When President Bush leaves tomorrow on a five-nation tour of Latin America, he will be entering a region that has become more important to our national security than at any point since the Cold War. ~Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison

Exactly how has it become more important?  She’ll tell us:

A fresh wave of authoritarianism — fueled by petrodollars, populism and anti-Americanism — has cast a dark cloud over the future of freedom in our hemisphere. In order to deal with this emerging threat, we need to dust off the Cold War playbook and become increasingly active in helping our friends to the south.

This would be the authoritarianism brought about through the ballot box.  I am perfectly happy to agree that mass democracy leads to authoritarianism and even to despotism, and I believe it is doing just that in Latin America, but let’s be very specific about what we’re talking about.  Several Latin American countries will become, or have become, basketcases because of the proper, regular functioning of mass democracy.  Mass democracy is a threat to freedom, indeed its very antithesis in many respects, but if we were going to make it our business (which we shouldn’t) we should be very clear that we are opposing the rise of successful democratic polities in Latin America because of the politics of the majority of the people in many Latin American countries.  This seems short-sighted and pointless to me, as most interventionism always does, but I insist that if Mr. Bush wants to meddle he has to admit that he is meddling to stymy democracy and oppose the will of most people in Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.  That should make for an amusing press conference, if nothing else.

Not only do we have a moral responsibility, but we have a larger responsibility here, Jim, in our obligations to NATO, our commitment to those people. And I think the president is right on this one. We can’t defer this tough decision any more, because if we do, it will get worse. There’s butchery going on in the backyard of NATO — my goodness, if NATO can’t deal with it there, a few hundred miles away from NATO headquarters. So any measurement of the responsibilities that we have as a people, it’s very clear to me that we have to get in and deal with this along with our 18 NATO allies. And I think we can and I think we should. ~Sen. Chuck Hagel

That icon of the “appeasers” then went on to say about the bombing of Yugoslavia, using words that probably will be thrown back in his face today:

At the same time, we have to be careful we don’t squander some precious time here and give Milosevic the wrong message that we may be divided. We are in this to win. That debate is over, as far as are we committed or not. We’re committed. As Senator Hutchinson said, we crossed that line, and we have elevated expectations. We can’t lose this. This is not only the credibility of the United States and NATO, but as we move into this next century, other Milosevics, people in Iraq, in North Korea, in other places are watching this very intently to see what the will is of the United States and NATO.

Can someone remind me again why antiwar conservatives should like Chuck Hagel?

This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It’s made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we should make recourse to strategies that, allegedly, would have, in retrospect, have been optimal for coping with Hitler as our regular basis for dealing with foreign leaders who don’t eagerly submit to American hegemonic aspirations is daft. ~Matt Yglesias

Yes, it is daft.  It is also the sum total of the neoconservative understanding of how to run a foreign policy.  Naturally, Yglesias is commenting on a Ledeen post.  This post tagged Hagel as the “ideal standard-bearer” of appeasers (meaning, of course, all people who oppose Ledeen’s brand of mad interventionism of the “throw a crappy country against the wall every ten years” variety).  Given Hagel’s foreign policy views and his record, that’s like saying Lieberman is the “ideal standard-bearer” of pacifists or McCain is the “ideal standard-bearer” of paleocons.  Hagel is such an “appeaser” that he voted to authorise Bush to attack Iraq; he was such an “appeaser” that he supported the bombing of Yugoslavia and he gives you no reason to think that he would not have been a supporter of the Gulf War and Panama had he been in the Senate at the time…well, you get the point.  When it came time to put up or shut up, the man has never not backed the use of force since he was elected.  This lie about Hagel is very much like the reinvention of Jack Murtha as some sort of lily-livered peacenik–it is the only thing neocons have left in their arsenal when traditionally very hawkish and internationalist figures turn against their lunatic policies.  This does not mean that I think Hagel has actually turned against the war, but that even his pointed criticism of how the war is being fought is enough to put him in the ranks of the new Chamberlains.  This is absurd on every level, as you would expect from Ledeen.  The strange thing is that this view of Hagel is widespread on the right, so it cannot be explained away as the fantasy of Ledeen alone.  Brownback is getting similar treatment because he kinda sorta opposed the holy “surge” (but refused to vote for cloture to bring an anti-“surge” resolution to the floor). 

On the constant Munich and appeasement references of the “1938ist” jingoes, I wrote this last summer along similar lines:

Indeed, these paradigms are likely to distort and confuse us more than help our analysis of the situation, not least because certain examples–particularly the 1938 one–impose a moral and emotional weight on the debate that is dangerous and irresponsible.  If you treat this as 1938 and you really think Hitler is on the rise and about to launch his war, nothing is going to deter you from taking action against him, knowing what you know about Hitler.  This makes people get very excited and muddles their thinking.  There is also the problem that Hitler is dead and we are not actually facing Hitler redivivus.  Indeed, it may be that if we act now as some believe the West should have done in 1938 we will precipitate precisely the kind of disaster that we believe we are going to prevent.  Comparisons of this kind are fun, and they give us historians work to do, but they cannot be the basis for analysing international tensions with any effectiveness.  Besides, any ten year old can come up with these comparisons after watching enough History Channel propaganda.  Historians more than anyone know that it is our attention to historical differences that can tell us the most about any given period relative to others.  

And then there’s Nigeria. Is Nigeria just the happiest place in the world, or what? It’s always an outlier in these polls, and this one is no different. Nigerians have a more positive view than the world average of every single country in the poll. They like everyone! Except Venezuela. Why are they so sunny in their outlook about everyone except Venezuela? ~Kevin Drum

I generally share Drum’s amazement at the Nigerians’ belief (40%) in the positive role that North Korea has in the world compared to the mere 28% who believe it has a negative role, but I imagine the problem many Nigerians might have with Venezuela is that it represents a major competitor in oil production.  They also have pretty negative views of Iran (48% neg/31% pos), albeit below the world average, but unusually positive views of Israel (45% pos/31% neg).  They love us (they are more positive about the U.S. role in the world than Americans are) and the Japanese, perhaps because we and the Japanese buy their oil?  Could we really explain the attitudes of an entire country towards other nations solely based on the economics of one of their major exports?  We could try, but that would not explain Nigerian ambivalence about India (43% pos/33% neg).  It also doesn’t work when the Kenyans are just as enthusiastic about everyone and just as down on the Venezuelans.  Apparently the Bolivarian revolution doesn’t translate well in Africa.  Actually, everybody except about half of Lebanon seems to be down on Venezuela (especially the Hungarians!).  Maybe Rick Santorum should go on an international speaking tour.  Actually, what the poll shows is that most people in these countries have no views of Venezuela one way or the other, but most of those who do have an opinion tend to view Venezuela negatively. 

It’s tough out there for a Chavista.

You hear a politician who says he wants to help people, a sort of Dr. Phil-meets-Ned Flanders for the political arena, someone who just might be able to talk, listen and care his way into the Oval Office. ~Michael Scherer

A politician who wants to help people?  Mr. Bush wanted to help children, and gave us NCLB; he wanted to help Iraqis, and they are now being massacred by the dozens and hundreds every day; he condemned the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and embraced hard-edged, city-destroying incompetence with a little torture thrown in.  Because he cares.  Because he has compassion, and wanted government “to move” when “people hurt.”  Unless they hurt in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Iraq or anywhere else.  Spare us a politician who wants to help people!  I think I may finally understand why the Brooklyn goombah seems so attractive to some people–whatever else you can say about him, he would never unload this treacly garbage about helping people on his audiences.  The point is not that actually helping people is objectionable, but that governments that attempt to “help” invariably do not help and inflict more suffering than if they had left well enough alone.  If governments focused their attention on the very few tasks they should be doing, they just might manage to provide public order and basic border security, keep the streets in good repair and prosecute lawbreakers most of the time.

On a much more fundamental level, Mr. Scherer has just described exactly why Huckabee will go nowhere in the primaries.  Real-life conservatives hate Ned Flanders as an idio-doodli-otic caricature of who we are, and I think all men with a pulse must despise Dr. Phil.  I suspect, but do not know, that all single men want Dr. Phil thrown in prison, where he never will be able to unleash his smarminess on the rest of humanity.  I assume most single women, if they allow themselves to admit the truth, feel the same.  To put these two figures together and have this hybrid talk about the need for arts programs would be to summon forth a lot of hostility.  I mean, a lot.

Of Huckabee, Michael had this good observation a couple months ago:

I recently noticed Mike Huckabee is releasing a book of feel-good psychobabble. I worry that there is an irreversible trend away from Southern politicians who shared folksy wisdom through entertaining metaphors towards Clintonian self-help-helplessness. I don’t want a President whose primary qualification seems to be the self-mastery of weight loss, spurred by diabetes.  I fear also that this is exactly what the American people do want.

Perhaps they really do want a Dr. Phil who can fit into the ugly clothes of Ned Flanders.  If that is the case, God help us all.

Update: On the other hand, Huckabee can also say things like this that make you want to forget the problems with his saccharine huckster act:

“Folks, I stand here today knowing full well that I am probably not the first choice to be president on Wall Street. I am probably not the first choice among the people on K Street,” he told the crowd. “I just want to be the first choice among the people who live on Main Street, out there in the heartland of America, who shop at Wal-Mart, who go to church, who hunt, who fish, who drive pickup trucks and listen to country music and follow NASCAR, the kind of people who are tired of politicians telling them what they want to hear rather than what the politician truly believes.”

“There is a very strong feeling that we have to assert ourselves or we’re going to end up with somebody we can’t support,” says Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist and cofounder of Moral Majority. Weyrich says Christian right leadership is currently split “around fifty-fifty” over whether to pursue such a plan or to adopt an every-man-for-himself approach, in which activists would gravitate toward the candidate of their choice.

A concerted attempt to steer evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic voters toward a second-tier candidate could hit Romney hardest. In reversing his support for abortion rights and gay rights, Romney’s strategy is to convince right-wing Republicans leaning toward Huckabee or Brownback that he’s the more viable candidate. (The plan presumes that McCain and Giuliani will fight for the votes of the Republican establishment.) “There’s a big group of pragmatic social conservatives who don’t want to waste their votes,” says a Romney aide. “We’re going to be the second choice of a lot of people who want to follow their hearts but want a strong candidate.” ~U.S. News & World Report

Via Kirsten Powers

Obviously, nothing would satisfy Romney and the other two more than to watch religious conservative leaders scatter to different campaigns in a such way that is absolutely guaranteed to minimise their influence.  Pretty clearly, they need to rally around someone (I really think their best bet is probably Hunter, because Brownback’s immigration views will kill him with actual primary voters and Huckabee may be quite charming but doesn’t have any experience with military or foreign policy).  In my fantasy world, they would rediscover their inner constititionalist and back Ron Paul, but I know that isn’t going to happen this side of the millennium.  

So the Romney campaign is appealing to “pragmatic” (read gullible) voters on the basis that Romney is a “strong candidate” they should rally around.  It seems as if they have everything they need to make this plan work, except for the strong candidate part.

Read the following and just try to tell me that you didn’t have the same puzzled, baffled reaction I had:

Of the three front-runners, Romney has been courting evangelical leaders most zealously. After a meeting at his Massachusetts home last fall with roughly 15 high-powered religious conservatives, Romney sent each attendee a wooden captain’s chair mounted with a brass plaque that reads, “You are welcome at our table anytime.”

Gar, mateys, ’tis time to vote for Cap’n Romney!

Wooden captain’s chairs?  Where does he come up with this stuff?

On the Republican side, by contrast, things are a bit of a joke. You’d think a fairly normal conservative Republican would win the Republican nomination. But it hasn’t been possible for any normal conservative Republicans to get famous under the Bush shadow, except for Bush’s brother Jeb who, it seems, can’t run because he’s the incumbent’s brother. Instead, we’re left with the Terrible Troika of Romney, Giuliani, and McCain. ~Matt Yglesias

Terrible Troika does actually sound even more terrible than my preferred phrase to refer to these three, the Terrible Trio, so I have to give Matt Yglesias credit for coming up with a phrase that better expresses just how terrible they are.  But, wait, his article gets even better:

Mitt Romney is the most freakishly transparent liar I’ve ever witnessed. His party is desperately reliant on playing the Christian card on election day, but most traditionalist Christians deny that his religion counts as Christianity. He can’t decide which state he’s from, invested major resources in barely winning a Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll last weekend, and, for his trouble, managed to snag the endorsement of Ann Coulter at the same time she was calling John Edwards a “faggot.”

You really can’t accuse Yglesias of exaggerating how bad the top three GOP candidates are, because it is extremely difficult to exaggerate this.

This seems pretty basic, but if someone gets charged with obstruction of justice and perjury and it later turns out that we discover that there was no “underlying crime” (as some put it in their Clintonian burbling), the justice-obstructing perjuror does not get some sort of “do-over.”  “Oh, see, I couldn’t have lied to the grand jury, because I had nothing to lie about–some other guy said so.”  That’s a bizarre claim to make, especially when it can be demonstrated that this person did lie to the grand jury.  If you think that witness oaths matter, since they are, well, rather fundamental to our entire judicial system, it is matters whether people violate them.  Was 1998 really that long ago?  Did the Goppers lose their copies of the old talking points? 

The main problem with obstructing justice, the evil that the law tries to remedy by criminalising this activity, is that it delays and hamstrings investigations unnecessarily because of a failure to cooperate with officers of the court, which may serve as a cover for far worse crimes.  It may be enabling criminals to destroy evidence that they might otherwise not have had a chance to destroy, or it may be enabling them to cook up a cover story, or it may simply be running up the costs of the investigation in an attempt to drag it out and exhaust the patience of the prosecutor.  Because the investigation has been thwarted and delayed, the prosecutor would not have been able to discover whether or not there were other crimes to investigate, because the person obstructing justice has prevented him from doing his job.  Having wasted the prosecutor’s time and prevented him from reaching the appropriate conclusions about the question of the “underlying crime,” the justice-obstructing perjurer does not get to say, “No hard feelings!”  He has shown contempt for the rule of law and has to be held accountable.  That is, by the way, what the rule of law means. 

Libby was held accountable.  That is as it should be.  If Republicans really think that having the President pardon a convicted perjuror is the right kind of image of their party that they want to present to the public, by all means push for Libby’s pardon.  Many Americans suspect that Republicans will tolerate any amount of corruption when committed by people on their side.  This is the chance to remove all doubt–don’t disappoint us by suddenly discovering ethical integrity!

This was a political show trial, and partisans of Joe Wilson will use the guilty verdict to declare vindication. ~James Taranto

Needless to say, perhaps, Fox’s Alan Colmes did a pathetic job of challenging Coulter’s flimsy defense. The whole segment was a show trial in reverse. ~Michael Crowley

I don’t know whether this represents some sort of trend in atrocious uses of language, but it is interesting that both of these ridiculous statements appeared on the same day.  The first refers, of course, to the Libby conviction, and the other to an appearance by Ann Coulter on Hannity & Colmes. 

You can believe that Fitzgerald’s prosecution was driven by political or personal vendetta, as some would like to believe, and you can believe that this case should never have been brought to trial.  I disagree fundamentally with both of these views, since I think that obstructing justice and perjury are wrong regardless of why someone does it (lots of Republicans used to believe the same thing) and that such crimes should be prosecuted if the charges can be proven, but it is possible to hold these other views without becoming a squawking buffoon.  James Taranto, as usual, bounds across that line and never looks back when he calls this a “political show trial,” demonstrating either his tremendous ignorance or his utter corruption of mind.   

A political show trial has a very definite meaning.  These were trials conducted during the Purges of the 1930s whose outcomes were predetermined by the Party and Stalin and therefore whose entire procedure was purely for “show.”  Hence the name.  (Incidentally, Republicans were very eager to talk about “purges” during the Connecticut Senate primary last year, invoking a word chiefly associated with Bolshevik terror in the context of a domestic election, once again showing themselves to be unfit to comment on anything.)  These trials had no logic or purpose, except to provide a certain veneer of public legitimacy for the deposition of prominent Party men (including top figures such as Zinoviev and Kamenev) that paved the way for their exile, execution and elimination from the historical record.  Unless I have misunderstood the sentences for violations of federal perjury and obstruction of justice statutes, Libby does not stand in much danger of summary execution by NKVD operatives or their equivalent.  He has not been fraudulently charged with crimes he didn’t commit as a way of covering up a purely political prosecution.  The court will not “request” his suicide, nor will his picture be artificially scrubbed out from all official records.  Indeed, we all know that he is going to go scot-free with a pardon, because we are not ruled by laws but by particularly venal and self-serving men, so please spare me the whinging about how Libby is the victim of neo-Stalinist jurisprudence.  This is not only an insult to the millions of victims of Stalinism, but is an insult to the intelligence of the audience.  It is also particularly rich to read complaints about politicised justice coming from the pages of the right’s Pravda, which never thinks that anything the administration does in matters of national security or other policy is as heavily politicised as it obviously is. 

Now to the other example.  While I might theoretically enjoy comparisons of Hannity & Colmes to Stalinist purges, if only to show the relatively greater intellectual integrity of the latter, when someone is silly enough to refer to a cable talk show as a show trial, whether it is in “reverse” or not, it becomes immediately clear how wrong this use of language is.  Most of us do not, I think, make pithy comparisons between certain things we happen to dislike and, say, concentration camps, gas chambers or mass graves.  You don’t usually hear someone say, “Boy, this week’s Meet The Press was a sort of journalistic Kristallnacht–only in reverse!”  I leave it to my readers to puzzle out what “show trial in reverse” even means, but I think it prompts the promulgation of Larison’s First Law of Political Commentary (not to be confused with the Laws of Foreign Policy Commentary): unless you are referring specifically to a contemporary case of politically motivated kangaroo courts that serve as a pretext for the exile and/or execution of political enemies, you never get to compare anything in present-day domestic politics to a show trial; first-time violators should be prohibited from speaking about domestic politics for a period of not less than ten years; repeat offenders are banned for life.

So Matt Yglesias asks.  As readers of this blog will probably already know, he was noted for being more pro-Israel than the Israelis last summer during the war in Lebanon, declaring  the bombing of Lebanon to be a “miracle of God.”  That his “miracle” was busily killing Christians along with other Lebanese civilians never seems to have troubled him.  Naturally, he was speaking at AIPAC.  Yglesias sums up:

So you see, John Hagee, who wants to see Israel adopt a hawkish foreign policy that he believes will result in its destruction at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance is a friend of the Jews. By contrast, everyone who thinks a little pressure to make peace could wind up helping Israel in the long run is an anti-semite.