Barack Obama issued a statement in response. He called on “all those who have influence with Hezbollah” to “press them to stand down.” Then he declared, “It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.”

That sentence has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement. Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of? ~David Brooks

Brooks goes on to explain that he spoke to Obama, who dispelled Brooks’ concerns, but the problem here seems to me to be that Brooks had these concerns in the first place.  Who could have read or heard the lines given above and thought, “Oh, that’s some appeasement right there”?  Where did Obama say that any of the reforms he was describing were aimed at including Hizbullah?  You have to assume that anyone who is interested in combating the power and influence of Hizbullah through something other than a dead-end air war (which Obama also supported two years ago, much to his antiwar supporters’ lasting chagrin) wants to “mollify” Hizbullah, rather than subvert them, because the only alternative to the unavailable option of crushing Hizbullah militarily is apparently to cut a deal with them.  Isn’t Brooks’ initial reaction precisely the reflexive disdain for procedural reform and diplomatic engagement as tools that Obama routinely criticises, and which this administration shows with embarrassing frequency?  Isn’t this precisely the identification of any and all diplomacy with “appeasement” that Obama has been railing against this week?  Brooks was smart enough to think better of using the “appeaser” label, but what does it say about the folly of an ideology that frames foreign affairs in terms of resolve vs. appeasement that Brooks even had to ask Obama those questions?

Republicans are shellshocked over losing a third House seat in a special election this year. Much as a series of special-election defeats by Democrats in 1994 augured that the first midterm election of the Clinton years would be bad for the party, the GOP now worries it could lose up to 20 House seats this fall. That would place Republican numbers in the House in the range of their pre-1994 levels – and make the party a hopelessly outnumbered minority. ~John Fund 

“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day. ~Peggy Noonan

“There comes a time when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.” ~Battlestar Galactica

One thing about the Mississippi election that has puzzled me is why so many conservatives have expressed some form of despair or anxiety about what it portends.  Suppose for a moment that this means the decimation of the Republicans in the House and Senate as many more conservative Democrats are elected.  Conservatives have some reason to take solace from this, since it means at once the repudiation of a party that abandoned restraint, prudence and wisdom and the opening up of something like a real competition for the votes of cultural conservatives.  Republicans betrayed their promises, and so another people shall inherit what they were given. 

Conservatives have suffered from the effects of living with a political monopoly, since they have felt compelled time and again to swallow their disagreements with the GOP and continue backing it for fear of the alternative.  The lack of a tolerable alternative made this seem unavoidable.  But what if the alternative begins to include ever-larger numbers of blue dog Democrats and the like?  They may take cultural issues no more seriously than the GOP, but their mere existence creates more competition for conservative support and so might potentially give conservatives some minimal leverage and might lead to the GOP serving their interests more faithfully than they have done.  No one should invest too much into this idea, since we have cheered Webb and then found him in practice to be pretty much the conventional Democrat that he had become.  On the other hand, the Heath Shulers in Congress have proven to be reasonably good on immigration.  Perhaps the prospect not just of losing in the fall, but also of seeing its entire coalition evaporate before its eyes will stir the GOP to abandon its embrace of the war and its attachment to centralised power.  Of course, that would still leave them in search of a positive agenda, which they haven’t had for years and years.  Remember how Republicans used to trumpet that they were the party of ideas?  No one says that anymore, or at least not with a straight face.

Shouldn’t that be Neuropean Buddhist, James?

I didn’t realise that noticing the weird resemblance between Roger Allam and Christopher Hitchens was a new thing.  When I watched V for Vendetta years ago, and I saw Allam playing a sleazy, fascist, corrupt talk-show host I briefly assumed that Hitchens had volunteered to do a cameo.  Then I discovered that it was a different person, but you can see why I was confused.  The style of argument, the mannerisms, and the personality were all as you would expect.

Ross continues the discussion about Brooks’ “neural Buddhists” column, which Caleb Stegall has also discussed at Taki’s Magazine, and he has a very useful summary of Brooks’ argument and the problems with it:

This notion’s major premise is summed up nicely by Brooks as follows: “Particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.” No, the Christian would say: Particular religious systems are cultural artifacts, in a sense, yes, but they’re artifacts built around specific human experiences, not universal ones. Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they’re “built on top” of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the “transcending boundaries/overflowing with love” experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God – the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity – are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe.

Ross is correct to say that religions are cultural artifacts (it is the “just cultural artifacts” claim that the materialist or psychoanalyst wants to emphasise), and that they are rooted in specific experiences, since there is no way for people to have universal experiences.  To some extent, because all human experience is historical, all religions are historical, though not necessarily to the same degree, and in that light religions have to be artifacts that have arisen and developed over and in time.  Religion, strictly speaking, encompasses those things that man creates to worship or communicate with the noumenal.  Revelation implies that man has received something from the noumenal realm, and that it necessarily transcends the material and temporal.  In this respect, neuroscience can describe how we are experiencing contact with the noumenal, but it cannot tell us very much, if anything, about what we are experiencing or the content of the message that we are receiving.  On a more mundane level, neuroscience tells us very little about whether we are or should be willing to credit a textual tradition that purports to relate to us the will of God.  Higher criticism is in many ways more dangerous to taking Scripture to be the Word of God than neuroscience is, and like neuroscience it claims to be scientific without necessarily having as much reason for doing so.  Higher criticism tends to induce doubt in those who have approached Scripture with an utterly simplistic understanding of scriptural interpretation in the first place.  If Genesis may reflect the influence of the Babylonian Captivity and echoes certain Mespotamian creation myths, then for a person trained to think about Scripture in a certain way this discovery is devastating and horrifying.  For those who accept that God is the Lord of history, and understand that His revelation is being worked out in time, this is not disconcerting or even surprising, but should be expected.

I would go still farther and say that the brief nods in the column towards Buddhism and perhaps some New Age theories of “self-actualisation” are also misleading, because Buddhism, insofar as I understand its ideal expression, has no truck with the things Brooks is talking about in part of his column.  Brooks says:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In this last sentence, it seems to me that he is describing some form of Vedanta, but Buddhism has no gods and repudiates attachment of every kind.  Detachment is, in fact, a place where Christian ascetics, Buddhists and philosophical pessimists seem to come together in a common experience of dying to the attachments of the world, albeit for very different reasons.  Nirvana is not the same as apatheia, and for Christian ascetics apatheia is acquired in the context of submission to God’s will, whereas Buddhists take for granted that attachment to this world–including the belief in a deity–is ultimately delusional and holds one back from escaping samsara.  As Ross’ title very perceptively notes, what Brooks is talking about bears some resemblance to the identity of Atman and Brahman in the Upanishads.  Obviously, this has nothing to do with Buddhism.

It’s questionable to me whether “an approach to spirituality that dispenses with the weirdness and scariness and miraculousness of the Judeo-Christian encounter with God, throws a scientific patina on prayer and meditation and promises that Love is all you need seems like a pretty obvious winner.”  I don’t mean that it is questionable whether it is a “winner” in some ultimate, spiritual sense, since I would, like Ross, obviously argue that it isn’t.  It seems to me that this sort of vague, nebulous “spirituality” will always attract a certain subset of any population, but once these people find that there is a richer, more concrete and more mystical (and sometimes more mystifying) tradition within one of the monotheistic religions, and particularly within Christianity (from which so many of these people in this country have fled without ever having really known it), they will give up on that “spiritual” path and seek something more compelling.

James is right when he says:

Obama’s remarks may make for wrongheaded policy — I happen to think that in some instances they do and in some they don’t — but Bush’s remarks typify the clumsy, overgeneralized, harping, dull, and rote approach to democratization that has made his administration such a sustained failure.

Certainly, that is what should be emphasised about Bush’s speech, along with its basic conceptual error that negotiations are an exercise in persuasion.  Diplomacy is much closer to haggling and pazari than it is to rhetoric.  In fact, a good diplomat doesn’t really care whether his opposite number has been persuaded by the virtue of his argument, but is most concerned to know that his opposite number is operating in good faith and will follow through on the bargain that has been reached.  There are things that will be non-negotiable for other regimes, just as there are for our own, and part of the art of diplomacy is to make maximal gains towards that limit of the non-negotiable for your side.  Or you can pretend that diplomacy has something to do with being nice and yielding to your rivals, as I assume Mr. Bush must believe for him to equate it with appeasement, which is almost the exact opposite of what proper diplomacy is.  It doesn’t matter to me that much whether or not Bush was referring to Obama.  I think he was, but that isn’t my concern.  What concerns me is that idea that Mr. Bush’s style of foreign policy can still be presented as self-evidently right and competent in the face of a mountain of evidence that it is neither.

I once said that Schaffer in Colorado had a decent chance of competing with Mark Udall for the open Senate seat.  I don’t think that anymore.  Here‘s why:

In Colorado, Bob Schaffer, the Republican Senate nominee, made a horrendous blunder last month when he touted the guest-worker program in the Northern Marianas Islands (notorious for forcing abortions and trafficking in sex slaves), which he had once visited on Abramoff’s dime.

It’s not really surprising, but Clinton leads McCain in Arkansas 53-39, while McCain leads Obama 57-33.  She gets 84% of Democrats, he gets 50%, and his unfavs are 61%, but who cares?  It’s just another one of those irrelevant states that she could win and he’s going to lose.  After all, we know that she drives away independents (she wins them 43-41) and he attracts them like moths to a flame (they go for McCain 56-32).

Via Yglesias, Matt Bai tries to make sense of McCain’s interventionist standards:

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

Fortunately, he said this “thoughtfully,” so I suppose this means we can forget about his apparent ignorance of the Near East’s colonial past.  By this standard, McCain could not support interventions on most continents, since every one has experienced some form of foreign, usually European, colonialism at some point.  (This is true of Europeans as well–eastern Europeans have experienced Ottoman, German and Soviet colonialism.)   Antarctica would theoretically still be available.  If McCain applied this standard consistently, most of our bases and deployments around the world could be shut down right away. 

While I don’t believe for a moment that McCain’s reluctance to intervene in Africa has something to do with concerns about the legacy of colonialism, McCain’s answer on Zimbabwe is the right one, though it doesn’t go quite far enough.  The complete answer would be: it would be resented as neo-colonialism and we have no reason to interfere in the affairs of Zimbabwe, bad as the situation may be.  A truly superior answer would include the added point: if these countries are ever going to be free of the effects of colonialism (and these effects include the abuses of the regimes created by old, kleptocratic anti-colonialists), they and their neighbours must solve their own problems without the possibility or expectation that outside forces are doing to sweep in and attempt to fix things.  Never mind that the attempt may make things worse or change nothing–even the expectation of intervention is the kind of crutch that you hold out to developing nations only if you want to keep them perpetually in a position of weakness and dependence.

Stuart Rothenberg re-examines some assumptions and looks at MS-01 again:

Most of the state legislators in the district outside the Memphis suburbs are Democrats, and statewide Democratic candidates, including Attorney General Jim Hood (D) in 2007 and Secretary of State Eric Clark (D) in 2003, have carried the district.

The Republican Congressional nominee should have an edge in this district not because it is such a red district but because Republican candidates normally draw at least a quarter of the white Democratic vote — conservative Democrats who have become accustomed to voting for Republican candidates in federal races.

Hold on, you may be thinking. Isn’t Davis’ inability to hold conservative Democrats a strong indication that President Bush and the damage to the Republican brand are responsible for Childers’ win? Maybe, but that’s far from certain.

Polling in the district showed Bush’s “favorables” well above 50 percent, and Democratic pollster Anzalone minced no words when he told me, Louisiana’s 6th and Mississippi’s 1st “are not referenda on Bush and Republicans in Congress.”

So what we really have in MS-01 is a case of a conservative Democrat winning the votes of conservative Democrats who often vote Republican at the federal level.  Commentary on the Mississippi special election has tended to treat this district as if it were deepest Provo, which has led most observers to exaggerate the national significance of the result because the competitiveness of the Democratic Party at the state and local level was neglected.  Of course, Childers comes out of county government, and perhaps was able to translate the local Democratic appeal into a pick-up in the House.  What Childers and Cazayoux seem to represent is the success of the new Democratic flexibility in recruiting more conservative Democratic candidates who are well-suited to their districts, and the electoral strength of a combined socially conservative, economically populist, antiwar message.  We could call it the gradual “Shulerisation” of the Congressional Democrats.  Observers are so quick to look for signs of Republican collapse that I think we overlook evidence that shows the Democrats simply beating the Republicans at their own game. 

This is not to let Greg Davis,, the NRCC and the national party off the hook for the dreadful, unimaginative campaign they ran, or to suggest that the Republicans are not going to be badly bloodied in House and Senate races this year.  They are.  But this does put things in some perspective, and it confirms my earlier skepticism that the MS-01 outcome was not as nationally meaningful as many seem to think it is.  However, the media will run with the story and this story will contribute to the narrative of Republican collapse.  The overall narrative has more of a basis than the story about MS-01 we have been hearing, but anything that can be made to fit that narrative does have an ultimayely negative impact on the fundraising and morale of the national party.