Troparion 

Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, Who hast revealed the fisherman as most wise By sending down upon them the Holy Spirit; Through them Thou didst draw the world into Thy net. O Lover of Man, Glory to Thee!

Kontakion 

When the Most High came down and confused the tongues, He divided the nations; But when He distributed the tongues of fire, He called all to unity. Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the all-holy Spirit!

As the Belarussian nun who was visiting us yesterday said to me, “Happy Pentecost!” 

She mentioned that a British priest had visited their convent, and they had enjoyed a “small Pentecost” because the two priests had served in their respective languages.  Of course, almost all Orthodox churches here in the U.S. use multiple languages in services, so we are fortunate to have these small Pentecosts every week.

Sullivan:

But an expansion of troop presence in the tens of thousands deep into the Arab heartland is a huge shift – the first real shift since the end of the Cold War [bold mine-DL]. And that makes this election a very profound one in many ways: it’s about the direction of the US – the meaning of the US – in a post-Cold War world. A permanent Iraq presence really does mean an imperial future for the US – revealed nakedly for what it is.

Replace Iraq with Saudi Arabia, rewind seventeen years and you could say exactly the same thing, because the “huge shift” occurred in the early ’90s and meaningful political resistance to that shift was never very great.  There seems to be a great need to act as if the invasion of Iraq marks a radical departure from the interventionism of the ’90s and the prolonged military presence in the Gulf, when it would have been unthinkable without both for a number of reasons.  Without the presence in the Gulf, the embargo of Iraq and the ten-year air war against Iraq, it is difficult to imagine what else would have so motivated predominantly Saudi terrorists to strike at the U.S., but more directly it is impossible to imagine anyone believing Iraq to pose a threat to the U.S. had we not spent an entire decade treating Iraq as a bombing range and viewing its government as our principal foe in the world.   

That is another thing about mission creep and empire-building: it can always be described in the beginning as an act of defense (even if interventionist or hostile policies that helped pave the way for an attack had been in place long before).  Even if you take the initial claim of self-defense to be true, it is the persistence in maintaining control or a military presence in places where none is needed any longer that separates empires from other powers.  That is why in a very meaningful way our involvement in WWI had no meaningfully imperialistic overtones to it; it was a bad idea, but it was not a case of imperialism of any kind because all of our forces came home once the war was over.  Indeed, the problem with our involvement with WWI was its crusading anti-imperialism directed at other states. 

Rome eventually dismembered Pontus in response to an attack on Roman citizens in Asia, and it occupied Egypt when the latter took sides in the civil wars, but then the Romans never left.  Their empire expanded by fits and starts, and often they acquired new provinces through some wars that could fairly be described as defensive (as well as some that were cases of out-and-out aggression), but it was above all the decision to remain and oversee these new lands, whether through intermediaries or directly, that made them what everyone acknowledges to be an empire.

James’ observation is correct, but aside from being another occasion to say that popular opinion is no guide to making good policy I would add that the frequent comparisons made between a long-term presence in Iraq and other long-term presences in Korea, Germany and elsewhere makes for an exceptionally good reason to leave Iraq immediately.  It is clear that people easily become accustomed to the idea of long-term presences in other countries, which is why they should not be given the time to get accustomed to the idea.  The long-term deployments in Korea, Germany and elsewhere, whatever legitimate and appropriate purpose they once served, are no longer necessary.  A long-term presence in Iraq is not now and never will be necessary, so whether or not “the American people” will accept it misses the point: they have continued to accept long-term deployments and alliances long after these became obsolete, which suggests that the people’s willingness to accept outdated and unnecessary policies should not be a factor in embarking on a genuinely foolish and costly course of action. 

Washington made the choice to undertake the “huge shift” without any real consultation or consent from the people in 1991, and so we remained in the Gulf and around the world.  Leaving Iraq would be a first step to correcting that error.

The distinguishing characteristic of Hyde Park’s political history – the feature that sets it apart from every other neighborhood in the city – is its longstanding defiance of the Chicago machine. ~Thomas Frank

That must be why Obama, true son of Hyde Park, is deeply opposed to the Chicago machine.  Oh, wait, that’s completely untrue:

Obama the reformer is backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Daley boys. He is spoken for by Daley’s own spokesman, David Axelrod.  He was launched into his U.S. Senate by machine power broker and state Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd).

As I have made clear already, I think the Hyde Park-bashing attack is ridiculous, but any notion that Obama gets to take credit for Hyde Park residents’ opposition to machine politics in Chicago is even more so.  Did the WSJ give Frank a regular column deliberately as a way to embarrass the left, or was it just a happy accident?

The age and party affiliation table from the latest Pew survey shows the demographics of party identification in great detail.  Pay attention especially to the marriage gap in the very bottom of that table: among 18-29 year olds, where the greatest gap between the two parties is to be found (58-33 D/R overall), there is essentially no gap among married people (44-43), but among the unmarried it remains a vast 30-point difference that benefits the Democrats (61-31).  As the overall number suggests, there are far more unmarried than married 18-29 year olds and significantly more than there have been in previous generations.  This is consistent with what others have been finding, and helps confirm one of the basic structural reasons why the GOP continues to have as much support as it still does and why its future in its current form is extremely bleak.

Jim Antle notes that he fits the Obamacon profile pretty well, and I have to say that the same goes for me, except for the small problem that neither of us supports Obama’s election.  You’d think that a paleo in Hyde Park would be the quintessential Obamacon, but that is not so.  A repeal or amending of the PATRIOT Act is not likely forthcoming under an Obama administration, when he voted to reauthorise the Act in 2006.  Jim’s reservations about Obama’s position on Iraq and mine are very similar.  Here is Jim’s point:

Second, given that Obama’s proposed Iraq exit is conditional upon there being no “security vacuum filled with terrorism, chaos, ethnic cleansing and genocide that could engulf large swaths of the Middle East and endanger America,” he might not actually end the war in any meaningful sense. 

As I speculated a few months ago:

Indeed, this is another case where Obama’s instinct for interventionism will probably prevent withdrawal from Iraq, or will require an immediate re-deployment for the sake of “stopping genocide.”  A hardened realist might wash his, our, hands of Iraq and refuse to be drawn back in; Obama’s foreign policy-as-moral preening would demand another intervention.  Immediately the political debate would be inverted, as progressives suddenly discovered the virtues of interventionist warfare once again and Republicans would be outraged at the “distraction” from our real security threats.     

Discussing Bruce Bartlett’s article on the “rise” of the Obamacons, which I suppose must go beyond a trend and consitutes an entire movement of at least eleven people, Jim writes:

Finally, there isn’t much evidence that Obamacons exist in large numbers at the grassroots level. Most polls show McCain winning twice as much Democratic support as Obama wins Republican support. In past elections, it has tended to be the least conservative Republicans who have voted Democratic. Bloggers, columnists, academics, and other conservative elites are important, perhaps more so than the average voter. But if Obamacons are men (and women) without a country, their “rise” won’t have much impact on the election.

What is notable is how concentrated the Obamacon phenomenon is among bloggers, columnists, academics and conservative elites.  Or perhaps a better way to put it is “limited to” these people, since there is no groundswell of pro-Obama sentiment on the right.  As Jim suggests here, the “Obamacan” (i.e., Republicans for Obama) phenomenon is more electorally significant, and yet is ultimately not much greater than typical levels of crossover voting for the Democratic nominee.  Where Kerry got 7%, Obama typically gets 10%.  As I’m sure others have noted, there are fewer self-described Republicans out there, so there are a lot of former Republicans, some of whom may be supporting Obama, thus increasing his numbers among independents.  The reason why the Obamacon phenomenon is so small is that it requires a tremendous act of imagination and equally tremendous trust in a major party politician for a conservative to rationalise supporting a Democratic candidate for President, and most people haven’t the time or inclination for either one.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t live in northern Virginia, but so far this year I haven’t had much to say about the GOP primary challenger in Virginia’s 8th District, Amit Singh, but I should say a few words on the occasion of his defeat in the primary.  Richard and Danhavehad a lotmore to sayabout his campaign.  Singh was endorsed by Ron Paul himself, and represents one of a number of House and Senate Republican primary challengers who have been inspired by Paul’s presidential run to advance a more libertarian, small-government and non-interventionist line within the GOP.  It is actually quite heartening that Singh was able to garner 44% of the GOP vote in northern Virginia running on a platform that included scaling back overseas deployments in Europe and Asia.  I’m trying to think of many other Republican House candidates advocating anything similar, and I am not coming up with a lot of names.       

From the antiwar conservative perspective, his stance on the war was hardly ideal (notable is the lack of any call for withdrawal on any timetable), but he was clearly a far better alternative than his primary opponent.  Unless one insists on being a single-issue Iraq voter, in which case Moran has been right from the start, Singh was a reasonably attractive candidate and his success would have been a healthy development inside a moribund and confused GOP.  As little time as I have for the modern GOP, it does not serve the American interest to have one overreaching unified government replaced with another that is equally unaccountable and unchecked.  A GOP with more Amit Singhs and fewer Mark Ellmores as its elected leaders would function as a better opposition party in the short term and offer a more credible alternative to what the Democratic majority will offer over the long-term.   

If Ron Paul’s influence on U.S. politics is going to become a phenomenon more enduring than one or two election cycles, the movement that grows out of his campaign will need to include a great number of people who have been wrong, sometimes stunningly wrong, on major policy issues in the past or who have had professional backgrounds that make them suspect to opponents of expansive and intrusive government.  The current Libertarian nominee for President, Bob Barr, or Rep. Walter Jones are perfect examples of those who mistakenly supported the war in Iraq and the PATRIOT Act and have now come to oppose one or both of these.  Presumably, we on the antiwar and constitutionalist right should welcome those who have come to agree with us, if we would like to have any sort of influence on the government that is not trivial.

When asked which party should control Congress, Democrats win 52-33, which is the largest lead any party has had in 13 years and is a larger lead for the Democrats than they had two years ago.  Anyone who cites the high disapproval numbers for Congress as proof that the public has wearied of the Democratic majority is kidding himself.  We are probably looking at another year of a net gain of 30 seats for Democrats, and perhaps more than that depending on how the public mood changes over the summer with gas prices continuing to rise.  Since the GOP is likely to suffer through another horrible election, how bad will it be and where will they suffer losses? 

Looking over CQ‘s race ratings and the latest news, we can start with VA-11, Tom Davis’ seat, which is now considered a toss-up.  This isn’t entirely surprising, as it is a northern Virginia suburban district that has been trending towards the Democrats for some time along with the rest of northern Virginia.  Eleven other seats are extremely vulnerable or leaning towards the Democrats: Young’s At-Large district in Alaska, MN-03, NC-08, NJ-07, NM-01, NY-25, OH-15, OH-16, and WA-08 are all toss-ups, and the AZ-01 and IL-11 open seats are very likely to flip.  All except for Young and the North Carolina district held by Hayes are open seats that have been vacated for reasons of retirement, running for other offices or indictment, and Young is vulnerable because of the haze of corruption that has been hanging over Alaskan Republican politics for the last several years and threatens also to drag down Ted Stevens in the Senate.  Hayes’ seat seems to be in jeopardy (again) because of the same shift away from the GOP that elected Heath Shuler two years ago and may push Liddy Dole out of the Senate this year.  Of course, Hayes barely survived last time and faces a re-match against Larry Kissell, whom he defeated by 329 votes.  It seems quite likely, especially given Republican weakness even at the presidential level in N.C., that Hayes will be defeated. 

Since its creation in 1968, New Mexico’s 1st District has never elected a Democrat.  As an open seat in a Democratic-trending district, NM-01 may finally flip, but the dynamic may have changed to the extent that alienated Republicans and independents who refused to vote for Heather Wilson and who even voted for Madrid last time may be inclined to support the Republican, Darren White.  Wilson won by the narrowest of margins, but White might be able to improve on her showing because of his local popularity as county sheriff.  I assumed Madrid would win last time, but this year I am not so sure that the Democrats can take it over.

The Ohio, New York, New Jersey and Minnesota open seats listed above are probably going to be lost to the Democrats.  In addition to the 25th District, the 26th, vacated by Tom Reynolds of Foley scandal and failed NRCC chairmanship fame, is also very vulnerable despite its official ranking.  The open seat vacated by Fossella on Long Staten Island is unusually vulnerable as a suburban district in the Northeast where the GOP label is in particularly bad disrepute (thanks in part to the news about Fossella’s extra family).  Florida’s 13th District only very narrowly went for Buchanan last time amid much controversy about vote-counting (as usual), so it is likely quite vulnerable.  Schmidt and Chabot in Ohio and Gerlach in Pennsylvania will be hard-pressed to survive another Democratic wave.  I assume that at least two out of these three lose.   Idaho’s 1st is never guaranteed, considering how unlikeable Sali is, and Wyoming’s At-Large will probably once again be more competitive than Wyoming should ever be.  Cubin was the candidate, as you may recall, who derided and mocked the wheelchair-bound Libertarian candidate after a debate.  All of the competitive Illinois districts –6th, 10th and 18th–are probably going to be even more competitive this year.  The open seat in MD-01, brought about by the short-sighted tactics of the Club for Growth, is likely going to be vulnerable, and the same goes for FL-15 and NM-02.  The incumbents in Michigan and the ever-embattled Chris Shays in Connecticut will have great difficulty resisting another wave.  Safer than most of the others, but still at risk are Kuhl and English, who faced stiff challenges last cycle but who were able to put together solid wins.

All of this is subject to change, but it is easy to see how the Democrats can get to a 30-seat gain this year in the House.  the best chances the GOP has are the open seat in Alabama and FL-16, Mark Foley’s old district.  Nancy Boyda’s endorsement of Obama may come back to haunt her in her district, partly because she succeeded against Jim Ryun because she kept her distance from national Democrats last cycle.  It may be a mistake for her to associate herself with the national party now that she is an incumbent, but it’s not clear that the Republicans will be able to recover that seat.

The conventional wisdom has started to congeal (that seems the best way to describe the process) that the election will primarily over whether the public will accept Obama, the relative unknown and newcomer to the scene, and this will end up turning, as it did in 1980, on whether the public becomes comfortable with someone whose ideas on a lot of things are purported to be (by his critics at least) far out of the mainstream.  The comparison to Reagan in ’80 and Reagan’s success in the debate with Carter should give the Obama campaign pause, since Obama has had some notoriously awful debate performances.  He hasn’t had one lately, since he never agreed to another debate after the debacle in Philadelphia in April. 

It seems to me that he also has a higher bar to clear than Reagan did.  His opponents attempted to portray Reagan as dangerous and reckless in his ideas, but they did not have the advantage of using the same charge of inexperience against a former two-term governor (which would have been a bit rich coming from the Carter campaign in any case).  So far Obama has deflected this charge by making a perfectly reasonable argument that judgement matters more than long years in Washington, but the obvious counter to this argument is that Obama doesn’t have long years of experience in government of any kind and has had few occasions to demonstrate this judgement when actually in an official position to exercise it.  Strangely, this would matter a lot less if he were running a conventional me-too, “centrist” campaign, but he proposes to make a number of significant policy changes.  The more significant the departure (or just the perceived departure) from the status quo, the more powerful the “inexperience” charge becomes.  (This is a point Stark makes in his column.)  It doesn’t necessarily matter that he is advancing an agenda that is, on the whole, quite popular.  It becomes a question not of whether the candidate has the right proposals and policies, but whether he can be relied on to carry them out competently.  Competence, not ideology–this could, very ironically, effectively become the motto for the McCain campaign, despite the fact that McCain doesn’t have any record of judgement or competence and wears the same ideological blinders as Mr. Bush.  Then again, Hillary Clinton didn’t actually have a record of experience, but she managed to flog that issue for a full six months and made life very difficult for Obama.  After the last eight years, the desire for a competent administration, even one that does not pursue the policies that one would like in every or most areas, may be very strong, especially among those voters who do not yet have strong preferences for one of the candidates.   

Contrary to what has often been said during the last few months, I think the general election is going to turn even more on matters of biography and personality than the nomination fight did.  During the primaries, the relative lack of policy differences between Clinton and Obama made the campaign fairly biography- and character-oriented, but I would suggest that the greater the policy differences between the candidates the more important matters of biography and character are going to become.  Counterintuitively, this is why Obama’s need for a series of pivotal moments to persuade the public that he can be trusted with the Presidency is more dangerous for him than it was for other relative newcomers to the national scene, because he is proposing enough of a significant change in course that he will have to be especially persuasive and he will probably have to do it in a format (i.e., in debates) where he has been much weaker. 

This is really what the “inexperence” charge comes down to: who are you, what have you done and why should I trust you?  In his decades in the House and the Senate, McCain has accomplished relatively little, and he has taken leadership roles on legislation mostly in the last decade as he has been building his national profile for the sake of his two presidential runs,  but he has very effectively used the media to define himself as he wants to be portrayed that has created the illusion that he is a trustworthy teller of truths and opponent of corruption.  Those who talk about the paucity or length of Obama’s legislative record ultimately miss the point.  McCain’s record won’t bear much scrutiny, either, if one is looking for meaningful accomplishments.  Yet the number of co-sponsored bills and passed legislative acts is almost beside the point, and only interest groups, activists and obsessive political junkies will pay attention to these anyway. 

As frustrating as it is to watch, because it often yields horrible results later, presidential elections turn not just on which candidate has shown “leadership,” but on which candidate can create the illusion that he has shown leadership when, in fact, he has done nothing particularly worthwhile.  Thus Bush sold himself as a governor who worked well with the opposition (never mind that his position was constitutionally very weak), and then won re-election on the basis of perpetuating a war he had started.  Bizarrely, Bush’s remarkable inability to adapt and his tendency to embark on ill-conceived crusades was taken as proof of deeply-held conviction and a willingness to act, which somehow proved that he was more of a “leader” than the overly deliberative Kerry.  Looking at the general election match-up between McCain and Obama, I get a cold, dreadful feeling of deja vu.  

McCain will weave an absurd story about himself in which he has played the heroic corruption-fighter and outspoken defender of unpopular causes (even though these causes are usually always very popular with his most important constituency, journalists), while the very nature of Obama’s swift ascension through the political ranks suggests, in the words of John Kass, “a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.”  That was Tom Bevan‘s point earlier this week.  At the same time, it is easy to imagine that Obama’s virtue of thoughfulness will be twisted into the flaw of indecisiveness.  I think this is the gamble the McCain campaign is making when they make a major issue out of Obama’s willingness to enter into talks with “rogue” governments.  The policy idea itself makes sense under certain circumstances, and McCain risks revealing again just how attached he is to the administration’s failed foreign policy approach, but I am guessing McCain thinks that if he can portray Obama as the candidate of talk and set himself up as the candidate of action (as meaningless and misleading as this dichotomy actually is) that he will prevail in the election.  If he can thereby goad Obama into making additional rash promises to be willing to “take action” (against, say, Iran), he succeeds in blurring the differences between the two of them, which helps to undermine the theme of Obama’s campaign and make McCain’s own foreign policy views seem less extreme.    

Obama has often done worst of all in debates when confronted with the “gotcha” questions concerning various controversies, whether serious or absurd, and we have seen this reaction again in the latest flap over Jim Johnson.  When confronted with questions about his associates, he falls into his worst habit of playing the part of a dismissive, hyperean wise man who will not deign to lower himself to respond to such petty trivia…even when they are questions about the person running his vice presidential search committee.  “These aren’t folks who are working for me” might well become the “no controlling legal authority” meme that will haunt Obama for the next several months, because it does reveal something that Obama consistently does when challenged on his associations: first, he dismisses it as irrelevant or as a “distraction” (one of his preferred words), next he denies that the person is very closely tied to him, then he gets annoyed that people are asking him about such things, and finally the person leaves his campaign or he makes some statement distancing himself from them.  This is what all politicians do to one agree or another, but what may make it more significant in Obama’s case is this question of winning public trust.  If voters desperately want to depart from this administration’s policies, and they do, but they have reservations and are hesitant to vote in Obama, all these little episodes, perhaps not very important in isolation, gradually add up and create significant resistance to the candidate.

One of Sullivan’s readers whines about the use of the word empire:

This is not the British in Malaysia.

Quite true.  Unlike the British, our government seems to have no intention of leaving Iraq under any circumstances. 

One wonders if these people understand how British rule, or Roman rule for that matter, was extended to many of the places that later became “the empire.”  In many cases, the Romans and the British alike initially made a number of treaties with local rulers, who agreed to submit to occupation and taxation in exchange for being secured in their traditional (or usurped) rights, and over time these local rulers became merely figureheads to maintain a useful fiction that helped maintain the imperial system or they were liquidated/removed and replaced with direct imperial administration.  Our useful fiction is that the Iraqi government is a sovereign democratic one, we are currently demanding the right to occupy their country militarily, but we seem to have done without demanding the ability to tax Iraqis for our own revenues.  As far as I can tell, that is the only significant structural difference between a long-term military occupation of Iraq and old-style colonialism.  British rule in India did not begin with anything so obvious as a direct invasion, the elimination or expulsion of the old ruling class and the creation of an entirely new political order from stratch.  First, they merely did business with the existing rulers, then co-opted them and then the relationship became more coercive and hegemonic.  All the while the formal domestic institutions of a representative constitutional monarchy not only remained in place at home, but were gradually liberalising at the same time that the empire was expanding.  Not only is there no contradiction in having an officially democratic regime engage in imperialism, but it has happened several times in the history of modern democracies.  The “liberal imperialism” of Gladstone and the “Tory democracy” of the late 19th century helped fuel expansionist policies in Africa.  Roman rule throughout the Near East was the result of a series of treaties made with local kings (and, of course, backed up with military might).  Rome was just a republic making treaties with the legitimate rulers of various states, so why worry about empire?    

There is nothing “excessive” about the word empire to describe the political and military domination of other countries.  Hegemony may be slightly more precise, but the practical difference between hegemony and empire is not very great when hegemony entails the establishment of dozens of military bases on foreign soil.  Perhaps people who believe that Washington and Baghdad are merely negotiating a bilateral “status of forces” agreement as between two equal, sovereign states also think that the Batavian Republic was a free and independent state that just had a very friendly relationship with France.  Oh, but that couldn’t have been imperialism–France was democratic at the time!  France and the Batavian Republic also made a treaty, one that was quite disadvantageous to the Dutch but a treaty all the same, so that must have made the ensuing occupation all right.   

If there is one good thing that might come out of the disaster of the war in Iraq, it is that the absurd, excessive and naive faith that democracies are never aggressive and imperialistic may be shaken at least a little.

In one of his earliest foreign policy blunders on the trail, Obama said that he would launch strikes inside Pakistan against Al Qaeda targets without Islamabad’s permission, and his supporters have made a point of reminding everyone about this, as if they thought their candidate needed a dose of reckless hawkishness to compensate for something.  As it happens, this has also been the policy under the current administration, which doesn’t seem to embarrass the proponents of “turning the page.”  After all, what could go wrong with such a proposal?  Maybe something like this:

U.S.-led forces killed Pakistani troops in an airstrike along the volatile Afghan border that Pakistan’s army condemned on Wednesday as “completely unprovoked and cowardly.”

U.S. officials confirmed that three aircraft launched about a dozen bombs following a clash between Taliban militants and Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces late Tuesday. Pakistan says the strikes killed 11 of its paramilitary troops.

The Pakistani army said the coalition airstrike hit a post of the paramilitary Frontier Corps and was a “completely unprovoked and cowardly act.”

It launched a strong protest and reserved “the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression,” the military said in a statement.

In addition to violating Pakistani sovereignty and potentially destabilising a somewhat friendly and very important allied government, we can also add the possibility of killing allied soldiers by mistake to the rather long list of reasons why Obama and Bush have been wrong about this and, shockingly, McCain has been the sober voice of reason by comparison.  No, that last part is not a joke.  As if the Pakistani military were not demoralised enough as it is by being compelled to fight a hard counterinsurgency on our behalf, they now have to worry about their paramilitary units being mistaken for Taliban.