“We’re completely invisible to this debate,” said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign’s response. “As a constituency, the Christian left isn’t taken all that seriously [bold mine-DL],” Penalver said. ~The Politico

I await (almost certainly in vain) the avalanche of corrections that will be coming from progressive bloggers who believed that, “Oh, yeah, well so’s your old man!” (usually by digging up some of Bill Donohue’s more, um, colourful statements from the past) constituted a serious response to the controversy over Edwards’ two awful bloggers.  If run-of-the-mill Irish Catholic Democrats were also deeply offended by the trash Amanda Marcotte wrote, because what she wrote was actually hideously blasphemous and obscene, that would seem to suggest that complaints about her flagrant anti-Catholic and anti-Christian hatred are not simply the product of the “noise machine” and the “wingers.”  Of course, Edwards is under no obligation to fire the two women, and they are perfectly free to rant against Christians with as much obscenity, sacrilege and blasphemy as they please (such is the appalling kind of thing allowed under creative interpretations of free speech protections).  Then again, no one is under any obligation to view them with anything other than contempt.  Gauging from the average progressive’s reaction to this controversy, I would guess that the Christian left isn’t taken seriously as a constituency because most of their progressive allies regard them as amusing eccentrics and consider them to be occasionally useful for providing cover against the charge of the left’s obvious impiety and general godlessness; most of the time, they are completely irrelevant and are treated accordingly.

A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both. ~Jeffrey Hart 

But it’s hard to escape the impression that he [Hart] mainly objects to modern conservatism because it doesn’t know what color shirt to wear to the regatta. There’s a place for that kind of snobbery, I suppose, but as political analysis it’s just horseshit. ~Ross Douthat

Well, I guess Jeffrey Hart’s remarks on conservatism of a couple months ago, which originally appeared in Dartmouth’s alumni mag and were put online here, were not all together well-received at the Scene.  Ahem.  I had noticed this section in the article, and I had thought about commenting on it late last year, but I became more focused on his knocks on populism and evangelicals and didn’t return to it.  On the latter, I remarked about his Dartmouth alumni magazine comments and his earlier WSJ op-ed, much in the vein of Ross’ “regatta” crack:

Hart’s op-ed did also elicit strong reaction over his somewhat cavalier treatment of opposition to abortion (in which he rather unimpressively cited vague irrrepressible “social forces” on a matter of fundamental moral principle), and in his disdain for evangelicals one often gets the sense not so much of a High Church man whose mind boggles at the shallowness of Enthusiasm but of a Northeasterner who finds people from much of the rest of the country rather drab and miserable yokels whom we should ignore as often as we can.  

The quote from Hart that elicited Ross’, er, disapproval seems to meet with the hearty approval of Andrew Sullivan, which should always worry the person being thus favourably quoted, but I do not take that as ipso facto proof of the foolishness of the statement.  Actually, I doubt my competence to point out the flaws of Mr. Hart’s prescription for classy quasi-aristocratic social habits, since I associate all of that nonsense with the numerous Midlothian kids named “Trey” (their real names were things like James Richard Norbert III) driving around in their Benzes and (if they felt like it) marrying horse-obsessed women from Sweet Briar and I intentionally avoided that scene as much as possible when I was in Virginia.  These people were reflexively Republican, of course, but if they were “socially conservative” in any meaningful sense they hid it awfully well.  These were George Bush’s people by upbringing, background and habits.  Some of them probably played tennis and maybe even some of them would not have been out of place in Match Point.  Maybe when people act like this in the Northeast it doesn’t seem pretentious and excessive.  Perhaps the climate is better-suited to it.  I don’t know.  In fact, I typically leave all metrocon-ish and other fashion questions to Michael, though I was recently complimented–at least I assume it was a compliment–on my overcoat as being in the tradition of Lord Raglan, so perhaps I have something to say about it after all. 

What Would Lord Raglan Say?

The problem with Mr. Hart’s list is, of course, not the particular list of what a good “social conservative” of this type would wear or drink or do, but that it does not even attempt to claim, as “crunchy cons” or agrarians would plausibly try to claim, that there is a humane and tradition-guided purpose behind inculcating certain habits related to consumption, aesthetics and way of life.  Mr. Hart takes a string of things that the discerning “man about town” should prefer and calls it social conservatism, because the things actually aimed at the preservation of a sane Christian ethos are all together too controversial and liable to force you to get into arguments at the yacht club–the members of the club are the “social forces” that might be more worrying to such a “social conservative.”  Whatever the potential snags in a paleo, “crunchy,” or traditional conservative concern about the concentration of wealth and power, factory farming, soulless mass consumption, environmental degradation or the sheer ugliness of many parts of post-modern American life in their lack of grace, balance and proportion, among many other things, these are assuredly much more pressing concerns than what kind of scotch a man drinks.  To the very limited extent that “crunchy conservatism” appeared to be or actually was just a manual for how to be a right-wing wine-and-cheeser, it deserved to be ridiculed.  A respect for festivity and a spirit that understands that wine maketh glad the heart of man are important things to embrace; striking a Paul Giammati-esque pose about the virtues of “cab franc” or pinot grigio is worse than irrelevant–it is absurd.  Give me an evangelical Bryan who eschews any kind of drink to the Northeasterner with his martini and his refined sense of style any day–it is Bryan’s sort of America that I come from, at least in part, and his sort of people, whatever their flaws, who might still have it in them to create a living and sane culture. 

What was always so frustrating about the “crunchy con” debate, and every debate that touches on a conservative modus vivendior so-called “lifestyle conservatism,“is that critics normally would match the superficiality of this limited part of the argument with their own fairly shallow perceptions of the rationale behind the entire appeal.  When they were not attacked for being forerunners of yuppie fascism, “crunchy cons” were accused of making personal preferences and tastes into important, principled standards, which I think was (for the most part) untrue, but here Mr. Hart states very plainly that social conservatism is really not much more than having a sense of good taste in fashion and drink and attending the right university.  Good show, what!  Let me just say that there were more than a few folks who graduated my alma mater, which still is a fairly good school, who would have passed these tests with flying colours who would nevertheless not understand the meaning of what it is to be a gentleman.   

The idea of an aristocratic republic does not at all offend me, nor does Mr. Hart’s disdain for populism always irk me (my blog is called Eunomia after all).  But there is populism, a la John Edwards, and then there is populism.  As I said in December, there is a very real possibility for an aristocratic populism, the forerunners of which were none other than Bolingbroke and Jefferson.  In the former, this aristocratic populism was avowedly non-democratic, in the latter decidedly more democratic, but their political ideals remain surprisingly consistent across the century.  It is an appeal to these ideals, rather than the idea of rallying the mob itself, that makes up a serious, reasonably conservative populism. 

There is actually a great deal to be said for following in the tradition of those somewhat eccentric classicising aristocrats who, like Bolingbroke, fought for the broad distribution of property, the landed interest, the classical ideal of the “mixed constitution” and the diffusion of power away from the center.  It was possible for the same Old Whig principles that were embraced by oppositional aristocrats in the early eighteenth century to be championed by the Democratic Republicans and populists in the nineteenth.  This may not sit well with some of our New England and Northeastern friends, but it is far more integral to the history of American republicanism, constitutionalism and conservatism than a modish preoccupation primarily with style and cultivating a socially acceptable image.    

So there is even more to be said for adhering to the American Jeffersonian tradition that drew heavily on these aristocratic Opposition views of the Country tradition, and so there are good reasons–rooted in the finest Old Whig and High Tory hostility to corruption, the moneyed interest and centralism–to deplore the Northeastern centralising politics more or less inevitably associated with the social habits Mr. Hart holds up as ideals.

This idea, so quickly lost in discussions of Israel, is so easily grasped in other contexts. Those who oppose breaking up Belgium into separate Flemish and Walloon entities are not Flemish-hating racists, nor are those who advocate the breakup of the Belgian people animated by racist loathing of Walloons. ~Matt Yglesias

Matt Yglesias is making a lot of sense in this article, and I recommend it to you all, but I think he may have chosen a somewhat poor analogy with the example of Belgium, since it is unfortunately the case that the Belgian political class and their European cheerleaders do make the Flemish and Walloon independence movements (most especially the Flemish) out to be racist and dangerous movements.  This is because, yes, they are nationalist movements, but they also have the poor taste to object to unfettered immigration, which is their greater crime.  These claims are essentially self-serving propaganda from Brussels, which never has any trouble encouraging the self-determination of regions in other countries in Europe or elsewhere around the world, but which cannot stand the idea that Belgium, a country with scarcely more raison d’etre than Iraq ever had, might break up into its constituent regions on the basis of ethnic and linguistic differences.   

Of course, speaking of the overwhelming majority, the Wallonian nationalists (yes, they do exist) and the Flemish nationalists are not racists by any reasonable definition of the word, try as the Belgian government may to tar some of them as such as a way to revoke their public funding and disband them (as was done to the former Vlaams Blok, now called the Vlaams Belang)–this is incidentally one of the best arguments against the public financing of election campaigns.  (By the way, the great champions of freedom of speech and association who rallied to the defense of Jyllands-Posten and Denmark last year had nothing but congratulations or silence on hearing the news of the outlawing of the VB–that is what liberty amounts to in the heart of the EU.) 

As has long been the case, the charge of racism (or any other kind of terrible -ism of prejudice) is very frequently simply a weapon defined and used by those who reject the very idea of ethnic or racial identity as a basis for political organisation.  In the Belgian case, the drive for Flemish independence would deal a crippling blow to Belgium by taking away some of its most productive and wealthy areas, and the triumph of nationalist separatism in their own background would also be a significant embarrassment to the state that prides itself on its decided lack of nationalism and its role as the center of the transnational mental ward of European nations that is the EU.  Naturally, every state tries to preserve itself, and it usually has no compunctions about doing so through extremely dishonest and brutal means.  Flinging the extremely powerful charges of the West’s greatest contemporary thought crimes is a most effective weapon in effectively suppressing and intimidating dissidents or at least temporarily impeding the success of political movements that the state sees as inimical to its interests.  Interestingly, in the Israeli case it is not nearly so often the government in Israel that engages in these sorts of tactics, but rather it is usually its sympathisers abroad who lead the charge in trying to marginalise or discredit speech they regard as hostile to the integrity of the Israeli state.

Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).  This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. ~Jonah Goldberg‘s challenge to Juan Cole, c. 2005

Via Matt Yglesias

While no one doubts Goldberg’s preference, if not skill, for clever word play, I don’t suppose there would be much danger for him to engage in a lot of CV reading as a cover for his bad arguments.  There wouldn’t be much of a CV to read anyway.  In any case, he prefers the route of ad hominem and distortion. 

This bet exemplifies what has always been so painfully comic about debating neocons on anything related to the Near East: it has almost always been a contest between the relatively well-informed, the professional and the expert among us on one side and on the other people, like Goldberg, who strike bold moral poses about a region they do not begin to understand and believed they could remould like so much potter’s clay.  These were the people who included such luminaries as James Woolsey, who could write (presumably seriously) in The Wall Street Journal in the months before the war that Iraqi Shi’ites were primed and ready to be the Jeffersonians of Iraq–he specifically used the term Jeffersonian.  These were the people who would quote The Arab Mind as some sort of reliable guide to the region’s peoples, while laughing at the State Department’s Arabists because they were deemed to have an insufficiently morally “clear” perspective on Israel (i.e., at least some people at State believe that Arabs are human beings and should occasionally be treated as such).  When necessary, they would trot out the egregiously biased Bernard Lewis as one of their house professionals to bless their foolish invasion, even though everything about the history of the nation-states of the modern Near East screamed, “This will fail!”  These were the people who said, “The road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad”–they just didn’t realise that they were referring to the road that leads to Jerusalem from Tehran.  Well, better luck next time, I suppose.    

Now that it is too late to avoid calamity, these profound thinkers discover that Iraq is a fissiparous and artificial state seething with rivalries and resentments that had just been waiting to burst out into the open.  Indeed, the new meme bouncing around is that Iraq was always such a godawful mess that nothing could have been done to prevent the nightmare now unfolding (except, of course, the option of not invading–but for them this is never considered a serious alternative, not even now).  This is said now not so much as an explanation as an exculpation, a way out for all of the villains and enablers who pushed a war of aggression and destroyed a country.  Exactly like the fragmented Yugoslavia that these same masters of the universe cheered on to its destruction (and whose destruction they did more than a little to hasten), Iraq has rapidly fallen to violent contestation of power among its constituent member groups (just as more than a few people who knew more than two things about Iraq said would probably happen in the absence of strong central rule).  This would be the natural result of the aftermath of the collapse of any regime, especially any regime trying to hold together at least three mutually antagonistic communities, as those with some respect for and knowledge of history outside of the hallowed 1938-1945 period would have known.  Yet somehow it has taken these far-seeing visionaries entirely by surprise. 

As late as last summer these sages quibbled over whether you could really call the savage sectarian killings in Iraq civil war.  You see, there weren’t rival armies in distinctive uniforms duking it out in the fields of Pennsylvania, so therefore it couldn’t be a real civil war (not that our “civil war” was actually a civil war, of course, but that would take us too far afield).  When they were pressed to admit the obvious some of their less scrupulous allies cooked up kooky analogies to the Spanish Civil War (in which America apparently was functioning in the role of the Soviet sponsor of the Second Republic…which in addition to being atrocious also happened to lose its war).  Naturally, they wished to avoid admitting the existence of civil war, because they know that Americans are funny about seeing their soldiers getting killed in somebody else’s bloody grudge match.  Americans don’t like this at all and assume that a foreign civil war is an intractable conflict that is not worthy of American sacrifice.  To acknowledge the existence of a civil war makes plans for counterinsurgency almost irrelevant, because it is an admission of deep political failure that precludes any possibility of successful counterinsurgency.  It is no surprise, then, that we should find the most die-hard supporters of the misguided surge among the same people who were the last to admit the reality of Iraqi civil war.  The surge supporters are, of course, among the last to keep pretending that there is an “Iraqi government” distinct from the Shi’ite militias and death squads–they have to maintain this fiction if they are going to be able to support the surge.  

In early 2005, civil war seemed likely, and the elections along sectarian and ethnic lines virtually confirmed that there would be one sooner or later.  The Samarra bombing roughly one year ago signaled to everyone paying attention that it had clearly started.  That Goldberg could predict in 2005, in all earnestness and snide condescension, that there would be no civil war in Iraq, even when essentially every relevant precedent and modern experience with post-Versailles multiethnic states in the wake of the Cold War told us otherwise, should have discredited him completely then as a commentator on all things Iraqi.

While on quasi-hiatus, it is tempting to look in and remark on the odd ill-advisedwager of steak or comment on the idiocy of the Senate’s failed cloture motion connected to the surge “debate” (Al Franken must have Coleman running scared–he even voted for cloture), but really of far greater interest for all, I think, is to comment on my recent reading of the first part of Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act in connection with my L.A. Armenian experience.

Over the weekend, I was in L.A. among many Armenians at a graduate student colloquium at UCLA.  The colloquium was well-done and successful all around, though there was the occasional, minor flaring-up of arevmtyan and arevelyan hay disputes that are fascinating in their subtlety and complete imperceptibility to most of us otarner (foreigners/non-Armenians).  For those who scarcely know what the Armenian language is, the distinction between the two major dialects is even more obscure, and so, too, are the slight cultural variations between the different Armenian communities.   

Part of the dispute is, of course, the different place of the genocide in the collective memory of the Diasporans around the world and the Eastern Armenians living in the Republic, and the other part is the related problem that the Diasporans–because their people came from eastern Anatolia in Van, Erzerum, Cilicia and elsewhere–tend not to see the Republic as their real home country.  This brings us back to the tragic story of Hrant Dink, whose prosecution by the Turkish state–leading to the incitement of the public and Mr. Dink’s murder at the hands of a nationalist fanatic–turned on the twisting of a phrase that he intended for a Diasporan audience.  He had said that the Diasporan preoccupation with Turkish guilt was acting like “poison in their blood,” which some time-serving goons in the Turkish government managed to twist into a claim that Turkish blood was poison.  Mr. Dink’s point, lost on so many Diasporans and even more Turks, was that obsession with recognition of the genocide, the extensive leaning on this one historical event as the definition of your identity, was crippling them as a people and diverting their energies from the necessary work of building up Armenia.  He was essentially right, but it is another tragedy that his murder by a Turkish nationalist will almost certainly drown out his reasonable appeal and make recognition of the genocide that much more of a priority over more practical concerns of aiding the actual state that Armenians finally have. 

As related in one of the talks at the colloquium, Western Armenians, scattered around the globe as they are, are focused more intensely on the nature of their national identity, while the Armenians in the Republic tend to be focused more on the bread-and-butter concerns of economic and political reform in their country.  This is not to say that Eastern Armenians aren’t concerned with their history, since they are very much concerned, or that Western Armenians aren’t concerned about Armenia, because they are quite concerned, but that the primary emphasis for each community, broadly speaking, often lies elsewhere.

This got me to thinking after having read the early parts of A Shameful Act (Dr. Akcam, by the way, will be speaking at the University of Chicago this Friday at the Oriental Institute at 7:00), because it occurred to me that, as often as various early republican Turkish officials insisted that the genocide had been necessary to pave the way for the Turkish national state (hence the Turkish Republic’s obsession with denial), the genocide also served ironically to artificially divide Armenians from the Diaspora and Armenia from one another to some degree.  The memory of this horror has proved to be so much more powerful and central for many Diasporan Armenians in a way that was never entirely possible for the Eastern Armenians whose ancestors did not experience it, and it has probably come to form a larger part of the Diasporan identity because it is directly part of their history–rather than part of a general national history in which their immediate kin never directly participated–and has thus managed to introduce a barrier of sorts between them and their fellow Armenians.  Its final bitter fruit has been to create something of a gap in understanding between the two largest parts of the Armenian world.  Of course, I think it is fair to say that almost all Armenians still desire recognition of the genocide as genocide from Turkey, but even then it is possible that this recognition will not mean quite the same thing–and so may have very different effects in the two communities–because the genocide does not have quite the same meaning for both.

In that case, I guess my name would be Quin Hillyer.  Hillyer at his boilerplate best:

And the conservative movement of Buckley and Rusher and Tyrrell and Blackwell and Weyrich and Viguerie and Kemp and Friedman, soon to be bolstered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett, and allied with Thatcher and Pope John Paul II and a union leader named Walesa, along with thousands of other conservatives who kept the faith, all joined behind Reagan and, yes, used their power to start the world over again.

Start the world over again?  What nonsense is this?  Have you ever read such rot?  If any halfway decent conservative had ever been under the impression that Reagan, Thatcher et al. were trying to “start the world over again” in some sort of political messianism, he would have fled in the other direction.  The conservative ideal of renovatio is not one that presumes that the world can be started over from scratch, but that what was best in the old order can be renewed and restored and given new life. 

Once you get past the hilarious opening paragraphs of Hillyer’s piece, where he trots out a series of hypotheticals with the sense of profound meaning worthy of Bernard Henri-Levy (including this winner: “What if Karl Rove re-establishes his reputation as a political genius and designs a stunning political comeback for the president?”), you come upon a string of some of the lamest attempts at saving the sinking fusionist ship that you will ever see in your life.  The virtually content-free nod to Russell Kirk comes in the same breath as ridiculous praise for Giuliani, and immediately after he has invoked the pro-gay drag queen mayor he tells us that “Judeo-Christian values” are the “wellspring of our civic tradition.”  Except in an election season, when we need to get behind someone like Giuliani, who wouldn’t know “Judeo-Christian values” if they ran over him in the street.   Then we are treated to a horrifying hybrid: the “mind of Madison”! the “exuberance” of Kemp! “the courage of Churchill”!  You can hear the hybrid speaking now: “We shall never surrender the empowerment zones in our inner cities!” 

Why does the reader get the impression that Mr. Hillyer just grabbed a bunch of well-known figures from Anglo-American political history (though what Jack Kemp is doing wedged between James Madison and Winston Churchill, I could not tell you) and made a competely incongruous and patchwork list?  Oh, because that’s exactly what he did.  It reads like the dispatch from a Party Congress that has to make sure to acknowledge all of the representatives of each faction as a way of demonstrating official approval of all of the members.  It has the tone of a wartime propaganda poster: “Don’t forget the heroism of Comrade Zaitsev!  Not one step back!”  What a dreadful pseudo-paean to the departed President Reagan on his birthday.  What a hideous exploitation of the man’s memory.    

There is assuredly some irony in the fact that Friedman and Viguerie, to take two from Hillyer’s roll call of glory, had long since repudiated central elements of the Bush administration, whose decaying corpse Hillyer is clearly trying (with great difficulty) to lift up onto the high altar of conservative veneration.  The late Milton Friedman, may he rest in peace, rejected the Iraq war as the aggression that it was, and Richard Viguerie is rather upset with a great many GOP betrayals–hence his new website and book called Conservatives Betrayed.  Somehow I don’t think either one would want his reputation and past work to be summoned to lend aid to the likes of Scooter Libby and used on behalf of an absurdly ill-conceived increase of troops in a war that one of them regarded as essentially immoral.

Yes, he’s socially liberal.  Yes, he won’t be anybody’s moral crusader.  That’s alright with me.  If the man understands the real nature of the office AND follows his career-long law and order instincts, then there is arguably no one better for the White House than Rudy G.  He is articulate, effective, and widely admired.  ~Hunter Baker

Yes, but is he clean? 

That’s actually a serious question.  Giuliani is potentially going to have a lot of problems with the post-9/11 business deals he made, and some of them may well be more shady than others.  The man who gave you Bernie Kerik for DHS is also the man who has been raking in millions in the aftermath of the attacks–do we all really assume that it is all entirely above-board and legit?

Just think about it: it will bring together the Hungarian and Cuban vote!

A couple of months ago I suggested to look out for McCain/Pawlenty in 2008. Today Giuliani/Huckabee may be the better bet. ~John McIntyre, RCP Blog

And yep, Giuliani-Huckabee has a certain ring to it. Reagan Democrats plus Southern Evangelicals equals . . . victory? ~Ross Douthat

Um, no. 

But why stop here with the implausible ’08 GOP tickets?  Some have even been batting around the idea of the formidable Romney-Hutchison combination, which will apparently try to pull in the Big Hair vote.  Don’t look now, but we might have to watch out for a Brownback-Snowe dynamo!  Or maybe Bloomberg-Inhofe, just for fun!

I respectfully submit to you all that imaginary presidential tickets that put together two candidates (such as Giuliani and Huckabee) who don’t stand a snowball’s chance of winning more than one or two primaries can be very amusing and help to while away the hours, but they are inherently silly.

Interrupting my hiatus yet again, I present here an unintentionally amusing line from Hugh Hewitt as he complains about Terry Jeffrey’s preference for Tancredo over the Terrible Trio:

But encouraging the sort of destructive crusade that Congressman Tancredo wants to lead should be labelled exactly what it is:  The triumph of posture over purpose.

So wrote the man who is organising a grassroots revolt to force the GOP to commit political suicide over a meaningless non-binding resolution on the surge.  There is absolutely no posturing involved here, let me tell you!

But just consider Hewitt’s reaction to Jeffrey’s (obviously half-hearted) support for a second-tier candidate.  To support anyone outside of the Terrible Trio appears to him to be something akin to insanity.  He literally cannot fathom that voting for one of the few reasonably, actually conservative candidates in the race is something other than a “protest” vote.  Presumably, voting for Tancredo would be a protest vote under normal circumstances, but under normal circumstances there is usually a top-tier candidate who genuinely and reliably holds at least some conservative views.  (If someone cites Giuliani’s opposition to crime as proof of his supposed conservatism one more time, I will lose all patience.)  Certainly, on immigration Tancredo is light years ahead of the top tier and is the better conservative candidate on immigration, with the possible exceptions of Hunter and Paul, who have also been reliably opposed to the open borders crowd.  In the top four, you have three pro-immigration candidates and Romney, the last of whom has shown a willingness to “discover” convictions as and when he needs them. 

In fact, Tancredo is probably the best-known elected Republican opponent of amnesty and open borders, while most of the major candidates are either pro-amnesty or have been sitting on the sidelines of the debate all along.  It may or may not be true that opposition to mass immigration is a loser in general elections (I strongly doubt that it is a losing issue), but in the GOP primaries it will be a burning issue.  Mr. Bush’s support for amnesty has been the chief reason why most conservatives around the country have lost confidence in him.   

From my perspective, Tancredo has been entirely wrong on the war, but for GOP primary voters he is in many ways a perfect fit for their issues.  Instead of the politically deadly combination of being vaguely critical of the war and pro-amnesty, as Hagel and Brownback are, Tancredo is pro-war and staunchly against any amnesty or amnesty-lite.  Plus, religiously, he is the reverse Brownback, a Catholic who became an evangelical, which can probably only help him in the primaries.     

Whether he could be a successful candidate is quite another story–obviously, the money and organisation of the major candidates are going to be superior, and most of them are almost certainly more accomplished campaigners.  But a Tancredo nomination is not nearly as far-fetched and ridiculous as the shills, The Wall Street Journal and the rest of the open borders lobby would like to think. 

I take Jim Antle’s point that a failed Tancredo ticket, should it ever somehow come to that, could do more harm to the causes of border security and controlling immigration than good, but no good will come to either of those causes if both nominees next year are pro-amnesty.

Taki Theodoracopulos, co-founder of The American Conservative, has brought out a new webzine, a much-expanded Taki’s Top Drawerthat will start shaking some of the rot out of contemporary conservatism and giving the usurpers who have run conservatism into the ground a good hiding on a regular basis.  Takialreadyhashadquite a few things to say this month.  He is joined by Paul Gottfried, Justin Raimondo and F.J. Sarto, who is also the managing editor of the webzine.  Before too long, you may see another familiar name showing up over there.  More updates in the future.

I realise that I have been negligent in linking to Joseph Pearce’s blogging at Small Is Still Beautiful.  See what he has to say about land, democracy, direct action, and bogus democracy and its relationship to centralism.

Update: F.J. Sarto says of Giuliani:

Nevertheless, we must give this much to Giuliani: He may have cheated on his wife flagrantly in the mayor’s house, appeared in drag with a disturbing frequency, gone to live with two male homosexuals for almost a year after divorcing his betrayed wife and adopted positions indisintinguishable from those of Hillary Clinton, but we cannot take this from him: On Sept. 11, 2001, he did not cry like a little girl. Nor was he reading “My Pet Goat” or hiding in an “undisclosed location.” So perhaps he will be something of an improvement.