Some of my best friends are libertarians and the greatest intellectual influence on me was Hayek. However, in practical political matters, libertarians tend to live in alternate universe, without regard for the real world consequences of their actions. Ron Paul – the only Libertarian in Congress – is a disgrace. He has waged a war against America’s war on terror, in lockstep with the left, and against the state of Israel, the frontline democracy in this war. ~David Horowitz

Via David Beito and Matt Barganier 

Far be it from Horowitz to contemplate the possibility that many of the measures enacted in the name of the “war on terror” are unconstitutional and that in defending them many Republicans and conservatives have become as hostile to the plain reading of the Constitution they once allegedly endorsed when the fundamental law was being distorted by overly broad interpretations.  It is, of course, inconceivable for him that on these matters people on the left may have come to the right conclusions (if not always for the best reasons or with the best arguments), and even farther outside his grasp that opposing various power-grabbing and state-expanding policies may be the very essence of patriotism and civic virtue when so many other politicians meekly submit to whatever the executive demands.  If our system of mixed and balanced government survives at all, it will have a lot more to do with the principled integrity of the Ron Pauls of the world than it will with the bloviations of David Horowitz and his ilk. 

As Barganier notes, Ron Paul is a Republican, so Horowitz can’t even manage to get the basic details right in his attack.  He has been a Republican for most of his career, except for his brief excursion as the LP’s presidential candidate in ’88.  I am proud to say that my mother voted for Ron Paul in that election, when the nation was confronted with a choice between Bush the Elder and the ridiculous Dukakis.  Indeed, given such a dreadful choice, it is fairly strange that Paul did not pull in tens of millions of votes.

Still, it still is odd. If Coulter had accused Edwards of Treason nobody on the right would have batted an eye. ~Matt Yglesias

More on the book in a moment.  Interestingly, I actually had a similar reaction to the Republican blogger reaction to Coulter’s failed joke.  Perhaps that’s because many people on the right whom I admire have been accused of treason and/or lack of patriotism, as have implicitly all antiwar conservatives and libertarians been declared to be in league with the enemy, so it seems obvious to me that it is much worse and much more obnoxious and poisonous to question so baselessly and cavalierly someone’s loyalty to this country than to bluntly question his heterosexuality.  Similarly, to cavalierly call someone a racist or anti-Semite in the course of a policy argument, as supporters of the Iraq war have done unapologetically numerous times, is actually infinitely worse than taking a shot at Edwards’ masculinity (which is, of course, the point of every Coulter shot at some Democratic politician’s sexuality, be it Clinton, Gore or Edwards–it is aimed at reinforcing the “Democrats are weak” idea).  That many of these people would then twist themselves into knots and make all the right PC noises about how offensive Coulter’s latest remark is, while being perfectly happy to recycle the most disgusting and vile accusations against their political opponents, says volumes about these people who claim to speak on behalf of conservatism.  Any on the left who continue to use the same labeling tactics against conservatives or their fellow progressives while expressing their shock and outrage over Coulter’s latest shot would also have to be the most stunning hypocrites.  

Nonetheless, when Coulter declares large portions of the country to be godless traitors, most of the very same people on the right who are shunning her today have cheered loudly.  This seems to be the thinking of the Hordes of Hewitt: they begin with the axiom that opposition to a bad government policy or law (e.g., invasion of Iraq, PATRIOT Act, the “surge,” etc.) undermines Vital and Necessary measures for national security (even though they have not demonstrated that these measures are either vital or necessary or that they will even achieve the stated goals), and therefore no one can persist in opposition to these things without a willful hatred not only of the government but of the country itself.  Therefore, to call these opponents traitors is not inflammatory or inappropriate, because the Hewittians believe it to be self-evident.  This is, of course, lunacy on stilts.  The reason why charges of treason seem to fall from the lips of Republicans so much more readily these days is a combination of reheated abstract nationalism and an abiding conviction that they have a monopoly on political virtue.  In other words, the neo-Jacobins are acting like neo-Jacobins. 

But even throwing the treason accusation around has its limits on the right, as the case of D’Souza has shown us.  Weirdly, D’Souza somehow managed to find himself on the wrong side of the acceptable treason-accusing line, too, since he suggested not only that cultural decadence had inspired terrorism against the U.S. (which you might initially think would satisfy two Republican preoccupations in one go) but that, at least at some level, decent people everywhere should want to respond to cultural decadence with the same kind of indignant response, if not necessarily with political violence.  Worst of all, he called for solidarity with “traditional Muslims” against the “radicals”–a proposal I consider meaningless because it assumes a meaningful distinction and opposition between the two not in evidence–which is what really set off his former allies.  D’Souza has made an argument charging the cultural left with civilisational treason of a sort (an argument with which, in its broad outlines, I actually do not really disagree), but here he has violated the Ultimate Rule of Republican PC: thou shalt never attempt to explain, understand or rationalise the actions of jihadis, because they are inexplicable, incomprehensible and irrational.  Any attempt to provide an analysis that accounts for “why they hate us” that does not return the result “they hate us for our freedom and all our many virtues and maybe even Wal-Mart” is clearly an attempt to “blame America first” and to treat jihadis as political actors whose motives and goals can be understood and therefore potentially addressed by means other than cluster bombs.  For all kinds of obvious reasons, this is entirely unacceptable to significant numbers of Republican pundits and a large part of their audience.

In fairness, I should say here that the generic habit that Coulter, Hewitt, Frum and others have of imputing disloyalty and treason to their political enemies at home (a habit that is, by the way, quintessentially identitarian and leftist, to use Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s taxonomy, and therefore quite natural to democratic politics) is somewhat distinct from at least some of the specific arguments in Coulter’s Treason itself, particularly as they relate to McCarthy and Hiss.  In laying out Hiss’ actual treason and thus alluding to the decades of liberal apologies for Hiss (which continued up until his guilt was finally confirmed beyond all doubt) and in showing the extent of actual communist infiltration in the government that McCarthy made his pet cause, she could show that there were huge blind spots on the left to communist infiltration in the Cold War.  With the rise of the New Left, these blind spots became in some ways even more vast.  Absurdly, because of the idiocy of the two-party system, the name McGovern became inextricably tied in Republican collective memory with New Left radicalism in all its worst extremes, when no one could have better represented the mainline Old American contempt for foreign wars, such that McGovernite “isolationism” became, like America First “isolationism” before it, tainted by associations that it either did not have or that were entirely incidental to it. 

So, Coulter takes some concrete truths and overgeneralises from them so as to make them almost meaningless.  At some level, I strongly sympathise with the view that there is something inherent in left-liberalism that attenuates and undermines patriotism, and I would go so far as to say that whiggery in general is guilty of this disease of disloyalty to one’s own country, but in many cases what Coulter is talking about is not a lack of patriotism but a lack of zeal for statist activities overseas. 

In conflating loyalty to this or that state policy or loyalty to the government generally with loyalty to country, Coulter makes a typically nationalist move that would rephrase Clinton’s phrase this way: “You can’t love your country and hate its government’s wars.”  Actually, very often you can, but such is the wretched state of conservatism today that doing so as a conservative earns you the hatred of most other “conservatives.” 

While someone like me might regard an internationalist foreign policy that privileges the independence of other nations that have virtually nothing to do with us over American lives and liberties as fairly unpatriotic, an interventionist jingo such as Coulter holds herself out to be can really have no complaints whatever about most pre-1968 Democrats during the Cold War.  These were her kind of people in their zeal to meddle overseas, invade other countries and, when the occasion called for it, kill foreign leaders (or acquiesce in the locals’ killing of those leaders).  The kinds of policy preferences she despises are the sorts of policies that Republicans used to pursue and advocate during much of the first two decades of the Cold War.  Conservatives weren’t usually the ones who spoke crazily about “rollback,” though they did on the whole embrace containment, which at the time was pretty much a forward strategy that seemed unnecessary and unwise to the remaining figures of the Old Right and a few of the earliest figures in the conservative movement.  With Vietnam, the American right increasingly fell into reflexively defending what was really a misguided liberal interventionist war because they did two things rightists should never do but often wind up doing: they trusted the government, and they assumed that what the government was trying to accomplish in the war would actually benefit the United States.  These two things will always yield disappointment and sorrow, because government fundamentally cannot be trusted and foreign wars have rarely, if ever, benefited the United States over the long term.  But when countercultural radicalism and opposition to the war began to be intertwined, this only reinforced the idea that supporting the war had something to do with affirming traditional American values.  To be a hawk then was, perversely, to align oneself with normal America, because so many of the doves seemed tobe in favour of sacrificing the normal to the abnormal (to borrow from Chesterton’s famous dictum on the modern mind).  Thus was born, I think, the unfortunate link in the minds of many conservatives between opposition to pointless wars and what they saw as contempt for America, which has since morphed into an all together insane militarist litmus test: failure to endorse maximal war powers claims of the executive and maximal hawkishness in foreign policy questions is proof of one’s “weakness” and in engaging in such “weakness,” if you persist in these “failures,” you demonstrate your disloyalty.  I don’t hesistate to say that there is something more than a little Soviet about this kind of thinking.

No one should interpret Romney’s CPAC showing as representative of his strength among conservatives. But it’s not clear why his attempt to gin up support — and demonstrate that he can put on a good show — is hinky. ~Hotline

Of course, Romney boosters have been portraying the victory as representative of Romney’s strength among conservatives and as proof that he now cannot be accused of being a phoney.  It isn’t a credible argument, but they’re making it anyway.  As in David French’s statement:

This is huge and will blow away all the “he’s not a real conservative” garbage of the last few weeks.

That would be great, except that it isn’t huge (it’s a rather disappointing result given all of his preparations) and it doesn’t do anything to convince doubters that he’s a real conservative.  It tells us that he’s fairly good at organising things, which I think we already had picked up from, oh, I don’t know, the 2002 Olympics.  Here’s a reminder that expectations for Romney were a lot higher in the week leading up to the straw poll:

Matthew C. Hall, youth chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, said that he had tried to get other campaigns to provide buses, too, but that none were [sic] willing.

“I would expect Romney will do pretty well in the straw poll because his campaign is the one we are seeing investing so much money and energy into it,” Mr. Hall, who said he was not affiliated with any primary campaign, wrote in an e-mail message. “The response we’ve seen from students in Michigan is that regardless of who they are supporting for president, they are more than willing to take a free trip to the conference if all they have to do in return is wear a shirt and vote for him in a straw poll [bold mine-DL].”

But besides underperforming, Romney’s campaign may have been doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.  The good folks at Hotline have linked to this post that purports to show one of Romney’s agents of influence, Jordan Sekulow, engaged in what are apparently not all together appropriate activities.  Says Krusty Konservative:

I’ve had a number of people email me that attended the CPAC konference [sic] and tell me that what is important to know about the video is that Jordan Sekulow shouldn’t have even had the badges, since the Straw Poll was only open to registrants to the conference. Each badge is one vote.

So it might be the case that Romney’s people inflated his showing at CPAC not simply by the technically above-board distorting of the vote by bussing in supporters, but perhaps also by more devious or inappropriate methods.  However, whether or not Romney’s people engaged in any underhanded tactics at CPAC (these are political operatives we’re talking about, after all), it won’t change the reality that Romney would have won relatively little support had he not brought in and paid the way for 200 people.  He would have polled around 8% without those people, which pretty much matches the level of support he’s getting nationwide in many polls.  That sounds about right: I can believe that one out of every ten conservatives is either desperate enough to find a viable candidate or gullible enough to believe his stories to embrace Romney’s appeal.  All of this also doesn’t change that Romney is not credible.  No number of straw polls will change that.

Dave Weigel (via Matt Yglesias) on the video of “awkward fanboy” Romney and Ann Coulter prior to Coulter’s failed joke:

The most interesting exchange is Coulter’s defense of Romney’s Mormonism (most probably how the media covers Romney’s Mormonism).

COULTER: No, they don’t understand! We hate liberal atheists! You can’t get these sectarian wars going with us. We’re all Christians.

ROMNEY: We’re not Sunni and Shia here!

Iraq civil war humor – slays ’em every time. But seriously, this is evidence that Coulter doesn’t actually go to church. I’ve been to Baptist Bible studies where the question of whether Catholicism is a cult was heatedly debated. Romney may be doing a good job of papering over his differences with evangelical Protestants, but the differences exist.

I don’t know which is more amusing: that one of the few famous right-wing pundits to endorse Mormonism’s claims to being Christian is Ann Coulter (which pretty much proves those claims false right there if nothing else does) or that Ann Coulter has effectively affirmed here that she must approve of all theists anyway (which tends to render moot her whole “we’ll convert you to Christianity” shtick), since it is apparently only “liberal atheists” that “we” hate.  There is something grimly ironic about sectarianism jokes from the sort of people who wouldn’t have known or cared about the differences between different sects in Islam four years ago.  With the invasion they backed having stoked and even more sharply politicised those sectarian rivalries than they already were and turned them into the source of widespread violence, it is now a throwaway line to laugh about the supposedly enduring hatreds of two groups that this war has encouraged and inflamed. 

This is not unlike when ham-fisted internationalists were meddling in the early break-up of Yugoslavia, which precipitated open war between the constituent republics of Yugoslavia and then, through foreign recognition, turned that internal war into an international one.  Their own meddling, which helped reopen the old wounds and politicise the ethnic and religious identities of the peoples in the region, then gave way to scenes of exasperated Americans and western Europeans puzzling over the supposedly “ancient” and “centuries-old” rivalries between the different groups.  Having thrown fuel on the fire of relatively recent resentments from their own century, about which they knew nothing and cared even less, these buffoons then pretend that the entire conflict is some timeless, inscrutable blood-feud that cannot be understood by “rational” and “enlightened” people such as they are.  This allows them to pose as the superior, benevolent outsiders who have come to make the squabbling child races stop their petty bickering–but, remember, it is the people who acknowledge and take seriously the reality of ethnic and religious difference that are the ones denigrating the humanity of other peoples!    

There is something else worth noting.  Prior to the invasion and during the early years of the war, paying attention to those sorts of different identities would mean that you think other peoples privilege “tribe or religion or whatever” over sweet freedom (the public assertion of which is obviously “racist,” and we have that on good authority).  If these loyalties supposedly weren’t important for Iraqis in 2003 and afterwards, because that would evidently be a mark of some kind of backwardness (rather than being, oh, the normal experience of humanity), it is no wonder that Republican elite figures have no clue that the same kinds of religious and cultural identities make relatively quite strong claims on Americans (albeit not as strong as in many other parts of the world).  This tells you something about the superficiality of the religious identities they publicly hold if they literally cannot imagine how confessional or religious differences might cause tensions or political opposition.  In this they are as blind as they were when calling for the invasion of Iraq on the assumption that the “Iraqi people” would all join together in the work of rebuilding the country together.  On the other hand, to the extent that they might be able to acknowledge that such religious identities are tremendously powerful in this country, they would almost certainly view people committed to such identities as regressive or dangerous.  One gets no sense from this little exchange that these people use their respective religions as anything more than a flag with which they can rally seriously religious people to their side, while they meanwhile snicker and laugh about potent religious identities in private.  That is in its way far more damning of both Romney and Coulter than anything else they have said in the past, because it makes their public pose as some sort of Christian or religious conservative vanguard to be little more than a pose.

The first direct Tehran-Caracas flights have begun, enabled by Condoleezza Rice’s decision to grant the Iranian aircraft industry spare parts despite Iran’s refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. ~Michael Rubin

When they add a connecting route to La Paz, I guess we’ll just have to bow down and proclaim Rick Santorum our king for his prescience.  Why, if someone took the first flight and then took the second one, you’d suddenly have an Iranian in Bolivia, which proves that their plans for world mastery are drawing close to completion.

P.S. Rubin’s post had to be a joke, right?  Right?

Maybe Congress has no business debating Turkish history, maybe it is doing so for the wrong reasons. Yet if Turkey is to become the stable, Western-oriented democracy that it aspires to be, its politicians will have to learn, at least, to react the way everyone else does to nonbinding House resolutions: that is, with a shrug. ~Jackson Diehl

I think I know what Mr. Diehl is trying to say here.  Even though I have argued that the genocide resolution should be passed over the objections of the Turkish government, while Diehl seems to think the entire thing is more or less irrelevant, he is making the proper point that Ankara’s threats and tantrums are absurd, do Turkey no credit and hurt the development of its domestic politics.  But Diehl seems to be missing (as Diehl often will) the more important point, which is that the ultranationalists and Kemalists in Turkey are some of the biggest barriers to Turkey’s development into anything other than any other tinpot Near Eastern state.  The propagation of the official lie that no genocide took place shores up their power and serves as a tool to suppress liberal dissidents of all kinds who oppose the regime.  I have no illusions that Turkey will actually become a full Western-style liberal democracy, because its political and religious cultures are ultimately hostile to such a development.  However, continuing to play along in their genocide denialism only strengthens the worst elements in Turkish politics while discouraging the relative few who have some genuine commitment to Western values.

Meanwhile, Ankara has to understand that it has a lot less influence in Washington after it refused to allow U.S. forces to launch part of the Iraq invasion from Turkish territory.  The clueless Wolfowitz was assuring everyone right up till the end that the access would be granted and seemed to view it as a surprise when the access was denied, when it was plain for all to see that the government and public opinion in Turkey were both firmly against it (because they were quite rightly against the war).  The Turkish government has a much weaker hand this time around and is almost certainly overplaying that hand. 

Of course, Diehl makes a very odd statement, given the debates we have just had over the past two months.  Did “everyone” react “with a shrug” to the nonbinding resolution on the “surge”?  These peoplecertainly didn’t.  Come to think of it, almost everyone in both parties became quite animated by the entire question of a nonbinding resolution about the “surge.”  Perhaps the Turkish government noticed this and determined that nonbinding resolutions were actually deeply serious and meaningful.  If they ever thought this they would have been, much like Hewitt and his gang, very, very wrong.

Conservative blog readers aren’t their own standalone constituency; they’re a proxy for the movement. The lineup in the blogosphere probably isn’t too far off from the organic votes cast at CPAC. ~Patrick Ruffini

So roughly 13% of conservative bloggers and their readers are bought and paid for by Mitt Romney?

I just have to do what Popeye used to say: “I am what I am and that’s all I am.” I indicate what my positions are, what I think about issues. ~Mitt Romney

Well blow me down!  Of course, Popeye didn’t used to donate money to Bluto and vehemently reject all association with spinach and then turn around and decide that Bluto was his enemy and spinach was the source of his strength, since that would be, well, less than honest.  Romney may be what Romney is, but the question everyone else has is: what exactly is that?

Romney Hates All Palookas?

But I think what you’re seeing is that blogs are able to get to bottom of things and to cut through the spin. ~Mitt Romney

We do what we can.  The former Governor of Massachusetts gives us a lot of spin to cut through, so I guess we bloggers should be grateful that he has presented himself as such a ripe target for our tender mercies.  I wouldn’t want to disappoint his high opinion of the blogosphere by laying off and giving him the benefit of the doubt.  Let every fraud be revealed.

Like it or not, conservatives such as Tanner will have to grapple with the political, moral and fiscal consequences of an imperial foreign policy. ~Jacob Heilbrunn

Of course, conservatives such as Tanner presumably also want no part of such a foreign policy, since they suffer from no schizophrenia about the size of government when it comes to Pentagon budget requests.  Unfortunately, most conservatives not only do not want to grapple with these consequences, but they even deny the premise of the recommendation.  Nonetheless, even most conservatives do not make a priority of the government-shrinking goals of Cato, as Ross would be only too happy to tell us.  

Even so, for many conservatives, there isn’t any such “imperial foreign policy” and 700+ military bases around the world (like the invasion of Iraq!) have something to do with “national security.”  Huge disbursements for the military and an expansive and activist foreign policy are often considered separately from the question of supporting “small government.”  After all, we have to dominate the Near East to make the world safe for vouchers and partially privatised pensions, or something like that.  I hasten to add that this separation of domestic and foreign policy questions is not true of people at the Cato Institute, who understand the inevitable connection between the empire and Leviathan at home, but then to say that most conservatives do not share the foreign policy views of Cato is to say something so obvious that it is almost not worth writing. 

Sometimes liberals will hit interventionists on the right with what they think is a clever line: “Don’t you realise that the military is part of big government?”  They are, of course, arguing against the rhetorical self-presentation of their enemies, since the people who actually oppose big government have next to no influence in the real world (because, as Ross would tell us, there aren’t very many of us and we don’t draw any water in any of the places that matter), or they are arguing against mythical foes from the last generation, since many of them have probably never actually encountered a real government-shrinking conservative in political office in a long time. 

In any case, the neocons have long had an annoyingly effective rebuttal to this shot at the supposed ‘contradictions’ between small government in domestic policy and big government abroad: “Yes, we do realise that, and we don’t care.  We want to make government even bigger in that respect, and we are quite content with big government everywhere else, too.”  Most conservative activists are allergic to the phrase “big government conservatism,” and they are only too happy to mock it when it fails (as fail it inevitably will), but many of the same people put up half-hearted (at best) opposition to the policies of big government conservatives when they were being pushed through. 

So Heilbrunn’s critique would be a lot better aimed if Tanner and other small government conservatives were the ones advancing neo-imperialist foreign policy arguments, but the few of us small-government types who remain are among the only ones on the right objecting in principle to interventionism and the continuing pursuit of maintaining an unsustainable–and undesirable–superpower status.  We see the dismantling of the empire as essential to rolling back the power of the state here at home, so it is hardly a telling rebuke to us to say that we must count the costs of empire.  We have been counting them, and they are too high.  Now we just have to somehow pull off the miracle of convincing the other 85% of the right that their foreign policy views are deeply inimical to the best interests of this country.