(Display Name not set)November 2006 Archives

In a press conference yesterday, on the day that contents of confidential Fort Worth Catholic diocese files on sexually abusive priests hit the papers, FW Bishop Kevin Vann held a press conference. He profusely apologized for the abuse, which took place under the, ahem, leadership of his late predecessor, Bishop Joseph Delaney. But he repeatedly refused to criticize Delaney's handling of the matter. Vann told the press: "Not being here at the time those decisions were made, I can't say that they should have done this or that."

Oh, [barnyard epithet]. Why on earth is it impossible for Bishop Vann to say, "It was wrong for Bishop Delaney to let priests who molest children stay in ministry"? Is the idea that you have to be so loyal to your predecessor, even though his bad decisions put innocent kids and their families at risk, that you can't even find the stones to say that this was wrong? With these guys, it really is about saving face, no matter what. Nobody blames Bishop Vann for what happened before he got here. But now people are mad at him for refusing to say the bleeding obvious, for whatever reason.

This incident reminds me of something a conservative priest told me about running into a well-known conservative Catholic bishop at a large gathering of bishops. The priest remarked to his ideological confrere, "Well, it's good to see a good bishop at last." The bishop didn't think the compliment was funny, chastising the priest thus: "Every bishop is a good bishop."

Reader Conor sends a link to a must-read Commonweal essay from Andrew Bacevich, the retired colonel and professor of international relations. He's a conservative, but has long been a critic of the Iraq War. In this long, wide-ranging essay, Bacevich warns that the United States is in danger of losing the Republic because of cultural decadence combined with a crusading pridefulness that refuses to acknowledge the limits of our own power to remake the world to suit us. This is the fault of both left and right, in Bacevich's view (which is the same view I put forth in "Crunchy Cons"). Here's a key passage:

During the same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations-notably those in the Islamic world-to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]

The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and self-gratification. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once observed, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.” In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence.

The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing behavior once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative.

Laws, traditions, and social arrangements impeding the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and children raised in single-parent homes-all once viewed as problematic-lost much of their stigma. Pornography-including child pornography-reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. And popular music became, in the words of cultural critic Martha Bayles, a “masturbatory fantasy.”

Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign-policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world-those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights-today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with-and even reinforced-the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of “stuff.”

Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillment (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption-acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets.

By the end of the twentieth century, many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that “to consume was to be free.” The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006-with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with “Islamofascism”-an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?” In the conduct their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative.

Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows “the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,” Cross comments, it also imposes “the duty to spend for the ‘good of the economy.’” Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today, consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic wellbeing. In recent years “Black Friday” has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar-the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation, should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last.

American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution-both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right-massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders, who see our reigning conceptions of freedom as shallow and corrosive.

Bacevich goes on to say that the central question posed by the failure in Iraq is:

Are ongoing efforts to “change the way that they live” securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise?

If we're going to continue to defend "the American way of life," it's going to require massive infusion of money -- which we're borrowing from abroad -- and a commitment to militarizing our society for the sake of reforming the world. Far better for us to focus on reforming ourselves, and our own habits, both cultural and economic. We are, Bacevich says, writing checks on a bank account that's already overdrawn, and living as if the law of gravity (so to speak) had been repealed by force of American will. And we are slowly moving towards tyranny, which will be required if we are to keep up our self-indulgence. Bacevich again:

Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it deadens our awareness of the danger it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning clichés about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe. We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation.

A final thought: from time to time here, I mention lessons I learned at a Dubai media conference last year at this time. I am haunted -- the word isn't too strong -- by what I saw among the Arab Muslims, as they grappled with the new media world that was going to wipe out, or at least dramatically alter, their traditional culture. As an American scholar of the Arab world told me at the time, we Americans have to understand that the media revolution our culture underwent took place over 50 or 60 years, and within a culture that was much more able to receive it. The Arabs are getting it jammed up within about 10 years, and they're far less culturally flexible. Some things are going to break. And despite the problems I have with Islam, and my desire to see some pretty basic aspects of Islamic culture (e.g., the way they treat women) change, I can't be enthusiastic about American cultural hegemony. The idea that the Middle East would become an outpost of Hollywood depresses me. Better Hollywood than Peshawar, to be sure, but still, those of us here who lament how corrosive the nihilistic American popular culture is should consider how it must look to Muslim men and women overseas, who quite rightly see us as a threat to the things they hold dearest.

Daniel Johnson, writing in today's New York Sun:

If, as Turkey's senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope on his arrival, Islam is a religion of "vast tolerance" that rejects all violence and terror and "assumes that killing an innocent person is a heavy crime and sin," it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?

If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic" to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of Turkey's tiny Jewish minority.

Islam is a religion of peace, and those who say otherwise had better watch their backs.

(Via Amy.)

If she hadn't passed away earlier, Benedict's capitulation on Turkey's EU bid would have killed her. Well, the Vatican is saying that it's not that big a deal, Benedict's saying that he now encourages Turkey's bid to join the EU, when in the past he had been against it. That means that the Pope is now pretty much on the same page as Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew on that question. Bartholomew wants it because he believes that it will result in more religious freedom for the few remaining Christians in Turkey. The price of this, though, would be opening up the entire European continent to unrestricted immigration from a strongly Islamic nation of 70 million -- and this would risk annihilating European culture. If the Turks were having to consider a massive influx of European Christians, of which there are fewer and fewer each day, into their country, they'd be quite right to be concerned about how their Islamic culture and society would be permanently altered. But everybody knows that virtually no French, Germans, Italians and Spaniards will be migrating to Ankara; the movement will be entirely westward.

In 2004, when he was still a cardinal, Benedict said publicly that historically and culturally, Turkey has always been distinct from Europe. What he might have said too was that in fact the Turks have for centuries been the sworn enemy of Europe. Now, no one should want enmity to continue, but seeking peaceful coexistence in no way requires political union. Why Turkey (and more broadly, Islamic civilization) has been the enemy of Christendom have to do with geopolitics, yes, but also with very different and incompatible cultural values. Benedict is now saying that if Turkey meets EU requirements on free speech and freedom of religion, then its entry into the EU would be fine. But the state changing its laws does not change what's in the hearts of its people. What happened to the Ratzinger who once understood that, and understood that European Christian culture, or what's left of it, would be permanently altered, and maybe even eliminated, by the Islamic flood from Turkey? And for that matter, why on earth does the Orthodox Patriarch believe gaining more legal liberty for the few Orthodox remaining in the former Constantinople is worth Europe's opening the gates to massive legal Muslim immigration -- especially with Western Europe so spiritually and culturally weak, and failing to reproduce itself?

What am I missing here?

A second new leader has left the Christian Coalition:

The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a nondenominational megachurch in Longwood, Fla., said he resigned as the coalition's incoming president because its board of directors disagreed with his plan to broaden the organization's agenda. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Hunter, 58, wanted to take on such issues as poverty, global warming and HIV/AIDS.

"My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we're not carrying out the full message of Jesus," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They began to think this might threaten their base or evaporate some of their support, and they said they just couldn't go there."

It's hard to blame the old-guard leadership at CC headquarters for this. They say they had four state chapters break away in protest of Pastor Hunter's statements indicating he wanted to expand the conservative activist group's areas of concern. Notice expand not change -- but the old-line grassroots revolted. Well, if that's how they feel about it, fine; I think what Pastor Hunter represents is terrific, but I'm not a member of the Christian Coalition. But do please note that this reveals once again how fractured Evangelicalism is, and how the coming generation of Evangelicals have different priorities.

Back in 2004, Fr. Gassalascus Jape pondered Turkey's possible entry into the EU in light of the advantages it will supposedly bring to the small number of Christians living in Turkey. Excerpt:Moll quotes Verhuegen’s smug approval of Turkey’s “improving situation”...

The subject line is a quote from Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth files, released yesterday by a state judge. The files are diocesan records on seven accused child-molesting priests whose cases were part of a 2003 lawsuit against the diocese....

A lovely post from "eCurious" in the Santa combox below:Sigh. Here it is again, the idea that having Santa (or even St. Nick) constitutes lying to your children.In the great classic "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Don Quixote lives in...

Here's my Dallas Morning News column today about Benedict's trip to Turkey. In it, I talk about the suffering of Christian populations under the Islamic yoke, and how important it is for Eastern and Western Christianity to find as much...

In a combox thread below, we're talking about whether or not to do the Santa Claus thing with your kids. Some readers are saying that they celebrate St. Nicholas' feast day on December 6. You might be interested to know...

Matthew and I pray together for part of the way to school. This morning, I nearly swerved off the road when I heard him say, "Thank you, God, for Santa's birthday coming soon." I think he was just messing with...

On the Right-wing Film Geek blog, Victor spies a particularly obnoxious form of seasonal Christophobia:CHICAGO (AP) — A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says.Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the...

The Jewish historian Bat Ye'or has written about how invisible to the West are the persecuted Christians in the Islamic world. It has long been my view that American journalists are far more worried about offending Muslims than they are...

Get a load of this story from Dallas:Roxane Sterling didn't know the man standing in her Allen bedroom. But he had been hired, he said, to kill her. "Your husband wants you murdered," he told the eight-months pregnant woman. Then...

Tmatt has the goods on a yummy "clarification" the Episcopal Church has put out to counter the blogstorm that erupted over Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's limousine-liberal condescension towards Catholics and Mormons. Once again we see the vindication of Michael Kinsley's...

The person who stole my Diana Krall Christmas CD had better return it right this second, before someone gets hurt. She's my special Christmas elf, and all. Have a heart, willya? Willya? Have to admit, painfully, that I was in...

Via Reihan, this thought-provoking column by the conservative Ben Stein, based on a conversation he had with Warren Buffett in which the second-richest man in the world told him that the rich were making out like bandits. Excerpt:It turned out...

Got a nice e-mail from a Baptist clergyman in a Dallas suburb. I've edited out a couple of details to protect his privacy:I wanted to tell you briefly about a crunchy con dilemma I encountered this weekend and the cost...

Here's Rebecca West, in her 1941 classic "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia," reflecting on the poor inhabitants of a Dalmatian island, and in particular a "heartrending figure" of a despairing woman, sitting on a stone wall.This...

It's not online, but here, from the print edition of today's Dallas Morning News, is my short interview with Army 1st Lt. Daniel Ebarb, to whom I spoke last week, and for whom I'd asked y'all to pray when news...

From this story:Along with that, even young children are having to deal with peer pressure and other societal influences.Beyond the drugs, sex and rock'n'roll their boomer and Gen X parents navigated, technology and consumerism have accelerated the pace of life,...

Via Ross, you must read this long essay by Mark Danner, about the Iraq situation. It is the most lucid and straightforward presentation of how we got into this miss, and how difficult it will be to get out of...

I've rewritten this post from earlier.Reader Scott Lahti, on what he's thankful for:Thankful for Nature, that most ruthless of aristocrats in her bell curve of talent and in its trickle-down blessings to even the humblest among us; for the First...

I think not.(Thanks to Minkoff for sending this in. )...

Well, it's going to be a lovely Thanksgiving around here. Both the boys have a stomach virus, which means ... well, I'm not going to be gross, but you know what that means. I'm home from work today taking care...

Laymen who don't understand how our media priesthood works often wonder why certain figures -- the same old same olds --keep turning up in stories, quoted as experts. There are four reasons, any of which may be present, alone or...

The Mighty Favog -- who invented that great snotty-tot Aunt Kate poster, as it turns out! -- has a great post up slapping around the earnest believers who think that the way to attract people to Christianity is by making...

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who was recently on "Jeopardy," made a mild crack about spelling "potato," which mildly cheesed off my friend John J. Miller at The Corner:Who Is Margaret Spellings? [John J. Miller]A secretary of education who thinks...

Go to the Anglican Web Elves site and scroll down to see their hilarious new ECUSA recruiting poster. Oh me oh my, but that NYT interview is going to haunt Bp. Jefforts Schori for a very long time.UPDATE: Even better,...

The Dallas Morning News has been running this week an excellent series about Cactus, Texas, a wretched little town in the Panhandle. The town is about 75 percent illegal immigrant, and the only reason to move there is to work...

Fascinating report in the Times today on a Faith/Science conference, which ended up like ... well, here's what the story says:Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which...

Here's a painful story about a Polish high school exchange student who spent a hellish few months living with a fundamentalist Christian host family in North Carolina. They sound like a bunch of cultists. Of course this story got a...

In a post about glossolalia, Ross wants to know:I am, however, consistently puzzled by the resistance, whether it's among my friends and neighbors or the Sam Harrises of the world, to any consideration of the notion that religious experience might...

News came late today of the death in Fairfax, Virginia, of Father George Calciu, an Orthodox priest and immigrant from Romania. He served many years in communist prison there for his faith. My friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, whose spiritual child he...

Well, whaddaya know: apparently in American culture, you still can go too far....

I was in a video store over the weekend, and what caught my eye was a new copy of "Civilisation", the famous 1969 BBC survey of the Western cultural, artistic and intellectual tradition conducted by Sir Kenneth Clark. I'd heard...

"Crunchy Cons" readers will remember the Robert Hutchins family from the food chapter. They're the fundamentalist Christian family -- 12 kids! -- raising livestock organically, and home-churching. Great, great people. On the DallasNews.com site, there's a video report about their...

Outgoing Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney is calling on the State Supreme Court to put an amendment to ban gay marriage on the state ballot if the legislature doesn't do so when it reconvenes in January. The legislature has basically killed...

Ross Douthat and Spencer Ackerman are two of my favorite writers, but I couldn't watch this snoozy "diavlog" for more than a couple of minutes. But that's not why I write. I write because they're both young guys with beards....

Also in today's NYT Book Review, Books and Culture editor John Wilson writes about how Evangelicals have become the all-purpose bogeymen in our fiction and non-fiction -- even as the authors of such intolerant hysteria show little understanding about who...

Comprehensive -- that's today's euphemism for "as eager as possible to drive this sucker off the cliff with the windows down and horn blaring." Here is is used by Presiding Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, in an...

Today's NYT Book Review carries a longish review of "I, Goldstein," the new memoir by the infamous pornographer, Al Goldstein. Reading these lines:Goldstein, in addition to being a porn king, made an art of self-loathing. It pervades “I, Goldstein” and...

The one good thing about the GOP losing the House, I told myself, "is that it'll force those clowns to have a come-to-Jesus moment, and get their acts together."Well, so much for that theory. I'm hearing that one big reason...

Mr. Bone-Through-the-Nose doesn't like George W. Bush:Pamungkas said the ritual, which involved killing a snake, a black crow and a goat, deployed “Haitian-style voodoo” because “Indonesian black magic does not work on foreigners”. Smearing his face with a mixture of...

Really interesting discussion going on in the combox thread under "Church and community." Terry Mattingly relates there something interesting:Back in the mid-80s, Bishop J. Francis Stafford -- now a cardinal in Rome -- was sent to Memphis, Tenn., which was...

Hobbes's best friend deploys crunchy-con arguments in service of a particular Dreher vice: procrastination. Good on 'im. Thanks to reader Jason for sending this in....

Wesley J. Smith says we are on the slippery slope:Infanticide, alas, has become a respectable notion, at least among some elite opinion makers. History shows that this is how baby killing begins — by convincing ourselves that there is such...

"I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person." -- Milton Friedman, 2002.From a Seattle reader of "Crunchy Cons":I've recently come across your "Crunchy Con...

A big part of the crunchy con sensibility is taking pleasure in cooking and eating at home. With biggest food-and-family day of the year coming up a week from today, I'd like to start a Thanksgiving recipe thread here. When...

We got the following prayer request on an Internet prayer chain today:Friends and Family: We have a young couple in our church, David and Christina Kristynik. David is in Iraq and due to be sent back to the states in...

Iraq is now in civil war. Here's what we're looking at real soon if things continue along the current path:"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing...

I was googling around tonight for information on the great economist Milton Friedman, who just passed away, and found this passage from an interview he did with Peter Robinson in March of 2000:Milton Friedman: ...The reason you have a surplus...

There's a really good discussion about church and community going on at Mark Shea's blog. It's among Catholics, about the Catholic Church, but the themes emerging there are universal among Christians. Folks are talking about the relative importance of having...

My Bnet colleague David Kuo has a piece in today's NYT saying that chatterers claiming that the Evangelical vote is opening up to Democrats are premature, that there's no conclusive evidence that Evangelicals are moving toward the Dems. Instead, he...

Today, brethren and sistren, is the day when the pert Gamay grape deigns to brighten our tenebrous late-autumn melancholy. Beaujolais nouveau, the Mary Lou Retton of the wine world, is in stores today. Let joy be unconfined.Yea, even the combox...

The US Catholic Bishops' message to gay Catholics is causing confusion and controversy. This from the LA Times' story today:Written by Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., chairman of the bishops' doctrine committee, the document teaches that persons with...

So columnist John Tierney is leaving the New York Times op-ed page to write for the Science section. He won't be missed. His column was predictable and mostly ho-hum. But at least as a libertarian, he brought some ideological diversity...

It occurred to me this morning, listening to an NPR report on the Catholic bishops' statement about homosexuality, that activists and interested observers on both sides are probably too worked up over this policy statement. Love it or hate it,...

Well, after all that, the Catholic bishops came up with a statement on homosexuality praised thus by CourageMan:I must say I haven't been this encouraged by a Church document in a while. Frankly, it brought tears to me eyes in...

Conservatives like me hoped that the GOP would lose the House, not only because it hugely deserved to, but because we thought that was the only thing that would cause it to repent of its big-spending, lobbyist-loving, corrupt ways, get...

They are disappearing from the Holy Land. They can't win. They have to endure the pains of being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation, as well as persecution from the Islamic Palestinian majority. From the story:"We are stuck in no man's...

Courage is a very fine organization for same-sex oriented Catholics who wish to live chaste lives in accordance with Church teaching. I've had several friends who are now or who once were part of a Courage chapter. It's not a...

We have a handful of regular combox commentators here who can be pluperfect jerks, or, in the case of that one north Texas typist, a Travis Bickle in training pants. But unlike commentators on the Reason blog, nobody here makes...

One learns to expect outrage upon outrage from the poor old Church of England in her death throes, but even this took me aback: the C of E has endorsed infant euthanasia for the most severely disabled infants.We keep crossing...

Bruce Frohnen, who was one of the very best contributors to NRO's Crunchy Con blog, on the lesson of last week:In his heart, every conservative knows “our” party deserved its shellacking because Republicans ignored regular people and pursued disastrous, liberal...

Readers of "Crunchy Cons" know that one of its animating ideas is Alasdair MacIntyre's intuition that our civilization is like the late Roman Empire in that we have fragmented and continue to fragment, having lost a common moral language and...

Reihan Salam likes Obama, but is a bit uneasy with all the hero-worship. Writes Reihan: "I wonder if the kid gloves treatment has something to do with out reluctance to tarnish a figure we all (or most of us) badly...

I had a big laugh over this one: an ex-Defence Ministry official in the UK says that Her Majesty's government is not paying sufficient attention to UFOs, which he believes are real, thus leaving the nation vulnerable to alien attack.Which...

This is from Peggy Noonan's column today:We all have things we would say to the new Congress if we could. We are a country that makes as many speeches in the shower as it sings songs. I would say this:...

Finally, the first post-election controversy to which I can bring fresh passion: Which was the best 1980s band, R.E.M. or U2?I agree it's really between those two, and no others. If you don't buy that premise, then, well, which of...

Before you conclude that J.D. Hayworth's and Randy Graf's getting their clocks cleaned counts as a definitive defeat for anti-immigration forces, check out Mark Krikorian's piece. Excerpt:What’s more, if legalizing illegals is so widely supported by the electorate, how come...

As I've said, I'm going to wait until the Bramwell attack on conservatism from the Right is available for everyone to read before I write about it critically (which is a high-minded way of saying I'm completely snowed under with...

David Weigel, on the Reason blog, reminds us of how crazy the Republicans were, and why they deserved to lose:What did the GOP ever do about its raft of scandals, anyway? They responded to the problems of Rep. Tom DeLay...

So, who's it going to be? My predictions:Democrats: Hillary will have the organization, but she won't make it. For one thing, the Democrats aren't going to be foolish enough to nominate someone who can't win. Her negatives are very, very...

Jonah Goldberg's got a typically well-written column out saying that the elections prove not that conservatism has failed, only that Republicans have. I think he's mostly right, and he makes a particularly valuable point when he says that we're going...

WARNING: If you've never read "The Lord of the Rings," a major spoiler follows. Stop reading now if you want to avoid it.I'm reading "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy aloud to Matthew. He's capable of reading it himself, but...

From Lee Podles at Mere Comments comes very sad news that a Hungarian Roman Catholic cardinal, the former primate of the nation, was an informer for the communist government, and is apparently not so repentant. Excerpt:Not only was Paskai informing...

At long last, Rush Limbaugh's shackles have been shattered:There hasn't been ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism, for atleast two to maybe four years. ... Now, I mentioned to you at theconclusion of the previous hour that people having...

RUMSFELD IS RESIGNING! CALLOOH! CALLAY! Hmm. Wasn't it just last week that The Decider said that Rumseld was going to stay on for two more years? What a difference a Tuesday in November can make.This was a long time coming....

Mark Levin, writing at the Corner:Warning to the White House: Nixon tried buying peace with the Left. Hence,we have the EPA, OSHA, affirmative action, etc., and it didn't work. (Yes,I know Bush doesn't have Nixon's ethical issues; that's not thepoint.)...

You have been weighed and found wanting. This morning, the Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves for this disaster. The President got us bogged down in this foolish war and arrogantly refused any prudent change of course when it...

This is just stunning: the entire GOP establishment has been wiped out in Dallas County. Dallas is now a true-blue Democratic city. Every single Republican judge but one lost. The County Judge (who is the top county executive) lost --...

I share this sentiment with David Brooks:Why am I weirdly happy? I’m a conservative. Many people I know and admire losttonight. And yet somehow this strikes me as a good night for the country.First, there would be something wrong for...

What's going on with "economic nationalists," better known as Lou Dobbs Democrats? Michael Barone says they flopped:In cycle after cycle, we hear that certain forms of populism–full-throatedopposition to immigration and free trade–will sweep all before them. The 2006results, at least...

CNN exit polling showing that a majority of women voters in Virginia went for Jim Webb, suggesting that Allen's attacks on him for his anti-women-in-combat stances of years ago didn't work. Interestingly, a third of Virginia voters who voted to...

Looks like Missouri voters are rejecting the pro-ESCR proposal. Good....

From C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters":"Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence or partisan spirit,...

"We could be seeing the creation of a more conservative House of Representatives than the one we have." -- George F. Will, just now on ABC.He means that the liberal-to-moderate Republicans are being knocked off, and the Dems that are...

CNN reporting its national exit polls find that Iraq is not as high on voters’ Most Important Issues list as the Economy, Terrorism and Corruption. Though they are all pretty close, Corruption was the No. 1 issue – and not...

Leading British medical authorities are calling for euthanizing disabled infants because, in their words, "A very disabled child can mean a disabled family."Good God. But you know, 10 years from now, this will make all the sense in the world...

I think he's been nuts on Iraq, but I'm still sorry to see Rick Santorum go. My Bnet colleague David Kuo notes that:the United States Senate has lost the ONLY Republican who regularly fought on behalf of compassion programs to...

Happy Election Day, if that is the word. I'll start by opening up this thread for comments. Talk about who/what party you voted for, and why. What issues drove your voting, one way or another? Let's do our best not...

TimesSelect is free this week, so I'm pleased to link to John Tierney's column today. In it, Tierney explores the depressing fact that the more we talk about political issues, the more extreme we become:But when people informally discuss politics,...

Well, Karl, so much for that permanent Republican majority....

I have to admit that I'm excited about this next era of American politics, which'll start tomorrow morning. The Dems will take the House, and maybe the Senate, and their Congressional delegation will be more socially conservative than the Dem...

Kate O'Beirne at The Corner reports most PA Catholics went for Casey, even though Santorum is strongly Catholic. Big-Catholic Santorum got the Evangelical vote. Bill Bennett said that Santorum might have a shot at the presidency in '08. At first...

John Podhoretz sends the extremely welcome news that Sacha Baron Cohen is going to star in a remake of the 1998 French farce "Le diner de cons," which was released in English as "The Dinner Game." It's one of the...

Get a load of this: British atheist Richard Dawkins interviews the Rev. Ted Haggard. Dawkins poo-poohs the "childish" idea of seeing the world in black and white, yet he compares the service at the New Life Church to a Nuremberg...

E.J. Dionne notes that Republicans used to blame Democrats as the party with no ideas, but now they can claim that mantle for themselves. They've campaigned this fall on one theme: We're not as bad at the Democrats! (As far...

Spengler says that America is, in fact, the enemy of traditional life, whereas Islam is its apotheosis:Issues that seem trivial and even grotesque to Westerners, such as the veiling of women, are life-and-death matters for the survival of Islam, as...

Russell Arben Fox, a registered independent, social conservative and economic progressive, on why he's decided to vote Democratic this year. Excerpt:[T]his time around I'm supporting a party that is going to probably do a mildly better job than the Republicans...

Here are Ross Douthat's sane, sensible and humane comments on the Haggard marriage, its future, and what it might mean to the rest of us. Excerpt:If my wife of thirty years, with whom I had five children, confessed to me...

From today's Dallas Morning News comes a report that Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is cruising to re-election tomorrow (and who will be at a rally tonight with The Decider and an all-star GOP cast in an arena right outside...

Excellent post by Daniel Larison on the past and present arguments over my book. L. says that the debate has degenerated into carping from the critics, and bitter responses from the crunchies and fellow travelers ... but then again, it...

Just got a PDF copy of Austin Bramwell's upcoming article from The American Conservative, and it will indeed start a thousand fights. Good. The conservative movement needs to have some fights to clear the way to its renewal. I'm going...

I've no intention of seeing the new priest-pederasty documentary "Deliver Us From Evil." Too spiritually dangerous for me personally. But Grant Gallicho of Commonweal, a writer who is no water-carrier for corrupt clerics, says the movie is fatally one-sided --...

David Kuo quotes from Ted Haggard's final sermon before his life blew up:"Heavenly Father give us grace and mercy, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections and Lord we pray for our country....

I'm not sorry he's going to hang for his crimes. He's actually getting off easy, considering what he put his victims through (one of the trial witnesses talked of being dragged into a torture center with his family, and seeing...

A friend of this blog writes to say:I don't think Haggard's a creep at all. I feel sorry for him. He's a tortured character and deserving of prayer, and we should be happy for him that he's had this charade...

Wow. His church leadership decided that he really did have sexy-time outside his marriage, and removed him from ministry. Good grief, whoever heard of such a thing? Shouldn't they have recycled him through the St. Luke's Institute, and found him...

Well, I saw it yesterday, and it was hysterical. I was literally shrieking with laughter at the hotel chase scene, and could hardly breathe. In fact, I can only think of two other movies that made me laugh harder: "There's...

According to Daniel Larison, who's seen a copy, Austin Bramwell has a devastating attack on National Review's foreign policy, and on the conservative movement's failings in general, in the new issue of The American Conservative. The essay is not online...

If you read the comboxes here, you see from time to time pro-choicers saying they don't understand why pro-lifers make such a big deal about a clump of cells in a womb. We say, "It's a human being;" they say,...

Behold, the advent of the Church of Rod Dreher is Bad! Cultural anthropologist Clark Stooksbury introduces us to it. Excerpt:The best thing about our Church is that it doesn't have all of those stuffy rules and Commandments. In fact, we...

Pat Buchanan on what this election will show:What, then, has cost the Republican Party its patrimony?The answer is, first, hubris. Dominating Congress for a dozen years, the GOP began to behave with the same haughtiness as those they displaced. They...

One of the more frustrating things about following the discussions here is the assumption some make that if you wish the Bush administration to be held responsible for its conduct of the war, then you must by that fact be...

Man, I tell you, try to read this short Vanity Fair piece without your jaw dropping. Some of the top neoconservative advocates of the Iraq War and wailing and gnashing their teeth over it all. Excerpts:To David Frum, the former...

Amy Sullivan on how Catholic Democrat Bill Ritter, who is likely to become the next governor of Colorado, has found a successful middle ground on the abortion issue. It's not going to satisfy lots of voters, both pro-life and pro-choice,...

Ted Haggard admitted to reporters today that he bought crystal meth from a male prostitute, but claimed he threw it away without trying it, and that he never slept with the guy.Yeah. Right. Leaving aside the claim that he bought...

The invaluable ethics writer Wesley J. Smith, writes here on John Derbyshire's loss of faith, taking particular exception to Derb's conviction that as a species, man is nothing special. Excerpt:The idea that we are just part of nature and nothing...

This, finally, is what continued Republican rule means: sneakily shutting down an independent office that keeps track of waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq. You really can't make this stuff up. According to the Times report, House Republican committee staffers...

Jonah, who will soon explain to us all why a middle-aged junior senator from New York is not altogether different from a fascist dictator aligned with Hitler, suggests that meth-buying, possibly-gay-prostitute-hiring preacher Ted Haggard is a crunchy con....

I'm taking heavy incoming fire in the comboxes below for my having said that I hope Jim Webb wins in Virginia. My support of Webb is almost entirely because I think he's long been sensible on Iraq, and I think...

I am going to see "Borat" this weekend. I don't care if Ted Haggard and Don Rumsfeld smoke crystal meth on my front porch and plot a break-in at the Democratic National Committee, it will be a great weekend because...

I can't reproduce graphics here, so take a look on Belgravia Dispatch at the US Govt PowerPoint showing that the situation in Iraq is redlining on the verge of total anarchy. Greg Djerjian says:Heckuva job, Rummy! Will he stay on...

The conservative military strategist Ralph Peters, writing in USA Today. Emphases mine:My disillusionment with our Iraq endeavor began last summer, when I was invited to a high-level discussion with administration officials. I went into the meeting with one firm goal,...

After the panel on which I spoke at the Texas Book Festival last weekend, a woman who had been in the audience came up to me and said, "I can't believe conservatives believe these things you've been talking about." What...

I presume the author of this from the Corner is Jonah:Rod will be the first to tell you I never quite got the whole crunchy con thing, but I was pretty sure crunchy cons were pro-life. Was I wrong?No, you...

Remember when Matthew Shepard's murderers came to trial, and it was alleged that the men attacked and beat him to death for coming on to them? You know, using words that they found threatening and offensive? The "gay panic" defense...

Who says Anglicans are squishy? Anglicans will put up with a lot, but Christian orthodoxy on homosexuality is not one of them -- at least not at one British cathedral. Its dean has banned Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of...

Boris Johnson, the Spectator editor and a Tory MP, has a must-read column up about the Iraq mess. Thanks to Fred in Paris for sending it along. Excerpt:And that, of course, was the beginning of the disaster. Nobody came to...

Just got off the phone with a reader ("I'm a big Republican") who took issue with this DMN editorial today, particularly these lines:"If you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make...

Whoa! Megachurch pastor and National Association of Evangelicals head the Rev. Ted Haggard has stepped down pending an investigation into allegations by a former gay male prostitute that he carried on a three-year relationship with the powerful minister. Haggard --...

Here's the latest report on Daniel Ebarb, the wounded US soldier I asked folks to pray for yesterday:Daniel was taken to Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany yesterday (11/1) and there is no evidence of spinal cord damage....

I mentioned the other day that I met one of my favorite writers, Adam Gopnik, at the Texas Book Festival. We had only a moment to chat, but it turned out that he'd been reading about "Crunchy Cons," and said...

Would that Click and Clack were readers of this blog. Maybe somebody who reads it can help. Here's my problem.I found out today that my 1993 Mercedes sedan needs a new power-steering pump and gear box. On this model, that'll...

I read Andrew Ferguson's wonderful Weekly Standard piece about Jim Webb's campaign, and like the author, I wondered why on earth conventional Democrats like this reactionary ... and I wondered why on earth I shouldn't. Excerpt:The culture so dramatically symbolized...

President Bush said today that he's planning to keep Cheney and Rumsfeld around for two more years because they're both doing "fantastic jobs." (Didn't he mean to say "a heck of a job"?) Cheney was elected, but Rumsfeld was not....

I just got this from a friend, about the son of old friends back in Louisiana. If you pray, please pray for this soldier, and all soldiers:Second Lieutenant Daniel Ebarb, United States Army, has been wounded in Iraq. The son...

Kerry is a doof, okay? He really is. I was talking just now to a colleague who spent some time on the campaign trail covering Kerry in 2004, and she said that he cannot give a simple answer, that he...

We had an interesting discussion in our regular Wednesday editorial board meeting here at the News. We're preparing an editorial for the weekend editions talking about the situation in Iraq, and its bearing on the election. One of my colleagues...

The novelist Frank Schaeffer is a pro-military Christian conservative, and a Republican, but he was so infuriated by George Allen's attack on James Webb for the racy passage in a Webb novel that ... well, read for yourself:I just got...

While I don't agree with all of it -- defending Hugo Chavez? Huh? -- Jeff Taylor has a pretty solid take on this election, at least as far as this excerpt goes: If control of Congress changes hands in January,...

On Slate, an economist finds fault with Michael Pollan's logic and conclusions in "The Omnivore's Dilemma."...