The anti-surge resolution, as symbolic and empty a gesture as it was, does tell us something a little interesting about the politics of the war in the country today.  Specifically, it probably tells us something about the geography of antiwar sentiment as reflected in Republican crossover votes.  At first, it seems pretty predictable when we find that the largest group of Republican defectors comes from the Northeast and Midwest, which together produced eight of the seventeen votes.  However, given the Midwest’s tendency to be more antiwar and anti-interventionist than other regions it is a little surprising that more Republicans from the region didn’t support the resolution.  

More unexpectedly, the Carolinas account for three of the GOP’s anti-surge votes, and all together the South (including Florida) had seven GOP members who crossed the line.  (Delaware and Maryland had one GOP member apiece vote for the resolution.)  It is granted that these seven include the rebellious and principled antiwar figures in the party, such as Duncan and Paul, but the number of members from the South would seem to qualify the commonly held view of reflexive Southern support for the war.  Feeding into that view, however, would be the Democratic members from Georgia and Mississippi who voted against the resolution.

No surprise to anyone, the House passed its might non-binding surge resolution, H. Con. Res. 63, 246-182.  Interestingly, the number of Republican defectors (17) went up between the time the first surge opponents made their position known and the vote.  (There were two Democratic nays and six members not voting.)  If nothing else, it suggests that the old Victory Caucus has about as much influence as I do in forcing Congressmen to do what it wants.  That’s good news for the GOP, at least for the time being.  Watch for the Hewitts to go into insane revenge mode to tear down these 17 members. 

Among the Republicans supporting the resolution and opposing the surge were such unlikely figures as Bob Inglis (SC-04), who won his last election with 64% of the vote in a solidly GOP upstate district.  While I have been stressing the political vulnerability of Republican members in predominantly Democratic states as an explanation for the members’ opposition to the surge, that does not quite do justice to many of the members who are gaining no political cover and are risking the wrath of their constituents in voting for this resolution.

Earlier in the week, the geniuses at the old Victory Caucus couldn’t even figure out which Congressmen to target for their opprobrium.  They listed Roscoe Bartlett (MD) as one of their enemies, when he ended up voting against the resolution!  Meanwhile, Reps. Johnson of Illinois and Petri of Wisconsin, who did end up supporting the resolution, received no prior mention at all.  Way to keep their feet to the fire, Hewitt!

At RCP’s blog, they have a post pulling together some blog chatter about Giuliani’s pro-choice self-description and his views on Court appointments.  Here’s one remark that got my attention:

Bush describes himself as pro-life; Giuliani as pro-choice. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all that far apart – in terms of practical effect.

So, in other words, Giuliani will be as much of a basically do-nothing President on life issues as Mr. Bush has been, but at least he will be more upfront about his indifference?  Inspiring!

Then there was this one:

He’s basically parrotting Bush’s position, which is, felicitiously enough, my position, and a principled, coherent position to take on the issue. Put strict constructionists on the court to adjudicate not legislate new dubious rights, and Roe may or may not fall, and then the states can decide on the question.

I don’t know that it’s necessarily principled or coherent, but if it is effectively the same position then we can count on Giuliani to appoint justices who believe (or at least publicly state that they believe) Roe is settled precedent about which there is nothing more to say.  So, in fact, Roe definitely will not fall, and the “strict constructionists” appointed by Bush or a future Giuliani administration (I shudder at the thought) will not actually be like any strict constructionists that any constitutionalist would recognise as such. 

Strict construction has become one of those meaningless phrases that Republican candidates learn to say because they know that it is what their constituents want to hear.  Those constituents, God bless them, are still working on the assumption that Republicans in government would like to limit the role of the state and sharply define its powers.  This is entertaining, I suppose, in the way that someone taking candy from a baby is entertaining.  “Strict construction” is now right up there as a meaningless talking point with “government has gotten too large” or “our states are the laboratories of our democracy,” which Republicans will utter right before (or even after!) they vote for massive new entitlements or nationalise education standards.  Giuliani hopes that if he utters this phrase often enough, people will become confused and think that he actually means the same thing they do when they use it.  Sometimes he runs into trouble when other people point out what strict constructionist is supposed to mean (via Ross):

KING: Let’s move to some things domestic. You’ve had some quotes lately that — that seem contradictory. I know you’re pro-choice, you’ve always been pro-choice.

GIULIANI: I am.

KING: Yet you’ll say you’ll appoint judges who are strict constructionists. If that’s the case, they’re going to vote to overturn “Roe v. Wade,” which you don’t want.

GIULIANI: I don’t know that. You don’t know that.

KING: Well, what is strict constructionist?

GIULIANI: Well, OK, there are a lot of ways to explain that. I mean (UNINTELLIGIBLE)… 

Actually, there aren’t a “lot of ways” to explain what strict construction is.  But then it all depends on what the meaning of “construction” is, right?  Maybe he means that linguistic meaning is constructed by judges, but that these judges should construct meaning in a rather strict way.  Perhaps Giuliani is saying that he is in favour of a button-down, businesslike nominalism, as opposed to the free-love, hippie commune kind.  I think Giuliani would like to find judges who have a respectable way of making it all up as they go along. 

Of course, actual, hard-core strict constructionists of the old Jeffersonian mode don’t exist in our judicial system, because they would never be able to endure the law school where they would learn to parrot precedents that have essentially no basis whatever in the Constitution, starting with Marbury v. Madison and getting worse from there.  These folks certainly don’t get appointed to high courts–they would be compelled to throw out reams and reams of legislation, and I don’t know of many Senators who like to see the number of federal laws decreasing at a rapid pace.  That is a topic all its own for another time, but it is worth remembering whenever people start throwing around the label “strict constructionist.”  It is almost always the case that, if politicians are using the phrase (with the exception of Ron Paul and maybe a couple others), they have no idea what it means or have no intention of adhering to that view.  Of course, I’ve never quite understood Republican presidential candidates who think they can claim to be strict constructionists when it comes to the kinds of judges they appoint but who can then be ueber-Hamiltonian in their discoveries of all sorts of implied and inherent powers in their office once elected.  They couldn’t just be pretending to be defenders of the Constitution before they got elected and then become usurpers afterwards, could they?  That wouldn’t be very honest at all!

One more related item.  Here is Rich Lowry on Romney’s flip-floppery:

For all the trouble the flip-flops have given him, let’s face it, we wouldn’t even be talking about him if he were a one-term pro-choice former governor of Massachusetts.

But for some reason “we” are talking incessantly about a two-term pro-choice mayor from New York.  “We” are not just talking about him as if he were a serious candidate, but actually as the “frontrunner” and a “top-tier” candidate.  There is a disconnect in all of this somewhere.

In the long run, the only way to prevent embarrassments like this [the Edwards blogger scandal] from escalating and causing greater damage – and more importantly, to fulfill the rich potential of the blogosphere as a persuasion and organizing tool – is for the voices of reason within the Netroots to stand up to the smack down artists and prod their peers to trade their juvenile accusations for mature arguments. ~Dan Gerstein

This appeal to reasonable Kossacks and lefty bloggers is roughly the same as all of those earnest entreaties by liberal columnists who keep asking, a la Friedman, “Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King?” or the more common refrain, “When will the moderate Muslims stand up against the jihadists?”  These appeals are amusing in a way because they assume that there is a large number of reasonable people in these communities who fundamentally disagree with the fanatics, but that they simply are not as loud or active as the latter.  It may be that there are a very few who do disagree, but they are so few that if they were ever to try to stand up to the overwhelming majority they know they would be shouted or cut down. 

Besides, the lefty blogger narrative of this controversy became established very early on.  Like some embattled minority group rallying around an accused criminal from their community, progressive bloggers across the board seem to have come to the same conclusion: “First they come for Marcotte, but tomorrow they will come for me.”  It became unacceptable for any of them to open up a breach in their wall of mindless solidarity.  They just had to keep telling themselves: “It’s only the noise machine, it’s only the noise machine.  Besides, Christophobia is funny.”  It’s a lot like watching Republicans rallying around Mr. Bush’s decisions, regardless of what they are. 

The prevalence of automatic groupthink in the Netroots, that supposed bastion of boisterous discussion and debate (if you believe the descriptions they give of themselves), has been interesting to watch, even if the response does not really surprise.  The most amusing thing is that the Netroots as a whole took this episode as a challenge to their influence and they believed that they could only retain their influence by defending Marcotte and McEwan to the last, when all they managed to prove was just how oblivious and politically dense they were and so ensured that their influence would decline.  Their solidarity with the two bloggers (the latter’s remarks about “Christofascists,” by the way, were obnoxious and ignorant, but fundamentally no different in substance from the idiocy spewed by Andrew Sullivan or Chris Hedges in their books) actually guaranteed their further marginalisation and irrelevance as a quasi-independent political force.  In some ways, this is a shame, because it aids the center-left warmongers and the Lieberman-loving centrists of the Democratic Party and makes one of the most vocal antiwar constituencies appear to be a gang of radicals deeply alienated from the beliefs of the vast majority of the American people.  This is exactly what opponents of the war didn’t need.  It was also the opportunity for the major players on the blog left to demonstrate something approaching good judgement on a no-brainer of a cultural controversy.  They missed their opportunity, and they won’t get another one quite like it.

The senior Turkish official said there was no plan to intervene and no link to the genocide bill. But Ankara is increasingly impatient over US reluctance to suppress armed PKK separatists who launch raids into south-east Turkey from Iraqi Kurdistan. And according to Asli Aydinbas, of Sabah newspaper, a “limited and defined” Turkish military intervention in Iraq is already on the cards.

“The US government believes passage of the Armenian resolution would make a cross-border operation more likely,” he said. “Even a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives would end Washington’s power to deter such an operation.” Seen this way, the genocide bill could spark a whole new bloodbath. ~Simon Tisdall

Normally I would take very seriously when an allied state insists against our government doing something that would badly damage bilateral relations.  However, the genocide denial in Turkey is absurd and it is a colossal lie.  The genocide did happen, and it was genocide, and there is every reason why Congress should acknowledge it as such.  Perhaps when one of its greatest allies and patrons acknowledges it, Ankara’s continued denial will become that much more untenable. 

Normally I am quite satisfied to allow other states to perpetuate their own self-serving lies about their own history, since it is not the business of our government to compel them to acknowledge historical truth, and nothing in the bill before Congress will change the laws or official propaganda in Turkey.  It will, however, stop the U.S. government from enabling Turkey in its genocide denial any longer.  It will demonstrate some solidarity with those relative few Turkish citizens who have been fighting for some genuine freedom of expression and for the sake of historical truth.  It may even embarrass Ankara enough that it will have to stop prosecuting people for speaking the truth, though I am not so naive as to assume this will be the case. 

Normally I am not interested in our government taking deliberately provocative steps towards allied states over a matter that they regard as fundamentally important.  But in this case Ankara is so profoundly in the wrong, and each day that our government officially plays along with Ankara’s lie is another day that the U.S. government fully embraces the Kemalist regime in all its repression, be it repression of its minorities or the attempted repression of history itself.  If Ankara wants to try to blackmail Washington with threats of meddling in Iraq to maintain the decaying facade of denialism, our government should not be intimidated by it.

No, The 1/2 Hour News Hour doesn’t count as dazzling, deathless television but if it fails — particurly after the collapse of the Dennis Miller Show — it will be a long, long time before right-wingers get another shot at entertaining our own troops via TV and demonstrating that conservatives do, after all, possess a sense of humor. ~Michael Medved

I love that bit where he says, “especially after the collapse of the Dennis Miller Show.”  As if that painful experience were something that anyone would want to remember!  What does this new show seem to have in common with Dennis Miller’s act?  It’s pompous and it isn’t terribly funny.  Fortunately, the nation has at least been spared Joel Surnow’s brand of comedy on Monday Night Football.  He talks of it as if this were the last chance for conservatives to ever have their own comedy show, when I’m fairly sure the Murdoch empire would be only too glad to keep trying to come up with a formula that doesn’t peel the paint off of walls.      

You can almost feel Medved suffering as he writes this sorry apologia for what appears to be some of the worst television FoxNews has produced since, well…probably since their last program aired earlier tonight.  Consider theseclips and this promo as evidence of cruelty to viewers–if you dare to watch them in their entirety.  It is really too easy to knock the show as an elaborate version of the kind of torture Jack Bauer might use on suspected terrorists (the upside is that it might be more effective in gaining information than inflicting physical pain), but what could Joel Surnow expect when he tried his hand at comedy if not jokes about torturing the audience?

What is it that drives some conservatives to want to imitate things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?  I suppose I understand the desire to have a popular and entertaining medium that caters to your side of the political street, but it seems to me that it’s an odd response to the success of your political rivals.  First of all, it completely misses that the two shows are capable of mocking the pretensions of most kinds of people, and they are not simply focused on their political enemies.  To the extent that they do focus on the administration and the GOP, you have to admit that these have proved to be rich targets for comedians of all stripes, just as Clinton was in the ’90s.  It also misses the reality that the shows rely heavily on the talent of their hosts–the format of fake news/fake talk does not necessarily make for great television.  Those of us who remember the Craig Kilborn era of The Daily Show understand the difference that Stewart made to the quality of the show.  Those of us who saw the early days of Colbert’s effort remember cringing at some of his weaker efforts–and even those weak shows were much better than any clip of this new show that I’ve seen.   

Producing this new show is the act of someone who can perceive the outward form of someone else’s success and thinks that if he starts dressing like the other person, takes up the same hobbies and begins going to the same social gatherings that he, too, will be as successful.  This conservative mimicry of left-leaning pop culture successes is a bit like Ottoman programs of Westernisation: they are completely artificial adaptations of the merely external products of another culture, one that the imitator does not even attempt to really understand.  All the mimic knows is that the other guy seems to be popular, successful or powerful and he wants to receive the same accolades and rewards.  So, shave your beards, wear European fashions and put your soldiers in Western uniforms as you teach them to march like Prussians, and you will finally stop losing wars to the Europeans!  How did that work out? 

One way that you can be sure that the creators of the new show don’t get the appeal of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report–which extends far beyond a purely left-liberal audience–is the way in which the “anchors” on the new show project the kind of appalling smugness that Colbert projects as part of his riff on…FoxNews talk show hosts.  Even in their “satire,” the people at FoxNews apparently can’t help but take themselves way too seriously, thereby playing directly into the hands of Colbert’s persona of the right-wing blowhard host.  Then they take the perfect subject for satire–Barack Obama–and somehow manage to miss the target.  On top of it all, they have laugh tracks–laugh tracks on a satire show!

This whole mau-mauing didn’t even scratch Obama… unless by November 2008 we’re obviously winning. ~Dave Weigel

This sentence is either one of the greatest gaffes of 2007 or an example of the most brilliant reverse double irony that has ever been written by a blogger.

Update: If no one besides me gets why it is brilliant reverse double irony (or something like that), I suppose that it isn’t actually that great.  I still thought it was amusing.

I take second place to no one in my opposition to Mitt Romney’s run for the White House, but the reaction to his choice of venue for his announcement of candidacy in some circles has been downright crazy.  No, make that super-crazy.  For example:

In the space of a week, we have had a professor from an Orthodox-oriented Israeli university argue that some medieval blood libels against the Jews were based in fact.We have had Muslim clerics declaring that the Jewish Temples of antiquity never existed, that there is no evidence that they ever did, that the Jews’ insistence that they did was “the greatest fraud crime in history,” that the Western Wall is a Muslim site, that the Jews’ reverence for it – and for Jerusalem – is a relatively recent and politically-motivated phenomenon. 

Not coincidentally, we have had Egyptian legislator Mohammed el-Katatny of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party informing parliament “That cursed Israel is trying to destroy al-Aqsa mosque,” and that “Nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence.”

And now we have Mitt Romney.

Might it be that the first three things and Romney’s use of the Henry Ford Museum are so radically different that only a blithering idiot would list them as part of the same trend?  Hm, let’s see: a threat to nuke Israel and…talking about cars (and innovation!) at the Henry Ford Museum.  Yes, I see the connection right away.

Rising in Mitt Romney’s defense was Zev Chafets.  You see, there was no time to be wasted on Romney’s announcement at the Ford Museum, which was a complete non-issue anyway.  The real anti-Semites have to be fought tooth and nail:

If attempting to link Romney with anti-Semitism is a cheap political trick, it is also something worse. Jews have real enemies these days, some of whom insist that a Jewish conspiracy has hijacked U.S. foreign policy on behalf of Israel. This is genuine Ford-ism, and it is found primarily on the “progressive” end of the political spectrum — as the National Jewish Democratic Council knows very well. Crying wolf is always irresponsible, but doing it in the middle of a forest is truly dangerous.

I could go through the whole argument about why this is a pile of garbage unworthy of any more serious consideration than it has already been given before, but I’ll leave it to Matt Yglesias to answer this time. 

But then, incredibly, the leadership chose not the “whip” the vote. That means they decided not to lean on Republicans who have soured on the war and who are declaring for defeat.

 

The outrage that had been directed at the Senate’s waverers only two weeks ago is now building and erupting against not just the round heeled Republicans, but also with much more fury at the leadership. ~Hugh Hewitt

Not satisfied at sabotaging the re-election chances of several vulnerable Senators, Hugh Hewitt has made it his holy cause to ensure that the Democratic majority in the House also increases significantly by threatening the same kind of blackmail of the NRCC if it “fails” to abandon anti-surge members and “fails” to meddle in primaries in favour of “victory” candidates.  The name for his latest pathetic protest?  The Victory Caucus!

Rep. Ric Keller from Florida is already being targeted with a primary challenge because, in spite of elaborate qualifications about how much he supports the troops and the war and President Bush, he agrees with most serious analysts that the “surge” will fundamentally change nothing and will be a waste of American lives. 

He didn’t say “waste,” of course, because we all know, as Obama learned recently, that you can’t say that soldiers’ lives are “wasted” when they are being, well, wasted on a bad plan in a bad cause in an unjust war.  Saying the plain truth about a bad plan in particular is evidently more insulting to the soldiers in question than endorsing the plan that is about to get some of them killed for no good reason–don’t you see how patriotic it is to urge on the surge? 

So Keller and ten thirteen other Republicans in the House are supporting the Democratic resolution.  If the Senate gives us any idea about the level of actual disapproval of the surge, there are probably three times as many Republican members who don’t think the plan will achieve much of anything, but only a few are willing to go out on a limb and say so.  In fact, many of the members in question come from districts and states where they are undoubtedly under tremendous pressure from back home–that would be pressure from the constituents whose interests it is their duty to represent, by the way–to demonstrate some miniscule amount of displeasure with Mr. Bush’s decisions.

Some of the dissenting Republicans are members who have always been or who have become reliable antiwar Congressmen, such as Ron Paul, John Duncan and Walter Jones.  Then you have Tom Davis of Virginia, Castle of Delaware, English of Pennsylvania, Upton of Michigan, Kirk of Illinois, Gilchrest of Maryland, Walsh of New York, Coble of North Carolina, Ramstad of Minnesota and LaTourette of Ohio.  With the exception perhaps of Coble, you can see a pattern: most of these are districts from Democratic-leaning states.  Undoubtedly the political bloodbath in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio for Republicans got the attention of Reps. English, Walsh and LaTourette.  Davis represents a suburban NOVA district, which is just the kind of district filled with disgruntled moderates and independents; Davis is deep in Webb country, and he recognises this.  Moreover, all of these Congressmen have the perfectly plausible argument that this plan is a bad idea and is unlikely to work.  For stating what ought to be obvious, Hewitt and his legions will try to drum them out of a “victory” GOP caucus.  Of course, the only time this caucus will enjoy any victories is in its name, because Hewitt’s proposed sabotage of House fundraising efforts will help to kill candidates in swing states and solidly Democratic states.    

I confess that I don’t quite understand the obsession with preventing Republicans from voting for a resolution that everyone acknowledges is a symbolic nothing.  I have a hard time grasping how anyone believes that the surge will lead to Hewitt’s oft-mentioned victory.  At best, it may calm things down for a few months, when it will be time for the Iraqis to take up the slack and everything deteriorates again.  Congressmen such as Rep. Keller express their frustration at the failures of the Maliki government, but, as usual, rather than directing their ire at the Maliki government, which is entirely compromised by Sadr’s forces, Hewitt and his allies have decided that targeting Congressmen like Keller, who espouse nothing but support for the war they think is so important, is the smart and necessary thing to do.  If I were Howard Dean, I would be loving the spectacle of Republican cannibalism right now.

Those Politico folks are doing some good work.  As Roger Simon notes, the Old Man may have a real problem because he is so very…old.  Meanwhile, the Drag Queen has bigger problems than his occasional enjoyment of putting on wigs and dresses.  (Did I mention that I’m not a fan?)  Simon writes:

And get this: A USA Today poll released Wednesday shows that 24 percent of Americans would not vote for a Mormon (Romney), 30 percent would not vote for someone who has been married three times (Giuliani) and more than 40 percent would not vote for a “generally well-qualified person” for president who was 72 years old (McCain’s age by Election Day 2008).
 

Simon also rehearses all the reasons why the top three on the other are also very vulnerable and weak, and he’s right.  This tends to strengthen my insanely overconfident prediction that none of the six leading candidates will be nominated.  I have been arguing that Romney is unelectable for a while, but this new information reminds us of just how poor the chances of the other two candidates really are.  There is nothing that McCain can do to ward off people’s doubts about an old President if so many are simply set against anyone 72 years old, and there is not really anything Giuliani can do to make people accept a thrice-married candidate.  He could try to explain that he had his second marriage annulled, so, technically, it doesn’t count as being married three times, but then that might require him to rehash the whole ugly, sordid business. 

I guess this helps answer the question of whether Giuliani’s, um, “colourful” personal life will make a difference in the election.  Yes, it will, and it will be a huge difference.  That 30% probably comes overwhelmingly from one side of the spectrum.  Social conservatives in the primaries will listen to Rudy, clap politely when he says rah-rah things about fighting terrorism or whatever it is he’s supposedly qualified to do and then vote en masse against him and the decadent Yankee order he represents.  And by decadent Yankee order, I mean, of course, the order of things in which the Yankees have the biggest budget, most obnoxious fans and consistently most underperforming team in baseball.  Well, there’s that, and then there’s the rampant immorality.