Here’s a pretty easy test to determine whether you should vote.  For some reason, I completely blanked on the last two questions, but got the rest right (which isn’t saying much).  At the risk of distorting your results, watch for Michael Moore sporting a UNM baseball cap.  I had no idea our university was so popular with left-wing rabble-rousers.  That will make some of the students there very happy.

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men;
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland. long a province, be
A Nation once again!

As the old Fenian song reminds us, the story of Thermopylae has been used and reused more than a few times.  300 the “graphic novel” was no different, and shares with this Fenian song the conceit that Spartans were fighting for “freedom,” which is only true in the sense of thinking of the independence of their polis and resistance to barbarian rule as defining freedom.  In the mouths of Miller’s Spartans, the invocations of “freedom and reason” come off sounding like bad speechwriting for the current administration or, just as annoyingly in its way, the motto of a libertarian magazine.  Whether or not the lines from the “novel” sound as trite when spoken in the film, I don’t know.  When reading it, I do remember thinking that it was this forced ideological part of the “novel”–where the Spartans simply had to be fighting for some high Ideal and couldn’t just be fighting to repel the invasion of foreign conquerors–that was the least interesting.  No doubt it is only a matter of time before certain jingo enthusiasts of the movie begin referring to war opponents as new Ephialteses. 

The AP movie critic has dubbed300 “ultraviolent.”  If the hype about how supposedly super-gory the mildly violent Apocalypto was is any indication of how squeamish modern movie critics have become, the knock on 300 for being excessively violent (which seems silly, since it is a movie about the comic version of a battle) is probably overblown.  I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t say myself whether the other knock the AP critic gives it is justified.  Like 300 the “graphic novel,” which I have actually read (who says four years of college and five years of graduate school taught me nothing?), the movie is apparently extremely pleased with its own seriousness and insists that you, the audience, take it just as seriously:

But Snyder’s depiction of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans fought off a much larger Persian army, is so over-the-top it’s laughable — so self-serious, it’s hard to take seriously. 

I don’t know what it means to say that a movie based on a comic book is over the top.  There are bad comic book movies (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3) and entertaining comic book movies.  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.  But criticising exaggeration and camp in comic book movies would be like ridiculing Bollywood movies for all the song and dance numbers–these things are integral to the genre and cannot be cut out without making it into an entirely different kind of movie.  You may as well hold the moodiness of noir films against them, or discount the New Wave for its unconventional style–what’s the point?

Matthew Dowd, who was a senior strategist to George W. Bush in 2000 and his chief strategist in 2004, has said that if Republicans are to win national elections in the future, they must increase their share of the minority vote. And the Hispanic vote is the most fertile ground.

“Hispanics are more like European immigrants of the early 1900s or late 1800s,” Dowd said. “They are like the Irish: They start out Democratic, but as they become part of the economic mainstream, they become much more valuable to Republicans.” ~The Politico

That must be why there are so many Armenian-American Republicans running around.  Who can forget the great work done by Hnchaks for Bush in ’04?  That’s also why there are so many Irish-American Republican voters tipping Massachusetts, New York and Illinois into the GOP column on a regular basis.  Obviously, there are some Irish-Americans who have been or have become Republicans (Reagan was the most famous example), just as you had a large number of white ethnic voters who changed party affiliations in the ’80s or, in some cases, even earlier, but I am guessing that non-European immigrant groups tend to affiliate with the Republicans in relatively smaller numbers and these low levels of support for the GOP persist generation after generation.  It was probably culture war and national defense matters that brought a lot of these ethnic voters over to the GOP side, rather than the result of the gradual embourgeoisement of the immigrant groups.  That doesn’t absolutely rule out the possibility that the latter will bring in a few new supporters, but the overwhelming majority will always go to the Democrats, because they embody the political values and programs that the immigrant groups are more likely to embrace because of the political habits they have inherited and brought with them.  The GOP can wage demographic revolution against this country, but they should not mistake it for the route, whether in the short or long term, to their own future political dominance.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign has been burdened by unusually public discussion about his behavior with women. ~The Politico

Back home we are all familiar with the stories of the governor’s, um, hands-on approach to personal interaction, and those of us who don’t like him (myself included) are glad to point out that he can be quite crude when he is around women.  That being said, I have never heard any serious allegations of really improper conduct, and, as far as I know, unlike with a certain other Governor Bill there have never been any stories about the governor’s wandering eye.  John Dendahl, former state chairman of the GOP and his opponent in the gubernatorial race last time around, would have used even the slightest hint of scandal against Richardson, but it has simply never come up.  There are all sorts of reasons why Richardson shouldn’t be President, but this isn’t one of them.

It is the one-size-fits-all mentality, that’s what lies behind it. Individualism is notoriously eclectic in the sort of human lives it regards as perfectly legitimate, acceptable, capable of being lived properly, virtuously. But what do so many conservatives want? To get a clear view of this one need but read the non-fiction works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who would send us all back to live on the farms; or John Lukacs, who has become an environmentalist and is urging us all “to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where [we] live.” ~Tibor Machan

Apparently these citations are supposed to serve as some kind of insult.  Farming!  Tending the landscape!  You can almost hear him sneer when he says Prof. Lukacs “has become an environmentalist.”  How can he live with himself?  Before you know it, these people might even be encouraging others to get married and raise families.  What will the mad fools think of next?   

If Mr. Machan were in the least familiar with the tradition of conservative thought represented by ISI and the IR, both of which he maligns in this article, he would know that the last thing these folks have is a “one-size-fits-all mentality.”  Decentralism, variety, and the encouragement of regional and local diversity are among their guiding principles.  If they don’t accept the ideas that liberty entails self-indulgent license or that liberty should mean the collapse of community, this is indeed because they want to uphold the integrity of the variety of people who are inevitably reduced to increasingly identical masses of individuals in a world where particular loyalties and attachments are swept away in the storms of “creative destruction” and the homogenising effects of centralised politics, mass media and mass consumerism.  It is because individualism is the prelude to every abusive collectivist backlash (because the atomisation and separation of individualism is unnatural for man) that those genuinely interested in preserving inherited liberties regard individualism in every sphere as an abomination and a threat.

Inexplicably, after reading (or, more likely, quickly browsing) Look Homeward, America he has this to say:

Each of these advocates embraces just one of thousands of ways of living a good human life, favoring it above all the rest but for no discernible, rational reason one
can identify.

There are thousands of ways to live a good human life?  I suppose there may theoretically be thousands of kinds of work a man can do, or thousands of places he can live, but when it comes to living a good, humane life the alternatives are actually surprisingly few.  You can hold fast to the traditions and customs of your fathers, remain loyal to your hometown, raise a family, cultivate habits of restraint and discipline of the passions (submitting them, by the way, to reason and moral imagination) and worship God as you have learned from your religion, or you can choose to neglect one or more of these things.  Ayn Rand, to pick on the hero of Objectivists (since they feel compelled to kick around some of our folks), neglected pretty much all of them and was proud that she had done so.  We on the traditional conservative side argue that the former assist in cultivating human flourishing, and we discern this from the effects these practices actually have in the real world and the effects that their neglect has.  Individualism cannot contribute to human flourishing, because man was not meant to live in just any old way.  There is a way of life in accordance with nature, so in the sense that everyone is human (which even includes the Objectivists) it is appropriate to say that there is, broadly speaking, one, virtuous way to live.  That a man can live a virtuous life in a variety of professions and settings is not in doubt.  How insisting upon the life of the virtues dictates a “one-size-fits-all” view of things, I have to confess I have no idea.

Just to keep matters in balance, let me point out that although it is mostly the Left that hates individualism—remember, socialism means that we, humanity, are all just one organism—the Right’s hostility toward it is no less virulent.  Just recall that both Hitler and Stalin hated individualism, in any of its varieties. ~Tibor Machan

Actually, Hitler and Stalin hated personal liberty and they hated individualism.  To confuse the two is typical of people who think that individualism is somehow a good thing.  Also, Hitler was a radical nationalist who endorsed the supreme importance of labour and encouraged the collaboration of the state and industry in a state capitalist economy.  Only in the fever dreams of libertarians does that place him on “the Right” or associate him with conservatives of any stripe.  If this is how Mr. Machan begins his tiresome attack, you can just imagine how much worse it gets.

Peer into the abyss, if you dare.

These kinds of associations of money and politics are wrong in my view….I do not like the influence of money. ~Mitt Romney

This is the man whose profound commitment to the First Amendment was only recently awakened.  Perhaps he was meeting with a local director of the ACLU and they were discussing freedom of speech and association when it struck him.  Perhaps he would tell it this way: “I was sitting there with my chief of staff and we just sort of looked at each other and realised that all these reforms we had been supporting were unconstitutional.  We had never really given it much thought before!”

Of McCain-Feingold, Romney has, of course, said something different: “one of the worst things in my lifetime.”  Perhaps he can square his newfound contempt for the major piece of campaign finance legislation of the last thirty years with his opposition to money in politics, but I doubt it.  I would hazard a guess that a well-heeled, connected corporate type who wants to become President, such as Romney is, realised that having “moneyed interests” in politics weren’t so bad after all as long as you’re the one receiving the money. 

More on Romney and the ’08 race here and here.

Even if you argue that Mr. Bush brought this on himself, the fact remains that presidential authority is in a hole. At this rate of erosion, there will be such lack of clarity about the presidential role come January 2009 that any new president will spend an entire term merely reestablishing his or her authority.  A Democratic president who hasn’t drawn a line in the presidential sand will be in hock to the party’s pacifist left. Absent a vigorous debate on these matters, we are likely to elect a weak President, no matter who wins.  ~Daniel Henninger

Having a weak President is like having a weak jailor–it means that there is that much more chance of a successful escape from his clutches.

We and they seem to be operating in separate universes just now: they in the beanbag political world as defined by campaign consultants and we in the world defined by al Qaeda, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin. ~Daniel Henninger

Is Daniel Henninger’s world really defined by Al Qaeda, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Putin?  How terribly sad.  What a miserable life he must be living if the contours of his world are set by people he will never meet and who have, on the whole, nothing to do with him.  It makes political junkies fretting over Giuliani’s social views seem positively grounded and normal.