Brownback has some cross-over appeal. Anti-war, big government Christianism has a real constituency. ~Andrew Sullivan

Brownback may or may not have crossover appeal.  He is a U.S. Senator, after all, which does require, even in deepest Kansas of paranoid liberal myth-making, some support from people beyond his core partisan supporters.  But whatever crossover appeal he does have, be it on his cockamie “compassionate conservative” message, his “save Darfur” do-gooding or his support for amnesty, has nothing to do with his views on the war.  His general views on the war, as I have been sayingagainandagain, place him squarely in the mainstream of Republican opinion.  He continues to support the war just as fiercely as ever–it is only the profound confusion of surge proponents and opponents that has made Brownback’s position on this one plan make him appear to be some sort of antiwar Republican.  Nothing could be more wrong.  Here, again, is his statement on Iraq from his presidential campaign announcement:

We are a nation at war. I just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops–the finest, most courageous people our nation has to offer–are fighting for the cause of liberty in places that have never known her. It is a long fight. We will win. We cannot lose our will to win! We must win to redeem our troops’ sacrifice. Let us resolve to have a bipartisan strategy for the war. We need unity here to win over there. This is not the time for partisanship on any side. Lives–and our future–are at stake. 

In any case, the Sullivan remark quoted above would be from the same clever political analyst who has determined that the “big-government Christianists” (who, in reality, do not exist) and the “fundamentalist” mentality they possess were the chief moving forces behind the Iraq war.  The point is not that his prior claim is correct (it is ludicrous), but that he cannot really expect us to view the “Christianists” as the force of utter malevolence he has made them out to be if they are also now forming a real constituency against the war. 

The reality is somewhat different from both fantasies that Sullivan has come up with: most Christian conservatives, who are not “big-government,” supported the war out of their sense of patriotism and (surely misguided) deference to the President, and they continue to support it for these same reasons.  There are in any case very few “antiwar evangelicals,” as Sullivan has called them, and Sam Brownback is neither antiwar nor is he any longer an evangelical.  Once again, opposition to the surge is not opposition to the war, and being anti-surge is not being antiwar.  Everyone who can read a newspaper, except apparently Hugh Hewitt and Andrew Sullivan, understands this.

We dirty Christians and Jews only have holidays.  Shiites have holy days, so they must be on a higher moral plane, I guess.  ~NRO Reader

Now I have no love for the Times, whose story about the Ashura bombings prompted this bit of hysteria, but even I find this sort of reading-pro-Muslim-bias-between-the-lines to be absurd and risible.  Holiday means holy day.  Holiday the English contraction of the two words into one.  If it often is used with a different sense in the English-speaking world today, that is the result of increased secularisation of our holy days themselves, which can only be rather indirectly laid at the door of The New York Times.  More relevant to the story at hand is that it reports on the deaths of dozens in yet another example of the appalling security situation in Iraq.  If I were the average NRO reader, who probably still thinks the media are keeping the “good news” from the American public in a treasonous plot to undermine the war effort, I would also want to do everything possible to talk about anything else in this story other than the event it was reporting.

As GOPers debate ideological comfort, Dems argue over experience. But much like Romney, Obama’s survival will depend more on how he performs, than the attacks he draws from opponents. ~Hotline

This is true.  Not having much of a record worth mentioning on the social issues he now claims to champion, Romney has to be able to win over the doubters, for there will be many doubters.  Right now, people who are not immediately inclined to accept his “conversion” tale aren’t accepting him. 

Given the performance Gov. Romney gave at the NRI Summit the other day, where even his boosters have acknowledged he was on the defensive when speaking about his conservatism (perhaps when you know your position as a conservative isn’t at all tenable, it can make you feel very nervous in a room full of people who expect you to be conservative), he isn’t performing terribly well.  When his explanation of how he became pro-life rings hollow with people, as it often does, he says, “But look at what I’ve done!”  But then when people look at what he’s done and conclude that it isn’t very much at all (or that he was largely unsuccessful in winning the fights that he got into), he shouts, like an adolescent who is being contradicted, “I am so pro-life!”  Usually, when you have to keep insisting on it, and almost appear to be convincing yourself in the process, it won’t obvious to anyone else that it is true and it means that you really need to work on your delivery. 

As Brownback keeps hammering him on this point, watch as Romney’s star fades.  Unfortunately, that can only mean the ascension of Amnesty Sam to a position of prominence.  The Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency is not doing anything to convince me that it will be changing its ways.

We need to recast the geo-strategic reference points of our Iraq policy. Some commentators have compared the Bush plan to a “Hail Mary” pass in football — a desperate heave deep down the field by a losing team at the end of the game. Actually, a far better analogy for the Bush plan is a draw play on third down with 20 yards to go in the first quarter. The play does have a chance of working if everything goes perfectly, but it is more likely to gain a few yards and set up a punt on the next down, after which the game can be continued under more favorable circumstances. ~Sen. Richard Lugar

Apparently, we need to recast our geostrategic reference points into a series of football reference points.  That should make them more amenable to the limited understanding of Mr. Bush, who was, after all, a “yell leader” in his younger days.  If we’re playing a “field position” game, as Sen. Lugar absurdly describes it, that means we had better have an awfully good “punt kicker.”  In the real world that means we would have to be something like a back-up plan when the surge (sorry, “draw play”) fails.  (For those paying attention, we don’t have any such back-up plan.) 

It will probably fail because the Iraqi government (sorry, I mean the “blockers”) is actually working with the death squads (er, “defensive line”) and our “quarterback” will get “tackled behind the line” for a “loss of five.”  Query: do we really want politicians who are routinely exposed to the Redskins to be using football analogies in connection with wars?   

See Michael Crowley‘s post on the same.

To answer Spencer “Democrat Party” is a slur just because it’s wrong. ~Matt Yglesias

This is about as “inside baseball” as blogging can get, and will therefore probably be of interest to all of twelve people, but let me make a few remarks.  As you will have noticed, Republicans nowadays like to refer to the Democratic Party as “the Democrat Party.”  Mr. Bush did this the other day in the SOTU, and Republicans have been doing it for years before that.  They do this, yes, to be insulting by refusing to call the party by the name its members use, but they also want to insult Democrats by effectively denying the Democratic Party’s claim to being a party of the people.  That is, they want to deny its claim to being democratic (a dubious honour that they, the Republicans, have decided to start claiming for themselves), so they refuse to call it the Democratic Party. 

This is bound up with the many contortions that the party of corporations and the moneyed interest has gone through to make itself into the vehicle of populist resentment (without, mind you, actually doing anything to address populist resentments or desires) against “elites.”  That the Democratic Party of the last seventy-odd years has been increasingly a party run by a political and cultural elite for the interests of that elite to the detriment of many Americans hardly helps to rebut these charges of not being a party of “the people,” but leave that aside for now.  If you were to press some Republicans on this usage, “Democrat Party,” they would probably assure you in great earnestness that this has either always been the name of the other party (which is wrong) or that it is now the appropriate name for the party of elitism.  One basic problem with the new name for the opposing party favoured by Republicans is that it is simply illiterate: democrat is a substantive, democratic is an adjective, and they should be used in the proper way by those who would like to be considered functionally literate English-speakers.  Since Mr. Bush is the foremost representative of the GOP these days, I suppose it is understandable that they would begin to imitate his special facility with the language and would start using the wrong words for the wrong things.

The way forward requires abandoning that conviction in favor of a fundamentally different course. A sound Middle East strategy will restore American freedom of action by ending our dependence on Persian Gulf oil. It will husband our power by using American soldiers to defend America rather than searching abroad for dragons to destroy. A sound strategy will tend first to the cultivation of our own garden.

A real course change will require a different compass, different navigational charts, and perhaps above all different helmsmen, admitting into the debate those who earn their livelihoods far from the imperial city on the Potomac. A foreign policy worthy of the name will reflect the concerns and aspirations of ordinary Americans. It’s that last prospect that Frederick Kagan and James Baker most fear. ~Andrew Bacevich

What can we say of this proposal? Simply this: to imagine that 170,000 troops will accomplish what 140,000 troops failed to do in nearly four years or that marching a handful of additional combat brigades into the maw of Baghdad will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat qualifies as pure fantasy. Kagan’s “surge” is the first cousin to Kenneth Adelman’s more famous “cakewalk.” It is ideology dressed up as strategy. Marketed as the product of careful analysis, the surge should be seen for what it is: a naked gamble. Tacitly acknowledging the point, some proponents even refer to it as the “double down” option.

That in places like AEI and the editorial offices of The Weekly Standard Kagan himself has emerged as the man of the hour testifies to the depth of neoconservative desperation. Kagan’s insistence that his surge will do the trick postpones the neoconservative day of reckoning. Believe Kagan and you can avoid for at least a bit longer having to confront Iraq’s incontrovertible lessons: that preventive war doesn’t work, that American power has limits, that the world is not infinitely malleable, and that grasping for “benign global hegemony” is a self-defeating proposition.

Indeed, the very niggardliness of Kagan’s plan testifies to the core problem to which neoconservatives refuse to own up. Between their professed aspirations and the means at hand to pursue those aspirations there yawns a massive gap. ~Andrew Bacevich

The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo. ~Andrew Bacevich

Dan McCarthy has a smart and interesting article in the new TAC, now online:

More plausible than either liberaltarianism or a revival of 1990s-style paleo-libertarianism, however, is a gradual reconfiguration of conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism alike under the pressures of the War on Terror. Lindsey may have been more right than he realized when he wrote, “the real problem with our politics today is that the prevailing ideological categories are intellectually exhausted”; it may already be anachronistic to talk about libertarians aligning with the Left or the Right, when different factions of Left and Right are even beginning to align with one another, not in some grand theoretical project but in support of or opposition to the extreme measures that have so far characterized the War on Terror.

The highly unusual mixture of support for Sen. Jim Webb found among antiwar conservatives, conventional liberals, economic populists, and libertarians suggests what may be in the offing. If Left and Right really are outmoded terms, libertarians—and others who are beginning to peel away from the conservative establishment—should not wonder which side to choose. They should simply stay true to their philosophy and oppose government aggrandizement as effectively as they can—which, contra Lindsey, does not mean embracing energy taxes or forgetting that war is the health of the state.

Chronicles readers will be interested to see the parts of the article related to the magazine and the attempts at a paleocon/paleolibertarian alliance. 

So why, after six years of glorifying George Bush and devoting their full-fledged loyalty to him and the GOP-controlled Congress are conservatives like Lowry and Gingrich suddenly insisting that Bush is an anti-conservative and the GOP-led Congress the opposite of conservative virtue? The answer is as obvious as it is revealing. They are desperately trying to disclaim responsibility for the disasters that they wrought in the name of “conservatism,” by repudiating the political figures whom they named as the standard-bearers of their movement but whom America has now so decisively rejected.

George Bush has not changed in the slightest. He is exactly the same as he was when he was converted into the hero and icon of the “conservative movement.” The only thing that has changed is that Bush is no longer the wildly popular President which conservatives sought to embrace, but instead is a deeply disliked figured, increasingly detested by Americans, from whom conservatives now wish to shield themselves. And in this regard, these self-proclaimed great devotees of Conservative Political Principles have revealed themselves to have none.

When he was popular, George Bush was the Embodiment of Conservatism. Now that he is rejected on a historic scale, he is the Betrayer of Conservatism. That is because “Conservatism” — while definable on a theoretical plane — has come to have no practical meaning in this country other than a quest for ever-expanding government power for its own sake. When George Bush enabled those ends, he was The Great Conservative. Now that he impedes them, he is the Judas of the Conservative Movement. It is just that simple and transparent. ~Gleen Greenwald

As far as the “movement” and especially the people gathered at the NRI Summit are concerned, Greenwald is pretty much entirely right.  The new “don’t blame conservatives, blame those treacherous Republicans” narrative is a sad and sorry dodge of responsibility that everyone who worked hand in glove with the GOP for at least the last six years is using to escape the collapsing wreckage of the Bush Era.  In the past, there have been occasions when it was possible to make this sort of argument work.  It was possible for conservatives to have expected something more after 1994 and then become disillusioned with what followed.  It was perfectly legitimate to view Bush the Elder as someone who had betrayed the people who had voted for him by breaking his promises on taxes, etc.  But with this Mr. Bush there was almost never a time, even when he was a candidate, when conservatives should ever have allowed that Mr. Bush was conservative, because he so clearly was not if the word meant anything at all.  Support for him should always have been extremely conditional, rather than wildly enthusiastic as it was from very early on.  This was true even pre-9/11, as I recall a cartoon in The Washington Times showing Mr. Bush returning from his first foreign visit to Europe as if it were a new V-E Day and he was some sort of conquering hero.  Of course, absolutely nothing had been achieved on his first European trip; he had, I think, said something rather blunt about Kyoto, which annoyed the Europeans, but the popular attitude towards the man was completely out of all proportion.  So it would be for the next many years.  That the “movement” was willing to embrace him as a conservative of some stripe, or at least was willing to tie themselves so closely to him and his fortunes as they did signaled their submission to his goals and policies.  

That doesn’t mean that the gross distortions and contortions of conservatism that these people have engaged in during their period of near-complete slavishness towards Mr. Bush and the GOP are anything like proper conservatism, but it surely does mean that many of these people abandoned that conservatism right along with Mr. Bush every time they cheered on his aggressive war or looked the other way as he enlarged the size of government or pretended not to notice while he shredded constitutional protections and checks on the executive.  Even when some did occasionally, meekly raise a voice of protest about Medicare or immigration or some other domestic policy, they would effectively render that protest meaningless by affirming that they would continue to support Mr. Bush because of his great war leadership.  There is a myth developing out here that 2006 saw massive conservative defections, which I would like to believe, but the GOP turnout machine brought essentially the same core people to the polls that they did in 2004–the key difference last year was the overwhelming loss of independent voters to the Democrats.  After everything that happened between 2004 and the midterms, core conservative Republican voters continued to go along with Mr. Bush.   

These people did effectively “hollow out” conservatism and fill it with whatever horrendous ideas the administration put forward.  Arguably, this hollowing out has been going on for a good deal longer than the last six years, but it became acute and fatal in recent years.  Someof us on the right have been saying as much for quite a while, and certainly long before it was popular or advantageous to say so, and I appreciate that Greenwald acknowledges some of these people later in his post. 

The first hollowing out was the fraud of “compassionate conservatism.”  The next was the effective indifference of most of these “movement” people to Mr. Bush’s “big-government conservatism,” which they tolerated or even endorsed (because Medicare Part D uses private companies for providing prescription drugs, which means it can’t be a bad idea!).  They tolerated all of this because of the more abiding sell-out to activist, interventionist foreign policy that became the priority of most “conservative” leaders.  These people cheered every unconstitutional executive usurpation, every trampling of constitutional rights and every abdication of congressional responsibilities, and counted it as villainy if anyone dared suggest that the President had no right to do any of these things.  From early 2002 until the midterms, all things would be endured for the sake of Mr. Bush’s abominable foreign policy, the chief example of which has been the Iraq war.  Even now these supposed leaders of conservatives will go down with Mr. Bush’s War sooner than repudiate that abomination.  Even now the apparatus of mainstream conservatism works to chastise dissenting Republican members of the Senate for daring to question the glorious surge.  The surge’s possible merits and flaws are irrelevant to these people–what matters is, as Greenwald himself has noted before, that Mr. Bush and Gen. Petraeus have said they are for it, so the followers take it as something close to revealed truth that it must be the path to victory.  (After all, when has Mr. Bush ever been for a plan that didn’t work?)  These movement leaders may as well go down with him, since they have no credibility left, except among themselves, and are now receiving the payment of their sale of principle for the brief moment of basking in the reflected glory of power. 

All that being said, Greenwald’s approval of the main thesis of Sullivan’s book is misplaced and I think he is deeply mistaken to take Sullivan’s explanation of the woes of conservatism seriously.  If I have some more time this week before I go to L.A., perhaps I will try to get into how Greenwald has missed the mark on Sullivan’s book.