Something interesting is brewing in Iowa:

Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)

Yes 48%
No 37%
Undecided 15%

Get Hewitt on the phone!  He needs to find some way to get half of the Iowa Republican Party expelled.  Democratic numbers from the same poll are 64-9% in favour.  Somewhat weirdly, despite obvious strong pro-withdrawal sentiment among Iowa Republicans, Hagel has actually lost ground since an earlier Iowa poll done by this same firm in January. Then again, since Hagel isn’t really against the war and has been quiet as a churchmouse about actual withdrawal plans, it’s no wonder pro-withdrawal Republicans aren’t more excited about his (still) undeclared candidacy.

In 1994, NARAL’s Kate Michelman pronounced him a phony pro-choicer. “Mitt Romney, stop pretending,” she demanded. “We need honesty in our public life, not your campaign of deception to conceal your anti-choice views,” she said. Some conservative Boston newspaper columnists view it similarly. As Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globeput it: “Romney’s very public migration rightward over the last few years is . . . intended not to hide his real views but to liberate them. In 1994, Romney struck me as an extraordinarily bright, talented, and decent man — and a political neophyte who fell for the canard that the only way a conservative could win in Massachusetts was by passing for liberal.” ~James Bopp Jr.

Yes, honesty in public life–what an idea!  Is the point of these anecdotes to make us believe that in his heart of hearts Romney was always pro-life but was engaged in a deception against the people of Massachusetts on two different occasions eight years apart?  That he was posing then, but he is sincere now?  That he really was willing to say anything to get elected, but was never serious about what he said along the way?  Are we supposed to believe that his vehement protestations of protecting a “woman’s right to choose” (he is clearly angry in the 2002 debate at the suggestion that he is in any sense pro-life) and his insistence that it had been his position ever since 1970 were part of an elaborate hoax designed to trick liberal Massachusetts voters into supporting him?  Is the purpose of this part of the article to say that he was always phoney and opportunistic, and not just recently when the White House appeared on the horizon?  In other words, to trust Romney now Mr. Bopp wants us to believe that he was a charlatan before?  I don’t quite understand the thinking here.

Romney’s conversion was less abrupt than is often portrayed. In his 1994 Senate run, Romney was endorsed by Massachusetts Citizens for Life and kept their endorsement, even though he declared himself to be pro-choice, because he supported parental-consent laws, opposed taxpayer-funded abortion and mandatory abortion coverage under a national health insurance plan, and was against the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have codified Roe v. Wade by federal statute. ~James Bopp Jr.

Hm, Massachusetts Citizens for Life…where have I heard that name before?  Oh, I know–they would be the group whose 1994 endorsement Romney repudiated in disgust in his 2002 gubernatorial race.  See the video at 1:23 and after. 

Romney: “I don’t know about the endorsement of the Mass Citizens for Life, I didn’t seek it, I didn’t ask for it [grimaces].  When you say I accepted it, I didn’t write them a letter and say, here, thank you very much for your endorsement…Shannon, I can tell you again, I did not, in any way, acknowledge their endorsement nor do I…When you say I accepted it, in what way did I accept it, Shannon?…I don’t have a campaign spokesperson here tonight, I’m here right now and I can tell you that I do not take the position of a pro-life candidate.  I am in favor of preserving and protecting a woman’s right to choose, and your effort to continue to try to create fear and deception here is unbecoming.” 

Yes, creating deception is bad.  Candidates should avoid trying to deceive people!  So, either someone has misinformed Mr. Bopp about the nature of Romney’s response to the endorsement (he obviously vehemently denied having anything to do with it in 2002), or Bopp is telling the truth about the endorsement and Romney was a blatant liar in 2002 or Mr. Bopp has been co-opted to lie on Romney’s behalf.  The latter seems most unlikely, since Mr. Bopp has no reason to join in Romney’s deceptions if he knew them to be false, so the other two seem the more likely explanations.

The answer, of course, is obviously no. This is why it’s so noteworthy that someone like Mr. DeMoss — who literally wrote a book about moral approaches to life and business — came out early and strong on behalf of Gov. Romney. ~Nancy French, Evangelicals for Mitt

All right, so let’s reliably assume that Mr. DeMoss is on the up and up.  I have no reason right now to assume otherwise.  Did he happen to also to write the books How To Not Get Trapped By Wishful Thinking or How To Avoid Being Conned By Politicians Who Tell Me What I Want To Hear?  Until he has demonstrated similar insights in these areas, we might hold off on investing his support for Romney with too much significance. 

No one’s questioning Mr. DeMoss’ integrity–we’re questioning Romney’s!  Part of the criticism of Romney is that he is tricking people into supporting him by saying all the right things, so it hardly exonerates the con man to say that the honest mark is really honest.  To the extent that we’re questioning Mr. DeMoss at all, we’re questioning the soundness of his judgement as to whether Gov. Romney’s “evolution” is more than cynical expediency.  If Romney has a history of changing his positions to suit the political environment (which he has) and an apparently impressive ability to reinvent himself somewhat convincingly, a perfectly honest man could trust him and be completely wrong about the man. 

Gen. Zinni endorsed Bush in 2000 because of his relatively “realist” foreign policy positions, but I bet he’s wishing he could have that one back!  Remember: nolite confidere in principibus!

And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television. ~David Geffen

I was reminded of the line in the title (which is translated, “Strike and kill me, you have the right!”) from Sayat Nova’s Nazani, one of his finest love songs, while reading this First Things piece by the University of Chicago’s own Prof. and Mrs. Kass on Erasmus’ Colloquy on courtship.  Sayat Nova is frequently urging his beloved to engage in some kind of violent disembowling or stabbing with a knife, and this is one of the better-known examples.  The beloved is sometimes cast as a sultan or khan dealing out summary justice to the poor, suffering lover.  This is very similar to themes of the Colloquy, as indeed it echoes most other love poetry; Sayat Nova took conventional and commonplace imagery and created amazing songs. 

Another great, time-honoured ashugh pick-up line: Eshkemet hivandatsil im (“I have grown sick from your love”).  (Note: These lines do not work!  Do not try on your own!)

Ah, back to the good old days of Italian government.  How long did this one last?  Nine months?  That’s just about the old Italian average, pre-Berlusconi.  I have confidence the next government will not linger for an unnecessarily long time.

Why has Andrew Sullivan started referring to Iran as Persia and Iranians as Persians?  Is this some left-over English tic that has suddenly resurfaced, or is it supposed to be some kind of clever rhetorical jab at the Iranian government?  If the latter, it isn’t working, because it isn’t clever.  Iran has been the name of the country there among the Iranians themselves for a lot longer than it was identified with the name of the province of Fars.  It’s hardly the most pressing matter out there, but it strikes me as a kind of silly pose that serves no purpose.  But, then, this is Andrew Sullivan we’re talking about.

Update: In fairness, we don’t refer to Finland as Suomi or Hungary as Magyarorszag, but it seems to me that since Iran is now the fairly common usage to refer to the country it is a kind of weird affected anachronism to start calling it Persia again.

This is very plain in the creationism-evolution debates, whose anti-outgroup subtexts are, on the one side:  You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other:  You are obscurantist ignoramuses who’d like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think.   Neither subtext has much relation to reality, in my experience—I mean, I know a couple dozen people on each side of this, and none fits either description.  The scientists are not looking to convert Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason; the creationists aren’t plotting to burn heretics at the stake. ~John Derbyshire

Quite right.  I think you’ll find that it should be the 11th century (living pre-Investiture Contest is a must!), and you can’t convert heretics if you’ve already burned them.  Now Manichees are a different story… 

In fact, most creationists and even those odd ducks, such as myself, who somehow manage to think that evolution describes something about the created order that has no great bearing whatever on the existence of God are not concerned to drag anyone anywhere (and we don’t even have a time machine).  We would all prefer, I think, to have certain outspoken scientists refrain from making bold metaphysical claims (e.g., God does not exist) as if they were obvious proven facts, when they are contestable philosophical claims like everybody else’s and we would just as soon be spared tiresome lectures about how the Church impeded and handicapped science for ages, when it was principally the Church that sponsored and encouraged all branches of learning for the better part of our civilisation’s history.  That might improve relations between the groups a bit.

In the 1950s, parents got concerned when girls “went steady” instead of playing the field, but Stepp is convinced this “new” habit of playing the field will warp girls’ hearts and make it impossible for them to settle down when the time comes. “It’s as if young women are practicing sprints while planning to run a marathon,” she worries. ~Meghan O’Rourke

Ross makes some smart comments on how O’Rourke’s article tries to do two contradictory things (expressing concern for the girls while also laughing at the author who expresses really serious concern for them) and fails, and I think he has it pretty well covered, but let me add a couple points about this bit about “playing the field.”  It should hardly be necessary to have to explain why “playing the field” in the 1950s and playing the field today are rather different.  First, the field has changed, and so have the rules of the “game.”  To be more blunt, parents in the ’50s didn’t want their daughters sleeping around, much as I suspect most sane parents today don’t want their daughters sleeping around, yet this is what field-playing more or less is today (unless formal courtship and cotillions have made a comeback and nobody told me).  If the parents are consistent about it, they shouldn’t want their sons sleeping around, either, I suppose, but that’s another discussion.  If you mean “keep your options open” or “don’t commit too quickly” by “playing the field,” I suppose most parents today might advise the same thing, but if you mean “hook-up with every guy in sight,” I submit the obvious observation that no parents anywhere on earth want this for their daughter.  It also seems fairly obvious that this is not a particularly sane or edifying way to live.

O’Rourke won’t be stopped, though, since she hits Unhooked for contributing to a culture of girl-repressing guilt:

From at least the 1920s (when everyone thought flappers were destroying manners) on through the 1980s (when teen pregnancy rates had everyone alarmed), girls have been hearing that their sex lives are the symbol of generational decadence.

I know this is supposed to be insightful, but I am having the hardest time understanding how.  Yes, societies focus on the sexual habits of their women because most societies recognise certain obvious connections between the state of marriage, families, relations between men and women and the ways in which society allows women to behave.  When social norms are fairly indulgent, there is going to be the legitimate and well-founded concern that this will have a significant impact on all of these things for the worse–and this concern is usually vindicated when these things do enter into crisis.  Concern about these things is rooted in, among other things, certain biological realities, since the merely practical costs to women and to society of “casual sex” (doesn’t this odd phrase imply that somewhere someone is having formal and semi-formal sex?) are far greater (e.g., children born out of wedlock, relatively impoverished single-parent households, and all the developmental and social problems that follow from these things, etc.).  This doesn’t begin to delve into the necessary and good functions of shame, honour and admittedly very old-fashioned ideas of what it meant for a woman to keep her virtue intact.  Naturally, the “emancipators” have sought to provide all manner of workarounds (contraception, abortion, etc.) to avoid these costs without requiring anything so tiresome as restraint, but O’Rourke makes it seem as if the focus on girls is somehow bizarre or lopsided, when it is many of the girls and society as a whole that pay the price for the “fun” O’Rourke mentions at the beginning.   

What strikes me as particularly unimpressive about this remark by O’Rourke is that no one disputes the realities under discussion.  No one claims that the flappers were, in fact, misunderstood Victorian ladies with a slightly different sense of fashion–they did represent a dramatic, visible change in social habits and in sexual mores.  The trick here is that O’Rourke doesn’t care about that dramatic change, except insofar as it is a step forward the “fun” of later times.  Likewise, I don’t think she really doubts any of Stepp’s evidence.  She and Stepp simply evaluate the evidence according to entirely different standards, and since she doesn’t accept Stepp’s standards she thinks she has come up with a great zinger to paint Stepp as joining in what she portrays as unfair girl-bashing.  This is the progressive’s superior moral pose posing as an argument, when it is simply a lot of hand waving. 

By any standard of traditional morality, the things O’Rourke cited are examples of generational decadence; by certain ’emancipated’ standards, they are supposedly examples of women’s growing independence.  Any critique of the “hookup culture” that assumes that stable, successful marriages are what young women (and, by implication, young men) should seek to have is going to assume that patterns of behaviour that put off or seem to devalue marriage are detrimental to the well-being of those young women.  Yes, really, it will!  Furthermore, it’s going to assume that these young women don’t know enough to know any better that the patterns of the “hookup culture” are actually damaging to the kinds of later relationships they will probably want to have.  O’Rourke doesn’t simply disagree with Stepp’s prescriptions, descriptions or methods, though she nitpicks all of them, but rather she rejects the entire premise of the inquiry, which is to question and then deny the value of that culture itself and to raise an alarm about something that O’Rourke doesn’t find terribly alarming. This is especially true since that culture will inevitably appear to O’Rourke to be another expression of individual emancipation and progress towards unicorn-like gender equality.