, “Thy children shall cause a great emission of chloroflourocarbons and shall cause the atmosphere to trap heat and gradually warm the entire planet.  And I, the Lord thy God, shall be angry with the children of Abraham for their refusal to pass a meaningful carbon tax.”

The point is that religious beliefs will usually have little to do with attitudes towards the truths discovered through scientific inquiry.  No religious teaching is offended or violated by the existence of climate change, regardless of its causes or severity.  Where religious convictions and ethics derived from religious tradition may well come into the debate concern the applications of scientific knowledge and medical research.  The “scientific truth” about an embryo is, at least in part, that it is a human being in the very early stages of development.  The ethical and moral arguments against killing humans in very early stages of development do not reject any “scientific truths.”  The opponents of abortion have come to significantly different conclusions about the significance and value of humans in very early stages of development.  Science does not necessarily settle the matter one way or the other.  The same might be said of stem-cell research or genetic engineering.  Science describes and studies empirical reality, but it does not normally provide prescriptions for how men use that understanding of reality.

There are strict literalists who will insist that evolutionary biology and Scripture cannot both be right.  This is, happily, not the view endorsed by the teaching authorities of most Christians.  Christianity affirms the unity of truth.  Indeed, belief in a Creator demands that we acknowledge that the study of the natural world cannot disclose anything that contradicts revelation.  If people believe they have discovered obvious contradictions, they have either not worked on the problem long enough or they have been interpreting either the scientific evidence or revealed truths or both in a mistaken way.  Most non-literalist Christians, which would be most Christians in this country, have whatever problems with evolution that they do because of the impression they receive, whether through relatively poor scientific education, the preaching of dogmatic evolutionists or popular culture, that if a theory of evolution describes how life on earth probably developed and changed everything their religion teaches eventually falls apart.  This isn’t true, but it is repeated often enough by polemicists on both sides that those with relatively poor scientific education are either going to fall back on their prior beliefs and reject evolution or accept evolution and reject their religious upbringing.  It does not help matters when you have prominent religious conservatives, such as Brownback, construct unsatisfying fideistic halfway houses that are not really faithful to either science or faith. 

To make matters worse, Intelligent Design just makes a mess of things by pretending that you can solve scientific problems by saying, effectively, “And here we can see that God is working.”  Indeed, ID-as-science seems to owe much of its momentum to visceral opposition to randomness: things can’t simply be randomly evolved, but must have a certain structure.  Even if, as Christians believe, the structure and orderliness in the natural world points towards a Creator, acknowledging this will not add any new insights to the research.  Even if everyone granted the ID activists’ point, our scientific understanding of the world would not have actually gone forward.  This acknowledgement may very well lend new meaning to the study of the natural world, but it does not change anything in the understanding of the natural world.  In its pretense to be science-plus-religion, rather than religious philosophy attempting to lecture natural science on its deficiencies, ID convinces no one who is not already a believer and manages to get itself lumped in, bizarrely, with creation science with which it has virtually nothing in common.

Ross is right to locate conservative anxiety about these questions in the “political and moral implications” of them.  However, this may be where conservatives have been going wrong for a very long time.  If I accept, say, Hitchens’ or Dawkins’ explanation of what the political and moral implications of evolutionary theory (or cosmology or whatever) are, I have already conceded that these implications, which I don’t like at all, must follow from this or that scientific theory.  This leads me to want to question the reliability of that theory and to propose quasi-theories that seem to subvert the authority of that theory, but in the end I have still yielded the crucial ground, which is to accept the hostile materialist’s most tendentious interpretation of the meaning of an empirical observation.  Obviously, by playing their game their way, you are bound to lose.  The simplest way around this, and the one with the most intellectual coherence and integrity, would be to accept the truths of evolutionary biology as the most reasonable understanding thus far of how life changes and develops on this planet, but to categorically refuse to grant that evolutionary biology must somehow jeopardise the truth that man is created or that Scripture is true and the revealed Word of God.  There is actually no good reason why it should, and a proper appreciation for science would teach us the humility about what we can and cannot know.

Appeasement at Munich led to nearly six years of devastating war in Europe. Political appeasement of the base may be less inducing of violence, but no less devastating [bold mine-DL], as it risks military paralysis or financial collapse once in office. ~Jason Steck

So Mr. Steck thinks that representing the interests of core constituencies may be less “inducing of violence” than encouraging Hitler in his aggression (he isn’t sure about it yet, but it just may be), but representing those interests will be no less devastating than WWII, which killed something like 50m people (the figure would be lower for Europe alone, but still somewhere around 30m).  This is what is called “moderate” opinion in this country: if you politicians refuse to be a squish like me, you are inaugurating the political equivalent of a global bloodbath.  I can begin to see why fewer and fewer people listen to such “moderates.”

Nonetheless, the director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Soner Cagaptay, estimates that there are now 250,000 soldiers, most of whom have gathered in the last four weeks, massed at the Qandil mountain range on the border with northern Iraq. Those troops, according to Mr. Cagaptay, include heavy artillery and tanks, the most significant troop buildup by the Turks since they nearly invaded Syria in 1998 while accusing Damascus of harboring the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. The Iraqi official yesterday said the figure of Turkish troops was closer to 100,000. ~The New York Sun

If Turkey invades northern Iraq, the Turkish-American alliance will be hanging by a thread.  Washington needs to make two things very clear: it must give Ankara a guarantee that the PKK’s operations will be curtailed and state very plainly at the same time that the Turkish military and government are risking the entire relationship with the United States over this.  If Turkish forces cross the border in large numbers, one contingency must be to convince as many leaders of the non-PKK peshmerga units to not engage with them. 

Turkey has legitimate security concerns, the same as any country attacked by terrorists from foreign bases, and our political class’ excessive sympathies with the Kurdish cause have blinded them to recognising the seriousness and legitimacy of the Turks’ concerns.  Washington must provide some arrangement by which American and Iraqi Kurdish forces will cooperate to contain the activities of the PKK.  Our policy in Iraqi Kurdistan appears to have mostly been on autopilot for the last few years, and this is the result.  On something of this magnitude, the prevention of a possible Turco-American or Turco-Iraqi war, the country would support the President if he showed anything resembling intelligence and determination on this question.  Unfortunately, given his track record, I have little confidence that this crisis can be averted by anything that the President or the State Department might be able to do.

Jim Antle wrote a really smart and insightful article describing how Iraq had become the sole unifying element holding the GOP coalition together, and how that issue would help bring down the party.  For rank and file conservatives, this is largely true, but for the conservative elite of the major newspapers and magazines of the movement the grand, unifying cause really is…Scooter Libby.  As if to confirm E.J. Dionne’s somewhat overwrought column, the Wall Street Journal editorial page today has come out with a disgraceful op-ed written by Fouad Ajami entitled (I kid you not) “Fallen Soldier.”  The despicable nature of this title is obvious.  Here is Libby, a convicted perjurer, being likened to the honoured war dead and those wounded and missing in the service of their country.  Libby has indeed “fallen” as a partisan footsoldier who did the bidding of an administration responsible for sending Americans to war based on lies that Libby and his cheerleaders embraced, promoted and defended.  While Libby faces a maximum of 30 months in jail, 3,500 actual American soldiers have fallen and over 20,000 have been wounded, their lives ended, ruined or severely damaged.  Mr. Bush has no power to recall them from death and injury.  There can be no comparison between an administration lackey and patriotic soldiers, unless it is the purpose of that comparison to demonstrate how completely different they are.  

These scoundrels, the unspeakable moral villains at the WSJ have the gall to use the rhetoric of soldiering and war on behalf of a man who broke the law, who lied under oath and who worked to subvert the course of justice.  Ajami does not use this soldier image passingly or briefly.  It is the core of his argument:

In “The Soldier’s Creed,” there is a particularly compelling principle: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors.  Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs.  They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress.  A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

Ajami is not done insulting the dignity of American soldiers.  He continues to taint and dishonour them by association with a criminal:

Scooter Libby was a soldier in your–our–war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war’s critics.

And again Ajami insultingly tars the honoured war dead with yet another association with Libby:

He can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.

These are the words of a patriot and a supporter of the military?  They are the most depressing partisan trash I think I have ever seen.  Certainly, it is the most despicable thing I have seen coming from the War Party in some time.