RSI's Response to the Challenge of the Protein Wisdom Collective

The Protein Wisdom gang is such a lockstep group that I thought of referring to them as the Protein Wisdom "'Soviet," but I was able to resist temptation.

Anyway, I thought I would respond to Jeff Goldstein's challenge through my response to somebody in the group. Unlike Goldstein (who often gets tied up in his own cleverness), "Zelda" provided something that I could respond to.

To Quote from Zelda:

“I don’t approve of killing people for their skin color, preventing anyone from getting married, shunning children for their parents’ race, segregation, Jim Crow laws, job discrimination, and using naughty words to insult someone’s ethnicity.”

You’ve nicely summed up the substance of American conservatism in your disavowals here. Let me get to the heart of the matter in relation to race. Conservatives went from “Killing people for their skin color” in order to enforce segregation to using the rhetoric of “color-blindness” to justify generalized racial hostility, “job discrimination,” consumer discriminations of all kinds, police targeting of young black men, racial profiling, and other kinds of discriminatory behaviors. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King characterized whites as an “oppressor group” be ause of white support for segregation. Given the wide range of discriminatory and oppressive behaviors toward blacks in contemporary America, whites are still an oppressor group and the rhetoric of color-blindness is used both to justify the oppression and to cut off any kind of remedies for the oppression (like affirmative action).

What makes Goldstein and Protein Wisdom a particular evil is that he’s making the justification of oppression into something “cute,” “fun,” and “hip” while providing a haze of pop culture references to cover their practical alliance with the hard core bigots.

The same is the case with gay marriage. Zelda writes that she doesn’t approve of “preventing anyone from getting married.” In case she hasn’t noticed though, preventing gay people from getting married has been one of the top political priorities of the American right for several years. Why is this the case? As Karl Rove would say, campaigning against gay marriage was a way to ensure that people who hate and fear gays, homophobic people in other words, voted Republican.

In fact, marriage is one of the fundamental acts, sacraments, or relations of our society. For someone to advocate the exclusion of any group of people from marriage is to tell people in that group that they are not full citizens, really not full human beings. When Goldstein opposes gay marriage (I haven't seen him say why yet), he is telling gay people that they are not worthy of the fundamental and good things of our society. That’s pretty much exactly the same thing that the more overtly bigoted right-wingers are saying.

At the same time, Goldstein is providing a slick cultural cover for the hard-core homophobes. Once again, that makes him worse than the bigots.

Today's "Ric Caric Celebration" at Protein Wisdom

Today was "Ric Caric Day" at the right-wing blog Protein Wisdom. As much attention as they lavished on me, Jeff Goldstein and Dan Collins might as well have held a parade. I guess they didn't like one of my comments on their posts. They had three top posts (here, here, and here) challenging me to debate feminism, race relations, gay marriage, Islamophobia and enough other topics to fill out a five book research project. One of the posts by Collins was funny in the fluff kind of way that Protein Wisdom does well. But as usually is the case with Jeff Goldstein, he did a lot of bragging about his super-powered intellect without saying anything substantive. My reply boiling down my initial argument that the "intellectual conservatism" of Protein Wisdom is more evil than unsophisticated bigotry is here.

Republican Suicide Watch--No. 1

Slim Republican Chances in 2008. According to a Bob Novak column, Republicans in Congress see themselves as having one chance to win in 2008--the fact that the Democrats are likely to nominate eithe Hillary Clinton (a woman) or Barack Obama (an African-American). As has been the case for a long time, bigots are the best friends of the Republican party.

Actually, I doubt that they even have that chance.

Mostly because they seem bent on committing political suicide.

The Petraeus Plan. That certainly seems to be the case with the evolving plan for occupying Iraq. According to MSN, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are drawing up a military plan* that envisions the surge as continuing through June 2008. The idea is that American forces won't be able to establish "localized control" in Baghdad and other areas for at least another eleven months. Another year after that, in June 2009, the plan envisions American troops as handing the baton off to Iraqi forces.

What's the strategy? That's hard to say at present. According to MSN:

The plan envisions using locally based security initiatives, such as those that in western Anbar province have proven successful in reducing insurgent violence this year, as a starting point. Such efforts are now under way elsewhere in Iraq, including some parts of Baghdad.

That doesn't seem like a likely plan. What Petraeus means by "locally-based security initiatives" is setting up outposts in neighborhoods, gaining the trust of the locals, providing a higher level of security, and paving the way for economic reconstruction. However, that had nothing to do with American progress in Anbar which occurred because Sunni tribes switched allegiance from the global jihadis to the U. S.

It's not likely that Shiite leaders will do the U. S. the same favor in areas like Sadr City in Baghdad. Unlike the foreign fighters, the Shiite militias are genuinely popular in Shiite neighborhoods. The militias are led by the two most popular Shiite political parties (SCIRI and Sadr's Party) , have leaders who are genuinely popular among the Shiite population, and are made up of young men from Shiite neighborhoods. It will be extremely difficult if not impossible for the American military to induce the Shiite population to switch their allegiance from their own leaders and militias to the Americans attacking their militias.

MSN doesn't report what Petraeus think of the chances of this plan succeeding. However, it's a bad sign that Steven Biddle, a member of an advisory group working on Petraeus' plans last spring, believes that his own preferred "carrot and stick" strategy for dealing with insurgent groups only has a 10% chance of working. Evidently, he believes that Petraeus' own approach has less than a 10% shot of succeeding.

Suicide is Painful. The chances of Petraeus killing GOP chances in 2008 seem to be a lot higher than his chances of securing Baghdad. By June 2008, the nomination process will be over and the Republican nominee would be preparing for the convention in July. This is normally the season when the Republican attack machine does it's best work in smearing Democratic candidates. If the surge is still going on in June 2008, that's not going to happen because the Republicans will be stuck in the position of defending a highly unpopular military policy. The reason Senate Republican like Mitch McConnell only want to give the surge until September 2007 is that they think they'll need 14 months to recover from the unpopularity of the surge if they want to win in 2008.

That's why Petraeus' plan is political suicide for the Republicans. It has little chance of succeeding and it won't give the Republican Party any time to recover from the failure.

George Bush and Dick aren't running for office in 2008. Suicide, however, is going to be painful for the rest of the Republican Party.






*For all those miltiary jargon fetishists out there, the official term for the plan is the "Joint Campaign Plan" (inevitably the JCP).

The "Alberto Gonzales" of Attorney Generals

"Alberto Gonzales" has become a watchword for incompetence in American society. Given that Alberto Gonzales is also the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales is the "Alberto Gonzales" of attorney generals. Maybe we should just call him "Al."

Tomorrow, the "Alberto Gonzales" of attorney generals is going to return to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Gonzales' prepared remarks:

I believe very strongly that there is no place for political considerations in the hiring of our career employees or in the administration of justice. As such, the allegations of such activity have been troubling to hear . . . I could walk away or I could devote my time, effort and energy to fix the problems. Since I have never been one to quit, I decided that the best course of action was to remain here and fix the problems. That is exactly what I am doing.

Gonzales doesn't mention that one of the main problems of the Justice Department is that he himself is such an incompetent. Unfortunately, Gonzales doesn't mention how he's going to fix that.

The Only Way to Save the Surge

Ouch! The right-wing's "Save the Surge" campaign took a hit today when ARG revealed that President Bush's approval rating had sunk to 25% in their polling. Of course, somebody could just say "that's George Bush, not the war."

But they would be mistaken. A just-published NYTimes/CBS finds that only 19% of the population thinks the surge is making things better.

As Bush Goes, So Goes the War. President Bush's popularity is a good barometer of the popularity of his war policies. Even if polls other than ARG don't find that Bush's popularity is in the mid 20's, the failure of Bush's approval ratings to rise means that the campaign to bolster the surge has not taken hold with the public.

Bush is the Problem. President Bush is not only commander-in-chief, he's also the no. 1 salesman for the war. In fall 2006, a Bush blitzkrieg was helping the Republicans until the Mark Foley scandal broke. This time, it's different though. The fact that Bush has been out more speaking on behalf of the war seems to be actually hurting his public standing. The other problem from the conservative point of view is that the popularity of Bush's war policy is being dragged down because of its association with Bush's many scandals. The fired prosecutor scandal, Jack Abramoff scandal, Scooter Libby commutation, and Hatch Act violations scandal are all dragging down the popularity of the war as well as the popularity of the President.

Impeachment is the Answer. If President Bush is one of the right-wing's main problems in promoting the war, the right-wing is in a bind. Believing that god is on his side in the war, Bush isn't going to resign. At the same time, Bush's unpopularity means that the war could be brought to a grinding halt any time Congress decides to stop funding it.

In this context, the right should support impeachment for Bush and Cheney. I'm serious. Bush and Cheney aren't doing the conservative movement any more good than they're doing the country as a whole. It is true that Nancy Pelosi opposes the war now, but the right could hope that Pelosi might change her mind if she gets to see the same intelligence data as Bush and Cheney and gets regular reports from the generals. Right now, a change of heart on the part of President Pelosi (sounds good doesn't it?) is pretty much the only hope the right has. If Clinton or Obama run on withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, they're going to have to carry through with it or face an extremely angry electorate. It would be better for the right to support impeachment now and deal with President Pelosi than get scorched in the 2008 elections and have to deal with a triumphant anti-war movement.

Of course, there's lots of grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney. Deceiving the country into going into war, the malfeasance with which Bush and Cheney have managed the war, the constantly evolving torture policy, the politicization of the Justice Department, the violations of the Hatch Act, and obstructing justice in the case of Scooter Libby are all impeachable offenses. Spokespeople for the right-wing should just announce that they've had the same kind of change of heart that Mitt Romney had on abortion, declare themselves to be "shocked, shocked" at the rampant criminality in the Bush administration, and start pushing for impeachment.

It's the only hope for their war.

The Socialist Mentality of the Fluff Right

Protein Wisdom blogger J. Howard posted today on "Welfare and the Road to Serfdom" about the family apparatus. In J. Howard's imagination, family law has become a welfare apparatus but J. Howard doesn't make an argument for this so much as she alludes to words that are important to conservatives.

Pursuant that reality and now that this particular variant of a deeply ruinous welfare state is coming out of the closet, I’ll freely admit that it’s becoming much harder to find a way to present the argument than it is to define its factors: What do you call such tyranny? Tyranny? Does a program that’s grown beyond a simple socialist bent still warrant the label? Do we trot out and dust off that old standby, Communism? What we’re finding, objectively, has many of the hallmarks of a nice deep shade of collectivist reality, after all (my emphasis).

J. Howard also quotes extensively from the writing of Stephen Baskerville at an Ayn Rand site. Like Howard, Baskerville uses the topic of family law to marshall a lot of conservative words.

it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”

Baskerville's Ph.D. must be in name-calling because that's most of what he does as he performs a kind of operant conditioning on conservatives. It's a pretty simple technique. J. Howard and Baskerville write terms like "deeply ruinous welfare state," "tyranny," and "communism" and conservatives that trigger the conservative group loyalties like identifying something they loathe. Then watch their right-wing audience salivate. Trigger the right-wing group loyalties of their readers with other words like "kafkaesque machinery," "bureaucratic tyranny," and "the state," and they'll salivate even more.

Of course, all of this ignores the realities of the millions of people wanting divorces (hence divorce lawyers), the acrimony involved in a lot of those divorces, deadbeat dads like my father and my brother (hence government involvement in collecting support payments), abusive families, hopelessly addicted parents, and the like. But J. Howard and Baskerville don't care any more about that than Dick Cheney cares about democracy in Iraq. The trick is to formulate right-wing jargon in a way that triggers the sense of group loyalty among conservatives. Once that's accomplished, the particularities of the subject matter aren't very important.

This focus on words can have disadvantages in dealing with the nitty gritty of public. Witness the Bush administration's incompetence in dealing with Iraq and Katrina. However, the words are much more important to almost any conservative than policy success. This kind of word fetishism is a very effective technique when group loyalty is the highest priority of the people involved. And in the case of conservatives, group loyality is at the top of their list.

Call it the socialist dimension of American conservatism.

What if Bush Had Been More Like Dumbledore?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has run though our family. Katy finished last night, me this morning, and Mrs. RSI is finishing up herself now.

Exhaustion reigns.

Oddly though, my deepest emotion is that I need to finish my own book. J. K. Rowling may have her limitations as a writer (who doesn't?), but I've always admired her greatly for writing The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows at all. As a wealthy and famous woman, Rowling had the celebrity version of academic tenure. She could have rested on her laurels for the rest of her life, but she kept writing and kept improving.

That's what I want to do as well.

Without giving too much away, it struck me that the U. S. would be much better off as a country if George Bush had followed the path of Albus Dumbledore. A great and good person in his own way, Dumbledore also recognized that he was not the kind of man who should hold great power. In his own words, Dumbledore was "unworthy." (720) That's why Dumbledore turned down several opportunities to become Minister of Magic. He knew that such power would tempt him to act recklessly and foolishly, to bring about his own destruction and that of many others.

What would have happened if George Bush had had a similar moment of self-reflection when Republican recruiters came calling upon him to run for President? What if Bush had realized that he had qualities that made him unworthy to hold enormous power? Bush has many disqualifying personal characteristics, any list of which would include his longstanding failure to exercise responsibility in his own life, lack of curiosity, lack of capacity for self-doubt, lack of attention to detail, and ignorance of many of the issues. George W. had already run two businesses into the ground and made himself an embarrassment in his father's White House. If he had recognized that his previous failures weren't accidents, he could have saved himself, and us, from being such a monumental failure as president.

Of course, it's always difficult to identify the right path, but George Bush should have recognized that the road to the White House was the wrong path for him.

The Pentagon/Hillary Flap

Fred Kaplan has a well-constructed article on the current flap over the reply of Eric Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, to an inquiry by Hillary Clinton over plans to withdraw from Iraq.

Here's the important passage in Edelman's letter.

Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. … Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risk in order to achieve compromises of national reconciliation. …

Kaplan perceptively argues that what Edelman is doing is making the equivalent of a treason accusation against Hillary Clinton and that Edelman's treatment of Hillary might cause the Bush administration more trouble with the Senate and with female voters.

What Kaplan does not recognize is that Eric Edelman, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity all believe that Hillary Clinton in fact is committing treason when she advocates troop withdrawals. For right-wing audiences reinforcing "enemy propoganda" (what little there is of it) is a form of "aiding and abetting the enemy" under the definition of treason in the constitution. Likewise, they think of the Lincoln administration's suspension of habeas corpus, closing of pro-Confederate newspapers, and arrest of prominate pro-Southern political figures provides historical precedents for treating people like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton as traitors.

What stops the Eric Edelmans of the Bush administration from openly advocating the arrest of
people like Hillary Clinton is their sense that they don't have the power to make it stick. But, that's really the only thing.

The Coup Next Time

I've been very struck by this passage from Johann Hari's story about the recent National Review cruise.

I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."

In a way, this is innocuous beach chatter, but the chattiness disturbs. It's like "Hillary-Ann" thinks the idea of executing "prominent liberals" is so obviously appropriate that it doesn't really need much discussion. The right has been much less tolerant of opposition to the war in Iraq than it's been for previous wars. Murmurs of Democratic senators like Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton committing the "treason" of aiding and abetting the enemy started up with people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in 2003. But the pressure against allowing political rights for liberals and war opponents got stronger after the Democrats swept the 2006 elections. There have been a few specific statements about the curtailing of democratic rights by Newt Gingrich (here and here), Thomas Sowell, Harvey Mansfield, and Frank Gaffney, but my own sense is that there was a fairly broad sentiment on the right that the liberals and war opponents shouldn't have the right to win on anti-war platforms.

In a way, "Hillary-Ann" expresses this well. From her perspective, the United States needs to change in fundamental ways. I take this to mean that if conservatives are going to be able to wage the wars they want, people can't be allowed to publish criticisms of wars, put together anti-war organizations like MoveOn.org, put out movies like Fahrenheit 911, or move to cut off war funding in Congress. In this context, putting on show trials and mounting executions for prominent liberals would be a standard strategy for repressing dissent across the whole of the mass media, the Democrats as a political party, and liberal political activists. As "Hillary-Ann" says, "then things will change."

The right-wing is in a weak position now and their position is likely to continually getting weaker unless the surge actually is the success that people like Hugh Hewitt claim it will be. So, there is little or no danger that "Hillary-Ann" will get her wish to see the Bush administration send liberals go to the "gas chambers" the same way that the Nazis executed the Jews.

However, the "next" George Bush elected president will be a different story. Whether that happens in 2008, 2012, 2020, or beyond, there can be little doubt that an incoming conservative president would be eager to launch new wars against the Iraqs and Irans of the world. When that happens, there will be a lot of pressure from the conservative think tanks, talk-radio hosts, and everyday right-wingers like "Hillary-Ann" to start arresting Democratic politicians and anti-war leaders. In effect, making such arrests would be a coup against the American constitutional system. But the right-wing has begun to contemplate such a coup with pleasure.

The Republican Choice: Chickenhawks vs Chickendoves

The Republican Party is dividing into two kinds of chickens--chickenhawks and chickendovers. The chickenhawk specialty is warmongering despite being completely unwilling to serve in the military. John Wayne is probably the Jesus figure of the chickenhawk movement, but Dick Cheney is their current spiritual leader. Having gotten his wife pregnant to get his fifth deferment from the military during the Vietnam War, Cheney became a prominent hawk as he climbed the political ladder. In fact, Cheney seems to have decided that war is the best solution to just about any foreign relations problem. The same is the case with George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and the rest of the chickenhawk wing of the Republican Party.

Max Blumenthal has a great little segment on chickenhawks among College Republicans.

But the Republicans are developing a chickendove section as well. Richard Lugar, John Warner, George Voinovich, and Susan Collins have all come out against the surge, but they refuse to vote against the Bush administration on Iraq-related legislation. Most of the chickendoves voted to support Mitch McConnell's filibuster of the most recent Democratic proposal to withdraw from Iraq. In the case of Susan Collins, she voted against the filibuster but was going to vote against the withdrawal bill as well.

You have to have some sympathy for Republican chickendoves. They're going to get the shaft wherever they turn. If the chickendoves support the war, they lose the support of marginal Republican voters, independents, and weak Democrats they need to win. That will kill them in the general election and Susan Collins for one is going to face tough Democratic opposition.

But if they oppose the war, they lose the support of the Republican base which will either get them a tough primary opponent (see Lincoln Chaffee) or kill the party's enthusiasm for a general election campaign.

Still, politics is a tough game and the war in Iraq is the overriding issue in American political life. If Republican fence-sitters can't make up their minds about the war, they shouldn't be in office.

The Republican Party--cowards whichever way you turn.

Harry Potter: Final RSI Family Thoughts

The Potter-obsessed Caric family of Kentucky hasn't been talking much about whether Harry is going to live or die. My wife and I think Harry will live while our 12 year old daughter Katy believes he'll die. No doubt, Mrs. RSI and I are biased toward irrational optimism concerning teen-agers as our own daughters march toward their teen years.

But Harry's fate really hasn't been the main topic. What we worry about more is the how the forces of good and evil line up and what Rowling is going to do with Voldemort's horcruxes.

Camp Voldemort. Our main idea about how the order of battle between good and evil is that there's going to be trouble in Voldemort's camp. Voldemort's death eaters have put up a relatively united front through the first six books of the Potter saga, but Harry's cause will be aided by major schisms within in The Deathly Hallows. Certainly, Peter Pettigrew will betray Voldemort. That was foreshadowed in Prisoner of Azkhaban. Likewise there will be a falling out between Voldemort and the Malfoys (Lucius, Narcissa, Draco, and perhaps sister-in-law Bellatrix Lestrange). There's no way to avoid this. Voldemort is still angry at Lucious for goofing up the attack on the Department of Mysteries and he's going to punish Draco for not killing Dumbledore when he had the chance in The Half-Blood Prince. Even worse from Voldemort's point of view, Narcissa Malfoy's love for her husband and son are greater than her commitment to Voldemort.

However it works, I think the Malfoy's will wind up as allies of Harry's.

Severus Snape will leave the death eaters for good. I don't think Snape is being "good" or feeling guilty any more than I could see John Bolton as being good. But Snape's just too powerful now to remain a stable element within the Voldemort camp. If nothing else, Voldemort's paranoia about Snape will drive Severus into an alliance with the only person Voldemort fears--Harry Potter. I also have an idea that Snape's betrayal of Voldemort will be the event that triggers the movement toward the final showdown. Like most people, I think Snape is central.

Finally, there is a wild card somewhere. It's generally accepted that Regulus Black is RAB, but Dumbledore said in The Half-Blood Prince that one person could not have retrieved the locket by themselves. Regulus Black must have had an accomplice and it is pretty likely that the accomplice is still a death-eater. In other words, Voldemort has a mole in his circle. Perhaps it really is Snape himself. More likely, however, the accomplice is a true wild-card and a new character for Deathly Hallows. But Harry should get suprising and powerful assistance from the accomplice of Regulus Black.

Harry's Assets against Voldemort. First and most importantly, Harry loves on a large scale and that will be a decisive element in Harry's defeat of Voldemort.

Right behind love in significance is the fact that Harry is mentally stronger than Voldemort as proved by the confrontation in the cemetary in The Goblet of Fire. Harry also has the advantage of Voldemort's having used Harry's blood to regenerate himself, but his mental power is what will be decisive.

Like Voldemort, Harry has a large number of allies. These include his friends Hermione, Ron, Ginnie, Neville Longbottom, and Luna. There are also adults like the Weasleys, Minerva McGonnegal, Tonks, and Remus Lupin from the Order of the Phoenix. I'd be surprised if the adults were of much use. They didn't help a lot in either the Order of the Phoenix or the Half-Blood Prince. There will probably be one death from the ranks of Harry's adult allies though. Like a lot of people, I bet on Mrs. Weasley.

However, Hermione's a very talented witch; she'll solve a problem. Likewise, Ron gets one very good idea per book. Harry's friends Neville and Luna have surprising capabilities. They'll all provide real help. Unfortunately, one of these characters will probably die as well.

Horcruxes. Harry and Dumbledore hypothesized that the remaining horcruxes were Slytherin's locket (last seen at 12 Grimmauld Place in Order of the Phoenix), Hufflepuff's cup, a relic from Griffindor or Ravenclaw, and Voldemort's snake Nagini. Like a lot of people, the lovely Mrs. Caric believes that Harry himself or his scar is a horcrux. She called me from her office in January to tell me this. Perhaps that's possible. Maybe Voldemort wanted Harry's corpse to be his last horcrux but wasn't able to fulfill the intention because of his failed Avada Kedavra curse.

If Harry is a horcrux, this doesn't necessarily mean that he'll die though. Like many things in the magical world, the horcrux spell can probably be reversed.

Our daughter also thinks that one of the horcruxes is the tiara on top of the cabinet in the Room of Requirement where Harry hid his illegal potions book. That would make it Rowena Ravenclaw's tiara. Perhaps!

But I'm pretty sure I know how Harry will find the horcruxes. He'll use "legilimency" to find three of the horcruxes in Voldemort's mind without having to do an extensive physical search. In other words, Harry's going to break into Voldemort's brain to find the information he wants and Voldemort won't be able to stop him. This is where Harry's mental superiority to Voldemort will come into play. I bet that Voldemort and Harry will have an epic mental battle as Voldemort tries to keep Harry out of his brain, but that Harry will win.

I also think that Harry will find the final horcrux by commanding Kreacher to give him Slytherin's locket. Of course, destroying the horcruxes encased in the objects will be more difficult.

Then, it will be on to the final confrontation.

Unlike most of my theories about most things, my family likes the idea of Harry finding the horcruxes through legilimency.

John Edwards in Prestonsburg, KY

When John Edwards spoke in Prestonsburg, KY today, RSI decided to be a good father and drive the 1 1/2 hours with my daughter to hear him speak.

The speech was advertised for 2pm, but Edwards had already started speaking at 1:55 when we arrived. No surprise for the Appalachian poverty belt, his theme was the "Two Americas." The One America was the very rich and the "Other America" was the rest of us who work for a living and struggle to make ends meet. All of Edwards' stories were about the Other America"--the hospital workers who could not afford health care, the families that were still poor despite being fully employed, and the tortures of the disability system. The same was the case with his policy prescriptions of universal health coverage, making unionization easier, raising the minimum wage, and making college available for everyone. Edwards embraces the values of equality, work, and responsibility, and all of his policy prescriptions were geared to making things somewhat easier for working people to get by.

Edwards is a skilled speaker but his speech was not rousing and he really needed to rouse this crowd. The people at the speech clearly enjoyed the celebrity aspect of John Edwards speaking in Prestonsburg and wanted to get excited about him as a presidential candidate. In the final analysis, they didn't get excited though. Edwards didn't deliver the goods as a candidate and people were still thinking of him more as a celebrity as they walked away from the speech.

I read once on MyDD that Edwards was a disappointment because he wasn't opposing anything. You could really see that weakness in his Prestonsburg speech. Edwards desperately needed some stories of the excesses of the wealthy and the powerful to balance off his stories of poverty and vulnerability. And he didn't have any. To give the most obvious example, there were no anecdotes of insurance companies rewarding employees for thinking up new reasons for denying coverage. Likewise, Edwards didn't condemn the high price of drugs or the enormous profits of pharmaceutical companies. He didn't say anything about CEO salaries or golden parachutes for fired executives, or anything like that at all. There wasn't a single reference to Michael Moore or Sicko.

Edwards may want to eliminate poverty in thirty years, but his speech almost cried out that he did not have the political backbone needed to take on the institutional interests of the big corporations, K street lobbyists, and their political allies. This is where the stuff on Edwards' appearance comes in. It's not just $400 haircut and the Breck girl jokes, it's also his perfect--and I mean absolutely perfect--tan. As long as Edwards isn't more aggressive, accusatory, and abrasive in his speeches, people are going to focus on his looks and keep wondering if he's a hypocrite or a dilettante.

It was also pretty obvious from watching Edwards that he is not a natural as a politician. Two of the fundamental gifts of politicians are remembering names and making happy small talk while working a crowd. I don't know about Edwards and names, but he definitely neither smiled nor seemed to say anything while he was signing autographs after the speech. In fact, Edwards had the kind of determined look that people have when they're doing something that's difficult or unpleasant for them.

As far behind as Edwards is in the polls, he needs to make it all look easier. Otherwise, he's going to continue to be what he was in Prestonsburg, a political celebrity rather than a political contender.

Peter Galbraith's War Take-Down

Peter Galbreath has a comprehensive critique of the war in Iraq in Salon. Galbreath is sober, thorough, tough-minded, and avoids unnecessary cheap shots at the Bush administration. He also concludes that there is no way for the war to have a positive ending for the U. S. Although there will be no al-Qaeda take-over of Iraq, there will be a Shiite/Sunni civil war. The Shiite central government will be closely allied with Iran and opposed to American policy.

There will be no peace, no secular democracy, and no American ally in the war on terror.

There will be no "victory."

Follow the link through. In my humble opinion, the article is a must read for anyone still on the fence about the war.

Best of RSI: Weenie-Boy Masculinity and the Right

WHAT'S UP WITH WEENIE BOYS? I think I'm going to start a series on "political weenie boys." There are forms of masculinity that are particular to the Bush administration and the right-wing and the best term I've come up to characterize this kind of masculinity is "weenie boy." I'm not entirely comfortable with the term "weenie boy" because it can imply that there is a masculine ideal and that deviation from that standard is an indication of deficiency. I don't believe that at all. Personally, I like the idea of a thousand masculinities blooming and all of them able to recognize women as equal selves and citizens.

However, we're a long way away from that in the United States and "weenie boy" is a good way to describe right-wing guys who articulate their politics in terms of heightened macho images. George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and the right-wing political theorist Harvey Mansfield all strike me as weenie boys and they've all contributed mightily to the toxic character of American politics.

As the U. S. makes the transition out of right-wing government, it's important to consider the weenie boy elements of right-wing politics both as a way to understand the Bush administration and the mentality of the conservative opposition to a future Democratic administration. As much as we might want to wish it were not the case, the weenie boy politics of the right-wing will continue to be a powerful force in American society for some time to come.

Might as well be prepared. As a result, this is my first effort to discuss what it means to be a weenie boy.

EXACTLY WHO IS A WEENIE BOY? That's a big question for the Bush administration and the right-wing. There are four key traits for weenie boys in politics.

1. The conventional masculine ideal. First and crucially, weenie boys fervently believe in conventional standards of masculinity. They look to the sports stars, Brad Pitt-type entertainers, rock stars, big men on campus, and "popular" guys as models of what they themselves want to be--athletic, good-looking, at ease with themselves and at ease with good-looking women, not having to kow tow to authority. In this sense, weenie boys identify conventional masculinity with an easy and natural success in high school and college and the logical projection of that success into business and marriage. The role models of conventional masculinity might not think that way about themselves. But that doesn't matter to the weenie boy mind. What does matter is the image.

2. Weenie-Boy Failure. The second characteristic of weenie boys is that they live in contradiction to their masculine faith because they do not conform to the conventional masculinity they admire. In the language of Harvey Mansfield, weenie boys are frustrated because they can't be "manly" and this is the way they experience it themselves. George W. Bush always had the basics of weenie-boyness because he admired the kind of physical domination exercised by sports stars while not having the size, coordination, or self-discipline to be a good athlete himself. The same was the case with Rush Limbaugh who worshipped athletes and entertainers but didn't seem to have the social skills needed to leave his room as a teenager.
Of course, not everyone who is not conventionally masculine is a "weenie boy." Lots of musicians, computer geeks, bookworms, gays, and other kinds of guys would not be "weenie boys" because they don't particularly buy into conventional masculine standards of physical strength, social self-assertion, dress, and the like. Sneering at athletes as idiots, the popular types as snobs, non-conventional guys don't feel the same tense contradictions that weenie boys feel.

3. Hyper-masculine Compensation. That's not all there is to weenie boys though. The third characteristic of weenie boys is that they adapt heightened or hyper-masculine images for themselves as a way to compensate for their lack of success at conventional masculinity. In their computer games, pornography consumption, sports fanaticism, or action/horror movie fetishes, weenie boys identify with a fantasy masculinity that is far more powerful, dominating, and violent than the conventional masculinity from which they're either excluded or marginal. Here, the right overlaps a great deal with mainstream popular culture which is also permeated with extremely heighted images of masculinity. Conservatives are often big fans of cowboy or action movies that pose outsized versions of masculinity. For example, the main examples of masculinity used by Harvey Mansfield in Manliness were John Wayne movies and Gary Cooper in High Noon. Apparently, reality wasn't masculine enough for him. For more current weenie boys, it's the heightened images of Rambo, Grand Theft Auto, pornography, and heavy metal that defines masculinity.

4. The Gift. To a certain extent, the whole world of computer gaming, horror flicks, and heavy metal music would have a dimension of weeniness to it. What makes someone a political weenie boy is a political gift that enables them to turn their imagery of heightened masculinity into political action. People on the left generally think of their opponents on the right as lesser beings because of the individual right-winger's bullying, dishonesty, rigidity, and delusions of grandeur. But it is important to recognize that Rush Limbaugh has a gift for creating impromptu right-wing dialogue, sticking it to the left, and promoting conservative delusions. As rigid, delusional, and self-aggrandizing as George Bush is, he had the political talent needed to project himself as a regular guy while promoting a right-wing agenda. From all accounts, Paul Wolfowitz was a tenacious and successful bureaucratic in-fighter as he promoted "regime change" in Iraq.

The ultimate triumph of the right-wing weenie boys though was making their own fantasies of out-sized masculinity into the dominant image of political manhood in the United States. This is what killed "big man on campus" types like Al Gore and John Kerry. Both Gore and Kerry were thorough embodiments of conventional masculinity. They were both popular, relatively secure guys who were ambitious, served in the military, and worked their way up the ladder. With the cooperation of the media, however, the right-wing weenie boys were able to trump the conventional masculinity of Gore and Kerry and make the "natural," "assumed" manliness of the Democrats look artificial, contrived, and effeminate.

In many ways, the success of George Bush and the invasion of Iraq represented the political triumph of toxic weeniness in American politics. If the Democrats and liberals want to prevent the re-emergence of weenie-boy politics after the Democratic landslide of 2008, we need to develop a more critical perspective on the weenie boys now.

David Vitter and His Lustful Members

Disgraced Sen. David Vitter came before the cameras with his wife today to make statements about his career as a customer of New Orleans and Washington prostitutes. Actually, Vitter denies having "relationships" with prostitutes in New Orleans. Who knows? Maybe he's telling the truth. But that's the kind of denial that doesn't usually stand up.

What caught my attention here at RSI was the way that Vitter declares that matter closed by emphasizing that he's already confessed and been forgiven.

"Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and from my wife in confession and marriage counseling."

Maybe Wendy Vitters does forgive him. As is usual in these rituals of public confession, the U. S. Senator looks like a plastic megajerk while the wronged wife comes off as multi-dimensional, mature, and real. Maybe we should start electing people like Wendy Vitter rather than her husband.

But I don't think the Christian god is going to forgive him. Jesus is pretty clear about what's going to happen to those who lust on the scale of David Vitter:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut if off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. (Matthew 5: 28-30)

Jesus appears to be very strict about lust here. If a man lusts after a woman, he is already committing adultery in his heart. If his eye is "offending" him through it's participation in the sin of lust, a man should "pluck it out" rather than spend eternity in hell. The same with a man's right hand. Of course, the primary organ of lust is the penis and the obvious implication of the New Testament here is that a man should "pluck out" his penis rather than lust after women. Ouch!

What about a guy like Vitter who lusts on a large scale? According to Jesus, the question is not whether David Vitter confessed and asked forgiveness. The question is whether he plucked out all the members of his body that were involved in his adultery. If his eyes were involved with the good ladies of the D. C. Madam's escort service or the New Orleans bordellos, Vitter should have had them plucked out. The same with his hands, his penis, or his tongue--maybe his nose too. Otherwise, Jesus demands that his whole body be cast into hell for eternity.

That's a long time. Even longer than the 552 days George Bush still has in office.

One of the most famous passages in the Gospel of St. Matthew says that "narrow is the way which leadeth unto life (Matthew 7: 13-14)." Or heaven. When someone goes as far out of "the way" as David Vitter, he should have thrown all his lust-filled baggage overboard. If that means plucking out his eyes, his hands, and his you know what, then that's what Vitter should have done.

I'd be surprised if David Vitter's priest hasn't already suggested this. After all, the Bible is the unerring word of God.

Bob Novak: Classic Weenie Boy

Weenie boys are sprouting up all over on the right. Conservative reporter and news personality Bob Novak is a case in point. In my posting on weenie boy masculinity, I defined weeniness in terms of men who deeply admire conventional class president, jock, frat boy, popular-type guys but can't live according to that model themselves.

Novak is such a classic weenie boy that Edward McClelland even titles his Salon review of Novak's memoir "Bob Novak is not one of the popular kids."

McClelland quotes a passage from Timothy Crouses The Boys on the Bus about Novak's inability to fit in with other reporters:

"Novak was standing off to himself. He was short and squat, with swarthy skin, dark gray hair, a slightly rumpled suit, and an apparently permanent scowl ... Some of the other reporters pointed him out and whispered about him almost as if he were a cop come to shush up a good party.

"'There's a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy,' said a magazine writer. 'So much of what he writes and talks about in private tends to reinforce one impression: he's against anything fashionable, anything slick -- and liberalism is slick in the circles he travels in. Maybe that's why he's down on it.'"

Novak wanted to be one of the "popular" guys. He seems to remember every dinner party he wasn't asked to over the last fifty years. But like George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Doug Feith, and a bunch of other right-wingers, he just couldn't bring himself to fit in.

McClelland stretches out the list of envious and unconventional conservative types a little further.

If that were true, it would place Novak in the same company as nerdy right-wing intellectuals like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Samuel Alito and Kenneth Starr -- homely, brainy Debate Club types who embraced conservatism as a form of revenge against the swinging '60s liberals.

And during the Bush administration, the weenie boys got their revenge on the more conventional types. Too bad the weenies didn't care too much about governing effectively.

The Fluff Right Lives

Good News for Fluff Right Fans--Protein Wisdom is back in business. It appears that former lead blogger Jeff Goldstein has gone on blogging vacation for a year. That's kind of surprising. Usually, rehab only goes for thirty days. Dan Collins seems to be the guy now, but fans of content free conservatism shouldn't worry. Collins works just as hard at being funny as Goldstein.

"L" is for William Kristol

William Kristol's op-ed in today's Washington Post should have been entitled "I'm Not as Stupid as I Look" rather than "Why Bush Will Be A Winner." Kristol knows very well that the success of conservatism as an ideology and the meaning of his own career will be determined by the success of the Bush administration.

If Bush is a winner, Bill Kristol is a winner. If Bush leaves office with an "L" for loser tattooed to his head, Bill Kristol also looks like a loser despite his pundit prominence.

From Kristol's perspective, things don't look good right now. The president is a goofball and his administration is filled with incompetent cronies and sycophants like Alberto Gonzales. The Republican presidential candidates for 2008 don't look that strong either. Fund-raising for the next election cycle is going poorly and conservative columnists like Robert Novak are reporting intense pessimism in the GOP caucus. And it doesn't seem like the Republicans can buy a break from scandals either. Every week, there's some sort of news from the old Abramoff scandal or the current fired prosecutor, commutation for Scooter Libby, and Hatch Act scandals. And if it's not one of those controversies, someone like David Vitter, Republican senator from Louisiana, is revealed to be an unbelievable scumbag.

Pretty soon, Republicans are going to need a version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" just to remember all the scandals.

Even worse, the surge is doing even more poorly we think and Bill Kristol helps explain why.

In his attempt to cast the Bush administration in a positive light, Kristol stresses that we "are routing al-Qaeda in Iraq [and] we are beginning to curb the Iranian-backed sectarian Shiite militias."

Though these are positive developments, our military didn't contribute much to them. What happened is that we caught a couple of big breaks. Sunni tribesmen in Anbar province turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq on their own and are now fighting on our side. That's why al-Qaeda is being routed. They lost their "host" among the Sunni population.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Shiite militias decided to largely stand down on their own rather than fight newly arriving American troops. Consequently, the U. S. hasn't had the confrontation with the Shiite militias that was anticipated.

Given the recently decreased pressure from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia, one would think that our military would have secured Baghdad and the surrounding region now that the surge has been going on for six months.

But nothing is farther from the case. The numbers of suicide bombings, car bombs, IED attacks, and death squad killings may each vary from month to month, but the overall level of violence in Iraq has not declined much since the beginning of the surge in January.

Nothing speaks more to the failure of the American military mission in Iraq than our inability capitalize on these kinds of favorable developments.

William Kristol must know that whenever he sees that pesky "L" on his forehead.

Three Cheers for Big Buildings

When I first drove into Philly on my recent research trip, I saw a welcome sight--a skyscraper going up. Substantially taller than the previous highest building in Philadelphia, the Comcast Center is a testament of the continued vitality of the city. There was also a lot of construction going on around the Jefferson Medical School. If life is building up and tearing down, there was a lot of life in Center City Philadelphia.

A lot of my friends on the left have an almost instinctive aversion to new construction. Here I part ways with them. One of the impressive things about the early work of Karl Marx is his emphasis on the creativity of human nature in his concept of "species-being." For Marx, the big contribution of capitalism was the liberation of human creativity from the straight-jacket of tradition and primitive technology. Capitalism showed what social labor could accomplish even though the wage-labor relationship itself also served to limit human productivity. From Marx's point of view, communism would lead to the full expression of human nature and would be even more active, more productive, and more creative than capitalism.

Many of my friends have a preservationist mentality of protecting the natural and traditional worlds from the restless activity of the present. But there's almost a hostility to human nature in the efforts to keep big construction projects out and preserving buildings that no longer meet anybody's needs. It's almost a Platonic preference for contemplation over the "dirty" irregularity of congemporary life.

This kind of contemplative attitude is just as conservative now as it was when Plato wrote The Republic.

And just as wrong.

Of course, "conservation" is a fundamental dimension of any rational approach to public policy. But profligacy and wastefulness are just as fundamental to human activity and public policy also has to allow for the full range of building up, tearing down, and squandering resources as well as conserving them. That's the only way to maintain the vitality of our cities, towns, and rural areas.

So, three cheers for the Comcast Center.

I hope they start a bigger building soon.

Dom Giordano's Talk-Show Urgency

Yesterday, I did the whole 600 miles from Philadelphia to Morehead and would have made decent time if I didn't have to take a couple of naps.

Having listened to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix all the way through Pennsylvania and Maryland, the cd player started skipping somewhere around Buckhannon, WV and I began looking for radio stations. After experimenting with some dreary baseball shows, what I got was radio talk show out of Philadelphia with Dom Giordano, a right-winger who was very concerned about the Iraqi parliament going on vacation this August. Talking from his air-conditioned station, Dom didn't want to hear any more about the 130 degree heat in Iraq, Iraqi parlimentarians suffering under Saddam, or the fact that Iraqis are used to taking vacations in August.

NO EXCUSES, Giordano emphasized. For Giordano, American troops were dying, so Iraqi legislators should be in Baghdad legislating.

Giordano was so emphatic about the Iraqi parliament because he knows the clock is running out on the war in the United States. Giordano divides the world into people who are "urgent" about the war and people who are "patient" about the war. Well, that's how he divides up the 25% of the population that supports the war. Giordano categorizes everybody else as "unprincipled Democrats."

Listening to Giordano though, I got the impression that "not giving in to the Democrats" is his main inspiration for continuing the war in Iraq. Giordano knows as well as I do that it wouldn't make any difference if the Iraqi parliament took a six-month vacation. They still wouldn't get anything done. But "surrendering" to the Democrats by giving up on the war is too intolerable to bear. So Dom's sticking with Iraq.

Otherwise, Dom and the rest of the right-wing would just be moving to the next war.

My George Bush Moment

Thursday afternoon, I attended a talk at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The speaker was a Georgetown University history prof who gave a great talk on considering the Virginia colony from a global view. Starting with the interesting fact that early Jamestown leaders had served in the Mediterranean, Madigascar, and other parts of the world, she built up a compelling argument about why the "global" careers of these men were important for understanding the early years of the colony. What made the talk particularly impressive was the spirit and enjoyment with which the professor talked about her work. The lecture was filled with an embracing laughter as the speaker discussed her sources and reached out to draw in the work of the other historians in the room. It was all extremely well done and done in a way that made me and everyone in the audience happy that we too were historians.

So, how did I get a George Bush moment out of this? Actually, the speaker was a first year graduate student at the same time that I was a fellow myself at the McNeil Center. Because she was dating another of the dissertation fellows, she was a fun part of the crowd when the fellows got together for seminars, dinners, and generally hanging out.

Yeah, I still haven't gotten to the Bush part yet. Anyway, the guy she was dating was from New Zealand and one night the beer brain in me decided that "Trevor" was not American enough and started calling him "Trev-Bob." And for good measure, I also called her "Muffy." It was the University of Pennsylvania after all, and there was a lot of "muffiness" in the air. There still is. And the nickname stuck so well that she was known as "Muffy" for the whole year.

At the end of the year, people went their different ways and I pretty much forgot my exercise in nicknaming until the speaker inadvertently reminded me after her wonderful talk. It seems that I had written a note on her illegally parked car for the cops to go inside and ask "Muffy" about moving it. Then it hit me. That's exactly what George Bush did with people like Karl Rove, or "Turd Blossom" as Bush calls him. I had been acting just like George Bush which was not exactly a morale boosting comparison.

But then I consoled myself that "Trev-bob" and "Muffy" were the beginning and end of my nicknaming career. Unlike Bush, I was able to stop giving my friends nicknames (although I actually think of Rove more as "doughface").

The "Save the Surge Movement"

The "save the surge" movement has begun.

The President's out in public giving speeches in Cleveland and holding a press conference today in Washington.

And there's people who know how to communicate in English promoting the surge as well.

The right-wing of the New York Times reporting staff is writing up optimistic comments by generals verbatim. Conservative bloggers like Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds are up in arms and the talk radio guys are celebrating the "interim report" to Congress about the "wonderful news." Rush Limbaugh is so happy about the interim report that his web site poses him at his "weenie-boy" best with a big American flag over his shoulder.

I never knew that conservatives could so excited about committees. That's because it turns out that appointing committees is the major accomplishment of the Iraqi government since the surge began.

According to the CNN Report Card (sorry I couldn't work the link), the Iraq government has formed a Constitutional Review Committee and has completed its Constitutional review.

Excellent.

But still, appointing even an important committee doesn't make up for the fact that the Iraqi government hasn't "established a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the Constitution of Iraq." In fact, the Iraqi's can't. The Shiite militias are the strongest Iraqi military force and have effectively infiltrated the Iraqi Army and police as well. Any attempt by the Iraqi government to disarm the militias would be political and military suicide.

But there's more.

The report grades the Iraqi government's progress on "setting up procedures to form semi-autonomous regions" as "satisfactory." Like Rush, I'm ecstatic about that. In fact, I've been walking around Philly with a flag over my shoulder just to show my happiness. And I can't tell you how many people have stopped me on the streets to tell me how impressed they are over these new procedures.

But I do wish that better progress was made on "ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi Security Forces" and that the Iraqi government was "providing Iraqi commanders with authority to make tactical and operational decisions, in consultation with U.S commanders, without political intervention, including the authority to pursue all insurgents and militias."

As important as new procedures are, these items seem more significant.

The Iraqi government did spend $10 billion on economic reconstruction and provide three brigades to support the Baghdad security plan.

In fact, however, the Baghdad plan has not changed the situation in Baghdad. Sunni insurgents are still able to carry out car bombings. Shiite militias are still active in death squad work, and the Iraqi government, military, and police are still massively corrupt, riddled with militia members, and incapable of carrying their share of the load--or any share of the load.

I tend to assume that the "save the surge" campaign will have some impact on public opinion. The right is good at public relations. But the Bush administration has generally found that new kinds of bad news from Iraq wipe out their efforts to manipulate public opinion.

It's hard not to believe that this will be the case with the save the surge campaign as well.

One More Day

Today's my last full day in Philadelphia. A stop at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, a seminar at the McNeil Center, hanging out a little with the historians, and then I start packing.

Hanging out with historians means drinking and last night I split a couple of pitchers with a great guy from Penn State. I don't I had more than 2 or 3 beers all year up to this point.

The sacrifices we make for our careers.

The Right's Groundhog Day, or The Boy Who Cried "Gold"

I can't make up my mind whether the right is living a reverse Groundhog Day or a reformulation of the "the boy who cried wolf" fairy tale. Let's start with the Bill Murray/Andi MacDowell semi-classic comedy about a weatherman who couldn't escape Punxsatowney, PA. Murray woke up every day to a rewind of yesterday in Punxsatowney until he stopped being a selfish, preening asshole, retooled his personality, and began to appreciate the town's little quirks.

In American right-wingers wake up every morning and find to their dismay that the country is still opposed to the war by a 2 to 1 margin. Nothing works. First, they believed with Dick Cheney that we would be greeted as liberators. Then that capturing Saddam would turn the tide. After that a constitution. Elections. By now the public was getting tired of optimism and turning against the war. But the right kept believing. There was also the initial success at Tel Afar, the killing of Zarqawi, President Bush announcing all his new plans for clearing, holding, and rebuilding in 2006. I feel like a Billy Joel song here.

And finally, it was Gen. Petraus and the surge.

Here's where the boy crying wolf comes in. The right-wing cried "gold" everytime the Bush administration announced a new "turning point." But everybody except Haliburton and Blackstone Security stopped listening to announcements from Bush.

Then, finally, something good happened. Sunni insurgents in Anbar province have switched sides and are now fighting with American soldiers against al-Qaida. It's definitely forward movement and there are even sharp little promotional nicknames for it like "Anbar Awakening." Perhaps there's the gold.

But Americans are waving their hands in disgust if they're responding at all. "Fool me five times/ I'm not listening anymore." And who can blame them? If they cared, people would ask why the good news in Anbar would be evidence of the surge being successful if the Sunni side switching didn't result from American military action. Wasn't the surge supposed to bring security to Baghdad? Violence has been increasing there again. The Shiite militias are still just as much a threat as before and the Iraqi government is just as incompetent. All the surge has done is move some pieces around on the board. Again! The right doesn't have answers to these questions. They just want to point to "Anbar Awakening" and should "gold" at the top of their lungs.

And that's why nobody is listening to them. The Iraq War is the same one step forward/two steps back that it's been since the capture of Saddam in 2003. The right just doesn't get it or doesn't want to get it and that's why they're waking up to the same reality of popular disgust with the war. And that's what the right will continue to get until they embrace the fact that the war's a disaster and stop being such preening assholes to boot.

Bush Plays Chicken with Republicans

Elizabeth Dole came out against the surge yesterday and she joins Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Domenici, John Warner, Gordon Smith, and Chuck Hagel as Republican senators who have decided that the surge isn't going to work.

How is President Bush responding.

Of course, he sent Stephen Hadley up to Capital Hill on a "scouting mission" to sound out Republican senators about the war. That's right, the president is now scouting the Republicans as if they were an opposing baseball team, the political opposition, or an enemy army.

Why isn't President Bush friends with Republican senators. Evidently, the Bush administration has been just as high-handed and demeaning in their dealings with Republican office holders as they've been with Democrats.

And Bush's underlying strategy with Republicans in the Senate is the same as with the Democrats. He's setting up a game of chicken where he's daring the Republicans to vote with the Democrats. First, he dared the Democrats to cut off war funding because polls showed that voters did not want resolutions to end war funding.

However, when the Dems caved, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi found out the hard way that cutting off funding was much more popular than the war itself. They're still taking a beating for it.

Now President Bush is daring Republicans to support Democratic resolutions. And it might work for a while. Congressional Republicans have been pushed into a box where anything they do will be unpopular with big constituencies. Supporting President Bush and the war makes them anathema to 2/3rds of the public while opposing the surge ticks off their core conservative support.

But President Bush could also find himself daring Republicans to override his vetoes.

I, David Vitter

There's a scene in I, Claudius where Augustus lines up the staff at his palace and gradually discovers that every man there has had sex with his daughter Julia. That's kind of what's happening to Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana. Not only was he on the DC madam's phone list, Vitter apparently hung out in the brothels of New Orleans. It may be the case that reporters will have a hard time finding prostitutes who haven't had sex with Vitters.

U.S. Senator David Vitter visited a Canal Street brothel several times beginning in the mid-1990s, paying $300 per hour for services at the bordello after he met the madam at a fishing rodeo that included prostitutes and other politicians, according to Jeanette Maier, the "Canal Street Madam" whose operation was shut down by federal investigators in 2001.

But thank God! Vitters did oppose gay marriage.

Protein Wisdom Bites the Dust

It looks like RSI's encounter with Proteinwisdom was too much for right-wing blogger Jeff Goldstein. He appears to have closed up shop. From the appearance of Goldstein's endorsement list though, it looks like the fluff right is a going concern. Just what the world needs!

Is the Right-Wing a Cancer on Our Country? (revised, expanded, and linked)

Over the last week, I've had a lot of contact with the right-wingers at proteinwisdom.com (which now seems to have gone out of business). It's hard to describe their viewpoint. They're not evangelicals because there's no mention of religion at all. They're not necessarily neo-cons, and they make a special point of disavowing Limbaugh and Coulter. They're supportive of President Bush but don't talk about Bush anymore than Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney. Maybe Bush is taboo. Maybe the Bush brand has gone out of style.

Instead, the main motif of proteinwisdom is making fun of the left and the blog just bristles with little satires, inside jokes, put downs and demeaning little nicknames for people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald. Certainly, they think they're hilarious. Blogger Dan Collins emphasized the hiliariousness of it all in a reply to me last night.

But, it's basically fluff. So, the fluff right it is.

However, one of their bloggers, Darlene Click, did get upset with me for referring to the right-wing as a "cancer" on American society. To be fair, I'll be glad to concede that I'm not worried about the fluff right here. They're not active enough and don't care much about anything beyond their own self-esteem to be much of a danger to anybody.

Why then, is the right-wing a cancer on American society?

1. Several prominent right-wing authors have been experimenting with ideas for eliminating democracy as we know it in the United States. These include Harvey Mansfield's justification of one-man rule, Thomas Sowell's yearning for a military coup, Newt Gingrich's proposal to weaken the protections in the first amendment, and another Newt idea to establish military tribunals for domestic war dissenters.

Figures like Robert Bork (for example in Slouching Toward Gomorrah) have been complaining for decades about federal guarantees for First Amendment and due process rights. Others have been critical of the evolution of popular culture, the ethic of tolerance (especially Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind), and the further democratization involved in the feminist and gay rights movements. The right is also suspicious of political dissent and there was a lot of talk among conservatives of treason among Iraq war opponents and mounting military tribunals to try and hang senators like Carl Levin of Michigan.

Much as they admire the flag and the military, the right-wing has been dissatisfied with the broad democratizing trends of American society for a long time. Now prominent right-wing spokespeople are talking about taking away fundamental rights and overthrowing democratic institutions. That makes them a threat to American society.

But what kind of threat? Given that the American right is largely a native growth, the right-wing can't be considered an external threat in the manner of al-Qaeda. Likewise, the right isn't exactly contemplating treason (although launching a military coup obviously would be treasonous). Instead, the publications speculating about the overthrow of American democracy suggest that the right is an internal growth that is beginning to pose a threat to the health and the life of whole system.

Cancer is a good word for that kind of growth.

2. The right-wing is pushing for more wars in both the short and the long term. Specifically, the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute are pushing the Bush administration to go to war with Iran before their term end. A war with Iran would be a war about nothing. Of course, the right has blown up Iran's nuclear program, the $200 mill they give Hezbollah (we give the Israelis $6 billion), and their accusations of Iranian aid to the Shiite militias in Iraq into the second coming of the Nazi blitzkrieg across Europe. If fact, the Iranians are a military non-entity and would still be a military non-entity if they had the bomb. Iran spends $6 billion compared to our $573 billion on defense. The right's primary idea in invading Iraq was to provide a secure base for intimidating or invading Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. But with the Iraq mission blowing up in our faces, there's no a longer a reason to finger Iran as the next in the long line of Hitlers we have to fight.

Because the right would like the U. S. to be a militarized society in general, there was relief in some conservative quarters (like Andrew Sullivan in his warmongering days) that the 9-11 attacks shook us out of our frivolous lives. The right's warmongering is closely related to its rejection of democracy. The goal of the right as expressed by the Project for the New American Century was for the U. S. to dominate every corner of the world and be willing to go to war with every competitor for regional influence like China, Iran, or Russia. The key is domination. The neo-cons wanted to establish global relations of domination that mirrored the domestic domination of the right projected by Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. What happened is that warmongering made global terrorism stronger while weakening the American military and dividing American society. Much like the demand to dominate American society, the warmongering demand to dominate the rest of the world turned out to be a kind of cancer on us.
3. The final cancerous dimension of the right they oppose the contemporary meaning of "the creed" in Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal." The currently fashionable bigotries are prejudices against Muslims and immigrants. Ann Coulter sums up right-wing religious bigotry succinctly when she demands that the U. S. invade Muslim countries and either kill Muslims or convert them to Christianity. She also captures conservative anger over immigration when she characterizes the United States as a "roach motel" for Mexican immigrants. Nice girl, that Ann. The conservative movement is also the home for white racist sentiment, homophobia, and hostility to women's rights. The worst thing about conservatives on these issues is that they keep finding compelling new ways to package and promote their bigotries. The most prominent packaging effort was William Bennett's repackaging of hostility to African-Americans as "color-blindness." Bennett was so successful that "color-blind racism" has become the dominant form of racism in the U. S. But the same kind of creative bigotry can be seen in the campaigns against gay rights and abortion. In many ways, the right-wing has turned the defense of traditional racial, gender, and sexual-orientation hierarchies into a on-going an on-going crusade against contemporary America.

As the Bush years wind down, the right-wing is beginning to coalesce against American democracy in all its forms. I'm not quite sure that they are an immediate (clear and present) danger to the American way of life and I believe that the failure of the Iraq War has arrested the progress of the right on several fronts. But it's hard for me to see the right as anything but a cancer on American society.

Gotta Love Mother Love

It was definitely hot in Philadelphia today, so hot my mother called me from upstate New York to see if I was okay. She'd heard reports about there being heat alerts here.

Actually, it wasn't quite as hot as I thought it would be. I even cooked in at my B & B although that looks like a mistake.

So, after telling my mom I was fine, we talked a little about the upcoming family reunion where my brothers, sisters, and I (at least the ones talking to each other) get together with our kids.

Then I thanked her for being concerned about whether her 53 year-old son could handle the heat.

Gotta love mother love.

Colin Powell Gives Me That Nauseous Feeling

The Times of London reports that Colin Powell spent 2 1/2 hours trying to talks President Bush out of invading Iraq.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

In that light, Powell should have resigned rather than continuing as Secretary of State. Powell doesn't say whether he spoke with Bush before or after his own dramatic UN presentation that turned the American public in favor of invasion. If he spoke with Bush before the UN presentation, Powell bears enormous responsibility for justifying an invasion he didn't believe in. In my opinion, that would make Powell just as culpable for the war as George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Paul Wolfowitz. In fact, one could argue that Powell would have had a greater culpability because lack of public support might have forced Bush and Cheney to call off their invasion.

Even if Powell talked with Bush after his UN presentation, he still should have resigned. A resignation would have stiffened the backs of the Democrats (who really needed it), given legitimacy to the anti-war movement, and perhaps pushed a couple per cent of the vote to John Kerry in 2004. That's all speculative, but Powell could have given alternative scenarios a much better chance is he had left the Bush administration in protest.

By the way, Powell isn't helping his reputation or legacy through these revelations. Just thinking about it makes me nauseous.

After Maliki, the Deluge

It looks like the government of Nouri al-Maliki is getting ready to collapse in Iraq. An umbrella group called "The Iraq Project" is preparing a no-confidence vote on the Maliki government for July 15. The "Iraq Project" is led by Sunni politicians and probably includes the Kurds and secular Shiites. According to a CBS Report, their basic idea is to put technocrats rather than political party people in charge of government ministries.

CBS doesn't mention this, but there was talk last January and February of the Bush administration trying to ease Maliki out in favor of "a moderate alliance." It sounds like "The Iraq Project" is the same group. The Bush wants a more moderate and secular government in Iraq for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, Shiite religious parties like Maliki's Dawa Party, Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc, and SCIRI (Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council) all have close ties with Iran and would be extremely angry at an American attack on Iran. That serves to constrain American military action against the Iranians.

Another important consideration for the Bush administration is that the Shiite religious parties are barely tolerant of the American military presence in Iraq and will want all American troops out at the first glimpse of stability. The Bush administration views Sunni politicians, the Kurds, and Ayad Allawi's secular Shiites as more friendly to American interests.

Finally, the leading role of the Shiite religious parties in the government has resulted in the infiltration of the Shiite militias into government ministries, the police, and the Iraqi Army. As a result, the government has been heavily implicated in the Shiite death squads that have been targeting Sunni communities around Iraq.

So, replacing the Shiite religious parties with a secular coalition more attuned to American interests would be a good thing. No?

Definitely not! In fact, it would be the biggest disaster we've fobbed off on the Iraqis yet.

First, there would be the decision-making problems. The kind of moderate alliance projected by the Iraq Project would have such a diverse membership and so many conflicting interests that decision-making would be paralyzed the moment the enthusiasm of taking power wore off. If people think Maliki is indecisive, wait to you see his moderate successor.

Moreover, the Iraq Project has almost no popular base. The key asset of the Shiite religious parties has always been that they have a strong political base among the majority Shiite population. To the contrary, the Sunni politicians are not even as much of a force among the Sunni population as the criminal gangs allied with al-Qaeda. Ayad Allawi's party doesn't have much support either. The only part of the Iraq Project that has popular support is the Kurdish segment. Having no popular base means that nobody is going to be loyal to the Iraq Project during hard times.

And what else is there in Iraq but hard times?

Of course, the worst problem with the Iraq Project is that it will result in the alienation of the majority Shiite population from the government. That's bad enough in any case, but there are tens of thousands of men in the militias connected to the Shiite political parties. Because the Shiite religious parties are in power, those men are connected to the government. What's going to happen to the Shiite militias when the Iraq Project is in charge?

Are they just going to lay down their arms?

Not likely. But any attempt to forcibly disarm the militias would create even higher levels of sectarian strife in Iraq. The Shiite militias and the whole Shiite population would lose their stake in governing and gain enormous incentives for armed rebellion. In many ways, the Sunni resurrection has run it's course as Sunni tribal leaders have decided the al-Qaeda is even worse than the American occupiers. If the Iraq Project gains power, there is an excellent chance that the Sunni insurrection will be succeeded by a Shiite insurrection.

The current government is a prescription for failure--The Iraq Project is a prescription for disaster.

1st Year Best of RSI: The Bedtime with Dick Cheney Series

I wrote a three-part response to the Scooter Libby conviction emphasizing my concern, and the concern of everyone on the left, for the health of Dick Cheney. My daughter Katy likes "Kumbaya Dick Cheney" the best, but my favorite is "Sleep in Heavenly Peace."

Good-Night Dick Cheney

Ever since Dick Cheney was attacked in Afghanistan, there have been a lot of reports about people on the left who would rather see Dick Cheney dead.

I don't believe it.

My left-wing friends and I bear bear nothing but good will toward the greatest vice-president since Al Gore. In fact, we at Red State Impressions are so concerned about Cheney's health that I flew to Washington personally to tuck him into bed and read him a story tonight.

Here's some lines I read from the children's classic, Margaret Wise Brown's "Good Night Moon."

Good Night Moon.
In the great green room
There was a telephone.
And a red balloon
And a picture of--
The cow jumping over the moon
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs
And two little kittens
And a pair of mittens
And a little toy house
And a young mouse
And a comb and a brush
and a bowl full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering "hush."

I told the Vice-President that I would be reading "Winken, Blinken, and Nod" tomorrow night, but he preferred "The Three Little Pigs" instead. It's one of his favorites. If anyone has a bedtime story that they want me to read Dick Cheney, please reply below. RSI

Kumbaya Dick Cheney

I feel so sorry for Vice-President Dick Cheney. He's had such a tough time lately. The combination of the bombing in Afghanistan and the blood clot in his leg were bad enough.

Then today, Scooter Libby, one of his closest associates was convicted of four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. It must be so hard for Dick Cheney to find out that Scooter Libby is a . . . CRIMINAL.

Gracious me!

I'm sure that Dick Cheney's going to have a hard time sleeping tonight and we definitely don't want him to get dependent on sleeping pills like the first President Bush.

So, what I'd like all of my fellow leftists to do is join your hands together while we sing "Kumbaya,"a traditional Gulla song from African-American settlements on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.

I'm sure Dick Cheney will appreciate this gesture from his left-wing friends. Like everyone from Wyoming, Dick Cheney has a deep appreciation for the Gulla dialect and black culture in general. I admire him so much!

Everybody ready.

KUMBAYA
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya

Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbayah

Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya

Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya

Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya

Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya
Oh Dick Cheney, kumbaya

I'm sure Dick Cheney appreciated our personal touch in revising the song a little bit. And I know that Dick Cheney will always have a warm spot in his heart for all the liberals and leftists who helped him sleep tonight. God bless.

Dick Cheney's Heavenly Peace

Few people know what it's like to be responsible for the suffering, maiming, and deaths of thousands and tens of thousands. I remember reading something once about how WWI flying aces were traumatized by the screams of those they shot down. Think how heavily the deaths of thousands would weigh on our minds, especially when we're asleep and our excuses, justifications, rationalizations, and other defenses are much more relaxed than they are while waking.

While we sleep, the horrors we visit on others haunt us whether we killed by accident, negligence, or according to plan and it would take a super-human evil on the order of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao not to be paralyzed by the dream spectacle of other people's suffering.

Fortunately for our country, Dick Cheney is not such a man. A sensitive man, Dick Cheney feels the death of each of the 3,185 American soldiers who have died or been maimed in Iraq--their being shot, blown apart by IED's as they ride in their Hummers, drowned in the Tigris or Euphrates, or mangled to such an extent that they had to have large parts of their arms and legs amputated.

Knowing that he was largely responsible for sending those troops, Dick Cheney sees American soldiers wounded and dead every night in his sleep.

Shakespeare portrayed everyone killed by Richard III as visiting Richard in his sleep before the Battle of Bosworth Field, reciting Richard's crimes, and telling him to "fall thy edgeless sword: despair, and die!" In the same way, the American men and women killed or maimed in Iraq visit Dick Cheney to remind him of the half-truths and lies by which he promoted the invasion, his refusal to think through the problems of occupation, and the recklessness and arrogance with which he wasted their lives and continues to waste the lives of their friends and comrades.

The same is the case with the more than 50,000 Iraqis who have died as a result of the U. S. invasion. Poor Dick Cheney! There must be spectral riots as the shades of the Iraq War dead fight each other for the opportunity to haunt a little bit of his sleep.

It must be an awful thing.

That's why Dick Cheney needs our help. Unlike those on the right, we on the left also feel the burden that the death and suffering in Iraq imposes on Dick Cheney and all of us. Because our minds are not tied up in rationalizing the war or justifying the Bush administration, the shocking brutality of the situation in Iraq strikes us harder than it strikes the warmongers.

Therefore, it's up to us to help Dick Cheney as much as we can. Some on the left might argue that Dick Cheney's own suffering would be a small price for him to pay for all the suffering he's caused and there's a way I can agree with that. It would be an "eye for an eye" vengeful kind of justice for Dick Cheney to experience some of the pain that he has dished out one way or another in Iraq.

But, in fact, Dick Cheney could never "pay in full" for what's happened in Iraq. One person can never suffer enough for the tens of thousands of deaths that Cheney has helped cause.

More importantly for our own piece of mind, there is a justice of love and mercy that has a higher claim on us than the law of revenge. It's this higher sense of justice that is the most distinctive contribution of Christianity to modern life. The ability to love those who are not "our own" or even the opposite of our own, is what allows us to empathize with our soldiers even if we disagree with the war and feel the suffering of the Iraqi people even though we live a very different kind of life.

The higher law of justice should also allow us to exercise a care even over the Dick Cheney's of the world, especially because he emerged out of our society and our way of life. It's the Christian vision of love and mercy as the highest and truest form of justice that leads me to suggest "Silent Night" as our comforting song for Dick Cheney tonight. Dick Cheney certainly is haunted by those who have died for his war, but we on the left can visit a little "heavenly peace" to his soul by singing him this song.

Altogether now.

Silent Night
Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon Virgin,
Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.

Silent night, holy night!
Shepherds quake at the sight.
Glories stream from heaven afar
Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia,
Christ the Savior is born!
Christ the Savior is born.

Silent night, holy night!
Son of God love's pure light.
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus Lord, at Thy birth.
Jesus Lord, at Thy birth

Amen to that!

Good-night Dick Cheney.

1st Year Best of RSI: Jesus and the Refusal of the Dispossessed

Matthew 5:39-41."But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil . . . And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain."

Not resisting evil means more than just turning the other cheek; it means giving enemies or evil people more than they seek. Jesus demands that we have a constant will to self-sacrifice and views humiliations such as loss of property or demands for menial service as special tests of our willingness to sacrifice ourselves. Being humiliated in these ways tempts us to reassert our own dignity. To the contrary, Jesus demands that we not only not give into that temptation, but that we go the extra mile in our sacrifice for our opponents and enemies.

In the United States, giving to the poor, downtrodden, and marginal is a particularly difficult test of our willingness to self-sacrifice. In the RedStates and elsewhere, people give gladly for the sake of their companies, communities, families, work, and churches. However, any effort to consider poor people, blacks, gays, immigrants, women, or the disabled is viewed as a special kind of burden. It's like those of us in the white mainstream think of the dispossessed as being thieves and oppressors and are always imagining ourselves as needing to reassert our dignity in the face of their demands.

Whether the benefit is recognition of basic rights, providing access to social status, recognition of employee rights, or providing any kind of material benefit like health care or public assistance, Americans often treat any consideration for the poor and marginalized as the same kind of special burden as Jesus poses in the above quote. And there can be little doubt that we as a nation fail to meet Jesus' standard of giving the dispossessed more than what they ask for.

Much of what specifically characterizes the RedStates is a constant resentment over anything that is sacrificed for those outside the sacred circle of the mainstream. Liberals and the Blue States don't do that much better, but resentment over the prospect of sacrificing for those outside the mainstream is one of the main reasons that the right-wing has so much political success in this region. This is another way in which the RedStates reject Jesus and it is helpful to keep in mind the Christian rejection of Jesus when seeking to understand the conservatism of the RedStates.

1st Year Best of RSI: A Love Song for Kim Jong-Il

This was my first post for Red State Impressions. Obviously, our president hasn't done anything to dispel this suspicion.

A Love Song for Kim Jong-Il

Perhaps it's overly simplistic to look at Bush's intelligence initiatives strictly in terms of the violations of the U. S. Constitution and American Law. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why the Bush administration has been so anxious to violate every American and international law they can find? Why do they specifically ignore their own legal experts and go out of their way to ignore their obligations to Congress? What does Bush get out of it?

My conclusion is that Bush is really engaged in an elaborate mating ritual with Kim Jong-Il, the "Dear Leader" of North Korea. For the last five years, Bush has been sending a wide variety of signals that he's interested in Kim's affection--love songs for Kim Jong-Il, if you will.

There's been the bellicose denunciations of Kim, the refusal to talk, and the withdrawal of aid. Kim eats this stuff up. He doesn't want food aid for his country anyway. Guantanamo? It might not be based on a North Korean model, but it was sure to get Kim excited. Nothing like adding a little torture to your everyday supermax confinement to get Kim's attention. With the Hoekstra letter, it looks like Bush is revealing that he has no more respect for the law than Kim.

Personally, it looks like President Bush is preparing the ground for a move to North Korea after he leaves office. That way, Bush can be with a "man's man," live in a country with a "really strong" executive, and finally escape the "liberal media."