Did the Founding Fathers Follow Jesus?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo gets grumpy with Mike Huckabee because of Huckabee's claim that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were clergymen.

I've sort of gotten tired of explaining that, no, the Founding Fathers actually weren't all born-agains and bible thumpers. Not hardly. (Probably better to say that the great majority ranged from believers in an entirely impersonal God -- Deists -- to believing Christians who nonetheless viewed popular religious enthusiasm with a polite and paternal disdain.) But presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, himself a Baptist minister, actually told a crowd yesterday that "most" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were "clergymen."

Actually, it turns out that only one signer of the Declaration was a minister.

But Marshall doesn't go nearly far enough. In fact, it's extremely difficult to imagine Jesus supporting the American Revolution. The British were certainly the leading tyrants of the age, but the Palestine of Jesus' time was occupied by much worse tyrants in the form of the Romans. Did Jesus criticize Roman rule, countenance revolt, or support those who did revolt. Did he value either personal liberty or the liberty of the Jewish people?

The answer is a resounding "no" on all of these counts.

The Revolutionary period in American history began with resistance to the new taxes associated with the Stamp Act--"No Taxation without Representation." To the contrary, Jesus specifically endorsed paying what would have been far more onerous taxes to Rome. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:13-17).

Of course, the British committed other kinds of tyrannical acts besides imposing taxes. They tried to set up elites around royal governors, quartered troops in colonial cities, and killed colonial militiamen at the battles of Lexington and Concord.

However, Jesus counseled against resisting these kinds of tyrannies on several levels. If the colonists considered the British to be enemies as Thomas Paine argued they should in Common Sense, Jesus was emphatic in proclaiming that people should "love their enemies."

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse yo, do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. (Matthew 5:44)

Emphatic indeed.

Perhaps the British weren't just our enemies. Perhaps they were evil. However, Jesus says to "resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." (Matthew 5:39)

Of course, we could argue that the values of freedom for which the American revolutionaries were fighting were "Christian values."

But not if Christianity has anything to do with Jesus.

What Jesus valued and lived in his own life (at least according to the New Testament) was suffering and especially suffering that led to martyrdom for his sake. That's why he opened the Sermon on the Mount with blessings for "the poor in spirit," "they that mourn," "the meek," and "they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness." (Matthew 5:3-6)

From the point of view of Jesus, it's the poor, weak, suffering, and lost who will inherit both the earth and the kingdom of heaven. It's those people who were best suited to follow his own path toward martyrdom.

If Jesus had used the rhetoric of freedom (and there's no record that he did), he would not have meant freedom in terms of protecting liberties, rights, and property or avoiding various kinds of subordination. In other words, Jesus would not have meant the freedom that the colonists fought for during the American Revolution.

Instead, he would have meant the freedom of having nothing left to lose--A "Me and Bobby McGee" kind of freedom.

Let me be clear. I don't mean to criticize the American Revolution here. But Jesus would have been the last person to endorse revolt and revolution of any kind, including the American Revolution.

And Mike Huckabee is kidding himself if he thinks the American Revolution can be associated with either the Christian god or Christianity as a religion.

Another Chance for the Democrats

I'm getting tired of beating up on the Democratic leadership in relation to Iraq. So, this time, I'll pose the issue in terms of "opportunity." The Bush administration is requesting more money for the wars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year.

The White House has reportedly tacked on an additional $46 billion to its upcoming funding request for Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total to a breathtaking $196.4 billion for a single budgetary year — and assuming this passes as is, there could even be more supplemental spending bills down the road.

This is another opportunity for the Democratic leadership in Congress to push for a withdrawal from Iraq. Given that President Bush vetoed legislation that tied funding to a withdrawal deadline, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should up the ante a little more and cap funding in Iraq to those expenses necessary for winding up current operations and withdrawing troops.

And it should be a hard cap as well.

For the Democratic leadership at this point, it's a matter of choosing the way they're going to get pounded. If they pass withdrawal legislation, the Republicans will go after them with every tool in their smearing playbook. If the Democratic leadership doesn't pass withdrawal legislation, they'll be criticized by the progressive wing of the party and discourage Democratic voters more generally. They found that out after the last round of political combat over funding the Iraq War. Democratic voters were tremendously dissatisfied over the failure of the leadership to end the war and registered their disappointment in low approval ratings for Congress.

In the final irony, failure to pass troop withdrawal legislation won't help them with the right-wing either. All Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hannity would do is switch from the accusations of treason they were making last spring to a big round of gloating over the cowardice and ineffectiveness of the Democratic leadership.

Given that they're going to be hammered no matter what they do, the Democratic leadership should just bite the bullet and refuse to fund anything about the Iraq War except the withdrawal of American forces from their current combat roles.

Bush Crime Watch--No. 1

There was so much crime news from the Bush administration and it seems like it's going to go on for so long that I'm starting a new series of posts on the Bush crime scene.

1. It appears that the Blackwater security company stole a couple of airplanes from the Iraqi government and refused to give them back. But I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Perhaps Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki welched on a Super Bowl bet with Blackwater honcho Erik Prince.

2. Former federal prosecutor Bud Mackay claims that an Inspector General's report fromt he Department of Justice is going to recommend that Alberto Gonzales be prosecuted for perjury before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Will Bush give a pre-emptive pardon? And would that pardon constitute obstruction of justice as well?

3. According to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, American forces killed 15 civilians and wounded 52 other civilians during a raid on the Sadr City section of Baghdad this morning. There are other reports of American troops targeting any and all fleeing cars, a couple of toddler bodies in the city morgue, and a 14 year-old boy being shot while he was sleeping on the family roof. The spokesperson for the military claimed that they weren't aware of any civilians being harmed.

But shooting up a neighborhood isn't just dumb. It's a crime.

Doing Nothing About Pakistan

The MSNBC link to the Newsweek story on Pakistan is titled "The World's Most Dangerous Nation." But it's been that way since 2001. Bin Laden is in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda has significant support in the Pakistani intelligence apparatus and tribal regions. Likewise, the Pakistani government of Musharraf/Benazir Bhutto is hanging on by a couple of threads, and Pakistan has real and verifiable nuclear weapons.

All of that makes Pakistan extremely dangerous.

At this point, most liberal bloggers would say that the Bush administration needs to "do something" about Pakistan.

But I think it's better that the Bush people aren't doing much beyond learning Musharraf's name. Given the Bush administration's competence issues, "doing nothing" is probably the best way to "do no harm."

Gay Dumbledore Enhances Potter Series

Having grown up in an abusive family, I've always been moved by the "paternal" dimension of the Harry Potter series. Protagonist Harry Potter grew up in the abusive household of his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon Dursley, but Rowling created a web of paternity around Harry to help him grow up as he gradually came to confront the threat of Voldemort. Headmaster Albus Dumbledore was the primary paternal figure but there was also his godfather Sirius Black, teacher Remus Lupin, Arthur Weasley, the images of biological father James Potter's family in the Mirror of Erised, and the patronus figure that came to his aid against dementors. Even the phoenix Fawkes had some key paternal moments although the healing, encouraging baum of phoenix song and phoenix tears could also be seen as an extension of Dumbledore's care.

The collective fathering of Harry Potter came into focus in the last few chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as Dumbledore, James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin all (along with Harry's mother) reached from beyond the grave to provide Harry with final instruction, guidance, and encouragement.

Once again, Dumbledore was the key figure, the wisest man despite (or perhaps because of) his limitations and mistakes, the person who helped Harry the most, the one with whom Harry had to reconcile.

But the other father figures were just as necessary even if they were more limited.

It was all that assistance and love that allowed Harry to confront Voldemort and confront him alone when the time came.

Yesterday, J. K. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was gay. I think the revelation of Dumbledore's gayness enhances the whole series. Being gay adds another dimension to the humanity of the Dumbledore character and helps explain his enthusiasm for Gellert Grindelwald and his lack of heterosexual involvement. What adds to the series is that a gay man could take up the burden of providing fatherly guidance for a young boy facing enormous difficulties and be constantly animated by "the greater good" of the boy's welfare.

Much as African-Americans are still associated with stereotypes from slavery, gay people (and especially gay men) are still stereotyped as selfish, immature, inherently pedophilic, and obsessed with sex to the exclusion of everything else. Rowling's Dumbledore certainly had weaknesses, but Rowling portrays Dumbledore's youthful selfishness, ambition, and vanity and his mature errors of judgment as broadly human and shows Dumbledore doing his difficult duty to Harry and the whole wizarding world by taking Harry under his wing.

The fact that he was gay adds a further dimension of humanity to Dumbledore's heroism.

The Worst Season for Conservatives

Perhaps people on the right don't appreciate any of the seasons of the year. If someone like Clarence Thomas could be bitter over graduating from Yale Law School or confirmation to the Supreme Court, surely he could find something to resent about winter, spring, summer, AND fall.

But the bleakest of all the bleak seasons for conservatives must be autumn--the time when the trees put on rainbow coats of leaves. Given that resentment over the diversity of American society is one of the most salient characteristics of conservatism, conservatives must experience the mixture of colors in the autumn trees as peculiarly distressful, embittering, or depressing. Conservatives have long been pained by the increasing visibility of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Jewish people, gays, and American Indians in American society, the global character of cities like Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, and the nearly two hundred languages spoken in the Los Angeles school system. Last year, a lot of conservatives couldn't get over the huge pro-immigration rallies by Mexican immigrants in cities like Los Angeles.

And now there's also the presidential candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for them to worry about as well.

That's why we should be particularly mindful of the mental health of conservatives during the fall season. Just as many people become depressed from the barrenness of the landscape and lack of sunlight during the winter, conservatives might be especially vulnerable to depression as they contemplate the reds, golds, browns, yellows, and remaining greens of the trees around them.

Being conservative while the trees are changing colors must require constant vigilance. It takes a determined conservative to maintain their insistence on sameness, order, and hierarchy in the face of all the temptations created by autumn beauty. In fact, it would be interesting to see if conservatives watch significantly more football on televisions than liberals. If so, it's likely that people on the right are watching more football as a way to avoid contact with the natural world at this particularly "dangerous" time.

Perhaps we should call it "Autumn Avoidance Syndrome," or AAS for short.

There's also something uncomfortably democratic about the autumn for conservatives. From a conservative point of view, fall colors are garish enough on a hillside or along a highway, but it also seems that each tree makes its own claim for attention in a manner that conservatives find offensive. In my town of Morehead, KY in the Daniel Boone National Forest, it's not only the forest that is multi-colored, but individual trees and bushes sometimes have two or three different shades. There's a bush in our yard with poinsetta-red leaves along with faded greens. Along the streets, some trees have green and yellow leaves while others have red leaves on the outer branches and green on the inner. It's very striking. On top of all that, I've seen some individual leaves that combined green and yellow as well. It's like the leaf itself has become multi-racial or transgendered.

Because the philosopher Plato identified democracy as a polis with a multi-colored nature, he would have seen the autumn in the country like the United States as a kind of hyper-democracy of nature. What made Plato a conservative is that he found this kind of variety vulgar and dangerous. Plato didn't even like "Dorian knives" because they could serve several functions and he certainly would not have liked the changing colors of fall leaves. They were an offense against his sense of the existential smallness in both God and human kind.

American conservatives are much the same way. The right feels comforted by the certainty of a god bound by the strictures of Biblical texts and especially like the Old Testament because it makes them feel more snugly enclosed. Just as they thought of the golden calf as an idol (although they did like the gold), conservatives view the liberal god of individual freedom, generosity, and social justice as false and wrong. For the more liberal in politics and spirit, autumn diversity is implied in every season of the natural and the human world. Because conservatives believe that variety means sin and degradation, they take more pleasure out of seeing it destroyed in the flames of hell or forty days and forty nights of rain.

But diversity is not only an external of our outer garments of clothes, friends, and politics, there is a diversity of the soul that is rejected by those on the right. In his Constructive Programme, Mahatma Gandhi spoke of the need for people in India to adapt Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Zorastrian into their own souls whatever their particular beliefs. Much as the autumn trees can be several shades of red, yellow, orange, and green, Gandhi wanted people to identify themselves with other religions just as much as they identified with their own. Contrary to the conservative fundamentalists of all religiouns, Gandhi insisted on a multiplicity of identities in the individual soul as a condition for the democracy and justice.

But here Gandhi makes a demand on American liberals as well. Gandhi not only demands that we value people of other races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations as much as their own, he would insist that liberals identify ourselves with the conservative of spirit as well. Given the intensity of the ideological conflicts in American society this is an especially difficult matter. But I don't see how liberals can avoid it. If we are calling on conservatives to value difference, we have to learn to value conservative "difference" as well. If the liberal at heart would be true to themselves, we would need to incorporate some of the beige hues of American conservatism into our own souls even if we still disagree on the issues of the day.

At the very least, we can extend the hand of generosity and sympathy to our conservative friends as they suffer through their most painful season--autumn.

Mukasey Lays Down the Key Marker

Let me start out with the obvious. The Bush administration's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey should be rejected by the Senate because he refused to say that waterboarding is torture in his hearings yesterday.

The Senate's duty to reject Mukasey is a very simple matter. Federal statutes, military law, and international treaties which the United States has signed (and which we indeed initiated) all forbid the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique because it constitutes torture. Given that Mukasey is not prepared to enforce such laws, he is not fit to serve as attorney general.

For those who don't know what waterboarding is, here's a definition from DailyKos:

Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

Why then is Mukasey insisting on not defining waterboarding as torture. It's because the Bush admininistration has been systematically employing waterboarding, extreme sensory deprivation, mock executions, and other torture techniques in its interrogations. They've also been sending accused terrorists to countries where they would be tortured.

All of these practices are felonies under American law and violations of international law. If Mukasey admitted that waterboarding was torture, he would be admitting that a wide range of American practices are torture and he would be putting everyone associated with those practices from the interrogators on the spot to President George Bush in legal jeopardy.

The problem is that the Bush administration deserves to be in legal jeopardy.

What the Democrats need to do is step up to the political plate and refuse to endorse anyway for Attorney General who does not acknowledge the illegal character of Bush administration interrogation practices.

And the Democrats should do so even if that means not having an Attorney General confirmed through the end of the Bush administration.

Deborah Kerr dies

CNN has a story about the death of Deborah Kerr, the British actress who starred in a number of great movies from the 50's and early 60's.

I'm surprised Kerr never won an Oscar and never became "Lady Kerr". She was tremendous in From Here to Eternity and An Affair to Remember. Kerr projected the same nervous rage as Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn (say in My Fair Lady). It was that kind of rage that made the 60's possible and it's hard to miss in the popular culture of the 50's. But Kerr was also able to sublimate that intensity into a kind of luminous effect that lit up the screen despite the fact that she was no great beauty.

The magic of the movies I guess.

Kerr was great when matched up with powerhouse male actors like Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, and Richard Burton because she was just as much a powerhouse as they were, if not more so.

Although there's a lot of great actresses today (and little commentary on that), the only one that I would see as achieving Kerr's kind of effect is Julianne Moore in movies like The End of the Affair.

Government By Triangulation

Hillary Clinton is not only drawing contributions from business as a whole, she's also the candidate who is getting the most cash from the defense industry.

An examination of contributions of $500 or more, using the Huffington Post's Fundrace website, shows that employees of the top five arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics -- gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to Republicans. Senator Clinton took in $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R.), who raised $32,000.

This is both a huge problem and an opportunity for people on the left like myself. If she's elected with corporate support, Hillary Clinton would be eager to solidify that support. And with good reason. As anybody who reads the literature on the power elite like William Domhoff's Who Rules America knows, the corporate sector is by far the most powerful and influential part of American society. Democratic administrations are in a particularly complex situation in relation to big business. Where the Republicans basically want to give business everything they could possibly desire, the Democrats have to weigh the interests of business against core Democratic constituencies like white liberal reformers, environmentalists, labor, feminists, and African-Americans. Business hostility can destroy a Democratic administration and contributed greatly to the failure of the Carter presidency. But the Democrats can't be successful without the enthusiastic support of core liberal constituencies either and they were reminded of that by the Nader candidacy in 2000.

The inevitable outcome for a Hillary Clinton administration would be a triangulation between business, liberal constituencies, and Democratic political interests. But the situation has changed since Bill Clinton's administration. During the Bill Clinton years, the right-wing was ascendant, business was extremely aggressive, and liberal reformers were on the defensive about social issues and driven away from the table in relation to the economy. In 2008, the right is going to be more of a a nuisance picking away at the Democratic administration than an influence.

At the same time, business is going to be somewhat chastened. The Bush administration and the Republican Congress gave business everything they wanted but expected that business would become a subsidiary of the Republican Party in return. The corporate elite didn't appreciate that. Eight years of right-wing government might also have convinced business that they respect the right even less than they like the labor, the left, and social reformers.

In this light, I believe that both a Hillary Clinton administration and the corporate sector will be disposed to compromise with liberal politicians and their activist constituencies. In fact, figuring out those compromises will be much of the work of the next Democratic administration.

Slavery: Legacies and Potential Legacies

Yesterday, Inrock of African-American Political Pundit published the slave narrative of William Moore who had been a slave in Louisiana and Texas before being freed at the end of the Civil War. Here's some excerpts from Moore's account.

“We had a purty hard time to make out. Marse Tom didn’t feel called on to feed his hands any too much. I members I had a cravin’ for victuals all the time. My mammy used to say “my belly craves somethin’ and it craves meat.” I’d take lunches to the field hands and they’d say “Lawd God, it ain’t ‘nough to stop the gripe in you belly.” . . .

‘Seems like niggers just got to pray. Half they life am in prayin’. Some nigger take turn ‘bout to watch to see if marse Tom anyways ‘bout, then they circle theyselves on the floor in the cabin and pray. They git to moanin’ low and gentle, “someday someday this yoke gwine be lifted off of our shoulders.” . . .

Marse Tom was a fitty man for meanness. He just about had to beat somebody every day to satisfy his cravin’. He had a big bullwhip and he stake a nigger on the ground and make another nigger hold his head down in the dirt and whip the nigger until the blood run out and red up the ground. We li’l niggers stand round and see it done. Then he tell us, ‘run to the kitchen and get some salt from Jane.’ That my mammy. She was cook. He’d sprinkle salt in the cut, open places, and the skin jerk and quiver and the man slobber and puke. Then his shirt stick to his back for a week or more. . . .

One day I’m down in the hawg pen and hears a loud agony screamin’ up to the house. When I git up close I see Marse Tom got mammy tied to a tree with her clothes pulled down and was layin’ it on her with the bullwhip and the blood am runnin’ down her eyes and off her back. I goes crazy. I say ‘stop Marse Tom and he swings the whip and it don’t reach me real good but it cuts jus’ the same. I sees Miss Mary standin’ in the cookhouse door. I runs round like crazy and sees a big rock and I takes it and throws it and it cotches Marse Tom on the skull and he goes down like a poled ox. . . .

Mammy and me stays hid in the brush then. We see Sam and Billie and they tells us they am fightin’ over us niggers. Then they done told us the niggers ‘clared to Marse Tom there ain’t gwinebeno more beatin’s and we could come and stay in our cabin and they’d see Marse Tom didn’t do nuttin’. And that’s what mammy and me did . . .

I've also references to slaves attacking masters and surviving in reference to the slave narrative of Solomon Northrup, but believe that the defiance of the slaves on William Moore's plantation and their success in curbing a slave owner's violence was quite rare.

Inrock titles the post "Read your History, Read Our History" and I'm at least initially assuming that he's addressing African-Americans and referring to African-American history.

But I'm not sure that the history of William Moore is only African-American history. Certainly, I wouldn't want to deny that African-Americans have a special relation to the history of black people in slavery as their legacy as a people. But shouldn't white Americans view this history as "our legacy" in our own particular ways as well?

I think so.

It goes without saying that whites would identify in complex ways with the slave owner of the story, Tom Waller. Waller was white, occupied a position of slave owner that was monopolized by whites, bought and sold slaves, and mistreated and tortured his slaves in a manner that was peculiar to white slave owners. Waller's monstrous behavior is an important element of the white legacy to those who are descendants of slave owners and those who are descendants of everyone both North and South who enthusiastically supported the slave system.

That legacy can be seen in many areas of American life, including the persistence of many of the racial stereotypes of African-Americans deriving from the slavery period, the constant racial jokes told by whites, and the arbitrary and brutal police behavior toward African-Americans, among other things.

There's tremendous embarrassment, shame, and guilt among whites over the behavior of people like Tom Waller as well.

And that's also an important part of the white legacy from slavery.

But I'd like to suggest another element or possible element in the white legacy of slavery and that's an identification with William Moore and other slaves. It's not the same as the "that could have been me" or "that was my great-great grandmother identification" that can be seen with African-Americans.

But it's still real.

I've taught the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others several times to white students in Kentucky. Sometimes move toward identification by asking the "what would I have done if that were me" question. Other times and this strikes me as a likely response to William Moore's narrative, there's an identification with the black person suffering from, resisting, and/or escaping slavery as the hero of the story--someone who is admired and liked, someone who the reader has an emotional stake in seeing them succeed.

I think it would be a positive thing if whites could go further in their identifications with the slaves and slave resistance--not just see William Moore, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or W. E. B. DuBois, MLK, and Malcom X as admirable and heroic figures but view them as persons to be emulated by white people as well as African-Americans and see themselves and many of the good aspects of their own white lives as resulting from the efforts of African-Americans.

In other words, it would be a good thing if whites began to view their own lives as part of the legacy of African-American history.

Boomer Oppression

Probably the most energetic arguments I have with my students are over music. I can't understand why so many of my students have written off the music of their generation and reverted back to the rock n' roll of the 60's and 70's. I especially remember walking down the street and hearing a student play something from "Frampton Comes Alive" and telling me that he played Frampton because today's music "sucks."

To me, all of this means that the sounds of the 60's and 70's, boomer sounds, are putting severe limitations on the musical imagination of the present. It's a kind of artistic oppression that prevents people from believing the ways that their own thinking, attitudes, and experiments are expressed in music.

I listen to classic rock stations and sing along quite badly to the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf, and Hendrix. But it's all nostalgia. Why would anybody under thirty listen to that stuff any more than I listed to Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington when I was 19?

I mention this as a preface to a letter from a professor in Mississippi that was published by Andrew Sullivan. What's interesting is that he views the boomer politics of left/right as having the same constraining effect on contemporary political imaginations. I have lots of doubts about the idea that an Obama presidency would break through the ossified conflicts of the boomer generation, but I have a lot of sympathy with the idea of breaking out of boomer constraints on the political imagination.

I'm a young, newly-minted assistant professor here at a large state school in Mississippi and I've got to say I've had just had an interesting conversation with one of my more conservative students. As far as I can tell he's a pretty 'die hard' Republican. He's really big into state and local politics and is even participating in a big way in a statewide campaign - and not for the first time. He is bright, sophisticated, and probably a future power in state and local politics here in Mississippi.

What surprised me was both his anti-war attitude and, moreover, his positive view of Obama versus Hillary. Though I did not ask, as it was not my place, who he intended to vote for, it seemed clear to me that he recognizes that 2008 is going to be a disaster for the GOP outside of the deep south and that Obama was probably the best the Democrats had to offer in terms of leadership potential. What most impressed him, he said, was that Obama was against the war from the beginning - giving credence to the effectiveness of the 'Obama has superior judgement' meme that is being put out by Obama's campaign.

Andrew, this is a young, white, male conservative, from the deepest of the deep south professing support for an intellectual, African-American liberal from Chicago. Democrats have written these folks off for decades.

A Hillary candidacy would merely continue this tradition and would represent a return to the familiar, divisive politics that has divided the baby-boomers for decades. Reagan and then the '94 election killed the 'old left' in this country. Let's hope 2008 and Obama kills the 'old right' because, like Dick Gephardt and the UAW, movement conservatism has outlived its usefulness. Maybe once both these old boomer ideologies are well and truly discredited something new, from both the left and right, can emerge.

An Obama presidency would be a stake through the heart of the vampire politics bequeathed to this country by the baby-boomers inability to set aside their differences over Vietnam and the cultural changes that shook this country to the core in 60s and 70s. We cannot be rid of their influence soon enough.

Revealing the Obama Cover-Up?

Lynne Cheney revealed on national television today that Dick Cheney is an eighth cousin of Barack Obama. Ms. Cheney had a predictably gushy characterization of the connection.

"Think about this," Mrs. Cheney said. "This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor, a man that came to Maryland, could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick's and Barack Obama's."

It must be a real embarrassment for the Obama family to find out that it's related to someone who has committed a wide variety of crimes against humanity, worked relentlessly to substitute an imperial presidency for the basic framework of American government, and was the key figure in the campaign of deception that led to the invasion of Iraq.

That's even more embarrassing than Al Sharpton discovering that he was related to Strom Thurmond.

In fact, being related, even distantly, to Cheney is such an embarrassment that one has to wonder if Obama himself hasn't covering up the connection out of shame.

Maybe Michelle Malkin can investigate.

P. S. And no, I'm not related to Ann Coulter. I'll deny it to my dying day.

How Did That Dinosaur and Her Mate Fit on the Ark?

Paleontologists have recently recovered almost a full skeleton of a plant-eating dinosaur that measured 32 m, or 105 feet, and would have lived in South America 88 million years ago.

Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation.

Futalognkosaurus dukei is only one of three giant dinosaur species found in South America.

Patagonia also was home to the other two largest dinosaur skeletons found to date — Argentinosaurus, at around 115 feet long (35 meters long), and Puertasaurus reuili, 115 feet to 131 feet long (35 to 40 meters long).

I wonder how two of each species of these big boys and girls fit on the Ark.

The Republicans Lose Business, the Wealthy

There's a couple of perceptive articles out on the problems that the Republicans are having with raising money from big business and wealthy individuals this year. For both Daniel Gross and Jeanne Cummings, the problems of the Republicans with business run deeper than the fact that the Democrats now have majorities in Congress. Cummings emphasizes that big business resented the high-handed way that people like Tom DeLay dictated who business lobbies could hire into their leadership.

Republican leaders threatened a freeze-out of business lobbyists who dared hire a Democrat or ignored the names on the leadership’s private hiring tip sheet.

They also didn't like the shake-downs for bigger campaign contributions that happened every time important legislation came up for a vote in the GOP-led Congress.

Pay-to-play became the insider mantra during the Republican reign. But “extortion” was how many CEOs described the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries. No group expressed greater relief — privately and publicly — than the business community when the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banning unlimited corporate donations to politicians became law.

The bullying Republican leadership didn't act any better toward their business friends than they treated their Democratic opponents, and business lobbies didn't like it.

Business leadership also had contempt for the incompetence and cronyism of the regulatory bodies they worked with, the free-spending ways of Republicans in Washington, and wanted health care reform the Republicans refused to deliver.

According to Daniel Gross, Republican business leaders are viewing Hillary Clinton rather than any of the Republican contenders as "the establishment candidate" in this election.

As happens every four years during the primary season, Republican business leaders are rallying around the establishment candidate. This time, however, it's a Democrat. Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack, who raised more than $200,000 for W's 2004 campaign, came out for Hillary this spring. James Robinson III, the Atlanta-born banker, former CEO of American Express, and co-founder of RRE Ventures, told me: "I've been a Republican all my life. I believe in fiscal conservatism and being a social moderate." But this Fed-Up CEO now makes the case for Hillary as effectively as James Carville. "It seems to me she's the person who has got the broadest experience. She understands the importance of business development, innovation, and entrepreneurship," he says.

It's unfortunate that Gross (who's a terrific business journalist) didn't follow up on the "social moderate" part of the quote from James Robinson. Big business has been far from heroic in its treatment of African-Americans, women, and gay people, but large-scale corporations like Disney have gradually begun to affirm the value of diversity as they've sought to appeal to gay, hispanic, African-American, and urban market niches. This has created a large cultural gulf between business and the diversity-hating religious right and is a major reason why

voters in the East making between $150,000 and $200,000 favored Democratic
candidates by a 63-37 majority.

Likewise:

Since 2004, the percentage of professionals identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 44 percent to 37 percent, according to a September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The movement of various segments of the big business sector toward the Democrats is far from being a comfortable thing for business. Given that the Democratic Party is also the home of the labor movement and anti-business reformers, it's possible to claim that there is neither a "party of big business" in the United States nor a reform party.

However, the Democrats might find themselves in a state of permanent triangulation if the Republicans continue reducing themselves to a fringe party of the declining farm belts, the old Confederacy, and all the bitter Clarence Thomas-like guys in the audiences of the radio talk shows and readership of the right-wing blogs.

A Couple of Blackwater Thoughts

It looks like Blackwater USA is going to be coming home from Iraq over the next few months. I'm not sure that's an altogether welcome prospect though. Why would we want to have a trigger-happy private army in the United States any more than the Iraqis would want to have them in Iraq?

The fact that Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, is wired into the extreme right of the Republican Party through his family connections with the Michigan Republican Party, Gary Bauer and the Family Research Council, and his sister's connections with the DeVos family (of Amway fame) is also disturbing. The last thing this country needs is for either of the major political parties to be associated with armed private militias and, in my opinion, Blackwater's political allegiances make it a threat, a low-level threat to be sure, to American democracy.

In that light, I would like to see Blackwater USA and other private militias subject to tough investigations, legal restrictions, and potentially to being banned altogether. Given the recent killing of 21 Iraqis by Blackwater employees, Blackwater USA and other private militias should be investigated for crimes against humanity in Iraq. Congress should also take this opportunity to ban American government agencies at either the federal or state agencies from employing private security firms for security functions.

If these kinds of measures do not dry up their revenue streams and force the private security companies to operate on a much smaller scale, Congress should investigate whether they should not be banned altogether.

By Constitutional Amendment if necessary.

How Many Invaluable People Lost?

In the course of a very interesting post on the lack of African-American characters in a sci-fi series entitled Race to Mars, Afro-Spear comments in a heartfelt way about the human loss of the wars in African nations like "Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Republic of Congo, Cote D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan and Uganda.”

“How many future African scientific researchers have been killed who would have discovered the cure for HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and Ebola? How many future African doctors and nurses have been killed who would have brought relief to the sick by providing adequate care for their ailments? How many future African agricultural scientists have been killed who would have found a solution to the increasing desertification of the continent and boost food production to feed the people? How many future African political, social and economic scientists have been killed who would have made substantial contributions to the development of the continent’s resources, both material and human, which would benefit not only the continent but all humankind as a whole? How many future African teachers have been killed who would have inspired and managed the educational development of their students to be leaders in the field of science and other disciplines? How many future African astro-scientists have been killed who would have revolutionized space travel and exploration and make it possible to reach the impossible dream?”

I found this litany of loss painful to even read. The point Afro-Spear made was about the "euro-centric" perspective that people of African descent have nothing to contribute to the progress of mankind and can thus be "left behind" in the striving for new human accomplishments. One could also say that that's why there has been so little regret about the severe loss of African humanity over the last twenty years as well.

But I wonder.

Specifically, I wonder about whether the "euro-centric" or "Anglo-Saxon" imperial perspective that values people of African descent so little is as powerful as Afro-Spear thinks.

Certainly, the imperial perspective has weakened in Europe and even the foremost champions of the Anglo-Saxon imperium on American right aren't very confident that they can continue to bully the American public into supporting a program of (white) American domination.

There's no doubt that the vision of leaving people of African descent behind still has a great deal of cultural power in the United States.

But that's not the only vision.

In fact, there are a variety of cultural perspectives from which African-American perspectives are viewed either as equal to those of whites or as primary in themselves. People tend to underestimate the extent to which the cultural egalitarianism of the multi-cultural ethic has taken hold among American whites. African-American figures like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Sojourner Truth have become standard parts of America's heroic pantheon and African-American figures like Oprah Winfrey are just as much a part of the cultural firmament as their white counterparts.

If not more so.

In the case of Ken Burns' influential films, the experiences and virtues of African-Americans as portrayed as the core of what it means to be American. The valuing of African-Americans in these films is not done in the same terms as the valuing of African-Americans in Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, jazz, or Martin Luther King. But Burns and white multi-culturalists more generally are closer to the African-American view than they are to the cultural and political imperialism that is still defined as the American creed by conservatives.

I don't want to get pollyannish here. Certainly, the gradual mutual assimilation of African and European cultures in the United States does not in any way compensate for the monstrous exploitation of African humanity in this country.

But that mutual assimilation is real and continues to gain strength despite the continued power of the imperialism vision of American conservatives.

And as long as that's the case, the impulse to "leave African-Americans behind" will get weaker rather than stronger.

Sunday with Bill Kristol

In this week's Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol takes the opportunity to tell us that everything's right with the world that George Bush made. The war in Iraq is going great, the economy is just super-duper, and all of George Bush's policies are working.

And Clarence Thomas is the happiest guy in the world.

Praise the Lord!

Back in the real world, Clarence Thomas is still a broken guy who drinks deeply from the well of bitterness.

Likewise, the war in Iraq is going almost as badly as ever. The big positive news from the combat zone is that American casualties fell to June 2006 levels last month which would be great if the mission hadn't been failing in 2006 as well. Former Gen. Ricardo Sanchez claims that the surge is a matter of "staving off defeat." But it would be more accurate to say that Petraeus is trying to prevent failure from becoming disaster.

In a sense, that's what William Kristol is trying to do, prevent the current failures of the Bush administration from becoming a disaster for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Right now though, I'd have to say that Gen. Petraeus is having more success in staving off disaster in Iraq than William Kristol is having in staving off disaster for the Republicans.

Whoa! UK 43/ LSU 37

They announced UK/LSU scores all evening at the regional high school band competition tonight.

Several great things here.

It wasn't so much that the UK football team beat a no. 1 team (although they hadn't done that since 1964) but they won the kind of game they've been losing for decades. UK used to play top teams tough, but find ways to lose in the end.

Tonight, they found ways to win in the end.

Another thing is that Kentucky scored the last two touchdowns of regulation against an LSU defense that was supposed to be dominant. UK's strong on both lines and has lots of talent in the skill positions. It showed tonight.

Finally, the LSU win is a validating win. Arkansas and Louisville don't seem as strong now as they seemed when UK beat them. But LSU was coming off a win over Florida and has a win over South Carolina as well. LSU is the real deal and the win over LSU validates the previous wins over Arkansas and Louisville.

After the Louisville win, I wrote that UK was a 10-20 team. They look more like a top ten right now and playing Florida straight-up win or lose next week would confirm that.

Ann Coulter, Jewish People, Kittens

When the announcement for Ann Coulter's new book came out, I predicted that Ann would try to stimulate sales by putting in a picture of herself biting the head off a kitten.

Given that the kitten is still alive, the prediction would seem to be wrong.

Instead, Ann is trying to goose her sales by dabbling in anti-semitism. You can't help but admire the clever way that Coulter steers interviewer Donnie Deutsche toward her anti-semitic comments on "The Big Idea." When Deutsch asks Coulter about her ideal version of America, she describes the 2004 Republican convention (via African-American Political Pundit).

In her recollection of the convention, she said: "People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America."

Of course, Republican delegates were also overwhelmingly white, straight, and very well off. By focusing on Christianity, however, Coulter leads Deutsche into his next question.

"It would be better if we were all Christian?"

Now, Coulter is off to the races. Having set up the question about not accepting other religions, Coulter answers with a simple "yes" as a way to focus the interview on her favorite terrain, i.e., the question of whether she's a bigot, in this case whether she's anti-semitic.

" When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like "the head of Iran" and "wipe Israel off the Earth," Coulter stated: "No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. ... That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws."

Under more questioning about whether she was being "offensive," Coulter continued:

"No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be. I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews. We believe the Old Testament. As you know from the Old Testament, God was constantly getting fed up with humans for not being able to live up to all the laws. What Christians believe -- this is just a statement of what the New Testament is -- is that that's why Christ came and died for our sins. Christians believe the Old Testament. You don't believe our testament."

It's almost needless to say, but Ann ends her anti-semitic statement by implying that it's really the Jews who are prejudiced. "We believe your testament, but you don't believe ours." I swear that sometimes I think there must be a Bigotry for Dummies book that instructs racists, homophobes, and religious zealots to end every statement with a claim that minorities are the ones who are the real bigots.

So, what's the meaning of it all?

Obviously, Ann Coulter is trying to increase sales of her book by being "outrageous" and the Anti-Defamation League gives her a hand by being "outraged":

"Coulter's remarks are outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism.

But there are some interesting considerations there. For example, it looks to me like Ann Coulter--who is as good at political calculations as anybody--has decided that there's no chance for a Republican presidential candidate to get anywhere with the Jewish vote. So, why not start a controversy over anti-semitism if that's going to help her sell books. It's not like she would think that Jewish people are a group that actually matters to the Republican Party or the conservative movement.

That's the same calculation that goes into Coulter's gay-baiting of people like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. If Republicans had a shot at the gay vote, she probably wouldn't do it.

Beneath that calculation, there's another calculation that should disturb Jewish leaders much more than Coulter's "outrageous" comments. If Ann Coulter is going to get out this kind of casual anti-semitism, then it's quite likely that she doesn't think that the Jewish community is capable of anything more than impotent outrage.

If I were a Jewish leader, I'd be much more worried about the political calculation behind the insult than the insult itself.

Help! Ahab's After Me

My sister-in-law Cheryl just sent me some pictures from our August family reunion. My kids are cute, but I look like the great white whale at about 230 pounds. Time to lose.

Sanchez on Incompetence and Other Bush Crimes

CRIMES OF NEGLIGENCE. Speaking about the war in Iraq, Ret. Gen. Richardo Sanchez, the U. S. military commander in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, claimed that Bush administration incompetence was responsible for the "nightmare" of the Iraq War.

If some of America’s political leaders were in the military they would have been relieved or court-martialed long ago, Sanchez told a conference of military journalists.

"Neglect and incompetence" by the National Security Council has led to an intractable situation in Iraq, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq said.

As was the case with Jimmy Carter's assertion that the Bush administration has been engaged in torture, what Sanchez is saying about "neglect and incompetence" is obvious and has been for years. What's interesting is that Sanchez is characterizing the incompetence of the Bush team as "criminal negligence." Bush administration officials would have been "court-martialed" if they had been in the military because their "neglect and incompetence" resulted in the loss of so many American and Iraqi lives and the waste of so many military assets.

An indictment of Bush administration negligence would certainly be extremely long--including George Bush's going with his "gut" on invading Iraq, the idiotic belief that the occupation would be a piece of cake, the decision not to suppress the initial round of looting, the breaking up of the Iraqi Army, and the failure to evaluate the internal politics of Iraqi Shiites.

Of course, there was Abu Ghraib as well.

As matters of criminal negligence, all of these examples of neglect and incompetence constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors" that would be impeachable if the Democrats were strictly applying the constitution.

Sanchez doesn't mention that the Bush administration was also involved in a variety of crimes against humanity that would include the constant round-ups and illegal interrogations of "men of military age," the treatment of accused terrorists at Guantanamo, the policy of exporting accused terrorists to countries that engage in torture, and the use of practices like extreme sensory deprivation, psychological torture, and waterboarding in our own facilities.

It's already well-known that the Bush administration has been engaged in widespread violations of American and international law. By alluding to the criminal negligence in Bush administration conduct, Sanchez adds another dimension to the indictment of the Bush team.

Anger over Graeme Frost

I am generally not particularly affected by right-wing nastiness. It's disgusting and I try to highlight the disgusting aspects of right-wing smearing in my Smearkrieg series. But I generally look at right-wing smearing primarily as a tactic by political forces that I oppose. In the case of Graeme Frost, however, I find that I have a lot of anger over right-wing efforts to smear him and his family over the family's receiving S-CHIP assistance.

Thinking about why that is the case, I want to give my "friends" on the right an idea of why the smear didn't work and why it will get worse for them if the story goes on.

The bottom line is that the Frost case reminds me of Terry Schiavo.

What made most Americans disgusted with the conduct of the right in the Schiavo case was that they could imagine the Bill Frists and James Dobsons interfering with their cases if they were catastrophically injured. Would the religious right keep them alive as vegetables for ten years? Twenty? Forty? People were invested in the Schiavo case because they saw what the right was doing to Terry Schiavo as something that could happen to them.

The same is the case with Graeme Frost and his family. The two Frost kids were in a car accident, have had large-scale medical bills, and have benefitted from the S-CHIP program. What makes me angry about the efforts of Malkin and other conservative bloggers to smear the Frosts is that they would just as soon do the same thing to my family if we were in that situation and it suited their political purposes. My family makes more than twice the income of the Frost family but that could easily be wiped out if one of us was injured, became ill, or otherwise wasn't able to work. If my family received assistance as a result of these kinds of events, we could be just as subject to a right-wing inquisition as the Frosts.

And the thought of it pisses me off.

Obviously, it's dangerous for me to generalize from my own anger over the Frost smear to the country as a whole.

But I think that a lot of the reason that the right-wing is losing ground in the Frost controversy is that most Americans have a sense that the right could treat them the same way.

And they don't like it.

More Than Mean-Spirited

I don't think that Hillary Clinton quite gets it right when she describes the right-wing attack machine as "mean-spirited."

“President Bush and the Republicans should lay off Graeme Frost and all the other children who are getting health care . . . I thought I’d seen the depth of political partisanship and mean spiritedness but the Republicans and their right wing allies have really taken the cake this time."

Of course, it's not like the term "mean-spirited" does not have an honorable lineage in relation to the Republicans. Kentucky Democrats often refer to Republicans as "mean-spirited" Republicans.

And "mean-spirited" might still be a good term for regular Republicans.

But "mean-spirited" does not adequately capture the sick viciousness of the right-wing attack apparatus. In fact, what the right's been doing to the Frost family isn't unusual or distinctive at all. It's the same thing they did to 9-11 widows, Michael Schiavo, John Kerry, Max Cleland, gay people, the Alabama Democrats Rove attacked as pedophiles, and the impoverished black women the right used to stigmatize as "welfare queens.

In each case, the smear artists of the right sensed a smearing opportunity and moved in for the kill as if smearing was the only thing that made their lives worthwhile. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case for a lot of them. They smear, therefore they exist.

That's not mean-spiritedness, it's a particularly repulsive kind of sadism that the right confuses with toughness. As a type of politics, it's best characterized as the "politics of repulsiveness."

Carter Being Obvious Again

Jimmy Carter stated another obvious truth in an interview with CNN.

In an interview with CNN, President Carter said the U.S. is undoubtedly torturing prisoners in violation of international law. “I don’t think it. I know it,” Carter told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where statements by major Democratic figures about the obvious truth concerning the Bush administration are rare . . .

And praiseworthy.

Jimmy Carter: Master of the Obvious

"Master of the Obvious" might be an understatement in relation to Jimmy Carter's comments on Dick Cheney for Reuters today.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a "disaster" for the country . . . who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy . . . He's a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world.

In many ways, Dick Cheney is a tragic figure. Cheney waited thirty years for his opportunity to enact his vision of unlimited presidential power and his ideas turned out to be just as disastrous now as they were during the Nixon years.

However, there really is little doubt that "Cheneyism" has been a disaster for the United States and its interests in the world--a disaster that will take a long time to recover from.

Folks on the right might argue that it's improper for Carter as an ex-president to criticize a sitting vice-president so harshly, especially during a time of war.

But ex-presidents Carter, Bill Clinton, and even George Bush I should have a duty to speak out more concerning the abuses and disasters of the current Bush administration, not less.

As I've observed many times in the past, the Bush administration is no longer a credible government and the United States really needs people to step into the void and speak with the (informal) authority of the public concerning issues of public importance.

I initially thought that Nancy Pelosi might be able to serve as a spokesperson for the public at large. But she wasn't willing to risk the next election to serve the public now.

Ultimately, it looks like all the major figures outside the Bush administration are going to sacrifice the public welfare for short-term political manuevering. As a result, Jimmy Carter's willingness to speak the American public's revulsion toward Dick Cheney and the Bush administration is a welcome development.

Smearkrieg No. 10--The Joy of Shooting Bambi

The dispute over the right-wing's attempt to smear Graeme Frost, the 13 year old boy who delivered the Democratic Party radio address on Bush's SCHIP veto a couple of weeks ago, have been all over the internet.

But you have to love this comment by right-wing blogger/Fox commentator Michelle Malkin.

“When a family and Democrat political leaders drag a child down to Washington at 6 in the morning to read a script written by Senate Democrat staffers on a crusade to overturn a presidential veto, someone might have questions about the family’s claims. The newspapers don’t want to do their jobs. The vacuum is being filled. If you don’t want questions, don’t foist these children onto the public stage. Fight your battles like adults and stop hiding behind youngsters dragging around red wagons filled with your talking points.”

For Malkin and the other smear artists of the right, it's all about the joy of shooting Bambi, of taking a 13 year old kid and pumping him full of lead, humiliating him within an inch of his life, or at the very least stealing his lunch money.

She loves it.

The more innocent or worthy the representative of a liberal position, the more joy that people like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter take in smearing them.

If you're an innocent kid like Graeme Frost, they'll attack your family. If you're a war hero like John Kerry or a Marine colonel like John Murtha, they'll get extra big kicks out of tearing into your military record.

That's why Michelle Malkin blames Democratic Senate staffers for her smear campaign. If they're going to put a kid out there, they should know that Malkin will take extra pleasure in smearing him. The Democrats just should have known.

What a great country!

Lucky the Virgin Mary wasn't a liberal. The smear-artists of the right would have asked a lot of tough questions about one of her sons and there would be no "Christian traditions" to defend.

The Unwelcome Return of the Liberal Hawks

One unfortunate consequence of the stabilization in Anbar province is the return of "liberal hawks" like Michael O'Hanlon and Richard Cohen to the editorial pages of major newspapers. Here's Richard Cohen in the International Herald Tribune:

But I suppose the one thing that astonishes me above all is the apparent CERTAINTY of almost everyone about Iraq. Here’s a monster called Saddam Hussein (no “annoying thug” as L.K. Burnett suggests in comment 45), with a Stalinist personality cult, heading a Baath party that borrowed heavily from Nazi
totalitarian organization, sitting for decades at the head of a country he’s turned into a nighmarish realm of terror, populated by a circles within circles of cowed informants who make the Stasi look like a plaything.

Cohen doesn't seem to understand that "almost everyone" (outside the neo-con dead enders) is certain that the invasion of Iraq failed because we actually made things even worse.

Changing Standards for Landslides

Way back in the day, the right was crowing about what a big win Bush got in 2004 when he beat John Kerry by three points.

But times have changed.

Republicans are increasingly expecting to lose the presidential election in 2008 and lose big.

But they're also raising the rhetorical standards for landslides. Bush's three point win in 2004 was practically a landslide but even a fourteen point Hillary win could be easily dismissed.

According to Rep. Tom Cole, the chairman of the Congressional Republican Campaign Committee (via David Broder):

"That is no landslide election . . . The Republican nominee, whoever he is, wins at least 43, 44, 45 percent against her, and that gives us a base for congressional races.

I wouldn't dispute that the Republicans will still have a base in the South, Plains States, and rural areas after 2008. It's not like they're going to dry up and die.

But if Hillary wins 57-43, that will be a landslide.

That's also my very preliminary prediction for the final outcome.

In Addition: Glenn Greenwald brutalizes Broder for reporting Cole's views as though they were actually true.

Fred: The Legacy Candidate

There are a few things that are clear about the 2008 campaign even in the early stages. One thing coming into focus is that Fred Thompson is running as the Bush legacy candidate.

Like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004, Fred Thompson expects to get a lot of credit just for getting his lines straight. And here's some Fred Thompson lines from a positive review on National Review Online.

‘a government powerful enough to give anything to ya is powerful enough to take away everything you have.’

“I hear a lot of folks talking about ‘lost revenue’ when it comes to tax cuts. When you have tax cuts, the revenue’s not lost. The taxpayer knows where it is, it’s in his pocket!”

“We are locked into a mandatory spending cycle that’s going to bankrupt the country if we continue on the same pattern.”

“We are blessed to be living longer than ever before, and /we are blessed with the best health care in the world in this country. But we are turning our blessings into a curse for the next generation.”

It doesn't take any policy expertise or experience to deliver these kinds of lines. A guy doesn't have to his homework to get it right. In fact, too much knowledge could mess him up. A guy like Thompson can be out of the loop for ten or fifteen years and still get it right.

And that's exactly the point. Thompson's core constituency is people who are suspicious of too much knowledge, too much work, and too much involvement in politics.

Just like George Bush, "hard-working" Fred gives them what they want.

We'd Pay to NOT SEE Them

Signs of a forthcoming Republican apocalypse keep appearing. The religious right is thinking of running a third party candidate. Republican politicians are retiring like lemmings and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are drowning in money.

Right now, the smart money is on a Hillary presidency, 57 Democrats in the Senate, and a very healthy Democratic majority in the House.

So what happened to the Republicans? Speculation is rife. David Brooks thinks it's because the Republicans abandoned something called Burkean "dispositional" conservatism for "creedal conservativism."

But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

But that doesn't make sense. A lot of "suburban, Midwestern, and business voters" are no longer conservative at all on social issues like gay rights, women's rights, race relations, and abortion. That's much of the reason why suburban voters in the North went for Gore by 20 points and why the inner suburbs around cities like Philadelphia have become Democratic enclaves.

The current "progress" of conservativism hasn't helped the Republican Party either. With conservatives becoming "anti-science" on evolution, and global warming, "anti-medicine" in cases like Terry Schiavo, and generally "anti-competence," the Democrats are looking like the party of knowledge, progress, and sanity to suburban voters.

This is what former Republican John Cole of Balloon Juice (via Glenn Greenwald) is picking up on.

Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of
every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.

But Cole ignores the failure of the war in Iraq. As long as the right-wing could use the war in Iraq to promote an image of themselves as the party of masculinity and toughness, they could trick voters into forgiving them for their many peculiarities and vote Republican.

With the failure of the war, the Republicans also lost the benefit of the doubt on social and economic issues. Where swing voters, independents, and moderates might once have tolerated the social bigotries, hypocrisies, corruption, and general weirdness of the right, now these kinds of voters are openly contemptuous of conservatives and conservatism.

How contemptuous?

John Cole gives us a good idea.

The threat of higher taxes in the short term isn’t enough to keep me from voting out crazy people and voting for sane people with whom I merely disagree regarding policy. Hillarycare doesn’t scare me as much as Frank Gaffney having a line to the person with the nuclear football or Dobson and company crafting domestic policy.

Cole's comment on taxes is the flip side of the old line where somone says that "I'd pay to see them play" in relation to sports teams and bands. In the case of the Republicans, Cole and other moderates and swing voters are willing to pay higher taxes if that means getting the Republicans out of office.

In other words, many moderates and swing voters are willing to "pay their own money" to not see the Republicans any more.

Is there a higher form of insult?

Our Future Inheritance

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration approved secret memorandums justifying torture techniques (waterboarding, extreme sensory deprivation, etc.) that they had renounced in 2004.

. . . soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Dpartment issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was . . . an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency. The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

The New York Times dug up this information in relation to the controversy about the Bush administration's use of illegal torture techniques on terror suspects. This is an extremely important issue and Glen Greenwald has a typically excellent post on the pervasive lawbreaking of the Bush administration in relation to interrogation policy here.

But the point I want to make is that the secret memos on torture are unlikely to be the end of the story. It's most likely that lots of confidential memos have been written to justify the illegal, corrupt, or inept practices of Bush administration appointees. For better or worse, there's no reason to think Bush appointees have been any more interested in following the law or adhering to their own procedures in managing the Department of Homeland Security or the EPA than the Justice Department. Little bombs like the secret torture memos unearthed by the Times may be set to go off all over the federal government.

As bad as the situation looks now, it's probably going to look a lot worse after a more complete picture of the Bush administration emerges.

And that more complete picture will begin to emerge if Bush is replaced by a Demcratic president in 2008.

The Bottom Line on Safety and Security

Troubled Torturers. Yesterday's article in the NY Times about the Bush administration's torture shenanigans prompted President Bush to make another one of his Orwellian "we do not torture" statements. It seems that the Bush administration engages in "humanitarian" waterboarding, extreme sensory deprivation, and extraordinary rendition to countries where suspects will be subjected to even more humanitarian treatment.

But the debate over torture brings us to a bottom line over the Bush administration in relation to national security. Here's Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto speaking today.

It's troubling . . . I've had the awful responsibility to have to work with the New York Times and other news organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information. And I can tell you that every time I've dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of America with the publication of this kind of information.

Like Fratto, I reflect on the ways in which "the safety and security of America" is being compromised every time I see these stories. But I view the Bush administration and the right-wing as the ones who are chipping away at American security. The Bush administration's war in Iraq, refusal to cooperate with other American political institutions, and relentless defiance of American and international law have all served to strengthen global terrorism and weaken American capacities for dealing with global terror.

At the same time, the political fights over the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror have revealed that the right-wing is more of a threat to American society than the global jihadis. What has emerged is that the right-wing has little respect for American democracy and that major figures on the right like Newt Gingrich and Thomas Sowell are thinking about how democracy can be overthrown in this country. With their ideas of creating military tribunals for trying and imprisoning war opponents, activists on the right have even worked out a "constitutional" mechanism for ending American democracy as we know it.

It's impossible to separate the Bush administration from the right-wing. Efforts by the Bush administration to nullify laws against torture show the same contempt for American democracy that's shown by the chatter on the right about military tribunals, one-man rule in this country, or curtailing the First Amendment. They represent an effort to chip away at the democratic character of Amerian government and society.

And it strikes me that the Bush administration's and the right's efforts to strike at democracy represent a greater threat to this country than global terrorism.

Bad News for Hillary Supporters: Hillary at 53%

Yesterday, a Washington Post/ABC poll came out with Hillary at 53% and Obama at 20%. Most of the time, political candidates consider it to be really good news if they make that kind of big leap in the polls.

But I think 53% is more Trojan horse than gift horse for the Hillary campaign.

Of course, the Post/ABC poll might be an outlying poll. Hillary might still actually be in the low 40's. That's still a very strong lead even if it's not overwhelming.

If the numbers are real, they might be a sign that Hillary is peaking too soon. That's especially because Hillary's going to become more of a target for negative media coverage and right-wing smears the farther ahead she gets.

If Democrats start listening to the negativity, the numbers will go back down.

Being so far ahead also creates the likelihood of complacency, decreasing creativity, and lower energies as candidates and their staffs sit on their huge leads.

That can also bring the numbers back down.

Even worse, a huge lead in the Democratic primaries means that Hillary might not fully prepared for everything the Republicans are going to throw at her in the general election. Obama's failure to fight now means that Hillary's not going to be in fighting trim next July.

Given the stakes in the 2008 presidentiail election, that's very unfortunate.

Cutting a Better Deal for Soldier Heroes

My good friends at Protein Wisdom insist on the value of right-wing irony. A good example of that kind of irony comes from the enthusiastic war-monger Robert Kaplan in today's Wall Street Journal online. What Kaplan is complaining about is the tendency of the media to "pity" American soldiers rather than lionize them as heroes.

As one battalion commander complained to me, in words repeated by other soldiers and marines: "Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer Army? I'm a warrior. It's my job to fight." Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged.

I can see the battalion commander's complaint. In fact, there's relatively little coverage of day to day operations in Iraq outside ludicrous war-romantics like Michael Yon and his "al-Ameriki" schtick. When American troops are engaged with an enemy, they fight hard, fight effectively, and are almost always victorious. But the embedded reporters are gone, the romanticizing of military technology played out a long time ago, and most people became suspicious of heroism stories after the military lied about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

It's really too bad.

But Kaplan's engaged in a pity story himself. He's essentially asking people to feel sorry for soldiers because they are not being treated as heroes.

What an irony!

If the U. S. were a better society, we indeed would be treating soldiers as heroes. Everyday American soldiers are doing remarkably well despite the campaign of deception that brought the U. S. into Iraq, the incompetence of the Bush administration, and the overall failure of the mission.

In fact, however, we in the United States don't value people who aren't being successful RIGHT NOW and the military mission in Iraq has been a failure for at least three years. As a result, American soldiers are stuck in the same "pity" rut as single black mothers working multiple jobs, cancer patients, students getting through college despite working 40-50 hours a week, and people successfully fighting off depression, anxiety disorders, and other mental health problems.

I see lots of these folks in my job as a college professor and I'm sometimes so awestuck by the energy, talent, and commitment of some of my students that I end up hero-worshipping them even as I'm supposed to be acting as a role-model.

Another irony!

But the best that any of these kinds of folks can do in the mainstream media is to be portrayed as "victims" and pitied. Oh, maybe there's some token stories about "everyday heroes," but the the overwhelming focus of the media is on the wealthy, celebrities, rock stars, and the titans of business. People who have to be heroic to either get by or move one step forward are lucky to avoid being stigmatized as failures, losers, whores, and rednecks.

That's the pitiable reality.

American soldiers in Iraq want more respect from the media.

And that's fine.

But it's unfortunate that they'll only get that respect if America becomes a better society at home.

The Dominatrix Right--Exploring A Conservative Fantasy

What would a right-wing life be without fear? Of course, the primary conservative fear used to be fear of blacks and black skin, black diseases, black sexuality, and black talk. But the right has branched out over the years to luxuriate in the fear of gays, women, Hispanics, crime, pedophiles, their kids being kidnapped, secular humanism, communism, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, and Hillary Clinton.

It goes without saying that fear is what makes life worth living for people on the right.

In fact, if the right has any kind of practical dictum at all, it's that "we have nothing to enjoy but our wonderful fears. "

This brings us to the fear du jour--fear of radical Islam--the idea, even the conviction, that radical muslims will be taking over the United States and introduce sharia law, make everybody convert to Islam, force everybody pray five times a day, and make "our women" wear burkas whenever they left the house.

The pervasive fear of radical Islam seems to derive from some statements that Osama bin Laden has made about destroying the West and forcing everyone to convert.

There seems to be an operant conditioning principle at work here: Osama speaks, conservatives fear.

Not that it takes the right much to be "afraid, very afraid" anyway.

Glenn Greenwald printed a stunning example of this kind of fear in his Salon blog yesterday. I'll quote at length.

Glenn -- just read your post about how we're all over-reacting to Islamic fundamentalism. How refreshing! I had no idea that our fears were so ill-founded. There I was, all set to actually believe the rhetoric of Al Qaeda and Iran and the countless video tapes of suicide bombers, not to mention the actual language of the Quran. In fact, I'd even begun to believe this poll, which says that quite a few American Muslims think that there is justification or strapping a bomb to yourself and walking into a mall . . . But who needs polls when I have Glenn Greenwald! Thank heavens we have you to balance all this with an argument that can basically be summed up as, "well none of these people who mocked Islam have been killed, so you all need to relax, OK?"

I picture this moment, Glenn, and it brings me a little chuckle. It's you, begging some terrorist for your life, pointing out all the wonderful things you wrote that undermined America's resolve to fight against Islamic terrorism. "Look," you say, pulling articles out of your pockets with shaking hands, "I have served you! Clearly this means that I deserve to be spared!" I won't tell you how it ends, Glenn.

I imagine this scenario brought Greenwald's correspondent more than a little pleasure. This person's imagined "terrorist" sounds more like a dominatrix than anything else as he holds a knife to Greenwald and makes him beg "to be spared" before slitting his throat. This kind of terrorism porn even has a connection to reality because it's fairly close to what happened to Danny Pearl when he was murdered in Pakistan.

When conservatives conjure up the "Coming Muslim Take-Over of America," they essentially envision terrorists holding a knife to the throat of all Americans and making us do their will. For some reason, they find this to be a really fascinating and exciting vision of their future.

But it's essentially a dominatrix-style pornography in which conservatives enjoy the thought of themselves and their fellow Americans being punished by our terrorist doms. We've been such bad boys and girls not to have supported the Bush administration.

Maybe this is why Ann Coulter is so popular on the right.

The next time you see a conservative, ask them if they're part of the "Dominatrix Right."

Jonah Goldberg on Clarence Thomas

Jonah Goldberg has this notable passage on Clarence Thomas in an article entitled "Clarence Thomas' Great American Story" at RealClearPolitics.

Thomas survived, of course, and if his opponents had been able to read this book
they would have known he would. My Grandfather’s Son is a tale of pride, determination and independence — from the constraints of discrimination and the deadening influence of group-think.

As I stated in my last post, there are good reasons for empathy towards Thomas. Much as someone should ask "how would I do in battle" before condemning soldiers, we should ask "how would I have done during the heat of desegregation" before condemning Thomas.

But the story of Clarence Thomas is the farthest thing from "a tale of pride, determination, and independence." I see a lot more self-pity than "pride" or "determination" in Thomas' story

I also wonder about Thomas' purported "independence" from the "deadening influence of group-think."

What was the "group-think" that Thomas liberated himself from? In the final analysis, the idea that Thomas rejected was the hundred-year struggle for racial integration by generation on generation of African-Americans. Far from being deadening "group think," the struggle for racial equality had an overwhelming rightness and nobility to it. Thomas rejects "the grand theorists" of the Civil Rights Movement like MLK and Thurgood Marshall and also rejects the thousands of African-American activists whose courage and daring finally succeeded in opening all of American society to the talent and energy of black people. For Thomas, what the Civil Rights Movement largely meant was that he was impelled to become a pioneer of integration at places like Yale Law School. In fact, the success of civil rights activism created the imperative that young black men and women perform the very painful chore of taking up all the new opportunities within a larger American society that was still hostile to black people.

And Clarence Thomas hated the burden of desegregation, hated that he had been led to take up that burden, and has resented the Civil Rights Movement and the relentless black push for desegregation ever since.

Ultimately, Thomas turned his back on "the Great American Story" of his generation for the very "deadening" world of carping about integration and being a black poster boy for conservative opposition to the black community. He's been called an "Uncle Tom" but that's an overly-generous term for what Thomas became.

I haven't walked in Clarence Thomas' shoes. So I don't know how I would have responded to the same pressures. Who knows? Maybe I would have done the same thing.

One thing's for sure though. Clarence Thomas was on the wrong side of history, political morality, and common decency when he turned against the century-long struggle of African-Americans for civil rights.

And anybody else who would have made that turn would have been just as wrong-headed as Thomas.

Clarence Thomas: Preliminary

I would read Clarence Thomas' memoir if I had time but know I'm not going to have the time this semester.

But I think I'm going to do a couple of posts on it anyway.

One of my conservative students did a senior seminar paper last semester comparing Clarence Thomas to Thurgood Marshall. It was obvious from the student's materials that Marshall was an even greater man than I had been lead to believe while Thomas is a self-pitying, bitter kind of guy.

Certainly Thomas did not measure up to Marshall.

Having said that, I think it would be absurd to blame Thomas for not being a great man. How many great men or great women are there anyway? I have a considerable amount of self-esteem but I wouldn't measure up to Thurgood Marshall either.

And I don't particularly blame him for being a self-pitying, bitter kind of guy. From his long interview with ABC News, it seemed that Clarence Thomas' main problem was the integration era and the fact that he was one of the black people moving forward to integrate schools, colleges, offices, and political institutions.

Thomas was not the kind of guy who was suited to being a pioneer, to being the only black person or one of the only two black people in high school, college, and work settings. Being "stared at," being the target of racist insults, and being painfully self-conscious all the time about what people were thinking about him were enormous burdens.

And Thomas found no solace with other black people because he was just as painfully self-conscious about what wealthier or lighter-skinned black people thought of him.

As the black feminist bell hooks once wrote, "racism hurts." And for Clarence Thomas, every dimension of the American racial system hurt.

And the people that Thomas blamed for the pervasive pain he felt were the "grand theorists" of integration who took him and others like him out of the segregated communities--people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernethy, the liberal judges who pushed desegregation, and the white social elites who supported them.

They were all great men and Clarence Thomas believed that their schemes demanded much too much of bright but not extraordinary young men and women, men like Clarence Thomas.

Thomas would find the conservatives who were suspicious of integration for other reasons to be much more congenial than the people who had pushed him into the cannon's mouth of integration.

But my impression is that Clarence Thomas was pretty much a broken man for a several years before he was nominated for the Supreme Court.

Ann Coulter: A Liberal's Best Friend

Ann Coulter has a passage in her new book where she gloats about the inability of liberals to destroy her career.

Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as “citing facts,” is the spice of life. When I see the hot spittle flying from their mouths and the veins bulging and pulsing above their eyes, well, that’s when I feel truly alive. This happens, I dearly hope, once a week when my column is released. But the public gnashing of teeth that I incite occurs approximately every six to eight months, which is rather peculiar, since I believe I annoy liberals much more often than that.

Coulter is an incredibly clever polemicist and provocateur and she's right when she claims that her writing sends liberals into "paroxysms of rage." And it reflects a weakness on the part of most liberals that they allow her to make them so angry.

But liberals really would be fools if they still wanted Ann Coulter to lose her writing gigs. After five books, hundreds of columns, and thousands of interviews, Ann Coulter has become an asset to political liberalism. That's because she really did go one step too far when she slandered the 9-11 widows in Godless.

As a result, public opinion has tipped against Coulter and she's become a living symbol of the right-wing's habitual venom and bigotry to mainstream America.

Now, Coulter's in the same league as Rush Limbaugh. When one of her outrages on Muslims, John Edwards, or the right of women to vote gets publicized, it's seen as an example of everything that's wrong with conservativism.

That makes Coulter a friend of the left. In fact, one of our best friends.

A Visit with Greg Goldey

Today, my wife and I traveled bearing the gift of lasagna to Winchester, KY to visit with Greg Goldey. Greg had been sleeping on the couch but got up quickly and was in good spirits. We talked about how he was feeling, discussed some shop issues, and had a generally good time.

Avoiding Faux Pas. Greg is very thin, thin enough that his face looks Lincolnesque because his ears stick out. The last time we visited, I mentioned his resemblance to Lincoln as a kind of joke. But it turned out to be not funny at all. Goldey's father-in-law is a strong believer that Lincoln was a warmonger and a tyrant and that Gen. George McClellan was a much preferable figure. My luck to be calling somebody Lincolnesque in the only household in America where McClellan is a hero.

But today I managed to avoid that kind of embarressment by keeping my historical references to myself. Of course, Greg still looks Lincolnesque.

Getting Better. Greg is getting stronger but in somewhat of an ironic way. After his first dose of chemo, Greg slept constantly. Weeks later, he's now strong enough that he can throw up a lot. That's very promising. Greg is also up and around, talking about department business, and getting a little heated in discussing things. In other words, he's improved to the point where he can throw up and be more himself. That's progress. Soon, he'll be able to cope with underachieving students.

No Stomach for Stomach Cancer. Given that Greg's cancer is in his abdomen, he still can't eat regular food even though he's tried some fruit. It will be a very good sign when he can eat regular food again. Right now, he's still got no stomach for it.

Not Voting Republican. Goldey and I didn't get a chance to talk politics or sports. Not talking sports was probably a good idea. He got his Ph.D. from Oklahoma and Oklahoma was upset yesterday by Colorado. As for politics, I'm pretty sure Greg's not going to come out in favor of a Republican. He can barely stomach the Democrats.

The Presidency 2008--A Four Way Race?

According to Salon, some of the big wigs on the religious right have been meeting in Salt Lake City to lay the groundwork for a third party candidacy should Rudy Giuliani win the Republican nomination.

The bottom line for James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and their colleagues is abortion rights. Giuliani supports Roe v Wade and the leaders of the religious right find that intolerable. James Dobson, probably the no. 1 leader on the religious right is particularly adamant in his refusal to even vote for Giuliani (or Fred Thompson) let alone give him his full-throated support. As a result, he's thinking about picking up their marbles and getting out of the Republican Party game.

Some of this is the fault of conservative religious leaders themselves. Dobson and Bauer have refused to back social conservatives Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback because they viewed these guys as losers. But the refusal of the conservative religious establishment to endorse one of the social conservatives has meant that they had absolutely no chance whatsoever.

The religious right couldn't find it within themselves to hold their noses and support Mitt Romney either.

So now they're nowhere in the Republican Party.

But a third-party campaign from the right would be more of a body shot than a knockout punch to a Giuliani candidacy. That's because people on the left will probably launch a fourth party campaign if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. It's not like anti-war activists and anti-corporate crusaders (with whom I agree on almost all substantive issues) have been sitting on their hands. They've been supporting Edwards and to a lesser extent Obama. But they aren't winning either.

A fourth party presidential campaign from the left wouldn't be as strong as a religious right campaign from the right (unless Gore or Edwards were running). The left just has less money and less institutional infrastructure than the religious right.

Ultimately then, a third party campaign would hurt Giuliani more than a fourth party effort would hurt Hillary. It just wouldn't be a knock-out punch.