April’s Diageo/Hotline poll is out, and it has some frankly stunning results that should make Republicans very unhappy.  The generic ballot gives the Dems a 20 point advantage.  McCain-Clinton and Giuliani-Clinton match-ups are where the Republicans do their best overall, and Giuliani even edges out Clinton, but in every other contest the Democratic candidate dominates.  Obama pulls 17% of Republicans in a match-up with McCain; he pulls 13% against Giuliani.  Neither of them beats Obama right now.  Edwards gets 14% of Republicans vs. McCain and 12% vs. Giuliani.  Edwards beats both of the supposedly most “electable” Republican candidates. 

Romney…well, Romney is like a chicken being taken to the chopping block.  It’s just embarrassing how badly he loses in these match-ups.  Clinton beats him by 14, and that’s the smallest margin of Democratic victory.  Obama wins by 27, and Edwards by 25.  He actually underperforms relative to the generic Republican ticket against both of them.  Against Obama, he can barely get a majority of Republicans to admit to supporting him if he were the nominee.  The Mormon factor?  Maybe.  Maybe people are just turned off by his inhuman cadence and condescending grin.  Bizarrely, the most recent polls show a narrow plurality of GOP primary voters rallying to the man who seems likely to be the worst general election candidate the GOP has had since Taft’s re-election bid (the difference is that Taft at least had the excuse that he was in a three-way race). 

Yes, yes, it’s early, these polls mean next to nothing as I have said on many occasions, and the Republicans still have a lot of time to recover and compete, but I cannot recall the last time the margins between major named candidates were this large.

Continued warfare makes John Boehner teary-eyed, but not for the reasons you might think.  Was the remark about his oath to defend the Constitution an indirect confession that he had failed to keep his oath?  It’s moments such as this one that remind me that I literally do not understand what makes Republican politicians tick.  Today’s GOP man is a strange mix of sentimentality and machismo; he has the heart of a compassionate jingo.  Weird.

The new conservative media infrastructure is ideally suited to rapid-response punditry and rallying the base, but it’s not really an alternative to the major cultural institutions—the big dailies, networks, universities, and Hollywood studios. Talk-show hosts and bloggers criticize the mainstream media’s excesses, but rarely do any reporting of their own. Conservative think tanks provide a corrective to Ivy League liberalism, but aren’t in the business of actually educating undergraduates and churning out Ph.D.s [bold mine-DL]. The O’Reilly Factor can give a right-leaning movie a much-needed boost, but aside from a few outliers like The Passion of the Christ, it isn’t clear that Hollywood has become any more hospitable to conservative values and themes in the last decade or so. ~Ross Douthat

This is from a review of South Park Conservatives Ross wrote a few weeks ago last year.  His conversation with Henry Farrell pointed me to it, and this quote in particular struck me as being very right.  A few weeks ago I had made some similar remarks:

If anyone wants an explanation for why the academy is dominated by the left and why the youngest cohort of voters has gone even more overwhelmingly for the Democrats than usual, you need look no further than precisely this sort of professional cop-out, giving up on educating the next generation for the sake of the easy, cheap and ephemeral victories of politics.  Every conservative out there complains about the declining standards of education, the ruin of the academy, the politicisation of the classroom and on and on, but what happens when it comes time to step up and do some of the educating themselves?  They go to law school to get a “useful” degree, or go into politics or some other field where the “prospects” for the future are better, and then wonder how the media, academia, the arts and cinema have all been taken over by people who loathe everything they believe.   

The creation of these parallel institutions, such as they are, has had the somewhat predictable effect of reducing incentives for conservatives to persevere in the various hearts of cultural darkness and also has tended to make sure that conservatives are less relevant to much of the discourse today in any number of fields that were ceded and abandoned decades ago.  Were modern conservatives such great “theocrats” as some parts of the left accuse them of being, you would think that they would dominate the seminaries and divinity schools around the nation, but the opposite is usually the case.  Were conservatives in fact as medieval as their progressive adversaries believe them to be, you might think that they would dominate medieval history, but the opposite is usually the case.  History departments were once redoubts of reaction, and nowadays almost the opposite extreme is true.  This is perplexing, since you might think conservative-minded people would be very keen to learn about their history and traditions and so pass them down and reproduce them, but with baffling regularity they entrust the keeping of the faith and the preservation of memory to those who are less inclined to venerate traditional forms and those who may be more interested in subverting and debunking than understanding.  There has been a recent flurry of arguments in favour of reviving the study of military history, which is a very good idea, but even when that study revives there will not be many conservatives doing the scholarship, because the academy has already been deemed enemy territory.

And we think of angry Venezuela, the Middle East, and Russia every time we fill up — if we can afford to fill up. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Do we really?  It seems to me that we might just as easily think of Mexico and Nigeria.  That would make as much sense as any of these, except that no normal person thinks about any of this when he is putting gas into his car.  Strangely enough, when I was hit recently with a near-$60 gas bill I did not say, “Lousy Hugo Chavez!  Why does he persecute me so?”  Unlike Rick Santorum, I do not have an unceasing stream of panicked thoughts about the President of Venezuela.  Unlike the editors of The Daily Telegraph, I do not wake up in the middle of the night after having nightmares about Vova jacking up the petrol rates.  It seems to me that anyone who thinks about Hugo Chavez when he is at the gas station has been breathing in the fumes for a little too long.

I don’t think finding a connection between this and the Iraq war makes much sense. What you see here is a glimpse of the other side of the cultural abyss, in which the control of women – their bodies and their souls – by brutal patriarchal fundamentalists is the norm. It’s evil. ~Andrew Sullivan

I think what is most amazing to me is that this doesn’t take place in some tent in the middle of the desert or a stone hut [bold mine-DL]. These people are not dressed in tribal garb — they are wearing jeans and t-shirts and the whole thing takes place in a street in what appears to be a modern town. It isn’t the Moqtada al Sadr brigade or Al Qaeda extremists —it’s not part of the civil war although according to the article, many Iraqis are trying to rationalize it as such. This is nothing but barbaric patriarchal violence perpetrated by our alleged allies, the Kurds, toward a teen-age girl…~Digby

What is lacking in both of these responses is any sense of just how crazy it always was to think that Iraq was well-suited for anything like modern democratic government, when this takes place in Kurdistan, alleged bastion of enlightenment (at least according to the pro-Kurdish pundits in the West).  Leave aside for a moment the incompatibility with an Islamic society–what of the incompatibility with a tribal one, such as that of Kurdish Yezidis, who are not even Muslim?  Of course, there’s nothing surprising that the Yezidis are wearing modern clothing.  It is a quaint, silly idea that cultural habits and mentalities are somehow required to be linked to this or that economic or material condition.   

To offer a slightly different perspective, let me ask this question: what part of this episode do Westerners find more troubling?  Is it the stoning, the brutal killing of the girl, or is it the idea that there should be social control over interpersonal relationships and sharp social separation between religious groups?  Some might say that the two are bound up with each other and would argue that the stoning is simply a product of the latter.  That’s reasonable.  Yet if the punishment for this transgression was not execution, but was one of ostracism or some other means of shaming, what is the outsider’s real, principled objection to it?  That people should be allowed to love and marry whomever they like?  To the mind of anyone in a traditional society, this is insane and a recipe for the annihilation of small groups.  Indeed, all things considered, it is a fairly strange idea.  In any case, it is the Yezidis’ marginal, minority status in an Islamic sea that helps explain why they are so ferocious and brutal in their insistence on maintaining the boundaries of their group.  This is part of the more general collapse of security to the extent that this and things like this will happen more and more as different sects are forced to turn to self-help and customary law to govern their part of the country.  It is part of the war to the extent that the war was the cause for unleashing the revival of sectarian identity as a particularly important element in everyday life.

Strategic Vision’s new Iowa poll has some interesting numbers.  First, they ask about candidate preferences:

1. If the 2008 Republican presidential caucus were held today between Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Fred Thompson, and Tommy Thompson for whom would you vote? (Republicans Only; Names Rotated)
Mitt Romney 20%
Rudy Giuliani 18%
John McCain 16%
Fred Thompson 10%
Tommy Thompson 7%
Newt Gingrich 5%
Mike Huckabee 3%
Sam Brownback 2%
Tom Tancredo 2%
Ron Paul 2%
Duncan Hunter 1%
Jim Gilmore 1%
Chuck Hagel 1%
Undecided 12%

Then they ask about the war:

5. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)
Yes 54%
No 37%
Undecided 9%

It is obvious that approximately half of these pro-withdrawal voters must be supporting some candidate who has no intention of supporting withdrawal in the next six months or in the foreseeable future.  85% of all Iowa GOP voters claim to support a candidate who is in favour of remaining in Iraq for some considerably longer period of time than six months.  Of pro-withdrawal GOP voters, plainly only the 2% backing Ron Paul (and, I suppose, the 1% behind Hagel) are expressing candidate preferences that match with their preferred Iraq policy. 

Either the war is of significantly lesser importance to Iowan Republicans than it is to other kinds of Republicans (doubtful), or these voters have no idea that all but perhaps two of the named candidates in this poll (with some mild qualified dissent from Tommy Thompson) want to stay in Iraq “as long as it takes” or their candidate preferences bear no relation to the candidates’ stated views on the war.  Voter irrationality is fun, isn’t it?

I suppose if we merely use “invite” as a synonym for “provoke” or “give rise to,” we can say American policy “invited” 9/11, or at least served as one component of the invitation. But nobody ought to be enraged and offended by that suggestion. Rather, people are outraged and offended because to say one has “invited” something implies that one “has it coming,” that one can scarcely complain when the invited guest arrives. ~Julian Sanchez

Sanchez is replying to John Tabin, who would like to save libertarianism from the dread influence of Ron Paul.  Ron Paul, as my readers will know well, has the gall to say things consistent with being a libertarian, which is apparently a real danger for keeping libertarianism “respectable” and non-threatening. 

There were two distinct points that I tried to make in a previous post answering Tabin.  Perhaps I did not state them clearly enough.  One point is that you cannot accuse a critic of U.S. foreign policy of “blaming America,” since this conflates state and nation in a terrible, misleading way.  Indeed, this is precisely the kind of conflation that terrorists and theorists of total war make to justify the targeting of civilians, who are allegedly “complicit” in the perceived or real crimes of their government.  Maintaining a clar distinction between the state and the people, on the other hand, repudiates all such justifications for intentionally targeting civilians, whether they come from Bin Laden or Dean Barnett.  This distinction is vital to repudiating any potential justification for terrorism.  This is a distinction that Mr. Tabin apparently would like to efface, so long as it allows him to get in his shots against Ron Paul. 

The other is that even if you are in some sense “blaming” the government for the bad policies that have provoked violent terrorist responses, you are not saying that the government “invited” those attacks.  Unintended consequences are just that–unintended.  Conservatives and libertarians have normally been aware that presumably well-intentioned policies often have consequences that were unforeseen (albeit perhaps not unforeseeable).  Interventionists, on the other hand, would like us to believe that interventionism never has sharply negative consequences, while engaging in “appeasement” or failing to intervene will almost always have negative consequences.  Bombing and slowly starving a nation for a decade cannot have any radicalising effect on people in the region, but pulling out of Mogadishu has catastrophic effects.  (Actually, almost the exact opposite is the reality.)  The difference between them is that in the former we are being “strong,” while in the other we are showing “weakness.”  Replace “strong” with unjust and “weakness” with wisdom, and we might begin to get somewhere.

In just the same way, interventionists very clearly pin blame for the outbreak of wars on all those policymakers who fail to take a hard or militant enough line against other powers or groups.  Sometimes they may be correctly assessing the situation, but there is no doubt that they engage in this blame-game more than just about anyone.  As they tell it, failing to take their policy advice leads to terrible suffering and bloodshed on a massive scale.  They plainly say that policies of “appeasement” invite attack.  Neocons say this about Clinton-era policies all the time.  When it serves their turn, they have no problem saying that America very actively “invited” terrorist attacks, provided that the policies they are referring to happen to be the exact opposite of whatever they recommend.  They are quite happy to blame the government and the people for their laxity and diffidence that allowed terrorism to flourish.  In this view, when the government engages in illegal bombing or maintains a presence in a foreign country that demonstrably contributes to the motivations of terrorists, the policies are not only beyond reproach but they cannot possibly contribute to anything bad.  The policies are beyond reproach because these were, for the most part, their favoured policies.  Whenever someone complains about someone or other “blaming America first,” you have to know that the person making the complaint is really saying, “This person is blaming people like me and my preferred policies.”  That is what gets interventionists so angry–the idea that they are responsible agents who might be held accountable for the bad policies they advocated. 

So they employ the very rhetoric that they say is so poisonous and awful when it (allegedly) comes out of the mouths of their political adversaries, and then feign shock when those adversaries point out that it is actually interventionist policies that provoke violent responses.  It might seem that both sides use the exact same kinds of arguments for opposite ends, but this is not quite right, either.  Non-interventionists typically do not use this language of “inviting,”  while interventionists use it as a matter of course.  What’s more, it’s obvious that they use this language, which is why it is stunning that they would claim it is somehow an outrageous and appalling thing to say.  Maybe it is as outrageous as they now claim to find it, but in that case it is they, not non-interventionists, who should be beyond the pale.

Guram Sharadze, head of a small nationalist movement, was shot dead in central Tbilisi on Sunday night.

Police say a man arrested shortly after the shooting has confessed, but they declined to give further details out of concern about compromising the investigation.

Sharadze, who led the Faith, Fatherland and Language movement, was a prominent critic of Western influences in Georgia and had especially denounced the civil-society work funded by U.S. philanthropist George Soros. ~Pravda

Via Srdja Trifkovic

This is sad news.  You can be fairly sure that someone who opposes Western influence, Saakashvili and Soros truly was a Georgian patriot.  The nasty personal dictatorship of Saakashvili grows stronger by the day, and Washington winks at all of this because he is a useful tool in the Caucasus and a good means to pester the Russians on their southern border.  Such are the fruits of “people power” in Georgia.

Alex Massie tells us:

a reader who has some knowledge of these things writes to say that “Matalin’s imprint has been a colossal flop” sucking “millions of Simon & Schuster’s dollars down the right-wing rathole.”

Alex Massie really hates Braveheart.  Fair enough.  While it is not the historical absurdities of the film that bother him the most, they are enough to make me shake my head in disbelief, so I am not going to say very much on behalf of Braveheart.  I am afraid that I’m having trouble finding the racist element in it beyond the general categorisation of Englishmen as barbarous thugs who want nothing more than to rape and pillage (oh, wait, I’ve got it now).  If I were a Scot, I would probably find it to be as dreadful as I found The Patriot as an American.  My objections to the latter may be slightly idiosyncratic, since I found the movie’s treatment of Loyalists, for one thing, absolutely awful; the happy South Carolinian beach community where our hero takes refuge is also a bit hard to take.  (In knocking The Patriot, I risk no backlash from outraged fans, since none exists.)  I think I may be able to explain why Braveheart won such a following in Scotland.  First, any group of people will respond favourably to the the dramatic re-telling of the stories from their national history that portray them as the put-upon, longsuffering people who throw off the yoke of oppression and whose hopes are embodied in a charismatic warrior figure who suffers and dies on their behalf.   Maybe this is why some Indians liked Mangal Panday–who knows?  My guess is that they liked it because of Rani Mukherjee, but that is another story.  

On a different point, I would remind everyone of the great enthusiasm Braveheart generated among many on the right, along with neo-secessionist sympathisers with the SNP, in this country.  It was frequently feted in the American conservative press as the “conservative movie of the year.”  Why?  Because Gibson was always talking about “freedom,” which was a word that had already become a substitute for alot of conservative argument back in 1995.  In fact, the redeeming features of Braveheart had little to do with some general “freedom” (sorry, that’s “freedom!”) and everything to do with waging a vendetta for his murdered woman (compelling, but totally fictitious) and fighting on behalf of his friends and countrymen.  (If I recall correctly, Wallace’s original skirmish with the authorities was actually a fight for the right to keep a fish that he had caught, which is a respectable, if less romantic, thing to fight for.)  The things that made Apocalypto worthwhile were the things that kept Braveheart from becoming a purely Eisensteinesque approach to the middle ages.  My impression is that students of film could probably learn something by comparing Alexander Nevsky and Braveheart as similar ideological treatments of medieval warfare that recast the medieval struggles in totally different, modern terms.

Setting aside their problems, the thing I find interesting about Braveheart and The Patriot is the way that they show how, for lack of a better word, “blowback” comes into being.  Gibson always sets up the story as one of the average man whose hand is forced by brutal and repressive action by the invading/dominating (always English) forces to take violent retaliatory action.  He reprises part of this sort of story in Apocalypto.  This was a Gibson action flick that I actually enjoyed, which was described to me as the most paleo film ever made and which Peter Suderman has called “the ultimate reactionary movie,” which may well be true.  When Republican audiences see Gibson leading a rebellion against a tyrannical occupying force, be it the English of the 14th century or the British of the 18th century, they tend to eat it up (though, somewhat weirdly, there was a much stronger positive response to Braveheart in America than to The Patriot), but when it comes to Americans projecting power far from home and occupying other peoples’ lands, well, they seem to forget all of this and become very incensed at the idea that people in other countries might respond to the indignities and humiliations of domination by foreign powers in a similarly rebellious way.

One final point: people tend to respond more favourably to Wallace-like martyr figures than they do to successful Bruce-like political leaders in their art and literature (not necessarily in their voting), because I think there is a broadly shared and deep sentiment that makes many people really want to believe that good leaders are firmly uncompromising and slightly mad.  Political leaders who engage in politics are always going to be considered less inspiring and less admirable, even when those leaders actually bring home the bacon, because people will receive this “bacon” with the knowledge of the supposedly unsavoury process by which it was acquired.  It was acquired by compromise, you see, which is obviously less desirable than acquiring it through a bold armed raid on the local pig farm.  This doesn’t make any sense.  It is part of the chaotic, destructive side of romanticism, and it isn’t supposed to make sense, because it is an open revolt against things that make sense.