I wrote this opinion piece for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter: For conservatives, success will follow a return to roots. (Their title, not mine.)

How the British prisoners were treated via Washington Post:

The 26-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant said that when the 15 were brought to the Iranian shore, they were subjected to repeated interrogations. “The questions were aggressive and the handling rough, but it was no worse than that,” he said.

But after they were moved to a prison in Tehran the next day, “the atmosphere changed completely,” Carman said.

“We were blindfolded, our hands were bound, we were forced up against a wall,” he said. “Throughout our ordeal we faced constant psychological pressure.”

He said they were later stripped and given pajamas. “The next few nights were spent in stone cells approximately eight feet by six, sleeping on piles of blankets,” he said.

“All of us were kept in isolation,” Carman said. “We were interrogated most nights and presented with two options. If we admitted that we’d strayed, we’d be back on a plane to the U.K. pretty soon. If we didn’t, we faced up to seven years in prison. We all, at one time or another, made a conscious decision to make a controlled release of nonoperational information.”

[…]

Air said in response to a question that the worst moment for the group was probably the incident when they were lined up against a wall at the prison in Tehran. But he said it was not an actual mock execution.

“I think some of us feared the worst when we were in that situation, hearing weapons being cocked and not having any awareness, being blindfolded and our hands bound,” the 25-year-old Royal Marine captain said.

After reading this, I don’t think Iran has really done anything wrong. Let’s take the incident the soldier calls the “worst moment.” They were lined up against the wall, blindfolded, and the Iranians cocked their weapons. But this was only a threat. The Iranians only induced panic — and that’s all it was, there was no actual physical harm done.

Having shown that the worst moment isn’t that bad, it’s easy to debunk the notion that the British soldiers were tortured in any way. The Post notes that they faced “constant psychological pressure.” So the Iranians played some mind games. It’s not like they pulled out anyone’s fingernails.

Even though the handling was rough, I’m pretty sure Iran is still on solid legal ground. They did not engage in outright torture. Coercive interrogation was only used to get information. Torture is a pretty reliable way of getting information, judging from how well the War on Terror is going (no attacks in 5 years). Thus, I think although the British have recanted their stories, they are actually lying now. Their confessions were right and they were illegally in Iranian waters.

Besides, even if they were subjected to worse treatment, it’s not like Iran and Britain were at war. The British were not prisoners of war and hence are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. They were only detainees.

So I really don’t understand why the Washington Post is giving space to quotes from a bunch of dhimmis who simply surrendered. Nothing wrong went on here. And even if they did, the Iranians were justified in using more coercive techniques in order to get the proper information. It just goes to show that you can’t avoid liberal bias.

[Alright, time to shift from satire mode.]

Quote worthy of remembering:

Roper: “So now you’d give the devil the benefit of law?”

More: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?”

Roper: “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.”

More: “Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, Roper, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

“Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.”

Neoconservatives, the devil has turned on you. Where are you going to hide?

I just wanted to get this prediction on the table before events happened. We will revisit this after primary debates and the presidential debates.

I predict that YouTube will radically transform the way we view the debates.

I am extremely confident about this.

Note: I plan on utilizing YouTube to its fullest extent when any debates roll around. With any luck, I will be one of the persons helping along that transformational process.

Holy crap! This just in from the Washington Post: Republican Thompson Enters Race.

Oh wait, that Thompson. April Fool’s.

Blake Bailey recounts the appalling Road Home program at Slate.

If there is a hell, it is not a place of burning. It is the eternal waiting room for heaven.

The banality of everyday life is suffocating. Even events of seeming significance shrink into nothing. I’ve been have a lot of trouble caring, lately. My work, the 24-hour news cycle, all the little pictures that facebook’s news-feed serves me, they seem irrelevant. I have bigger things to worry about.

Has corruption entered the American character? I know, I know, Americans have never had pure hearts. What I mean to ask, “Is America on the decline?” Has the war on terror caused us to accept a bunker mentality? America is in the vicelike grip of fear. Our backgrounds have been turned into potential terrorist battlefields. Let me tell you something, the idea of the bureaucratic agency called the Department of Homeland security frightens me. Do we really want the tentacles of the federal government reaching into every crevice of our lives?

Face it, we can’t protect our malls from suicide bombers. And that prospect scares me. What happens to America when they hit the heartland? Will the people clamor for the government to take their civil liberties? The sad thing is that I am certain that this will be the response. I am beleaguered on both sides: The ever-present specter of tyranny is equally as destructive as a terrorist’s bomb.

Something deep within our souls changed that day, when the barbarians sacked Rome. The American Empire suddenly felt vulnerable. Our collective psyche is still wounded. Like fools, we turned to our strong leader George Bush, who turned out to be the biggest fool of them all. His Manichaean paranoia₁ is dangerous. Disparate bands of Islamic terrorists and disparate totalitarian Islamist movements have been linked together into the monolith that is Islamo-fascism. We’ve raised our children under the dark cloud of terror. This is all they’ve known. This is almost all I’ve known. I was just aware enough to know that 9/11 changed everything, but I didn’t know anything about that everything that had been changed.

I have glimpses. I remember a time when you felt a slight twinge when the airplane landed and could give your loved ones a hug right before they boarded the airplane. These kids will have grown up in America under siege. As long as they can remember, you’re supposed to submit. You’re supposed to take off your shoes. Your luggage occasionally has a paper in it saying that TSA conducted a search. You’re supposed to smile and thank them for protecting our country. For us, security is a hassle. For them, it’s natural to leave the hair gel at home, or put it in a plastic baggie.

They’re growing up in a world where the phrase “The American Way” is foreign. Truth is trashed for expedience. The institutions of justice are tossed aside for the prerogative of the executive. They may read in the history books about a different America, not hated by the international community, full of dreams and full of the entrepreneurial, the frontier spirit. Alas, they hear, that time is over. We are a different America who faces a different threat, unlike any other.

Not I, you say. But maybe you’re like me, under another level of the cloud cover. Worried about the internal threat, I run the trouble of ignoring the fact that I’ve allowed them to frame the debate. The fear still envelopes me. We need to beyond the fear and quantify the threat in a realistic manner.

I also chastise the scoffers who think there’s no threat at all. I won’t take the time to address them, but I will say that the threat of terror is very real and will continue to remain real no matter what happens in Iraq. The question becomes: How do we address terror without fighting a war on terror? How do we fight without fear? How do we keep ourselves safe without security consuming our lives? How do we undo so many mistakes? How do we reframe the debate?

One answer is that we cling tenaciously to our traditions.₂ I mean various things by tradition. Most especially, I’m referring to our institutions of justice and government. If we give those up, then all is for naught. We must also preserve our moral traditions. This has nothing to do with gay marriage. This has everything to do with our belief that every human being has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, this isn’t enough. It’s not enough just to believe that we need traditions. In order to reaffirm tradition, we need to defeat the bunker mentality, the Manichaean mentality. We need to end the war on terror. We need to work with the international community to make terrorism unacceptable and a crime against humanity. We need to work with the international community to create an acceptable mechanism for punishing states that sponsor terror.

Americans need to be prepared for the next attack. We need to not become panicked animals who need to be herded by the government when that next attack hits. The Department of Homeland Security is just a bastion of pork-barrel spending. The real effect of terrorism is psychological. They can do nothing if we dust ourselves off. They can do nothing if every attack is met with swift emergency response. The casualties are reduced and quickly we return to our everyday lives. They can’t break us if we don’t submit.

Yet even all that’s not enough. It’s not a question of what we need to do, but implementation. Brzezinski asks, “Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, ‘Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia’? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.” This is why I’m so worried about 2008. I see no one.

This is the problem I struggle with now: How to save America from the decline. I see many things that need to be done, but no will to do them. I can’t do this alone. You can’t do this alone. Unfortunately, I don’t know what can be done as long as our current crop of candidates remains mediocre and politically un-courageous. I thought letting this all out would provide with the clarity to provide solutions, but I see nothing at this point. At least, nothing that will solve everything all at once.

For now, let me be courageous. Let yourselves be courageous. And maybe I can get some other young people to be courageous. Spread the word that the “war on terror” is counterproductive. Tout America’s traditions as the best way to protect the “homeland.” Wherever you see false security, speak up.₃ Don’t let anyone get away with anything anymore. Don’t let security be determined by politics. America deserves real solutions, not this madness. Tell all the politicians, when it comes to keeping America safe: No more bullshit.

If they tar you as unpatriotic, shout even louder. They want nothing but theater. We want real security. We want the security of civil liberties. We want the security of emergency response. We want the security of international institutions and international law. We want the security of justice, not some vague forever-war. Most of all, we want the security of not being afraid.

I think that if this happens, if America awakens and demands a return to her traditions, the so-called leaders may finally do something.

This is Phase 1: The Awakening.

₁Brzezinski used this phrase when he was being interviewed on the Daily Show.

₂I was surprised at Brzezinski’s line at the end of his article, mentioning that we should be true to our traditions. It spoke to me very much. I find it strange that now it is the conservatives who want to throw away tradition.

₃This is the difficulty with the bureaucracy. The people no longer control how the nation keeps itself safe. Bureaucrats do. These people think they’re experts, but they’re just fucking things up.

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Thompson has also been criticized for failing to back some comprehensive tort reform bills because of his background as a trial lawyer. Here he insists his stance was based on grounds of federalism. “I’m consistent. I address Federalist Society meetings,” he says, noting that more issues should be left to the states. For example, he cast the lonely “nay” in 99-1 votes against a national 0.8% blood alcohol level for drivers, a federal law banning guns in schools, and a measure limiting the tort liability of Good Samaritans. “Washington overreaches, and by doing so ends up not doing well the basics people really care about.” Think Katrina and Walter Reed.

I’m sold. Run, Fred Thompson, run.

Interesting reading on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Selected quotes:

“In contrast to most of al-Qa’eda’s senior leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed liked to indulge in the sins of the Western civilisation that his movement is devoted to wiping out.”

“Peter Bergen, the author and leading expert on al-Qa’eda, said: ‘I think he really was in it for the fun. To use a horrible metaphor in this context, he was having a blast.'”

For some reason, this reminded me of The Dread Pirate Bin Laden. I momentarily thought of KSM as some sort of swashbuckler.

Captain’s Quarters adds this:

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not the only jihadi who indulged the sins of the flesh while on assignment as a terrorist. The 9/11 attackers also enjoyed so-called Western decadence during their short stay in the United States. As the 9/11 Commission report noted in its excellent recounting of the plot, a half-dozen of them made test flights to Las Vegas in the three months preceding the attack — and while in Sin City, they indulged in alcohol, gambling, and strip clubs. KSM apparently lived the dissolute lifestyle as a rule, though, and not an exception.”

Anyway, if this is true, KSM is no Islamofascist, no jihadist — he’s just a plain criminal. But what to make of the 9/11 foot soldiers?

On a semi-related note, here’s my quote of the day for August 28, 2006: “There are criminals and killers — we know the scum who wear the mask of the Jihad and religion… They used to kill people as criminals and now they kill them under the cover of jihad.” — Abdul Qader Mohammed Jasim, the Iraqi minister of defense

I don’t think the actors in 9/11 were mere criminals, but I do think criminals are trying to legitimize themselves with the cover of jihad. I also think that it may be helpful to take control of the narrative and not call the terrorists jihadists, but to call them common criminals. Food for thought, especially for the Manichaeans out there.

We stood in the long line for maybe a minute, but we knew we weren’t going to get in. Fine with me, I didn’t want to see Coulter anyway. On one hand, I wish we could’ve got in. Then, I would’ve sat there, and I could’ve booed or walked out. On the other hand, I find it far more likely that I would’ve sat there, quietly seething.

Instead, I found out the next morning that Ann Coulter had pretty much called John Edwards a faggot. I think John Hawkins, at Right Wing News nails it, calling her selfish.

I never liked her before, but now I have no respect for Ann Coulter at all.

And don’t give me that “It was a joke” excuse. That is the lamest excuse ever. There’s something called “delivery.” Ann’s delivery wasn’t funny; it was just insulting.

I used to think that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but… bah, who knows, maybe this helped her with her book sales.

What depresses me the most is how people cheered. No, depresses and disgusts. AGHH!

By the way, here’s a sneak peek at Ann Coulter’s next CPAC speech: “I would say something about Obama, but apparently you can’t call a black person a nigger anymore without going to rehab.” [I wonder how many kids would cheer that.]

If she’s coming next year, I am so protesting.

I smirked a little bit. I had taken a glance around the room and noticed that a few people were starting to nod off. Tim Pawlenty wasn’t giving a stump speech, he was giving a lecture. While his execution was off, I still think he had a few very interesting things to say.

He stressed the importance of suburban voters, specifically, suburban women voters. He said we shouldn’t refer to them as “soccer moms,” giving a very persuasive spiel about them being in the work force, etc. He expressed a worry that suburban voters, even though they liked Republican principles, they thought of the Republicans as the party of the rich. I think he’s onto something and the Republicans have really got to fix their image. We’re seen as the party of bigots and the uber-rich.

Pawlenty, at one point, asked the audience about the person most popular among women. After a pause, I managed to answer along with him: Oprah. He said that Obama was Oprah-ish, managing to exhude that same type of demeanor.

I don’t think Pawlenty managed to tap into any of that Oprah power, but I think he’s on to something. Republicans need to appeal to suburbia, and especially suburban women.

I was surprised at the rousing ovation that Tom Delay received. I guess he is “the Hammer,” but didn’t he leave disgraced? Well, I didn’t stand up and clap. I didn’t do much listening to either Delay or Horowitz, who were speaking on some type of panel. However, I did do enough listening to Horowitz to feel very uneasy about it. No wait, let me backtrack.

First, when the lady was introducing them, she took so much pride in the fact that they were people that liberals loved to hate. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be hated. If someone can’t stand me because of certain political positions, fine, they can do that, but I’m not going to actively try and get someone to hate me. Somewhere in her introduction, she said that Horowitz was a former Marxist.

Anyway, I leaned over to my friend and said, “This will probably get me shot, but I think Horowitz still sounds like a Marxist.” Ironically, while I was thinking those thoughts (before I mentioned them to my friends), Horowitz prefaced some statements by apologizing for sounding like a leftist (although I think it involved how he was using many numbers or something).

Strangely enough, the choice derogatory term for the Democrats from Horowitz is that they are a “religion.” They are religious in that they want to establish a heaven-on-earth. Fair game, I hate their idealism, but the way Horowitz describes the left just makes me feel creepy. I can’t say what it is, but although his targets have changed, his language sounds the same… as if he’s still denouncing the bourgeoisie. He spoke of the left as a monolith, and I didn’t like his approach.

I didn’t hear him speak, but my friends apparently enjoyed Huckabee’s speech at CPAC. We looked up his record afterwards and apparently he was a big spender. I don’t really have an opinion of Huckabee, but I couldn’t resist writing this down:

Fuck Huck.

Sorry to be crass, but I think it’s hilarious.

Although I’ve weighed against too much professional bureaucracy, I don’t want this to be an attack on intellectuals in general. I think if we’re going to adapt to this century, we’re going to have to listen to scientists. The tension becomes even more, um, tense, when I consider that I want very much to listen to the scientists, but I don’t want them telling me what to do. One could posit a resolution of this tension in making scientists be descriptive of our problems rather than prescriptive of solutions. However, I don’t think the dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive is as clear-cut as one may think. Moreover, my penchant for the wisdom of crowds I doubt extends to science, which often has very specific knowledge. I think, somehow, that the answer may lie in education of the public, so that scientists are not magicians, waving facts they culled from who-knows-where.

Forgive me if I have been ignoring current issues. I’m trying very hard to look far into the future that it is becoming difficult to see what is right in front of me. In fact, I’m feeling myself start to withdraw from this world and enter a world of abstraction. As much as I hate abstraction, theory is useful and I’m trying to do more forest thinking, as opposed to tree thinking. I’m trying to see how liberty can survive in the “long term,” for this century, that is.

Hypothesis: With the growth of population, the modern world needed professional bureaucracies to deal with increasingly complex issues. In the postmodern world, the complexities of issues have outstripped even the abilities of a professional bureaucracy. Hence, the need for a new federalism, perhaps. We also need to figure out how to harness the wisdom of crowds.

I’m still unsure about the ways this new decentralization of power will take place. I’ve been thinking about the radical ways in which the internet can create communities that are not geographically-based. I’m not sure what implications this has.

In any case, even without our current crises, our democracy is slowly dying and the body politic is becoming corrupt. The lack of agency, the lack of participation, along with the growth of the professional bureaucracy, is a threat to the continuation of liberty.

Any thoughts?

I am toying with a concept of “neofederalism,” which is a horrible name, so maybe I should just call myself a federalist. I think that if we’re going to solve problems like health care, it cannot be done on the national level. The issue is too complex, and so we should experiment on the state level to see what works and what doesn’t. However, these are not laboraties for federal policy. If a policy spreads, it will not be top-down. It will spread from state to state because the idea works, and because each state will have the freedom to adapt good policy to the needs of the people. I think giving health care is an admirable goal, but I don’t believe it can be done on the national level. I think other similar “liberal” concerns cannot be dealt with on the national level, or will be better dealt with on the state level. Some may argue that this process is slow, and so we should use the federal government. But it’s supposed to be slow. We are dealing with complex issues, and it will take years to hammer out the kinks. We should not be so hasty. We should also not be so arrogant as to believe that our idea will most definitely work for all people. It is an inherently conservative approach.

When we look at the current state of affairs, we see a paralyzed Washington. Some think that we should jolt the parties back to the center. I think that will take a long time, and even then, it won’t be enough. We can take the initiative on the state level, and we should. Legislators and governors of mixed parties can get along just fine and have done some amazing things. Some people think, “Okay, we should go ahead and duplicate this on the national level.” I don’t think that at all. I say, “We should duplicate this in every state.” If state governments can work together and Congress can’t, then screw Congress. When they’re ready to act like adults, maybe then we’ll talk. If the grown-ups are on the state level, then we should enter a dialogue on the state level. I don’t think it’s a crisis if Congress can’t get its act together on things like health care; it’s a benefit that these guys aren’t screwing things up worse. Led Congress be in gridlock, and let the more local levels act.

In my dream world, people more readily recall the name of their state legislators than they do their Congresspersons and Senators.

I also may end up advocating a more radical localism, but this I’m even less sure of than my new embrace of federalism.

I think a similar type of approach may be taken to world affairs. We should admit that the world is too big. We cannot solve all the world’s problems. We should let regions and countries solve their own problems. We should promote democracy, but we should not be too eager. The imposition of radical equality on an unprepared state only leads to chaos. Instead of the top-down approach of Iraq and unilateralism, we can lead by example, along with the rest of the West. We can encourage values, but we cannot impose them. We should criticize when we can, but the power to criticize is not a license to force people to change their ways.

These ideas are all starting points, not finishing points. I think it’s important to enter a bigger dialogue, so that we can address the political problems of the 21st century.

Sullivan linked to this, where I found something that caught my attention: “Burke saw that, and saw habit not as something self-contained and self-justifying but as the accumulation and realization of goods that go beyond habit and consequently must somehow serve at least in concept as a more ultimate standard.”

More ultimate standard? Sounds strangely abstract…

But maybe that’s just coming from my current flirtations with Pragmatism. After all, Sullivan, in his book, fell prey to the Platonic cave story with its ultimate truth.

I believe that the notion of inherited rights is strongly against a “more ultimate standard” and more in line with practicality. So, I think Kalb is incorrect when he asserts:

Indeed, it seems to me that when you try to turn “don’t be stupid” into a general political philosophy, you are likely to end by simply dividing policies and politicians into those you like and those you don’t like and leaving it at that. Any reasoning not used opportunistically to support opinions already held would be abstract and ideological, and so non-Burkean. Your politics will tend to become at bottom a matter of asserting general personal superiority.

“Don’t be stupid” respects the idea that the stock of reason in man is so little. It’s not merely about what policies you like and don’t like. It’s about which policies are more radical and which are less radical. It’s about which policies have a chance at working and which don’t. And, it’s always about looking for unintended consequences. The point of conservatism is that these ideas need not come from some over-arching ideology.

Besides, why does Kalb assume that the point of politics is his search for a “constructive function”? I leave you with a quote from the “operatic” Burke that Kalb links to: “It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed, as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation, than enjoyment.”

These are my preliminary thoughts, and I’ll sharpen them later.

This time around, I felt that Bush sounded especially cogent and connected (sounded — I didn’t say he is). At least, it seemed like he definitely did have a clue as to what was going on when he mentioned the various sects of Islam. Then, he said this:

“The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat.”

Apparently, Bush is a uniter, but instead of uniting us, he’s uniting our enemies. Whoever heard of “unite and conquer”?

A disaggregation of the terrorist threat allows us to stop thinking in Bush’s Manichaean terms when it comes to withdrawing from Iraq. Perhaps these terrorists will grow in size, but maybe they’ll be too busy killing each other instead of us. (While this sounds good in an abstract sense, it is not necessarily morally just because of all the people caught in the middle.)

The costs of defeat are great, surely. But I must ask: What are the costs of “victory”?

It has already cost us lives, limbs, and billions of dollars. Even if the surge stabilizes Baghdad, I believe that Iraq cannot survive as a democracy if we do not provide the necessary economic aid. This, I suspect, will require a civilian component, which always seemed to be lacking in Bush’s rhetoric. Democracy requires nation-building. The military is not made for nation-building.

To “win” as Bush has defined it, requires many more lives, limbs, and dollars. Tax-payer money that could fund more space science or stay in our pockets, but instead it goes to Iraq to fund their economy. Hell, do we even have enough money in the first place? Democratization in Iraq also requires time. It requires a long-term commitment of at least 30 years. Let’s put it this way: It requires empire.

I understand the opinion of many on the right who believe that leaving Iraq would be a disaster. But we must also consider the costs of victory. Could it bankrupt us? (Dollar-wise and morally.) What are its long-term effects on our military? Will it cost us in the propaganda war being waged for hearts and minds around the Middle East? (I especially pose this question to the right who believe that we must take the metaphoric gloves off in order to pacify Iraq.) We would do well to consider the lesson of King Pyrrhus, who defeated the Romans, but at so great a cost that the result was ruin. I’m not saying that pacifying Iraq would be a Pyrrhic victory. At this point, I’m only asking that we seriously consider it.

Whenever I think about 2008, I get really pessimistic. I keep hearing myself say, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” I can’t help but believe that presidential power has not yet reached its zenith. Ambition has not yet been counteracted with ambition; President Bush is only in temporary retreat and has not received a proper slap down, these past elections notwithstanding. If the next president is a Republican, I fear he will have the same profile as Bush. If it’s a Democrat, I fear that unified government (at least with a Democratic Congress and Democratic president) will not provide a necessary check. Or that a Democrat may be poised to abuse power even more in order to prove his (or her) tough credentials. 9/11 dropped a bunch of shit onto George Bush’s lap. I feel sorry for him more than anything because that is a tremendous burden, and he just wasn’t capable of handling it. We thought he rose to the challenge when he held that bullhorn atop the rubble, but we were wrong. The answer to our mistake that is Iraq is not to clam up. Militant fundamentalist Islamists still pose a dangerous threat to America. I don’t trust Russia. China is gearing up to become a superpower. The new president must be prepared to fight the long war in which the very fate of democracy and freedom is still up for grabs. But in this battle, he must not sacrifice the very rights and freedoms we are fighting for in the first place.

I look at the field and am severely unimpressed. I maintain an open mind about the lesser-name candidates, but I am pessimistic about their chances. I hear Obama and think, “Where’s the beef?” I have an irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton — and a legitimate concern about American democracy being controlled by two families for over two decades. McCain capitulated on torture and the MCA. He’s also very old and that means the presidency could potentially fall into the hands of an inept vice president. It’s not that I don’t think all of these people could never ever be president; it’s that I feel the times call for someone especially extraordinary, and I don’t know where that person is. What I’m most worried about is that we, the voters, will have a choice between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, a choice between shit and shittier.

There may be reason for hope. The one great thing Bush did was appoint John Roberts as Chief Justice. I recently read a piece about him in the Atlantic and his commitment to acting as a court rather than 9 ideological individuals is wonderful. Another piece in the Atlantic talked about Unity 08, an attempt to make a bipartisan ticket and jolt us toward the center. I vaguely remember reading about some internet movement way back when but I thought it was an attempt to start a viable third party, which I thought was ridiculous, but Unity 08 is completely different. This seems possible of having a shot if both candidates for the major parties suck. It’s still a tall order, and I can’t help but remain pessimistic.

Maybe we won’t make a difference in 2008. Maybe it’ll be business as usual and the politicians fiddle while Rome burns.

Then, I changed my mode of thinking. Just as the war against radical Islam is a long war, so is this nascent war to remake American politics. Begin to dig the trenches. We’ll do our best to get the right people elected in 2008, but we may fail miserably. (Who is this “we”? I don’t know yet. We’ve still yet to make our voice heard, to gather, to even materialize. Maybe it’s all the people who think the current state of politics is too divisive and not focused on solutions. This we is not the angry or the ideologues.) If we fail, though, we must continue to fight. The capacity for change does not disappear after one electoral defeat. If the nation weakens and the sky darkens, our only choice is to double our resolve. We must never give up. The fate of the republic rests in our hands.

So if you despair at this moment… if you look around and feel powerless, do not fret. I too feel often feel impotent and don’t be too surprised if it gets worse. But I beg you, do not give up. All I ask is that you steel your minds. Gather up your resolve. Think. Speculate. Talk. Act, even. But bounce back if your actions fail. Be prepared for a long fight. Change is not going to happen overnight. Do not panic. Just be ready.

Who we think of as allies and enemies will completely change. The landscape will be remade, even if it’s not in 2008. Soon, we will figure out who “we” are, what we are fighting for, and what we are fighting against. Pessimism is a perfectly reasonable response, but only for the short-term. In the grand scheme of things, I am unwaveringly optimistic and resolute. You should be too. I’ll say it once more: Be ready for a long fight.

In my local paper not too long ago, I read an article about someone trying to introduce a bill that would ban spanking for children under 3. Ridiculous, I thought, it’s never going to pass. And that was the end of it.

Then I heard her on a radio talk show, and I started to get cynical. I wondered if she was doing this just to get attention. It reminded me of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s publicity stunt of performing gay marriages (which I view more cynically than heroically, despite being for gay marriage). I’m still undecided because it seems unlikely that she could’ve calculated this media maelstrom, unlike the instant attention Newsom could count on. Here’s an article about her attention-getting: No-spanking bill’s backer – Mtn. View’s Sally Lieber – taking her turn in the spotlight.

Note to future self: If you want some instant national spotlight, do something “controversial.”

Here’s a video of Jon Stewart interviewing Bill Kristol. Jon Stewart says that neoconservatism is just liberalism with old guys. Kristol says, “It’s liberalism grown-up” at about 5:38 in the interview.

Reminds me a little bit of this (which I stumbled upon a while ago but I don’t remember where I found it): “I certainly was not aboard that Ship of Fools, so-called ‘conservatives’ as well as ‘neo-conservatives’ – more correctly neo-trotskyites – who sailed with Bush right over Niagra Falls and smashed to pieces on the rocks of reality below.”

Liberalism grown-up? Say what? You’re neo-whats again??

I came upon this quiz while reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I scored a 26, which, interestingly, is the same as Sullivan’s score.

I doubt you can find a thing much more expensive than war. Throughout history, wars have depleted the treasuries of countries and led to civil unrest or worse.

Do I have any historical examples in mind? Not yet. I’m going to do some research on the claim to find out if it’s true or not. I mean, one can provide a counterexample of a post-WWII boom, I suppose, but I fail to see how Iraq is stimulating our economy. Then again, weren’t we practically a command economy during WWII? I don’t know yet if my claim is true or not, but if it is, it means preventative war (and occupation) is a very dangerous strategy.

I do know, however, that war is expensive. The results of war’s expense — I will find them.

I must make an important distinction. In my mind, the Republican Party has not been hijacked by the religious right; it has been hijacked by those who exploit the religious right.

EDIT: I do think that there are members of the religious right who are exploiting their own.

GOP Majority, RIP

From the Washington Post, GOP Laments Mixed Results As Control of Congress Ends:

Compared with the liberal ascendancy, which ran from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and arguably Ronald Reagan’s election, the conservative era has been brief and relatively inconsequential, said Julian Zelizer, a Boston University congressional historian. Nothing in the past 12 years compares with the creation of Social Security or Medicare, the voting rights and civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. Nor were any of those big-government achievements fundamentally altered.

Far from ending an imperial Congress, Republicans centralized power in their leadership to an unprecedented level.

Even some successes — such as a balanced budget and the diminution of farm subsidies — proved short-lived, GOP lawmakers and former leaders conceded.

*sigh*

In other news, I got through part of Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel’s book, The Plan, and I actually like their part about civil service. Know thy enemy is my excuse for reading it. It’s also good to steal your political enemies’ best ideas.

Selected quotes from the NY Times, Report on Iraq Exposes a Divide Within the G.O.P.:

“The divisions could make it more difficult for Republicans to coalesce on national security policy and avoid a bitter intraparty fight going into the 2008 campaign.”

“But the debate will go to the heart of the party’s identity — and its image as the party of strength on national security — after Mr. Bush’s aggressive post-Sept. 11 foreign policy brought electoral successes in 2002 and 2004 but was profoundly challenged by voters this year.”

“The ambivalence and introspection were summed up by Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who spoke at length in the Senate this week about the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq but said he could no longer support the status quo.”

Bitter intraparty fighting? Bring it on.

In case the discourse turns out to be like everyone else’s next great American novel (viz., unfinished), I want to get out the gist of it on this weblog — or at least, the gist of my current thinking. It has to do with the habits of societies, and treating tradition as habit. Lloyd, directed me to this article, trashing Bush from a conservative position. He showed me this particularly intriguing paragraph:

Once, while I was a graduate student at Columbia, I took a seminar in important thinkers with Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. Barzun, in particular, liked to start by identifying the core of a great thinker’s thought. When it came to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution, I offered: “Burke knows that if you tried to tie your shoes in the morning by means of reason you would never get out of the house.” That is, you tie your shoes by habit. Barzun nodded approval but gave this a social dimension, saying, “Burke wanted his morning newspaper delivered on time.” That is, the writing, manufacture, and delivery of that newspaper require a great many actions that are accomplished by habit. Social institutions are the habits of society.

I want to add a moral dimension to this analysis: A good society has good habits. A democracy is not made smiply by the existence of certain laws. One will instantly think that laws must be enforced, but even the ability to enforce laws misses an element. When you have vast amounts of people breaking the law, it is very hard to enforce the law without overwhelming force, and the use of force to impose your will isn’t exactly democracy at work. The moment when a government is established cannot create a democracy. It’s something entirely less clear-cut. A democratic society has the habits of democracy.

If you want a good reason why democracy is so hard to establish, I can simplify part of the answer with an old maxim: Old habits die hard. Case in point, the “habit” of assassination. Here we have a case of assassination in Russia. Note the title of the weblog entry: “Assassination is ‘in’ again.” I would argue that it never was “out.” My emphasis on societal habits might indeed lead to a different paradigm of thinking. (The idea isn’t new, of course, but tradition seems to be generally equated with good things and here I am talking about bad habits.) It would be impossible to declare by fiat that assassination shall not occur. (After all, find me a place where assassination is actually legalized.) It’s much like declaring on New Year’s that I will go to the gym everyday. The declaration doesn’t mean a damn thing. Going to the gym once doesn’t mean a damn thing. Going to the gym off and on for a month, might be slightly more admirable, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it doesn’t mean a damn thing either. Writing a constitution, establishing a new government… it doesn’t mean a damn thing if your society simply reverts to its old ways. Why should we be surprised at all when Russia is becoming as closed a society as it once was?

Don’t buy into my theory of habit? Don’t think a society can have habits? Well, imagine a different America. Imagine if instead of retiring at the end of two terms, George Washington stayed until he died. We would be a much different place. Perhaps we would see each president stay in office until he died. If that were the case, the presidency would’ve had a much bigger role throughout history and been much like a cult of personality. We would reelect presidents that way because it was simply the way it has always been done. Besides, if you were to tell me that society doesn’t have habits, you would say that the entire field of sociology is bunkum because it studies the reproduction of social structures. In my mind, it’s easy to equate reproduction of social structures with habit, especially since it’s easier for the common man to grasp.

Keep in mind, though, that I don’t believe social structures are impossible to change. This idea of old habits being difficult to kill mainly destroys the idea of historical inevitability — that democracy is on the march, or even can march at all. Habits may evolve in certain ways, but rarely do you see bad habits evolve into good ones. Often, there needs to be an agent, or agents, pushing for such change. Hence, the title of the discourse is Principles of Agitation, which can try to say how one might go about making such change (or how one should not go about making such change).

Now, read this column, The Politics of Murder, from David Ignatius. He compares the politics of murder to a disease. It’s the wrong view. It implies that the sickness can be purged. Simply bringing the killers to justice will not do anything. He’s on the right track when he says, “[The UN] must make this rule of law stick.” However, one example of punishment doesn’t make anything stick. The ones who participate in assassination must be repeatedly brought to justice, otherwise, you’ll just get more of the same. It’s not a disease. It’s a habit. And old habits die hard.

Important note: Habits don’t explain everything about government or society. It may be easy to carry the analogy too far, and I wonder if I’ve done so myself, but I do find it a useful way to frame the issue.

Check out this: Christian Coalition loses leader in dispute.

Here’s the gist of the article:

The Rev. Joel Hunter, of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood, Fla., said he quit as president-elect of the group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson because he realized he would be unable to broaden the organization’s agenda beyond opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

And here’s the part that makes me go “hmmmm”…

“To tell you the truth, I feel like there are literally millions of evangelical Christians that don’t have a home right now,” Hunter said.

Is the Christian Right’s monopoly over faith and politics in decline? Perhaps, perhaps not. This is but one event. Nevertheless, I can’t shake my feeling that a shake-up is imminent (or already occuring). McCain may have already sealed his fate by moving so close to the Christian Right, but there’s still time to change. I sense an opening, but I don’t think anyone in ’08 will be ready to grab it. Maybe 2012. I want to believe that there will be some big shift in political affiliation, but I’m still very unsure.

Are we in the midst of a realignment?

(Found this article via the Daou Report.)