As campaign promises go, it isn’t all that inspiring a slogan, but now that Ralph Reiland has given us the idea I think we should run with it with every ounce of statist gusto that we’ve got.  As pointed out by Ramesh Ponnuru, he comments on the state of conservatism and Mr. Ponnuru’s story from a few weeks back on “conservatism in crisis,” and with the flair of a good two-speed libertarian (they have two speeds: hyperbole and indifference) he takes Ponnuru’s sensible observation that social conservatism has been an overall electoral winner and economic conservatism has been an electoral liability and makes it into a libertarian’s worst nightmare:

Arguing that conservatism’s crisis is “badly misunderstood,” Ponnuru offers a policy prescription that’s sure not to sit too well with those who support freedom, both economic and social.

“Social conservatism is an asset to Republicans,” he writes, “and economic conservatism a liability.”

That sounds like a call for more faith-based tax hikes, perhaps for more wars, because, as the president has explained, God wants men to be free. Domestically, it looks like a call for more government flashlights in the bedrooms and fewer dollars in our wallets.

Mr. Reiland takes what has actually become a pretty standard assessment of American electoral reality (social conservatism helps, economic “conservatism” hurts) and make it into an argument for a certain set of anti-libertarian policy prescriptions.  Indeed, he calls it a prescription, when it is really a description.  So right away there is a great deal of confusion in Mr. Reiland’s response.  The rest of his response is fairly overheated, when you consider the simple truth that cheering on the workings of an unfettered market and pushing for massive deregulation, for example, are wildly unpopular.  It might be the case that something that is wildly unpopular is still the right thing to do and is worth advocating in spite of the political cost, but that is a different argument.  Before we can have that argument, libertarians should at least be able to acknowledge that advocacy of their economic policies is a political liability, especially nowadays.  As Ponnuru says in his post:

I am for anti-statists taking a careful look at their actual political prospects rather than at what they wish those prospects were. But I am not surprised that some libertarians would respond to my attempt to do that by retreating deeper into fantasy. 

Even given the retreat into fantasy, each item Mr. Reiland brings up seems weirdly and completely disconnected from Mr. Ponnuru’s assessment of electoral reality.  Perhaps economic populism would mean “fewer dollars in our wallets” or perhaps not, but “social conservatism” as it is usually defined has no obvious position on taxes (on the whole, avowed social conservatives have tended to be anti-tax to the extent that they see reducing revenues as a way of weakening an intrusive and culturally hostile government).  Social conservatism is not the equal and opposite of what we are calling “economic conservatism.”  For the most part, they relate to entirely different spheres of life and support for one does not necessarily imply hostility to the other.  While a social conservative may be more sympathetic to state power to regulate certain kinds of behaviour that he deems immoral, it does not necessarily follow that he thinks the government should be involved in economic regulation to the same degree.  But as far as I can tell Ponnuru wasn’t defending one or the other.  He wasn’t making a prescription at this point.  What Mr. Ponnuru said, pretty plainly, is that one tends to win a party votes and the other tends to lose a party votes.  If this runs up against the findings of the methodologically questionable and difficult–to-credit Kirby/Boaz report, that is not the fault of all the people who regard the report’s findings to be an exaggeration of libertarian political strength.    

Just out of curiosity I have to ask: what, pray, is a “faith-based tax hike”?  Is Mr. Reiland referring obscurely to Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s support for jacking up property taxes in his conviction that he was serving a Christian vision of social justice?  This was surely a fairly isolated and unusual incident.  (More common, at the state level, were the tax hikes of the Taft administration in Ohio aimed at closing the budget gap created by the habit of reckless spending acquired in the booming ’90s.)  If this is not a reference to Riley, I literally have no idea what he’s talking about, since the trouble with Mr. Bush’s fiscal management has been rampant spending together with tax cuts.  Had we had a few more “faith-based tax hikes,” the deficit would at least be less egregiously unbalanced (which is not to say, lest Mr. Reiland have a stroke, that we should have had all the spending that we did have).

What, in fact, does social conservatism have to do with war?  It is apparently and unfortunately true that many of the most stalwart leading social conservatives (e.g., Santorum) are also strongly in favour of the war in Iraq and Mr. Bush’s proclivity to use force generally, but if warmongering were a feature of social conservatism itself you would have to count this against social conservatism’s appeal.  The appeal that social conservatism has is to those people who feel their values or way of life threatened by attacks in the culture wars, rather than seeing their values being necessarily advanced by the wars in Asia.  (Indeed, if most social conservatives are Christian and a Christian “theocracy” is supposedly the goal of these people, as Mr. Reiland hints at the end, how do wars of “liberation” in the Islamic world that work to benefit of Islamic fundamentalist and to the detriment of Christians overseas advance this social conservative vision?)   

Note that Mr. Reiland thinks that Ponnuru is advocating more government flashlights in our bedrooms, which apparently means that he believes that the government has flashlights there now.  Are these Homeland Security flashlights, issued in case of power failure resulting from a terrorist attack?  Or are these flashlights that people get from the government when they pay their taxes in a timely fashion as a complimentary prize of sorts?  Yes, I do realise he is speaking figuratively here about government intrusions on our privacy, and if he focused on the actual intrusions the feds have done in the last few years he might find a very sympathetic conservative audience that regards the PATRIOT Act as excessive and unconstitutional.  But, no, it’s always about people snooping on what you do in your bedroom, in spite of the fact that the old Republican majority did essentially nothing that might be construed as an attempt to dictate sexual mores or intrude on the privacy of anyone’s bedroom.  In the very same article where he notes that sodomy laws have been struck from the books, he would have us believe that the government needs “flashlights” to ferret out the social miscreants engaged in unseemly acts in the bedrooms of the land.  Why does the government need flashlights anyway?  Don’t the social miscreants have light switches?

Yet he hopes to remain in the public spotlight as director of the EPPC’s brand-new America’s Enemies program.

“It’s a stark name,” says Santorum. “But we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize. It’s not just Islamic fascism, but also Venezuela, North Korea, and, increasingly in my opinion, Russia.” ~John Miller

Yes, it’s all terribly complex, especially when so much of it is made-up.  If Mr. Santorum would just leave the world alone, the world would leave him alone, but still he persists.  So we see that Mr. Santorum’s list of our major foreign foes ranges from the delusional (“Islamic fascism” as such doesn’t exist, so it has to be an imaginary distortion of the real jihadi threat) to the silly (Venezuela) to the blindingly obvious (North Korea) to the absurd (Russia). 

I don’t doubt that Hugo Chavez despises the U.S.  Like his hero, Castro, he is reflexively hostile, but while we’re listing inconsequential tinpot dictators and demagogues we might list the dictators of Burma or Robert Mugabe or Evo Morales as our enemies.  Do any of them actually have the ability to threaten the United States or our legitimate, just interests?  Not really, no.  Not unless we insist on defining our interests as including those things that these governments do threaten, which are mainly their own populations.  As for Russia, Moscow will pursue its interests, which may sometimes conflict with Washington’s, but we would be fools to resurrect the old dynamic of antagonistic rivalry between our governments by heeding the irresponsible voices of people like Mr. Santorum. 

There is some consolation that Mr. Santorum’s ideas will not get very far in today’s Washington.  He tells John Miller that his expertise for EPPC will be in the realm of ideas and communication:

“This is a very impressive group of folks who share my worldview more than any other group in town,” says Santorum. “We’re going to have a lot of synergy. I know that I’m not the foremost scholar in the world, but I can offer a lot of ideas and help put together a communications strategy to describe the threats we face. Communication is a big problem, as the results of the elections in November show.”
 

I suppose he has confidence in this because effectively communicating the message that Venezuela and Iran are trying to take over the world worked so well for him in the past.  Still, you have to admire the conviction that it isn’t the horrible message of confrontational interventionist foreign policy that failed so completely in his own campaign and around the country.  In this view, it is simply the method of communicating this vision that needs improvement.  If only the true believers could get the Truth to the people, they would finally get it!  That’s a communications strategy!  Who better to advise EPPC on effective communication than Rick Santorum?  This should be a big success, just like his re-election campaign.

I don’t imagine new anger was invented yesterday or that it first arose in the pages of The New Republic. ~Peter Wood

Not that I would want to be contrary or anything so disreputable as that, but wasn’t the whole point of Mr. Wood’s original anti-Chait article last week that “New Anger” (which used to be capitalised in Mr. Wood’s writings, but has now apparently lost its special status) was very much a new phenomenon in political journalism, one of whose leading pioneers was none other than Mr. Chait at TNR?  Wasn’t the main point that Mr. Chait’s response to Brink Lindsey, which I discussed here, was a shining example of New Anger (I am confident that Mr. Wood was profoundly wrong on this vital point) and that Chait was therefore a prominent representative of that phenomenon?  According to Wood, Chait did not invent this kind of anger, but he unleashed it in the world of “respectable” journalism and commentary (where it had supposedly never existed before then).  Thus Mr. Wood wrote last week:

This is the anger of show-offs and eager-to-ignite match-heads. It had been gaining ground in American culture for decades before arriving in mainstream politics.  When it did arrive in politics, New Anger found homes on both the Left (e.g. Howard Dean) and Right (e.g. Ann Coulter), but the Left provided much more commodious quarters.
————————

“Mad About You” broke a long-standing taboo in serious political journalism. Before the article few would have thought that “I hate President George W. Bush,” was a respectable argument — or any argument at all. But Chait’s declaration somehow changed the chemistry of liberal political rhetoric. In the months that followed the article, declaring that one detested President Bush moved from the fringes to become a mainstream way for many liberals to articulate their political passion. 
 

So he never claimed that the phenomenon arose “yesterday” or that it finds its origins solely at TNR, but he did say that Chait and TNR provided the catalyst for making this kind of “anger” respectable, such that it “changed the chemistry of liberal political rhetoric.”  That still lays a rather considerable part of the blame, if so it can be called, at their door.   

Let me first declare an interest.  As a blogger and a curmudgeon, I “sneer” at all kinds of people on a regular basis and whether or not this is a new addition to our political discourse (which, of course, it isn’t) it is certainly no more undesirable than the dreary mumble of consensus politics or the dreadfully affected seriousness of wannabe “experts” that make up most political arguments today.  Typically what the mumblers and “experts” find so troubling about political passion of any kind is that it is a) volatile and therefore difficult to manage and stifle as they are normally able to do to political opponents and b) likely to exist among those who have no time for people like them.  It is also normally not something that the elite possesses, but is something obviously visceral and populist.  To such people, someone like Lou Dobbs disqualifies himself as a reporter of the news because he gets, well, rather agitated about the ongoing betrayals of the nation by corporations and their time-serving lackeys in government, which doesn’t mean that his claims are actually untrue or that it is wrong when his sense of patriotism is outraged by such betrayals.  (Note: to call someone a “time-serving lackey” is, according to the milquetoast guardians of public discourse, an angry and mean thing to say.) 

Indeed, you almost have to think that there would be something deeply wrong with opponents of Mr. Bush and his policies if we believed that Mr. Bush and his policies were as abominable as we hold them to be without getting a bit angry about what they have done to our country.  While there is the real danger that inflamed political passions can be blinding and irrational (for a good example, see the near-insane hysteria of war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq), the alternative that these sages propose is one of living death in which we watch as our country, Constitution and Republic are savaged, mistreated and insulted by treacherous villains with a mild equanimity.  Apparently, we must never get upset about even the most appalling crimes and wrongdoing.  The irascible aspect of the soul should not go to excess, but there is something vicious and strange in the failure to get angry at gross injustice and criminal misrule.  Many of the people who are angry at or even hate Mr. Bush have very good reasons, and they are not making arguments for anger but are making impassioned arguments against an abominable and awful administration.  If those arguments put off many “moderates” and the like, it is because our political culture has almost certainly become too pathetically nice and has been completely sapped of the kind of vigour that once made politics the sort of rough-and-tumble affair in which decent men would not have wanted women to participate because of its harshness.  

Nowadays we have the ludicrous Speaker of the House having photo-ops of children holding the Speaker’s gavel and the President talking about how much he cares about this or that suffering group.  The endless appeals to bipartisanship, the constant flow of saccharine rhetoric and the nauseatingly cheerful ranks of professional politicians tell me that our political culture is so far from being flooded with anger that it isn’t even funny.  For those who, like Mr. Wood, think we live in an age of considerable political anger and fear its culturally destructive effects, I will point them to the bizarre enthusiasm for Barack Obama, who always offers the sickening “let’s bring people together” pap and embodies the tiresome “I understand your valid concerns” style of disingenuous politicking.  Everyone seems convinced that the midterms were a message to Washington to start working together, when nothing could be further from the truth.  We elected the Democrats to start throwing up roadblocks and engage in pigheaded obstructionism.  Why else would you elect the opposition party except to actively oppose the President?   Personally, I regard this treacly, meaningless kind of political appeal as a far more serious threat to the quality of our political discourse than legions of bitter Kossacks shouting themselves hoarse with contempt for the GOP.  The Kossacks and the like may not have much to say, but they do say something.  Politicians operating in the Obama style have nothing to say and actually seem proud that they deal in such empty banter.   

People who are passionately stirred up over questions of policy are usually people who believe that the political consensus has got it horribly wrong and that the mumblers and “experts” are doing serious harm to the country.  For the most part, those who supposedly want us all to calm down really just want us to roll over and play dead while they continue to ruin the country.  The number of people complaining about liberal anger today or conservative hatred ten years ago because of a deep concern with upholding Stoic morality is assuredly very, very small. 

When Chait finds Republicans rather ridiculous and two-faced for making a sudden discovery of apatheia as a principal political virtue, he is quite right.  In the ’90s, people on the right were genuinely angry and they let everyone know it.  It was assuredly the media that created and pushed the stereotype of 1994 as the year of the “angry, white male,” but that didn’t mean that a lot of white men weren’t angry at Clinton and the entire state of affairs.  Conservatives once found liberals’ habit of dismissing every legitimate defense conservatives made against the latest social or cultural outrage of the left as “hate” to be intellectually vacuous and insulting.  Now some on the right would apparently like nothing more than to adopt this pose of righteous calm (righteous indignation being so very culturally destructive) at the very moment when liberal rage is likely to diminish and moderate with the Democratic takeover of Congress.  There has been the tendency on the part of liberals to reduce an opponent’s entire position to being nothing than “hate,” as if no one could oppose rampant immorality, racial preferences or intrusive government, to name just a few things, without hating other people.  Alongside this, though, there was real hatred of a terrible President in Clinton, whose administration only appears relatively decent today because of the hideousness of his successor’s policies. 

Clinton-hatred was frankly a major part of the glue that held conservatives together despite differences among ourselves.  Oddly enough, without a Democrat in the White House to serve as a hate-figure against which all conservatives could rally, all those who call themselves conservative have (re)discovered that they haven’t had a lot in common with each other for a very long time.  To that extent, those who stoked the anti-Clinton fury of the ’90s knew what they were doing: they were attempting to keep some kind of coalition together during the right’s time in what was still effectively the opposition despite having control of Congress.  Anyone familiar with most talk radio or the blog right will also know that the same passions that animated so many conservatives back then have not gone anywhere and have, especially with respect to the Iraq war, gotten worse and worse in the last few years.   

There may be a sense in which there is a real difference between the types of irascibility across the political spectrum that both Wood and Chait miss.  It was Chilton Williamson, I believe, who proposed in the pages ofChroniclesthat an important distinction between right and left was the difference between hatred of those things that threaten and endanger what you love and an aimless, insatiable rage that simply seeks new things about which one can be enraged.  The former is not only sometimes necessary but is actually the mark of sanity, whereas the latter is a consuming, demonic force that devours those who participate in it.

Jim Antle writes on the left’s recent anti-Mormon assaults:

The standards being set by the Mormonphobes could have the effect of excluding a lot of other believers from the political process.

Today is the Orthodox celebration of Nativity on the Old Calendar (some Orthodox have already celebrated the Feast on Dec. 25), and today seems a good day to make a few more remarks on the implications of the Linker and Weisberg anti-Mormon articles.  Weisberg is more explicit than Linker and takes a slightly different tack when he indicates his preference for older religions that have had centuries to more effectively dilute the stranger and more troubling (to secularists) aspects of their teachings.  Thus Weisberg:

The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor. The Church of Latter-day Saints is expanding rapidly and liberalizing in various ways, but it remains fundamentally an orthodox creed with no visible reform wing.  

Where Linker seems to favour the anchors of long-established traditions that keep a religion from becoming unmoored by the latest prophetic wind (regardless of how exaggerated his view of Mormon prophecy may be), Weisberg prefers really old religions on the implausible grounds that great antiquity results in a religion turning its truth-claims into mere metaphor and sentiment.  The venerability of a religion somehow guarantees its moderate, “reformed” state.  It is the lack of such “reformed” moderates (i.e., the lack of people like Bishop Spong to openly deny central tenets of the religion) that makes Mormonism beyond the secularist pale.  At least most of the other religions have some respectably black sheep and dissidents a secularist can admire and root for: “Go Kueng!  Go Armstrong!  Go Hauerwas!”  For a secularist looking for a ray of “enlightened” hope in different religions, Mormonism must present an unusually bleak picture.  For good or ill, these folks all really believe what they are supposed to believe (and they don’t even offer yoga classes!).  

While there are strands of Judaism and Christianity that make a virtue out of their progressiveness and just how “with it” they can be, these are precisely the strands (think Conservative Judaism or the Episcopal Church) that are dwindling in numbers.  The most robust and fast-growing religious groups tend to be those that emphasise the reality of what their revelation claims to be true.  (See The Economist‘s survey of Pentecostalism for some interesting reporting on one of these groups.)  After all, what else would really be the point of religious observance if there were ultimately nothing behind it but some nice imagery or if it was nothing more than, as a much less friendly observer put it, “mucking about with half-remembered lines of bad poetry”?  (For the record, if there was any doubt, I don’t agree with that observer.)  

Today, for instance, the Orthodox did not celebrate a nice, imaginary idea of God coming down to earth out of compassion for us, but celebrated an event that happened and had to have happened if our Faith is to mean anything.  Today we marked the day when God was born in the flesh of a Virgin.  Perhaps that true miracle and the stories in the Book of Mormon appear equally plausible to someone like Weisberg, but if he is serious about his argument he can no more honestly accept anyone who believes in the Incarnation (which will always appear as foolishness to the Greeks) than he can a Mormon.  I say this not because I think the beliefs of the Orthodox and Mormons are comparably true on the one hand or equally implausible on the other, but because I think a rampaging secularist does not get to pretend that he tolerates religious non-Mormons as political candidates when he obviously cannot really do so (if he is telling us the truth about why he objects to Mormonism in a candidate) but gets some special exemption to regard Mormons as especially foolish. 

Jim has Weisberg dead to rights:

In other words, religion is fine if you are a Unitarian or can reduce your scriptures to poetry. But if you actually believe that stuff, you might be a fanatic.
  

Christ is born, glorify him! Christ is from heaven, go to meet Him! Christ is on earth, be ye lifted up! Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing out with gladness, all ye people. For He is glorified. ~First Ode of the Christmas Canon

Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, hath shined upon the world the light of knowledge; for thereby, they that worshipped the stars were taught by a star to worship Thee, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know Thee, the Dayspring from on high. O Lord, glory be to Thee. ~Festal Troparion

The Virgin today gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One. Angels and shepherds glorify Him, and wise men journey with a star. For a young Child is born for us, Who is the eternal God. ~Nativity Kontakion

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Christos razhdaetsya! Slavite!
Christos gennatai! Doxasate!

Most ominously, Iran has brazenly provided training and weapons to the Shiite militias–who carry rifles straight off the assembly lines of Iranian weapons factories–and these militias have emerged in the last year as the greatest threat to US troops and to the Iraqi government. ~Robert Tracinski

Right off the bat, you can see that Mr. Tracinski doesn’t quite get it.  He speaks of “the Iraqi government” being threatened by Shi’ite militias when the Iraqi government is being effectively guided by the very people who run one of the largest of these militias.  With Sadrists and the Dawa Party on the one hand, and SCIRI on the other, you have a constellation of political forces from the dominant community all dedicated to not suppressing Shi’ite militias, since it is from these militias that they derive their real, effective power.  There is no nonsectarian group that can serve as a viable alternative to the influence and power these groups possess in Iraq.  That SCIRI’s armed wing has been “brazenly” armed and trained by Tehran has been well-known to everyone since before the invasion.  Back then the government did not even attempt to “treat” the “symptoms,” because the government delusionally believed that SCIRI had a legitimate place in Iraqi politics.  If Iran is arming more of these militias today, they are simply expanding a policy to which we turned a blind eye for the last several years.  It is rather rich to use this practice now as the pretext for war with Iran. 

In the old days of the 1980s, we regarded SCIRI and its Badr Brigades as “terrorists,” but after the invasion we discovered that they were good, old Iraqi patriots after all, who nonetheless still received funding and orders from Tehran.  This reality did not trouble the warmongers in the least three and a half years ago or at any time since, and when SCIRI gained representation in the Iraqi legislature they said nothing.  The sad thing is that Mr. Tracinski is apparently perfectly aware of Iran’s long-standing ties with SCIRI, and yet somehow thinks that the capture of Revolutionary Guards members at Hakim’s house (whose arrest, it should be noted, was protested by the “Iraqi government” as a violation of diplomatic protocol) tells us something we haven’t known all along.   

The fatal flaw in Mr. Tracinski’s analysis here is that he thinks there is really an “Iraqi government” allied with the United States to achieve the same goals that our government has (whatever those might be) and that the proliferation of militias threatens such a government, when the “Iraqi government” long since became an appendage of the Mahdi Army.  When Maliki told our soldiers to end their cordoning-off of Sadr City shortly before our midterm elections (an operation aimed at retrieving one of our soldiers apparently held hostage by the Mahdi Army), that was the signal of whose side he and the “Iraqi government” were really on.  These militias are a threat to our soldiers, which means that Maliki’s government and the entire security apparatus attached to it are potential threats as well.  Given this state of affairs, why we are contemplating anything other than the “go home” option is frankly beyond me.

But there is another, far more effective option: go wide.

Going wide means recognizing that Iraq is just one front in a regional war against an Islamist Axis centered in Iran–and we cannot win that war without confronting the enemy directly, outside of Iraq. ~Robert Tracinski

The constant insistence that Syria and Iran are fueling what is happening in Iraq is a different form of the same, tired spiel that “foreign fighters” were the ones promoting all the carnage.  Instead of “foreign fighters,” we are now told that “foreign sponsors” are primarily responsible for the chaos in Iraq.  Just “take out” those sponsors, the thinking seems to be, and Iraq will be pacified fairly quickly.  Never mind that practical options for an effective military operation against Iran do not really exist (the Syrian regime may be more brittle and easier to break, but what comes after is, again, not something these fools have thought about at all).  Never mind the colossal economic and political costs of inaugurating a blatantly aggressive war against a major trading partner of at least three nuclear-armed major powers.  Russia, China and India all have strong interests in Iran’s security.  we potentially jeopardise our newfound good relations with New Delhi and might invite some serious Chinese action against our interests if we try to wreak havoc in the country responsible for a large part of their oil imports.  Much of the rest of the world does business with Iran and most other major governments do not reflexively regard it as a serious threat.  Few outside the United States give much credit to the idea that Iran is responsible to any large degree for what is happening in Iraq today.  Consequently, they will see any American attack on Iran as pure aggression and madness.   

For a time even the most dedicated jingoes learned that talking about “foreign fighters,” who are few in number in Iraq, was as meaningless as talking about “Saddamists” and “dead-enders” as a way of describing the Sunni insurgency.  Now that they have the convenient targets of Syria and Iran (which they want to target anyway) to blame for what is happening in Iraq, they can lamely attempt to sell a war with Iran as some sort of solution to our Iraqi woes.  Supposing that everything the jingoes claim about Iranian and Syrian involvement is true, does it make any sense that escalating a low-level proxy war with Syria and Iran (which is what they claim it is) into open, full-scale war actually helps matters in Iraq?  Where there may be covert infiltration and supply of weapons today, there would be the open involvement of the Iranian armed forces in actively and openly supporting their clients in Iraq, which include at the very least the Badr Brigades of SCIRI.  It is by no means certain that the current Iraqi government and its armed forces, Shia-dominated and largely loyal to Sadr as they are, would side with our soldiers in repelling an Iranian incursion.  On the other hand, they might aid the Iranians in conducting sabotage and disrupting our supply lines.  The U.S. government could quickly find the army they have been training turn against our soldiers (the only good news is that they are still such a ramshackle army that they would not pose a serious conventional threat) when the irredeemably sectarian government decides to throw its lot in with its coreligionists and come to an understanding with its neighbour.  This is such a terrible idea that it is almost incomprehensible why anyone advocates it with any seriousness.  Why anyone else takes it as something other than the ravings of a looney, I will never know.

In words unlikely to endear him to the protesters outside, Mr. Lieberman declared that there was “an axis of evil with headquarters in Tehran.” Mr. Lieberman entered the “what-year-is-it debate” among foreign policy experts with his view that it’s the 1930’s and/or 1942. ~The Caucus

“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”

Just a month ago Mr. Hussein was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. Much of the Middle East reacted with a collective shrug when he was found guilty of crimes against humanity in November.

But shortly after his execution last Saturday, a video emerged that showed Shiite guards taunting Mr. Hussein, who responded calmly but firmly to them. From then on, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.

“The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride too.”

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now.”

At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation.

In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni world.

The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve.

“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.” ~The New York Times

The incessant chatter and talk about Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and particularly all of the back-and-forth on the question of his religion, have apparently not been good for his public image.  According to Rasmussen’s latest fav/unfav ratings out this week (sorry, subscription only), Romney’s numbers have changed for the worse over the past two months.  In their November 5 poll, he was at 30% fav/29% unfav and stands, as of January 4, at 29/35%.  His “very favourable” rating has been nearly halved from 11% to 6% and his “very unfavourable” has nearly doubled from 7% to 12%.  He has picked up a little ground in the “somewhat favourable” column, but this simply brings that rating to parity with his “somewhat unfavourable” rating: 23 vs. 23.  The intensity of those who dislike him is currently greater than that of those who like him, and the current trend is not promising for a candidate who only just officially announced his candidacy.  For a “fresh face” on the national stage, his unfav rating is stunningly high.  If this isn’t the result of anti-Mormon bias, I don’t know where it’s coming from.