This is from February 23, 2006.

We are constantly heckled, in the endless abortion debate, that pro-life fears of a slippery slope leading from the devaluation of human life in the womb to the devaluation of human life elsewhere, are merely that: The unrestrained fantasies of a group of religious fanatics.

Maybe.

My good and esteemed friends Josh Trevino and Paul Cella like to heckle me for abandoning Europe to its death-throes, arguing that we are bound to that Continent in a hundred ways, and that at any rate, if for no other reason than this, we should stand by Europe to see what lies in store for us.

Maybe.

So I give you this:

A pro-abortion city councilwoman in Rotterdam says that forced abortions should be used to curb the "problem" of unwanted children in Holland and its territories.

Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam (LR) party says the forced abortion and contraception would reduce the incidence of child abuse. ...

Van den Anker said Antillean teenage mothers, drug addicts and those who are mentally disabled should be forced to have abortions and use contraception if they are having sex.

Otherwise, an "unacceptable risk" of some children exposed to "violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse."

She indicated courts would determine when women should be forced to have abortions and that social workers "can see in 95 percent or even 100 percent of cases whether the child has a chance of growing up with love."

Every child a wanted one, indeed.

Oh, I know, this is different somehow. And I'd be dishonest if I told you I expect this to pass on the first try. Heavens no. There's a certain ... griminess here that won't take.

Right now. In ten years, the unthinkable will be normal. And there will be good, wise judges to make sure that no unloved child is allowed to enter this world. And we'll all shrug.

Hat tip to Orrin Judd.

This one is from August 4, 2006.

I once accidentally ate moldy bread and drank curdled milk, in the same sitting. (Don't ask.) Though the side effects were mild, I nevertheless wished I could undo that damage.

Little did I know, you can go back again!

Tribal leaders and indigenous rights groups will ask the pope to rescind a 1493 Vatican document which they believe paved the legal road for Europeans to take land from indigenous American people.

Twenty-three organizations and 100 individuals signed a resolution Thursday at the Summit of Indigenous Nations at Bear Butte. The resolution, which will be sent to the Vatican for review, targets the Papal Bull Inter Caetera of 1493, in which Vatican officials urged Christopher Columbus to convert indigenous Americans to Catholicism.

"We command you in virtue of holy obedience that, employing all due diligence in the premises, ... you should appoint to the aforesaid mainlands and islands worthy, God-fearing, learned, skilled and experienced men, in order to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents in the Catholic faith and train them in good morals," reads the 1493 document.

"This is going to be history in the making," Vic Camp announced before the resolution and a separate treaty amongst summit participants were signed.

Granted, in the history of pointless acts, this may be a pinnacle.

My favorite part?

Debra White Plume of Bring Back the Way, one of the summit organizers, said she experienced trauma attending Catholic boarding schools.

Honey, everyone who's attended Catholic schools has experienced trauma. Deal.

This post dates to November 15, 2006.

This is a long one. Forewarned is forearmed.

I begin by noting that I'm a monarchist.

Well, that's not precisely correct; it's no more accurate than saying I'm a theocrat, an oligarchist, a republican, a democrat, a plutocrat, or even a certain kind of fascist. What I am is someone who does not believe that government needs to be responsive to the people it governs; rather, it needs to be the government to which the people consent. Thus, as I once remarked offhandedly, I'm not opposed to theocracy per se; I'm only opposed to it insofar as it is not the form of government to which its people have consented. Calvin's Geneva, while predictably awful, was legitimate. Based on how the Iranians act, their government is legitimate. The iron test is not voting or some other positive means of assent (although that is a useful measure); a mere negative test, i.e., a lack of a sufficiently large insurgency or insurrection, is sufficient to make the point.

There are certain forms of government, however, which no matter how legitimate, are simply unacceptable, and must be brought down by all means necessary, either because of the human toll they inflict on their own citizenry; because of the dangers they pose to others; or more often than not, both. Thus, the Soviet Union. Thus, Hitler's brand of fascism (but maybe not Mussolini's). Thus, frankly, whatever it is that Kim Jong-Il is running in North Korea, and the People's Republic of China. And, thus, Saddam Hussein's regime.

I'm not going to bother proving all of that; that would result in a thousand irrelevant discussions that step past where this is going. My essential point is that I generally subscribe to the idea that men should be able to sentence themselves to Hell if they so desire, but that we are our brother's keeper when other men are sending them to Hell on Earth. The government of Saudi Arabia, while repellant on a number of levels, appears to be a fairly consented-to one, and for all their small-level atrocities, they don't aim high; as such, it's not our problem. Hussein, by contrast, not only reveled in the little tortures that made his life bearable, he was unapologetic in his view that the rest of the immediate area belonged to him, and he was willing to get it.

Thus, whether or not he had weapons of mass destruction, he regularly tortured his own for fun; he invaded other countries; he undermined the much-ballyhooed sanctions regime to the point where it was a mockery of our power and the power of the (heh) international community; he gassed, he shot, he murdered en masse; and let's be frank, one way or another, he would have had a nuke pointed at us or Israel or both at some point.

Suffice it to say that I have and had no quibble with eliminating that psychopath once and for all.

I'd go a bit farther, in fact: Although I had and have serious doubts about its ability to work, I'm entirely comfy with giving a run at "planting" democracy in Iraq. The reason is because such an idea is, counterintuitively, profoundly conservative -- or more accurately, its impetus is.

My good friend Paul Cella is fond of saying that the Iraq War is a profoundly unconservative one; indeed, he goes so far as to say that it is Liberal. We disagree on this point because the most fundamental Conservative insight is that men are entirely fallible, and keep making the same mistakes again and again. Recognizing those past mistakes, and trying to avoid them (while realizing that your chances are slight), is one of the most conservative activities possible.

We did the Realpolitik thing in the Middle East starting with FDR and one of the original al-Sauds. The net result was despotism unchecked, constant war with Israel, mass murder, theocracy (frequently preferable to the only alternative on the ground), terrorism, inflated oil prices, war unyielding, and, finally, thousands dead on our shores.

The belief that continuing that path would yield a different result is the classic definition of madness. It is not conservative; it is insane.

I add that a very good reason to try what we did is that there are no really new events in history; and one of the great lessons of history is that when a superpower gets punched in the nose, it generally responds with a massacre of whoever was dumb enough to take that swing. Quite simply, while I love my countrymen dearly, I'm not convinced that one nuke floated into Baltimore Harbor would not produce an undeniable demand to turn the Middle East -- and the millions of innocent men, women, and children living there -- into a shiny, well-irradiated parking lot. And if we didn't try something different soon -- I believe this to be the key Bush insight -- then that parking lot was in the undeniable future.

As a Christian, I'm also compelled to note that recognizing that we are our brother's keeper is sort of entrenched as a 2,000 year old teaching, which sounds suspiciously conservative to me.

But all of this is beside the point, now. And it's because of the consent of the governed.

All of the calls for a "Sherman style" general who will ride roughshod over the Iraqi insurgency are pointless. All of the calls not to "cut and run" are irrelevant. We lost the Iraq War last week, because we, as Americans, elected to lose.

I know, I know. The Democrats say they won't "cut and run." Some manner of Republicans, embracing the belief that hope can triumph over experience, believe them, and, showing signs of early madness, suggest that the Democrats don't dare cut and run.

This is foolishness of the first order, and I would respectfully submit that the American people are not so stupid as that. The Democrats' unabashed foreign policy platform since Nixon first pasted them on a Presidential run has been "no American wars." They don't hide it. They got elected en masse in 1974 when Americans knew (or should have known) that the Democrats would abandon the South Vietnamese to mass slaughter and gulags. They made no secret of their positions, and if Americans thought they were repaying the GOP for Nixon, they assuredly didn't care that they were condemning millions to death and torture. The most bellicose Democrat President since 1968 couldn't bring himself to put troops on the ground if there was any chance that their blood would flow. While it's fair to say that the Democrats haven't exactly articulated any meaningful plan with regard to Iraq, they weren't required to do so; they did what any good opposition political party would, and simply stomped their feet and said the opposite of the party in charge. And what they said, removed from all the pretty dressing, was "cut and run." Or redeploy somewhere five thousand miles away. Something like that.

And the American people heard them. Oh, we can sit here and come up with dozens of reasons why the GOP lost last week, and God knows I have a nasty post just waiting to share my thoughts; but at the most basic level, whatever other motivations voters had when they went to the polls, they knew -- or if they had active brain cells, which the overwhelming majority do, should have known -- that every time they pulled the lever for a Democrat, they voted to run tucktail.

In other words, there will be no March to the Sea Through Sadr City. There will be no vicious ground campaign. There will be no long-term assistance to the Iraqi government, even though they seem to want it, because the American people have had enough. Pretending otherwise is for the politicians. Eventually, we will have a point where the popularly elected Democrats in Congress put forth a budget with no appropriations for the war in Iraq. The popularly elected (through the electoral college) President will either sign it, or he will shut down the government. George W. Bush will not shut down the government.

We are basically looking at a situation where black has a queen, a rook, and its king, and white is left with only its king, and we're watching just to see if black is competent enough to steamroll white into checkmate without stalemating him first.

One of our best commenters is fond of predicting the decline of the Pax Americana, and the rise of India and China. I have often disagreed with him, but for a very limited reason: India may or may not rise, but China's doom is written on the wall. Anyone reading through my comment exchanges with him will note that I never say it is because I expect America to continue prevailing of its own weight. Roughly half of our country would be perfectly at home in Europe, if Europe offered the same amenities. They do not have more than one or at most two children. They favor heavy government intervention, relatively high taxation, forced preservation of land that isn't theirs, socially liberal policies, and European bloodlessness to the murder of innocents in different countries. While I disagree stridently with their ideas, that does not make them immoral; its makes them highly rational, but ultimately doomed to head the way of Europe. All humans, as I've noted before, are scum; that half of the country's manifestation as scum merely has the side effect of electing Democrats does not make them more or less scum than the rest of us.

And they just set our foreign policy by convincing enough of their fellows to agree with them.

The problem, of course, is yet another of those history lessons: When a giant -- an empire, a superpower, what have you -- slinks away from a battle, the world knows the giant is weak, and begins tearing it down in every way possible. Behold Rome when she started erecting walls. Behold the Mongols when they started entrenching. Behold the Crusader kingdoms, the Soviet Union, the Byzantines, the Holy Roman Empire, various Chinese Dynasties, the Ottomans, the Spaniards. When a superpower embarks on a military adventure, it must win, or watch its own doom writ on a wall.

Ronald Reagan knew this. Jimmy Carter did not. George Bush, I suspect, knows this. Nancy Pelosi does not.

And so, if I thought we had popular will behind us -- because we only act at the consent of the governed -- I would say we must push on, and leave Iraq in better shape than it was. We must be prepared to mix blood and peace as need be, whether that means slicing Moqtada al-Sadr's throat or shaking hands with him, so long as we win. And when Iraq has a government to which its people can consent, and which threatens no one (especially not us); or if the Iraqi government asks us to leave; then, and only then, should we withdraw. To do otherwise is to leave our fellow men to blood and terror. To do otherwise is to surrender any pretense to authority -- not "moral authority," which is merely Leftese for "agreement with the Left," but rather the kind that actually bends other nations to our will in ways great and small -- on the world stage. To do otherwise, frankly, is to prepare the nuclear launch codes for the day when New York City is so much glowing rubble.

But this is 1974, not 1980. Good or bad, right or wrong, our system has just informed us that today is the day when we abandon Iraq. I frankly wash my hands of it, but there is no denying the popular will.

Thus passes the Pax Americana, because of the consent of the governed.

This dates to January 31, 2007.

In Catholic theology, the term scandal has a very specific meaning, that's usually lost on the outside population and the overwhelming majority of Catholics. The Catechism -- or, as liberal Catholics would have it, "that silly rule-summary-thing" -- identifies scandal thus:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2285 Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized. It prompted our Lord to utter this curse: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."[85] Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others. Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees on this account: he likens them to wolves in sheep's clothing.[86]

2286 Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion.

Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to "social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible."[87] This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger,[88] or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

2287 Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged. "Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come!"[89]

(Emphasis added.) And that brings us to Hell's newest permanent resident: Robert Drinan.

A more vicious, nastier human being has rarely lived -- not because he was a lawyer (although that's a good first step); not because he voted for, and avidly supported, the Evil Party (also a good step); and not because he was John Kerry's nominally Catholic shield during the 2004 campaign (y'know, these parentheticals are beginning to add up...).

Robert Drinan is as surely in Hell right now as I will be someday, for the evil he effected, directly through his own acts, and indirectly through the scandal he flouted with his every public act.

Let's begin with the obvious. The Silly-Rule-Summary-Thing has a great deal to say about deliberately induced abortion, and none of it is nice. You'll note something about excommunication by nature of the act itself. You may, if you read very carefully, even note some stuff taken from or inspired by that John Paul II-created, fascist document, the Didache, stuff like "The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined."

For this -- for one of the oldest teachings of the Church of whom he was nominally a priest, for the words that should have been a lifeblood given his nominal Order -- Drinan had nothing but contempt.

Conservative Catholics are often accused, by the Protestants who sit in our pews and pretend to be Catholic more liberal of our brethren, of whom Robert Drinan was one, of being obsessed with abortion, and overlooking issues like poverty, general social and economic justice, and burning topics like whether we should have married priests. What they -- let's be kind -- forget is that, putting to the side that the second sin in the Bible was a murder, that, to use Lockean language, life is the prerequisite right from which all other rights flow. Put differently, no one cares about insufficient housing if he's dead. The unshaken -- all too often ignored, but unchanged -- rule of the Catholic Church has been that deliberate murder of an innocent human life (and, explicitly, therefore abortion) is "gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere."

And this -- one of the cornerstones of our nominally shared Faith -- he flouted. He derided, and called "no great thing." He praised President Clinton's veto of the partial birth abortion ban -- and thereby defended a practice so awful that even Supreme Court justices recognize its evil. And he did this from a position of authority. He did it as a prominent Congressman and former Congressman; as a priest (and a well-known one); as a law professor; and as a public activist. He defended the murder of the unborn day after day, and did so from authority; for that scandal alone, our Fallen world is cleaner for his absence.

That's the easy part. Then, there's this:

He grew up in Hyde Park and was educated at Boston College when it was a small school atop the heights of Chestnut Hill. He became a Jesuit, got his law degree at Georgetown, and became dean of the BC Law School in 1956 as it was moving from a downtown location to a new building near the college. He could have been content to let the law school serve a Catholic population in more spacious surroundings, but he had greater ambitions.

"He stood for inclusivity, opening up the law school to faculty and students of all faiths, colors, and genders," professor Sanford Katz said in a telephone interview yesterday. Drinan set up a presidential scholars program to attract top students from around the country. He established the law review and a legal aid clinic in Waltham to help the poor. He was in the vanguard of those who transformed Boston College into a national institution.

I see nothing wrong with a law school open to students of all faiths, colors, and sexes. I can overlook someone being pretentious enough to use "inclusivity" instead of "inclusiveness"; I think we can safely assume that the Faculty of Boston College recently formally decided that the former word is now doubleplusgood. The crime for which Drinan must answer is being one of the breakers of higher-level Catholic education in this country. Georgetown is as Catholic as Boston College, which is to say, as Catholic as Adolf Hitler (who had been Catholic until he was ten! Seriously! That proves the Holocaust was a Catholic event!). The degradation of the Catholic model of education -- to the point where there are Hemlock Society, Communist Party, and NARAL chapters on nominally Catholic campuses -- is a more pervasive (if not so grave) sin against humankind, and a more direct one than all his blathering and activism combined. Catholic universities, as a rule, are now neither. For this, Robert Drinan bears at least part of the blame.

I could go on, for days, if not weeks -- and I think there is a credible argument that his calls for the abandonment of the many Catholic and Buddhist South Vietnamese to the death camps, and his votes to do the same, will weigh on his soul at Judgment -- but suffice it to say we are well-rid of the man.

To Hell with you, old man. I'll be seeing you there soon enough.

This dates to August 15, 2005.

I normally eschew this sort of thing for reasons that will become clearer below. But I want to say something about this Cindy Sheehan nonsense that I think hasn't gone said anywhere else.

There is nothing special about losing a child. Or, more accurately, there is nothing special about losing a child, given that many people lose children. I did.

Many folks would say I did not, as my wife was only a few months along when we lost the child. Some might even think it funny. I did not. I'll spare you the personal details, except to say this: I would have given my life for that child. I begged God to take me instead. With pain, if need be. He did not.

My wife made the same offer, same result.

I understand the pain of losing a child. I understand what it can do to your head. I understand wanting to die as a result. I understand being angry. I also understand that you're emotionally vulnerable on that count.

So here's my point, and it's two-fold: Cindy Sheehan has no more right to argue against the Iraq War than I have to argue against legalized abortion. I do not bring up my loss when discussing abortion or embryonic stem cell research because, simply, it seems ghoulish beyond compare to drag one's lost little ones into your personal war. Does it animate my arguments? Take a guess. Frankly, what motivates me isn't anyone else's concern. But I'll be damned before I drag a child over whom I still cry sometimes into a political mudfight. And having lost a child that way, or indeed, any other, I understand wanting to rage at everything in sight.

And now let me get to the real target of all this: The ghoulish, deranged Left. Shame on you. Each and every one. Sheehan's anger is understandable. Your behavior is not. You've taken her as a Judas goat, torn her family apart, and paraded her in front of the cameras so you can have one more small cut inflicted on Chimpy McHitlerburton. Or BushCo. Or whatever it is you call the man you hate so much.

Oh, I'm sure she's gone along willingly at every turn. I'm sure the Left takes comfort in this. You have no freaking idea what it's like to have every parent's worst nightmare come true. I would have stormed Heaven's ramparts for my child when the moment came that we all knew was coming.

Ms. Sheehan should have our humble thanks for the sacrifice of her son, and then we should turn our eyes away from her grief. Maybe she needs to protest to get this out of her system. There's still no excuse for our enabling this, or for our voyeurism.

Let it go.

This dates to February 7, 2007.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

"I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less."

"Only by adopting the techniques of the big lie can the vice president make his case that those opposed to the Iraqi war fail to understand the importance of a firm response to terrorists. In fact, given the deleterious effect it has had on our effort in Afghanistan, and the enormous boost it has given to anti-American forces around the world, the big truth is that the Iraq war has damaged our ability to fight terrorism."

In 1974, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians on his hands. The Democrats responded by feeding the Reaper, as they'd been elected to do. To this day, they congratulate themselves for their noble sacrifice of millions of Asian lives.

In 2006, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Iraqis on his hands. The Democrats have responded by offering non-binding resolutions.

For thirty years, the Republican Party sliced off core Democratic voting groups who had become convinced that the Democrats were and are weaklings, cowards, and faithless allies willing -- joyful -- at the prospect of sending millions to the abattoir. The Democrats are now responding to the same kind of mandate by adopting a new pose of cowardice.

Dhimmicrats. DemocRATS. Surrendercrats. The names come as easily to some lips as Rethuglicans come to others. For every yahoo who elides an argument about foreign policy into a slur, however, there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters convinced that Democrats are, to put this charitably, unwilling to engage in war. From the homebuilding tyrant enabler to the youthful pugilist to Mickey Mouse in a tank, the Democrats had to live down their response to Vietnam (again, even while they praised themselves for it). Even the serial adulterer had to waste time that could have been spent on White House Hotties proving he was willing to high-altitude bomb someone into submission. Tough and Strong went out of their way to repudiate Tough's own traditional stand on foreign policy, so that voters would be fooled into thinking that Democrats would be willing to go to war without a direct attack on the country first.

Obviously, that didn't work so well.

But oh, the worm has turned! Behold! They ran in 2006 on, well, very little; but the Democrats' consistent message, for anyone who was listening, was that the little party we call the Iraq War is over. And the voters gave them their marching orders. Now, for the first time in a generation, the voters want to try letting people get massacred en masse, and that's precisely what the Democrats were running on. Thus should begin a symphony of synchronicity.

So where are you, you cowards? You've made clear from the Spring of 2003 that you believe this is an illegal, unjustified, awful, soul-destroying war; that a Congress that wasn't a mere rubber stamp for the President would have pulled the cord a long time ago; and that, by a God you don't believe in, if you came to power, there would be no more Iraq War. You've salivated for the chance to truly make this another Vietnam. Your most prominent loons ran on little else. Now's your chance to exercise the only power Congress has in the exercise of war -- the ultimate power, in every sense of the word -- and end the whole thing. Come on, you fevered, yellow-bellied tucktails. Let's all climb to the top of a building and watch the last helicopter leave. Let's have another commission named after that brave milquetoast Frank Church. Let's remind the international community that Americans will fall in line when they demand it. Let's give your neo-McGovernites -- and the voters who agreed with them -- the blood they want.

Come on, you wastes of political skin. Defund the war. Do it. Cut all allocation for the war from the budget. Allow no supplementals. Consummate your promises. Prove those of us who think you spineless cowards that you have the right kind of spine to roll over and pee yourself when the world demands it.

Do it.

Cowards.

This dates to August 21, 2007.

Full disclosure: I have no dog in the 2008 Presidential brouhaha, am unlikely to develop a dog in the immediate future, and frankly, share a sentiment with a commenter/diarist whose handle rhymes with MeveFellBay, to-wit: None of the above. Part of this is because I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about political campaigns (yes, a great guy indeed to have a Director of RedState); part of it is because, with or without Fred! I'm underwhelmed by the current candidate pool, which ranges from a liberal New Yorker to a nativist to a crazy libertarian to some guy named Cox, with not a lot of improvement or fall in between; and part because, as I've said so many damned times, we are taking our eye off the ball of Congress, the State elections, and 2007, and royally hurting ourselves in the process.

Believe it or not, however, all of that was a digression. The point of this post was to say, for pretty much the only time in over a year, Mitt Romney blew my socks off (go to 9:30):

Now, the mandatory carping: I disagree with the old Mittster on a few things, not least of which being that if you're going to put faith in the public square -- an enterprise of which I'm an enthusiastic supporter -- you need to be prepared to discuss and defend it there. I'm fully aware of why Romney isn't interested in that conversation, but Catholics have had to do it for decades; I see no reason why this should be different. There's more, but it's just nit-picking.

With that said, Wow. If you could get him to drop the Ken-doll approach that he insists on adopting when the mike is on, I'd have been on this guy's team for a year now. That you can't concerns me in many of the same ways Al Gore concerned me, and the parallels are disturbing; but if this was how Mitt Romney was 24/7, I'd be a Romneybot too.

This dates to October 21, 2007.

Four years ago, Ben Domenech was excited about Bobby Jindal. So was I. He thought Jindal had a good chance at the governor's mansion. I did not.

I was right.

I won't go through the reasons I turned out to be right. I was. A woman who, I believe, is my sister's godfather's (my father's best friend from high school's) first cousin won by suddenly reminding everyone in Cajun country what her maiden name was, and reminded all of Louisiana that Bobby Jindal was not melanin-free (that this was successful in a State with such a strong history of interbreeding (not intermarriage, though) is an irony lost on most) -- and most importantly, manufactured votes in the time-honored way her Party always did, by getting 238% turnout in Orleans and a few other Parishes.

Four years later, I was wrong.

So: Ben (and Orrin): I apologize. You were right, just four years early. You called correctly, if early, something I never really thought would happen.

Erick is 100% right (though the Carter analogy is 100%, the better analogy to the Mary one is Catholics not fearing being burned at the stake after Charles II came to the throne after that psycho Cromwell breathed his last).

For the first time I can remember, I can say my family hails from Louisiana without feeling a little bit of rue and shame as I say it.

And Bobby? God bless, and congratulations.

This post dates to November 5, 2007.

It's another Giuliani/Huckabee diary. If just those five words are enough to turn your stomach, you should probably read something else.

Anyway: We're in the middle of something a lot of folks haven't really seen since 1980, and perhaps haven't seen in their lifetimes: A well-and-truly contested Republican Presidential Primary. Now, because we're unused to it, it's my theory that we don't remember how to react; and because the Party was a very different animal then, the coalition of groups who compose it have little to no institutional memory of how to resolve formational problems before they get out of hand.

Put differently: Depending on which candidate is ascendant at any given time, a lot of otherwise good-faith Republicans are threatening to take their ball and run away, because they don't know precisely what else to do.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that anyone must vote for this guy, or must not vote for that one; I'm not going to get into the middle of the what-happens-when-the-general-comes argument. I have enough headaches without engaging that.

What I'd like to do is offer every camp an insight into why we are where we are, and point to some possible resolutions of the problem. I would suggest that we need to get this done now, rather than, say, September 2008. So, if you have some time, read on.

I used to be a pretty fair hand at game theory, but as with so much else in my intellectual life, what sense I had for it at anything but the intuitive level has largely atrophied from disuse. I hope you'll pardon any obvious gaffes on my part as I try to work through this; but I really think it's the best analytical framework for this election, and I'm going to offer it that way.

I'm going to make two simplifications that I hope don't destroy the model, for explanatory purposes, and that will save a lot of "but ifs" sprinkled through the discussion. First, I'm going to assume that each group described below has more or less homogeneous beliefs, and internally consistent priorities, thereby allowing me to treat groups as an equivalent number of individuals. Second, while essentially, every participant in coalition politics has a slightly-to-highly uneven hand in the nomination process, let's simply assume that each has the same vote. Like I said, these assumptions glaze over a lot, but I'm looking for a basic model more than anything else.

Given that, here's where I think we are:

The "social conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is social issues -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and probably some other things we don't need to rehash here. The "fiscal conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is money and market, i.e., spending, taxes, and government regulation of the market -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on taxes, government expenditures (and size), and government regulation of life in general but the markets in particular. There are of course other factions -- the "immigration conservatives," the "gun conservatives," the "liberty conservatives," etc. -- but I won't deal with those because (1) they complicate what's already a too-long blog post, (2) I think hyphenated conservatism is so much media hooplah, and (3) each of those groups, if they exist, can find something to adamantly dislike in either or both Mike Huckabee and/or Rudy Giuliani.

The problem we're experiencing is that Rudy Giuliani is currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and Mike Huckabee is making a poorly funded darkhorse surge. Both men, on paper, have great credentials; however, each has the potential, based on current pronouncements and past acts, to split off large, vitally-needed chunks of the party come election time, should he make it to the general election. For Rudy, it's the social conservatives; for Mike, it's the fiscal ones. Social conservatives, now warming up the signs for the thirty-fifty anniversary of Roe, are wondering why they give their time, effort, and boots on the ground to a Party that not only can't get Roe reversed, but that actually got it affirmed the last time it made it to the High Court, with Justices appointed by post-Roe Republican Presidents providing the critical votes to uphold that monstrosity. Fiscal conservatives, listening to Reagan's rhetoric about government being the problem and but rarely the solution, wonder why every Republican President since Nixon has presided over vastly increased spending, increased taxes, or both; why the Code of Federal Regulations never shrinks; and why a Republican Congress showed admirable fiscal restraint for about five months in 1995, then went a-porking.

In Rudolph Giuliani, the social conservatives see an avatar of all the things they believe wrong with the Republican Party: A greater emphasis on electability and belligerence than on protecting the unborn, a liberal (sorry, guys, it's true) on social issues that don't directly affect crime rates whose personal life suggests that we don't want to spend too much time poking at the Clintons this time around. In Michael Huckabee, the fiscal conservatives see all the morass that is "compassionate conservatism" without even the little motes of sunlight offered with, say, No Child Left Behind and Medicare D -- a bigspending Southern Populist who'll say, "I'm with the people, not with the powerful," and mean it, forgetting that in the Republican Party, we believe that the "powerful" are not merely composed of the "people," but that they, through extraordinary selfishness run amok, actually help the people.

Now, what makes this problematic is that all of this has been simmering for decades now, and the various members of the Republican coalition are rather wondering why they bother with all the effort if nothing comes of it. This is further exacerbated by having a President of whom both sides can say bad and good things (again), and of having on the other side of the upcoming v a woman whom both sides detest enough to actually cause blood-vomiting; in other words, the stakes are highest just when everyone's patience is worn thinnest.

And that leads to the game-playing. There's a complex series of calculations at work here, for each faction, relative to each candidate. Each decision made in this particular game could yield disaster for the moving faction; for the non-moving faction; and for the Party as a whole.

Let's take the example that's received the most ink (and pixels): The social conservatives who have threatened to vote third-party rather than vote for Giuliani. Say they don't follow through, and vote for Giuliani:

(1) The Party/Giuliani might decide it doesn't need to even pay lip service to social conservatives if they'll simply shut up and vote when called to do so, regardless of the candidate's record (ample historical precedent exists for this in the Democrat Party);

(2) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as the deciding vote in a close election;

(3) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as irrelevant in a landslide election, and elect to stay with a socially moderate message to keep the landslide voters on-board;

(4) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives, to whom it/he believes there was a need to pander, as the reason for a loss in a close election/landslide, and so decides to dump those social conservatives, as they were never well-loved to start.

Implicit in this, of course, is how the other player -- let's say "the Party as a whole" -- reacts both to the action by the social conservatives, and how the election turns out -- and that all of this is taking place behind a double-blind. But let's continue, on the "sit out" option, to show what the social conservatives have in store:

(1) After a narrow win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(2) After a landslide win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they don't need the social conservatives any more, and the social conservatives spend the next twenty years in the political wilderness.

(3) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(4) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that the Party's coalition structure needs to be totally revamped, and tosses the social conservatives out the door, forty years in the wilderness, etc.

The moving party -- the social conservatives -- not only doesn't know how their participation or non-participation will affect the election, nor how the rest of the Party will react, but the rest of the Party is clueless too.

The same thing might come to pass with the fiscal conservatives and Huckabee; just plug and chug and you can see the same kind of analysis. As an added bonus, both sets of players are playing for the highest set of stakes possible in a coalition: Perceived electoral significance. Take the Huckabee example: I'd submit that a true populist ticket could make a serious run at the Presidency. If successful, why would the fiscal conservatives matter? (As a son of Louisiana, let me go on the record and say if a true populist wins the Presidency, I'm moving to Poland.) On the other hand, maybe those fiscal conservatives, even if overrepresented on the internet, are a vital component of the coalition, and their absence means doom for the Party. The only way to know if you're gonna win at Russian roulette is to put the revolver to your forehead and pull the trigger.

All of this was to make a simple point: The fellow you're accusing of bad faith is not acting in bad faith; instead, he's playing a game maybe more complex than even he realizes, for stakes he considers worth it. More importantly, you are too. As we're going to need these people in downticket races, I'd respectfully submit we keep the "Hit the road" rhetoric to a bare minimum. We have a Wicked Witch to melt in a year, after all.

To the men and women who would do this, I maintain that you are nothing but a group of tucktails. If the Iraq War is so bad, so immoral, do everything in your power to stop it. Allocate no funds. Bush vetoes? Keep allocating no funds. Force Bush to choose between literal force protection and a staredown.

Stupid, immoral, cowardly excuses for human beings, the lot of you. If this war is merely a waste of lives and treasure, you are honor-bound to stop it at all costs. So do it. Relive the 1970s. Show us that you accept the inevitable slaughter of millions as irrelevant so that we can all watch the evening news without being bothered. Prove that refugees dying on boats and in camps are merely pictures, and not men, women, and children possessed of human dignity, being tortured because the United States won't live up to its promises. Remind the world again that we are a paper tiger, and then grieve when another embassy is held hostage.

Heck, why wait? Why don't we go slaughter a million Iraqis in bombing runs, so this time the blood will be directly on our hands, and we can avoid the irritating images of boat people and other refugees fleeing genocide?

That our Party once knew the value of honor, and words kept, and standing for the weak when they could not; and now accepts in its midst those who would spit on all those things, is a shame to the Republican Party. That the Democrat Party -- a Party that once championed the dignity of all Men -- not only slaughters them in the womb, but would abandon them to slaughter ex utero for political advantage; and that few Americans call them the mass-murdering tyrant enablers they've become -- should shame us all as Americans.

Fall on your face in shame, my fellow Americans, because we are giving away our honor, a piece at a time.

In honor of Steve Gilliard:



Rest whatever way God feels appropriate.

I'm loathe to engage in intra-dextrosphere blogwars, but I just wanted to add my bit about Dean Barnett's shots at pro-lifers (which, amazingly, seem to come as shots at John McCain, and appear to be a moral defense of the Dresden firebombing). I cannot hope to surpass Ross's, Mark Shea's (a hero of mine from years gone), or our own Alexham's (here and here). But I did want to add this:

One of the biggest dangers of respectable blogging is walking the line between being good partisans (or boosters for candidates) and good -- for lack of a more precise term -- ideologues. Put differently, if all you're getting is Wales, it doesn't always make sense to sell your soul. I therefore take issue with this:

Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers.

What drives me crazy about the abortion debate, specifically on our side, is our stridency. There’s little attempt to understand the other side, and little effort to comprehend why a mother-to-be might desperately want an abortion. One of the reasons we toss around terms like “murder” is because they’ll end conversations, not begin them.

Let's just get this out of the way: If I kill a black woman, with the intent to kill her, but honestly believe that because she's black, she's not a human being, have I committed murder? And might -- just bear with me -- pro-lifers call such a thing "murder" not as a means to end debate, but rather as an expression of their honest beliefs?

The post in question is basically a long-winded way of taking a shot at one of Mitt Romney's opponents John McCain, and is apparently a long-winded way of getting there. In the process of traveling that road, it was apparently necessary to take some shots along the way.

I liked you guys so much better when you were just ballplayers.

Just because.

Running into the 1988 Presidential election, Bloom County -- for those of you who were even more children than I at the time, a left-leaning comic strip penned by, what else, an Austinite -- took to calling the two major party nominees the Wimp and the Shrimp. The joke -- with respect to one of only three one-term Presidents of the twentieth century -- took aim at the elder Bush's penchant for genteel, Rockefeller Republicanism; love of bipartisanship; and general image of softness, compared to the giant who came before him.

Little did we know that the truth of that image would come back to haunt us throughout the man's presidency, culminating (but hardly ending) in that great bipartisan moment in which President Bush (1) decided that everyone who'd read his lips scant years before had been suffering from mass dyslexia.

One of the great worries many of us had in 2000 -- aside from the fear that we'd soon have an android in charge of the nuclear codes, and that his alien masters would overrun us all -- was that the Wimp's wimpiness was congenital, and a dominant gene. This did not overly concern me, because, first, any idiot -- and George W. Bush is not an idiot -- could figure out what cost his father the Presidency; and, second, I watched the younger Bush absolutely annihilate that old crone Ann Richards, and not gently, either. Sure, he liked the bipartisan game, but he knew where the long knives were kept.

I maintain that I was right, but to a point; and the beginning of my error is the beginning of the explanation for the absolute fecklessness of the last two and a half years of President Bush's last term.

It is a commonplace analysis that the Bush Administration is actually a tale of two Presidencies: The first was staffed with Executive officers who could each have been President; remarkable for an attitude Hell-bent on establishing Republican dominance for a generation; characterized by a poorly communicated, but determined efforts to make absolutely certain that another September 11 never happened; and willing to pull out knives for use in impromptu surgery on the Democrats. The second term has been filled with Executive officers more notable for loyalty than competence; political missteps a-plenty; a squandered Congress; and even more sporadic attempts to fight, and marshal support for, a war that the Administration still holds vital. The difference, the common wisdom holds, is that the Bush administration (1) was too wounded by Katrina, (2) had lame-duck written on it in December 2004, (3) burned too much political capital on Harriet Miers and a badly prosecuted Iraq War, and/or (4) discharged too many good Executive officers for mere sycophants.

I say this is a mistaken analysis, if not in first premises, then certainly in its underlying understanding of the Bush Administration. I would submit that President Bush's administration has suffered from two, related, but not identical, problems.

First, although the left side of the political spectrum likes to imagine that President Bush and his administration are filled with relentless knife-fighters willing to cut any femoral to win, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that they're willing to play hardball on a tiny number of issues, and to give ground more or less everywhere else. While this might have been a viable governing strategy fifty years ago, the times have changed -- whether those times changed with Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton depends on your political perspective and your tendency to romanticize the past (and your party's involvement in it) -- and they have changed in such a way as to make bipartisanship on large issues more or less impossible. Because this Bush subscribes to his father's view of governance -- electioneering is for election time, governing is for everything else -- he has been wholly unprepared to deal with the world as it exists now. In other words, the single insight of the Clinton Administration worth noting for Republicans -- the need for a permanent campaign in today's media environment -- was and is not so much missed by this Administration as it is utterly repugnant to their way of doing things.

Think about it: Candidate Bush actually touched the third rail of Social Security reform. He suggested, let us be frank, privatization. He ran on it. He clearly wanted it. He talked about it. And come election time, he hammered on it. Then, when he finally had a Congress to work with; when he finally had his shot at ending the biggest boondoggle coming down the pike at us ... the term of art is "communications failure." Normal humans call it "silence." As a result, the Democrats -- then the minority, so for them, it's always campaign time -- campaigned against it. Republican Congresscritters, one of the latest evolved subphyla of invertebrates, naturally rolled over and played dead. In other words, the election campaign long over, Bush played soft, expected executive pronouncements (with the strength of a majority mandate behind him) to carry the day; the Democrats campaigned; and on the election of Which Social Security Option Wins, the Democrats won.

Any conservative -- any libertarian, any fusionist, any Republican -- with skin in the game has a similar tale to tell: A barnstorming, sincere Bush who charges out in front on a given issue, swinging for the fences come election time; followed by a quiet, almost passive Bush come governing time. Pick an issue; it's there.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the second term has seen a more withdrawn, less active President than the first term: Because there is no campaign coming. President Bush was out on the trail in 2002 -- making a critical difference there -- for a whole host of reasons, but undeniably to soften the terrain for 2004. In a development that I'm sure is still breaking a large number of moonbat hearts, there will be no Bush on the ticket in 2008; ergo, there is no need to campaign.

That silence -- that quiescence -- reflects the Bush family's somewhat patrician view of electoral and governing politics; and for that honorable, if somewhat (from today's perspective) daft reason, the Republican Party has one more weight on its back. (Fill in dozens of others as needed.)

Second, the related-but-not-identical problem is that candidate Bush made no secret of the fact that he openly disdained President Clinton's style of governance, which was, charitably, to publicly, loudly emote every time someone fell down and skinned his knee. Essentially, Bush said, you are wasting valuable, limited political capital; that capital must be hoarded for when you are swinging for the fences. If I may continue the baseball analogy -- and I may -- President Clinton's Administration was a story of constant political small ball: Here a hit, there a walk, oops, someone leaned into the pitch, pop fly, end of the inning. President Bush's administration is a story of putting the bat way above your shoulder, taking a lot of strikeouts looking, and when you get one clean over the middle or just a hair low and inside, swinging that bat for all you're worth.

I confess that even now I admire that approach to governance. That doesn't, however, eliminate its obvious flaws. In other words, you'd better damned well connect with one of those balls, preferably with the bases loaded, or you're gonna have a poem written about you and an out achieved by passing the ball over the plate three times.

Now, don't misunderstand: It seems beyond dispute that Bush -- candidate or President -- had a fundamental insight that Clinton -- adulterer or President -- lacked: If you keep wasting your time on small, ugly, inconsequential things, you'll never accomplish anything great. The story of 1993-2001 is nothing more than the story of a massive peace dividend unleashed as a result of the acts of 1981-1989, and a caretaker managing more or less nothing on his own, except a few things that fundamentally cheesed off his party's faithful, and and a handful of inconsequential things that enraged the faithful of his opponents. I say this not as a partisan, but as an honest observer: To what great accomplishment can William Jefferson Clinton point and say, I did that. Me. I wrested the direction of the country in the way I thought it should go, and for that, I am applauded, because I was right?

But behold the effect of playing an all-power lineup: A first term filled with landmark achievements, some awful, some great, some with a jury still trying to figure out who will be foreman; and a second term of strikeouts punctuated by a bare handful of home runs.

The fundamental insight that Candidate, and now President, Bush missed is this: Political capital, while assuredly not infinite, is not precisely finite either. It may be analogized to musculature: If you let it atrophy, you lose it; if you feed and use it, even minimally, you keep it. By failing to expend political capital on small things as well as great -- and there is a balance in this, to be sure -- the Bush administration is like the great warrior who felled his enemies with but a swing of his sword, and who has now gone to fat. He has lost his musculature because he so rarely uses it.

I would submit that in today's media environment, the only way to remain influential -- to retain political capital -- through two terms is to use what you have consistently, whether on offense or defense. Bush's failure to actually fire back at his opponents on a regular basis may or may not make him more noble, but it assuredly has left him enervated before them. Having been bludgeoned on social security reform, and lacking the quick musculature needed to fire back, this administration was gutted -- without basis in truth, but truth doesn't matter in politics or political perception -- by Katrina, and what came after. Lacking the will to constantly engage on the vital nature of the Iraq project, when the President elects to speak on it, he no longer commands a national audience, or even the opening clip on the evening news.

There is implicit in this the lurking suggestion that the modern media environment has made it impossible, or nearly so, to achieve a Presidency filled with great accomplishments; that 24/7 media and new media coverage has accomplished what a bloated bureaucracy could not, and has actually made it impossible for one man to stand successfully atop the Executive Branch. Perhaps this is true; perhaps not. That is something we will have to test with the next President, because the current one is -- sadly for those of us who remain fans of his -- pretty well done.

This is purely a test post.

A Review of The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander The Great, by Steven Pressfield



I begin by noting that, no pun, historically, I have hated historical novels. Loathed them. They take liberties with historical events, facts, and timelines. They write today's prejudices on worlds so long removed from ours, that our underlying assumptions might make no sense at all whatsoever to a man of that time. They are, usually, at best fantasy novels set in a definite time period, and, at worst, cheap polemics.

If it can be fairly said that I have detested historical fiction, there is simply no word in English for how I feel about first-person fiction. Perhaps it was too many epistolary novels in undergrad. Perhaps it is because of the awesome conceit attendant with writing from some great historical figure's voice, when one is clearly reading the author doing a particularly bad sort of impersonation -- like the joke in the Eighties that whenever someone claims to be reincarnate, one is always Cleopatra reborn, rather than one of the camp whores who followed Hannibal's army up and down Italy, or Napoleon, rather than a stable hand who once tended to one of Napoleon's horses, and who died of syphilis some years later.

I have since changed my mind.

When I was asked to review The Virtues of War, I honestly had no idea I'd be reviewing first person historical fiction. I would have said no, had I known. It would have been my loss. Fortunately, I'm also a classics geek, so I said yes.

Before I received Virtues, I decided to do some background reading, and so picked up Gates of Fire, one of Pressfield's earlier novels (this time, on the battle of Thermopylae). It, too, was an historical novel. It, too, was a first-person novel. It was incredible. (A good review of Gates of Fire can be found here.)

In fact, I was so taken with Gates of Fire that I actually approached Virtues with some trepidation. Gates of Fire was one of those rare novels in which you know the ending ahead of time, but still feverishly turn every page, trying to find out how it turns out. Truthfully, in such a case, I've never read a novelist's second effort that climbed the same height as the first.

Virtues is at least as good as Gates of Fire. Indeed, it may even be better. I won't know until I've re-read it (which I rather intend to do, just as soon as I get done writing this review). But before I gush too much, let me get my picked nits out of the way.

First, Pressfield takes, alas, some historical liberties, which, to his credit, he discloses up front. I'll spare you those, as Pressfield lays them out in some detail in the preface, and as they don't detract seriously from the novel's integrity. We'll count that as a minor strike.

Second, and this stems in no small part from the novel's structure and chief concerns, hints of Alexander's private life are virtually non-existent. While this hardly detracts from the novel's purpose, it does put a crimp on understanding why Alexander is who he is. We get cursory looks at his youth; at his relationship with his mother; at the awful pressure of growing up in the Macedonian court. His wives are mere phantoms. All but his comrades-in-arms, indeed, are mere phantoms.

Finally, and this is the recurrance of my old tic, Alexander is just a bit too aware -- of history, of the likely (and usually correct) course of the future, of, indeed, everything. It works to great effect, placing the reader in some historical context (for example, why the men of Thebes, rather than Sparta, are the dominant military power of the age of Philip); but it irks, slightly, to get obvious historical foreshadowings, such as Alexander's certainty on how his Empire will dissolve. And it tends, slightly, to bog down the narrative in pedantry. It also shades into Alexander as super-mortal, a god among men; while Alexander, and those around him, might have viewed him that way, gods don't die in their early thirties.

That is every single bad thing I have to say about this novel. Otherwise, this is a work of art; a beautifully written, delicately and expertly crafted, perfectly structured testament to the ability of an author to imagine a subject, and to share it with his readers. If that sounds like overkill, consider this passage (chosen at random):

All that being said, how does one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but he couldn't find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don't. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle "rational"?

Rationality is superstition by another name.

What's great about that is not only the clear sentence structure -- it reads like someone would think -- but the way you would expect a warrior-king tutored by Aristotle, aimed squarely at a superhuman destiny, who traced his lineage through his mother to Achilles, to think. It's also a glimpse into a mind that is becoming ever-more obsessed with its destiny, and with a certainty that the gods themselves drive a man to greatness. Done incorrectly, this sort of prose can lend itself to mendacious trash like The Thin Red Line -- musings on the Platonic oversoul in the middle of an amphibious assault; done correctly, as here, it provides a textured background, a landscape on which the rest of the story unfolds.

And what a story. Alexander was the son of Phillip of Macedon, who had subjugated the Aegean peninsula, brought low the Thebans and Spartans, and planned on finally finishing off the Persian Empire once and for all. Phillip died at the hands of an assassin, and left behind a power vacuum into which his son (Alexander III, on ascension) stepped. Thereafter came, with the possible exception of Genghis Khan's empire-building, the fastest, most incredible creation of an Empire ever. Alexander marched, with the Macedonian phalanx and heavy cavalry, through Asia Minor, through the Middle East, through Central Asia, and into India, before being suddenly struck down with either a sudden illness or poisoning (historical sources differ). No army stood successfully against him; no general on an opposing battlefield truly thwarted his will. It is said of Alexander that he wept when he realized there were no worlds left to conquer. His name is legend even today. He was, in short, the sort of man coughed up only once every hundred or thousand years, if that; it is no wonder that he is called "the Great."

The novel is, as you might have guessed, Alexander's narrative (to his brother-in-law, a page in his camp) of his youth, his rise to power, his phenomenal march across the Persian Empire and beyond, and, inevitably, his demise. The novel begins on the banks of the last great river he will cross; the book carries a feel of imminent mortality, which only grows stronger as the narrative progresses, and Alexander wrestles more and more with his daimon, until it comes very close to consuming him. In a sense, it's almost as if his inner spirit, his daimon, consumes him from the inside (as Alexander is long fearful will happen), and this is the sickness that takes him. If Acton's axiom of absolute power has any truth, it is true not only on the spiritual, but on the physical level, as well; Alexander's flesh begins to revolt against him as his men cannot keep pace with his unyielding ambition. He rages. He grows feverish. He cannot speak. He is overcome and kills one of his oldest comrades.

To say that the military details are lovingly rendered is to engage in understatement. Pressfield brings the sort of love normally only an amateur historian can bring to the topic -- details about speed of hoof, armored cavalry charges, positions for lances, armor, tactics, and campaigns -- and somehow doesn't bog down the novel in the telling. Needless to say, I re-read those sections several times.

What really impressed me, at least as much as the storytelling and the narrative pace, was the structure of the novel. The novel is broken into Books, each of which describes an heroic virtue (such as "Contempt for Death") about which the Book loosely revolves. Impressively, without once conspicuously altering the narrative flow of the novel, each Book plays up that virtue through subtle emphasis and selective storytelling. The result is a novel that communicates those virtues; highlights Alexander's devout adherence to those virtues; and unsparingly demonstrates his ability to breach those rules, either by making a vice of them, or by ignoring them altogether. One cannot come away from Virtues without having absorbed, at least in some measure, those virtues. For example, is not our best brought out by striving against our enemies, and thus against ourselves; and should we not love our enemies for making us better?

A desire not to spoil the novel precludes further review. Suffice it to say, for the first time in something like four years, I have read a novel (other than Gates of Fire) that actually moved me in the reading. The best novels stay with you in your dreams and in your waking moments when you finish. I have dreamed of Virtues every night since I picked it up.

Even if Pressfield didn't bother to have Alexander slice the Gordian knot.

I heartily recommend Virtues, whether your penchant is for fiction, history, martial virtues, or, simply, a good time.

(A more political review can be found here.)

I'm not gonna post here much, for a while. Instead, I'll be at....


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(...state...state...state...)

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Redstate is the shiznit, kids. Talented bloggers (and me!), coming together to irritate the hell out of Jimmy Carville, drive Mary Beth Cahill to use as many mind altering chemicals as her old boss, and, speaking positively, to push forward conservatism in (and with) the Republican Party.

The fun's just starting, kids. Pop over.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSSETS --

DEMOCRAT Presidental Candidate John Forbes Kerry announced today a new program to shore up his support with African-American groups, a key constituency in any Democrat bid for the White House.

Called the "Bling Bling" Initiative, the plan would give millions of taxpayer-funded pieces of gaudy jewelry to African Americans as part of the Kerry2004 economic platform.

"We live in the wealthiest nation in the world," Kerry told a rally here today. "Seventy percent of Americans have little or no bling of their own. Everyone should have enough bling; there is no such thing as too much bling. Bling is a right, and it is our duty to make it affordable to every American." The Kerry campaign has indicated that this rally will begin playing as an ad in key battleground states such as Florida and Illinois, states that the campaign describes as "amoung the hardest hit in the continuing bling recession."

The rally drew immediate criticism from Congressional Republicans, who called the Initiative "insane," "loony," "demeaning," "racist," and, in the words of House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R, TX) "worthy of Walter Mondale."

Kerry's press secretary responded angrily to those attacks. "This is simply typical of the losses Americans have suffered under 'President' George W. Bush," he stated, using the universally respected "hanging fingers" for the quotation marks around the word "President."

"Since Bush took office, American bling has fallen in quality and quantity. Ordinary Americans can longer afford thick gold chains and oversized, diamond-studded earrings. And too much bling is made overseas, by exploited and underpaid workers, at the behest of Benedict Arnold CEOs."

Kerry had been under fire from prominent African-American Democrats for, among other things, ignoring them altogether, failing to hug Al Sharpton, including virtually no people of color in his lily-white campaign team, naming John Edwards as his vice-President, and, finally, being altogether unsure what a black person looks like, except for the women who clean his wife's numerous houses.

Angel was a very good show.

Better than Buffy, by a long margin. Better than almost anything else on TV during its run.

God was open to debate. I joked for a while that, given Cordy's, then Fred's, death (and Darla's constant menace), the show was one of the most misogynistic of modern times. Good wasn't destined to win; good didn't have a decent chance of winning; and everywhere, all around, people just seemed to get worse and worse.

But it was noble. It was about noble ideals.

For those of you who have no danged idea what I'm talking about, a brief recap.

Angel was a spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, itself the TV series born of the movie of the same name. The title character in the first started off as a minor supporting character, then love interest, of the title character of the second.

The trick: Angel was a vampire. Buffy was not. Buffy killed vampires.

The second trick: Angel was a good vampire. He'd been cursed, yes, cursed, with a soul.

Final trick: Although Angel longs to be human again, to touch, to feel, to die, to have a chance at salvation, the instant he experiences true happiness, it's all over: He loses his soul, becomes a kick-ass, deadly, decidedly, monstrously evil vampire all over again. So he must toil and toil and toil, experiencing only glimpses of true happiness -- which is manifest by the consummation of true love -- until at some point, the nebulous Powers of good deign to release him from the penance of crimes beyond human imagination.

And what makes the show so noble, so great, is that, quite simply, Angel cannot win. There's no endgame in sight where he can slay all of the bad guys and get his humanity back. He can't even deal Evil a crushing blow. He can hold back the darkness in drips and drabs, but it keeps coming. He knows he's fighting a near-hopeless, and possibly suicidal, war; yet he fights.

There is glory in hope. In despair, there is only loss. Angel suffers most when he gives into despair. When he finds hope again, he still suffers -- there is no way around that -- but he has the strength to fight on, hoping that what he does will begin to make a difference. Hoping that there is salvation.

The WB -- let us not kid ourselves -- is a drek network. It is what Fox was for its first few years, absent Married: With Children, The Simpsons, and In Living Color. 99.9% of what it produces is simple dross.

Angel was not dross. Not only that: Its ratings, relative to the enormous amount of pap that network produces, were phenomenal. And so, showing the know-how and creativity that make American business the powerhouse of the world, the WB canceled the show.

I mention this because the last episode summed it all up quite nicely. Angel, coming out of a period of self-imposed despair, offers a pact to his friends: Join me in one final strike on the darkness. We cannot vanquish the darkness, but we can strike it a telling blow. We can remind Evil that it does not flourish unchecked; we can bleed the Void. We may die -- we will likely die -- but we will do something that matters.

Given that offer, I likely would have taken it.

Is there sin in striking at the darkness, though you virtually assure your own destruction? Put to the side the Manichaean overtones (I don't mean to presuppose a heresy for this question); is it licit to strike a blow for Light, though Death herself is a near-certainty? It's not precisely suicide, but the dictum that one may not do good through an evil act seems somewhat important here; condemning yourself to death for a perhaps ultimately unimportant wound on evil is not quite so simple as allowing another to kill you, rather than renouncing God. Martyrdom is not cheap, and not always so straightforward as all that.

But if this is not heroism -- willingly laying down your life to aid the light when the darkness seems so oppressive -- then what is?

Angel's friends, to a one, accept.

At the end of the episode (and therefore, one supposes, the show), Angel and his friends have succeeded, though at some cost. They have wounded the Powers of darkness, and in so doing, have unleashed the wrath of Hell. An army of darkness pounds toward the wounded band.

Angel steps forward, and lifts his sword for another round of battle. There, of course, the show ends.

I believe I would want to be in that alley with him, shouting Gloria in Te, Domine!

As I mentioned, the question of God's existence is at best up for debate in the show. And yet...

What other show has been so very Christian, so inundated with sacrifice for others' sake, though your pain be nearly unbearable? And if Angel was to have any hope of salvation, on Whom else could he count?

I cried Friday evening. I had cried three times in my adult life, each time for the loss of a life very close to me. I cried because Ronald Reagan was put to rest. I never met the man. I was four when he was elected, twelve when he left office.

But I knew what he stood for. He stood for hope.

A three year old does not understand politics. A four year old is not much better.

But I remember how gray and dark 1979 felt. I remember how it got a little lighter in the winter of 1981. I remember how, by late 1983, the world seemed to glow.

I remember what it was to fear nuclear war. I lived with that fear for ten years of my life, either directly or indirectly. I remember when I realized that it would not happen. I remember when I realized whom I could credit for that, and I assure you, it was not the man with the strawberry birthmark on his head.

Ronald Reagan was elected President when so many thought we could never win.

But he had hope.

He had hope because he believed in America, the nation and the idea.

He had hope because he believed in the risen Christ.

He had hope because in hope, there is glory.

He did not teach me to hope; my parents deserve the credit for that. He taught me the incredible power of hope, when there is resolve behind it.

To all of those who murmur about his support for right-wing anti-communist dictatorships, and the thousands dead as a result of that support, I point you to the millions who need no longer fear the darkness in quite the same way, the millions more who live and breathe today because there are no longer men and women forcibly herding them this way and that; and those men and women are no longer near the levers of power, no longer able to support left-wing dictatorships that leave tens of thousands, if not millions dead, because one man had hope, and strength in that hope.

I thank Joss Whedon, militant atheist though he might be, for creating such an incredible Christian narrative.

And I thank Ronald Reagan for showing us that Christ's hope can effect miracles in the world. Requiem aeternas, Mr. President. Godspeed.