New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is viewed by Democratic insiders as rising to the top of the party’s second-tier presidential candidates, becoming a leading vice-presidential prospect and an increasingly possible nominee for president. ~Robert Novak

I have been paying attention to Richardson as the relatively most serious contender on the Democratic side for a while now, and I think he stands a reasonably good chance of getting the nomination.  When I first heard that he was running, I was very dismissive, because I know something of the man’s record and I don’t like him very much, but compared to the veritable non-records of his main competition he is like a giant among pygmies.  This is not said with any real sense of approval–it simply emphasises how poor the rest of the field is.

And why should they not? Russert is a perfectly honest man who would not lie. He was undoubtedly giving his best recollection.

But he is not the pope. Given that so many journalists and administration figures were shown to have extremely fallible memories, is it possible that Russert’s memory could have been faulty? ~Charles Krauthammer

Tim Russert will be shocked to learn that he is not the Pope–how did that happen?  (Only Krauthammer could make a bad column worse by inserting a totally erroneous understanding of papal infallibility into a discussion of perjury!)

Now I’m not a journalist, a White House press secretary or the Vice President’s chief of staff, so I can’t say that I know what it is like to do the jobs that they do.  Maybe they talk to so many people about so many things that it is impossible to keep it all straight, and it is possible that witnesses will have faulty memories and forget things or remember them incorrectly.  I’m going to assume that the jurors were capable of grasping this rather obvious idea, because, apparently unlike Libby’s apologists, I do not regard them as certified morons.  Krauthammer’s entire article rests on the assumption that the jurors never considered the possibility that the witnesses had poor memories and that he is somehow doing everyone a great favour by pointing out what would have occurred to anyone sitting on that jury.  Perhaps the jury factored in exactly what Krauthammer is saying and still believed that Libby knowingly made false statements under oath.  To kick up the epistemological puzzle a notch, how does Krauthammer know that they didn’t already take this into account?    

Let’s suppose, then, that the jury deliberated and reached its verdict as if they were also capable of understanding the most basic potential problems of witness testimony.  Let us suppose that they were, in fact, minimally competent at their task.  Let us suppose that they were at least as insightful as Charles Krauthammer (not a high standard to meet, I grant you).  If they were, I find it difficult to believe that they convicted a man on four counts because they were working under the delusion that Tim Russert has perfect recall and had never considered the possibility that witnesses could misremember.  What Krauthammer is talking about are all the reasons why one might reasonably doubt that Libby knowingly lied under oath.  The jury weighed the testimony and apparently decided that these and other reservations did not introduce enough doubt into the matter.  That’s how it works.  If we applied the Krauthammer test (busy people can’t possibly remember minute specifics of time, place and subject of conversation) to criminal prosecutions, it would probably be quite shocking how many convictions based on witness testimony would be overturned.  Probably not even Krauthammer would want to go down that road, so why is there such a concerted effort to undermine the legitimacy of this verdict?  (Of course, we all know why there is such a concerted effort, but how can it begin to be squared with a commitment to the rule of law?)

The four former Senate leaders know, more than almost anyone else, how difficult it is to find such agreement. So they are choosing their targets with care. The Iraq war is not on the agenda. They have launched a national security initiative, to be headed by retired Gen. Jim Jones, a former NATO supreme allied commander. But the emphasis will be on nonmilitary applications of American power and influence.

They may offer “common ground” approaches to other problems as well. Mitchell, for example, thinks they could synthesize the best suggestions on improving port security and perhaps take on part of the challenge of the dysfunctional health-care system. ~David Broder

Call Unity08–I predict a groundswell of support for a Baker-Daschle or Dole-Mitchell ticket!  Wouldn’t that be something to see?  Can you feel the excitement?  I sure can.  As Yglesias has disparagingly put it:

I’m no Senator, but here’s my commitment to Broder and to everyone out there in the grant-writing community. If you want to give me “a staff of 20 and a budget of $7 million a year” I will gladly put partisanship aside and reach across the aisle for solutions. Yes, yes, it’s true — I’m that selfless.

The really impressive part about this senatorial quartet is how they have committed to finding common ground only on those issues where people aren’t terribly divided.  They wouldn’t want to have find a compromise on anything so divisive–and important–as the war, because that might show their tired invocation of bipartisanship to be a waste of everybody’s time.  By focusing on all those things that aren’t terribly controversial, the quartet may succeed in forging a consensus, but in most cases it will simply be restating a consensus that probably already exists.  The main divisions between (and within) the parties today are not over “nonmilitary applications” of power and influence, but very specifically over military applications.  It is worse than useless to have a group dedicated to finding common ground on issues where there is scant division.  It would be like tackling the sharp divide over abortion by talking about how to improve pre-natal care.  It would be like addressing immigration reform by passing a resolution marking Cinco de Mayo.  They find “common ground” by talking about a completely different subject.  That is what you get with this idolatry of bipartisanship: nothing of any value.

“Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, terrorism, security, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” he said mockingly. “He seems incapable of developing even a single idea.”  ~Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

Whether by accident, reflexive anti-Americanism or actual insight, Chavez has managed to hit on something that some of Mr. Bush’s die-hard supporters still refuse to admit.  Mr. Bush does seem incapable of developing even a single idea.  He does speak endlessly and pointlessly about Iraq and terrorism, and he always says the exact same things, none of which inspires any confidence.  But, then one might mock Chavez thus: “Anti-imperialism, North American imperialism, oil, oil, oil, anti-imperialism, oil, revolution, oil.”  These two are really made for each other.

How ridiculous is developing ethanol as an alternative fuel?  So ridiculous that even Hugo Chavez can see through it:

But Mr. Chávez quickly shot back in an interview on a popular morning television program in Argentina, dismissing the ethanol plan as “a crazy thing, off the wall.” He accused the United States of trying “to substitute the production of foodstuffs for animals and human beings with the production of foodstuffs for vehicles, to sustain the American way of life.”

If only someone would tell Sam Brownback!

When a movie review begins with references to Der Ewige Jude, it is safe to say that it is not going to be a complimentary review.  Dana Stevens of Slatestarts out in heavy-handed fashion with the Nazi references and never stops to take a breath.  Then she says:

But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness.

Only in the most general sense can one cast the telling of this story as political, in that it is a story about a battle (which takes place, after all, in Greece, not in the Near East) and therefore the conflict being depicted has some political dimension as all wars do.  It may therefore have something to say generally about the politics of independence or anti-imperialism or opposition to aggression and conquest (none of which, mind you, does much for the 300-as-Iraq war propaganda argument), but in this it is no more a commentary on current policies than Braveheart referred to the Balkan Wars because both involved questions of national independence to one degree or other.   

I have been similarly unimpressed in the past by attempts to read political messages into the third season of BSG, because it seemed clear to me that a) this was implausible given the content of the New Caprica episodes and b) it was explicitly contrary to what the directors and writers themselves said they were doing.  When everyone involved in the production of something says, “No, we’re not talking about the United States government!” it makes sense to assume that they are probably telling the truth.  After all, it isn’t as if people in the movie and television business make their predominantly left-liberal politics a secret.  If they wanted to state that their project was a pointedly political one, they would do so, because that is what politically active film and TV types do.  Had BSG decided to go that route, they would probably have won as many viewers as they would have lost, so I find it unlikely that they shied away from open criticism of the government because they feared a backlash from fans.  Those who insist that they are not using their art, such as it is, to criticise a specific policy, but who say that they are trying to tell an entertaining and perhaps interesting character-driven story, are probably just trying to tell a story.  If it is set during wartime, wartime themes will keep cropping up that people living through a real war, however remote from the fighting they are, will naturally associate with their war–but that doesn’t mean that the two have any connection at all.  I think the same would hold true for projects that tell a story that might at first seem more favourable to a pro-war view, such as 300 at first appears to be.

I have not seen 300, but I did read the “graphic novel” some years ago and I am, in any case, familiar with the story of Thermopylae.  What are the important details of this story?  It valorises courage against overwhelming odds, praises patriotic defenders of their country against foreign aggression, and espouses the importance of a society governed by nomos and not by the arbitrary will of one man.  Pretty horrifying stuff, let me tell you.  An argument could be made (perhaps I will make it after I have seen the movie) that 300 is one of the most deliciously anti-imperialist, anti-Bush movies ever made.  Bush would obviously play the role of Xerxes (as the Timeshas already suggested).  His opponents could see themselves as Leonidas and the Spartans, an embattled few who nonetheless prevent the ruin of their country.  It would be really overdrawn and absurd in its own way, but not nearly as absurd as what Ms. Stevens has to say about the film, the experience of which she likens to being raped.  No, really, she does. 

When this sort of story is set at Minas Tirith and the vaguely Oriental hordes of the Hradrim are pressing down on the Riders of Rohan, most left-liberals don’t bat an eye–they cheer on the Men of the West, because they have entered into the fantasy world where the forces arrayed against Minas Tirith are clearly in the service of the Dark Lord.  Not even most multicultis like the Dark Lord, and their radar for ethnic stereotyping seems to turn off as they see strange, vaguely Arab-looking archers on the backs of oliphants.  Even animal rights activists don’t seem to get too upset over the rather mean despatching of the oliphants in Return of the King.  Now, set this same story in history, indeed identify it as a specific, critical moment in the history of our own civilisation, ignoring for the moment that this is an adapted and literally comical retelling of that moment, and watch how the liberal, in this case Ms. Stevens, throws a fit.  Did I not tell you this was coming?  Earlier this week I wrote:

They are pretty much all “over the top” once you see people sprouting claws, leaping from building to building or, in this case, fighting an army depicted with such purely Orientalist imagination that it would make Edward Said spin in his grave.  Everything about 300 the “novel” is over the top.  From the few clips I have seen in previews, the costumes and ethnic stereotypes seem to have leapt full-blown from the deeper reaches of George Lucas’ mind onto the screen.  I expect the cacophony of PC screeching any day now. 

I wrote that on Thursday morning.  By Thursday night, Ms. Stevens’ review had appeared.  Apparently without any sense of irony, Ms. Stevens wrote:

The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

Er, well, I don’t know about the traits of a “club fag” (a phrase which, if stated at CPAC, would probably merit denunciations from Hugh Hewitt), but to depict the Persian shahanshah as bejeweled and heavily decorated with makeup is not really that far from what we understand about Persian court ceremonials (at least in the late Achaemenid and again in the Sasanian periods) and proskynesis, which was the hateful barbarian custom that Alexander demanded of his commanders, was the ritual prostration before, or at the feet of, the emperor.  Obviously, it symbolises complete submission to the will of the ruler and represents a reminder of the prostrator’s much lower status.  Diocletian, probably not someone whom anyone would have called a “club fag” (certainly not to his face!), adopted proskynesis from the Persians and made it an integral part of what became Byzantine court ceremony.  So in other words, one of the things that really bothers Ms. Stevens is one of the things that 300 actually gets more or less historically right.  Um…okay. 

Since proskynesis is something that an imperial autocrat demands of his subjects, or indeed his slaves, it doesn’t seem so terribly outrageous to depict a ruler who demands such servility as being, well, an arbitrary ruler who demands servility.  Making the heroes of the movie into the opposite, free men who will not abase themselves before a mere mortal, also makes sense from the perspective of telling the story as a morality play (which, at bottom, almost every comic book worth its salt does).  That it actually has more than a little connection with the real Spartans and Persians of history is an added bonus! 

If the story were about heroic resistance fighters battling a Panzer division, or if there were derogatory references to “goose-stepping,” Ms. Stevens would probably be enthralled.  “Race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth” are great for most left-liberals, provided that the “race” being baited is German and the nationalist myth being promoted is that of FDR’s America.  It all depends on whose gigantic rhinoceros is being gored. 

To recount the story of Thermopylae as shown in 300, which is essentially a hyped-up version of an historically true account, is not necessarily to actually embrace the entire binary structure of Greek conceptions of identity where the free, rational Greek men are set off against effeminate, slavish barbarians and irrational women.  Of course, the point is that the Greeks perceived things in this way and understood the peoples around them through this lens, which Miller (probably unthinkingly) reproduces with his own exaggerated flourishes.  Perhaps it does not jibe with multiculti sensibilities as much as the multiracial rebels of The Matrix series, but the story is actually much the same: a dedicated few fighting off hordes of enemies, who are themselves enslaved by the ruler.  Possibly, the movie may try to subvert or alter the entire structure by making the story into one of the resistance of the relatively weak against the mighty. 

Ms. Stevens goes on:

Leonidas likes to rally the troops with bellowed speeches about “freedom,” “honor,” and “glory,” promising that they will be remembered for having created “a world free from mysticism and tyranny.”

This is apparently, from her perspective, a bad thing.  Now let’s understand something.  This is a perfect example of how Miller’s version of Thermopylae, and apparently the movie’s as well, is distorted by Miller’s own biases.  The Spartans weren’t fighting against mysticism.  Only the Romans were more superstititious than the Greeks when it came to mystery cults, oracles and divination, and the Spartans were no exception.  They may have been fighting, in some sense, for the gods of their city, but the rationalist, anti-religious strain that comes through here is entirely anachronistic and better suited to Ridley Scott’s nonsense of medieval history in Kingdom of Heaven.  In any case, these were not 5th century B.C. Voltaireans duking it out with theocrats.  Left-liberals and libertarians alike should love this angle of 300.  It is like V for Vendetta on speed in its bloody hostility to both religion and authority.  (This may be why an Objectivist friend of mine, who introduced me to 300, thought it was such a great story when we were in college.) 

It’s conservatives who should feel reluctant to lend 300 any cheers or support.  Why, after all, are mysticism and tyranny paired together?  What does one really have to do with the other, unless you believe that reason is reason-against-piety and hold that religion is the enemy of human liberty?  Isn’t this just some rehashed Gibbonian Enlightenment garbage about religion as a tool of despotism?  Yes, it is, and conservatives should be on their guard against it.  In this respect, 300 is a gorier version of Ryan Sager’s book or one of Andrew Sullivan’s madcap posts about “big-government Christianists.”  Slate readers should be thrilled by it, and it should tell religious conservatives something about him and his colleagues that Victor Davis Hanson is a big booster of the film.

So Pete Domenici and the Congresswoman I love to mock, Heather Wilson, have found themselves in something of a pickle with this U.S. Attorneys scandal.  It’s a shame that this issue didn’t come up four months ago when it might have saved us all some trouble and brought Wilson’s re-election bid crashing to the ground.  But let me say that if the scandal did bring about the political undoing of Domenici and Wilson, no one would be happier than I.  Domenici has had an undue and unhealthy influence on Republican Party politics in New Mexico, most especially in his boosting of Wilson over Bill Davis after the death of Rep. Steve Schiff in 1998.  He imposed Wilson on us, and some of us who never wanted her as the Republican candidate have been trying, without success, to get rid of her ever since.  Before the majority was kicked out, Domenici was also Budget Chairman and so was deeply implicated in all of the spending excesses of the old majority.  She, however, is ill-suited to run a statewide race to succeed Domenici, since the only reason she has managed to stay in office is that the First District is so unusually favourable to Republican candidates for a medium-sized city and its environs.  This is at least partly a function of Kirtland AFB and the tech corporations that now have operations in Albuquerque.  Once she has to campaign in northern and western New Mexico, even against a weak Democratic candidate, she will have a very hard time defending her reflexive Bush loyalism.   

The scandal, such as it is, is not enough to bring her down now that she is safely ensconced once more in her House seat, and Domenici is untouchable in New Mexico.  People love him back home.  He has been a fixture in state politics for my entire life, and I find it hard to believe that he is going anywhere unless someone finds something truly damaging.  Only in the event of his retirement does it become a contested seat, and I am betting that he will not retire.  In any case, the Democratic bench is pretty weak, battered by intra-party fights in the Roundhouse and scarred by the bribery scandal of recent years.  There is always Tom Udall, who could easily be replaced by almost anyone to hold NM-03 for the Democrats, but if both he and his cousin (Mark Udall in Colorado) run for Senate in the same year people might suffer from Udall overload. 

You didn’t need Ryan Sager to tell you any of that–you could have just asked me.

As an approach to national policy, doing the reverse of what Krauthammer recommends will get you 87 percent or so of the way to perfection. ~Matt Yglesias

Ross casts Nixon as the devil (see here for a slightly more friendly interpretation) in connection with this post.  I am actually less interested in Mr. Casse’s talk about the state of the Republican coalition than I am in the response the post elicited.  Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that Daniel Casse…

is a smart guy, but what a bizarre post that was. Paul Craig Roberts’s trajectory actually doesn’t tell us anything interesting about the future of the Republican coalition; it tells us that he’s a nut.

Two points.  First, it is probably more significant than not that a former high-ranking official of the Reagan administration would become an intense enemy of the Republican establishment and all its works on what he holds to be specifically conservative and patriotic grounds.  If Mr. Roberts were the only prominent Reagan-era official or pundit who had broken so dramatically with the GOP, it might be less meaningful, but we all know that he is far from the only one.  It might also just say something about the direction of the modern GOP and the conservative movement that someone with an “impeccable” background in both should feel compelled to become such a staunch oppositionist.  It probably does not mean that he is a “nut,” or else there is an increasing population of “nuts” who happen to agree with the overwhelming majority of what Mr. Roberts has to say.  The second point is that someone at a group blog that plays host to Michael Ledeen’s posts should take care with throwing around the word “nut” when describing people with whom you disagree, since it could so very easily be applied to some of your colleagues.

In Britain Thatcherism is not in favour and in America Reaganism is not on offer. But that doesn’t mean reformist conservative candidates are inferior to their socialist and liberal opponents. In a hostile political environment a scaled-down conservatism is still better than no conservatism at all. The current generation of Republican and Conservative leaders recognise this and are working to renew conservatism rather than destroy it.

The right thing to do is not to make faces at this bandwagon but to jump aboard and keep trying to drive it in the right direction of freer markets, freer people. If they hang together in this struggle, conservatives have a good chance of advancing their cause as a governing strategy, not as an angry protest. It they do not, they will, most assuredly, hang separately. ~Gerard Baker

This seems to be an increasingly widespread justification for backing bad, unrepresentative leadership based on little more than intimidation and dread of the other side.  This is essentially the GOP campaign theme from 2006.  Perhaps it was understandable that blinkered incumbents could offer nothing more than, “Hey, at least we’re not those guys!”  That was, of course, the exact same appeal the Democrats were making last year.  The difference is that it was much better to not be Republicans last year, and if their continued cluelessness and hopeless commitment to Iraq continue it will certainly continue to be better to be anything but a Republican.  The old “we’re not as bad as they are” spiel only makes works if there is some flickering memory of what real, competent and good conservative government looks like.  Lacking that, many people will laugh at the idea that the people who brought you Mr. Bush are here to help you, the conservative. 

It is bizarre to watch, but there is at least a certain consistency in these appeals to backing the party that “represents the conservative interest” (even though, when in power, they did stunningly poor jobs of representing the conservative interest, preferring instead the corporate interest and always reliable self-interest).  It is the same appeal that party men make at each stage.  They start this way: back the party because it believes what you believe.  When that is proven to be obviously untrue, they say: back the party because it will help you get what you want.  When that doesn’t happen, they say: back the party so that we can get “back” to a point where the party will actually believe what you believe.  Since the party was never really there in the first place, do you have much confidence that it will be returning to a place it never was?  The question for conservatives is this: having been duped at least twice, will you play the fool a third time?  Gerard Baker says that you must and threatens you with hanging (figurative, we assume) if you don’t agree.  Somehow, I don’t believe him.