Rudy: The Candidate of White Racism

A Sign of Beltwayness: Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Washington University, publishes a blog entitled Marginal Revolution: Small Steps Toward a Much Better World. One way that you tell that Cowen is a beltway guy is that he writes on art funding and ethnic cuisine. These kinds of posting topics are quite different from the frequent writing on religion and racism in a red-blooded, red-state blog like RSI.

The Foreign Policy Tide: Cowen writes that the continuing attention on the Iraq War helps the Republicans because a focus on foreign policy is always a help for the GOP. In light of this consideration, Cowen predicts that Rudy Giuliani will be the next president. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Iraq is a stone around the neck of the Republican Party and will be a special burden to the Republican presidential nominee. The last polls I saw indicated that disapproval of Bush's Iraq policy stands at 67% while support for Democratic bring home the troops plans sometimes runs in the 70's. If the Republicans win in 2008, it will be despite their foreign policy not because of it.

Rudy's Long Shot. I have to admit that I have a hard time taking Rudy Giuliani seriously as a presidential candidate. Given that Giuliani has surged at least 15 points ahead of John McCain without really doing much of anything, that's obviously mistaken. Tyler Cowen predicts that Giuliani will become president. However, Giuliani's shot at the presidency depends on domestic policy and his reputation as a mayor who adapted a policy of aggressive policing of black communities, defended New York city cops when they pumped 41 bullets into the entirely innocent Amadou Dialo, and showed nothing but contempt for black civic and political leaders when they protested against these kinds of things. The implicit promise of a Giuliani presidency for right-wing columnists (here's Rich Tucker at Townhall.com) is that Rudy will be just as aggressive towards Arabs, illegal immigrants, and other non-white populations as he was toward African-Americans in New York. In other words, Rudy's hope to win the presidency is that he is the man who can successfully apply the racial archetypes of white people to the America's conduct of the war on terror.

The RSI prognosis: To the contrary, I believe that the Bush administration's failure in Iraq has served to lessen the power of the Dirty Harry racial ideal of the hyper-aggressive white cop imposing order on a criminalized black population. The loosening grip of that kind of racial archetype on the white population and the mainstream media is one of the reasons why a black guy like Barack Obama can be seriously considered as a presidential candidate. Consequently, I don't think that Giuliani will be able to ride traditional white racial symbols into the White House even if he is able to sneak away with the Republican nomination.

Faith-Based Government

The mainstream media scoffs at the President of Gambia for saying that his ancestors had revealed an aids cure to him in a dream. Unsurprisingly, the media doesn't believe the Gambian health minister when he claims that the president has developed "herbal concoctions that are able to treat and cure patients with HIV-virus, which have been proven within all medical and laboratory parameters."

Nevertheless, I'd feel a lot more comfortable about Western superiority if my own President had not "become convinced that he is stronger than Churchill because [he] "has God" and Churchill didn't. "

Not that I want Bush to start listening to his ancestors either.

Are We Ready?

Chris Rock responding to a question about whether America is ready for an African-American president: "It's ready for a retarded president, why would it be ready for an African-American president?"

I've never thought that Bush was any less intelligent than Gore or Kerry, but there is something to the idea that Bush's presidency has helped prepare the country for an African-American or female presidency. Because Bush has worked so hard to project a sense of regular "white guyness," the failure of his administration has opened the door for Obama and Hillary to be taken seriously. The fact that Bush has also delegitimized appeals to "regular guy" white masculinity hampers white male candidates like Mitt Romney. It also tarnishes the ability of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani to bank on their reputations as "heroes."

By making it more difficult to appeal to symbols of white masculinity, Bush has levelled the playing field for female candidates like Hillary and African-Americans like Obamal.

The Loser's Ball

Knight Lost! Right-wingers everywhere must be mourning today's defeat of Bobby Knight Texas Tech University by the blue-staters at Boston College. Bobby Knight is a perfect right-winger, in other words a bullying, arrogant prick and supreme hypocrite even if he is a great coach. By the way, I went to a Knight camp at West Point as a high school sophomore in Upstate New York. Like everybody else in Upstate, I was a Knight-worshipper when I arrived at West Point for two weeks of camping. But it was easy to see what a jerk he was even then.

Duke Lost! As a North Carolina alum, I've sworn a blood oath against the Duke Blue Devils and I am now hard into a bottle of scotch to celebrate their loss to Virginia Commonwealth. Not really! I'm allergic to most booze. But I can't stand Duke. It's bad enough that Coach K is a Knight protege, but he looks like Adolf Hitler with that little curl in his mouth. And then there's those super-smug Duke students who any decent person would want to see in jail even if the lacrosse team wasn't a bunch of rapists. To top it all off, my ex-wife is also a Duke history professor. So, I'm double-happy when they lose.

The Bush-Rove-Gonzales Axis of Failure--The two most Bush-identified of all the Bushies in government are Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales and they are getting absolutely hammered in the fired prosecutor scandal. It's hard to say where speculation is going to go next--maybe talk of a perjury indictment for Gonzales' false testimony about the fired prosecutors to Congress or an obstruction of justice count for Rove's interfering with Carol Lam's investigation of Republican corruption. But it's going to get ugly. As Salon demonstrates, Rove has been up to his eyeballs in using government prosecutors for phony investigations of Democratic office-holders ever since his days as a punk political consultant in Texas.

But I'd still hate to see the dough-faced Rove resign. In the final analysis, Karl Rove is going to be the man most responsible for the Democratic Landslide of 2008. I'm hoping that he gets to watch the outcome of his handiwork from the Oval Office with President Bush.

So much for legacy!

The Indoor Golf Capital of the World

Yeah, golf baby! My university, Morehead State University in Morehead, KY, is raising $1.6 mill to purchase Eagle Trace Golf course in Sharkey, KY which is centrally located in the middle of nowhere. This is the case even though the university already owns one golf course and even though Eagle Trace is a big money-loser.

My university president explained the golf course purchase by saying that Eagle Trace would be a tourist attraction as the only 18 hole golf course in this part of the state.

Sure, golf would be a tourist attraction for the one month out of the year that it's not constantly raining.

Maybe the University should think about building a network of indoor put-put courses instead and make Morehead the "Indoor Golf Capital of the World."

Well, I have to get my umbrella so I can go out in the rain to take my daughter to see Steve Henry, as uninspiring a gubernatorial candidate as you can imagine, a guy whose main claim to fame is that he married a former Miss America.

Update: Steve Henry didn't show and his place was taken by a University of Louisville undergraduate who almost knew what he was talking about.

Hillary and the Coming Pooper Scooper Era

Last night, Hillary Clinton came out with a fairly nuanced position on Iraq, arguing that she would keep some troops in the country to guard against al-Qaeda, protect the Kurds, and prevent invasions from neighboring countries.

Matthew Iglesias expressed a rather respectful position of general disagreement.

I'm going to have to think about it though. Maybe I'll do some of that thinking here

The overriding reality for the next president if he or she is a Democrat is that they're going to have to devote most of their energies to cleaning up the Bush mess. The day Bush leaves office, the pooper scooper era is going to begin.

In that sense, Hillary Clinton is to be commended for outlining a coherent position on Iraq even though that position is hard to swallow for anti-war types like myself. Her idea is that American troops would serve as a kind of ballast to prevent the Iraq situation from getting horribly worse while the Shiites and the Sunnis negotiate or fight their way out of their problems.

It's not a bad idea especially because Hillary acknowledges (unlike neo-con delusionals) that the U. S. is not going to be able to dictate a winner in Iraq's sectarian conflicts.

But I agree more with the Pelosi/Murtha position that the American troop presence in Iraq should be limited to training Iraqis while the bulk of American forces would be withdrawn to Kuwait and other Middle Eastern spots and put into a wait and see mode concerning any possible al-Qaeda take-over in Anbar. Having American forces close by would deter Turkish or Saudi invasion while it might turn out that a large-scale withdrawal of American troops actually would diminish support for al-Qaeda in Anbar.

The Pelosi/Murtha position is hardly risk free, but I believe that minimizing the American mission in Iraq is the better way to go.

Speaking Truth on O'Reilly

Dennis Miller on a Bill O'Reilly segment plugging his new radio show: "I don't exactly know what's going on." Maybe he needs a better slogan.

Turning the Tables on Neo-Conservatism

In today's post for Salon, liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald savaged a dinner recently held by neo-conservative luminaries for President George Bush. Greenwald highlights a long list of ridiculous and/or failed neo-con ideas like George Bush's special closeness to God, the ultimate success of the war, and the extreme necessity of confronting Iran that made neo-con luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol look like complete idiots. George Bush looked like an even bigger idiot for taking "lessons" from the neo-cons in precisely these bankrupt ideas.

This is what the world is like for the neo-conservatives and the Bush administration in general. What Rush Limbaugh used to be to the Clintons, the liberal blogosphere is now to the neo-cons. The neo-cons can't sit down for a little self-congratulatory ritual without having liberal bloggers like Greenwald pummel them for their arrogance, hypocrisy, and lazy thinking. The lazy thinking of the neo-cons especially caught the eye of Jacob Weisburg as he trashed the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute for Slate.

The same thing goes with neo-con opinion journalism. A few weeks ago, a neo-con think tanker named Frank Gaffney proposed the seemingly clever idea of hanging anti-war Democratic Congressmen like Carl Levin only to find himself hammered by Greenwald and Alan Colmes (of all people) on Fox.

I don't want to say that the impact of Greenwald or any other liberal blogger has Limbaugh's kind of audience. The last figures I saw had Limbaugh's audience at 13 million. However, the liberal blogosphere has succeeded in turning neo-conservatives into professional punching bags.

Speaking of Sobriety

The Bush administration should get off the sauce. There's an Associated Press report from Baghdad that the Bush administration is pushing for "a national front to take over for the political bloc now supporting [Prime Minister] al-Maliki."

Dreams die hard with people who are drunk on their own fantasies and it looks like the Bush administration is pushing yet again for a secular government in Iraq. The Bush administration's idea is that a secular government would be more broadly representative, less closely connected to Iran, and a better model of democracy for other Arab countries than a Shiite government.

All of that sounds good in theory, but there is hardly any support for secular government in Iraq. Perhaps the Bush administration hasn't noticed that Iraq has become a much more religious place since the invasion in 2003 and Ayad Allawi's secular party got Joe Lieberman numbers in the last Iraqi election.

If the Bush administration replaced al-Maliki with a secular alliance, they would be plucking "a thousand dangers" on their heads to paraphrase Shakespeare's Richard II. Most importantly, they would be exchanging a one front war against the Sunni insurgents for a two front war against Sunni insurgents and the Shiite political parties and their militias. Bush and his people want a war against the Shiite militias, but they forget that the militias have the support of the Shiite population. So, going to war against the Shiite militias would be the same as waging war against the whole Shiite population.

The Bush administration is also under the delusion that an Allawi secular government would be a strong government. How could that be? An Allawi government would be a loose coalition of mutually suspicious secularists, Sunni moderates, and Kurds that wouldn't have popular support among eithe the 60% of Shiites or the 15% of Sunnis. If the Bush administration thinks that the al-Maliki government is weak and indecisive, wait until they see how weak and indecisive a secular government would be. Given the mutual incompatibility of the Sunnis, Kurds, and secular groups, any secular government would be even more paralyzed than the current regime.
Another problem is that a secular government would be seen in Iraq as even more of an American puppet than the current regime. Such a perception would further weaken any secular government. Especially because it would be true.

As has always been the case with Iraq, the Bush administration seems determined to take a bad situation and make it even worse.

Perhaps Bush should follow Pope Benedict's advice and govern with more sobriety.

Toward a Sober Pope

Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement yesterday that, among other things, called for greater "sobriety" during Catholic Mass. When I mentioned this over the breakfast table, quick-witted and Catholic Mrs. RSI asked if that meant the Church wouldn't be using wine for mass anymore.
Myself, I think the Catholic Church would be more sober if they gave up the idea that wine and bread could be transfigured into the blood and body of Jesus.

Few things are less sober than cannibalism!

The Doughfaces vs the Square-Jaws

Today, Alberto Gonzales assistant D. Kyle Sampson resigned over his role in the prosecutor purge. It was a case of the assistant taking the fall for the boss all the way. Sampson wrote an e-mail on criteria for evaluating federal prosecutors that linked the purge to the White House. So he had to go.

But, if you look at the pictures of Sampson at TPM Muckraker and CNN, you realize that he's a doughy-faced dead ringer for Karl Rove in the same vein as the even more doughy-faced Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, and some of the right-wingers on my campus. A lot of preachers and priests also have that same chubby little boy in old man's bodies kind of look. They all look like evil assistants to the arch-villain in James Bond movies. You can almost see them clearing out brush in George Bush's toy ranch to prove how tough they are.

This is where I wish that I could figure out how to put pictures into this blog. That's because David Iglesias (picture here) and most of the other fired federal prosecutors look like ram-rod straight district attorneys--no-nonsense, no irony, true, blue, all-American, hero types. The Pat Tillmans of the legal profession. Even Carol Lam looks like a macho hero compared to Limbaugh, Rove, or D. Kyle Sampson.

Expanding on an earlier post, the Bush administration has been characterized by an endless battle between doughfaces like Karl Rove and D. Kyle Sampson who waste their lives trying to prove how tough they are and principled square-jaw good guys like David Iglesias and Carol Lam.

As the Bush administration falls apart, it's obvious that the square-jaws are winning.

Polishing His Pandering Skills

When Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana endorsed Rudy Giuliani for President, he emphasized that "it's very clear to me that he's not running for president to advance any liberal social agenda."

I think that's safe to say.

But I wonder if Vitter asked Giuliani what he would do about New Orleans? Or Iraq?

Of course, Rudy might be running for president to advance his pandering skills more than anything else.

Bush vs Republicans in the Bureaucracy

This isn't my usual posting, but I'm in a paper grading frenzy right now. Here's Arianna Huffington on the prosecutor purge.

Not that we should be surprised by any of this. It's just one more vile example of how Bush treats every part of the executive branch: instead of protecting the environment, the E.P.A. is used to weaken it; the V.A. screws veterans; the State Department campaigns against diplomacy; the F.D.A. undermines food safety. And now the injustice at Justice. The Bushies have a long history of playing fast and loose with the law -- evading it, stretching it, getting around it, weakening it, ignoring it, nullifying it.

In most of these cases, the most determined opposition to the Bush agenda has come from Republicans in the federal bureaucracy.

You Know Things Are Bad When

Fred Thompson is talking about running for president. Today, the actor and former senator from Tennessee who hasn't been in politics since 2003 came out of the closet as a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

That's like George Foreman coming out of his million-year retirement to box again.

Talk about signs that prominent Republicans don't believe that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich could win a general election. This is interesting because McCain and Giuliani are running at least even with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the polls. The Tennessee Republicans promoting the Fred Thompson boomlet, Howard Baker for instance, must think that the good poll numbers are an illusion.

And they're probably right.

The Fred Thompson speculation also raises the interesting possibility of all the national contenders losing steam and local Republicans making some noise as favorite sons of their states, regions, or micro-constituencies. You could have Fred Thompson from Tennessee, Tommy Thompson from Wisconsin, and Jeb Bush from Florida. You could also have Chuck Hagel representing both Republican anti-war voters, and Douglas Feith campaigning on behalf of incompetents everywhere.

Now that's a meltdown I'd want to see.

Having Your Cake And Pretending to Eat It

Robert Kagan is the neo-con think tank warrior whose stunningly mediocre Of Paradise and Power helped enflame American contempt for the European orientation toward international law, negotiations, and patience during the run-up to the Iraq War. As a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Kagan got to enjoy living in Brussels far away from both the United States and the war in Iraq while pretending to eat the Europeans with his words.

Yesterday, Kagan came out with an editorial in the Washington Post defending the surge policy that was orchestrated by his brother Frederick Kagan, another battle-scarred conservative word warrior at the American Enterprise Institute.

Here's Matthew Yglesias' hilarious post on how the Kagans spread the family love around.

While The Weekly Standard has to make do with using Frederick Kagan's wife to write articles proclaiming the Kagan surge plan a success, The Washington Post believes in integrity and trots out brother Robert Kagan to do it instead. Maybe someday we can get [the deceased] Donald Kagan's take on all this. If only the whole world were made up of members of the Kagan family, then maybe George W. Bush would be a really popular president. At any rate, you're not supposed to mention Robert Kagan in polite professional punditry circles without observing that he's much smarter and a much more honest writer than your average neocon. This pearl of wisdom even has the virtue of being true. Sadly, as Glenn Greenwald exhaustively demonstrates, this really isn't saying very much. For a neocon, he has a great analytic track record on Iraq, which means his track record is horrible rather than, say, horrifyingly horrible. That he gets to slander his employers at the Post in the first graf of his terrible column merely demonstrates how nice it must be to be a conservative . . . well-worked refs are the best refs to have.

Square-Jawed Warriors Against Bushism

When the history of the decline and fall of Bushism is written, the most important opponents of the Bush agenda aren't going to be the Congressional Democrats, the mainstream media, or the left-wing blogosphere.

Instead, it's going to be square-jawed, rock-ribbed Republicans in the federal government, men and women who fell afoul of the Bush administration because of their belief in the Constitution, laws, rules, fairness, and fidelity to the best interests of the country. Spread throughout the State Department, uniformed military, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies, the square-jawed warriors were disgusted with the relentless efforts of the Bush administration to circumvent the Constitution, distort data, ignore sound analysis, and obstruct established procedures. As a result, they began to resist the people at the top. Disaffected Republican bureaucrats objected to distorted findings, leaked unjustified intelligence claims to media outlets like McClatchy, ignored hints that they needed to be more partisan, and started testifying about Bush abuses to Congress.

Braver than the Democratic leadership and mainstream media and more mature than the left-wing blogosphere, the square-jawed Republicans of the federal bureaucracy have been the most effective force in slowly grinding the Bush administration to a halt. They deserve a lot of credit. When the time came, Republican bureaucrats risked their careers and their reputations to stop the Bush administration's effort to turn the federal government into a constituent part of the Republican Party apparatus. They acted because they put a higher value on the values of democratic government than the Republican Party agenda and partisan advantage.

Hopefully, they'll receive all the credit they deserve.

Senate Democrats For Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Democrats like Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York must be highly committed to good government or at least to getting as close to good government as we can while George Bush is president. Otherwise, they wouldn't be calling for the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General.

Both Biden and Schumer know that Gonzales will be an extremely easy target for the negative ads of Democratic presidential, Senate, and House candidates if he stays in office. The torture memos, the firing of federal prosecutors, and FBI abuses of the National Security Letters--Gonzales is a living icon of Bush administration incompetence and corruption. When Democratic consultants got tired of bashing the Iraq War, they could run ads on Gonzales instead.

The ads would practically write themselves.

However, instead of seeking that kind of big partisan advantage, Senate Democrats are calling for Gonzales to resign.

That's kind of patriotism just brings a tear to my eye.

The Road To Rove

According to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, this morning's McClatchey story on the involvement of Karl Rove in the firing of federal prosecutor David Iglesias in New Mexico means that

"[w]e're now well past the point where anyone can pretend that Iglesias wasn't fired because he refused to use his office to advance the interests of the New Mexico Republican party by indicting Democrats."

Now the questioning shifts to San Diego where federal prosecutor Carol Lam was extending her corruption investigation from sad-sack Duke Cunningham to House Appropriations Committee powerhouse Rep. Jerry Lewis and into the CIA.

Did Karl Rove have Carol Lam fired to prevent further investigations into GOP corruption?

If so, that sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.

Brought to You By the Rain

A Surprising Lack of B. S. Last week at my sister-in-law's 56th birthday party, we started singing commercials for beer companies that have gone out of business. "Mabel, Black Label--Carling Black Label Beer." And "Schaefer /is the/ one beer to have when you're having more than one" and "Schlitz is a dry beer, a mellow beer, a hearty beer/blended into one beer/ a bright, light, fun beer/ Sc-c-chlitz/ Real Gusto in a Great Light Beer/ Schlitz.

We also got together a vigorous game of "Bullcrap."

Surprisingly, I didn't win.

This Beauty Sponsored By. Not having television anymore, I generally don't think much about commercials. But I was reminded yesterday when I saw a blooming pussy willow in my back yard early in the morning. My immediate reaction was to think about what a beautiful day it was going to be. But then before it clouded over and started raining.

Today, it's sunny again and the grass is beginning to spring back up. But perhaps there should be a sign that says:

"today's beauty brought to you by yesterday's rain."

David Obey vs the Anti-War Juggernaut

Thunder on the Left. There's a video out on YouTube and Fox of Rep. David Obey in a sometimes heated exchange with Tina Richards and another anti-war activist about Nancy Pelosi's current plan. Fox seriously overplays the heat of the exchange, but it is fun to watch.

A couple of points:

Needed: Good Guys on the Left. People on the left have always blamed corporate money on the ability of big business to beat liberal reformers in Congress. That's largely true, but one of the things that corporate money allows the business lobbies to do is hire extremely attractive personalities to promote business agendas--the happy warrior good-old-boy types, drinking and golf buddies, and prom queens who have a gift for making everybody comfortable around them. To the contrary, the do-gooder lobbies are often filled with abrasive, self-righteous people like these two anti-war lobbyists who have a tough time with anyone who disagrees with them. The liberal versions of Tom DeLay and Sean Hannity, these folks are often horribly ineffective at convincing people to take them seriously.

Moving the Debate to the Left. Those irritating people on the left are pretty effective right now. On election night last November, Nancy Pelosi and her team had no idea that they would be doing anything like setting deadlines to get out of Iraq. It's because of the people Obey called "idiot liberals" that Pelosi has been pushed into being more aggressive in opposing the Bush administration. Obey is irritated to no end that the anti-war left is pushing him to go much further than either the Congressional votes or public opinion will take him. However, the left deserves credit for pushing both the Congressional Democrats and public opinion a long way toward ending the war.

I See a Book in This: We on the anti-war left owe our moment in the sun to the monumental arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration. Somebody should write a book entitled How to Annoy People and Win to celebrate the coming triumph of the anti-war movement.

McCain: Frightening Authoritarian?

Reason magazine (via Matthew Yglesias) has an offputting article on the "frightening authoritarianism" of John McCain. Author Matt Walsh has a hard time deciding what makes McCain more of an authoritarian--the history of McCain's family in the Navy, the politics of patriotism that McCain developed during the 1970's, or McCain's role in pushing campaign finance reform. Walsh's efforts to smear McCain with the military history of his family were especially bothersome to me because my own heritage is a lot less noble than McCain's. It's bad enough that my grandfather on my mother's side left my mom's family during the Depression but it appears that both of my grandparents on my father's side were relentless philanderers who either abandoned (my grandmother) or practically abandoned (my grandfather) their four kids. And my abusive, misogynous, racist father isn't exactly a credit to humanity either.

To the contrary, it seems to me that John McCain has grown as much from the failures of his life as anybody could be expected to grow. In his autobiographical books, McCain took his failures as a POW (he ultimately cracked and signed a confession) and his involvement in the Keating Five as opportunities to become a better person and devote himself more fully to the good of the country. Good for McCain. In my own way, I've attempted to employ my experiences with my deeply flawed father to become a better father, better professor, and better human being. All of our families have skeletons and we all have failures in our lives. But it is possible to learn from these things and John McCain has done as well as a person could be expected.

I was never going to vote for John McCain and I'm disappointed with the non-stop pandering of his presidential campaign. At the end of the day, however, John McCain is not a frightening authoritarian in any way. In fact, he deserves a lot of credit for the way he's lived his life.

The Super-Asshole of the Week

Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias refers to Rudy Giuliani as a jerk, but "jerk" is too mild and too vague to apply to a guy like Giuliani. I prefer the term super-asshole. Lots of people can be jerks, but it takes a special kind of asshole to introduce your mistress to your wife over television (Giuliani) or let your wife know that you're divorcing her while she's in the hospital with cancer (Gingrich). A super-asshole.

The race for the GOP nomination looks like it's becoming the "Super-Asshole Challenge" with events like "Extreme Pandering," "B.A.S.S. Master Flopping," "Competitive War-Mongering," "Filling Your Closet with Skeletons," and coming before you know it--"The Ultimate Negative Ad." Republican primary voters have come to demand high standards of "Super-Assholeness" from their candidates and the Republican candidates have shown that they aim to please.

However, the Super-Asshole of the Week Award (SAWA) goes to Rev. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky who articulated the particularly creepy argument that doctors should be allowed to perform surgery on fetus' to change the sexual orientation of "gay" fetuses back to heterosexual and therefore cleanse out the "original sin." I'm not sure what's the most monstrous dimension of this idea. Readers should take their pick between the monumental hatred of gay people, the Joseph Mengele visions of the elimination of intra-uterine of supposed "deformities," or the hubris in the idea of "cleansing out original sin." Mohler apparently wants to make the Southern Baptist Convention into the lord of creation. Mohler's practically an embarrassment to heterosexuality.

Mohler's also shows a barely believable ignorance of the message of Jesus. If anything is clear from the biblical accounts, Jesus loved low-class fishermen, prostitutes, sexual sinners, and lepers as much as he was disgusted by preening, moralistic, busy-bodies like the Rev. Albert Mohler.

However you slice it, the Rev. Albert Mohler is the super-asshole of the week.

Stunning Gingrich Admission

Today, Newt Gingrich made a stunning admission while a guest on the radio program of James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, now the pre-eminent organization on the Christian Right.

That's right, Gingrich finally admitted that he wasn't God when he said that "there are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

Tsk! Tsk! The things people will do to become President!

Gingrich was ostensibly on Dobson's program to confess that he had committed adultery when he was married to his second wife Marianne. However, acknowledging that there is a god that is not an instrument for his own vision of American and human history must have been a lot tougher for a person of Newt Ginrich's world-encompassing ego.

Fortunately for Newt's newfound piety, he hasn't heard of Jesus' saying in Matthew 20:16 that "the last shall be first, and the first last."

If he knew that the Christian god didn't value winning life's competitions or imposing one's will on other people, Newt would go back to playing god himself.

Bush Scandals Unlimited

Free Falling Credibility. Every time the Bush administration thinks they've hit bottom, things get worse. The Mark Foley scandal broke just when the Bush administration thought they could curtail Democratic gains in the 2006 election. As a result, everything the Bush administration did to limit damage from other scandals, defend controversial figures like Donald Rumsfeld, and promote the war was wasted.

Killing the Surge with Scandal. The same thing's happening now with the surge. The Republicans have made a big effort to sell Gen. David Petraeus as the magician general who could turn their investment of 21,000 more troops into the political bonanza of a stable Iraq and functioning democracy. But the whole two-month public relations campaign for the surge has been forgotten as the Scooter Libby conviction, federal prosecutor purge, and Walter Reed scandal take over the headlines. The Bush administration loves to be hyper-aggressive with its enemies abroad and at home, but the triple whammy of scandals is forcing them into a defensive shell.

A Cloud in Every Silver Lining. Someone looking for a Republican silver lining might point out that having all these scandals at once blunts the impact of each scandal because of the media's short attention span. That true as far as it goes, but it's not like we can't expect more scandals from the Bush administration the future.

When you're running an unpopular renegade government, there's a cloud in every silver lining.

The Fifth Truth About the War

Four Unspeakable Truths. Jacob Weisburg of Slate magazine has a nice article out on the "four unspeakable truths about the war." For Weisburg, it's politically unspeakable that 1. the invasion of Iraq was a mistake; 2. that American troops have been victims of the Bush administration's misguided policies and incompetent execution, 3. that the lives of three thousand American troops have been wasted, and 4. that the U. S. is losing the war.

The Fifth Unspeakable Truth. The fifth unspeakable truth, something that seemingly can't be spoken by either politicians or the media, is that war opponents and the left-wing was right about the war from the beginning. The Bush administration, the right-wing, and the media made such a successful effort to stigmatize opposition to the war that nobody is yet allowed to say "you know, it was the people on the left who got it right on the war."

If the Bush administration had been half as effective in conducting the war itself, we'd be in a better situation.

The Wisdom of the French, or the U. S. Rejoins the Rest of the World

The Wisdom of the World. The American public is gradually joining the rest of the world in its opinion of the Bush administration. World public opinion has opposed the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq since the beginning and a current poll shows that 73% of those polled in 25 countries disapprove of the American role in Iraq.

The Dawn of Wisdom in America. After four years of fruitless war, the American public is now catching up to that heavy rate of disapproval with 67% disapproving of President Bush's conduct of the Iraq War in a Feb. 25 Washington Post poll.

The Greater Wisdom of the French. Of course, we still have a way to go before we match the wisdom of the French where 92% of the population disapproves of the American role in Iraq.

But we're learning.

A Quick But Expected Failure

One of the reasons that public support has coalesced around Democratic efforts to limit the surge may be that the public is paying attention to the bad news coming out of Iraq. According to Juan Cole writing in Salon, the surge may already be failing because of an aggressive series of attacks on Shiite pilgrims, big suicide bombings, and helicopter downings launched by Sunni insurgents. Insurgents respect the American military enough to avoid getting stuck on the flypaper of large-scale confrontations, but the days of "shock and awe" are long gone.

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 Chaney 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. Once 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!

Democratic Leadership: Moving the Numbers

Very few people ever have anything good to say about the Democratic leadership in Congress--either Nancy Pelosi in the House or Harry Reid in the Senate. In fact, however, House Democrats have come up with proposals to curtail the war that enjoy broad public support.

According to a USA Today Gallup poll, big majorities of the American public support Democratic ideas on Iraq. That includes requiring U. S. troops to come home if the Iraqi government fails to meet promises (77% favor-20% oppose), requiring troops to stay in the U. S. a year before being redeployed (76-21), withdrawing troops by the end of 2008 (60-39), capping the number of U. S. troops (54-42).

Interestingly enough, majorities do not yet accept the more aggressive approaches favored by liberal war opponents, including revoking the original war resolution (44-52) or cutting funding for the war (37-61).

Although strongly opposing the Bush administration's conduct of the war in general and the surge in particular, the American public is still reluctant to support a full-scale confrontation with the leadership in the White House. The Bush administration may be a renegade government, but the public doesn't want confrontations.

At least not yet.

Despite the uncertain and difficult environment, the Democratic leadership has shown a lot of political savvy in coming up with proposals that capture the public mood.

For that they deserve credit.

Now, for the more difficult task of embodying these ideas in legislation.

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 that 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.

Finding The Enemy at Walter Reed

American troops have always had a lot of trouble finding the enemy in Iraq. Before the surge, the Army's basic strategy in Baghdad was to drive around Baghdad (DAB) and wait for someone to attack them.

But Disabled veterans did not have much trouble finding the enemy at Building 18 in Walter Reed Hospital.

It was them.

According to Paul Krugman's article in today's Lexington Herald-Leader (sorry no link available because of NYT policy):

"the administration is breaking longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend out nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq, the Veterans administration, which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system . . . So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service related, remember this: All this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracy, but by the Bush administration's penny-pinching."

Surprisingly for such a good economist, Krugman doesn't fully get what's going on here. For Krugman, the point is the analogy with FEMA's performance with Katrina. He focuses on the appointment of an unqualified lobbyist as Secretary of the Army, the ensuring outsourcing of Walter Reed services to IAP Worldwide Services and the departure of skilled government personnel as the source of the incompetence at the Walter Reed hospital complex. This is bad enough as far as it goes.

However, services at Walter Reed were not only privatized, Walter Reed Hospital also began to act like an insurance company. Just as Allstate and State Farm insurance companies treated customers involved in car crashes as adversaries and bullied them into accepting low-ball settlements or face years of litigation, the privatized services at Walter Reed have been treating disabled veterans as adversaries when they apply for health care. They delay the acceptance of veterans into long-term treatment, warehouse them in a crumbling facility to encourage them to leave, and then pretty much ignore them.

Calling the treatment of disabled veterans at Walter Reed depressing, disgusting, and outrageous doesnt' go nearly far enough. Given that the war in Iraq is a monumental failure, American society and the government owe a special debt to the soldiers we've put in harms way and a special love to them as we carry out our obligations. Given all the embedded journalists and television coverage of the war, almost all Americans have a detailed knowledge of the dangers that our troops have faced in Iraq. As a result, we should have a special affection for troops who have served our goals and exercise an enhanced care with the physical and emotional difficulties of surviving troops now that they're home. Likewise, our feeling for the troops should be enhanced by the Bush administration's foolishness and incompetence in waging the war. The Bush administration might have wasted their health, but everyone involved should do their best to ensure that their recoveries aren't equally wasted.

The Bush administration has identified returning disabled veterans as their enemies. That must not be allowed to stand.

Bedtime with 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

Biggest Priority for Right: More Pseudo-Scandals

Conservative Job 1. Now that conservatives are returning from the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, they have a big job ahead of them--creating bigger, better, and more frequent pseudo-scandals for the Democrats.

The Crisis is Almost Upon Them. The political situation for conservatives is grim and there's no reason to think it's going to get any better. The Iraq War seems to get more unpopular by the minute and there's such widespread contempt for the Bush administration that conservatives barely tried to defend him at CPAC. The treatment of disabled veterans at Walter Reed is already a big scandal and the purge of federal district attorneys looks like it's growing into a big scandal while Congressional hearings over war profiteering are looming on the horizon. Worse, there are enough warnings of an economic recession at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 that stock markets are panicking. Unfortunately for the Republicans, 2008 is an election year when they will be defending their record on the economy. Few people have been satisfied with Bush prosperity because it's been so focused on the top 1/2 of one percent. Even fewer will be satisfied with the second Bush downturn.

Things aren't much better politically. McCain and Giuliani might be polling even with Hillary and Obama now, but a lot of conservatives don't see them or Mitt Romney as strong candidates for the presidency. The situation is even worse at the lower levels. I saw an estimate that the Republicans saved 10 House seats through Republican National Campaign Committee smear campaigns. If that's the case, the Republicans have to wonder just how weak they are in the House and the Senate.

The Pseudo-Scandal Solution. The solution to these problems. Since January, conservative bloggers and op-ed writers have responded to the political weakness of the Republicans by identifying and publicizing a series of pseudo-scandals. By the time the right was done with Nancy Pelosi's plane, they were ready to move on to John Edwards' feminist bloggers, Barack Obama's education in Indonesia, and anonymous commenters who were disappointed that Dick Cheney didn't die in last week's attack. Certainly, it took a lot of work and ingenuity to get these pseudo scandals out (that was especially the case with investigating anonymous blog comments) and the publicity might have kept things from getting worse for the Republican cause.

But, let's face it right-wingers, this little trickle of scandals has not been moving the poll numbers for Republicans. You need better and more frequent scandals. There must be a gay guy or a lesbian on Hillary Clinton's payroll somewhere. Why haven't you found them? Didn't some of Barack Obama's new Hollywood friends make morally offensive movies? Why haven't we heard anything about that? You're not working hard enough and you don't have big enough staffs of investigators? Maybe you should raise more money so you can hire "smear artists."

Wait a minute. "Artist" might be seen as effeminate. How about "smear warriors" instead. Once you have the cash in hand, have your smear warriors serve apprenticeships with Ann Coulter and Michell Malkin before letting them loose on the Democrats. Of course, none of this has anything to do with nuking Iran, privatizing social security, getting rid of public education, eliminating more taxes for the wealthy, or any of the noble causes that conservatives really want to promote.

But these are tough times, and if digging deeper into the gutter is what tough times call for, then tough people dig deeper into the gutter and don't complain about it. Did Patton care whether his troops got dirty? Of course not! The point is to win and if you can't win the point is to lessen your losses. And that's what digging for pseudo-scandals is all about--lessening losses.

Hmm. Maybe I should work on my inspirational cliches. Anyway, I hope that all my right-wing friends enjoy digging around for new pseudo-scandals. It's really your best bet for keeping things from getting worse.

Got to go to work. Links later.

All Ann All The Time

Maybe America's favorite bigot is thinking of a political career after all. Here's an example of Ann Coulter trying to have it both ways from Q&A at the CPAC conference last week.

"And of course, if you're working for a Republican candidate, you'll meet some nice heterosexual guys. By the way, before I let that slide, I do want to point out one thing that has been driving me crazy with the media, how they keep describing Mitt Romney's position as being "pro-gays, and that's going to upset right-wingers." Well, you know, screw you, I'm not anti-gay. We're against gay marriage. I don't want gays to be discriminated against. I mean, I think we have, in addition to blacks, I don't know why all gays aren't Republicans. I think we have the pro-gay position, which is anti-crime and for tax cuts. Gays make a lot of money, and they're victims of crime. I mean, the way --no, they are."

Coulter's argument is that people can be as opposed to gay marriage as James Dobson without being "anti-gay." This is the same kind of thing defenders of segregation used to say during the pre-Civil Rights era. They all "loved" black people, but did not want blacks eating in the same restaurants, swimming in the same pools, going to the same schools, serving on the same juries, or voting in the same elections. Similarly, Coulter isn't "anti-gay," she just wants to exclude gays from being married--a condition that's just as normal and basic to American society as going to the same schools, eating in the same restaurants, and swimming in the same pools.

Coulter is telling gays that "you can be normal except in the case of marriage where we conservatives think you're too weird and perverted to be allowed to be normal."

Or maybe not.

Maybe she's telling gays that "you can be normal except in the case of marriage where we conservatives can raise money and get more votes by saying that you're too weird and perverted to be allowed to be normal. Sorry about that!"

Because if she wasn't anti-gay, that would be the only reason for Coulter to oppose gay marriage.

Illusion and Reality in Sadr City

American troops entered the Shiite slum of Sadr City by the hundreds in the latest initiative of the surge campaign. Under Gen. Daniel Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy, the U. S. military is setting up a "security center" as a way to have a forward presence in a Sadr City neighborhood. It also looks like troops are creating a blockade on Sadr City.

The beginning of the Sadr City campaign has created an interesting illusion/reality problem. Because American troops met no militia resistance, it seems like they're making progress. But the progress is an illusion. The Mahdi Army, Badr Brigades, and other militias and their death squads have decided to lay low, but they're very potent forces that command the loyalty of Sadr City residents. It looks like the militias might want to wait out the occupation.

But the American military can't allow that to happen. If the militias emerge from the occupation intact, they would be able to maintain their grip on the government and resume death squad activity as soon as the Americans left. In other words, the surge would have failed to help create the conditions for a "stable democracy" in Iraq among the Shiite population in Baghdad.

The American military and Iraqi governments know this. That's why the Iraqi government claims that it's going to purge the government and arrest "lawbreakers"--in other words militia leaders. It's also why the U. S. military is doing house to house searches. The idea is to bring the militias out of hiding and defeat them militarily. If the militias can't be drawn out to the flypaper, the U. S. wants to force them out.

From the U. S. point of view, the initial illusion of progress and stability needs to be undermined so that long-lasting stability can be achieved.

This means triggering a battle that would appear to mean that American forces were failing and would get a lot of bad press in the short term. After winning such a battle or series of battles, the U. S. would then pacify the neighborhoods and begin the long-term work of economic and political reconstruction. That's the Petraeus Doctrine--Clear, Hold, and Reconstruct.

But I think that the idea long-term progress is also an illusion. The guiding assumption of the American occupiers is that large populations can be converted to the American/Iraqi govt cause if Sadr City neighborhoods are cleared of militias. To the contrary, it seems much more likely that Sadr City residents would become more antagonistic toward the Americans and Iraqi government. American doctrine assumes that residents of cities and neighborhoods have no connection with the insurgents. However, if the U. S. destroys the Mahdi Army and Badr Brigades, they will be killing the male relatives--husbands, uncles, brothers, sons, and sisters-- of families--all over Sadr City. In my opinion, no forward command forces, no American candy, and no economic reconstruction would have much impact on the resentment and bitterness of the Sadr City population after any decisive battle with the Mahdi Army. Instead, the U. S. would have to engage in a full scale occupation that would make Sadr City into another Fallujah or Ramadi.

In the minds of those planning the surge, American military power has an almost infinite ability to bend civilian populations to its will. I'm afraid that the U. S. military is going to discover once again that the idea of infinite power is the biggest illusion of all.

Counter-Productive Insults

Here's a featured response to Ann Coulter's CPAC speech from a commenter named RB at Talking Points Memo.

"As I read the reaction/fallout from Ann Coulter’s remarks at CPAC this week I’m annoyed by the entire progressive reaction to it and most of the many other outrages committed on a daily basis by the Republican Party. Why doesn’t a progressive with an audience say something to the effect “This is who and what the once proud and honorable Republican Party has turned itself into. It is a party of hate, intolerance, incompetence, greed, treason, fanatical, hostile to science and reality, and totally corrupt. They have no honor and no shame. They’re fascists and a cancer on our great nation, plain and simple and this is just another example of that.”

This is exactly the wrong kind of reaction to Ann Coulter's provocations.

First, RB's response is exactly what Coulter is trying to elicit from liberals/ progressives. In fact, the only thing that Coulter and her audience enjoy more than making the comments themselves is "outraged" liberal reaction. Congratulations RB, you've been jerked around and your opponents are enjoying their little moment of victory.

Second, RB is profoundly wrong in lumping everybody who attended the conference or everybody in the Republican Party into the "fascist" camp. Coulter conservatism may be dominant, but my impression is that it does not constitute a majority of the Republican Party. A lot of business-oriented Republicans, Main Street Republicans, Western rancher types, and conservative evangelicals would be either neutral or turned off by Coulter (in the same way that lots of liberals are turned off by Al Sharpton). Tarring all of these kinds of Republicans with the "fascist" brush is both inaccurate and counter-productive because it supports Coulter's basic arguments about liberals.

Third, it's important to emphasize that a lot of the people attending the CPAC conference wouldn't have necessarily agreed with Coulter even if they were highly entertained. Several students from my classes went to CPAC and moon over "Ann Coulter" even though they might argue that they don't share Coulter's "extreme" views. Actually, the head of the campus Republicans has told me several times that conservatives aren't nearly as extreme as I portray them on this blog let alone the "fascists" that RB is claiming. By calling the CPAC audience "fascists," RB is cutting off any possibility of communicating with people who might only be weakly identified with the Coulter agenda. Once again, this is exactly what somebody like Coulter would want because it tells conservative-oriented students that they can't talk with liberals (to paraphrase one of Coulter's titles).

There are many ways in which the various types of conservatism are defined by "hate, intolerance, incompetence, greed, treason . . . hostile to science and reality, and [total corruption]. I've argued most of these things myself. Still, just throwing around the terms is the liberal version of Coulterism and a not very clever version of Coulterism at that. If liberals want to be convincing, they have to show how Coulter's "jokes" actually appeal to hate and intolerance, how the Bush administration's incompetence is a manifestation of their conservative loyalties, the ways in which the religious right is hostile to science, and the many ways that people on the right are uncomfortable with living in the United States. It was by patiently working out these criticisms in the context of the failed war in Iraq that the left got the upper hand in the current rhetorical wars. Maintaining that patience is crucial to keeping that upper hand.

RB should have kept his insults in his pocket. Coulter and other right-wing put down artists are having a tough time these days. There's no sense in making life easier for them by playing their game.

Andrew Sullivan Gets It Right!

Andrew Sullivan, gay conservative blogger, on Ann Coulter:

"When you see her in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young . . . Her endorsement of Romney today - "probably the best candidate" - is a big deal, it seems to me. "

Far from dissociating himself from Coulter's bigotry, Mitt Romney viewed Coulter's endorsement as the highlight of his campaign to date.

And it was.

The Soul of Popular Conservatism

TPM's Greg Sargent wonders "Why, Why, Why" conservatives would be so eager to hear Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. In fact, the depth of Ann Coulter's appeal to the right-wing is hard for people on the left to understand.

So, instead of being "outraged" by Coulter's latest provocation, I'm going to take my shot at explaining Coulter's appeal.

In fact, Ann Coulter is the soul of popular conservatism. To understand Coulter's appeal, it is important to emphasize that right-wingers think they're morally and intellectually superior to white liberals and minority advocates. Conservatives believe that their morality of taboo breaking on race, gender, and sexuality is superior to liberal "goodness" on these issues. Right-wingers also think they're smarter, more rational (as opposed to emotional), and tougher than liberals. This is why Ann Coulter is idolized by the right. She represents the superiority of conservativism in the minds of conservatives.

Coulter gained this status because she is the grand priestess of a particular right-wing rhetorical game in relation to "political correctness." From the right-wing point of view, making racist, sexist, and homophobic statements is a demonstration of moral and intellectual superior. The idea of bigoted talk about "lawn jockeys," "ragheads," "faggots," etc., is to defy norms of political correctness and then laugh at the "outrage" with which liberals respond. Dick Cheney was playing this kind of rhetorical game when he told John Kerry to "fuck yourself." In this context, the "morality" is in the defiance of social convention while the "intelligence" is in manipulating liberal emotions. The right-wing short-hand for this rhetorical game is "driving liberals crazy" and right-wingers derive enormous satisfaction from playing it.

Now, it should be obvious where Ann Coulter fits. Having surpassed Limbaugh as a high-wire artist of calculated bigotry, fencing "outraged" liberals, and laughing all the way to the bank, Coulter is fervently admired because she captures the core of right-wing morality in a way that's extremely pleasing to conservatives. If Martin Luther King was the lens through which Americans were able to see the ugliness of segregation and racism, Coulter is the lens through which conservatives can view their bigotries as a sign of their intellectual and moral goodness.

From the conservative point of view, that's invaluable.

When Your Fastball is Gone

Tonight I heard a speech by Sen. Jim Bunning at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Political Science Association in my hometown of Morehead, KY. Bunning was a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Tigers, Phillies, Pirates, and Dodgers who went into Kentucky politics when he lost his fastball and served on the local and state level before moving to the House of Representatives and then the Senate.

Bunning's far from being a political Hall of Famer, but he also used to throw his share of high, hard ones in Kentucky politics as well. At age 75, however, the Senator has also lost his political fastball and barely survived a re-election campaign against a very obscure state senator in 2004. And tonight was more of the same.

So what do you get from washed up politicians?

In Bunning's case, it was bi-partisanship--a soft-headed helping of wishful thinking that everybody could just get together and solve the problems of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He did everything but quote Rodney King.

I had planned to ask a couple of tough questions about the culture of corruption in Congress and the sexual orientation of Kentucky's other U. S. Senator.

But I changed my mind and got up to leave at the beginning of the Senator's second baseball story.

I'll save my punches for somebody who can fight back.

A Swamp Less Rancid

Former Republican heavyweight Tom DeLay argued in his blog today that Nancy Pelosi's willingness to put William Jefferson (of $90,000 in the freezer fame) on the Homeland Security Committee meant that she wasn't "draining the swamp" of Congressional corruption as she promised.

But isn't the swamp a lot less rancid now that DeLay himself with his indictment for using illegal corporate contributions, two staff members with guilty pleas, and multiple ethics citations is out of Congress.

Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley are gone as well.

Maybe Pelosi doesn't have to do so much draining after all.

"Splatter Boy" Dick Cheney

Last night at a dinner for the Conservative Political Action Conference, Dick Cheney threw some more stuff against the wall to see if it would stick. The Bush people used to say that an American withdrawal would lead to an al-Qaida takeover in Iraq. But that didn't prevent increasing majorities of the American public from supporting withdrawal. So Dick Cheney's been trying out a new line. Now the problem is that an American withdrawal would free up al-Qaida fighters to go to Afghanistan, undermine the Musharaff government in Pakistan, and put pressure on the Arab oil monarchies.

Given how disconnected he was from any reality, Cheney might as well have added "and a partridge in a pear tree." Al-Qaeda in Iraq is only one of the many Sunni insurgent groups fighting against the American occupation of Iraq. Unless an American withdrawal from Iraq serves as a much bigger stimulus to al-Qaeda recruiting than the original invasion, al-Qaeda doesn't have anywhere near enough fighters to engage in a region-wide campaign to undermine Arab governments.

But reality has never been the point with Cheney. During the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, Cheney shifted back and forth from themes of Saddam cooperating with al-Qaeda to Saddam acquiring nuclear weapons, the Niger yellowcake accusation, "knowing" where WMD's were hidden, etc. Cheney could have cared less whether any of this was true. The point was to keep war opponents on the defensive by continuing to splatter new accusations against the Saddam Hussein regime into the media.

This worked in 2003 when the Bush administration still had a lot of credibility. But the story is different now that the war in Iraq has been lost and the vast majority of the American public is looking for an exit. Liberal/left blogger Glenn Greenwald is just speaking the broad public view when he characterizes Cheney an "increasingly embittered and reckless." But Greenwald is mistaken. Cheney isn't any more embittered and reckless than he was at the beginning of the Bush administration in 2001. The only change is that Cheney's "splatter-boy" tactics no longer have any credibility with the public.

Does Romney Have Enough Money for Newt to Win?

It looks like the battle for the Republican nomination is going to be one of the ugliest spectacles in the history of American politics. With all of the major announced candidates standing on shaky ideological ground, rivers of money are going to flow into the nastiest kind of negative advertising. In fact, if the Bush administration had been as determined to win the war in Iraq as McCain, Giuliani, and Romney are to win the Republican nomination, things would probably be going better for the American cause.

The guy who needs to do the most negative advertising is Mitt Romney because he is so far behind Giuliani and McCain that the only way he can lift himself up is to pull one of the other contenders down. Foreshadowing the negative campaign to come, Romney came out slugging against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in New Hampshire. For Romney, Giuliani "is pro-choice, he is pro-gay marriage and anti-gun" while McCain can't even consider himself to be conservative because of his support for immigrant amnesty and opposition to "a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. " If Romney can match McCain and Giuliani's fund-raising, this kind of stuff is going to be saturating television broadcasts in Des Moines and New Hampshire for most of the next year.

And what will be the outcome?

I don't see Romney as having much chance of winning himself. Right now, he's pandering so hard to the right that he's in a lot of danger of looking absurd to hard core conservatives. But, given the weaknesses of McCain and Giuliani, there is a decent chance that Romney could weaken one or both of the front-runners and set the table for a Newt Gingrich campaign.

Spring is in the Air!

On Tuesday, I saw the first sign of spring on the Morehead State campus--the re-emergence of the Easter Egg look. In this case, it was a female student with bright pink hair, but eventually there will be a sprinkling of green, purple, orange, pink, and white bobbing on the heads of both guys and women. Among the college students I've known, bouncing bright hair is an exercise in the expansion of one's persona. It's as if the hair color is springing itself and the young people involved into the world. It's a laughing sign of faith in the future and an eager anticipation of enjoyment to come.

Then today, the rain began. I know that spring rains cause tornados and flash flooding and can be incredibly destructive. Fifteen kids died today when a tornado slammed into Enterprise High School in Alabama and that's very poignant here because two of my colleagues are from the Enterprise area.

Yet, I've learned to view the spring rains as a sign of the beauty to come--of trees and plants so heavy with their blooms that they literally hang over the street bursting with colors just as outrageous as the young woman with the pink hair.

It puts a little bounce in my step just to think about it.

Undersecretary for Fuck-Ups

Douglas Feith, former no. 3 man at the Pentagon as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, has set up a web site to justify his role in generating phony intelligence on Iraq.

A recent report by the Defense Department's Inspector General reprimanded Feith in the mildest possible terms for engaging in "inappropriate" attempts to massage raw intelligence reports into conclusions that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaeda. Determined to salvage his reputation, Feith protests that civilian officials should be able to criticize the CIA. But the problem is that Feith's intelligence claims were driven by the Bush administration's obsession with invading Iraq. Consequently, Feith's intelligence judgements were even more bogus than the CIA's.

If Douglas Feith was a smart guy, he would focus on taking the real 800 pound gorilla off his reputation--Gen. Tommy Franks' statement that he was "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

But Feith doesn't seem to be that smart. Maybe that's why the Bush administration thought he would work well with Donald Rumsfeld.

Who's the Fly? Who's the Paper?

Yesterday, the American military raided the offices of Moqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City and arrested 16 leaders of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. Once again, commanders like Gen. Raymond Odierno are engaged in the "flypaper" strategy of enticing insurgents and militia members into an OK Corral kind of shootout that the U. S. would win easily.

But American generals have seen too many movies.

It's not like the Shiite militias didn't see it coming. According to Abdul Razzaq al-Nedawi, a Sadr aide, "the [American] operation appeared to be an attempt to provoke the Mahdi Army" into a confrontation.

The response of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades to the American surge has been to reduce their activity, lie low, and transfer their fighters out of Baghdad to avoid exactly the kinds of confrontations that the American military wants.

Not being stupid enough to confront American troops in Baghdad in the first place, Sadr isn't interested in fighting the Americans now either.

Actually, one has to wonder if Sadr isn't trying to draw the American military into his version of flypaper. If American (and Iraqi) forces try to start a "clear and hold" operation in Sadr City, they could just as well end up as the flies. Given that Sadr City is a sprawling slum of 2 million people, clearing the area of militia members would be a difficult, possibly bloody operation. Also there would be considerable risk for the kinds of religious desecrations and human rights abuses that might trigger a general Shiite revolt.

That's Sadr's flypaper, the likelihood of a broad Shiite uprising in response to an American effort to occupy Sadr City. If the event of such a development, the Maliki government would lose the support of the majority Shiite population and the American military would be facing the daunting task of occupying another hostile population in Iraq.

Right now, it's difficult not to see Sadr and the Mahdi Army as having the upper hand.

Weighing the Baggage

There have been a number of stories out on whether Hillary Clinton has too much baggage to win a general election in 2008. Here's an indexed video report on Fox. Hillary certainly has baggage. She's hated by conservatives, burdened by her vote for the bill authorizing the use of force in Iraq, and still has the legacy of Bill Clinton's peccadillos hanging over her among other things.

However, it's ultimately deceptive to weigh Hillary Clinton's political baggage in isolation. Barack Obama has the baggage of inexperience, a deceptive land deal, and suspicion over whether he's black enough. I have problems with Obama because I don't think he's aggressive enough with the right-wing.

That's not all.

The major Republican candidates are all going to be loaded down with the failure of the war in Iraq and the general aura of sleaze surrounding the Republican Party. The surge will be an especially big problem. It's tremendously unpopular with voters now and may be ending just in time for the political conventions in summer 2008. The Republican candidates also have their own particular problems, For example, everything that John McCain does in relation to the religious right creates new baggage for his candidacy. McCain's support for campaign finance reform, proposing of eventual citizenship for illegals, and criticism of evangelical leaders weigh down his efforts to appeal to religious conservatives. Indeed, the pre-eminent figure of the religious right, James Dobson, has already announced that he would never vote for McCain. However, everything McCain does to appeal to the religious right like speak at Jerry Falwell University is going to be baggage if McCain ever has to appeal to moderates.

Other Republican candidates and non-candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney also bear heavy burdens if they win the Republican nomination.

Given that all of the major presidential candidates have substantial negatives, it is important to consider the baggage of a candidate like Hillary Clinton in relation to the baggage of other candidates. The same goes for Obama, Edwards, McCain, and Giuliani.

In this context, Hillary Clinton is carrying some real baggage, but I don't believe that the things weighing down her candidacy are not nearly as burdensome as the Bush administration is going to be for Republican candidates. If Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, it will be her relative lack of baggage that wins her the general election.

Guilty!

I confess. I looked at an Oscar Night "fashion disasters" pictorial on MSN. I hate myself for looking at it, but not as much as I hate Joan Rivers, Mr. Blackwell, Kay Giantis, and all the parasites who gather to chew on Oscar fashion.

At bottom, the Oscar fashion pundits are woman-hating misogynists who use the same formula to get out their bile at highly accomplished women. In the fashion pundit universe, the only acceptable style is "classic elegance" represented this year by Kate Blanchett. When any actress deviates from the highly conservative elegance look, writers for fashion pundits delve deeply into the obscure corners of their English degrees to come up with insulting euphemisms, similes, and analogies for their ugliness. For example, Kay Giantis of MSN characterized Jennifer Hudson's "metallic python shrug" as looking "like something the flamboyant Dr. Smith would have made out of one of Will Robinson's aluminum foil jumpsuits on "Lost in Space." Once Hudson and other actresses stepped out of the narrow, classic elegance box, they become the target for put-downs of female moral character, intelligence, and sexuality that are aimed ultimately at all women. They're Medusas and other monsters, freaks, ditzy types', pitiful little children, passive victims of male mistakes, and sluts all rolled into one. For pundits like Kay Giantis, there's only one model of proper femininity. The rest are just "women."

By the way, Jennifer Hudson looked great in the accompanying picture. So did most of the other women portrayed as "cringe-inducing disasters."

Wasn't Jesus Buried Next to Judas?

Coming to the Tomb Next to You! James Cameron and his associates are airing a documentary claiming that they've found an ossuary or box that was the tomb of Jesus in a Jerusalem suburb, that Mary Magdalene is buried in an ossuary next to Jesus, and that their son Judah was buried in an ossuary next to them.

Evidently the Jesus family moved out to the burbs so they could have a bigger yard for young Judah. All that commuting must have been tough!

What About the Virgin in the Pan? The main evidence that Jesus was buried in the ossurary was the fact that it was labeled "Jesus." Theologians are dismissing the idea that the "Jesus" inscription meant that the "Jesus" in the tomb was the Jesus because everybody and their brother was named Jesus in the first century. This is understandable except that one of the scholars making the claim is Ben Witherington of Asbury College in Kentucky. Just a couple of years ago, it was Witherington who made the sensational claim that an ossuary he found contained the bones of Jesus' brother James. The importance of the James discovery was that it was supposed to bring us that much closer to Jesus. But if Witherington can still maintain that he found James, why can't James Cameron claim that he found Jesus and Mary Magdalene?

Besides if Cameron is right, that means that Jesus was not resurrected and that he was not the Son of God portrayed in Christian accounts. It would also mean that yesterday's story of the Virgin Mary in the pizza pan in Texas isn't true?

And we can't have that.

What About Judas? I have to admit that I don't buy into Cameron's account myself. I don't think that Jesus was resurrected any more than Cameron does, but having Jesus and Mary Magdalene buried in the same place is too much of a coincidence given that they probably died years apart and relatively far from their home towns.

Besides, Jesus would have been buried next to his best friend Judas.

The Strom/Sharpton Connection

One of the most disgusting facts about American slavery was the constant raping of black girls and women by slaveholders and their sons. The ideology of slavery may have held that blacks weren't fully human, but the men of slaveholding families viewed black females as very human when they wanted to have sex with them.

Which brings us to Al Sharpton.

Yesterday, there were reports that an ancestor of New York activist Al Sharpton was a slave owned by an ancestor of Strom Thurmond, the recently deceased arch-segregationist from South Carolina.

According to Al Sharpton, "it was probably the most shocking thing in my life." Of course, any connection with as prominent and determined a racist as Strom Thurmond would be shocking and embarrassing. As a white person, I'm shocked and embarrassed that Strom's white relatives haven't renounced him yet. Instead, a distant white cousin of Strom's named Doris Strom Costner,said Sunday she "never heard of such a thing" about slavery because "my momma . . . only talked to me about good things."

Uhh, right. Maybe her mother should have talked with her a little more.

But it gets worse. If Strom Thurmond's forebears owned Al Sharpton's relatives, there's probably a distant blood connection between the two men as a result of liasons that escaped the notice of genealogists.

Sharpton's no saint, but you really have to feel for him at a time like this.

Local Notes: Walking the Walk

Walking for Lungs. Props to Mrs. RSI and all the Morehead, KY Carews for doing the "Climb the Carew" walk up in Cincinnati today. That was walking up 45 flights of stairs in the Carew Tower, the tallest building in Cincinnati to raise money for the American Lung Association. The Carews trace their ancestors back through Ireland to the Carew Castle in Wales. As always, they make those ancestors proud.

The Husband Walk. I'm afraid of heights. So there was no "Climb the Carew" for me. But I did take care of our two daughters and their stream of friends while their mom was climbing in Cincinnati. After two marriages, doing the good husband walk isn't really that hard anymore and I didn't have to stop for oxygen like the Carew Tower climbers. But there was breakfast and lunch to get, picking up to do, clothes to wash, and lessons to teach one of my daughters about drawing up lists. For someone who hates cleaning up, I did ok.

A Standing "O" for Sportsmanship. Yesterday, Mrs. RSI and I went to the banquet for the Kentucky Middle School Speech Tournament. Our home team from Rowan County had won the state tournament 16 times in a row and our oldest daughter was on the team. This wasn't our year though. Only two of the kids on the Rowan County team finished in first place and a team from Ockerman Middle School in Boone County slipped through for the victory. Like the kids, parents were disappointed at losing. But every parent at our table gave the champions from Ockerman a standing ovation when they were announced. Believing in sportsmanship, we were happy to provide our kids with proper role models at a sensitive moment. I also took the opportunity to congratulate Kelly Crump, Rowan County Middle School's outstanding speech coach, on her team's successful season and her excellent work with my daughter.

There is a God!

In what has to be one of the most boringly officious New York Times articles of all time, David Kirkpatrick discusses the unhappiness of big league Christian conservatives at a meeting of the National Council for Public Policy, an umbrella group for the Christian right.

Founded by Rev. Tim LaHaye, the nut case behind the Left Behind series, the National Council for Public Policy was attended by James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Paul Weyrich, and other gunslingers and hate-mongers whose agenda is to reduce the federal government back to the nineteenth century levels, repeal reproductive rights of women once and for all, leverage their bigotry against gay people into constitutional amendments, put 11 million illegal immigrants in jail, and launch endless new wars without paying a cent in new taxes.

Hoping to continue using cancer as a weapon against sex among church-going girls, the Christian right also opposes a vaccine to innoculate girls against cervical cancer.

Such great humanitarians!

I don't think it's exaggerating to say that the leaders attending the National Council for Public Policy have done more harm to the United States than any convention of drug kingpins.

The problem for the National Council for Public Policy is that they don't see a candidate that the Christian Right can wholeheartedly support in 2008. John McCain thinks they're intolerant bigots (wonder why!). Rudy Giuliani has been married three times. Mitt Romney panders to liberals as well as conservatives. You would think that a Christian conservative like Sam Brownback would find support at this kind of meeting, but observers claimed that Brownback touched "only briefly on the threat of Islamic terrorists." Neither Mike Huckabee nor Duncan Hunter satisfied either.

The only speaker who provided full satisfaction for the gathered leaders of the Christian Right was the Pennsylvania politician Rick Santorum.

Fortunately however, Pennsylvania voters addressed the "Santorum threat" when they defeated him by 19 points last November.

There is a God!

A Gender Tipping Point?

Among all the books I haven't read, I believe that I like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point the least. Indeed, The Tipping Point may be the most destructive book published over the last 25 years. Certainly, the Bush administration's has been obsessed with finding "tipping points" in Iraq where little things like setting up outposts in Sunni neighborhoods can change the whole culture of the Middle East. The fact that our search for tipping points has made the situation in Iraq a lot worse has been a big factor in the overall incompetence and destructiveness of the American occupation.

With that said, I'm beginning to wonder about the potential for a tipping point in American gender relations.

That's a Hillary Clinton victory in the presidential election in 2008.

The most important thing here is the "Bushification" that can be seen in college guys. At my university, guys have been getting a lot less interested in academic achievement over the last ten years and have thrown themselves into pornography, stripping, sports obsessions, and computer gaming.

This is not to say that the past was ideal. I don't doubt that drinking, carousing, and rioting have been much more important than academics among college guys since the founding of the University of Paris in the 12th century.

All of this stuff is as heavily homoerotic as it is homophobic. The primary bonds--the time commitment, trust, interest, body contact, gestures of affection, and language of love--are with other men and women are either excluded or admitted on a strictly token basis. For customers, stripping is a good example of homoeroticism to the extent that the erotic charge is shared among the guys rather than between the customers and the stripper. The same kind of bonding among guys is also the case with heavy sports involvement and computer gaming where guys spend night after night involved with other guys.

If there's sexual activity associated with these kinds of homoeroticisms, it's mostly masturbation which seems to be becoming a bigger focus of college life for guys. That's obviously the case with pornography and stripping. Likewise, some female students have reported guys bragging about heroic feats of near-constant masturbation and that numbers of guys will choose masturbation over involvement with women.

Of course, involvement in heterosexual sex also has a heavily homoerotic component. When I asked one class about the percentage of guys who got most of their pleasure from heterosexual sex from talking about it to other guys, one male student replied "100% of American men" as if he were stating the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe he was.

To make a long story short, college guys are turning more and more into contemporary versions of George W. Bush. Like George Bush was in college, they're much more comfortable in a homoerotic "guy world" than they are with situations like classrooms in which women are present and competing with guys. Come to think of it, I haven't heard anything about Bush dating in college either. At the same time, they're just as deeply contemptuous of the academic work, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and focus needed to accomplish anything in academics, business, or artistic endeavors.

I'm not saying this is all college guys by any means. There's certainly lots of exceptions to this. I would argue, however, that the Bushification of college men is an emerging pattern and I get a great deal of agreement from both guys and women when I try out this idea in my classes.

To the contrary, college women seem to be becoming more committed to achievement. When I first started teaching in Kentucky, many of the brightest college women here were painfully self-conscious and insecure about their intellectual interests. There's still some isolated cases of painful shyness, but most of the best students, most of the most mature students, and most of the most committed students that I see are women. The female students also seem more determined as a group. Almost all of the students who overcome severe personal difficulties are women as well. Non-traditional women, women with children, pregnant women, and women with illnesses like cancer generally get through pretty well. Come to think about it, I hear a lot more from female students who are dealing with tough problems than guys. My suspicion is that a lot of guys (certainly not all) just drop out if overwhelming problems emerge.

In this sense, college women are looking a lot more like Hillary Clinton than they're looking like Laura Bush.

The value of female accomplishment still isn't recognized in American business, politics, culture, education, and academics. Generally speaking, under-achieving, low-energy guys still have a better chance of getting hired, getting promoted, and getting appointed to leadership positions than their more accomplished, harder-working, female colleagues.

But I don't think this can continue forever and I'm not sure it's going to continue for much longer. This is where Hillary Clinton comes in. One thing I've consistently heard over the years from female students is how important the lack of any female presidents has been to their perception of gender equality in the United States. Thinking about a possible Hillary victory, I wonder if Hillary Clinton's becoming president would not be a boost to the confidence of non-right-wing women all over the country. I know my 12 year old daughter is already excited about the prospect and I've promised to take her to any Hillary inaugural as a way to encourage that excitement.

I also think that there's a chance that a Hillary victory will encourage employers in all fields to look more at the bottom line rather than the gender line and start to notice that their female applicants, female employees, and female executives might be doing better than their male counterparts.

If that's the case, a Hillary victory might be a tipping point toward gender equality.