Logo Rhythms

[Posted by reader_iam]

What were you all thinking?



Perhaps you were to meaning to evoke the warm fuzzy of another song from that movie?



Better to have thought again, in keeping with the fundamentals your mothers no doubt tried to teach you:



(Hat tip to Blue Crab Boulevard for the last, though I sorta think Gaius won't thank me, in context. But what can I say? Sometimes in life things just get piled together in a heap and you work with what you have to sort it out--just like mama said.)

But If You Must Snark ...

[Posted by reader_iam]

Here's a glossary to help you do it liberally. Any nominations for 1) most useful words, 2) funniest words, 3) most unfair words, 4) most fair words or 5) your choice?

(If anyone knows of a comparable tool from other perspectives, let me know; having come across this glossary, I did poke around for something similar, but without success.)

Her Again

[posted by Callimachus]

Devone Tucker is another conservative who gets it:

Some of Coulter's defenders have argued that the right cannot afford to be civil when the left is gaining influence through incivility. This argument is sophistry of the highest order. If incivility is the key to political success, then why should we hold back with any epithet? If being as rude, crude and lewd as the far left will guarantee success, then what restriction is there on discourse? If we can obliterate Edwards by using derogatory terms, then what's to stop us from using similar language to beat, say, Barack Obama?

As the old saying goes, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything--and it appears that some of the folks making excuses for Coulter's language have decided to fall for anything. Modern conservatism was supposed to reject the degeneration of the current culture, not embrace it for potential political gain. Twenty years ago, Coulter would have been universally condemned on the right for her use of street language, not excused with a wink and a nod. It wasn't that long ago when conservatives were united in the fight against public acceptance of crudity. It should tell you something about the problems affecting the conservative movement that on certain right-of-center websites, those who find Coulter's remarks objectionable are viewed not as people who have a reasonable disagreement with her, but as -- well, what she suggested Edwards was.

All Liberals Now

[posted by Callimachus]

Dennis Sanders wonders why there is no collective statement from the principled right comparable to what certain leading liberal humanitarians have attempted on the left.

I've been wondering why there is no Euston Manifesto for the Right and Center Right. The Manifesto is signed by left-liberals who believe in defending democratic values and human rights. They were concerned in seeing so much of the Left that seemed more interested in Anti-Americanism and excusing terrorism, than they are in supporting democracy.

He asks, "why haven't conservatives come up with something like this"?

Well, you'd have to find a conservative, first. Are there really any left? The mis-called "social conservatives" are often reactionaries, but they can as easily flip into aggressive activism for social transformation. Neither position is essentially conservative.

Philosophical conservatives remain in certain universities (damned few of them, though) and on the mastheads of certain magazines. Their numbers are so small, it's not a question of writing them a manifesto. A group e-mail probably would suffice.

The neo-cons, or whatever you want to call people like me, don't generally qualify as conservatives, either, though we have some affinity and affection for them. We're descendants of the John F. Kennedy kind of Cold Warrior -- visionary, believing in the power of America as a force of good in the world (and, in practical terms, being not very effective). Reagan was of that class -- challenging the Soviet Union to an economic death race hardly was a "conservative" position.

That is the face of old-school romantic liberalism in the modern world, if anything is. The Euston Manifesto is persuasive because it attempts to pull sensible people on the left back to their philosophical roots, with reference to modern issues, even at the cost of agreement with their political foes of the moment -- who are, after all, often purist apostates from leftist churches, e.g. Hitchens.

What would a conservative manifesto call people back to? Standing astride the path of history and shouting "stop!" appeals to everyone on one issue or another. But very few want to take it as an overarching philosophy of politics or life.

The problem, as I see it, is that, whatever labels we choose to use for ourselves and one another, we're all liberals now, in one or another of the the philosophical senses of liberalism -- and we all believe in changing the world for the better -- as we define "better."

Which would explain the nastiness of contemporary politics: When one half of the dichotomy collapses, the game turns from grass court tennis lobs to rule-less mud wrestling. The vicious 1820s -- the mis-called "Era of Good Feeling" -- happened for the same reason. If you live in one of those local municipalities where the voters of one party outnumber the voters of the other by about 3 to 1, you know what I mean.

Oxymorons

[posted by Callimachus]

Is social conservative -- as shorthand for "anti-intellectual evangelical fundamentalist Protestant Republican voter" an oxymoron?

"Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative." [Dartmouth professor emeritus Jeffrey Hart]

The Founders, and the philosophers who instructed them, certainly would be in agreement with that. "Enthusiastic" religion horrified them, because they saw it as irrational. America, peopled in part by people who found their home societies insufficiently enthusiastic in religion, has got a strong dose of it. The most persistent strain is that the Scots-Irish carried down the Appalachians into the upland South, and rooted it there. They fought the British, the federal government, the Cherokees, the Confederate Authorities, the Revenuers. In some cases they fought for change; in some they opposed it. Nixon, holding his nose, brought them into the GOP as an electoral strategy.

That so many of the heirs of enthusiastic religion happen, in our day, to generally stand opposed to some of the most active efforts at social change -- especially in the realm of sexuality and morality -- or that it did so in the past with regard to desegregation, shouldn't fool anyone into thinking that it is in some sense inherently "conservative," in any philosophical or practical definition of the term.

As easily it can be a force for change. As it was during Prohibition -- surely a "progressive" movement (the further back you go in history, the more Americans drank). Back when New England, too, was full of "anti-intellectual evangelical fundamentalist Protestant voters," they were abolitionists. Who would John Brown be today? [While we're on the topic, who would Cindy Sheehan be in 1864?]

Let's Talk About Bush

[posted by Callimachus]

People love to talk about Bush. Love it like a babe, love it like it was all that mattered on earth. Being able to talk disgustedly, mockingly about Bush is the only bona fide that will pass muster with half of America and nine-tenths of the world. Otherwise, you're a "fascist." Global warming? All Bush's fault! He single-handedly started the industrial revolution, you see. Alternate answer: Nothing contributed to climate change that didn't happen in America AND after January 2001.

Pretty good work, wouldn't you say, for a "failed businessman?" That was one of the few things I knew about him in 2000. I wasn't studying him closely then. I had seen enough to know I thought he'd be a terrible president, and I had no inclination to cast a vote for him, even though I was a registered Republican.

Not that "failed businessman" was one of those reasons. American history features a long list of private-life mediocrities and failures who became wonderful presidents and statesmen. Ditto men who don't read a lot of books. Of course, failing with your own money and failing with other people's are two different things.

Now I know more about him. Now I think I see what kind of failed businessman he is. He's the kind of boss you'd love to have -- if you don't really care about your job. He's loyal to his people, not matter how bad they screw up.

He reminds me of Ernie, the amiable rotund Peruvian immigrant who managed the books-and-electronics department of an Abraham & Strauss store where I took a job in the early 1980s. It was all about the workday. You came in, you were cheerful, you tried to not screw up, but if you did, oh well, we'll fix it somehow. Tomorrow's another workday. It was great if you were only in it for the dope money, not a career, and you knew you were moving on eventually to something better. Abraham & Strauss is long gone.

There were, and are, many aspects of my dislike of George W. Bush as a president. In retrospect, the ones I weighted most in deciding whom to vote for in 2000 turned out to be the least important. His scary social conservative qualities turn out to not amount to a hill of beans, and were about as authentic as Reagan's -- thank God. Who would have thought his biggest positive legacy so far would be "spent more money on AIDS in Africa than Clinton did"?

But those qualities, if taken sincerely into the brain, might have served him better. So many social conservatives shuddered to their core when they saw what had happened at Abu Ghraib. They did it quietly, as is their way in such matters, and they didn't pour out of their homes to pick up the picket signs and slogans that International A.N.S.W.E.R. was ready to hand them, as some fools did. But they felt it, and they felt it as a betrayal of something essential. Would that Bush had felt that, too, when he had the chance to prevent it.

In retrospect, I should have paid less attention to how he prayed and more attention to his business history. And in retrospect, Bush wasn't too much of a Christian patriot: He wasn't enough of one.

What else did I know about him then? The Bushes were ruthess campaigners. They won, and they won dirty, and they surrounded themselves with the sort of characters -- Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove -- who fight ruthless, scorched-earth wars against their opponents and bring them down hard.

I hated that quality in American politics, and it might have been the biggest reason I rejected Bush as a candidate. But in part that helped turn me around on the notion of toppling Saddam in 2002. I knew Bush was going to war for a different mix of reasons than I would use to justify it. But it seemed if there was one thing he knew how to do it was win, at all costs, with the help of an intense and creative team of generals. Paradoxically, one of the reasons I didn't want him as president in 2000 became one of the reasons I assented to his leading the country into a risky war.

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Bush the First, and 1992. How, in spite of the aggressive team, he seemed to just lack the will to win. His fire was gone and he waged a desultory campaign, whose few sparks were nasty but feeble ones.

Yet there it was, in early 2003: The chance I had been waiting all my adult life for: To see America use its power and good will to clear a path for millions of people who had done nothing to earn the suffering that had been visited on them as a side-effect of the Cold War. To give them a chance to take hold of part of our lucky legacy of wealth of freedom. I had watched the grimy experience of Carter and Reagan's late Cold War policies around the world, seen and read the results of Kissingerite realism. I had traveled behind the Iron Curtain and had no illusions about our enemies. Yet I never resigned myself to a lifetime of simply backing our bastards, with guns and money and from a safe distance, just because I knew theirs were worse.

We ought to be better than that, or give up the notion and name of "America" and just settle for being Belgium or something. I don't think I'll see the chance again in my life. How that came about and how I feel about it is a matter between me and a great many people -- including Bush. How much I choose to say about it in public is my choice; it's not a sign of how I think you ought to live, it's how I choose to live.

But turn my back on all I've stood for, since I first followed the fall of Saigon in the "Inquirer" at age 13? Since I heard Desmond Tutu, then little known outside South Africa, speak at a college graduation? Since I saw the crosses at the Berlin Wall and drank with Kurdish refugees hiding out and waiting for black market passports? Just because some fool president also embodies the other great American virtue of mental laziness and screwing up a lot?

I Thought It Impossible, But

[posted by Callimachus]

The War of the Words, which in American public discourse has creepingly replaced the Clash of Civilizations, just got stupider. Kevin Drum, again [UPDATE: Actually, one of his guest bloggers]. I should just drop him, but he still manages to give me a grimy window I can peer through into the festering madness of the anti-war left without getting any of it splattered on me.

Here he quotes a certain Spencer Ackerman, pointing out something I noticed too: "Surge" is the Iraq Word of the Week, but people most prone to using it don't have any common conception of what it means.

Frederick Kagan, one of the leading proponents of the idea, seems to be talking about what I'd call a muscular re-commitment. A mulligan, a re-do of the entire project. Which, if we actually do that, is the one form of "surge" I'm inclined to believe has a chance in hell of working.

Ackerman calls this an "escalation," which is how it ought to look from an anti-war view. But then Drum and Ackerman veer off into Silly Land by claiming their definition of "surge" is the real one and effectively pouting that those evil neo-cons are stealing their language.

"This need not be complicated. A 'surge' suggests a brief increase in troops. Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, leading proponents of the idea, explained today that they want a 'surge' that 'is both long and large.' [Drum]

"Well, enough of this. Liberals, journalists, I'm calling on you. We must never talk about a surge unless we're actually talking about a surge -- a temporary infusion of troops. We should resist that as well. But now, if the proponents of escalation have escalation on their agenda, we must bring this out in the open and defeat it. Deal?" [Ackerman]

Let's look at that ol' dictionary, shall we?

1. to rise and fall actively : TOSS [a ship surging in heavy seas]
2 : to rise and move in waves or billows : SWELL [the sea was surging]
3 : to slip around a windlass, capstan, or bitts -- used especially of a rope
4 : to rise suddenly to an excessive or abnormal value [the stock market surgeed to a record high]
5 : to move with a surge or in surges [felt the blood surging into his face -- Harry Hervey] [she surged past the other runners]

Nothing in there about brief, small, or short. Nothing in Kagan's position about rising, but never falling back. Even though the 5th definition seems to allow such a meaning for "surge." When "she surged past the other runners" there's no implication that they then all overtook her again.

There's even a geological "surge" that stretches over millions of years.

I agree we need different words for the idea Kagan has and the one some folks have of a temporary flood of troops in Baghdad, to be quickly pulled back. But I don't agree "surge" automatically ought to belong to proponents of the latter. And to get all catty about a word is, again, what you do when you've willed yourself to stop thinking about reality.