There is a non-story making the rounds that the Russian military might base bombers in Venezuela and Cuba, provided that the Kremlin wanted to do this. In the same story that is being circulated, the Kremlin ruled out the idea as hypothetical speculation. Naturally, this had no effect whatever on wild accusations of Obama’s foreign policy failure. I give you Ed Morrissey:

It took John Kennedy more than a year to precipitate a military standoff with the Soviet Union over Cuba in the 1962 missile crisis. It’s taken the Obama Amateur Hour less than two months.

Mind you, there is no military standoff, Russia isn’t doing what Morrissey fears it will do, and Obama had nothing to do with this, but other than that Morrissey is on fire. Oh, wait, that’s not right. He continues to make a fool of himself:

Can you imagine Russia trying this with George Bush? For that matter, can you imagine Bush losing Kyrgyzstan — and a vital military route — to Putin?

Well, since Russia went to war with Georgia, resumed long-range bomber flights and sent a warship to Venezuela during the years of the mighty Bush, yes, I can imagine it. Since the lease for Manas airbase was set to expire anyway, had Bush somehow still been in office during the last two months he would have “lost Kyrgyzstan” just the same, so I can imagine this, too. This is because the decision not to renew the lease was made by the Kyrgyz government in response to public discontent over the U.S. presence that had been building up throughout the Bush administration’s tenure. As with so many other things in foreign policy, Bush “lost Kyrgyzstan,” if we must speak of things this way, and Obama is stuck with the consequences. I don’t say this particularly to defend Obama, whose handling of foreign policy (particularly with respect to India and Britain) has been mixed at best, but to correct painfully ignorant statements on matters that are of great importance to the United States.

P.S. The AP report included this item:

Russia has nothing to gain strategically from basing long-range craft within relatively short range of U.S. shores, independent military analyst Alexander Golts said, calling the military statement a retaliatory gesture aimed at hitting back after U.S. ships patrolled Black Sea waters near Georgia.

In other words, a decision made by the former administration in its ill-considered response to the war in Georgia apparently provoked this statement, so in the extremely unlikely event that Moscow pursued this basing idea it would be a response to Bush-era blunders. In reality, though, the statement is just bluster and has no significance.

The “other McCain” unsurprisingly doesn’t care for critics of CPAC or movement conservatism. They’re bringing everybody down, and if it’s one thing we know about movement conservatives it is that they must remain chipper and optimistic about their own fortunes. McCain:

But the disgruntled few remain disgruntled, spreading demoralization, despair and defeatism where confidence and good cheer might otherwise flourish.

If they can’t be winners, they don’t want you to win either.

Yes, if it weren’t for Rod Dreher et al., conservatism would be advancing in all directions and crushing all that stood in its way. There are no problems or lacunae in “the message,” everything is fine and the comeback is just a matter of time. Whatever you do, definitely do not make any judgments about conservative celebrities, and if it all possible just suspend critical thinking all together. Self-congratulation and cheerfulness are always the best remedies for failure. I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere. Of course, it does remind me of the old line in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy where he reports that a publisher said to him of someone else, “That man will get on; he believes in himself,” to which Chesterton replied (and this is worth quoting in full):

Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

Now if we could just get their doctors to stop demoralizing them, all would be well.

P.S. The follow-up in the rest of the passage is also worth quoting:

He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself [bold mine-DL].

I don’t mean to obsess about others’ obsessions with earmarks, but it is just weird how much attention this non-issue gets. Yes, I know that I am adding to the problem by talking about how much others are talking about the non-issue, but if there was ever an instance that showed how Washington has lost perspective and any sense of priorities it is the ongoing fascination with this minor, almost irrelevant part of the budgeting process. Worse than the fascination are the arguments against earmarks. Naturally, McCain has the most perfect non sequitur:

We are in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis; Americans are losing their jobs, their savings and their homes. We simply must rein in wasteful pork-barrel spending.

What does the one have to do with the other? There is no causal connection between the two, and to the extent that “wasteful pork-barrel spending” goes into a project that would otherwise not be funded the “wasteful pork-barrel spending” just might be employing someone who would otherwise be out of work or making less money in a different job. This person would then not be able to save as much, would probably have to use credit card debt to stay afloat until things improved and might have to borrow against the equity of his house, duplicating some of the very sort of behaviors that have helped bring so many to their current predicament. That doesn’t necessarily mean that funding these projects is the best or most effective use of the funds in question, and it is probably true in many cases that these projects are neither the best nor the most effective ways to use these funds, but of all the things to focus on at the present time it is hard to think of a more irrelevant target.

P.S. Incidentally, what does McCain have against astronomy? During the campaign, he complained about Obama getting funding for the planetarium here in Chicago, and now he complains about other astronomy funding in Hawaii. Maybe it’s a boondoggle, maybe not, but he rattles it off on his list of earmarks as if it were objectively silly to promote the study of astronomy. I consider myself to be a pretty strict constitutionalist, but if the Constitution authorizes copyright and patent protections to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (Art. 1, Sec. 8) the funding of scientific endeavors is not that unreasonable. It is certainly pretty far down the list of things an opponent of earmarks should want to be mocking.

Update: Fortunately, in the same forum Ron Paul is making a lot more sense:

To fight earmarks is to fight for an even more powerful executive branch. It is popular these days to condemn earmarks in the name of fiscal conservatism. The truth is that they account for less than 2 percent of the spending bill just passed. And even if all earmarks were removed from the budget overall, no money would be saved. That money would instead go to the executive branch to spend as it sees fit. Congress has the power of the purse. It is the constitutional responsibility of members to earmark, or designate, where funds should go, rather than to simply deliver a lump sum to the president.

Rejoice in the relative efficiency and good governance that is the earmark process. No, seriously. Add this to the ever-growing list of reasons why Republican obsession with eliminating earmarks is pointless and distracting.

I have neglected to draw attention to Michael’s excellent profile of Gov. Mark Sanford, but Reihan’s discussion of the profile here reminds me to recommend it and say a few words. As a longtime critic of McCain, I was not exactly enthused when I found that Sanford had endorsed McCain in 2000, and I am aware of some of the legitimate complaints against him on the right, but a few things have caused me to take a very favorable view of the South Carolina governor. This is almost certainly bad news for Gov. Sanford if he has any higher ambitions, as the politicians I find interesting and compelling tend to be the ones who have no chance of winning on a national level. One of the things that interested me was the discovery in Michael’s profile that Sanford, then a member of the House, had voted against the Iraq Liberation Act and the war in Kosovo. I promise you that there are not very many people who were right on both issues, and Sanford is one of them. More important, he came to these conclusions for the right moral and constitutional reasons:

In Congress, he opposed Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo. And he was one of only two Republicans to vote against the 1998 resolution to make regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. He says that it was a “protest vote” in which he tried to reassert the legislature’s war-declaring powers. When asked about the invasion of Iraq, he extends his critique beyond the constitutional niceties. “I don’t believe in preemptive war,” he says flatly. “For us to hold the moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive.”

As I have mentioned before, Sanford distinguished himself by penning an anti-bailout op-ed, which makes him one of the few well-known governors to have taken an early stand on this question and had the right answer. Finally, Sanford’s much-maligned, and perhaps rather impolitic, remark about Zimbabwe as an example of the wealth-destroying power of inflation tells me that he is one of only a very few elected Republicans who has a clue on monetary and economic policy. The mostly symbolic fight over 1% of the stimulus money coming to South Carolina seems like a losing battle, and I don’t quite understand why he is fighting it, but the other things are so much more important that it doesn’t concern me very much.

I would take issue with Reihan’s description of Sanford’s foreign policy views as “dovishness.” The hawk-dove terminology has never been very useful, poisoned at it is by its origins in another unnecessary, illegal war, because it gives the impression that if one is not supportive of aggressive and unnecessary wars that one is “dovish” and therefore some kind of pacifist. There is something very wrong when we are defining opposition to starting wars in this way. As far as electoral politics go, Reihan is probably right that anything that could be portrayed as “dovish” will not get Sanford very far with Republican voters in the event that he pursued a bid in the next election, but it reminds me that we need to develop a better vocabulary for describing these debates.

That said, all indications regarding the Afghanistan debate is that most of the skepticism about escalation is coming from the left or center-left, and the people backing even larger deployments are the same people who always back larger deployments regardless of circumstances. Assuming Obama pursues his limited withdrawal plans in Iraq and increases troop levels in Afghanistan, the natural reaction in the GOP will be to pillory the administration for “abandoning” Iraq and “mismanaging” the other war. It will become almost a mirror-image of Democratic leadership critiques of Bush, c. 2003-04, and the main difference will be that the wars will have switched roles. Unlike most Republicans on Iraq, who refused to change their mind on the war there regardless of what happened, Democrats are probably going to be much more inclined to cut losses in Afghanistan if things do not improve on both sides of the border, which will create an opening for a “hawk” on the right to claim that he will salvage the situation. Barring some remarkable shift in public mood because of ongoing economic woes and a recognition that the empire is unsustainable and an enormous drain of resources, a generally non-interventionist candidate on the right will probably have even less room to maneuver and fewer votes to pick up than was the case in ’08.

Here is the new video for the Oscar-winning Slumdog final number.

In an otherwise unimportant post, one Alex Knepper makes this statement:

The debate about free trade is over. It works.

I confess I don’t quite know what to make of this. It seems to me that this is a bit like discussing morality and saying, “The debate about killing is over. It works.” Works to do what? For whom? Who benefits, and who pays? What are the consequences? Free traders don’t care to answer any of these questions, or at least the people who have learned to mouth free trader lines don’t. Economists who bother to answer them make it very clear that these policies are geared toward consumers and an economy built around consumption, and the American firms it primarily benefits are exporters of raw materials and sellers of imported junk. Of course, that doesn’t settle anything, but raises a host of new questions about whether we should continue down that path. I am equally baffled by general negative statements about protectionist measures, as if saying “it doesn’t work” is any more persuasive than just saying that it does.

Update: Knepper offers one response that amounts to little, and then complains that one of his colleagues gave this post any consideration at all. In the second response, he resorts to the globalist equivalent of “if you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs,” which is the sort of indifference to real economic and human costs that I would expect from this sort.

The rest of the column is a recap of Rasmussen’s other polls, which show the president’s agenda strikingly unpopular. Let’s assume that’s true, and all other polls about Obama are wrong. Why, then, are Republicans faltering in the first competitive race of 2009 — the open House seat in New York’s 20th Congressional District? Why does the Siena poll just released in that race record a 65 percent approval rating for Obama in a district where he only won 51 percent of the vote over John McCain’s 48 percent? ~Dave Weigel

These are good questions. New York’s 20th District should not be this much of a challenge. Gillibrand only won the seat in ’06, and before that it was in Republican control. Republicans actually outnumber registered Democrats there by large margins, and still the GOP seems to be having a hard time securing Gillibrand’s former seat. Significantly, the Republican candidate, Jim Tedisco, has booted the NRCC from its role in providing advertising content for his race, as he has apparently come to realize that the ad campaign is tone-deaf. The same Siena poll Weigel mentions has the NY-20 race in a statistical dead heat. A once-formidable Republican lead has disappeared almost completely. This has occasioned a lot of carping about the bad job Michael Steele is doing at the RNC, but this is bigger than Steele’s poor leadership. If the GOP fails to pick up this seat, failure will have been a team effort and I think it will owe more than a little to the Republicans in Congress.

Frankly, I can imagine a number of other reasons why Kristol would prefer a liberal to Pat Buchanan even though both are staunchly pro-life. ~Wlady Pleszczynski

Well, this is true up to a point, though describing Kristol as “staunchly pro-life” rather greatly exaggerates how important life issues are to him. This is why Jim was correct when he said, “I do recall Bill Kristol saying he’d vote for a New Republic liberal on Iraq over a non-squishy pro-lifer,” because that is exactly what Kristol said:

I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives [bold mine-DL].

If I wanted to be more polemical, I could dwell on that last sentence for a while, but why bother? Kristol there is stating what everyone knows about his politics. Circa 2004, a “New Republic liberal” on Iraq was pro-war, and that fit Kerry quite well. It is quite clear that Kristol is saying that foreign policy trumps social issues when he is deciding whom he should support, which has obviously been true regarding the candidates The Weekly Standard has supported in the past and continues to be true today. More to the point, and coming back to the beginning of this debate, if Ross is a “squishy” pro-lifer as he described himself, Kristol is as limp as a wet noodle. If we are to believe that Kristol is “staunchly pro-life,” that would make Ross a relative hard-line fanatic on the subject, which would be misleading in both cases.

The amusing thing about New Majority is that it styles itself as representing creative and new conservative ideas, but routinely churns out some of the most hidebound conventional stuff imaginable on many of the policies where the conventional position has badly damaged the reputation of conservatism and the GOP. Take, for example, John Gardner’s complaint that Obama has signed the omnibus appropriations bill that contains a provision that “revents implementation of a provision in NAFTA that permits properly licensed Mexican trucking companies from operating throughout the United States.” This is the sort of thing pro-sovereignty conservatives have been insisting onfor years, and in the end it comes from the Obama administration and a Democratic majority in Congress. At least those reform conservatives who are indifferent to border security and controlling illegal immigration are being consistent in their hostility to this rule, but why anyone else would want to oppose a provision that improves border security and highway safety will have to remain a mystery.