Susan McWilliams on Nadya Suleman and our national difficulty with living within our means.

Bill Kauffman’s introduction on the regionalism issue of University Bookman.

Mark Mitchell on the conflict between virtue and a consumption-driven economy.

Stewart Lundy on conservatism and the art of living.

Jeremy Beer’s remembrance of his farming grandfather, originally published in TAC in the 1/12 issue of this year.

Jason Peters on efficiency and knowledge.

Ross has been picked up as the new op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Congratulations to him on the new job. The NYT has made a smart choice, and as always I am looking forward to reading what Ross has to say.

Update: I would just add that I hope this means that The Atlantic will now provide Reihan an individual blog platform to fill the gap Ross will leave behind.

Chris Cornell’s new album, Scream, has finally come out, and my copy just arrived today. It’s about time. From some of the videos I had already seen and on account of the album’s producer, I knew that the sound was going to be very different from most of Cornell’s other music, but for the most part I don’t buy the claim popular among some old Soundgarden fans that Cornell has “sold out.”

Update: To each his own, of course, but David Polansky goes too far when he calls Cornell “execrable.” What is it with that word? It seems to be cropping up quite often lately. Even if Cornell’s alt-rock career with Soundgarden and Audioslave (or Temple of the Dog) is not to your liking, which I can understand easily enough if you didn’t grow up in the ’90s, his solo work in Euphoria Morning and Carry On does not deserve this sort of contempt.

And, yes, the last time I checked, I am human.

Don’t they [the Obama administration] understand that you have to start your term in office by making it clear that people will pay a price if they cross you? ~Stephen Walt

One of the reasons I have not portrayed this controversy as a test of the administration’s will in challenging the status quo is that the Freeman appointment was apparently never the President’s idea and Blair did not consult the White House about the appointment. If initial reports are correct, DNI Blair made the appointment on his own, so the White House probably preferred dropping Freeman rather than mounting a fight to defend someone they had not selected.

That said, Obama has never been inclined to challenge the establishment consensus in foreign policy since he entered national politics, and this has been especially true with respect to Israel. This is why he supported the Lebanon war and the incursion into Gaza, why he abased himself before AIPAC last year, why he distanced himself from Brzezinski’s mild defense of Walt and Mearsheimer about as quickly as humanly possible, and why in principle he remains committed to using any and all means to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes. Despite all of that, many of the usual suspects were still obsessed with spinning everything Obama said or did in the most negative way possible. The Freeman appointment drew nearly as much criticism from left as from the right because there were quite a few Obama supporters who had already defended his record on Israel, and so they took advantage of the reported fact that Freeman was not Obama’s idea. They could tear down Freeman without necessarily having to contradict their previous assessments of Obama. Had it just been the same people who had been raving madly about Obama’s dinner with Said and his friendship with Rashid Khalidi all last year, I am guessing the administration might have been able to put up with or ignore the controversy, but it was the presence of several Obama defenders in the ranks of Freeman’s critics that kept the controversy from being dismissed as nothing more than partisan hackery. In the event, it was ideological hackery, which is apparently still taken quite seriously.

Incidentally, from early on in the controversy I thought it was mistaken to frame support for Freeman as a matter of changing U.S. policy, when this is exactly the last thing that the appointment represented. On this point, some of his defenders got a bit ahead of themselves in declaring victory, and some made tactical mistakes in not pushing back more specifically on the Saudi and Chinese questions. Once Freeman’s appointment became seen a test of how the administration would be perceived on its approach to the Near East, rather than judged as a matter of intelligence analysis apart from policy (where Freeman’s predecessors and colleagues all insisted that he would be outstanding for the post), the outcome was more or less inevitable.

All of this is a drawn-out way of saying that the administration probably doesn’t see this as an episode where it has failed to punish people who crossed them, but as a controversy they did not want to have and were glad to be rid of as soon as they could. Because Obama has no intention of challenging the status quo, he doesn’t really see the defenders of the status quo as his enemies, even though they just dealt his administration a politically damaging blow.

Update: The NYT Washington bureau chief explainsthe lack of coverage:

The bureau chief argued that Freeman wasn’t a “high enough appointment to go nuts over in a big way,” and offered up a challenge: “Go Google his predecessor and see how much coverage he got.”

Well, this was exactly my point when this entire business began. No one paid attention to Freeman’s predecessors, their views or their ties, because the position, while important to some extent, was not nearly so crucial or influential as his critics made it out to be. Indeed, as Ackerman has argued, the chairman of NIC had become relatively less important under the previous administration than the position had been earlier. As Andrew notes, the different treatment Freeman received is significant in itself, because it says something about the reason for the controversy (hint: it is not because of a lack of sensitivity to the plight of Tibetan rioters!*), and might have merited some coverage for that reason, but the bureau chief’s remark helps drive home how unimportant and indeed irrelevant the appointment was as a matter of setting administration policy. This helps to make clear just how hysterical, obsessive and ideological the reaction to his appointment was.

* One of the supposedly damning things that Freeman has said in connection with Tibet is that last year’s riots in Lhasa were “race riots.” Well, they were riots, and they targeted Chinese businessmen and residents whom local Tibetans saw as an intrusive colonial presence, and the Tibetan rioters were ethnically different from the Han Chinese whom they were assaulting. When something similar happens in an American city, it is not all that unusual to refer to it as a race riot. Call it an ethnic riot if you prefer. What is so remarkable about the reaction to this quote is that almost everyone in the U.S. feels obliged to treat every episode of unrest in China through the narrow filter of anti-government activism, when the resentments and conflicts in last year’s riots, while stoked by Chinese colonial policy and provoked by mistreatment of some Tibetan monks, are the product of much more mundane majority resentments of successful minorities. If these riots had happened against Chinese merchants in Indonesia, remarking on the ethnic dimension of the conflict would hardly be something controversial.

Second Update: Regarding the now-infamous quote from the listserv regarding Tiananmen Square, here is some background:

Blair and others countered that the e-mail was taken out of context, and that Freeman was not describing his own views but what he referred to as “the dominant view in China.”

One member of the listserv who did not wish to be identified said that Freeman’s e-mail came in the context of an extended conversation about what lessons the Chinese leadership took from the Tiananmen Square events, and that Freeman himself has always regarded the events as a “tragedy.”

Anyone who has participated in such listservs and other online discussions can imagine how one statement made during the course of a running debate with others, if it were taken in isolation, might give the wrong impression about what you believe about a certain subject. More to the point, when it came to action, as Fallows has already related, Freeman actually worked to help individuals in China. Here is Sidney Rittenberg’s testimony:

To my knowledge–and from personal experience–Chas Freeman as DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission, #2 to the Ambassador] in Beijing was a stalwart supporter of human rights who helped many individuals in need. Not political bluster, but intelligent and courageous action. He is strong in both wisdom and integrity.

What all of this tells me is that most of the criticism of Freeman on matters related to China was premature at best and was made without knowing very much about him, his views or his career. As to the questions of conflict of interest, the IG investigation would have resolved them one way or the other, but instead of waiting for an impartial and professional assessment of these matters the critics piled on with what were likely to have proved to be entirely baseless insinuations about Freeman’s integrity and accusations of working for foreign governments. As usual, character assassins typically reveal more about themselves than about the person they try to destroy.

We’ll all think about this episode for a while. ~James Fallows

As much as I would like to think that Mr. Fallows is right about this, I don’t think this is true. If most people bring up this unhappy episode again, it will be as a cautionary tale to make clear to anyone who wants to serve in government in any important post that merit, qualifications and reputation count for nothing if you do not check off the right ideological boxes. There will be a few who will refer back to this episode as another example of how distorted and warped our policy debate is, but this won’t matter very much. A qualified professional has been inexcusably dragged through the mud to satisfy a bunch of hypocrites, and in return I fully expect that we will get queries as to why we don’t have a better quality of foreign policy realists–you know, the sort who keep their mouths shut about anything controversial and do what they’re told. Then a few years down the road we will wonder why there were not any contrarian and independent minds challenging consensus views that proved to be completely wrong, and then, and perhaps only then, we will look back on this episode and understand how that came about.

In the end, this has been a contestation of power, and the defenders of the status quo won and actually won pretty easily. For all of the pleasant ideas about a changing political landscape and the rise of alternative voices in the debate over U.S. policy in the Near East, all it took to sink a non-confirmable intelligence appointment who had the full confidence of the Director of National Intelligence was a couple of weeks of public whining by a band of petulant, ill-informed hacks. Some may still think about this episode in the days to come, but on the whole “we” will forget, and that is perhaps the most depressing thing about it. The controversy will not elicit a backlash, but will instead change nothing.

Not to get pulled back too much into the Freeman controversy, which I would prefer to see resolved sooner than later, but I did want to comment on Leon Hadar’s post on the main blog. One of the things that Freeman critics have suddenly (re)discovered is their deep concern for human rights violations in China, which would seem to mean that state policy that cultivates a strong relationship with Beijing of the sort that Freeman has endorsed for decades is cynical and maybe even amoral. As Dr. Hadar reminds us, Israel pursues such a relationship just as our government does, and just as it did with apartheid-era South Africa when the two states shared many of the same international enemies and Western critics. It is Israel’s prerogative to pursue diplomatic relations that it believes serve its national interest, and I would expect them to do nothing else, but there is something strange about holding Freeman to a standard on these matters to which his critics have never held the Israeli government. One does not want to impugn motives, but it’s almost as if protestations about Freeman’s views on Tiananmen Square and other Chinese matters are themselves opportunistic and cynical. This would be shocking indeed.

Now it is true that some of Freeman’s defenders have over-generalized when describing his critics, and so have left themselves open to the silly but rhetorically effective taunts of, “Oh yeah, what about Human Rights Watch?” Yes, what about Human Rights Watch? Despite the fact that the organization does not presume to speak on Freeman’s qualifications as an intelligence analyst, which is the most relevant issue at hand, the sudden vesting of HRW with great moral authority by the standard “pro-Israel” crowd is surreal. This is the same organization whose reports on the war in Lebanon were denounced as anti-Semitic, among other slurs, and whose credibility is constantly attacked by these very same people when it describes the abuses committed in Israeli military actions. That is part of the reason for the polemical usage of HRW in this case as a way of saying “even Human Rights Watch is against this appointment, and you all know how much we hate Human Rights Watch,” but most of the critics have zero credibility in this matter. Indeed, under other circumstances, if HRW claimed something to be true they would almost immediately assume that it was false. The people who mocked the idea of proportionality and dismissed reports of civilian casualties and war crimes in Lebanon (and Gaza) cannot expect to be taken seriously when they suddenly pose as allies of the human rights activists, whom they previously attacked and insulted and whom they are now using to serve an entirely different agenda.

Update: As you all know by now, Freeman has withdrawn and issued a statement. Here is an excerpt:

The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

That sounds about right.

In recent Senate races, Specter beat back a Club-supported primary challenge from Toomey and won in November despite conservative defections to Constitution Party candidate Jim Clymer. In 2006, Lincoln Chafee similarly repelled Club-endorsed Steve Laffey and lost the general election despite winning 94 percent of self-described Republicans. In New Mexico’s open Senate seat in 2008, the Club favored conservative Congressman Steve Pearce over fellow Rep. Heather Wilson. Pearce got pasted in November but Wilson didn’t poll any better and barely hung on to her own House seat in 2006 by just 861 votes. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s article makes a number of good points, and he is correct that one cannot lay most of the GOP’s woes at the door of interest groups, such as Club for Growth, that promote conservative challengers against Republican incumbents. However, for the Club’s strategy to make sense on their own terms, they need to be able to show not only that they are not consistently doing harm to the electoral fortunes of the GOP, but also that they are helping to get the most conservative candidates elected to office. On those occasions when their challengers have knocked off incumbents, they have not had any general election victories, and in at least one case, the MD-01 race, the primary defeat for Gilchrest all but ensured that the non-incumbent Republican primary victor would lose in the fall during an already difficult year for the party. Perhaps the Club can explain why having one less semi-reliable Republican vote is a better outcome.

For the Club’s approach to make sense, there would need to be some evidence that Steve Laffey, for example, was as or more electable than Chafee, but in a particularly brutal year such as 2006 Chafee’s incumbency was probably the only thing that kept the race competitive, and it still wasn’t enough. For the Laffey challenge to make sense against the backdrop of the 2006 slaughter, one would need to make the argument that Laffey stood a better chance of resisting the wave, when even Chafee, whose positions on many issues were indistinguishable from the Democratic candidate’s, was unable to survive. If one could not make that argument, targeting Chafee doesn’t seem to make much sense at all, regardless of how viscerally satisfying it might be to campaign against a liberal Republican.

In elections for open seats, such as the New Mexico Senate race, it is harder to blame the Club for electoral defeats. Certainly, no Republican was going to win statewide office in a year when Obama won 57% of the vote in New Mexico. (Full disclosure: I voted for Pearce.) However, the fate of Pearce offers a warning to Toomey and his supporters: states that lean heavily Democratic at all levels of voting, as Pennsylvania now does, are unusually poor places to test the electoral viability of a Club for Growth-approved Republican. Unmentioned in Jim’s article is the collateral damage from the race to replace Domenici: both Republican House incumbents vacated their seats to run for the nomination and both House seats were lost in the fall. Arguably, New Mexico was so rapidly turning blue that it wouldn’t have mattered whether Pearce and Wilson stayed in their seats, but at least Pearce was more aligned with his district and stood a decent chance of winning re-election despite the tilt to the Democrats. Perhaps if Pearce had not been encouraged in his Senate aspirations, the Republicans would still have another seat in the House.

The problem with the Club’s approach is not necessarily its goal of targeting moderate incumbents, which can make sense and be perfectly appropriate if these representatives consistently ignore their constituents’ views, but it is instead the Club’s awe-inspiring lack of any sense of timing or awareness of the political mood of the states where they are backing their challengers. For good or ill, the Club specializes in recruiting true-believing free traders and anti-spending enthusiasts, and at the moment I can think of few worse places to run such a candidate than Pennsylvania in a recession. Nominating Toomey in 2004 would have made sense given the generally better position of Republicans nationwide, and had Santorum backed Toomey then he would have received less grief from pro-lifers in 2006 and might have done a little better himself. However, to correct the blunder of ’04 by putting Toomey in a position to lose a seat in 2010 that Specter might not hold anyway will give the Democratic majority another reliable vote, and it will create a convenient narrative that will be exploited to the nth degree by precisely the moderate reformer types Toomey et al. oppose, who will cite Toomey’s defeat as proof that the Club for Growth is a largely destructive force in the GOP coalition. It is precisely those who tend to sympathize more with the Club for Growth and the kinds of candidates it recruits that need to raise the alarm about the political cluelessness of the Club’s approach to elections, but this is not happening.

It is beneath my dignity to be critical of those beneath me. ~Rush Limbaugh

That’s strange. That either means that Limbaugh has built most of his career on sinking beneath his dignity, or it means that he believes that Michael Steele is a far greater man than he is. I don’t think he believes the latter.

I’ve written often about the need for renewing the conservative- libertarian fusion, why I think this is a natural alliance, and the terms on which I think it should be forged. The actions of an assertive liberal (in the contemporary American sense) government are starting to illustrate this to the most interesting of those writers often termed crunchy cons, who often think of themselves in direct opposition to a hyper-individualized, commercial political culture on the Right. That is, as among the least natural candidates for fusionism imaginable.

The nature of this alliance is simple: crunchy cons want government to be limited to allow space for idiosyncratic local communities. It is a grudging acceptance of limits, rather than a full-throated embrace of large-scale politics. This strikes me as a healthy view of the role of politics. ~Jim Manzi

Manzi is correct that some of the crunchier dissidents (he has linked to Rod and John in this post) are interested in a sort of fusionism in that they, we, remain convinced that moral restraint and limited government, or virtue and liberty (to use old-fashioned fusionist language) rightly understood, are mutually reinforcing, and indeed that one cannot long have any meaningful kind of liberty without both a human-scale way of life and an ethic of restraint. My guess is that Rod and John would tend to agree that decentralist resistance to any large-scale polity, and thus of large-scale politics, is needed to preserve customary and chartered liberties.

The problem I have always had with fusionism in practice as a matter of political alliances is that typically the far more numerous traditionalist or social conservative part of the alliance is compelled to define and express its views through the distorting language of rights, and as a result the ostensible partisans of liberty end up not only dictating priorities for any such alliance but also end up defining what everyone is supposed to mean when referring to liberty. This is inevitably liberty-as-emancipation and not liberty-through-restraint, and partisans of the former are always going to portray liberty-through-restraint as creeping statism/socialism/authoritarianism, despite the fact that they and their understanding of freedom are paving/have paved the way for the very things they accuse us of wanting to impose.

If most libertarians were like John or Dylan Hales, there would be no problem, but a great many libertarians are a lot more like this, for whom idiosyncratic local communities are “islands of moral chauvinism” and the intellectual riches of Christian civilization are meaningless scribble. This is what makes a fusionist alliance with such fiercely anti-patriotic, anti-religious and globalist types so implausible, fruitless and inherently unattractive.

Patrick Deneen on table manners and restraint.

Mark Shiffman on food, self-sufficiency and freedom.