This dates to April 12, 2006.

I posted this to RedHot the other day, but a conversation in our little cabal made me decide to open it to whatever comments y'all might like:

Most Americans are not techno-libertoid late-20s/early-30s cubicle dwellers with corresponding views of politics and social issues. In other words, they are not blogosphere dwellers. At best, we're putting ourselves in a position to get demagogued like mad on this, either by a clever Democrat (they do exist) or by a third party that'll get to our right. Most Americans will pay an extra $.25 for a head of lettuce so that bands of illegals don't loiter in a Home Depot parking lot, and so that their fundamental sense of justice isn't violated every time they drive by a construction project. Regardless of the merit of the law, those folks are breaking it. Americans inherited a fairly strong sense of law and order, and when there are folks here glaringly and without much hesitation clearly breaking the law, it rubs a lot of folks the wrong way. And that's without once getting into racist sentiment, MeCHA's blathering notwithstanding.

The fact that they're now organizing in protest marches -- after coming here in violation of the law -- is not gonna sit well, long term. We ignore this, in crass partisan terms, at our peril. We ignore this, as being the only remotely serious political party governing today, at our nation's peril.

What's worse is how this is being handled. The folks setting policy -- and, respectfully, the folks discussing this issue on this blog and others -- live in the D.C.-N.Y.C.-Boston corridor, or on the East Coast, by and large. They don't deal with this issue day in and day out. While illegal immigrants are now everywhere, the problem is developing by and large in the South and West, which is to say, the biggest law-and-order sections of the country. I suspect that's why there's a growing discontent between the policy makers, who tend to view this in bloodless, abstract, sometimes economic terms; and the folks on the ground, who do not.

Frankly, I suspect that the GOP is gonna get pasted on this; not because we will have an internal civil war over the issue, but because our policy positions -- including, and especially, the Senate bill -- are so far out of step, and because this issue is starting to really heat up, that we're going to take the Democrats' traditional place at the wedge end of a 60-40 issue.

The least bad thing I see coming of this is the rise of a third party. I have a famously low opinion of human nature. If this problem isn't resolved, posthaste, then we get to find out if men are inherently good, or if the Founders were right.

This post dates to June 24, 2006.

An archive scrub? Awfully mature. I guess crashing the gates is traditionally done with bullet-proof armor? And that your bullet-proof armor undies were soiled this morning?

Gee, Jerome, very public and personal humiliation can suck, huh? Of course, the good news is that you can reasonably expect to be be held up to this, being a public person and all.

Feels pretty good, huh?

This post dates to early 2005.







It is the great fallacy of the book reviewer to criticize a book for what it is not.

So I'll get to that in a minute.

I'm a bit late posting this review, as real life overwhelmed me the last few weeks, but one essential point that struck me about Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias has not left me since I finished it: I can't for the life of me figure out if I like this book or not. I enjoyed reading it, but ultimately came away not sure whether it was like a huge meal at a cruddy Chinese restaurant: Tasty at the time, but so quickly digested that it was ultimately not filling.

Part of that's because at 191 pages (including index) it's about a quarter as long as I'd prefer in a book of any type; partly it's because the orange and purple color scheme is disorienting; partly it's because no title should have an asterisk.

South Park Conservatives is a light, witty, quick, and enjoyable read. Many of the readers of this site will be intimately familiar with the background story of the demise of the Left-liberal paradigm it tells: RatherGate, Bias, The Ten Billion Tons of Missing Explosives, whatever it was that Howell Raines was doing while he was supposed to be making sure his reporters actually covered their stories, and so on. To the non-blogosphere denizen (you know, the majority of America), this is a quick, concise, useful read that also dips into the rise of talk radio, FoxNews, conservative publishing in the mainstream houses, the (surprising) rise of conservatism in academia, and, yes, the ever self-effacing blogosphere. It's written in a conversational style that's significantly easier to read than, well, anything I've ever written. It's extensively footnoted. It's short, clearly written, and should take no more than three hours to get through (it took me a little over one, but one of the few gifts I was given was a quick reading eye). I'd heartily recommend it as a gift to someone who has better things to do all day than follow politics and the death of the liberal paradigm -- which, again, is to say most Americans.

Now for the complaints.

There is no punch to this book. I think this reflects the book's greatest weakness: It is fundamentally caught between being a somewhat academic overview and summary of the rise of alternative conservative media and being a good old-fashioned polemic. The former mandates no punch, no excitement in its delivery. The latter positively demands it. The reason, I think, that I couldn't figure out whether I liked the book or not is because reading it was like being brought to the top of a roller coaster, then... finding out you're on a plateau. The ride down is enjoyable, but it would be better if they skipped the level part in the middle.

Arguably, and here's where we get into the criticizing-the-book-for-what-it's-not part, I suspect that my problem with this book is that I'm too familiar with the subject matter, and I'd rather the book skip to being a full-fledged polemic or a more thorough recounting of the rise of mass media conservatism (What happened behind the scenes? How the the GOP leadership react? How many were influenced by Goldwater but not Reagan, and the other way around?). South Park Conservatives is deliberately a tweener, a lighter read aimed much more at introduction than investigation or argument.

Unfortunately, that does not segue at all into my last quibble. I like South Park. I loved Baseketball. I think Parker and Stone are hilarious. I'm hardly a culture scold -- you can't love Major League as I do, or cry at cavalry charges like I do, and get overly exercised about vulgarity and violence all that regularly.

But.

I think Michelle Malkin is spot on about the book when she says:

Anderson argues that Comedy Central's cartoon series, South Park, embodies the "fiercely anti-liberal comedic spirit" of the "new media" from Kaus to Coulter. The cartoon, he writes, reflects a "post-liberal counterculture" that is "particularly appealing to the young, however much it might offend older conservatives." ...

My discomfort with South Park's increasingly mainstream vulgarity is not a matter of nitpicking. We're not just talking about a stray curse word here or there. As liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich points out, South Park "holds the record for the largest number of bleeped-out repetitions (162) of a single four-letter expletive in a single television half-hour." That's probably about the same number of profanities uttered at John Kerry's infamous New York City celebrity fundraiser last summer, which Republicans rightly condemned for its excessive obscenities.

Rich is wrong about most things, but he's painfully on target in noting the incongruous pandering now taking place by some in the cool-kids clique on the Right. Conservatives criticize Hollywood relentlessly, but as Rich notes, "the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too."

In fact, I'd go a tad farther. The title, South Park Conservatives stems -- as Anderson notes -- from Andrew Sullivan's coined "South Park Republicans." Obviously, there is not a perfect overlap here, and while it might be perfectly accurate (if wildly exaggerated numerically) to refer to a subset of the GOP's voting bloc as "South Park Republicans," I would submit it's difficult at best, and insulting at worst, to combine "South Park" and "conservative." And it's a particularly bad idea to take any term Andrew Sullivan has ever devised ("An Eagle has landed. Now let him soar.") and apply it to conservatives without a wry grin.

South Park is, decidedly, anti-P.C., and Anderson even notes a few decidedly praiseworthy parts of seasons past (my favorite was the NAMBLA meeting episode, though the divorce one was pretty good, too). But while, to royally screw up a pretty fantastic formulation, there may indeed be pearls in what you toss before the swine, I also have to agree with Malkin that "'politically incorrect' is not always a synonym for 'conservative.'"

If we can say that there are any unifying principles in conservatism, one must be a decent respect for tradition and the wisdom hard-earned by generations of men and women living with the same existential problems (and then some) that we experience now. South Park has more or less none of this. One easy example is language: It has been the experience of generations that certain words and phrases must be off-limits in polite conversation; that arguments, no matter how snide and nasty, must be kept out of the gutter, for fear that the whole discourse (and the acceptance of the rationale of discourse over violence) might disintegrate. Were I to enumerate South Park's failings in this regard, I'd run this site's bandwidth charges through the ceiling and violate the posting rules to the point of banning myself in shame. For this reason, if no other, it is at best a well-intentioned mistake of the first order, and at worst an obnoxious insult to tie conservatives and conservatism to South Park.

And of course Malkin is also right that only we under-40 curmudgeons are going to be so terribly offended by this, because so many conservatives want to be cool. We were on the outside looking in for so long; isn't there something nice about being inside, where it's warm, and there's cocoa, and my goodness, the ladies are gorgeous in here? (Relatedly, I suspect this is also why the very idea of "South Park Republicans" hasn't been laughed out of polite discourse by now: The idea that there's a brand new cohort with a brand new perspective on life who are gonna rock this joint is a peculiar symptom of our live-in-the-moment politics, and is assuredly neither conservative nor terribly plausible, but no one wants to say so, because then we wouldn't be cool.)

Bottom line: South Park Conservatives is a nice airplane book for the veterans of politics and the blogosphere of the last couple of decades; a great beach book or present for our friends, relatives, fiance(e)s, mistresses, coworkers, and captive employees who need a cleanly written primer on those years; and a frustrating, exciting, maddening, enticing hint of what lies behind the story of the naissance of conservatism in the mass media.

This post dates to April 15, 2005.

We are winning.

That is a good thing.

We control the House, the Senate, the Presidency. The state level isn't much worse. I'm sure the Democrats will have a new idea other than Kill Tom DeLay some time before 2015, but that gives us a decade with which to squish them. We are blessed with dire opponents with the political savvy of whelk.

Politics, however, is readily comparable to an interminable street fight. One does not win a street fight by kicking one's opponent in the knee and yelling, Ha ha!. It is won by yanking out a spiked pipe and working over one's opponent while he lies cowering on the ground.

So to speak.

Which brings us to Kathy Castor, and indeed, those like her. It is incumbent on us to break these Democrat up and comers now. They are the Democrats' bench team, the faint glimmers of hope for a party on the downhill slope and careening for the bottom.

So we need to kneecap them now.

That long, slow slide to the bottom usually produces political cretins who at best get trounced and energize the activist wings of their parties, and all too often get trounced to no good effect. (Spare me the moralizing about Goldwater: No matter what else one may say of him and his effect -- deliberate or not -- on the Party, he was a political incompetent of the first order.)

Castor, by contrast (and metonymically), is not an incompetent. She has three things running in her favor: She is a capable candidate (a rarity for Democrats in this state); she stands out for honesty on a governing board astounding for its historic corruption; and because of her mother (who really should be ashamed for losing that race), has good statewide name ID. I give her better than even odds to make the House: Her primary competitors so far are incompetents, and her district is basically well-gerrymandered for Democrats (it went for Bush in 2004 but went overwhelmingly for Castor over Martinez, and Jim Davis never faced serious Republican opposition there). She's young -- under 40 -- and has already been bloodied in an election. She has great name recognition in district in no small part because she is recognized as the rare honest member of the Hillsborough County Commission. She will likely be able to tap some of the same fundraising sources her mother did.

She, and those like her, are the future of her Party. They are coming up in relatively safe or at most competitive districts. One decade of losing is not sufficient to break these talented folks of their attachment to the Democrat Party.

That job falls on us.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we should fall prey to the sort of gibbering lunacy that drives some folks to pour perfectly good money into unwinnable races. Most House races, for example, aren't worth the time and effort, so well gerrymandered are they. What I am saying is that we need to strategically isolate races in which the Democrats' future is developing and crush them ruthlessly there. Think of it as poisoning your division rival's farm system.

There are, so far as I'm concerned, only three possible reasons not to adopt this approach:

If Castor (and others like her) are such capable politicians, why fight them tooth and nail? Isn't it a good thing to have good government, no matter the party label?

I call this silliness the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fallacy. Moynihan had all the earmarks of good governance: A strong belief in right and wrong; a remarkable intellect; the ability to buttress arguments with logic and emotion; and bow ties. But for all the impassioned speeches he'd give, with citations to social science and statistic, when the vote came up, he'd vote party line, regardless of whether he'd just spent the last hour arguing against it.

It goes to the larger point: Political parties are simply too important to be spat upon often. Oh, sure, you can have self-aggrandizing, pompous, airheaded, cretins who'll buck the party when the cameras come a-calling, but even they usually fall in line in the end -- because they know that the Party controls and direct funds, chairmanships, committee appointments, fundraising opportunities, and to a greater and lesser extent, the apparatus a candidate or politician needs to survive. The also know that those who get out of line too much end up getting shut out of the caucus.

All of this is a long way of saying: You'll die of asphyxiation if you hold your breath waiting for these up and comers to substantively break ranks with their Party. And that, in turn, means that every one of them, no matter how well-intentioned, is another vote for Roe and Casey; another vote to organize the chamber along their Party line; another vote against letting nominees to the bench get an up or down vote; another vote, in other words, for most of their Party's plank.

If Republicans keep winning, maybe these capable young folks will switch sides -- it's happened before.

Yes, and maybe I'll put on thirty pounds of muscle and get drafted to play strong safety for the Miami Dolphins. Could happen, but not too likely.

Party attachment dies slow, especially when, as in Castor's case, you come from a long line of prominent Party members. While the odds are appreciably better than a whelk's chance in a supernova, they're significantly less than the odds of my selection to take Louis Oliver's old spot. And anyway, isn't this a fairly horrible thing to bank on? I'll hope my opponent's best and brightest eventually join me because they're tired of being funded and cared for by the minority Party -- specially funded and cared for, because they're the only glimmers of hope the Party has?

Nah. Not good enough.

If we neuter the Democrats too badly, the Greens might rise to take their place.

I call this "a gamble I'm willing to take." The Democrats are big boys and girls; if they can't take care of their own, they'll sink. Theirs is, however, the oldest political Party in the country; I rather suspect they'll hold on until they inevitably rise again (American politics being rather cyclical, really). Anyway, this is something of an absurd argument: Play to win, but not too hard, because your opponent might be too crushed to play tomorrow. Sure.

I understand that resources are finite (although that somehow doesn't stop us from wasting money on Ralph Nader's campaign for no good purpose); I understand that some of this will be money down the drain, as we cannot realistically hope to prevail in every one of these races; and I understand that failing in these races might be problematic in itself, because a bloodied but still standing politician is a more formidable candidate in the future.

The gamble, however, seems worth it. If we're playing this seriously, we can't play tiddlywinks and hope our opponents' future never comes to be. We need to yank out the knuckledusters and cut some throats now (metaphorically, of course), to hold on to the reins of power as long as realistically possible -- now, and twenty years in the future.

This dates to August 3, 2006.

Ned Lamont is going to lose.

How do I know this? Because Stinky Stoller famously opined that candidates for office must run from racist blogs at all costs. And Ned Lamont, who all but employs a real racist -- the kind who thinks blackface is funny satire -- assuredly wants to get elected, right? I mean, sure, I believe him when he says that he has no idea about blogs, has never associated with them, and probably has no idea who all these people are following him around. Surely he'll take Stinky's sage, well-written advice, and drop Racist Hamster like there's no tomorrow.

But wait! Lamont is standing behind his woman! Why? I'd suggest that there are two alternatives, neither of which is mutually exclusive, both of which are probably true: The lefty netroots aren't ready for primetime, and no one cares, as Democrats are ok with racists anyway.

Stinky, by the way, fearless, pasty, smelly crusader against online racism, thinks that blackface is "edgy".

This post is from April 19, 2005.

The funniest thing -- and it's a heated competition -- about the New Left is that everything frightens them. John Ashcroft frightened them. Don Rumsfeld. Fluoride in tap water. The new season of Dragon Tales. (The correct response to that is disgust, not fear.) And so on.

To that end: The Dread Rises.

I care less than nothing for your sexual preference; but for the love of the God you claim to worship, be a frigging man. Some excerpts:

This was a statement as much as a selection. And the statement is that the church is circling the wagons. They simply could not have picked a more extreme candidate. And that tells us something important. ...

What this says to American Catholics is quite striking: it's not just a disagreement, it's a full-scale assault. ...

I expected continuity. I didn't expect intensification of the fundamentalism and insularity of the current hierarchy. I expect an imminent ban on all gay seminarians, celibate or otherwise. ...

And what is the creed of the Church? That is for the Grand Inquisitor to decide. Everything else - especially faithful attempts to question and understand the faith itself - is "human trickery." It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It's not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It's a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning. ...

The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so ... to prayer. What else do we now have? ...

So quick? So soon? What can that mean? Ratzinger?? The dread rises.

Grow a pair, huh?

A better, funnier, more thorough take here, and up; and here.

Update [2005-4-20 17:32:59 by Thomas]: The Dread Continues to Rise. I have to wonder at the paucity of the man's catechesis, or feel rising dread that my memory might become so poor when I pass 40.

This dates to September 12, 2006.

Now, I happen to believe that the Republicans will hold the House and the Senate. Why? The Democrats picked almost as many duds this cycle as we did; the demographics and effects of the 2000 redistricting are still in place; and the Democrats are actually touting their surrender-monkey-hood as a selling point.

In other words, the Democrats are as stupid as ever. Thank God.

We would not, however, be in this pickle if the "Republicans" we elected actually governed as, well, Republicans. Let's rack up some non-achievements:

Spending: Let's not even go there.

The Budget Deficit: Ditto.

Holding the Party line on perhaps the most important cross-group issue of our day, the war on terror: Senators McCain, Graham, and Hagel, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

Substantive restrictions, or at least, the hints of them, on abortion: When pigs fly.

Immigration: Let me put it this way: This is not an immigration thread.

Stem Cells: Ditto.

Reducing so much as the rate of growth of the government: It is to laugh.

In short, every, single, last thing we send those jokers to do on the Hill, they at best do poorly, and usually don't do at all. (Amazingly, they still do it better than Democrats.)

But what's even more interesting is that if you look carefully, and imagine that each component of the Republican coalition is defined by primary-but-not-exclusive interest in one of those points, you'll see that every single faction is taking it in the chest.

The most critical part of coalition politics is, obviously, keeping the coalition intact and pointed in the same direction. In theory, the Republican coalition does this by giving, on a regular basis, some, but not all, of the things each faction wants; they are then inclined to look at the alternative, realize they wouldn't do nearly so well there, and stick with the pack. The point, in other words, isn't to make any faction happy; it's to keep each faction less unhappy than they'd be elsewhere.

As members of the Stupid Party, however, I think we can safely say that our elected representatives played hookey the day they were teaching coalition politics in school. Let's look at the one thing that most of the coalition agrees on, to some extent or another: Judges. Let's see, we got Roberts and Alito. We got some, but not all, of the judges Bush sent up. Where are the rest?

Oh, right. A group of Republicans led the fight to kill them, to protect their prerogatives. And that's the issue on which Republicans have performed best.

The dumbest part about the Party's poor performance on all things Republican is that it has each faction convinced that it's getting uniquely screwed. Had they done their jobs right, we'd all think we're getting equally screwed.

This is why, frankly, we're stuck debating whether the social cons got everything they could have asked (and should therefore get to the back of the line) in Bush's (limited) stem cell ban or his first veto (or is it Terri Schiavo?), when of course, at best, these were bandages on horrible wounds in our polity. Or whether the fiscal cons got tax breaks out the yin-yang, so they should just shut it. Or whether the small government types got theirs ... well, ok, in fairness, except for maybe the tax breaks, no one's making too much noise about them. Or the hawks are getting theirs with an uneven prosecution of a war in two failed Muslim states. And don't even get me started on the immigration folks. And so on. [Full disclosure: I think these divisions are artificial and stupid in the extreme, but that's a blog post for later.]

In other words, the continued success of the Republican coalition is driving the coalition into the ground, largely because the people elected by the coalition aren't acting very Republican. Hats off, folks. And a big round of applause to the Democrats, too stupid, too weak, and too lazy to put a spine into our Party. When historians talk about the death of the Democrat Party years from now, the very next chapter will be the death of the Republican Party ten years later.

This dates to February 11, 2005.

Arthur Miller is no longer wasting precious oxygen.

Rest in Stalinist peace, fellow-traveler. May the cries of the innocents whose death you helped excuse and make possible waft their way into your holding cell in Hell.

Update [2005-2-11 20:22:2 by Thomas]: For those who think this is a bit much, ask yourself this:

Would it be a bit much if he were a Nazi, instead of an ardent communist?

Oh, wait, I forgot. It's ok to be a member of a totalitarian movement that slaughters by economic group, instead of (merely) by racial group. Silly me.

This post is from November 8, 2006.

Properly, today should be a day of quiet meditation, and consolidating forces. It should be a day we regroup, and start planning for 2008.

To the pits of Hell with that. I have some long knives, and it's time to start plunging.

We lost a tenuous governing majority because we killed ourselves, slowly, with a thousand tiny cuts. We lost Iraq because we simply had to give verbal aid and comfort (I choose those words deliberately) to the Democrats as they hauled out every last cliche from the antiwar movement of the 1970s. We kept abortion on demand the law of the land for at least another seven years because we had to try to fund the use of human beings as research matter. We guaranteed increasingly painful entitlement spending because we wanted to beat the Democrats to the punch on free drugs for seniors. We guaranteed profligacy by being progligate ourselves.

The Democrats did not win this battle. We locked our finest spears in the ground and plunged ourselves upon them.

This dates to November 13, 2006.


Oh, this is simply priceless. With Ken Mehlman retiring, we need a new RNC Chair.

We could have had a promising up-and-comer with a great life story, fantastic political skills, and odds-on-sharps like you wouldn't believe.

We could have had a dirty machine politico, who may make us all cringe a little at what he's willing to countenance, but who is used to the odd knifefight with a K-Bar and a rusty razor, and who could help us work our way back into the majority.

We could have had a lobotomized sea lion, who would at least know to bark to get some kind of fish on command.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next best thing (by a little) to making Kevin Phillips the new RNC Chair: Bonehead Martinez. Yes, that's right, Bonehead, who with a five-point Bush win in trending-Red Florida at his back, barely managed to beat one of the more anodyne, bland Democrats to run for the Senate outside of Massachusetts; Bonehead, who managed to take a dicey political situation in the Terri Schiavo affair and make himself into a Google search result; Bonehead, who if asked to eat eggs over easy and shave at the same time, would end up with shiny whites and yolk smeared in fork-tine streaks across his face; Bonehead is going to be the RNC Chair.

And if gets better! He's going to multitask!

This was brought to you today by the same morons who griped all last week about do-nothing leadership in the House, only to ... wait for it ... prepare to vote in the same losers!

I'm proud to be a Republican today.

This dates to October 16, 2007.


On general principle, I try very hard to avoid disagreeing with my fellow contributors anywhere but in the comment sections of their pieces; generally, it feels unseemly to turn the front page, or diaries, into a back-and-forth on some issue or another. This is just me; Heaven knows others have different perspectives, and have displayed them.

That said, I'm breaking that personal rule this time to take issue with almost everything Erick said here. Before I wander out on this thin-looking tree extension, I'd note that I have no small amount of respect for Erick as both a man and as a thinker. Generally, I don't publicly disagree with him because I have the luxury of seeing most of what he writes as essentially correct. Nothing that I write here changes any of that.

With that said, I think with respect to this specific piece, Erick's wrong in general, wrong in his initial premises, and wrong in most of his conclusions. I'll explain why below the fold, but I do want to ask you to follow me there, because there is one thing I think he's absolutely right about; and that one thing contains within it so much awful truth, I'd like you to not only tell me why I'm wrong, I'd like you to prove it.

I take issue more or less from the start.

Erick quotes approvingly Peggy Noonan (whom, I should add, I heart), for her question,

But it's something I often wonder: Why don't people in Washington go home anymore?

This particular question has been asked, so far as I know, twenty-seven of the thirty-one years of my life (and probably many times before that), and pretty well since a smiling guy from California, Noonan's old boss, was sworn into office on a blustery day in 1981. The answer, to any conservative who is not (as Ms. Noonan is) actually in love with humans, is that these people are humans. They have found a niche in which they discovered a place for themselves, and that niche is loaded with power and money they would not otherwise have. Respectfully, duh. While not by any stretch of the imagination a fan of term limits -- I believe people deserve the representation they're stupid enough to elect -- this is the most persuasive case I can imagine for them: That the men and women we send to the halls of power rarely leave of their own volition, and they work to keep themselves there at all costs. We remember and admire Washington and Cincinnatus not because they were normal, but because they were strange, great men, and forsook power to go back to being normal men. Men like Franklin Roosevelt, a cretin who held power until Death came and grabbed it from him, are the norm.

And we -- we being conservatives, we being Republicans -- are particularly shafted, because we do not send, as a general rule, our A team to Washington, or indeed, into government in general. Odd exceptions like Bobby Jindal and a handful of others I'm blessed to know or have met or have read about notwithstanding, our smart and capable people tend to run screaming from government because, well, they're conservative. Government service does not pay well, government service does not yield opportunities to unleash the human imagination, government service saps all that matters in life -- family, home, peace of mind -- and leaves a gray film over it. So generally, we send the slightly (or severely) stupid into battle for us, the slightly dim cousins we thought were safely locked in the basement to press our beliefs and policies, and then we all stand gobsmacked when they either mess up the presentation, get co-opted by the opposition, wander naked past Capitol City Brewing Company in broad daylight, or, worse, decide they never want to leave.

In other words, this is part of our lot in life. Sad, but true. So while Noonan's amazement (and by extension Erick's) is somewhat off-note, it does tie into Erick's critically correct insight. Which you'll have to keep reading to get.

Next, Erick laments:

The GOP has ceased to be a party of ideas. We have John Boehner playing to keep Jerry Lewis on the Appropriations Committee, despite his FBI investigation. He's added to the Appropriations Committee Ken Calvert, also under investigation.

Properly, there are two errors in here, one per thought.

First, the GOP was never the party of ideas. In point of fact, except for a brief portion of the 1994 mid-term election campaign, the GOP has been pretty darned awful at even having ideas. (This is, like so many other things, both a good and bad thing.) We earned and have retained the title Stupid Party, and by God, no one will wrest it from our hands. Look back at the start of the modern political era, which I date to 1960. Name a single GOP-spawned political idea. Go for it. Not a conservative, neoconservative (sorry, Ron, but they were the idea guys for a couple decades there), or libertarian one; not an idea spawned in the think tanks or by samizdat communique between conservative university professors; a GOP-spawned one. Ya can't. And this is because, oh, you know what I'm going to say, we send morons to government. We are talking, folks, about people who sent an embryonic-stem-cell research funding bill to the President, the head of their own Party, in the face of his veto threat and significant warnings from large segments of their own base, in an election year where they knew they'd have trouble anyway, and gave their opposition a wedge issue. Does this sound like people who have ideas larger than Make belt match shoes, ugh? The GOP was never the Party of ideas; it was the party of men who tried vainly to put good ideas into play, and usually failed.

The second is the suggestion that profound, complementary butt-covering is somehow something new (and suggestive) in GOP politics. It is not. Again, because we send morons to do our dirty work, we get the Boehners, we get the Lewises and Youngs and Stevenses, and we get the Packwoods and Gingriches and... Newsflash: When you send idiots somewhere with money and power, they are going to mess it up, awful. They are going to ride their gravy train until it runs off the track, and then they're going to grab everything that isn't nailed down and bail.

Now, I have to confess -- and this is my own pet peeve, so bear with me -- that I took serious issue with this:

For the longest time, "policy as a game" meant supporting the social conservative agenda at the expense of the fiscal conservative agenda.

Actually, this is true only if "supporting" means "providing lip service to." Now, I will be the last to say that the GOP Congress, especially after getting spanked in the government shutdown over a decade ago, has shown the slightest tendency toward fiscal conservatism. Indeed, the GOP of the 1980s, say, thought they were showing their fiscal conservative bonafides with Gramm-Rudman, which was so brilliant, it never actually worked. In point of fact, the only fiscally conservative thing the GOP has done during my lifetime is cutting taxes -- I count four large tax cut packages during that time -- and that usually over a not insignificant amount of intra-Party opposition.

But. Let's consider the monstrous advances the social conservative movement has made since Reagan's inauguration. Well, hm. First, we got Roe reversed... no, wait. Well, we made sure that there would be no gay marr-- Ok, scratch that one. Oh, I know! We ensured there would be no Federal funding for embryon--

The social conservative movement has, in my lifetime, actually scored the following successes, through the Grand Old Party, at the national level: After ten years of trying, a ban on one particular procedure for a tiny handful of late-term abortions; a limit (not a ban) on Federal funding for slicing and dicing children for medical research; and a bill, signed by a Democrat President, that unconstitutionally denies Full Faith and Credit to contracts for gay marriage entered in one State in another. (I'm willing to toss welfare reform in there, but only as a joint victory for both the social and fiscal cons.)

What the Republican Party has been simply marvelous at -- no way around this -- is talking one Hell of a good game on social issues, even though it cares, sometimes, sorta, more about fiscal ones. Furthermore, all this talk about "who was suffered more from Stockholm Syndrome" is pointless, a waste of perfectly good energy, playing into our idiot opponents' talking points, and a good way to have a nice, futile, self-destructive intra-Party war. (On a related note, I'm neither convinced that Rudy Giuliani will actually give a running flip about what social conservatives think or do, nor that a man who called the progressive tax system the basis of our economy is going to be a great fiscal conservative. But that's me.)

Now, never let it be said that I don't think Erick is capable of high comedy:

Second, while you and I are having our pity party and observing the Republican party cracking up around a lack of ideas, there's life over at Mordor. They are mobilizing behind a set of ideas to entrench their power.

Give the man credit for a pitch-perfect feel for absurdist comedy. The very last thing we need to worry about is what a ravening horde of morons, led by a wedge of rotting cheese, will accomplish. They will accomplish what they've shown they can accomplish: Ruining perfectly good chances at victory by the strategic use of blackface; writing absolutely awful gibberish about Coretta Scott King; raising a lot of money from saps who think they care about change; and copiously abusing the English language, including but not limited to the f-word. It may be true that a million monkeys typing long enough will produce Shakespeare's works, but it is not clear that a million troglodytes banging out their rage at the behest of moral midgets and weeks-old gorgonzola are going to produce new ideas that will set the electorate on a left-wing agenda for decades.

And that leads to where Erick is both wrong, and right, and where I'd like you to prove him and me wrong. Don't just say it; do it.

Let's move beyond the punditry folks. We've got enough of those. Now we need thinkers and doers. And we online conservatives, online Republicans, we need to fight -- first to get our party back, then to get back the majority.

We don't need thinkers; we have those by the millions, and we have them in well-funded (though not well-funded enough, in too many cases) think tanks. And that's the last thing Erick says wrong -- and all the wrong pales compared to what he got right. We have, as Erick correctly noted, the entire right blogosphere, sitting here and sharing its thoughts en masse, and not doing anything.

That is Erick's critically correct insight: We are not a party of activists. The rotting pile of cheese curds mentioned above is indicative of why we're well and truly handicapped in our fight: They make time for government, and we do not. We whine about it. Take me; I'm an excellent example. I'm a father of four with a job that usually consumes 12-14 hours a day, every weekday, and far too often, weekends, too. I patrol the comments section here, I write the occasional piece of punditry (no longer even things like this -- and by the way, R and B, if you're reading this, and I hope you are, sorry I haven't written in a while; sincere congratulations; and avoid the name Arthur for that reason, and because, dangit, that sounds like an accountant's name). When I have money, I donate it. I vote in every election. I've even done some GOTV (including for Dole-Kemp, God help us all). And that's it. Largely, government is something that happens to me; I have too many other things about which to worry.

And pretty much everyone reading this is like that too.

C'mon. Remember last week, when everyone was yammering about some folks announcing that if Rudy Giuliani is selected for the Presidential run, they'll vote third party for the Presidency? Aside from the colossal stupidity of the uproar -- whether or not they vote third party at the top of the ticket, I think we'd like to have them all the way down the rest of the ticket, thanks -- no one really paid attention to what was happening. A group of activists was trying to change the direction of the party. In response, a large number of commenters yelled about it.

That is what we do. If we want to win, win big, and keep winning, we cannot. Take an easy example: When Louisiana Democrats try to paint Bobby Jindal as a bigot because not only is he Catholic, but he believes it, where are the conservatives, the Republicans, the libertarians, the anyone, getting in that idiot Mary Landrieu's face and asking her if Jindal's stated belief in the correctness of Catholicism is bigotry?

I'll tell you where: They were whining about it on internet boards.

Got another: ActBlue, which was actually a great way to help the left blogosphere feel good about itself, is nominally the gold standard in grassroots fundraising. On the right, we've been slow to catch up. Here on RedState, we hawked a few sites that were trying to close the gap. The response? Wow, these aren't just like ActBlue. These aren't as good as ActBlue. These don't allow you to make your own candidate list like ActBlue. Why won't someone make something like ActBlue? Ladies and gentlemen, you are that someone. We have phenomenal communication methods that can link individuals with identical interests and beliefs, and a wide range of talents, to produce something better than ActBlue, and yet it's been left up to a handful of brave folks to try to do all this -- and to the rest to whine that it's not happening fast enough.

So let me lay it out for you: We are, well and truly, toast. We lack the time, the motivation, the energy, and the will to get out there and cause change, to fix all the things our Party and theirs have done wrong, individually or in unison. That is where Erick is sadly, gloriously right, in a way he's been preaching since I first met him very close to three years ago: We have millions of pundits, and a bare handful or two of activists.

But! Here's your chance: Do it. Start a group here, or in our blogs, or on your own email list. Start working out what needs to be done, and do it. Don't comment except to try to get something started, and if that doesn't work, try it a different way.

My money says this blog entry will be read, noted, and ignored, much as Erick's ultimately will be. My money says folks will get fired up, then forget it about it, and wonder why we don't mobilize as well as the baby socialists.

Prove me wrong. Or prove me right, and let's see how the 1970s play out this time.

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.