I have been slow in commenting on the outrageous murder of Hrant Dink, and for that I must apologise.  It was a terrible crime, and unfortunately only too representative of the state of modern Turkey.  The murder is the unfortunately all-too-logical outcome of the absurd and dreadful charges brought against Mr. Dink by the Turkish state for his alleged “insult” to “Turkishness.”  For some background, I cite from the Armeniapedia entry on Mr. Dink:

Dink wrote a series of articles in which he called on diaspora Armenians to stop focusing on the Turks and focus instead on the welfare of Armenia, said Karin Karakaþlý, an editor at Agos newspaper. Karakaþlý said Dink told Armenians their enmity toward the Turks “has a poisoning effect in your blood.” She said the court took the article out of context, wrongly assuming it meant that Turkish blood is poison.

On October 7, 2005 Hrant Dink was convicted under article 301 of the penal code of insulting Turkishness, charges that Dink said he would fight, adding that he would leave the country if they were not overturned. He was convicted and given a six-month suspended sentence, which means he will not be forced to serve prison time unless he repeats the offense. Dink has lived in Turkey all his life and was shown on television in tears as he denied the charges and vowed to fight them.

“I’m living together with Turks in this country,” Dink told The Associated Press. “And I’m in complete solidarity with them. I don’t think I could live with an identity of having insulted them in this country.”

The court said Dink’s article “was not an expression of opinion with the aim of criticizing but was intended to be insulting and offensive.”

Dink, speaking in Turkish, said the sentence was an attempt to silence him.

The assassin, who has now confessed to his crime, admitted to being motivated by the alleged “insult” to Turks and did silence him.  In a way slightly similar to the fate of Pim Fortuyn, Mr. Dink was officially vilified by the government authorities and made an object of hate in his own country based on false and obviously politically motivated charges.  Within two years of the official hate campaign against the man, he had been shot dead by some fanatic who actually took seriously the government’s claims made in service of its cynical control over its citizens’ statements.  The persistent official denial of the Armenian genocide instituted and maintained by the Turkish state has now contributed to a new murder of an Armenian dissident.  Like another April 24, a leading Turkish-Armenian intellectual has died at the hands of a Turkish nationalist thug.  If Turkey were at all serious about becoming a liberal or genuinely Westernised country, its authorities would either scrap or cease to enforce the dreadful section of the law that precipitated this awful deed.

PM Erdogan’s rush to denounce the crime is as predictable as it is cynical.  He laments that the assassination was an attack on Turkish freedom and democracy, yet the hateful charges against Mr. Dink would never have been brought and would never have existed to spur the assassin on to his horrible deed had there actually been real freedom of speech in Turkey.  His government and the entire apparatus of genocide denial in Turkey are effectively guilty as accomplices in this crime.  If anyone needed another good reason why Turkey should be kept out of the European Union, this is it.

In Ledeen’s fantastical world, where Iran is bent on conquering Kenya and where he never supported the invasion of Iraq, there is another new equally credible “revelation”: the murdered journalist Hrant Dink was Kurdish.  That would be very interesting to know, except that it is completely untrue. 

Hrant Dink was a Turkish Armenian and editor of the Turkish and Armenian language newspaper Agos, as this entry from Armeniapedia clearly shows.  His murder is a despicable outrage, but one plainly aimed at a prominent representative of the Armenian minority in Turkey because of his efforts to draw attention to the truth of the Armenian genocide.  (It is a bitter irony that Mr. Dink was known to take Diasporan Armenians to task for their preoccupation with the Turks’ guilt, whence came the “poison in the blood” line that later caused him such grief with the authorities and, now, has contributed to the motive of his assassin.)  It is fairly glaringly obvious that the late Mr. Dink was Armenian.  Not only does his first name shout it from the rooftops, and not only has every news story reporting on his death stated this basic fact numerous times, but the charge of “insulting Turkishness” of which he was convicted and his activism on behalf of awareness about the Armenian genocide were obvious indications of his background.  There are some non-Armenians in Turkey who also speak out about the genocide, but there are few Kurds among them (not least since a great many Kurds were involved in committing the genocide and most Kurds today are not eager to revisit that part of their history).  In any case, Hrant Dink was not Kurdish.  Indeed, it might be considered fairly insulting to the victims of the genocide to impose Kurdish identity on a man killed for his work in trying to gain recognition of the Armenian genocide.  Imagine calling a murdered Jewish Holocaust activist a Lithuanian or German and guess what the reaction would be. 

It is just one more sorry example of Ledeen speaking about something in the Near East without knowing the most basic information about the subject.  Pathetic.

Some guy invented South Park Republicans, so I can surely make up something called 24 conservatives.  Lorie Byrd (via Clark Stooksbury) gives us a window into the (confused) mind of the 24-con:

The Fox hit drama 24, featuring the superhero terrorist-fighter, Jack Bauer, is not a consistently reliable champion of conservative policies, but it sure does provide Americans with some politically incorrect terrorist-thumping entertainment. In spite of a “war for oil” story line one season that almost drove me away from the show, and some similar occasional bows to the PC police, 24 remains one place conservatives can find scenarios no one else will depict.

Because there are not many other shows on network television brave enough to show terrorists as anything other than white supremacist types or to feature a hero who routinely inflicts torture on suspected terrorists when innocent lives are at risk, it remains very popular with many conservatives. Even the four hour season premiere of 24, which has been harshly criticized by some for being overly sympathetic to ACLU positions by depicting an administration violating the civil liberties of Americans, had plenty for most conservatives to love.

The first admission that 24 doesn’t really sit very well with Ms. Byrd’s understanding of conservatism comes from the very column that begins by claiming that 24 and American Idol are signs of consolation for the despairing conservative–behold, pop culture is headed our way!  (More likely, both are signs of our impending self-destruction.)  It is an odd way for her to persuade the skeptics of the plausibility of this claim when her very first argument allows as to how her entire thesis is basically wrong.  

You can be confident that whenever someone writes one of these columns about pop culture to find the “conservative angle” on something, it is usually done by including as pro-conservative any element of the plot that might be considered reasonably decent.  “The characters in this show demonstrate great dedication to their jobs…working for a behemoth federal bureaucracy…which proves that 24 embodies a conservative work ethic.  And Chloe O’Brien is no feminazi!” Ms. Byrd did not write that, but she might as well have.  That is roughly the level at which these sorts of columns operate.       

You know the drill: find an attractive or admirable trait in some new movie or cultural phenomenon, label it as yours and then say, “Hey, this pop culture icon endorses my view of the world!”  It’s amusing, and some columnists make half their year’s earnings writing stuff like this, but it is ultimately as pointless as trying to prove, inter alia, that the early episodes of season 3 in Galactica were a massive antiwar protest.  It is a concession that the only cultural production that people consume on a large scale is not created by conservatives, which causes us, the conservatives, to scrounge, hyena-like, for what scraps of cultural meat we can get from the carcasses left to rot in the sun.  I await with a certain dread the column that tries to prove Johnny Drama is a populist champion of Middle America, yet I know that it, or something very much like it, is coming. 

[For those who haven’t watched seasons 1-5 of 24, multiple spoilers await below.]

Actually, if I were a hard-liner, hegemonist or a nationalist, I would have a lot of problems with 24‘s foreign policy implications.  A “war for oil” storyline would be the least of my worries.  That is almost secondary to what was really shockingly anti-interventionist about season 5.  Seasons 3 and 4 all but explicitly point to interventionist foreign policy and the warfare state as the causes of anti-American terrorism.  Jack Bauer never cares why the terrorists do what they do; he is simply interested in stopping them.  But after a while the audience might begin to piece a few things together: maybe intervention does lead to terrorism….Even more offensive to contemporary “conservative” tastes in the Bush Era, season 5 shows the scenario by which the government–up to and including the President–can be corrupted from within by the influence of private interests and how the government might even conceivably cynically use terrorists and/or terrorist threats as tools to advance policies deemed to be in “the national interest” according to the standards of a very few people.  Season 2’s fake terrorist connection to three Middle Eastern governments, pushed by the same hard-core faction that smuggled in the nuke, is surpassed in anti-Republican boldness by season 5’s concocted WMDs justification for intervention in…central Asia.  The insane lengths to which the people backing these hard-line politics will go seem only too plausible to critics of the real-life equivalents of these policies.  That is why it stuns me that 24 has become a popular conservative hit, when the show routinely shows the very sort of people and policies many conservatives tend to cheer on these days as variously traitors, collaborators with terrorists, mildly insane or the tools of larger conspiracies.  However, because the show also has Jack blowing away Muslim and other terrorist henchmen and wielding his knife ever so precisely around Walt Cummings’ eye as a way to extract information, it is supposedly conservative because it is “politically incorrect” (how it is politically incorrect to effectively endorse the current practice of the government vis-a-vis detainees escapes me, but perhaps I have missed my latest reprogramming session).   

If we fast-forward through the tiresome premises of season 1, when the great villains in the whole world of international terrorism were…Serbs, we see a pattern emerging in every other storyline.  The goals of “Second Wave,” an Islamic fundamentalist group, in season 2 are vague, but their hostility to the United States presumably does not come from nowhere.  Nonetheless, even though season 2 spends more time than any other 24 season focused on foreign policy and the retaliatory strike for the detonation of the nuke aimed at three nations supposedly backing Second Wave’s attack, actual policy debate takes a back seat.  We are treated instead to the more visceral imagery of the head of the NSA explaining that he allowed the nuke to be smuggled into the country as a way to force the Palmer administration to take a harder line with foreign threats–in short, to give Palmer’s foreign policy “some balls.”  Sadly, such is the state of modern conservatism that I suspect the NSA director’s character will appear to be a brave and patriotic idealist wrongfully persecuted by “realists” and, no doubt, anti-Semites.

Season 3 sees a very nasty terrorist mastermind (played brilliantly by Paul Blackthorne, who has to be cast as a Bond villain sooner or later) who intends to force the U.S. to “retreat within its borders” and is willing to use a heinous virus on the general population to compel government capitulation to his demands.  However, 24 is short on exposition and very much focused on the action: each time a terrorist has the opportunity to justify what he is doing, he usually resorts to the refrain, “You wouldn’t understand.” 

The most explicit anti-interventionist strain comes in season 4, when Marwan, the mastermind of a string of terrorist attacks, records a statement explaining, somewhat vaguely, that all of this has been in retaliation for interventionist policies.  Perhaps because these statements are put in the mouths of terrorists, some might argue that this is an attempt to discredit anti-interventionist arguments in the West, but each time the show presents no rebuttal and no counter-argument.  Because the show is focused on counter-terrorism at home, everything that happens takes on the appearance of self-defense, pure and simple, and the narrative and logic of the show repeatedly tell us that, regardless of motive or justification, the villains are out to kill innocent people whom Bauer is trying to protect.  This has the virtue of being true, though it obscures some rather important details.  Bauer represents a sort of last line of defense against the hornets official policy stirs up elsewhere in the world.  As such, no one is going to find fault with Bauer or his efforts to protect Americans–since that is one of the basic functions of the government–but this kind of storytelling also insulates the audience from having to worry about why each season brings such insistent attempts to bring mass death to American cities.  The audience doesn’t care and, what is equally likely, it wouldn’t understand.  That, unfortunately, is what 24 conservatism seems to embody: belligerence without understanding.

New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson today joined in the increasingly absurd 2008 presidential race.  How many candidates does that make it now?  Counting both sides, I count at least seventeen declared or presumably soon-to-declare candidates (e.g., Giuliani, Hagel) so far (you already forgot about Tommy Thompson, didn’t you?).  Before the spring is finished, we could hit twenty, and that’s not counting third party candidates.  If 1992 gave us the Seven Dwarves, 2008 will be presenting us, per Sam Brownback’s corny Oz reference, with the political equivalent of Munchkinland.   

Here is the article with a link to his online announcement.  I have no love for Bill at all, and most recently voted against his re-election, but one of the things that leaped out at me in his announcement was how incredibly detailed and policy-focused it was.  No grandiose, ridiculous claims about ending all deaths from cancer in 10 years for Gov. Richardson–he was talking the dreary-but-effective talk of pragmatism, competence and citing a record as a centrist Democratic governor.  Brownback can talk a good game about protecting life in Darfur, but that hardly beats Richardson, who actually reached a temporary cease-fire in Darfur.  In any contest to show who is more effective at taking care of irrelevant Sudanese problems, Richardson will win.  Therein may lie a bigger problem: Americans dislike a globetrotting foreign policy-centered President as much as they dislike a bumbling buffoon who can’t tell the difference between the Balkans and the Baltic. 

Unlike HRC, Richardson had something to say in his announcement.  He spared us the vacuous, Freudian, “I want to hear what you think” approach to politics and told us what he had done (sort of) and what he intended to do (more or less).  Except perhaps for Obama and Clinton, I can hardly imagine a worse person for the office of President of the United States currently in the race right now than Bill Richardson, but there is a boatload of far worse candidates.  There are fourteen or fifteen of them, in fact, whom Richardson beats on his substantive policy remarks, since he has been virtually the only one to make any substantive policy remarks of any kind in his presidential announcement. 

Where Obama and Clinton have both gone out of their way to be as vague as possible, Richardson was stunningly specific.  He has already shown why the very few governors in the ’08 race, including at the moment just Romney, Vilsack, Thompson and Huckabee in addition to Bill, will be the most successful candidates: they have experience, a record and policy ideas in place of empty bloviating, “national conversations” and saccharine sentimentality about American goodness, which seem to be the stock in trade of our candidates from the Senate. 

Leave aside that most of his foreign policy successes were glorified photo-ops for which he simply showed up, and let’s not forget the disgrace of his tenure at Energy when LANL lost, as it tends to do, top secret material and suffered from rampant security lapses and went through the big espionage scandal of the late ’90s.  As Sen. Byrd famously said of Richardson’s career at the time: “It’s gone.”  (And George Weigel thinks Condi had it tough!)  Byrd was apparently overestimating the impact rank incompetence would have on his electoral fortunes in a state like New Mexico.  We shall see whether voters in other states are as easily suckered by Bill’s glad-handing, world-travelling ways.

To answer Peter’s important question (sorry, I mean, truly important question), I would have to say that my bet’s on Romney.  The old BSG-Mormon connection can’t have just been a fluke, can it?

To Beck, that trip to hell does not stop with our politicians. It is societal.

“Too many people are concerned about their party, too many people are concerned about their labor union, and too many people are concerned about their own business,” he says. “You see it with your own children in school, where you see a child that has been misbehaving and they’re called on the carpet, and the parent immediately says, ‘Not my child!’ It is because it’s no longer about the collective; it’s about ‘me.’ ~Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Well, actually, the abdication of parental responsibility and the cult of indulging spoiled children are entirely separate from being principally concerned with your party, your labour union or your business.  The attitude behind abandoning responsibility and forsaking discipline for children is ultimately one of accepting dependency on someone or something else that will provide the constraints and discipline so sorely lacking in your own world.  That attitude is self-serving, which is not quite the same as minding your own business.  The former would very much like others to do things for him without his having to do anything for them.  Such self-indulgence and individualism are rather products of a breakdown of strong attachments to the numerous institutions of local life, be it the company, the union, the church, etc.  There is no sense of broader social responsibility because there is actually very little attachment to the institutions that form the web of relationships that maintain social solidarity.  The problem is not that too many people are too concerned with “their party” or “their labour union,” but that more and more people do not attach themselves to anything beyond their own self-interest.  They do this because they perceive that they have no need for these institutions, and so are indifferent to their conservation and have little interest in their renewal.  What these institutions may have once provided or still do provide, such individualists are only too glad to receive from the state or a megacorp, which in turn reinforces the degrading dependency of these people on the state or the megacorp or both.  The surest road to a real and destructive collectivism is this preoccupation with self-interest combined with Beck’s hostility to the attachments and loyalties people have at a more immediate, personal level.  

Concern with one’s own business is normally associated with the necessary responsibility to attend to that business successfully.   Normal people are concerned mainly with the things most closely related to them, and those are the things that should have priority in their lives.  If everyone were preoccupied with someone else‘s business, someone else‘s labour union and someone else‘s party, we would indeed have a “collective,” but it would be of a stifling, oppressive sort.  To some extent, we are already plagued by the need to meddle and to fix the other fellow’s problems rather than tending to our own affairs.  This disorder expresses itself in different forms in our society.  There are the people who feel compelled to “do something” about Terri Schiavo, there are the Save Darfur folks, and there are legions and legions of people with an activist frame of mind just like them.  There is a drive at the heart of it that may well be that old freethinkers’ impulse to make everyone else just as “free” as you are.  This concern for others is so obsessive and overwhelming that it obliterates all concern for restraint and limits.

Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.

Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.

But Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office rejected the plan, the official said.

The offers came in a letter, seen by Newsnight, which was unsigned but which the US state department apparently believed to have been approved by the highest authorities.

In return for its concessions, Tehran asked Washington to end its hostility, to end sanctions, and to disband the Iranian rebel group the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and repatriate its members.

————

One of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s top aides told the BBC the state department was keen on the plan – but was over-ruled.

“We thought it was a very propitious moment to do that,” Lawrence Wilkerson told Newsnight.

“But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President’s office, the old mantra of ‘We don’t talk to evil’… reasserted itself.”

Observers say the Iranian offer as outlined nearly four years ago corresponds pretty closely to what Washington is demanding from Tehran now. ~BBC News

Via The Plank

Apparently, the “old mantra” means “we don’t talk to evil even if the other side wants to give us almost everything we have wanted them to give us for 25 years.”  If confirmed, this decision would mark the most irredeemably stupid move this administration has made in foreign relations since the invasion of Iraq, and the competition for that dubious honour is quite stiff.

By the by, wouldn’t this report indicate that the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation to negotiate with Iran is potentially quite beneficial?  Granted, after three and a half years of dithering and needless confrontation, Tehran may no longer be interested in making this deal.  It would probably be worth finding out whether they were still interested.  That could possibly alleviate a number of problems.  Take Hizbullah, for example.  It would not disappear and would remain a significant force in Lebanese politics because of its indigenous base of support, but without millions in funding and continued Iranian supply of things such as advanced anti-tank technology, used to such powerful effect last summer, Hizbullah’s relative military strength would decline and its grip on Lebanon might weaken slightly.  That is the sort of thing anti-Iranian neocons and hegemonists are supposed to want.  Yet one of their champions rejected the offer that might have severed Hizbullah’s Iranian supply line. 

If Washington began to engage Syria as well, the other main source of Hizbullah support might dry up or could at least become weaker.  The administration willing to make an effort at rapprochement with both countries stands a decent chance of coming away with at least one, and possibly two, foreign policy coups.  Unfortunately, the current administration hasn’t the brains, vision or courage to attempt any such thing–indeed, if this story is true, they have already shown that they have lacked these things all along.

In his enthusiasm for belittling Obama (something of which I can heartily approve), Mark Steyn declares in his characteristically slapdash fashion:

The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine by some oppo-research heavies on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s team. Which if true suggests that Hillary’s losing her touch. It’s certainly the case that a foreign education doesn’t always assist in electoral politics: John Kerry didn’t play up the Swiss finishing school angle. But look at it from a Democratic primary voter’s point of view, the kind who drives around with those ”CO-EXIST” bumper stickers made up of the cross and the Star of David and the Islamic crescent and the peace sign. Your whole world view is based on the belief that deep down we’d all rub along just fine and this neocon fever about Islam is just a lot of banana oil to keep the American people in a state of fear and paranoia. What would more resoundingly confirm that view than if the nicest, most non-bitter, nonpartisan guy in politics turns out to have graduated from the Sword of the Infidel Slayer grade school in Jakarta?

Before Steyn can make this into the usual narrative of stupid liberal/virtuous and wise neocon, let’s not forget that neocons have been rather late to the game of being concerned about Islam, being old hands at Islamic fundamentalist-empowerment in the Balkans, the Caucasus and every other corner of the globe so long as it was deemed useful to advance their idea of U.S. hegemony and superiority over other great powers and their clients.  No one was more shocked–or at least no one expressed greater shock–post-9/11 that Muslims around the world had not been more grateful for all the times America had come to the aid of Muslim causes in different parts of the world than neocon pundits.  The litany was always the same: “Afghanistan! Somalia! Bosnia! Kosovo!  You people owe us.  We are on your side–why have you betrayed us?”  Having cheered on Clinton’s dealmaking with Iranian and Saudi-backed jihadis in Bosnia, they were over the moon when NATO came to the aid of the church-burning, monastery-destroying Islamic terrorists of the KLA. 

Imagine their surprise when an entirely different set of Muslims from other parts of the world were not grateful that the government and, in a supporting role, the neocons had helped to crush a Christian country for the sake of their co-religionists.  The neocon lament, which has since become an insane rage against the more specifically Iraqi ingrates, was profound, as if to cry, “Didn’t you Muslims pay attention?  We helped your guys in virtually every street fight in the ’80s and ’90s, and still you have bad feelings towards us!  How many more Christians do you want us to bomb?  Don’t worry, we’ll be glad to oblige.”  Their militant overreaction to Islamic terror is the overcompensation for years of encouraging and supporting the very same kinds of people against those, mostly Orthodox Christians by heritage, whom they despised even more.  Yet their every policy preference seems designed to perpetuate on the one hand the myth of their “moral clarity” in facing down Islamic fundamentalism (about which they were fairly indifferent in the ’90s) while also maintaining the remarkable fiction–embodied in official administration positions–that there are “moderates” and “reformers” within Islam whom we must support. 

I have written before on neocon Islamophilia, which is a phrase that seems bizarre at first until you recognise how and why neocons oppose jihadis–they do not oppose them because they are jihadis as such, much less because they are Muslims and heirs to nearly a millennium and a half of hostility to our civilisation, but because they are like fascists and totalitarians.  Hence the idiotic “Islamofascist” tag.  If only the Islamic world could know the benefits of Enlightenment universalism and the religious moderation that would supposedly flow from it, they tell us, all would be well.  On the political front, since they have determined jihadis to be adherents of a kind of fascism, how else should we combat that fascism except according to the established script of war, occupation and political “re-education” of entire countries as liberal democracies?  Having completely misunderstood the problem, they endorse remedies that have no chance of working, but which are likely to empower jihadis and the like through the spread of violent conflict and the insane enfranchisement of jihadi voting blocs.  

Back to Steyn.  Steyn’s claim about the prevalence of sappy Democratic multiculti sentiments sounds good.  It reinforces myths that Democrats like to believe about themselves: that they are the party of tolerance, diversity and heroic indifference to the more appalling aspects of foreign cultures.  These are the same myths that Republicans like to perpetuate about them to make all of them appear as foolish and ridiculous as their most looney members.  However, the myths aren’t entirely true. 

If we believe the latest Diageo/Hotline poll, which tallied American attitudes towards four religions, it is true that Republicans (11% fav/58% unfav) and independents (14% fav/41% unfav) tend to have much lower opinions of Islam than do Democrats, but it is still a relative thing.  For every Democrat who views Islam favourably, there is another Democrat who views it unfavourably (27% vs. 27%).  The remainder is made up of all those Democratic voters too ignorant to know what to make of Islam one way or the other.  Add together the people who don’t know any better with those who already have a dim view of Islam, and you have well over a majority of Democrats.  If Clinton can show those with a low opinion of Islam that Obama was raised as a Muslim, and if she can convince the ignorant 47% that he deceived the public or omitted these details from his biography, she might very possibly cripple his campaign before it starts. 

If the leak to Insightwas indeed the Clinton team’s work, it was not at all the sloppy or foolish thing Steyn makes it out to be.  It was a great potential momentum-killing revelation with the added advantage that the leak to the Washington Times‘ magazine protects HRC from a left-wing backlash.  If they did indeed use a conservative publication to reveal the information, Clinton’s team has managed to throw the blog left into an uproar at right-wing dirty tricks while making her appear to be a victim of still other right-wing dirty tricks that aim to sully her name with supposed prejudice that would theoretically hurt her with her primary voters. 

The funny thing about this blogger outrage on Clinton’s behalf is that an appeal to what silly people will inevitably call “Islamophobia” will not backfire with that many Democratic primary voters.  It may actually cause other voters to turn away from Obama when they might have otherwise supported him.  As the de facto front-runner with the most money and best organisation as of right now, all Clinton needs to do is prevent Obama from gaining momentum through this year.  Throwing up a hurdle like this–which will do amazingly bad things to Obama’s prospects as an “electable” candidate for the general–creates real problems for Obama.  It may not even harm him that much right now, but it will linger in the background until he comes under real media scrutiny and will then reappear with a vengeance.

Perhaps I am too critical, but from the moment Clinton’s online announcement of her exploratory committee began I was filled with a kind of nameless dread that alternated with fits of laughter when she said things like, “We all have to be part of the solution.”  There is nothing very funny about that line, but hearing her say it as a very-nearly-official presidential candidate made me chuckle. 

Evidently, the word “basic” tested well with the focus groups, because she uses it about five times in three consecutive sentences.  Ditto for “middle” and “mid”–she grew up with “Midwestern values in the middle of America.”  No crazy coastal liberal is she!  It has been so long since I have heard the woman speak publicly that I had forgotten how tiresome and condescending she can be.  It’s probably not the case that she’s trying to be condescending–she doesn’t know how to say things any other way. 

On a purely stylistic note, I would add that the strange zoom-ins and wobbly camera effect are unnerving and make those inclined to distrust her to come away with the feeling that they are being somehow manipulated.  If she is going to be “chatting” with us online several more times in the coming days, she needs to find someone who uses the cameras to her advantage.  If she could also find a way to have a completely different voice, that wouldn’t hurt, either.

Our favourite Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt are predictably not impressed by their natural foe, Sam Brownback, who threatens Romney’s drive to win the support of Christian and social conservatives.  Understandably, they are hitting him on his appallingly bad immigration position (one area where Romney actually does better than old Sam), and have argued his undoubtedly popular and sane opposition to the “surge” is proof of his poor leadership and lack of conservative bona fides (as if perpetuating an aggressive war not in the national interest is a mark of conservatism). 

Whatever else I may think of Brownback, it is Brownback who is taking something of a lead here and carving out a distinct position while almost all of the other GOP candidates are running and attaching themselves to Mr. Bush’s policy.  On foreign policy, Gov. Romney has really been a mere echo of Mr. Bush.  Clearly, the public is interested in something else.  On foreign policy, Bush Redux or Bush Lite will not be acceptable in the general election.  While I consider many of Sen. Brownback’s views on foreign policy to be horrifying, he at least has coherent views that he has articulated and can expound on at considerable length.  His interest in intervening in Darfur strikes me as fairly wild-eyed and dangerous, but he has demonstrated leadership on this and other issues.  If the test is one of leadership on foreign policy questions, Gov. Romney’s grandstanding over Muhammad Khatami’s visit is a poor alternative.  

Can the choice for conservatives really be between a flip-flopping, universal health-care-bill-signing Massachusetts governor who wants to persist in the folly of the Iraq war and Amnesty Sam, champion of Darfur and scourge of cancer?  Surely there is someone else.  Hunter?  Tancredo?  Paul?