So I experienced what many an unfortunate Chicago resident has experienced: today, my car was towed away to the deepest Southside (the 10000 block!) before my eyes.  I had stepped inside a building to pick someone up for a workshop, and all the while I had this weird uneasy feeling…maybe I should go check on my car, something told me.  Sure enough, they were hitching my car to the tow truck even as I had this sense of foreboding.  So the lesson is simple, folks: listen to your paranoid instincts!  Because they are coming to get you (or at least your car).  It is this sort of petty law enforcement (a.k.a., the city’s money-making racket) that makes me lose respect for the law, because this pretty clearly had nothing to do with clearing the road for rush hour (the alleged reason for making this area a tow zone) and had everything to do with milking me for a nice fat fine.  If any progressives out there would like to understand why people like me really loathe government, know that it is because of these obnoxious little abuses of power along with the great.         

In fairness to the horrible towing tyrants, I was in a tow zone designated as a tow zone between 4-6 for a grand total of three or four minutes after 4:00.  They had not yet taken my car away when I came running out to try to stop them from taking it away.  There was “nothing” the tow truck guy could do, he said.  Yeah, well, there was nothing he could do if he wanted to get paid more. 

The parking ticket/towing regime in Chicago is one of the most maddening things about this city, and if I had to make a short list of reasons why no one should ever live here it would rank high on that list.  It would fall below “large numbers of whiny Cub fans” and come in just ahead of “terrible blizzards.”

The idea that anti-Catholicism is a significant force in American life today is a complete canard, perpetrated by theologically and politically right-wing Roman Catholics–a minority among the Catholic laity–and aimed at anyone who stands up to the Church’s continuing attempts to impose its values on all Americans.

The people who scream “anti-Catholicism” at every opportunity use the same tactics as right-wing Jews who charge that any criticism of Israeli policies is anti-Semitic. And just as the Jewish Right attacks liberal Jews, the Catholic Right attacks liberal Catholics as well as liberal non-Catholics. ~Susan Jacoby 

Via Pro Ecclesia

I have no particular brief for the Donohues out there, but the idea that contemporary anti-Catholicism is simply the figment of right-wing Catholic imaginations is loopy.  Exhibit A, which is only the most recent, would be Amanda Marcotte and the blog left’s zealous defense of her disgusting blasphemy.  This could not have happened and been so widely tolerated and defended unless there was a well-entrenched prejudice against Christians generally and Catholics in particular.  You could argue that these progressives are unrepresentative of America as a whole (you would be, I hope, be right), but you cannot argue that they are politically irrelevant or obscure or a minor blip on the screen.  Arguably, the phenomenon we see in the Marcotte case or in the screeds written against The Passion (or past insults, such as the famous elephant dung-smeared Virgin in New York, an indecent portrayal of the Virgin Mother in a Santa Fe art exhibit a few years back, The Priest, The DaVinci Code, etc.) is not so much anti-Catholicism but hostility to traditional Christianity of all kinds.  It is possible that complaining about this prejudice can be overdone and the charge may sometimes be thrown around loosely, but those making the charge are pikers compared to those who wield the label anti-Semite if creating a tremendous climate of fear of criticising your group is the goal.  

Granted, anti-Catholicism is a lot less virulent and less widespread today than it once was, but it isn’t just concentrated among the coastal secular snobs, either.  You don’t have to go very far into conservative Protestant America before you will run into the same old anti-Catholicism that has existed as long as there have been Protestants.  Much of this is mostly ignorance, fed by popular DaVinci Code-style “history” that convinces people already biased against Catholics that they really do have secret orders of albino assassins who kill to keep the entire racket afloat, but it is all over the place.  Fewer people speak explicitly in terms of “popery” and “priestcraft” and “worshipping Mary,” and all the old nonsense, but there are plenty of Protestants in this country who believe that all of these things are deeply wrong and view the people who engage in them to be scarcely recognisable as Christians.  We may wonder why American Catholics are indifferent to their brethren in the Near East, but for Protestants the explanation is easy: for them, those people aren’t really Christians and should be targeted for missionary work just like the Orthodox or anybody else.  (Of course, if Catholics and Orthodox mean what they say, they believe the same about Protestants, but they have not typically had the unusually poor form of preying on particularly poor and miserable populations for new converts.)  Pentecostalism is booming in Latin America (as it is elsewhere in the world), and it is certainly not because the Pentecostals are saying nice, conciliatory things about the Catholic Church. 

In truth, many converts to Orthodoxy, especially those who have converted from Catholicism, make Catholic-bashing into a minor pastime, which they know will go over just fine with their Protestant or secular interlocutors who will basically nod along with the Orthodox fellow’s critique of papal supremacy–at least until he begins talking favourably about icons and the Theotokos.  Just get together the ex-Catholic, ex-Anglican crowd (there are more of these double converts than you would think) at an Orthodox gathering and watch them go!  They know more about the ins and outs of Episcopal church politics than most Episcopalians.  But that is beside the point.  There are perhaps some people who convert to Orthodoxy instead because it is sufficiently traditional, liturgical and hierarchical without having the perceived “baggage” that being Catholic carries with it in what is still a significantly Protestantised culture.  In my case, I genuinely found Orthodox theology to be more compelling on those points where the two confessions differed, but after a brief Slavophile, “the West is dying from Catholic-inspired rationalism” phase I have moved well away from defining my Orthodoxy by how upset I can make myself about, say, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  (Speaking of ignorance about Catholicism, you will not believe how many people in this country do not understand that the Immaculate Conception refers to the Virgin Mary and have no idea what it means–it is fairly frightening the level of ignorance about their own civilisation’s history some people have.)

All of this is by way of saying that anti-Catholicism in America is very real and it is sometimes quite vicious today.  If certain people exploit or abuse this truth for other ends (which I don’t necessarily accept, but I’m willing to entertain that it’s possible), that does not make the phenomenon less real.

The more I ponder it, the more I think Dr. Fleming’s view of the Pelosi-Syria matter makes the most sense.  I was never exactly cheering Pelosi on, but I fear I allowed my now instinctual aversion to agreement with the jingoes on just about anything to trump my better judgement.  In the discussion at Chronicles’ website, Dr. Fleming wrote:

What role congress has in advising and consenting to wars and to the appointment of ambassadors. But it is the Senate, not the House, that approves ambassadors. Pelosi has no more right than I do. For a change, George Bush is not only right, but he is more right than he knows.

As much as I disapprove of this administration and of the general misbehavior of the executive branch, I am even more disturbed by the spirit of anarchy that is growing among many fine and sensible people. Blogging only encourages the sense that each of has a right to whatever we please, including to act as if we were president, supreme court, congress, and gods all rolled into one egomaniacal package. It is a strong temptation to which I have not always been immune. But the world will not always be the way it is and I believe we should act in such a way as to encourage decent order [bold mine-DL]. I know this sounds like Sartre, but it is also sound Christian moral doctrine.

The point about the dangers of blogging unleashing vicious tendencies is definitely right.  If I and other administration critics have badly erred anywhere, it is in our enthusiasm to use any event or “scandal” as a cudgel with which to beat Mr. Bush and in the willingness to rally behind any self-seeking pol who happens to say something potentially useful to the cause of opposing Mr. Bush’s War.  I have tried to avoid the more absurd excesses in this regard (I did not think the anti-Rumsfeld retired generals were our saviours, I do not believe the U.S. Attorneys’ firings were really improper or wrong, and I find Chuck Hagel’s posing to be something of an embarrassment and consider antiwar folks’ embrace of him to be badly misguided), but I am sure I have fallen into two very inviting traps on more than one occasion: these are the traps of thinking 1) if neocons and the White House think there is something wrong with it, it almost has to be a good thing for America; 2) there has to be some remedy somewhere to the continued foreign policy incompetence and villainy of this administration, but if there is it almost has to involve breaking precedents and subverting the executive to some unacceptable degree in one of the few areas where the President has some legitimate role. 

The first trap is so inviting because this is often the correct view, but that does not mean that it is always the correct view.  The second is more inviting because it is deeply depressing to consider the possibility that there literally is nothing that anyone can do to stop Mr. Bush from continuing to make a hash of our foreign policy until he leaves office in 2009.  However, just because something is deeply depressing and bitter doesn’t mean that it isn’t the case.  For instance, it is deeply depressing that most conservatives still support the war, but it is undeniable.  The assumption that there is something that can be done about Mr. Bush’s policies is a fundamentally optimistic one, and I am not normally inclined to accept such assumptions.  

Many people, myself included, allowed ourselves to believe that a change of party in the majority in Congress would serve as some sort of bulwark, however imperfect, against Mr. Bush’s continued misrule, but we may simply have been so blinded by our contempt for the man and his lackeys that we missed that the elections were going to change essentially nothing.  As an anti-democrat, I am especially guilty of ignoring my better instincts and having some sort of faith in a process that I know to be fundamentally irrational and injurious to good government.  The assumption that something can be done is based in a confidence in our form of government as presently constituted (which is a far cry from how it was designed, but there you are) and founded in a belief that our present system is still healthy, capable of self-correction and capable of checking abuses.  The Iraq war itself stands as a repudiation of all such beliefs: the system failed entirely, it is not even attempting to correct itself and it has neither the means nor the inclination to check abuses.     

This lack of a remedy to foreign policy failure seems to be a glaring flaw in the structure of the modern federal government.  It is quite maddening that no one seems to have any recourse, whether through elections or anything else, when an administration commits itself to a foreign policy that is wrong, dangerous, contrary to the national interest and completely cut off from anything resembling reality.  But it could well be that there is no available solution to this dreadful state of affairs that does not involve compromising our commitment to law, custom and our basic principles.  Sometimes there are things that cannot be solved, but must simply be endured.  There is a certain amount of fatalism in this view, I suppose, but then most peoples who live under unaccountable autocrats have to become fatalistic to remain sane. 

It is typically the neocons and Lincoln-idolaters who seek to find justifications for Raskolnikovian overstepping of boundaries for the “greater good.”  How many times have you heard a Yankee apologist talk about “going beyond the Constitution to save the Constitution” and other such lies? Let’s not forget that the apologists for the mass bombing of civilians are legion.  They will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, which is why they are typically so often wrong in their judgements and actions, but it should be the mark of the defenders of Eunomia that we will stop at certain limits because without these limits we are no longer able to govern ourselves or restrain our worst instincts.  The respect for limits and restraint is what separates the morally sane from the fanatics and ideologues.  If we lose that, it will not matter if we win this or that debate, because we will have become the epigones of the possessed.

I replied that I expected the Vatican to proceed in a more catholic manner than that. ~Michael Novak

This from the man who went as the lackey of Mr. Bush to tell Pope John Paul II what just war really meant (because Novak & Co. had the better understanding of the matter)!  Talk about audacitas!  So it took Novak two whole days to spit at Pope Benedict’s Urbi et Orbi address?  He’s clearly starting to lose his anti-Vatican reflexes.

Novak is, of course, attacking Pope Benedict for saying, “Nothing positive comes out of Iraq.”  Because so many “positive things” come from Iraq.  This is partly true, if you count Christian and other Iraqi refugees as “positive things.”  This reminds me of one First Things contributor attacking Pope Benedict last summer for saying that “war is the worst solution,” because, well, it is.  Even though what the Pope said was true and consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church, as I tried to show at the time, it was too wobbly of a statement for our jingo friends at First Things.  Naturally, there would hardly have been reason for folks at First Things to comment on the Pope’s remarks in that case had the war going on at the time not involved Israel or the United States. 

This week, Fr. Neuhaus at least manages to dismiss the Pope’s opinion without piling on with quite so much obvious hypocrisy, but he did have this unintentionally amusing remark:

Admittedly, it is galling when Catholics and others who are usually blithely indifferent to church teaching seize upon a papal opinion with which they agree and, suddenly becoming hyper-infallibilists, elevate it to dogmatic status.

Imagine how much more galling it is to watch those who claim to defend adherence to the entirety of church teaching justify “preventive” war to “prevent” some theoretical future threat.  It is not only “preemptive war” that cannot be found in the Catechism.  Then there is that bothersome “last resort” qualification, which the FT crowd seems not to understand.  For them, it would seem as if all that you need to have a just war is a convenient pretext that there may be some future threat of aggression from another state (of course, using this dubious moral reasoning, terrorist attacks against the U.S. are just anticipatory strikes against the people who would try to attack them later anyway–emptying just war of all meaning cuts both ways).  By the same sort of thinking, Iran would be justified in launching preventive strikes against Israel’s preventive strikes that are designed to prevent Iran’s preventive strike, and on and on it would go ad nauseam–all in the name of perfectly just self-defense, of course.  It turns an admirable aspect of the Christian moral tradition into a respectable cover for the brutal logic of rival mob bosses racing to off each other.  Pretty clearly, this talk about “defensive” preventive war simply repackages whatever is about to happen as self-defense (not unlike what the Germans did when they invaded Belgium in 1914) and the person saying it will then take umbrage at the suggestion that this is all a lot of propagandistic nonsense.  In a world where everyone is theoretically a potential aggressor (except maybe Liechtenstein and Vatican City), it no longer matters who actually strikes the first blow or provokes the conflict, and so it also no longer matters whether the supposed threat from the other state is even real.  It might be real, and that is good enough for the quack court theologians of this administration.  With every state a potential aggressor (with only the likelihood of aggression preventing us from, say, “defensively” occupying Canada), every war can become more or less justifiable.  The horrors that this sort of perverted reasoning could lead to are not hard to imagine: if you believe a hostile state is developing nuclear weapons with the intent to use them against you, how long before it becomes the respectable First Things position that the “preventive” and “defensive” use of “tactical” nukes against that state is justified?  Depending, of course, on the “prudential judgement” of the magistrate, that is!     

Nobody is more blithely indifferent to Catholic teaching on war than Catholic neoconservatives.  His creative and, it seems to me, dishonest description of George Weigel’s awful article defending the just war merits of preventive war is a small contribution to this bad old tradition of indifference.

Now Novak isn’t satisfied with describing the address as a “low point.”  He wants you to know just how much good news there is in Iraq:

Under Saddam, scholars say there were between 75-125 murders of civilians every day. Bad as the murders are now under sectarian vengeance, the numbers of dead every day rarely reach that total, and most days are considerably below it.

Leaving aside the total lack of sourcing for this claim (“scholars say” is the laziest citation in the world), let’s think about those latter claims.  This murder rate presumably refers to all of Iraq in the Saddam era.  In Baghdad alone during the past year, there have routinely been 2,000-3,000 deaths per month that have been counted and reported, which means approximately 66-100 dead per day in Baghdad, at least during the last year.  (Incidentally, violent sectarianism has gone hand in hand with the politicisation of sect and ethnicity in the elections, which makes it unclear how those elections can be credited as something genuinely positive.)  I believe these figures do not normally include the victims of car bombs, which might raise it still higher.  That means that sectarian killings and other murders in Baghdad easily account for much of this supposed pre-war murder rate for all of Iraq, and this may hardly scratch the surface of what is happening elsewhere in the country (for which we have far less reliable numbers).  Of course, the threat of random catastrophic violence of the car-bombing type automatically makes life in Baghdad worse than it ever was before the war.  It is bizarre to suggest otherwise.  Add to that the tens of thousands (or perhaps more) of civilians who have been or are being slain during combat operations, and you obviously have a significantly worse situation, before you even take into account deteriorating living conditions and so forth.  Millions of Iraqis, who are usually the educated professionals who have the means to get out, have fled this country that is apparently enjoying a Giulianiesque recovery from a rabid Saddam-era crime spree.  Our open borders friends usually like to talk about how immigrants are “voting with their feet” when they come here in droves, but watch as they switch gears and pretend that millions of people fleeing a country tells us nothing about the horrible state of that country when we are talking about Iraq. 

And, yes, Novak has actually cited the Sadrist rally protesting the occupation as proof of something good coming out of Iraq.  Why, look, they’re free!  Well, yes, I suppose they are after a fashion, and look how many of them have chosen to use that freedom.

Mr Maude’s officials have been secretly drawing up the outline of a ‘velvet divorce’ with the Scottish Conservatives, which would give the Scottish Tories a new name, a distinct identity, and make the Conservatives officially as well as in practice a party exclusively devoted to seeking power in England and Wales. However benignly it was presented, such a split would, in effect, mean the final Tory retreat from Scotland, a historic fissure in British Conservatism, and the death of a party defined in many minds by its One Nation Unionism. ~Fraser Nelson

Viewed another way, this is the sane recognition of the futility of One Nation Unionism in a part of the UK that increasingly doesn’t believe itself to be part of One Nation (a phrase, incidentally, that has radically different connotations in Australia!).  What is more significant about this is that it might finally free the Tories to embrace the English nationalist identity that has become the logical thing for it to take on, as Mr. Nelson describes later in the article.  (Not that I expect the Cameroons, in their New Age, Mandela-worshipping trendiness, to understand this.)  So long as the Tories felt compelled to keep flogging the lost cause of the Union, they were to some degree prevented from effectively combatting the idiocy of “Cool Britannia” or the tiresome Europhilia of the ‘modernisers’ with a decisive appeal to English identity.  Political realities being what they are, the Tories already are effectively not much more than an Anglo-Welsh party right now–mostly Anglo and southern Anglo at that.  If Scotland should ever become independent, it will no longer matter whether there are many Tories beyond the Firth of Forth anyway.  If Scotland remains in the Union (this is the year of the rather unremarked tricentennial of that particular misfortune), whatever happens to the Scottish Tories will not be much worse than what has already been happening and might be better.

No subject in the world is as complex as foreign affairs. ~Henry Nau

I wish I could get published in Policy Review by writing the foreign policy equivalent of “different strokes for different folks” plus “life is complex” plus “you have to pick a side.”  That would be fun.  It wouldn’t be very interesting for my readers, but it would be fun.

How times have changed.  Today, the war in Iraq is far less justified, morally or strategically, than the Gulf War was; and yet, outside of Chronicles and Pat Buchanan, most “conservative” Catholics have supported the war unquestioningly. 

———————

And everything I wrote above applies in spades to “conservative” American Catholic support for Israel’s attack on Lebanon last July and August. ~Scott Richert

The title of this post might well be the chilling response one might hear from some American Christians of different confessions when they are confronted with the damage their government’s policies have inflicted on their Near Eastern brethren.  The entire sad, sorry tale of general American Christian indifference to our brethren in the Near East (with a few notable exceptions) reminds me of a remark I once heard in a conversation with an H-SC alumnus, who commented on the Christian Balkan nations: “It’s like they’re not even real Christians.”  (At least he did not preface this remark, as some of the faithful might, with lectures on the justice of fire-bombing civilian populations in WWII.)  The man might be forgiven for having bought into the drumbeat of pro-Bosnian Muslim propaganda that was called “reporting” during the 1990s, since there were very few sources of information that offered a different perspective, but the readiness of American Christians to disown Christians from other parts of the world struck me as particularly depressing.  Why should it be that many of those who claim to desire the Christianisation or re-Christianisation of America so much seem unfazed at the prospect of the de-Christianisation (and consequently still greater Islamicisation) of the Holy Land and the lands where Abraham and St. Paul walked? 

The readiness of more than a few American Christians, particularly conservative Protestants and Catholics, to throw the Christians of Lebanon to the wolves of Hizbullah and the destruction of the IAF (with bombs sent to Israel by the U.S. government) was just as appalling, if rather more predictable by that point.  Obviously, I was deeply moved by the plight of the Lebanese people, especially since Lebanon has represented one of the last redoubts of Christianity in the Near East, now more than ever.  Along with Syrian Christians (who make up roughly 10% of the population), the longsuffering Copts of Egypt and the hard-pressed, shrinking Palestinian Christian population, the Christian communities of Lebanon are virtually all that remain of what was once the fully Christian Orient.  If it has not actually been part of the design of U.S. policy to destroy these communities, the ruin of many of them has been the effect.  The decline of these communities under Islamic rule was obviously very great, but the modern decline has as much to do with our interference in the region.  You might at least have thought that in a country reputed to be among the more “religious” in the world (or so we tell ourselves as a way of pretending that we are much better off than the dying Europeans) and nominally still largely Christian there would be sympathy and concern for the travails of fellow Christians rather than indifference tending towards contempt.  You would be wrong to think that.

(Note to self: What has happened to Cliff? He seems to think that we should base our strategy on Zarqawi, not self-interest.) ~Andrew Sullivan

Does Sullivan actually know who Cliff May is?  Does he think that May was once upon a time a reasonable, well-informed person who held moderate or even conservative views about foreign policy?  This is Cliff “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies” May we’re talking about–he is the neocon who makes most neocons look timid and cautious in their promotion of global revolution and war.  At FDD, he is the team captain of a Who’s Who of hegemonist warmongers–only an outfit such as FDD could make Mario Loyola a “visiting fellow.” 

Sullivan is surprised that May is reciting the administration’s talking points?  It has become neocon SOP to cite Al Qaeda higher-ups to defend the Iraq war: if Zawahiri says X, we should believe him and formulate our policy accordingly.  Because Zawahiri says Iraq is vitally important to Al Qaeda, Iraq should therefore be vitally important to us–which means that neocons believe that we should have our strategy decided by the people who want us dead.  Of course, much like their support for the magical “surge” under any and all circumstances, the Cliff Mays of the world would assure us that the Iraq war was even more imperative if Al Qaeda leaders were constantly belittling the importance of the Iraq war.  It would go something like this: “You see, they have to constantly deny the importance of the central front in the war on terror, because we are winning in Iraq!  Because Zawahiri doesn’t say so!”   

P.S.  May cites Ayman al-Zawahiri as his authority for what we should do, not Musab al-Zarqawi as Sullivan claims.  Zarqawi is, of course, quite dead.  Not that Sullivan is paying attention to any of this.  Arabs with Z-names are all evidently the same to him.  For this he gets regularly paid and gets to blog at the site of one of the more respected journals in this country.  Clearly I have been taking the wrong approach to blogging success: the market apparently craves hysteria, inaccuracy and whimpering about how no one likes my book.  Now I just need to write a really bad book, and I, too, can enjoy the same kind of success.

Obama raised how much money?

Harry Reid on the Iraq war, and Nancy Pelosi going over to Damascus, Syria…This is a formula for a massive Republican comeback, especially at the presidential level, in ’08. ~James Pinkerton

Mr. Pinkerton’s commentary is usually very smart and on target, which is why I found this remark so bizarre.  It is true that people viscerally opposed to the Democrats regard Reid and Pelosi’s efforts with special disgust, but I don’t think anyone has seen the evidence that the public at large actually objects to the Democratic leadership trying to rejigger foreign policy.  They may object to meaningless grandstanding that changes nothing, but that would mean that the public wants real opposition to Mr. Bush and his war, rather than the opposition of cheap talk and self-important photo-ops and glossy magazine features (Chuck Hagel, this means you). 

Generic ballot numbers, Mr. Bush’s approval rating and the relative rarity of three consecutive terms won by the same party in the post-war period (since 1952, it has happened exactly once) all suggest that the GOP could not win in ’08, especially at the presidential level, even if the the genes governing the most impressive traits of Lincoln, T.R., Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan were all spliced together to combine some sort of GOP Serpentor and this being were made the GOP nominee.  As it is, given the pathetic state of the major candidate presidential field, they would be lucky to have a leader as effective as Cobra Commander (we could call him GOPra Commander).  To offset this tremendous weakness (made all the worse by the cluelessness of the GOP on popular attitudes about trade and economic policy), Pelosi would have to try to sell the Syrians large parts of Florida in exchange for a lifetime supply of baba ghanooj to make the GOP reasonably competitive in ’08.

Update: The March Hotline/Diageo numbers are available, and it has some interesting information for those fearing the great anti-Pelosi backlash.  Questions 15 and 16 are instructive.  Asked whether they are “happy” that the Dems won control of Congress, 55% said that they were.  Asked whether they thought Congress spent too much, too little or about the right amount of time checking the executive, 24% said “too little” and 32% said “about the right amount,” while only 33% thought Congress spent too much time on it.  If the Dems can sell what they are doing as imposing checks and balances on a runaway executive, they will win the crowd. 

Question 18 shows the generic ballot gap: the Dems lead by 18 with 15% of Republicans that either didn’t know or refused to give an answer, 6% choosing neither and 9% of Republicans backing the Democratic candidate.  That’s nearly one-third of the party.  By comparison, the Dems had 6/3/4% giving comparable responses.  The Democrats are far more unified behind their eventual nominee, regardless of who it is, than the Republicans, and almost the whole advantage they have in the generic poll would seem to come from this discrepancy in partisan loyalty.  Only 7 in 10 Republicans say they will back their party’s candidate, but the Democratic candidate gets 87% of Democrats behind him.

For the last 28 years, we have been operating in a world in which, according to the popular stereotype, strong executive = competent foreign policy = Republican and weak executive = bungling foreign policy = Democrat.  (The standard GOP/neocon knock on Clinton in foreign policy was that he was too weak, ineffectual and feckless, not that he was a rabid interventionist and authoritarian, and in virtually every case where he played these latter roles the neocons supported and defended his decisions.)  I believe that post-1979 world is ending, mostly thanks to a Republican combining executive usurpation and foreign policy bungling on a massive scale.  We have nothing to which we can compare this new world, because nothing quite like it has existed before.  Therefore, congressional challenges to a would-be strong executive and congressional challenges to that executive’s bungled foreign policy may no longer elicit the traditional response of the public rallying around the President.  Perhaps the old structure will reassert itself in the future, but it seems possible that an entire new generation of voters will naturally and appropriately associate executive power-grabs, warmongering and failure and tie it to their image of the GOP, which means that expectations of public outrage at Reid and Pelosi’s foreign policy adventures are based on political realities that no longer exist.  On the contrary, these moves may or may not be good policy, but they are likely to prove to be very good politics.  It seems to me that Boomers are still trapped in that old world and keep expecting the public responses that would occur during the post-Carter years.  They may find that things are no longer what they once were.