Ross and Reihan have been selfishly guarding their well-kept secrets and hoarding their witty insights for a month now (on the lame pretexts of “having work to do” and “employment”), so it will soon be time for them to come back and share the wealth.  Sen. Webb would approve.

This will be good news for many, but especially for my readers, since I will be going on a similar hiatus for the duration of February (it is the shortest month of the year, so I’m not depriving you all quite as much as the lads at the Scene have).  Conference papers don’t write themselves, and conference attendance this weekend will be swallowing up four days that might have gone towards something more productive.  (This is where I’m obliged to say that all academic conferences are terribly productive, appropriate uses of our time–chiefly because it gets us here in the Midwest out of seemingly near-Arctic temperatures and forces us to go to sunny California.)  Actually, I will probably get more reading done on this trip than I have managed in several weeks, but none of that will bring my dissertation chapters to completion. 

Eunomia has never been dormant for this long, so it will be interesting to see how many readers will still be here when I “get back.”  Technically, the hiatus doesn’t begin until tomorrow, but there are preparations to be made for the L.A. jaunt and some things that need to get done before I leave.  I may pop back in this evening for a final word.  If not, then hajoghut’yun.

Poor Mitt just can’t buy a break these days.  Now he’s being hit for a veto of funding that would have gone to reimbursing nursing homes so that they could provide kosher meals to elderly Jews on Medicaid:

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told The Politico that the governor vetoed the legislation to cut spending.

“The state was in a fiscal crisis, and it would have led to higher Medicaid reimbursement rates for nursing homes, which was unaffordable at the time,” he said. “Once we restored fiscal balance, we were in a position to add spending where appropriate.”

The provision is now law, and Fehrnstrom said the veto has not become an issue on the campaign trail.

Yet given the intensity of the battle for Jewish donors, it may become one. “Governor Romney has been pushing his strong and unadulterated belief in a very strong state of Israel,” said a national Jewish leader with close ties to the Republican Party. “Any sort of dents to his armor become problematic to him. There is hesitation in the community to begin with because of his Mormonism. [bold mine-DL] â€¦These sorts of chinks in his armor will help his opponents.”

“It’s definitely going to hurt Romney in the Jewish community,” said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “You’d think for someone who’s of a minority religion he’d be a little more sensitive to these concerns.”

Somehow I don’t think he’s going to be feeling the minority religion solidarity–note the line about “hesitation” in the community because of his Mormonism.  Now I understand what Christians and straight-up secularists don’t like about Mormons, but what are the specifically Jewish objections to the Mormons in particular?

The author pretends to argue that hostility to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is the defining characteristic of the “new” anti-semitism, which is fairly ridiculous on its own terms, but as you read through the examples that’s clearly not what he’s saying. Rather, his view is that some people make what he regards as extreme or over-the-top criticisms of Israel, and that anti-semites would also make such criticisms, so therefore anyone who criticizes Israel too stridently is either practicing anti-semitism or else creating it.

Needless to say, similar standards don’t apply elsewhere. Check out my friend Mark Leon Goldberg’s post about Anne Bayefsky’s ridiculous accusation that “the U.N. provides sustenance for the Iranian genocidal threat, which is directed at Israel now, and America next.” That’s a crazy, absurd, and horribly unfair thing to say. It’s not, however, evidence of racial animosity against Persians, or South Koreans or whomever. By the same token, criticism of Israel — even ill-informed, unfair, unduly harsh criticism of Israel — isn’t anti-semitism, it’s political disagreement.

At any rate, when you think about it, things like this essay or Jonah Goldberg’s little McCarthyite smears aren’t really about convincing people that I’m an anti-semite, or that Tony Judt or Adrienne Rich or Tony Kushner is. The idea, basically, is to scare the goyim who figure that while liberal Jews can take the heat, they probably can’t, and had best just avoid talking about the whole thing. And based on my observations of the blogosphere, it works pretty well as a tactic. ~Matt Yglesias

It does work fairly well as a tactic.  Most people don’t want the grief that would inevitably come with even broaching such sensitive topics.  Second–and this is the really clever part of the intimidation–they have already been thoroughly convinced by previous ritual denunciations of other people as anti-Semites for their policy views that they begin to think that the people being so denounced really are anti-Semitic, which not only intimidates them from commenting but convinces them that the only people who would even be motivated to say anything critical or contrary must be people with bad motives.  They know that they don’t have any bad motives or prejudices like those people, and so go along with the intimidation.  After all, all those denunciations couldn’t all be politically motivated trash, could they?  Actually, they could.  We are watching it unfold before us yet again.  

There are not many so masochistic, indifferent to career suicide or otherwise reckless to say very much critical about anything even touching on Israel, and the few who are impetuous enough to say anything can usually be pretty easily pigeonholed or ostracised and marginalised.  It remains a despicable and base tactic, but those are often the most “effective” kind when the goal is to destroy your opponent’s good name and annihilate his credibility. 

Of course, the definition of what constitutes excessively “strident” criticism of Israel will somehow wind up being in the control of people who tend to think almost every criticism of Israel is excessively strident.  That would be the point of the whole exercise, which is control of the debate and the definition of its terms and limits.  That is what happens in any discourse when a society tolerates the existence of self-appointed gatekeepers who hold all the keys and make all the rules about what can be said and how.

You’d have to be pretty thick not to realize that del Toro intends the fairyland narrative — heavy with arbitrary commands, underground abattoirs, and intimations of blood sacrifice — as a commentary on the politics at work in the real-world storyline, and this realization has sent many critics into raptures over the film’s supposed political sophistication. Hence, for instance, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern’s announcement that Pan’s Labyrinth “deepens our emotional understanding of fascism, and of rigid ideology’s dire consequences.”

This is, of course, precisely what the movie doesn’t do. López makes what he can of the character of Vidal, turning a cardboard villain into a memorable monster, but the film’s politics are about as deep as a puddle of blood. The fascists are beasts who torture, maim, and kill without compunction, before sitting down to fine dinners with local grandees and corrupt clerics; the Communists in the woods, on the other hand, are a heroic lot, sturdy and kindhearted and ethically pure, like figures out of, well, Communist propaganda. The only thing such caricatures deepen is our understanding of predictable left-wing bias in Western cinema. ~Ross Douthat (via Peter Suderman)

I haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth, so I reserve judgement on the quality of this film.  It almost could not be as good as everyone claims it is, because that would mean that it is as memorable and well-done as Casablanca but not nearly so clumsy with its blatant political moralising.  Obviously, if Ross’ review is right (and for the content of his review I am only working from the two paragraphs Peter cited), it is even clumsier and therefore probably much, much worse.  

Casablanca is a great classic in its way, but it is also one of the pioneers in heavy-handed, clumsy anti-fascist propaganda (this undoubtedly improves its reputation for most people, but it is a serious flaw in the film).  Victor Laszlo was also sturdy, kindhearted and ethically pure (and he gets the girl!), the Germans were also obviously cruel and malevolent, and Rick was that classic type of the embittered American idealist (whose motto apparently is, “I will never learn from experience”).  The inevitable conclusion is more predictable than the final shaadi scene in a Bollywood romance.   The shallowness of Casablanca‘s politics has never stopped people from considering it one of the greatest movies ever made, though it almost certainly should have.         

Speaking of the merry communist bands in the forest and the noble Laszlo, I much prefer my commie movie heroes to actually be decent patriotic Russians who are only later cynically transformed into Party symbols by the conniving little commissars who secretly hate the heroes (the portrayal of Zaitsev in Enemy at the Gates is a lot more believable and sympathetic than Laszlo’s cookie-cutter “freedom”-fighting commie).  Therefore, when I heard that Pan’s Labyrinth was something like a mythical allegory on the closing days of the Spanish Civil War, my heart sank.  I had initially been intrigued by what I had heard of the story, and immediately after learning about the political angle I was sure I already knew the script.  Ross’ description confirmed my suspicions: noble Republican heroes confront over-the-top bad guy fascists.  How they do so and what we see along the way become almost secondary to this tiresome moral lesson.  Maybe Pan’s Labyrinth doesn’t hector us as much as it sounds like it does, but it would be a unique anti-fascist movie if it didn’t.  When I first heard of the movie, I thought, “That might be very interesting.”  Then I heard the bit about the Spanish Civil War and I thought, “How dreary.”

This is not because I am uninterested in the Spanish Civil War (quite the opposite, in fact), but because I am entirely uninterested in morality plays in which it is taken as a given that the “fascists”–that is, the Nationalists–represent the embodiment of corruption and darkness, while the Republicans represent everything good and humane.  (When, I ask you, will someone make an updated version of the story of El Cid featuring the character of a dashing Carlist general?  When hell freezes over, comes the answer.)  It’s one of the reasons I always have such a hard time taking Hemingway seriously, because writers are supposed to be great observers of the world around them and writers who side with what I consider clearly atrocious causes have forfeited some of their authority as witnesses about the world.  That’s also one of the reasons I implicitly trust Roy Campbell’s aesthetic judgement.  I suppose I am in a distinct minority here. 

However, while I’m sure Ross is entirely right in his assessment of the depth of the movie’s politics and its lack of political sophistication, I submit that this is exactly the kind of “emotional understanding of fascism” that everyone wants and it is the sort of understanding that everyone will declare brilliant and insightful because it achieves something so much more important to a modern audience (especially a modern American audience) than real understanding of a phenomenon: it reenacts and condemns the audience’s foremost, universally-hated ideology in a sort of spectacle of moral judgement.  The only “emotional understanding of fascism” most of these people want is a very simple one that involves learning how to hate fascists.  In fact, there has never been any other kind of understanding in any form of Western art since 1945 for obvious reasons.  If that involves reimagining the Nationalists of Spain as stereotypical fascists, so be it. 

Everyone can unreservedly despise the “fascists” portrayed in the spectacle, while patting themselves on the back for being free of the bonds of such a “rigid ideology.”  There is no need to delve any deeper than puddle-level into the politics of the subject.  We know from the beginning how we will react to the fascists; our conditioning has done half the director’s work for him.  All he needs do is give us a little push and we are happily sprinting towards whatever he wishes us to see, as if we were in a race with our fellow viewers to see who will reach the expected feeling of revulsion and contempt first.  “Oh, look at me, I hate fascism the most–do I get a cookie?” the winner will cry.  “Simplistic narratives and characters,” as Peter describes them, are the only kind that can exist in a movie about fascism or any regime deemed fascist by the cognoscenti.  The closest anyone has ever come to making a more complicated movie about a famous fascist person, to my knowledge, was Max (Tea with Mussolini definitely does not count), but that was set in Hitler’s youth and even that, in the end, had to succumb to a caricature every bit as cartoonish as any you will likely see.  The ending of Max is the payoff to the audience that has endured treating Hitler like a real human being for well over an hour–they want to see him reduced to a gibbering madman, no more, no less, and the director obliges.   There may come a time when this is not the case, but until someone produces, say, a complex and intelligent bio-pic about Marshal Petain or some Clint Eastwood of the next generation directs Letters from Salo we will continue to be treated to the thin, predictable treatment that assumes everything and asks nothing.  That is the treatment everyone wants, because anti-fascism is essentially the last universally-accepted consensus view. 

If you took away the audience’s mindless anti-fascism, they would become very agitated and unhappy, because it would be to take away the one thing about which virtually everyone can agree.  It is to some degree one of the few truly universal bonds uniting people from all over the world, and it provides a handy moral and political compass for most of the world.  To challenge that consensus would be to invite doom on yourself.  To start introducing anything other than simplistic narratives and characters into storytelling about anything related to fascism or those regimes conventionally and often ignorantly deemed fascist would be to risk the classical charge of trying to reject the gods of the city.  Not only would the director who dared to try be crushed by negative press and his motives impugned, but very few people would go to see it.  It would be considered part of the decadent avant-garde and relegated to the realm of strange experimental films.  It is much easier, then, to take the normal route, paint in bright primary colours with no subtlety whatever and receive the accolades of a grateful public, whose comforting crutch of reconfirmed ideological superiority continues to support them and keep them from having to think about the rigidities of their own ideological commitments and the crimes of their own regimes.

The folks at the Prospect must be slipping.  Compare Amy Sullivan’s meaty, well-researched Washington Monthly article on Romney’s evangelical problem with Sarah Posner’s “What Evangelical Problem?” to see a significant difference in substance.  Nonetheless, Posner’s article is interesting, and it highlights some of our favourite Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt.  The article also does do us all a favour and traces the connections between two of the three that helps explain why they are working together to boost Romney’s candidacy.  However, the article starts out hinting that some of the “biggest power brokers of the Christian right are lovin’ Mitt.”  By some, she means exactly three.  That hardly does away with Romney’s larger problems with evangelicals. 

An interesting tidbit about one of the “biggest power brokers,” Jay Sekulow, that had either escaped my notice the first time around or drifted from memory was that Sekulow was a big booster of Harriet Miers’ nomination.  That doesn’t surprise me, since I was pretty sure at the time many evangelicals were thrilled to have “one of theirs” nominated to the Court in spite of her impressive lack of any qualifications for the position.  In fact, besides the gross cronyism and Mr. Bush’s love of incompetent appointees that were at the heart of the nomination, I assumed Bush had selected Miers because she was an evangelical and that this was his ham-fisted attempt to reward evangelicals for their political support.  Evangelicals certainly were enthusiastic about her, and resented the way she was drop-kicked when it became clear that all serious people were convinced the nomination was a horrifying disaster about to unfold. 

That brings us to Mr. Sekulow’s support for Mitt Romney.  If Mr. Sekulow’s judgement in presidential candidates is as poor as it was in backing a nonentity for the Supreme Court (a nonentity who, let us remember, also had an embarrassing record saying things about abortion that were not all together pro-life), we can assume that Gov. Romney is even less qualified that he might otherwise first appear to be.  Considering that Sam Brownback was instrumental in quashing the Miers nomination, it is especially fitting that he should be in a position to undo another one of the people Mr. Sekulow has chosen to support.  Consider also that, in the extremely unlikely event of a Romney presidency, Sekulow could have significant influence on the kinds of justices a President Romney would select, which means that we have good reason to expect more absurd nominees like Harriet Miers should Romney ever reach the White House.  That and that alone ought to be reason enough to make sure that we make this virtually impossible outcome totally impossible.

And the “larger” question I’ve been pondering of late is this: Why have some elements of the right attacked Governor Romney so viciously? Especially since many of these same people (like the guiding force behind MassResistance) not only don’t support an alternative candidate, they even voted for the Governor in past campaigns when he advanced more liberal views. Why the malice?

These attacks are interesting considering I spend all day every day working for a pro-life and pro-family legal organization and actually wear the uniform of my country as a member of the U.S. Army Reserves. I would take the attacks personally (and sometimes, I admit, it is hard not to), but I also realize an essential truth. This malice is not about me — and it’s not even about Governor Romney.

Yes, that’s right. The malice really has little or nothing to do with Governor Romney. Instead — and this is vitally important to understand — Governor Romney merely represents the vehicle (a highly public vehicle) for grinding axes within the conservative movement itself. ~David French, Evangelicals for Mitt

I can’t speak for anyone else (and I dispute the idea that anyone is being particularly malicious or vicious towards Gov. Romney), but it seems to me that the criticism really is all about Gov. Romney and about little else.  I don’t target him as a representative of a larger group in the conservative movement because he doesn’t represent any larger group–the group he would like to represent is precisely the group whose views he does not, in fact, possess (or has only possessed them for a very short time while he has been making his run).  My criticism of him is not really directed at someone else–it is really all aimed at Candidate Romney. 

He is being vetted as the social conservative he claims to be.  His claims are being challenged based on substantial evidence that gives conservatives pause and makes them wonder if the new Mitt Romney on display is anything other than a fraud being perpetrated on them.  Given the relative novelty of his position as a pro-lifer, in particular, it is shocking that any social conservatives of any kind are still considering him as a serious contender at all to serve as their standard-bearer.  This is, however, the cycle in which Giuliani is also being taken seriously as a contender for the nomination, so clearly standards are slipping all over the place.

But just ask yourself whether anyone who had recently joined a movement or a group would be encouraged to become one of the most prominent members of that group after having been a serious opponent of everything your group represents.  Of course, this wouldn’t happen, and we all know this.  It is virtually unheard of that the novice is allowed to become the abbot after a year or two, and it is almost never the case that the heretic gets to become bishop after a couple years of penance.  Likewise in any secular organisation: the newest club member who has just signed up to pad his resume does not usually get elected president; the freshman House member does not get to be Speaker in the space of a couple years; the branch manager of a bank does not get promoted to be CEO and Chairman of the corporation.  Even if there were no concerns about Romney’s opportunistic “discovery” of the sanctity of life–and there are many concerns–he is playing the role of the greenhorn upstart who wants to run the whole ranch.  Nobody likes that kind of guy (well, unless his name is Obama, in which case all kinds of people pretend to like him), and I mean nobody. 

The criticism against Romney has everything to do with Gov. Romney’s choices and record and the very convenient timing of his profound conversion to supporting the cause of life.  The first President Bush received similarly justified criticism when he suddenly discovered his abiding concern about the sanctity of life–this was around the same time he discovered how profound his problems would be in trying to get re-elected.  If Romney and his supporters want less scrutiny and less harsh criticism, he shouldn’t have egregiously flip-flopped in such a blatantly cynical way or he shouldn’t have decided to run for President in ’08.  In another four or eight years, concern about his “conversion” would have become less acute as he built up more of a record of prolonged commitment to the cause that was not so obviously tied to his ambitions for higher office (assuming, of course, that he changed his mind without having an election on the horizon).  That he chose to become pro-life and run for President at almost the exact same time cries out, “I am pandering for votes in the Republican primaries!”  If there has been any viciousness directed against Gov. Romney, it has only been the disdain smart voters and observers show for particularly clumsy politicians who try to dupe them with claims about their beliefs that do not pass the sniff test.  We don’t like frauds, and we’re not going to put up with their attempts to scam us.

I’m employed by a large pro-life organization and I can tell you that pro-lifers have been very receptive to Romney’s conversion story. Your advice that he “would probably be better off not talking about it all” is off the mark. If he doesn’t address why he’s pro-life after years of being mildly pro-choice, voters won’t accept that he’s sincere. But if he can openly share his conversion story, pro-lifers will gladly accept him into our ranks. ~Nathan Burd (of Evangelicals for Mitt) to Rich Lowry

Except that Lowry’s remarks advising Romney to keep mum about the subject were in the context of saying that he didn’t find the conversion story very credible or convincing at all.  Lowry said:

His account of how he came to change his view on abortion—through the issue of stem-cell research—isn’t very compelling and he would probably be better off not talking about it at all. Fairly or not, people aren’t going to believe it.

Indeed, becoming ardently pro-life by way of an acquaintance with stem-cell research is about as likely as deciding to become an Athonite monk because of exposure to the idea of intelligent design.  It isn’t implausible that thinking and reflecting on the matter over some time might eventually lead you on a path that ends at being ardently pro-life, but to make the leap Romney claims to have made in the space of a year or so is very hard to take.  Lowry is not alone in finding this story to be pretty far-fetched.  As Byron York wrote late last year:

Romney’s description of his conversion strikes some activists on both sides of the abortion issue as unusual. “People do change their minds,” says the pro-choice Kogut. “I’ve seen it. But this is different. It seems completely timed with his presidential ambitions.” Oran Smith, pro-life, questions Romney’s explanation in a more subtle way. In talks with conservative Christians, Smith points out, Romney has often addressed the issue of his Mormon faith by saying something to the effect of, “Our faiths are different, but they bring us to the same positions on the issues.” But by all accounts, Romney was a faithful Mormon when he was solidly pro-choice, and he is a faithful Mormon today when he is solidly pro-life. How, precisely, did his faith bring him to different positions, then and now? “Christians generally like for someone to have a conversion experience and a mea culpa moment,” says Smith. “But he doesn’t have that to turn to. He can’t say, ‘My faith changed, and therefore my views changed.’ That’s the normal thing with Republicans who move to the right on some issues — they claim to have had some spiritual transformation.”

Another problem Romney might have is the sheer recent-ness of his change of views, which occurred at virtually the same moment Romney was making early moves in South Carolina. A change itself is not that unusual, says David Woodard, but the timing is. “There are a lot of conversion stories,” Woodard says, “people who say, ‘I was pro-choice until my daughter got pregnant,’ or ‘I was pro-choice until a friend got pregnant,’ and then they had a lot of misgivings. That worked in the ‘80s, or the early ‘90s, but in 2004, after this issue has been aired for many years? It’s going to be harder.” 

In fact, what Romney’s “conversion” story tells us is that if he is telling the truth about the reasons for becoming pro-life he is basically not telling the truth about the influence of his faith on his “values” or he is simply admitting that his faith is not what informed his pro-life views and therefore his Mormonism becomes an even more significant problem for religious conservatives than it already was because he has effectively acknowledged his faith was not what brought him to the “same place” on these issues and because he has admitted that his faith was not what inspired the change (except in perhaps a very roundabout way).   

Furthermore, this “mildly pro-choice” nonsense that Mr. Burd has offered us has to be challenged.  Romney wasn’t just “mildly pro-choice” prior to his supposed conversion.  As Matt Yglesias has pointed out after citing this week’s Weekly Standard article on Romney’s pro-choice positions in 2002:

As you can see in the Medicaid answer, he wasn’t even a moderate on the issue — Romney was taking a strong, strong pro-choice stance.

This was a man who was adamantly “pro-choice” down the line and who has now become just as adamantly pro-life on just about everything.  Such a radical transformation did not happen, if it happened, because one Dr. Melton came in and talked to him about the fertilisation of ova and the extraction of stem cells.  It is therefore far more reasonable to conclude that the transformation never took place.

These moves may get him closer to the Republican nomination, but whether they reflect deep principles or merely a venture capitalist’s professional sense of what’s required to achieve his goal is already the defining question of the Romney campaign. ~Peter Canellos

Query: If Romney is the great venture capitalist who has a keen grasp of an operation’s weaknesses and the things that need to be done to ensure success, how is it that he can be so oblivious to the huge liability to his campaign that his religion represents?  Is that this particular venture capitalist’s blind spot?

The Congressional Republicans’ demand for “benchmarks” is becoming the GOP’s equivalent of Al Gore’s demand years ago for “lockboxes,” –an empty term originally intended to convey seriousness of purpose while disguising empty policy prescriptions, but which, by the sheer implausibility of the pose, became a term attracting  deserved disdain.

Republican resolutions calling for “benchmarks” are being understood by people serious about victory in the war as a no confidence lite.  To align with a call for “benchmarks” is to leave the victory caucus.  The Republican leadership should figure this out in a hurry and drop the idea as the genuinely bad idea it was and remains. ~Hugh Hewitt

Hewitt’s Townhall blog colleague Matt Lewis states the obvious that benchmark resolutions are not the same as resolutions against the surge.  Perhaps he, too, will be booted out of the “victory caucus.”  Lewis also has a delicious bit where he points out that Hewitt’s hero, Mitt Romney, also supports benchmarks.  I’m sure the pledge drive to refuse Romney all support in his bid for the White House will begin any day now.  Unless, of course, Hewitt is just an administration lackey using his public influence to badger the Senate into submission to the executive, but that couldn’t be the case, could it?

In many ways, I find Romney an appealing, moderate Republican: competent, reformist, articulate. And then he tried to run as Hewitt-theocon. ~Andrew Sullivan

Which is the worse thing you can say about Romney?  That Andrew Sullivan would have supported him, or that Hugh Hewitt does support him?  This is a very difficult question.  It will probably have to be settled by coin-toss, so dreadful are the alternatives.