(Display Name not set)October 2006 Archives

A Texas reader who is a conservative Catholic writes:

I saw your post on Beliefnet about the border fence being a good reason to vote for Republicans. I wondered if you'd had a chance to read this article in which even the Republicans admit that the "fence bill" gives the administration the ability to spend the money on different projects (such as roads and technology) and that probably only 300-400 miles will ever be built (if that).

To me, the money quote was, "In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details, and that key players — including the administration, local leaders and the Mexican government — oppose a fence-only approach."

I'm planning to sit this election out, and I'm the sort who used to take my kids with me to vote so they'd learn about civic duty.

But wait, Reader! Don't you want to run out and vote Republican to protect traditional marriage? Oh wait, that's right, the GOP cynically punted on that one too. Phonies.

The reader raises an interesting question, though: is it ever the right thing to do to sit out an election? My DMN colleague Mike Hashimoto wrote a funny but serious column yesterday saying that contrary to the eat-your-spinach, good-government propaganda, the nation is not well-served when ill-informed idiots vote out of some sense of civic duty. On a more serious (and ideological) note, the Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put forth an argument for sitting out the 2004 presidential race. Here's an excerpt:

Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.

MacIntyre says the best way to vote against a system that produces what he considers false choices is not to vote.

Is he right? Is it morally justified to sit out this election, if you believe you are presented with two bad alternatives? I'm not sure, but I'm tempted to say yes. Let's talk this through.

Here's Rick Santorum's speech warning of the Islamofascist "Gathering Storm". You know, I agree with much of this. We do face a daunting array of challenges, first from the Islamic world. But here, in one line, is what's wrong with the speech:

"If we really understood the threat at hand, we would not be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs."

I am not quite as exercised over the speech as Daniel Larison (see his impressive series of "Gathering Stupidity" posts here, here, here, here, and here), but my frustration with Santorum's tack is, a la Ross Douthat's, more in sorrow than in anger, over the depths to which an otherwise good senator will stoop to avoid responsibility for, or even the fact of, the colossal American failure in Iraq, and Republican responsibility for same. Here's Ross:

But it seems more likely that his "gathering storm" speeches will ensure that he's remembered not as a principled social conservative who lost his swing-state seat in a bad year for Republicans, but as exhibit A (well, okay, more like P or W) in the depressing tendency of conservatives, faced with the Bush Administration's manifest failure in Iraq, to duck that issue by pretending that the way to solve it is to start some variant on World War III, or IV, or whatever numeral the "faster, please" folks think we're on these days.

Anyway, why do I think that one line offers the key to why these Santorum speeches are so off the mark? Because it indicates that he thinks the only thing we're doing wrong is not fighting hard enough. If the past three years have made anything clear, it's that we're not fighting smart enough. We thought we could knock off Saddam with little problem, because we believed that the Iraqi people wanted "freedom," and would reveal themselves to be well-behaved small-d democrats. Here comes Santorum, having learned nothing, saying in his speech that we need to aid and abet the Iranian and Syrian people in overthrowing their government (if you get rid of Assad, loathsome as he is, look for a Sunni fundamentalist takeover -- what will Santorum say then?). That, ultimately, is what's so dispiriting about the Santorum speech: that the entire traumatic experience of Iraq has taught him nothing. That his idea of how to fight America's very real enemies is just to keep doing what we're doing now, only a lot more of it.

Because we are all going to see the US substantially withdraw from Iraq in the next two or three years, and the world will indeed be a much more dangerous place because of it (but we will have to go that route because there will be no choice left), we need to have at the summit of the American political leadership men and women who have good judgment about foreign affairs. That is paramount. I think Santorum is probably the best senator on social issues. But I don't believe we can afford this kind of fantasyland crusade any longer.

That's not because I don't believe we have enemies. To the contrary, it's because I think we have powerful enemies, but unconventional ones that cannot be defeated or contained by force of arms alone. What a tragedy -- really -- that one of the best US senators will have shipwrecked his career on Iraq.

So, Iraqi PM Maliki is now ordering US troops to take their hands off Sadr City. Well, he may well be an example of Iraqis standing up and taking control of their own country (um, we're supposed to want that, right?), but if this doesn't settle once and for all how reliable Maliki is as a partner for combatting insurgent and death squad violence, I don't know what will. Makes you wonder about those weekend rumors that a US-backed coup is in the offing. Hey, that'd be one way to unite Iraqis...

Do you observe Halloween? I know I'm going to get grief for this, but we don't. We're not one of the hardcore anti-Halloween families, but we're just not comfortable with it. It makes me uneasy (I guess that's what Halloween is supposed to do), and the fact that my friend, the Louisiana exorcist, strongly warned against it (and told pretty scary personal stories to explain his point) was enough to put me off of it.

No, we're not anti-"Harry Potter" people, and we don't crusade against Halloween. We just don't participate.

Via Ross Douthat, I came upon yet another reason why I think John Derbyshire is one of the most interesting conservative writers working today: his long self-interview about why he lost his religious faith. An admirable quality of Derb's is his blunt honesty: as far as I can tell, he never shies away from saying what he thinks, even when it gets him into hot water. Good. It makes him unpredictable, and even when you don't agree with him, you at least have the impression that there is a real, thinking, contrarian human being behind those words (and as I used to work at NR, I can tell you that he is a gentleman, and I regret that he only came to the office every couple of weeks for the meeting, ergo I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him).

Anyway, I highly recommend his self-interview, because even though I cannot endorse his conclusions, he writes about them humanely and engagingly. I particularly liked his discussion of the social utility of religion, which is widely understood, but also the limits of same, which is uncomfortable for many of us religious people on the Right to admit or to discuss. Here's Derb:

I have now come to think that it really makes no difference, net-net. You can point to people who were improved by faith, but you can also see people made worse by it. Anyone want to argue that, say, Mohammed Atta was made a better person by his faith? All right, when Americans say “religion” they mean Christianity 99 percent of the time. So: Can Christianity make you a worse person? I’m sure it can. If you’re a person with, for example, a self-righteous conviction of your own moral superiority, well, getting religion is just going to inflame that conviction. Again, I know cases, and I’m sure you do too. The exhortations to humility that you find in all religions seem to be the most difficult teaching for people to take on board. Mostly, I think it makes no difference. Evelyn Waugh would have been no more obnoxious as an atheist.

And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?

In the end, I think I’ve now arrived at this position: An individual might be made better by faith, or worse. Overall, taking society at large, I think it averages out to zero.

But he goes on to say he believes that religion is a natural instinct in humans, that it's just there, like the sexual urge. As with sex, when a society can figure out how to corral the religious instinct into socially constructive forms, religion can be judged good -- and when not, not. I think that's true, though as a believer I would say there's the matter of truth -- but to be fair, he's discussing religion as a social phenomenon.

What this discussion does, though, is to violate the generic American taboo against criticizing religion per se. We are a religious country in the sense that many people have religious impulses, and they are more or less accomodated in the public square. But there's this whole civic religion thing, in which religion is generally understood to be a public good (Kinky Friedman, running now for Texas governor, likes to sign off by gently wisecracking, "May the God of your choice bless you."). It ain't necessarily so. You won't be surprised to find that I'm favorably inclined toward the religious as a general matter, but the older I've gotten, the more I've come to see how religion can serve to fix a bad person in his or her patterns of behavior. I'm thinking of the people I've encountered, clerics and laymen, who have in various ways justified their wicked behavior by cloaking it in a mantle of religiosity ("Nobody'll screw you like a brother in Christ," a cynical Texas Baptist of my acquaintance remarked, from personal experience). This is kind of what I was getting at not long ago when I talked about how suspicious I get whenever someone starts a sentence with, "God told me...". And it is very interesting, Derb's point, about the inverse relationship between personal religiosity and moral self-discipline regarding the African-American and Chinese communities in America.

Finally, Derb is excellent here (emphasis mine):

Q. Can an irreligious person really be a conservative?

A. Of course he can. The essence of modern conservatism is the belief in limited government power, respect for traditional values, patriotism, and strong national defense. The only one of those that gets snagged on religion is the second. But while traditional Western society has had a religious background, it has usually made room, at all points of the political spectrum, for unbelievers. Plenty of great names in the Western cultural tradition have been irreligious. Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, was a complete atheist; and one has one’s doubts about Shakespeare. In any case, as Bill Buckley has pointed out somewhere, the key word is respect. Respect for traditional values implies respect for religious belief, even if you don’t share it.

The word the Romans used is piety. It implies a sense of respect for that which is greater than ourselves. God (or at least the idea of God, which as Derb observes is so great and universal a part of the human experience that due respect must be paid). Nature. Ancestors. That's what I find so worrying about the modern spirit, which you can find among conservatives as well as liberals, the Godly as well as the godless: impiety, by which I mean the sense that we have the right to remake the world anew, according to our own designs, because we can (or think we can).

Daniel McCarthy writes that to be a campus conservative used to mean you cared about ideas. Now, for the most part it means you've become a partisan of "mindless Republican boosterism." Ah yes, the Romanian Miners Brigades of the Right....

If you've never read the "Healing Iraq" blog, get over there ASAP. It's where you can find "Zeyad," a young Iraqi dentist who's been blogging from Baghdad since 2003. He was initially a big supporter of the war, but has...

Chances are that your friendly neighborhood Applebee's is not the kind of place you're likely to run into a crunchy con. But yesterday, I bought the book "Applebee's America" after sitting on a panel at the Texas Book Festival with...

Mickey Kaus picks up on what bothers so many people about the rush to embrace embryonic stem-cell research and gay marriage: that we're being rushed into making these enormously important decisions without being consulted (if the courts force them on...

National Review identifies what is to me the best reason for voting Republican this fall, despite everything: the border fence. Excerpt from NR's editorial:On the issue of immigration, majorities of Republicans in both the Senate and House have sided with...

David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office and a man who doesn't have to run for anything, warns that the US economy is headed for a serious crisis. From the AP account of a recent speech he gave:From...

Barbara Nicolosi picks up a rock, puts it in her sling, and http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2006/10/facing-facing-giants.html">lets fly at "Facing the Giants," the Christian movie that she believes is shlocky and sentimental, and is afraid will become the template for the kind of pandering,...

Happened to be in a Borders today, and saw that "Crunchy Cons" is now out in paperback. Let joy be unconfined. It's got a streamlined new subtitle, and a new chapter, too. And it costs about half as much as...

Peggy Noonan today:A year ago I wrote a column called "A Separate Peace," in which I said America's leaders in all areas--government, business, journalism--were in some deep way checking out. They saw bad things coming in the world and for...

Continuing with Mark T. Mitchell's introduction to the thought of Michael Polanyi, I read today something that puts the current argument over embryonic stem-cell research in a particular light. I hope I can give an adequate brief account of where...

For the Won't Get Fooled Again file, here comes the desperate GOP, going to the gay-marriage well one more time, trying to gin up social and religious conservatives to turn out on the belief that voting Republican will keep the...

Martin Cothran lucidly explains why a Democratic triumph on Nov. 7 will not mean a victory for liberalism, nor a defeat for conservatism. It will instead be a rejection of Republican rule, which many who had heretofore cast their lot...

I mentioned Gandalf in a blog a day or so ago because this week, I began reading "The Fellowship of the Ring" to Matthew. He is, I'm pleased to say, transfixed, but then again, I knew he would be. What...

A friend of mine who's a Catholic priest in Georgia writes:We had the most remarkable funeral yesterday at my parish (Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Carrollton, Georgia).It began Tuesday afternoon with the visitation at the funeral home across town...

I've had some requests in the past few days for a list of websites and a reading list that would be helpful to readers interested in the ideas in "Crunchy Cons." Please share in the comboxes below which books and...

New York's Edward Cardinal Egan is in the middle of a nasty tiff with some of his priests. The cardinal has a reputation, fair or not, for being aloof, aristocratic and unpastoral. He had a hard act to follow in...

I've thought this fall how incredible -- and incredibly stupid -- it was that with the US mired in a foreign war it's losing, to say nothing of the other huge challenges facing America, that voters in Virginia were being...

David Brooks says today (subscription required) that the conservative era of American politics will come to an end on November 7, no matter what the outcome at the polls, just as surely as the liberal era of American politics ended...

Several of you have noticed, as have I, that sometimes when you come to this blog, the freshest post up is one from days ago -- that is, several days worth of posts don't appear. I've noticed that sometimes, if...

A friend passes along an e-mail he received from the company that produces W Ketchup, purportedly the preferred tomato-based condiment of conservatives. W ("America's ketchup") is about to release an organic version. From the e-mail:Dan Oliver, CEO of W Ketchup,...

Predictably, Daniel Larison has some wise reflections on Heather Mac Donald's claim that conservatism has no need of religion to advance its claims. As a traditionalist, Larison knows better. So does Russell Kirk, who wrote (and is cited by Larison):The...

Cal Thomas reacts to the new census data showing that married couples are at last a minority in America. He blames the media in part for the decline in marriage, by normalizing and mainstreaming what we might euphemistically call "alternative...

Jonah Goldberg identifies something vexing about the liberal mindset. Here's Jonah remarking on the claim by TAPPED blogger Ben Adler that Republicans "have it in" for the disabled:But then there's the sticky issue of how he defines "having it in"...

Via Dan Larison, this excellent WaPo quote on the GOP from a leading Republican strategist:"They honestly need a baseball bat against the head," said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who helped Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) take over Congress in the 1990s. "Because...

Over at Brussels Journal, they're talking about an interview German author Henryk Broder gave to the mainstream left Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in which he said that young Europeans should emigrate if they want to have a future, because Europe...

Exhibit one in why I don't like it when Christians say "God told me..." as a way of qualifying their actions: the cheesy saga of Hollywood producer Matt Crouch. His Ma and Pa are TBN shlock pastors Paul and Jan...

That's the advice Andrew Sullivan dispenses to disgruntled conservatives this fall, unless the Republican on their ballot is truly "stellar." He says the exhausted Tories got clobbered in 1974, retired to the woods to do some hard thinking, and came...

Prof. Frederick Turner has a highly provocative column up on TCS Daily today, in which he posits that the death-squad violence in Iraq is following its own brutal logic, and may portend good. His argument is that the Sunnis are...

A week or so ago, I blogged critically about RNC chair Ken Mehlman over his alleged role in firing a State Dept official who reportedly wouldn't do Jack Abramoff's bidding. A reader has since brought to my attention a new...

Philosophical materialism, when injected into an industrialized society, manifests itself socially in another form of materialism – namely, consumerism. While all living creatures are necessarily consumers, consumerism as such is something altogether new. Industrialization provides the mass production necessary to...

How do I love IKEA? Let me just tell you. We bought a leather couch from there a while back because we needed something decently made and stylish to sit on, but something cheap enough to withstand life in a...

In his review of Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul," David Brooks praises Sullivan for asking some important questions about the meaning of conservatism, but complains that Sullivan is being reductionistic and (frankly) completely unrealistic when he tries to read religious...

Ross Douthat explains why this popular (in the media and among the punditocracy) notion that theocons are chiefly to blame for the GOP's travails is claptrap. Excerpt:Look, there's no question that the religious right has played a role in the...

Amy Welborn has one of her long, sprawling, excellent posts up, this one about Jody Bottum's First Things essay on the decline of Catholic culture in America. It defies easy summary, but let it suffice to say that the only...

Part one of a four-day discussion/debate between Joe Loconte and Amy Sullivan, over the way the Bush Administration has treated religious conservatives. Today, Loconte says despite some obvious disappointments, Bush has delivered pretty well for the theocons. Excerpt:[Bush] has mostly...

A Christian candidate for the U.S. Congress decided to run on orders from the Almighty. Says Republican Michele Bachmann (a Lutheran and native of Garrison Keillor's hometown):God then called me to run for the United States Congress, and I thought...

Near the top of the list of reasons some Republicans give for why angry conservatives are supposed to hold our noses and vote GOP this fall is that if the Dems get control of the House, they'll try to impeach...

Well, the Internet mysteriously restored itself here at home tonight, so yay for that. We'll get back to regular blogging tomorrow (there was a slew of stuff from over the weekend that I wanted to mention for discussion, so maybe...

UPDATE/NOTICE: If you're seeing this as the latest CC post, keep hitting the "refresh" button on your browser until you get the latest version of the CC blog. There's some software glitch that unpredictably eliminates every post that has gone...

An exceptionally satisfying blog entry from Daniel Larison, who doesn't appreciate being lectured to by Tony Blankley on his duty as a conservative to vote Republican, despite it all, at the risk of being "stupid." Excerpt:I know voter apathy is...

Though I'm trying to move on past my monster post on leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy, Bnet has posted a link to it on the front page today, and my friend Mark Shea has kindly written a companion piece in response....

Well, the Republicans haven't even had their tuchus handed to them yet, and already the recriminations have started. From the NYT front page today:Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks say...

When I was a Catholic, I never had much interest in the Tridentine Mass, though I have lots of friends who are devotees of it, and I think it's awful that the Tridentine mass -- sometimes called the "Latin Mass,"...

If you're not reading Bible Girl, you're missing one of the most vital and engaging religion columnists in the country....

You have to watch this all the way to the end to get the joke. It's worth it....

Mike Crowley over at The Plank cites a telling anecdote from David Kuo's book. Mike sets it up by saying that it has to do with the White House reaction to a 2002 Esquire article by John DiIulio, who had...

TMatt riffs on the sense going around the Religious Right political leadership that a cabal of gay Republicans has helped torpedo issues important to Evangelicals and other religious conservatives who are key to the GOP base. I concede that there...

Amy Sullivan has a smart piece on The New Republic Online dumping on fellow liberals for not knowing what to do with the revelations in David Kuo's "Tempting Faith" -- namely, that the Bush White House and the GOP elite...

They cannot build prison walls high enough, or pits deep enough, for people like this. Photographing children in sex bondage? This is Hell. Lock these devils up. Throw away the key. Literally....

Somebody had to say it, and bless their hearts, Jeremy Lott and Patrick Hynes have. They want to know how come religious conservatives get bashed constantly for their faith-inspired political activism, but politically active religious liberals are the darlings of...

That 5,600-word magnum opus I wrote about why I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy has drawn an enormous amount of attention. I wrote it in one sitting and posted it without re-reading it. There are lots of things I would do...

The other day I blogged that I didn't see where Europeans had much of a leg to stand on, at least philosophically, when it comes to banning the hijab, the burka and other examples of pious Muslim clothing. I have...

One of the most spiritually wise and practically helpful books on my shelf is "The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983." The late author, a well-known Orthodox priest and theologian (the website kept in his memory is here, was praised...

This is one reason why it's nice to have a baby in a Baptist hospital in Texas. As I was driving out of the Baylor Hospital parking lot the other day, heading home for a shower while Julie and Baby...

Can't stay awake. New baby in house. Am zombie. Help....

GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, as a top White House staffer, allegedly saw to it that a State Department official who stood in Jack Abramoff's way lost his job. Mehlman denies it. I do not believe him. A man with a...

I'd like to draw your attention to the new blog of my Beliefnet colleague David Kuo. I don't know David, but I did see the "60 Minutes" segment based on his new book, "Tempting Faith," in which he talks about...

Khalid al-Maaly calls b.s. on Arab intellectuals who say one thing when speaking to the West, and another when talking to Arabs, and who have a rank double standard when it comes to the rights of human beings oppressed and...

Almost 40. I know this because I can chart my personal decline into my dotage by the difficulty I've had in dealing with the advent of newborns in my family. When Matthew was born, I was 32, and handled all...

I want to thank all of you Catholics, especially the priests, who have written me privately or publicly expressed your good wishes for me and my family in the path our journey towards Christ has taken us. You haven't approved...

Don't know what happened, but most of last week's posts have been missing from this blog since Friday. I've been at the hospital with Julie and Nora, so I've been unable to attend to this, and I don't know what's...

That post I put up about my conversion to Orthodoxy was not only the longest post ever, but it has attracted the most number of comments. I wrote the post in one two-hour stretch, and posted it without re-reading it....

About 13 years ago, I was sitting on the front stoop of my house on Capitol Hill in Washington, talking with my neighbor about how much I hoped to get married someday, but how it didn't seem to be working...

This is huge, not only in terms of military strategy, but because of the challenge it represents to the British government's authority. The head of the British Army is in open rebellion against the government's Iraq policy. Gen. Sir Richard...

I apologize for this very long post, but it's time to clear something up: yes, I am now a communicant of the Orthodox Church, and have been (along with my family) for a couple of months. I did not intend...

Father Jape thinks Crunchy Cons are fine as far as they go, but that they're too darn nice....

Here's a website for Evangelicals who support the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney. Who's a Mormon. Would you vote for a Mormon for president? I honestly don't see what the problem is. I'd vote for an atheist if I thought...

Yes, says David Kuo, who used to help run the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Excerpt from the MSNBC story about his new book:More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command...

That's the title of a great post by Prof. Russell Arben Fox, over at his populist communitarian blog. "Freedom means shaping your own choices, not merely being able to make choices, however many options there may be out there," says...

A reader writes:Re your thoughtful words about the Amish shooting, I have to say this: I recently read about sexual abuse among the Amish. I don’t know how common it is, or whether it exists more among some Amish than...

I vote for laugh hysterically. A theologian friend just received this invitation to a conference sponsored by Syracuse University's Department of Religion. Can you imagine anything less relevant to religion as it is actually lived in the world today? "Feminism,...

I linked to Jody Bottum's First Things piece earlier today. In it, he mentions what a godawful mess the Diocese of Orange (Calif.) is, and says it's epitomized by the case of Father Rod Stephens:Father Rod was prominent for years...

Sorry for the light posting yesterday. We had to go back to the hospital yesterday for what turned into yet another false alarm regarding the imminent advent of That Myrna Minx, the baby girl who keeps teasing us about her...

Daniel Larison has a tremendous post up arguing for those who choose to graft themselves onto a Tradition, against the view of Prof. Guroian and Maggie Gallagher, who (coming from different viewpoints) find the whole idea suspect. Excerpt:But the central...

Liberals in Britain are being hoist on their own petard in the latest row over Islamic women wearing the veil in public. As a Guardian columnist points out, you can't go around tearing down customs and even laws, all in...

Who took over $1 million from the Orthodox Church in America? Why can't the Metropolitan account for it? Why give money if the church can't say where it's going? Mark Stokoe wants to know....

Back last night from Mecosta, and too much to get caught up on at the office today to do much blogging. Alas. But I exchanged e-mails with Maggie Gallagher, a critic of "Crunchy Cons," this morning on an issue that...

For me, the tipping point on the Bush Administration was "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie" -- especially when it came out that five of eight top FEMA officials at the time Katrina hit had virtually no disaster...

From "The Conservative Mind" (1953):These new instruments of conservation will need to be ingenious; for they must be employed against the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy. It is an error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism...

Home of the Russell Kirk Center, whose namesake wrote (in "The Conservative Mind"):The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character -- with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the...

Via Dan Larison, this observation from A.C. Kleinheider:Heartland conservatives, the kind of folks who vote GOP, in contrast to their immediate economic interests, have no idea what their leaders are really like and what they abide culturally. This is where...

For the Dems, that is -- according to analyst Stu Rothenberg. This part of the column caught my eye:Let’s forget all of the niceties and diplomatic language and cut to the obvious truth: From the White House to Capitol Hill,...

Peggy Noonan is surprised by how good the Woodward book is. Excerpt from her column:Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The...

Do you know that if you pour enough Theraflu down your goozlepipe, you can do just about anything? I'm just sayin'. I love me some Theraflu....

A Democratic friend of mine writes:There are those, including yourself, who think that the Republicans losing a chamber or two would be good because it might make the Repub’s clean up their free spending and their smugness as the sole...

My Dallas Morning News column about the Amish....

I'm still getting lots of good e-mail from teachers about my column blaming the public for lots of problems with public education. This Oklahoma teacher has an interesting proposal:I'm in my 14th year of teaching, and I've had classes from...

ABC News reports three more pages are now saying that Foley tried to get into their pants. One former page offers this memorable quote, which should memorialize the former Congressman's career:"He didn't want to talk about politics. He wanted to...

Fellas, don't abuse yourself during Ramadan. It's a mortal sin!...

Via Amy, we learn that SCOTUS has let stand a lower court ruling upholding a public school's approach to teaching Islam. Here are some details:The suit challenged the content of a seventh-grade history course at Excelsior Middle School in Byron...

Readers in Lawrence -- hello, KU! -- should turn out Monday night to hear Caleb Stegall lecture. Here's the info from the local paper:Since ancient times, people have raised their eating habits to levels of spiritual significance. Some Jews, for...

I see that John Podhoretz is taking some unfair abuse in one of the comboxes below for his reflection on hate and the Amish situation. I find a lot to agree with in John's post, the substance of which is...

George Lucas is not going to make any more movies....

Sick of Foley yet? Me too. But it's the scandal that keeps on giving, because it is so richly symbolic. I'm involved in an intense personal e-mail group conversation with a Republican lawyer friend who is convinced to the marrow...

Why? Because reality is weird enough. Exhibit one: Dallas Cowboys bad boy and world-class egotist Terrell Owens has written a children's book. No, really, he has. It's called -- wait for it -- "Little T Learns To Share." Future volumes...

Regular commentator Courage Man has a long, interesting post on the Foley affair. Courage Man is gay (though as an observant Catholic, chaste), which is important to keep in mind when you read this part of his blog:But it's the...

Why doesn't someone give Julie Lyons a book contract? She's a cool but non-crazy Annie Lamott, and boy can she ever write....

This video is very cool. And it came via Amy. Maybe it gets to me because Julie is at the end of her pregnancy. How close to the end? Well, we spent a couple of hours in the hospital on...

If there are any conservatives in Seattle, you'd expect them to be crunchy, wouldn't you? And highly caffeinated, yeah! Well, there's a Yahoo! group for Crunchy Cons in Seattle. Check it out here. From the site:For those rare birds in...

It's easy for me to get on my high horse about the GOP Congress. I live at the farthest reaches of Representative-for-Life Eddie Bernice Johnson's district. It's hard to imagine the kind of Republican who could win here, so my...

Can you believe this? The Amish are raising money for the family of the man who murdered their own children. Yesterday on NBC News, I saw an Amish midwife who had helped birth several of the girls murdered by the...

If this isn't hubris, the term has no meaning:WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I...

Rich Lowry just nails it:The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little...

Read this:A grieving grandfather told young relatives not to hate the gunman who killed five girls in an Amish schoolhouse massacre, a pastor said on Wednesday."As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was...

Daniel Larison has been doing some great blogging lately. Here he catches Rush Limbaugh out on an astonishingly un-conservative tear. First, a bit from the Limbaugh diatribe:You know, Republicans are said to be racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic....

Gary Seaton, a regular reader and commentator here, e-mails this passage from Hilaire Belloc:There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see...

Many of the teachers I've been hearing from in response to my column teach in mostly-minority public schools, and deal with what one of them calls the "ghetto mentality" -- a thug-culture way of looking at the world that in...

Larison is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Chicago. In this post, he explains why the study of history matters -- chiefly because it imparts to one a tragic sense, which is to say, a realistic stance...

We just spent an hour here at the Dallas Morning News with Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who represents the 5th Congressional District (which includes parts of Dallas). He was in for his interview in advance of our editorial board endorsement in...

From the Wall Street Journal's Foley editorial today:At least this seems to be the essence of the Democratic and media charge against Speaker Dennis Hastert, who admits his office was told months ago about a friendly, non-explicit 2005 email exchange...

Readers, have any of you seen a particularly good essay defending the President's position on detention, habeas corpus, interrogation, etc., vis-a-vis the bill just passed by both houses of Congress? I'm especially interested in an essay that refers to Christian...

There's a really moving story in the Times today, about a Kansas farmer watching his way of life die. This is such a rich and complicated story, and touches on a lot of things that "Crunchy Cons" is about: families,...

In a thread below, we're having a "What's the Matter With Kansas?" discussion, in which one of the stalwart combox liberals can't understand why a Kansas farmer in a news story we're discussing refuses to vote Democratic, despite his progressive/populist...

This just flopped in over the transom:Washington, D.C. - In response to the events surrounding the resignation of Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL), Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins released the following statement:"We are all shocked by this spectacle of...

I'm listening to a Pennsylvania policeman say on TV right now that the gunman in Lancaster County -- a 32-year-old milkman and married father of children -- tied those Amish schoolchildren up in their one-room schoolhouse and killed them execution...

The Republicans may be broadly corrupt, flabby, out of touch with their principles, and all that ... but as for the Democrats, well, here's the WaPo's Sebastian Mallaby:If Democrats cared about poor women and minorities, they would be clamoring to...

Well, I took our discussion here from last week about how one big problem with the public schools is the public, and turned it into a column for the on-dead-tree version of the Dallas Morning News. Check it out here...

So, Mark Foley is now claiming that he's a drunk, and is going into rehab. How tiresome and predictable and almost certainly untrue. CNN reports that this comes as news to his friends, who claim that they'd never noticed, but...

The House Republican leadership deserves all the grief it's getting, and will continue to get, on the Foley mess. Denny Hastert's hurried letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation of possible criminal violations by the dirtbag Foley provides no...

Last year, the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald both knew that Foley had had inappropriate communication with the 16-year-old page, but declined to write about it. According to CNN, the St. Pete Times says that when it contacted...

Matt, a former Republican and current agnostic, writes in response to my "sometimes, it's embarrassing to be a theocon" line:These are the same kind of feelings I began to have years ago as I realized that the republicans really do...

...but you can't hide. Not if you're Cardinal Roger Mahony, the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles. Watch the trailer....

Here's a famous historian's verdict on the Iraq fiasco:In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in the Middle East, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from...

Clive Davis recalls a Mark Bowden interview in which the writer admits that there are times when he thinks torture, or the threat of it, is appropriate. Bowden remembered a real-life case in which a German kidnapper had buried a...