So far, on the big issues, his [Ron Paul’s] main kookiness has been of the right kind: he does not want the GOP to become the Big Tent of Torture and Abortion. If that’s kooky, we need more of it. ~Mark Shea 

Something in the American psyche recognizes this, which is why the GOP has done so well since 94. But voting for the GOP because They Aren’t Demented Christian-Haters has given the GOP the notion that they are the Good Party. They aren’t. They are (or were) merely the Less Disdainful of Christians Because They are Useful Party, something Rudy Giuliani is aiming to fix by turning it into the Big Tent of Torture *and* Abortion. If he succeeds, we will soon have two demented Christian-hating parties. And sometime after that, we will have either national chastisment and repentance or national chastisment and a hardened national heart ending in ultimate disaster. The chastisement will, like all suffering for sin, be a natural fruit of our own choices, not some Cecil B. DeMille special effect. But it will hurt.

I’d prefer that not to happen, which is why I try to do my patriotic duty and chew out this Administration for its betrayals of the natural law and the law of God. That’s one tiny clue as to why my sharp words for the Prez and his cronies, enablers, sycophants, and apologists are not the same as the demented ravings of the “I hate Christianity, God, Western Civilization, mercy, hope and love and hope for the dawn of the Age of the Imperial Autonomous Self in a Socialist Utopia” types found everywhere in the Leftist base. ~Mark Shea

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) just pulled the immigration overhaul bill from the floor after it failed to clear a procedural hurdle.

“We bent over backwards” to accomodate Republicans who disliked the bill, Reid said. “We have to figure out a way to get this bill passed.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the top GOP critics of the bill, said: “This is a victory for sanity in this country.” ~The Politico

Brand is everything; that old advertising shibboleth that you can’t sell a thing if the product is rubbish is here turned on its head. As far as Wolff-Olins is concerned, you don’t even need a product in the first place, just a brand — a fiction, an idea, a notion to flog in the marketplace. ~Rod Liddle

It seems to me that the Wolff-Olins approach to marketing is Romney’s approach to campaigning.  Romney isn’t superficial and dishonest, you see, he’s just “trying to invent new ways to move the world forward.”  Liddle sums up this kind of communication:

A mode of communication which somehow manages to be simultaneously disingenuous and sincere. 

Beyond that, Romney’s recent two-day swing across Iowa also exposed the difficulty he has responding to questions that require unscripted answers — a challenge he’s likely to face again Tuesday in a New Hampshire debate co-sponsored by CNN.

Among the disappointed Iowans was Republican Linda Wessels, 41, of Rock Rapids. At a Romney forum in Sioux Center, her autistic 5-year-old son, Sam, asked the candidate how he would help children with the disorder.

“Cute little guy,” Romney responded before launching into a monologue on topics including stem cell research and cloning — but not autism.

“I felt avoidance of the issue,” Wessels said.

Retired aerospace worker Gary Steinbeck asked about expansion of the space program, leading Romney into a ramble on science, farming and energy. “He didn’t really talk about the space program,” Steinbeck said.

And at another forum in West Des Moines, Republican Steven Faux, 54, was left cold after telling Romney that his son’s National Guard unit was on the verge of deployment to Iraq. The candidate does not mention the war in his stump speech.

Describing himself as a “worried parent,” Faux, a Drake University professor, called the war a “mess” and asked Romney how he would fix it.

Romney responded by voicing support for President Bush’s recent troop buildup, saying it had a “reasonable prospect of success.” He outlined risks of a quick U.S. withdrawal but offered no hint of how he would proceed if Bush could not stabilize Iraq.

“I thought he gave me a stock answer,” Faux told reporters after the forum.

Still, Romney’s fast-paced outline of a conservative agenda — fiscal discipline, family values and a robust military — draws frequent, if not fervent, applause. His appearance strikes many as presidential, an image he often tries to enhance by using a giant American flag as his backdrop, as he did last week in Iowa.

With his suntan, swept-back hair and sharply tailored suits, Romney, 60, can also seem “too perfect,” as “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno put it — a nicelooking “cardboard cutout” who shuns liquor, tobacco and divorce.

“I can have a good time, but you’re not going to hear about it,” Romney joked in a recent appearance on Leno’s show. “What goes on in Disneyland stays in Disneyland.” ~The Los Angeles Times

The shorter version of Romney’s problem: it’s hard to give compelling, interesting answers to a wide variety of questions when you are a poll-driven, pandering robot.

Despite Ross’ best efforts, I am not anxious about the rise of that magnificent fraud, Mitt Romney.  It is ephemeral, like everything related to Mitt Romney, and his apparent momentum is superficial, like everything else about him.  His position in the polls, like his convictions, will change with time, and not for the better. 

Here’s my suitably counterintuitive and anti-Romney thought.  McCain and Giuliani will still be on the straw poll ballot, even though they will not be present and actively campaigning in the poll, while Romney will be pouring enormous amounts of money into organising a big shindig for the potential caucus members to attend.  Yet it remains quite possible that the various factors working against him (his blatant dishonesty, his Mormonism, his shiny hair) will give him a relatively weak result that will seem all the more disappointing given the absence of the two other leading candidates.  If that happens, Ames could be the moment that reveals Romney to truly be the unelectable, well-funded, establishment-backed Gramm of the cycle.  Far from kick-starting his campaign and making him the frontrunner, Ames could be the moment when the elaborate confidence trick that is the Romney ’08 campaign is exposed for what it is. 

I think we all make a mistake if we assume that Romney is now certain to win at the Ames straw poll.  I am happy to encourage such expectations, because I think they will not be met and then Romney’s bubble will have burst for good, but we count out the lesser candidates at our peril as political observers.  Tommy Thompson (yes, I’m talking about Tommy Thompson in a positive way) does not have the elaborate organisation or tremendous funding that Romney has, but he has been building up a small, steady base of support in Iowa.  Hunter has performed well in smaller straw polls and may surprise us here.  Brownback is the natural non-Romney social conservative candidate.  Any one of them, or all of them together, may give Romney an unpleasant shock.  At the very least they may make him spend a good deal more than he anticipated spending. 

If voting pacifist socialists into government won’t appease the balaclaved goons in ETA, it’s laughable to think it would do anything to mollify the far more ruthless Islamists lusting for Andalusia. ~James Kirchick

For all the rhetoric about Al-Andalus, Islamists seem to have left Spain alone since its forces left Iraq.  It is not possible to accommodate ETA in the same way, since Madrid is not going to recognise the independence of Euskadi.  Terrorists objecting to policies can only be mollified by changes in policy.  Many people reject this in principle, but it does have a strange way of working to eliminate future terrorism (at least from one source).  In the case of ETA, negotiation would only encourage Basque nationalists to believe that they were weakening Madrid’s resolve to hold on to Basque country and give them new hope of eventually breaking away.  Since Madrid can never give the extremists what they want, eliminating the threat from ETA will be much more difficult. 

Since Mr. Kirchick is so enamoured of Aznar, he might also remember that it was Aznar’s shameless attempt to pin the Madrid bombings on ETA, so as to avoid the electoral backlash against his Iraq policy that he feared was coming, that ensured his defeat.  Aznar knew full well that it was policies adopted by his government that had provoked the slaughter of civilians in Madrid, and he was desperately looking to blame it on a long-running internal political problem.  It would appear that the Spanish are cursed to be ruled either by clowns or fools.

But Romney seems so transparently phoney, so willing to say anything that I find him genuinely frightening. ~Josh Marshall

Well, there’s that, and the fact that he doesn’t seem entirely human.  Has anyone noticed how he never changes the tone or pitch of his voice.  He is in perpetual “golly gosh” mode, and he always sounds as if he has been given tranquilizers.  McCain is a cranky old man, and Giuliani is unbalanced, but at least I can tell that there is blood flowing through their veins.

I was so angry and hurt that I thought I would write that I would never read National Review again. But it isn’t true. The world is too small not to continue to know the magazine, to read it, and to interact with it.

Still, this much is true: From the moment Scooter Libby was indicted, all the way down to this moment of his sentencing, I have judged the character of many acquaintances in the worlds of writers, public intellectuals, and conservative politicians—their courage and their trustworthiness—by a simple measure: whether or not they stood up for Scooter Libby. ~Joseph Bottum

It seems to me that it would require a good deal more courage for a conservative today to stand up and say, “Perjury is a serious crime, and it should be punished whether or not the perjurer is a highly placed Republican administration official.”  All those lectures about the rule of law c. 1998 have to have meant something, or else most of the people calling for Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice (who are now calling for Libby’s pardon) were impressively shameless hypocrites. 

The people who have jumped on the Save Scooter bandwagon have been almost entirely conservative establishment fixtures and Bush loyalists (though some loyalists seem to have more loyalty to Libby than Bush!).  Most of those moved to work and write on his behalf, except perhaps for Fred Thompson, seem to have met or known the man.  They apparently respect him, and so go to bat for him.  Fair enough.  Derbyshire simply doesn’t care, and for that he gets called “vile”?  It’s just bizarre.    

For any conservative pundit in the mainstream movement to dissent from the received wisdom that Libby was treated unfairly and his unfair treatment is a Big Deal is a fairly bold move under the circumstances.  It also requires a bit of gumption to declare indifference to the “plight” of a man who has, for some reason, become the mainstream right’s martyr.  Whether or not you agree with the argument that you should care about Compean and Ramos more than you care about Libby (I don’t), it makes sense to reject the hysteria over what is actually a legitimate conviction for perjury (quoth Andy McCarthy: “The evidence that Libby lied, rather than that he was confused, was compelling”).

What angers Kurds is the squandered leverage. Instead of demanding rule-of-law, the White House has subordinated democracy to stability not only in Baghdad and Basra, but in Iraqi Kurdistan as well. Rather than create a model democracy, the Iraqi Kurds have replicated the governing systems of Egypt, Tunisia or, perhaps even Syria. ~Kamal Said Qadir

Via Sullivan

It will undoubtedly shock Wolfowitz, Christopher Hitchens, Peretz and the rest of the pro-Kurdish set, but whatever Kurdish democratic political development that did take place had been taking place under highly artificial conditions and is now beginning to revert back to a regional norm.  There were probably a few things that Washington could have done differently to oppose these developments, but the Kurds cannot have it both ways: they do not get the full credit for having allegedly created a successful, prospering, self-governing region unless they are also accountable when their government degenerates into a ramshackle despotism.  Kurdistan seems to be experiencing the problems that all newly-formed quasi-democratic developing states (or, in this case, statelets) experience, and it seems to be falling into a regional pattern where the entrenched parties and their militias want to make sure that they retain all of the power that they have right now.  

Qadir also writes:

Because Iraqi Kurdistan lacks a constitution, Barzani and other senior political leaders can exercise unchecked, arbitrary power. The absence of accountability and a free press has enabled corruption, abuse, and mismanagement to increase.

Is it any wonder that two armed factions in a territory ruled only by them do not submit themselves to any legal or institutional authority?  Is it any wonder that the territory they rule is a haven for criminals and terrorists?  The attacks on Turkish targets by the PKK based in Iraqi Kurdistan are not unrelated to the political corruption of the other Kurdish parties.

Least surprising is that nepotism is widespread.  This is the Near East we’re talking about.  Nepotism is going to be a standard feature of any society in which the extended family and/or tribe plays a significant social role.  The idea that you would cut off your cousin or your brother-in-law from the plum assignments that you are capable of handing out to people , whether in government or business, probably strikes someone from a traditional Near Eastern or Mediterranean society as virtually insane.  Someone will object that it is not as useful to prefer people based on relation rather than merit, which is irrelevant to people who have no strong loyalties to institutions or abstract ideas of “the nation.”  “Nepotists” are not interested in creating the best institutions or the greatest productivity–they are looking to make sure that their people reap the rewards of power and influence.  This is actually the common, normal way of doing things–meritocracy is a fairly rare and actually counterintuitive way of organising and managing things.  It involves many strange and admirably naive ideas about fairness.  It is something that has to be learned and reinforced on a regular basis, because the normal instinct is to make arrangements to provide for your blood relations and their families.  In a society where the bonds of social trust are weak, you don’t want the “best man” for the job–you want “your man” for the job, so that you know it is in the hands of someone you can rely on, because he has social and marital ties to your family.  Why would you want to give preferment to someone from another extended family unless he is first bound to you as part of your family? 

Qadir also notes:

Abuse of power is one of the main characteristics of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s administration. Iraqi Kurds speak often of arbitrary arrest, torture, and enforced disappearances.

And again:

Illegal treatment is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception in the Iraqi Kurdistan region’s detention centers. Disappearances remain rife.

And again:

Torture is common. Ali Bapir, the head of the Islamic Group, told Hawlati, the region’s other independent newspaper, that Kurdish security forces have crippled several dozen detainees in prison during torture sessions.

It’s a good thing Americans have gone to the trouble to “liberate” the Kurds from the oppressive master in Baghdad.  An oppressive master in Sulaimaniya is much better.