I am all for intervening in Darfur any way we can. ~Jonah Goldberg

It’s interesting that the absurdity of the Fred Thompson Phenomenon should call to mind the (non-existent) presidential potential of Larry Craig in particular for both Matt Yglesias and myself.  Yglesias also asks sarcastically, “Where’s Tommy Thompson?”  Tommy is, of course, running as fast as he can all over Iowa attempting to pull off the upset of all upsets in a campaign no less (but no more) deserving of mockery than the other Thompson’s.  That idea struck me as laughable when I first heard about it, but then I seem to find virtually every presidential candidate’s chances laughable.  Somebody has to win, I suppose.  Why not a Thompson-Thompson ticket?

Tommy Thompson is actually a very good example of the kind of candidate–accomplished reform governor of a Midwestern state re-elected with broad support–that the GOP desperately needs right now.  The only problem is that he hasn’t been the governor of anything for years.  Oh, the other problem is that virtually nobody knows who he is outside Wisconsin.  Then there’s the lack of money.  Other than that, he’s in great shape.  But if his optimistic claims are to be believed, he is practicing intense retail politics and just might surprise all of the people engaged in the celebrity-watching political “journalism” that first anointed Hagel as a minor deity (before overturning his statues and burning his temples in recent weeks) and that now makes Thompson into the messiah.  I really hope so.  Larry Craig isn’t in the race (yet), so we need someone like Tommy Thompson to step up to the plate and save us from the insane celebrity politicians.

There are things we need to be afraid of; we need to be afraid of Islamic fascists; we need to afraid of the internal terrors that we face. The fact that many people will go to work this Friday and get a pink slip and be told that the job they’ve been working at 20 years won’t exist anymore. The fear that people are going to get a phone call that their 8 year old has broken his arm on the playground and they’re not sure how they’re going to pay the doctor bill and pay the rent on the first of the month.

That’s real terror. I mean, people have to understand that there are many forms of terror in the United States. There’s a terror that exists because our healthcare system is upside down and we’re just so overwhelmed with chronic disease that it’s bankrupting us and making us non-competitive. Parents are afraid their kids are going to spend twelve years in schools and still not be prepared to challenge the issues of the world.

So those are real true forms of terror for many American families. What changes that is when we start saying, ‘alright, if we know what the problems are, let’s start working toward the solutions. Let’s quit taking all of this in the realm of political ideology and start bringing a practical way to solve the problem.’ ~Mike Huckabee

Huckabee hits on some important things here, demonstrating that he may actually grasp contemporary American anxieties better than a lot of the candidates, but since he just finished saying that he wanted to restore a sense of optimism to America he has gone about it in a very odd way.  Terror isn’t just the work of “Islamic fascists” (is this now a required phrase that every candidate has to utter?)–HMOs and teachers’ associations are evidently part of some kind of terrorism, too.  He doesn’t put it quite that way, he doesn’t name names, but you get the impression that the people preventing whatever Huckabee deems to be suitable health care access are equivalent to “Islamic fascists.” 

I think I understand what Huckabee is doing here: he understands that Republican primary voters these days won’t respond to anything unless it can somehow, however implausibly, be tied to fighting Terrorism, so he is trying to remake his syrupy, “being pro-life means having art programs” spiel into a more hard-edged, “being pro-life means fighting the HMOfascists.”  Huckabee can use HMOfascists free of charge–it is my gift to him.  However, it won’t work, since the people who use phrases such as “Islamic fascists” won’t be thrilled to have “terror” associated with health care or education.  They might think, not without reason, that this somehow cheapens or clouds the problem of terrorist violence.

Joining in the generalrevelry, I propose the following:

Washington, D.C.: We destroyed the Constitution, and all we got was this ugly architecture.

Too positive?

In his Global Me, Zachary provided the readers with a tour of the New, New Brave World and introduced us to fascinating characters, ranging from high-tech entrepreneurs to international aid workers, who posses the attractive mix of “roots” and “wings,” that is, hyper-mobile “global hybrids” with “transnational identities,” who won’t stay put in one place, who experience “the breakdown of the unitary self, the rising appetite for diversity, the growing taste for gumbo [bold mine-DL], the proliferation of voluntary attachments to places, practices and communities.” These individuals with roots in more than one nation and with wings to fly anywhere and anytime were “the fruits of the new patterns in migration and mobility,” Zachary wrote. “They are the future,” he concluded. ~Leon Hadar

A growing taste for gumbo?  That’s proof of a new cosmopolitanism?  What does an appreciation for masala chai suggest?  The Apocalypse?

Dr. Hadar also talks about the story that explodes all of these fantasies of globalised humanity.

Update: Incidentally, I had heard about The Namesake when it was first released and saw a copy of the book in the airport bookstore during my brief exile in Philadelphia.  There I was, wandering past the stacks of dreadful paperback novels and copies of Maxim, and suddenly Kal Penn’s loving face was staring back at me.  Kal Penn, best known to the stoner set through his work in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, is actually a somewhat decent actor who made the obligatory desi, “We are all desis, bhaiyye!” movie in Dude, Where’s The Party? (originally titled Where’s The Party, Yaar?), though he was actually upstaged by the relative unknown (Sunil Malhotra) who played the visiting FOB Indian, Hari (or, as he insists on calling himself when meeting new people, Harish Kumar Satish Kumar Patel).  Now he plays the desi torn between two worlds in Mira Nair’s adaptation of The Namesake, ultimately (so I understand) choosing in the end to return to the old country and his own people (which is also the take-home message of that Shah Rukh Khan vehicle Swades, which overflows with India’s Dilwale-esque call to NRIs everywhere: “Aaja, pardesi, tera des bulaaye re!”).  The problem of the divided desi is normally resolved in other such stories by the untimely-yet-comical death of the gauri who has attempted to take away the Indian man from his people (Bollywood, Hollywood) or by stealing back the Indian woman who has become involved with a white guy (Second Generation) and returning to India with her.  This latest story sounds less interesting than the Lear-like BBC production Second Generation, but might still hold some interest for me, since I have become something of a Mira Nair fan over the years.

Polygamy is a rank offense against the equality principle, which is why the Republican Party in their 1856 platform denounced it along with slavery as the one of the “twin relics of barbarism.” ~John B. Kienker

Perhaps it was their deep love of equality that drove them to denounce polygamy, or perhaps it was that many Mormons had adopted strong pro-slavery views and represented a potential impediment to the spread of Red Republican “free men, free labour” ideology into the territories.  It would have had the added advantage of associating their opponents in the minds of the public with a rather scandalous marital practice.  But I’m sure it was the profoundly principled stand that was the main motivation, since the Red Republicans have always been great ones for principles.

So I haven’t said anything since my return about my excursion to Charlottesville and the ISI conference I attended there.  Fear not–I will have some more remarks before too long.  Until my pen ran out of ink, I was taking fairly detailed notes on each talk, so I hope to be able to sketch out at least a couple of the ones that I found most striking.  Prof. Deneen’s talk was one of these, since it seemed on first hearing to agree with the thrust of something I had written a little over a year ago.  Amusingly, this was the piece that dragged me into the rathertiresomeskirmishes with the West Coast Straussians during the Crunchy Wars, which was then followed by an even more tiresome argument with those people after Imentioned that Claes Ryn had figuratively given the Jaffa-style Straussian reading of “the Founding” a good swift kick to the ribs in a speech at last year’s Philadelphia Society meeting. 

When Prof. Deneen remarked in his talk, as I remember it, “Sometimes, I think I am the only Straussian left,” I thought to myself: “If only that were true!”  But, no, that’s not quite fair, and that wasn’t the whole of my reaction.  I later thought: “If this is real Straussianism, it isn’t anything like what those people at Claremont have said that it is and it isn’t that bad after all.”  How refreshing!  The delight of apparently finding a Straussian using Strauss to argue for a position that I, non-Straussian that I am, had previously made from an entirely different perspective and one that the self-appointed successors of Strauss had vehemently attacked was considerable.  

Present at the Charlottesville conference were some of my TAC/Chronicles colleagues and partners in blogging thought crime, Dan McCarthy (who says he disagrees with a “great deal” in the talk) and Clark Stooksbury, as well as the fun, witty James Poulos, IMP, those champions of prairie populism and prairie populists, Caleb Stegall and Jeff Taylor, plus many, many more.  I had a very good time at the conference, and I believe the talks were well worth the trip (which unfortunately involved getting stuck in the Philadelphia airport for eight hours thanks to US Airways, whose motto ought to be, “Just try to fly with us if you dare”). 

While you’re waiting for my remarks on the conference talks, I will point you to another source for your edification and entertainment: Prof. Deneen of Georgetown has the beginnings of his remarks that he delivered at the conference up on his blog (via Dan McCarthy). 

Update: Prof. Deneen posts the rest of the talk here.

If you were a traditional Muslim, would you want to associate yourself with people who were constantly attacking your prophet, your holy book, your values, and your religion? ~Dinesh D’Souza

Well, obviously not.  I don’t expect them to do any such thing.  It is the neocon Islamophiles who think they can “win over” part of the Islamic world against the “Islamofascist” part, and they are the more foolish for it.  I don’t expect Muslims of any stripe to associate with me–I wouldn’t want them to be associationists!  (Okay, that was a bad Islamic theology joke–does D’Souza even get it?)  But, then, as a Christian, I don’t want to associate myself with people who say–indeed whose scripture requires them to say–that my Saviour and God was a mere man, who deny His Resurrection (and even His Crucifixion!), mock the Holy Trinity, desecrate and destroy the sites dedicated to His glory and His holy Name, deface the sacred images of His beloved saints and His All-Holy, Most Pure and Ever-Virgin Mother and kill my co-religionists without mercy.  The people most inclined to agree with some of the moral judgements (if not the juridical punishments) of “traditional Muslims” are the very people who have no time at all for people whose entire religion is a shoddy, warmed-over version of the worst heresies and deviations from our religion.  With Islam, significant doctrinal differences really do make all the difference, not least because these differences have dramatic, immediate real-world consequences (as, indeed, does almost every significant theological difference).  I generally tend to think that agreement on “common values” is not entirely possible with people who have a completely different doctrine of God, since in some of their most basic convictions they believe something that I regard as manifest falsehood.  If they are that wrong about God, how much less will they understand about the less important things of worldly matters?  If they are actively hostile to the Church’s teaching about God and His saving economy, how in the world can I justify taking their side in any quarrel, no matter how many superficial points of agreement D’Souza can throw out there?

Remember Christie Todd Whitman?

As recently as four years ago she was held up as a symbol that the Republican Party was moving away from its conservative roots and would maintain national dominance by appealing to moderate, suburban women. Ms. Whitman herself won two terms as governor of New Jersey and was tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency by George W. Bush. She left government in 2003, published a book called “It’s My Party Too” and created a political action committee aimed at establishing her as a moderate anchor for the GOP.

She then precipitously sank into political oblivion as her party sailed on without her. It’s not likely she’ll make more than a cameo appearance at next year’s Republican National Convention or, for that matter, at any other high-profile Republican event. She won’t, we can be confident, persuade many voters to follow her lead with whomever she endorses for president. In a few more years, no one will remember who she is or why she was once an important political figure. ~Brendan Miniter

Held up by whom?  An important political figure to whom?  Probably she was held up by other Northeasterners like Miniter shilling for the moderate wing of the party in the same old effort to push conservatives down and out to the margins.  These are the people who would have thought she was an “important political figure.”  These are the people who probably thought John Anderson was a bold and courageous leader of men.  Why might other people not take their opinions seriously? 

Nobody west of the Delaware and east of Palm Springs considered Ms. Whitman to be anything other than a rather bad joke.  You might as well claim that Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee were held up by a lot of people as the future of the GOP.  It isn’t true.  Everyone knows it isn’t true.  Why say things like this?  Oh, right, Miniter continues to flog his theory that the GOP is being reduced to regional isolation and has been driven out of the Northeast.  The GOP did suffer badly in New England, especially in New Hampshire and Connecticut (which, a generation or two earlier, would have been unthinkable, just as Democratic weakness in the South was unheard of), and got hit relatively hard in Pennsylvania and Indiana (the latter mostly because of intense anti-GOP sentiment aimed at the governor), but it actually held up better than expected in New York and also fared relatively well in the total disaster that could have been Ohio (again, the product of backlash against the corruption of the state GOP).  They probably only lost KY-03 because Rumsfeld was not forced out until after the election, and it is possible that the concerted pro-gambling attack on Jim Leach was the decisive factor in pushing that district, which Leach had held for years and years, into the Democratic column.  If Michelle Bachmann (!) can get elected in Minnesota in 2006, the GOP is hardly facing an unavoidable future of routs in the Midwest–provided that they pay some attention to what their constituents want. 

It would be a colossal error to assume long-term political trends from the repudiation of Mr. Bush and the corrupt GOP majority that 2006 represented.  If we followed this thinking, 2004 would have proved that Ohio was going to be eternally Republican–after all, if the Democrats couldn’t win in Ohio in 2004, they were never going to win there, right?  Three years later, people are making identical arguments that Ohio is now probably lost to the GOP.  This is silly.  It would be equally mistaken to conclude that the answer to the GOP’s woes it to suck up even more to the priorities of Northeastern Republicans–the sorts of people and the sorts of policies that helped bring the GOP and conservatism to their present lowly states.  Leave it to someone in New York writing for the ultimate metropole rag to not understand this.

Never mind that the Islamic tradition helped to pioneer the figurative reading of biblical texts. ~Andrew Sullivan

Yes, what would Origen have done without Muhammad?  It’s interesting that Muslims could have pioneered something that predated their religion by many centuries, especially when they explicitly reject figurative interpretations of their own scripture, since it is taken to be the uncreated Word.  Unlike our understanding of Christian Scripture, which is one of divinely revealed truth with multiple layers of meaning, there are no other “senses” of Islamic scripture, at least not in traditional Sunnism (in other words, the bulk of Islam throughout its history). 

I only just read Sullivan’s review in its entirety today, so I had not seen this amazing statement until today.  The folks at The New Republic should be embarrassed to run something with such a manifestly false, easily checked statement as this–and Sullivan has the gall to make this statement as a way to take a shot at D’Souza.  As Dr. Trifkovic has shown, D’Souza’s ignorance about the religion of his proposed allies is impressive and extensive, but this is not part of it. 

This is perhaps the single-most ignorant statement Sullivan has ever made.  There are so many competitors for this honour, but I think this one wins by a good distance.  I welcome nominations for runners-up.