Not everyone is sold on using politics as a filter for love. Janis Spindel, the legendary matchmaker known for searching nationwide for bachelorettes on behalf of her upscale, all-male clientele, balked when told about political online dating.

“Oh my gawd! What next?” she exclaimed in her signature New York accent. Asked why she doesn’t approve, she responded with a question of her own: “Are people looking to fall in love or are they looking to find a political match?” ~Samantha Slater, The Politico

Wasn’t it the old rule that one of the things you don’t talk about on the first few dates was politics?  Now it’s practically an entry requirement.  Count me as a confirmed skeptic of this entire trend.  As if our political associations haven’t become clannish and insular enough, we need to subject our social relationships to a political pre-screening!  What a depressing thought.  It may satisfy a very small niche market of political operatives, for whom this sort of match may really be a top priority, but for most people who use these services I suspect it will prove unsatisfying and unsuccessful.         

There is a certain logic to the idea of matching people according to their descriptions of their personalities, preferences and even politics.  For some very political people, there is some kind of logic for focusing especially on finding the right political match.  It just happens to be astonishingly bad logic.  First of all, and you don’t need me to tell you this, many people are unusually bad at characterising themselves.  It is also the case that many of the things that people think they prefer or actually do prefer are not at all the things they actually need to be happy.  Finally, people who place great value on the politics of their prospective dates ahead of other considerations are people who don’t even know what the question is. 

Most people prioritise the wrong things all the time–such is the comedy and tragedy of man–and nothing could better demonstrate this habit than the rising popularity of services geared towards people convinced that they must find their political match in order to even contemplate the possibility of a committed relationship.  I understand how bitterly unsatisfying this habit is because I used to be quite given over to it. 

It is one of those hazardous side-effects of being a political junkie that some of us can fall into without thinking about it, and as political junkies we can cook up all sorts of plausible arguments why this preoccupation with finding reasonably similar politics is not the dreary, abstract dance of death that it is.  “It’s important to find someone who shares your view of the world!” the political junkie will say to his bewildered friends, who place such a low, low priority on their mates’ politics that he, in turn, is baffled.  “How can you love someone who supports NATO expansion?” he yells at no one in particular.  (Of course, most sane people don’t spend their time worrying about NATO expansion one way or the other, so it isn’t one of those burning questions that fills the lovers with anxiety.)  More likely it will be something like, “How can she like Hagel?  Doesn’t she understand that he isn’t really antiwar?”  And so on.  For the record, this is often fairly stupid. 

As an Orthodox reactionary who admires the cause of the Confederacy, lauds Bolingbroke and waits for the day when the Greeks reclaim Constantinople, I hold out little hope of finding such a match, so I may be either the worst person to comment on this trend or one of the best-prepared.  The absurdity of these political match services becomes more obvious to people on what I suppose must be called the political “extremes,” especially when it is actually only too common to find many personal and political affinities between far-left greens and far-right traditionalists or even reactionary “blacks.” These are people who would, according to the rubrics of these services, supposedly be completely incompatible with one another–they are on “opposite ends” of the spectrum.      

There are cases where you have two people with diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive worldviews that make any sort of sane and stable relationship impossible, but then you would think they would usually recognise this conflict fairly early on.  The communist and the monarchist will run out of things to talk about pretty quickly.  So I suppose the only virtue of these matching services would have to be in eliminating the possibility of accidentally getting set up with a Satanist.  Otherwise they just endorse a rather weird and sad idea that enduring love can only exist between people who are in agreement about virtually everything. 

As the wise Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminded us in Leftism Revisited, love is the embrace of the radically Other (most powerfully expressed in mystical love for God); as the Fathers might put it, true love is kenotic and desires the good of the beloved even to the complete sacrifice of the self.  When people invoke the famous citation from Ephesians in which the Apostle commands women to be subject to their husbands, they often forget the other half of the citation, which is that the husbands should be willing to sacrifice themselves for their wives as Christ did for the Church.  (This would be the passage that some radicals think prove that Christianity is hostile to women, when it seems clear that it is men who are called upon to live up to a perfect example in this particular way.)  Inasmuch as this preoccupation with finding political mirror images of ourselves is simply self-obsession, it has nothing to do with love and so will not satisfy the natural yearning for love that the people subscribing to these services believe they will find.

Attaching invidious labels to those ideas, as a way of trying to isolate them from polite company, represents an insidious form of illiberalism of which we ought to be wary. ~Alan Wolfe

Thus wrote the man who called D’Souza’s book a “national disgrace” in a review called “None (but Me) Dare Call It Treason” and called on “decent conservatives” to “distance themselves, quickly and cleanly” from D’Souza.  That sounds a lot like shunning and ostracising someone and also quite a lot like “running” someone out of polite society.  But perhaps this is where Wolfe would agree with Stephens that there are some ideas that are simply too foul to be granted a real hearing?  Or is this where Wolfe says that he was merely “joining” the debate by telling everyone to treat D’Souza as a political leper? 

Now, as it happens, Wolfe’s response to Bret Stephens’ last argument (which is that he would cast Near East policy dissenters such as Jimmy Carter, Mearsheimer, Walt and Judt into the political equivalent of outer darkness if it were up to him) is basically correct.  To label people (falsely) as bigots in the hopes of driving them to the margins is insidious and it is illiberal (the two don’t necessarily have any connection–there can be times when it is very good to be illiberal).  Failure to drive your enemies into the wilderness does not prove that there is nothing wrong in the attempt.  The difference between those who understand this and those who don’t is the difference between people who think free speech is a burden we must endure because we lack the means to shut up our opponents and those who think it is actually a net good for the health of political discourse and government.  Failure in maliciously libelling your political enemies as a way of intimidating them does not prove that you were not trying to shut down the debate.  As Wolfe writes:

To call someone anti-Semitic because you disagree with them intends to stifle. It is a testimony to the vibrancy of our democracy, but not, alas, to the liberal sensibilities of those who wildly throw around charges of anti-Semitism, that they fail to do so.

Imagine an official censor assuring the people he was regulating that he wasn’t really engaging in censorship because he had been unsuccessful in stamping out all disapproved activity.  You would then have some sense of the lameness of Bret Stephens’ claim that there is no attempt to censor or suppress debate. 

After conservatives have endured so many years of being berated (almost always baselessly) as racists or fascists or homophobes or any other label that demonises the person to whom it is applied, it is particularly pathetic that the one arguing most strenuously for suppression of opponents through such shabby name-calling tactics would be someone representing an ostensibly conservative newspaper.

Governor Romney has been roundly attacked for the supposed “lateness” of his pro-life conversion. But according to today’s Los Angeles Times, Ronald Reagan’s conversion came in 1975–a mere year before he ran for president. (His first run was not in 1980, when he was elected, but in 1976.) Isn’t that interesting? ~Charles Mitchell, Evangelicals for Mitt

Not really, unless you think that President Reagan never did anything out of political opportunism when he was a candidate.  That seems fairly unrealistic.  It isn’t interesting, unless you take President Reagan as someone who became an impeccable champion of the pro-life cause.  That would be, to put it mildly, a little too generous.  (It would also mean, if we followed the comparison all the way, that Romney should lose in the primaries next year and would have to return in the next cycle to defeat the discredited President Obama.)  Unlike Reagan’s change of position, however, Romney’s claims don’t even come across as credible.  People don’t change their views about abortion after talking to doctors about stem-cell research.  Really, they don’t.  People may change their views about stem-cell research because of their views on abortion, but it doesn’t typically work the other way around.  Perhaps Romney is counting on the sheer oddness of his story to make it sound like the truth, but it isn’t working. 

It isn’t simply the “lateness” of the conversion that troubles so many people, but the obvious political calculation and timing of the move to coincide with his early primary maneuvers that scream that Romney is a fraud.  (Perhaps Reagan was–gasp!–initially also being opportunistic in his adoption of the pro-life mantle in 1975-76 when he was running against the socially liberal, Rockefeller wing of the party–such a position aided his image as the anti-establishment candidate.)  Romney’s explanation compounds the problem by insulting our intelligence with one of the more lame conversion stories on record.    

In his defense the Romneyites cite Reagan, whose pro-life accomplishments while in office were negligible at best.  Perhaps they are thinking of his Court appointments?  Yes, he appointed Scalia, but he also appointed Anthony “Right to Existential Self-Definition” Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor–so, in fact, his choices for the Court ultimately represented a setback for pro-life voters when it came time for the Court to revisit Roe in Casey.  Is that the kind of precedent Romneyites want to invoke as an example of what their candidate would do in office?   

Reagan would phone in his support to the March for Life, but he would never address it personally, much less did he ever march with the demonstrators as Brownback and Hunter did as candidates this year.  (Romney was too busy threatening Ahmadinejad with prosecution on “genocide” charges while in Israel to be able to attend.)  By all means, let’s stress the similarities between Romney and this “mostly talk, little action” approach to life issues.  I can think of nothing that would better suit the real pro-life candidates in the race.  There are a great many of them, and pro-life voters do not have to throw their support away on a man who is almost certainly playing them for fools.  Let’s hope that they are not easily swayed by vague, nostalgic memories of President Reagan, who did not actually make many policy decisions or appointments that advanced the pro-life cause very far and who made two appointments to the Court that turned out to be very bad for that cause.

One of the more depressing aspects of the Iraq Attaq, has been the way in which many conservative intellectuals have been caught with their pants down. It hasn’t been just the hacks. Michael Novak, Thomas Sowell, David Brooks, Victor David Hanson. These aren’t idiots. The question is, what to do about them? Should they all be fired for gross incompetence? There certainly is a very good prima facie case that if you screw up that bad, you should face some fairly severe consequences. On the other hand, the fact is these people have done excellent work in other areas. ~The Man Who Is Thursday

Via I, Ectomorph

I do share TMWIT’s disappointment with Sowell.  Not having been a great fan of any of the others or their work before the war, I can’t say that I was either terribly surprised or disappointed that they advocated for the war as zealously as they did and as they more or less continue to do today. 

Whatever his occasional insights about immigration, Hanson is a militarist who has exulted in the devastation that Sherman wrought in the March to the Sea.  He saw that mass of atrocities as a necessary blow to “aristocracy” in the South.  He is a confirmed democratic egalitarian, or at least this is what he will say, and he thinks it is quite appropriate to lay waste to entire lands for the sake of these supposedly high-minded ideals.  His support for the war was completely predictable for those familiar with his political writing. 

David Brooks was one of the early writers at The Weekly Standard and a proponent of “national greatness conservatism.”  Enough said.  Anyone who didn’t see his dedicated support for the invasion coming wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Michael Novak and his partner in theological crime, George Weigel, are completely predictable “theocon” jingoes.  As an offshoot or a group very closely related to and intertwined with neoconservatives, the major “theocons” of First Things, including the current editor Joseph Bottum, follow the neocon line on military adventurism (to the extent that they talk about foreign affairs at all) essentially without exception.  In his newer capacity writing at NRO, Novak has continued with the jingo bluster and bad WWII analogies. 

Thomas Sowell is the most disappointing, because I admired his work more than that of the others and I assumed that his old no-nonsense insistence on empirical evidence would compel him to be very skeptical and even hostile to the administration’s claims about Iraq.  I was wrong.  Perhaps, as Steve Sailer writes in the comments to TMWIT’s post, Sowell didn’t write about Iraq that often, but when he did his views were reliably in favour of it. 

The final straw for me was his disgusting, anti-intellectual dismissal of the damage done to the antiquities in the main museum in Baghdad.  It was true that the original reports of the devastation were significantly exaggerated, but the losses were still bad enough to pain and horrify anyone who loved knowledge and the study of the past.  He wrote:

Even when the military campaign in Iraq was triumphant, there was a chorus of complaints in the media about artifacts missing from a museum in Baghdad. It later turned out that these artifacts were not missing, after all, but even if they had been — since when are soldiers in a war zone supposed to be acting as museum guards?  

In fact, under international law all belligerent forces are obliged to respect and secure such sites for the sake of the preservation of their contents.  There had once been a sane and humane recognition that museums and stores of knowledge were goods that were important to preserve for the future.  The truth of the matter was that many artifacts had been destroyed or stolen (some, like the priceless Warka Vase, were recovered), and this information was available to anyone interested in finding out.  The magazine Archaeologymade a point of assessing the damage done and discussing the problem at length before Sowell wrote his column.  For those not likely to browse a specialist magazine, The Economist covered the matterinsomedetail starting immediately after the looting.  His ignorance of what happened and his obvious indifference to any losses told me all I needed to know about the man.  Here was someone who held himself out as a scholar adopting a Rumsfeldian pose of “stuff happens” towards the destruction of invaluable artifacts–what villainy! 

After that, I virtually never read Thomas Sowell again, convinced as I was that he would sooner carry water for the administration and the official line of, “What, me worry?” than acknowledge the terrible, irreparable damage that the war had done to the record of human knowledge.  That damage, so I thought, should deeply trouble him as a scholar.  Obviously, I overestimated the man’s seriousness.  

I will probably have more to say about Ecto’s claim that, “I still can’t see how we are worse off now than we would be if we could wind the clock back to 2002 and let things go on as they were.”  I suppose that depends on what he means by “we,” but if by “we” he means Americans, Iraqis and all other Westerners, I should hope that the ways in which “we” are all worse off are now leaping to Ecto’s mind.  For what it’s worth, the Chinese and, say, the Brazilians are scarcely feeling any pain, so viewed from their perspective the invasion has probably provided net benefits.

Your own governor, Democrat John Lynch [of New Hampshire] scored better (receiving a B) on the annual fiscal report card issued by the libertarian Cato Institute than Romney (who got a C). The 2006 Cato report described Romney’s message that he was a governor who stood by a no-new-taxes pledge as “mostly a myth.”
“Rather than forcing the Legislature to close the budget gap through spending cuts alone, Romney raised some $500 million in fees.

“Romney raised corporate taxes by an estimated $210 million and only backed down under pressure from pushing for even higher taxes on business.

“Romney watered down a voter-approved immediate rollback of the income tax, by proposing to spread the final phase of the cut over two years.

“Romney flip-flopped on rebating capital gains taxes to taxpayers that had been collected unconstitutionally. ‘I’d far rather see tax cuts in the future than tax cuts applied in the past,’ he said as the state’s highest court wrestled with the issue. ~Virginia Buckingham

Now he is supposedly Grover Norquist’s golden boy–no wonder he made a point of bragging to the NRI Summit that he had signed the “no new taxes pledge.”  It was a very new experience for him, and he wanted to tell everyone about it.  He was so eager to convince everyone that he wasn’t the sort of tax-raising Northeasterner they assume he would have to be. 

Perhaps he can concoct an equally implausible conversion story about this “evolution” of his views.  It would go like this: he had a meeting in the winter of 2004 with an accountant, who was going over his deductions, when he suddenly “discovered” that raising taxes actually costs people more money.  “My chief of staff and I just sort of looked at each other, and we realised that taxes take away money from people and give it to the state–that would be the welfare state, by the way, which they also have in Europe!” 

As many have noted, and as Ms. Buckingham notes again, Romney was against making the Bush tax cuts permanent until he once again recently “discovered” that taxes are a drag on economic growth.  (In other words, he was against the one relatively good Bush policy of the last six years until he found out that he needed to be for it to win over voters.)  Actually, he discovered that he had to come up with something to say to people in New Hampshire about taxes, and obviously he can’t run on his record, so he’ll just invent a new position.  His current position is that he is against taxes and for freedom.  Just wait a year or two, and he’ll have a different position.  What’s remarkable about all this is that he is such an obvious fraud, and his record should automatically make conservatives flee from him as if from the plague, yet he is receiving a bizarre, enthusiastic reception from a lot of top activists.  They can’t all be that gullible post-Bush, can they?  Apparently they can be.

We are weary of the bickering and bombast, fatigued by the posturing and self-promotion. For even as America faces a new generation of challenges, the halls of government are clogged with petty politics and stuffed with peddlers of influence. ~Mitt Romney (video)

Romney: I will make government as efficient as this SUV! 

A press conference later in the week might go something like this: 

Question: Gov. Romney, do you really think that the federal government is “the largest enterprise in the world”?  Is it really just a bigger version of a corner store in your mind? 

Romney: What I do know is that innovation and transformation are essential.

Q: Essential to what?

Romney:  More innovation and transformation!

It is weird how Romney and Obama mirror each other in their vapid, generic statements and their boilerplate agendas.  They are both “transformation” candidates: Romney wants to transform government, which is also what Obama wants.  Gosh, how original. 

Oh, look, Romney wants to secure the borders.  That’s fine, but what else does he have to say about immigration?  Nothing at all, as usual.  Certainly nothing that would be controversial or set off too many alarms one way or the other.  Romney thinks government is too big (applause here), and apparently he also loves his wife.  No surprises anywhere.  For someone who speaks of innovation and transformation in every other sentence, he rattles off every predictable conservative agenda item in the most unimaginative, rehashed way possible.  He even recycles Reagan’s “our best days are ahead of us” rhetoric.  And, yes, kids, he loves freedom.  When a candidate gives a speech against freedom, then I will be interested, if only for the sheer novelty of it. 

Query for Romney speechwriters: what does “nuclear epidemic” mean?  Do they know what epidemic means?  

It’s not just Obama’s ideas that he’s lifting.  Not to be outdone by any former Senator of Pennsylvania, Romney shows that he can also rattle the old sabre at the fearsome Venezuelan conqueror, too:

We must campaign for freedom and democracy in our own hemisphere, now threatened by a second aspiring strongman tyrant.

The first strongman tyrant being that mighty threat to democracy throughout Latin America, Castro.  Please, make it stop!  There are probably any number of reasons to oppose Hugo Chavez’s influence in Latin America, but defending democracy aint one of them.  His election and re-election are the results of mass democracy down south, whether we like it or not.  That he is doing his best to convert his election victories into something like one-party, perpetual rule is not surprising, but neither does it threaten democracy in any other Latin American country. 

Sam Brownback had best watch out for his bleeding heart conservative constituency–Romney is trying to poach that, too:

We must extend our hand to Africa’s poor and diseased and brutalized.

I guess that means sending aid for African AIDS victims and interventing in Darfur.  But who knows?  Vagueness is almost as important to Romney as innovation and transformation. 

He reprises his lame “explanation” of liberalism:

There are some who believe that America’s strength comes from government – that challenges call for bigger government, for more regulation of our lives and livelihood, and for more protection and isolation from competition that comes from open markets. 

That is the path that has been taken by much of Europe. It is called the welfare state. It has led to high unemployment and anemic job growth. It is not the path to prosperity and leadership. 

I love how he tells us what it’s called, as if no one has ever heard of the welfare state before.

Joel Surnow, pay attention!  Romney may be your guy:

America cannot continue to lead the family of nations if we fail the families at home.

And let’s not forget that America cannot defend its marriage to unnecessary international commitments if it does not defend marriage at home!  Or something like that.  Blech.  I’m beginning to feel queasy, but I will press on.  Oh, wait, he’s making a paean to American optimism.  Getting queasier.  He starts talking about innovation again.  The pain is getting worse…Now he is taking on Obama’s happy hope-talk:

But hope alone is just crossing fingers, when what we need is industrious hands. It is time for hope and action.

Okay, Obama, I’ll see your meaningless appeal to hope, and I raise you a meaningless call to action!  Take that!

Cue the silly exceptionalist reading of history:

America’s greatest innovation is freedom.

I know this is an applause line, and everybody probably loves this line.  “What now, Larison, are you against freedom, too?” someone will ask.  To which I reply, “Well, it depends.”  But my objection here is the idea that what we refer to as freedom somehow did not exist until Americans ambled onto the stage.  This is not true.  It is a mark of ingratitude to our ancestors to say that we somehow invented what they lacked, when we would have had no experience of political freedom had it not been for the British forebears who created the constitutional system that made it possible. 

But even if he has no idea where it came from, Romney is very excited about freedom:

Freedom will make the new American dream possible.

For those who haven’t read the whole speech, the “new American dream” now includes “dependable and affordable healthcare, secure employment and secure retirement,” among other things.  How freedom provides any of those things remains a mystery.  Presumably, freedom involves people making their own way and finding these things for themselves.  Romney’s MassCare certainly didn’t have much to do with any freedom I recognise.  How Romney’s prostrations before the idols of free trade (in Dearborn of all places–why not go over to Flint and kick some ex-factory workers in the shins while you’re at it?) provide for “secure employment” is also unclear, since the one thing that all his “innovation and transformation” do not do is provide secure employment.  Instead, they are only more likely to make employment less and less secure–and the more rapid the pace of innovation, the less secure it will become.  In an age of tremendous economic insecurity and anxiety, I can’t think of a message more out of touch with the country today than one that pushes innovation and free trade when more voters want some sense of stability and the protection of American labour.

USA Today has a new poll that asks, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be one of the following, would you vote for that person?”  The three possibilities are “black,” “a woman” and “Mormon.”  Not surprisingly, a Mormon candidate runs up against the strongest resistance at 24% for no.  There is also greater hesitation among those who say that they would vote for a Mormon than on the other questions: another 14% say they would vote for a Mormon with some reservations.

Still, 24% who refuse to vote for a Mormon has to be a heartening improvement in the polling over Rasmussen’s stunning 43% who would never consider voting for a Mormon, right?  Well, it would be, except that USA Today’s poll was simply a national poll of adults 18+, while Rasmussen polled likely voters.  Obviously, this would indicate that anti-Mormon attitudes are considerably stronger among likely voters than they are in the general population, which is clearly very bad news for the Mormon running in the ’08 race.

It remains unclear to me how any Mormon candidate, even without Romney’s other baggage of hailing (most recently) from Massachusetts, the health-care bill he signed, and his flip-flopping, could prevail in a primary contest when four out of ten Republicans say that they will not even consider voting for a Mormon and almost two out of ten say that they aren’t sure one way or the other.   Values, shmalues–you usually cannot win any election when a combined total of more than 50% of the voters are either dead-set against voting for you or are not really sure if they can bring themselves to do it. 

In an extremely divided primary field, it is extremely remotely possible that Romney might be able to capture enough of the remaining 42% of GOP voters that are willing to give a Mormon candidate a hearing to win the nomination, but even then every general election projection shows Romney losing badly to almost every Democratic candidate (he loses by a more respectable margin to Tom Vilsack). 

This is not simply a function of Rasmussen polling–RCP combines and averages many different polls that all show incredible Romney weakness against the major Democratic contestants.  BothNewsweekand Investor’s Business Dailyhave polls showing John Edwards leading Romney by more than 20 points (Newsweek gives Edwards an implausible margin of 34!), while HRC and Obama handily trounce him as well.  Of course, polls in February of the year before the election cannot mean very much, but if they mean anything then electability is clearly a problem for Romney. 

You could argue that these dreadful results are just a function of a lack of name recognition, but most people still don’t recognise Obama’s name and nonetheless Romney fares poorly against him as well.  It seems that, without the nationally recognised names of McCain or Giuliani, the generic GOP presidential candidate is getting slaughtered even by such equally unknown candidates as Obama.  If Vilsack is winning in national polls against Romney, when the Iowan’s name recognition outside Iowa is virtually non-existent, the desire to avoid another Republican President is apparently quite strong.  As Republican primary voters become better acquainted with the liberals and moderates in the field of candidates, there will be a temptation to rally around Romney as the “electable” one who is more or less conservative, but all indications right now suggest that he is even less electable than they are. 

Another candidate might be able to overcome the burden of the strong bias against returning the GOP to the White House, but not if he is already carrying an essentially unbearable burden of strong resistance to his candidacy because of his religion.  Conservatives will not abide McCain or Giuliani because their views or their past betrayals, but neither will they back someone who is certain to go down to defeat, as Romney almost certainly is.  How’s that for bucking conventional wisdom? 

I will say this much right now: someone from outside the Terrible Trio will win the GOP nomination.  Who that someone is still remains entirely unclear, but none of the three currently touted as the leading candidates will succeed (I don’t rule out the possibility that one of them gets the VP nod, but for at least two of the three it seems unlikely to be accepted).  I suspect we will have surprise nominees on both sides, but whichever party chooses a Senator or former Senator will lose (the Democratic side is simply drowning in Senators, which means their winning ticket depends on a successful Vilsack or Richardson campaign).  That’s as much as I’m willing to say at this absurdly early point.

Eduardo Penalver at Commonweal‘s blog had a fairly mild rebuke for Marcotte when the controversy started last week.  He was then quoted by Tom Donnelly at Faithful Democrats–it is worth noting that he quoted from that post entirely without comment. 

This Faithful Democrats site seems to be an annoyance to Matt Stoller at MyDD (via Blogometer), who does not even bother to notice that Mr. Donnelly is quoting Mr. Penalver’s earlier post from dotCommonweal (yes, that is the real name of their blog).  No, the “Faithful Democrats” must be taken down a peg for citing Penalver’s perfectly reasonable observations that Marcotte’s language was over the line and went well beyond criticism or disagreement with church teachings or dogma.  (Here is Chris Bowers, also of MyDD, peddling that particularly reprehensible misrepresentation of what Marcotte wrote.)  Here’s Stoller:

So it’s cool to Jesse Lava and Faithful Democrats to debate on the terrain set by anti-semites and homophobe?  Ok then.  Now I know that Faithful Democrats put a caveat in there about how Donahue isn’t a nice guy, but that’s really irrelevant.  This is very simple.  Donahue is using religion as cover for a political attack.  The only ethical response from anyone who actually opposes bigotry is ‘Donahue should be ignored because of his record’ or some variation thereof.  So until the self-described religious left decides to stop letting bigoted and extreme right-wingers talk for them, they are no different than the religious right they pretend to oppose. 

Fine, ignore Donohue.  I certainly do.  But what about Mr. Penalver and Mr. O’Dwyer and the Catholic Democrats and liberals whose views they claim to represent?  I can think of nothing that would better satisfy Stoller’s enemies than this sort of insane attack on the religious left.  By all means, declare war on religious liberals and convince them once and for all that the political left hates them intensely, so much so that their grassroots activists would throw a huge fit at the thought of seeing one of their own punished for her expressions of anti-Christian bigotry.  Better yet, convince them that if they should ever do anything so outrageous as object to having their religion trashed by an ignorant hack, the secular lefties will declare them to be no better than “right-wingers.”  Perhaps more than a few of them will draw the inevitable conclusion that it will be better to support and work for people who do not go out of their way to insult them and their beliefs.  Perhaps then there will not be much left of the religous left, and Stoller and his sort will be able to dictate to them with ease.  Meanwhile, the political fortunes of his party will tank and the buffoonish blog left will have itself partly to blame.

Another thing—this has doubled my committment to reaching out and helping highlight when the religious left fights the right wingers who have falsely claimed to speak for all religious people. ~Amanda Marcotte

This is too good.  Sometimes it is difficult to believe that there is an actual person writing this stuff.  The woman who liked to speak of “godbags” wants to help highlight when the liberal “godbags” go up against the other “godbags.”  (Where could anyone have gotten the idea that the left was hostile to religion?)  Presumably she hopes that they kill each other off in a melee, since she obviously has nothing but contempt for the beliefs of Christians on her side.  As it happens, some of those Christians are none too pleased with her.

What does Ms. Marcotte think is the lesson of the recent controversy?  She writes:

Bill Donohue doesn’t speak for Catholics, he speaks for the right wing noise machine. You guys pointed this out, you made a stink, you refused to walk into the same stupid trap that is laid out for liberals and Democrats by the right wing noise machine and I think you made a difference.  While loyalty played into the pushback some, the real story is that we liberals are not taking this crap any longer and we’re pushing back.

Do people at Commonweal and the Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council speak for any Catholics?  Are they also part of the “right wing noise machine”?  What a dreadful gang of politically and culturally tone deaf clowns Marcotte and her chums are!  Instead of resigning as she did, which she mentions in today’s post, she should have kept mouthing off and continued to pretend that anti-Christian bigotry would not hurt her candidate’s chances with ethnic Democratic working class and middle class voters.  Edwards has aimed his appeal at organised labour and working class people, and there are still a lot of ethnic Catholic voters involved in organised labour or attracted to candidates who champion their cause.  There was a very real way that this impressive hostility to their religion on the part of the Edwards campaign could have hurt him in the primaries.

For failing to destroy U.S.-Russian bilateral relations all together by throwing the diplomatic equivalent of a temper tantrum, Secretary Gates is getting hammered by some at The Corner. 

Allow me to explain why Gates’ non-response response to Putin was the appropriate and smart one, and why it could be a very healthy sign.  For the first time that I can recall in the last eight years, a major U.S. official had the opportunity to take an easy pot shot at Russia for some perceived offense (in this case, Putin’s sharply critical speech about the U.S.) and refused to do so.  This is potentially a huge step forward. 

In an upcoming article at Taki’s Top Drawer, which should be up later this week, I will be talking about the depressing pattern of anti-Russian reporting, propaganda and commentary that have spun the events of the last eight years in such a way as to try to foment a new wave of Russophobia for the sake of certain interested parties in the West and the advance of their preferred policies. 

If Secretary Gates is moving away from this exploitative, confrontational mode of engaging Russia, it is all to the good.  However, I suspect that this is not a substantial change, but was only done out of a consideration for avoiding an open breach with the Russians.  Meddlesome, confrontational and unwise policy, whether it involves NATO expansion, the Near East or internal Russian affairs, will unfortunately remain the order of the day under this administration and under the next one as well.

Mr. McCarthy is especially distraught that Secretary Gates dismissed the ridiculous and damaging Old Europe/New Europe idea first offered by Mr. Rumsfeld when American-European relations were at a generational nadir in 2002 and early ’03.  On this, I have to applaud Secretary Gates.  He is doing some of the necessary repair work in European relations that has been left undone until now.  Mr. Rumsfeld said many silly and obnoxious things in his time at the Pentagon, but few did more to worsen relations with western European allies, specifically France and Germany, than the Old Europe/New Europe crack. 

As a failure of diplomacy, it was magnificent to behold in all its brusque stupidity.  As an actual description of political realities in Europe, it was the most transparent fraud.  Actual anti-Americanism was higher in many of the central and eastern European states whose heads of government signed the Aznar/Blair letter, and opposition to the Iraq war was as high in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, for instance, as it was in Britain or Germany.  New Europe, to the extent it existed, consisted of the smaller, poorer, formerly communist states.  Some were terrified and intimidated into supporting the superpower’s foolish gamble, while others saw it as a first-rate opportunity to suck up to Washington.  Many had also joined NATO in the last round of foolish expansion in 2002 and felt obliged to pitch in, despite the fact that they saw no threat from Iraq to their countries and despite serious opposition at home.  Spain and Britain joined in because they were led by two great egomaniacs who dismissed the objections of overwhelming majorities of their countrymen, and both countries have paid significant prices for following them. 

There was nothing new about New Europe–in fact, most of the people who signed that letter or otherwise backed the invasion were reformed or not-so-reformed communists who had successfully adapted themselves to the rhetoric of “liberal democracy” like the good lackeys that they always were.  Medgyessy, the Hungarian PM who supported the war and committed a few dozen unfortunate Hungarians to drive trucks in Iraq over the strenuous objections of the Fidesz opposition, had even been a member of the communist Hungarian intelligence service in the old days! 

In 2002 and 2003 a new foreign master was calling the tune, and they were dancing appropriately.  Not for nothing did a Russian-American friend of mine refer to these people as the “bootlicking eastern Europeans.”  That embarrassing collection of greying commies and opportunists was strangely what Rumsfeld chose to call the “new” part of Europe, when most represented nothing at all new.  These leaders did not even represent their own nations, whose good names were turned into jokes because of their governments’ positions, much less did they represent some significant trend in European politics.  Repudiating the Old Europe/New Europe nonsense is just about the first thing Secretary Gates has done in an official capacity that really separates him from Rumsfeld and the man’s poisoned legacy.  That seems to me to be obviously good for America. 

Update: Am I dreaming, or has Max Boot written something that might almost be mistaken for responsible comments on foreign policy?  At Commentary‘s blog (everybody has one now), Contentions, he wrote:

Thus Gates avoided making news—a trick Rumsfeld never mastered—and kept the focus where it belonged, on Putin’s remarks, which alarmed many of the Europeans in the room. The Secretary of Defense also showed an unexpected flair for humor, joking, for example, about how he had given up his old habit of “blunt speaking” because as president of Texas A&M he had been sent to “reeducation camp” in order to learn how to deal with the faculty. 

The unfortunate thing here is that Boot, as neo-imperialist and anti-Russian as they come, has more reason to be pleased with Gates’ move than I do.  Gates did not escalate the public row with Russia, which was obviously smart and was the reason why I approve of what he both did and did not say, but by saying nothing at all about Putin’s speech he has allowed Putin’s speech to be used as an excuse for Europeans to pull away even more from Russia.  In this sense, it actually furthers the goals of people like Boot who want nothing more than a continued harrassment and isolation of Russia, even though Gates did not work to push Russia into a corner more than it already is.