The Wall Street Journal published an adaptation from a recent speech by Fouad Ajami about his four week trip to various spots around the Middle East.
[Open full post]“George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region,” a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me…
To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty…
The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption…
Unmistakably, there is in the air of the Arab world a new contest about the possibility and the meaning of freedom. This world had been given over to a dark nationalism, and to the atavisms of a terrible history. For decades, it was divided between rulers who monopolized political power and intellectual classes shut out of genuine power, forever prey to the temptations of radicalism. Americans may not have cared for those rulers, but we judged them as better than the alternative…That bargain with authoritarianism did not work, and begot us the terrors of 9/11…
…Mr. Bush may not be given to excessive philosophical sophistication, but his break with “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in the Arab-Islamic world has found eager converts among Muslims and Arabs keen to repair their world, to wean it from a culture of scapegoating and self-pity. Pick up the Arabic papers today: They are curiously, and suddenly, readable. They describe the objective world; they give voice to recognition that the world has bypassed the Arabs. The doors have been thrown wide open, and the truth of that world laid bare. Grant Mr. Bush his due: The revolutionary message he brought forth was the simple belief that there was no Arab and Muslim “exceptionalism” to the appeal of liberty. For a people mired in historical pessimism, the message of this outsider was a powerful antidote to the culture of tyranny…
It was Iraq of course that gave impetus to this new Arab history. And it is in Iraq that the nobility of this American quest comes into focus. This was my fourth trip to Iraq since the fall of the despotism, and my most hopeful yet. I traveled to Baghdad, Kirkuk, Erbil and Suleimaniyah…We met with parliamentarians and journalists, provincial legislators, clerics and secularists alike, Sunni and Shia Arabs and Kurds. One memory I shall treasure: a visit to the National Assembly…There was the spectacle of democracy: men and women doing democracy’s work, women cloaked in Islamic attire right alongside more emancipated women, the technocrats and the tribal sheikhs, and the infectious awareness among these people of the precious tradition bequeathed them after a terrible history…
A lively press has sprouted in Iraq: There is an astonishing number of newspapers and weeklies, more than 250 in all. There are dozens of private TV channels and radio stations. Journalists and editors speak of a press free of censorship. Admittedly, the work is hard and dangerous, the logistics a veritable nightmare. But no single truth claimed this country, no “big man” sucked the air out of its public life. The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. Among the Sunni Arabs, there is growing recognition that the past cannot be retrieved, that it had been a big error to choose truculence and political maximalism. By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world. No Iraqis I met look to neighboring Arab lands for political inspiration: They are scorched by the terror and the insurgency, but a better political culture is tantalizingly close.
…Everywhere, the order is under attack, and men and women are willing to question the prevailing truths. There is to this moment of Arab history the feel of a re-enactment of Europe’s Revolution of 1848 — the springtime of peoples: That revolution broke out in France, then spread to the Italian states, to the German principalities, to the remotest corners of the Austrian empire. There must have been 50 of these revolts — rebellions of despair and of contempt. History was swift: The revolutions spread with velocity and were turned back with equal speed. The fear of chaos dampened these rebellions.
As I made my way on this Arab journey, I picked up a meditation that Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat who embraced that “springtime” in Europe, offered about his time, which speaks so directly to this Arab time: “The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk.” It would be fair to say that there are many Arabs today keen to walk — frightened as they are by the prospect of the Islamists coming to power and curtailing personal liberties, snuffing out freedoms gained at such great effort and pain. But more Arabs, I hazard to guess, now have the wish to ride. It is a powerful temptation that George W. Bush has brought to their doorstep.
Pew has come out with a new poll in which it developed some new and interesting political typologies. If you want to find out what kind of “political animal” you are, then go here and take the survey. A few of the dual statements with which you are supposed to agree or disagree seemed to have overly-negative implications. For instance, one set offered a choice between
“Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
or
“Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough to help them live decently.”
There were probably better ways to ask that. Anyway, it’s still worth taking the test. I tried it a couple times, changing the shading on a few answers, but still got the same results. I am what Pew calls an “Enterpriser.” To put it another way, I’m a Limbaugh Republican.
Newsweek finally fully retracted its story, and the libertarian uber-linker Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) offered this own opinion regarding liberal hypocrisy and their manufactured outrage over this now-false abridgement of religious rights (and the more general Guantanamo “torture” charges)
I want to add that I don’t think there’s anything immoral about flushing a Koran (or a Bible) down the toilet, assuming you’ve got a toilet that’s up to that rather daunting task, and I think it’s amusing to hear people who usually worry about excessive concern for religious beliefs suddenly taking a different position. Nor do I think that doing so counts as torture, and I think that it debases the meaning of “torture” to claim otherwise. If this had happened, it might have been — indeed, would have been — impolitic or unwise. But not evil.
And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to be willing to apply the same kind of criticism to things like Piss Christ, or to explain why offending the sensibilities of one kind of religious believer is “art” while doing the same in another context is “torture.” If, that is, they want to be taken at all seriously.
I’m sure many don’t hold Reynolds’ view regarding flushing the Bible and probably, to be intellectually honest at some level, extend that respect to other holy books. Nonetheless, Reynolds’ calling out of the left on their religious hypocrisy is noteworthy.
[Open full post]From the OpinionJournal.com, offered without comment:
Liberal Fundamentalism
Who are the intolerant extremists?
Monday, May 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
We have been following the extensive theological commentary in the press on the subject of politics and religion in the current presidential campaign. It might not otherwise have occurred to us that so many editorialists and columnists harbored so many deep, pent-up opinions on religious worship, voluntary school prayer or Christian fundamentalism.
What we have been looking for but have so far missed in this great awakening of religious writing is a short sermon on the subject of liberal fundamentalism. And so in the spirit of Samuel Johnson, who once wrote homilies for his church pastor so as not to fall asleep during Sunday services, we would like to offer a few thoughts on what has been far and away the most messianic religion in America the past two decades–liberal politics.
American liberalism has traditionally derived much of its energy from a volatile mixture of emotion and moral superiority. The liberal belief that one’s policies would on balance accomplish something indisputably good generally made opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences unpersuasive. Nonetheless, politics during the presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower was waged mainly as politics and not as a kind of religious political crusade. Somehow that changed during the Kennedy presidency.
Mr. Kennedy used the force of his personality to infuse his supporters with a sense of transcendent mission–the New Frontier. The emotions this movement inspired coincided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced–Martin Luther King’s civil-rights movement. The Rev. King’s multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals. Some have since returned to traditional, private lives; others have become neoconservatives. But many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public-policy issue that has come along in the past 15 years. The result has been liberal fundamentalism.
The Vietnam anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the disarmament and nuclear-freeze movements, the anti-nuclear-power movement, consumerism, the Third World movement, the limits-to-growth movement. These have been the really active faiths in contemporary America. Their adherents attended the anti-war march on Washington in 1970, locking arms and once again singing “We Shall Overcome.” They characterized the leader of their own country at the time as demonic. More recently, they have held vigils outside nuclear power plants, singing and holding lighted candles, while their lawyers filed injunctions in friendly courtrooms. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups transformed “the wilderness” into a vast, pantheistic shrine, which they and fellow believers must defend against the depredations of conservative developers. America’s Roman Catholic bishops denounced nuclear war and became revered figures in the nuclear-freeze movement (but when they denounce abortion, they are reviled).
Not surprisingly, this evangelical liberalism produced a response. Conservative groups–both secular and religious–were created, and they quite obviously make the political success of their adversaries more difficult. Liberals don’t like that. So now, suddenly, we find all these politicians and columnists who are afraid someone might want to impose a particular point of view on them. “There is a long and unhappy history of intolerance which still flourishes at the extremist fringe of American politics,” says Ted Kennedy, a fundamentalist liberal preacher from eastern Massachusetts. Indeed there is. It greeted U.S. soldiers returning to California from Vietnam with spit. It has characterized people who work in the auto, drug and nuclear-power businesses as criminally amoral. It turned the investigations of Anne Gorsuch, Les Lenkowsky and Ed Meese into inquisitions.
If some liberals are now afraid that certain Christian fundamentalists will reintroduce new forms of intolerance and excessive religious zeal into American political life, perhaps we should concede the possibility that they know what they’re talking about. But they might also meditate on the current election and why there has been an apparent rightward shift in political sentiment in the U.S. It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and public values.
Sounds familiar? Yup, I posted a similar thing the other day. But I forgot this part, from OpinionJournal:
(Editor’s note: The editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 13, 1984.)
The more things change…
Over at Spinning Clio, I’ve written a longish piece (“Christianity as a ‘Founding Religion’ Disavowed: What DID the 1796 Treaty with Tripoli Say (and when did it say it)?” that investigates the historical interpretation of a rather obscure treaty that has been used to buttress the arguments of many secularists and others who seek to remove religion as a founding principle of the U.S. It is part of the History Carnival, a bi-monthly roundup of history blog posts. (This one is being hosted by Saint Nate, I’ll be hosting one of the two next month, incidentally.) If so inclined, please take a look.
[Open full post]There is an excellent posting on Captain’s Quarters about Janice Rogers Brown, one of the court nominees being filibustered by Senate Democrats, that references this Sacramento Bee editorial written by a liberal who, among other things, said:
I know Janice Rogers Brown, and she knows me, but we’re not friends. The associate justice of the California Supreme Court has never been to my house, and I’ve never been to hers. Ours is a wary relationship, one that befits a journalist of generally liberal leanings and a public official with a hard-right reputation fiercely targeted by the left…
Even though being in general disagreement with Brown’s political philosophy, she notes Brown’s dissent in the case of The People v. Conrad Richard McKay and comments further:
I find myself rooting for Brown. I hope she survives the storm and eventually becomes the first black woman on the nation’s highest court.
I want her there because I believe she worries about the things that most worry me about our justice system: bigotry, unequal treatment and laws and police practices that discriminate against people who are black and brown and weak and poor.
Consider these words from the conclusion to Brown’s dissent in the referenced case:
In the spring of 1963, civil rights protests in Birmingham united this country in a new way. Seeing peaceful protesters jabbed with cattle prods, held at bay by snarling police dogs, and flattened by powerful streams of water from fire hoses galvanized the nation. Without being constitutional scholars, we understood violence, coercion, and oppression. We understood what constitutional limits are designed to restrain. We reclaimed our constitutional aspirations. What is happening now is more subtle, more diffuse, and less visible, but it is only a difference in degree. If harm is still being done to people because they are black, or brown, or poor, the oppression is not lessened by the absence of television cameras.
I do not know Mr. McKay’s ethnic background. One thing I would bet on: he was not riding his bike a few doors down from his home in Bel Air, or Brentwood, or Rancho Palos Verdes – places where no resident would be arrested for riding the “wrong way” on a bicycle whether he had his driver’s license or not. Well…it would not get anyone arrested unless he looked like he did not belong in the neighborhood. That is the problem. And it matters…
It is clear the Legislature could not authorize the kind of standardless discretion the court confers in this case. Why should the court permit officers to do indirectly what the Constitution directly prohibits? How can such an action be deemed constitutionally reasonable? And if we insist it is, can we make any credible claim to a commitment to equal justice and equal treatment under law?
Well…No. Not exactly.
Do those words sound like some scary extremist? Of course not.
And yet, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid recently said this about Brown:
…She is a woman who wants to take us back to the Civil War days…
Which leads The Captain’s posting to end with these words:
This is the real Janice Rogers Brown, not some bogeyman dreamed up by People for the American Way and Ted Kennedy. Even her presumed political opponents in the California state capitol know better. It’s high time for the GOP to put an end to the smear campaigns of the Left and get Brown the up-or-down vote she deserves.
Nobody has put forth evidence that Janice Rogers Brown has let her personal beliefs cause her not to follow the Constitution in her judicial opinions. Rather, all they can offer are certain public comments which confirm that she holds some conservative viewpoints. The last time I checked, expressing such opinions was still an allowed freedom in America. This point is reinforced by Thomas Sowell.
Unsurprisingly, Reid’s comments have not stopped with just Brown. Here is what he recently said about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:
I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don’t–I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.
Discussing a Supreme Court case, Reid also said this about a dissent by Thomas:
…it’s like looking at an 8th grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard…
Also in the most recent link, James Taranto of the OpinionJournal.com responds with these thoughts:
When Trent Lott crossed the line two years ago, Republicans, after some hesitation, did the right thing and ousted him as their leader. If the Democrats retain Reid, it will tell us something about the party’s commitment to racial equality.
Here is the link to a 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial that explains the underlying motives for the words and actions of Senate Democrats:
The truth is that Judge Brown is all too qualified, and what scares the left is her chances for promotion. More U.S. Supreme Court Justices–including Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas–have come from the D.C. Circuit than from any other federal court…
The lesson liberals learned from Clarence Thomas’s success is to start attacking early when fewer people are paying attention. Senators who had approved Judge Thomas’s appointment to the D.C. Circuit found it politically difficult later to oppose his promotion to the Supreme Court…
So she’s getting the by-now-ritual Borking…
…attacks ultimately descended into something close to parody…Democrats accused her of being insensitive to victims of rape, housing discrimination, age discrimination and even racial discrimination.
Judge Brown was born into a family of Alabama sharecroppers in 1949. She has personal experience with racial segregation and every other precept of Jim Crow America. The idea that she needs a lecture on discrimination from…anyone…in the all-white and mostly male Senate is absurd on its face. But for Democrats the goal is to make her look somehow like an inauthentic black.
As Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Justice Thomas and others can attest, liberals reserve their harshest and most personal attacks for minorities with the audacity to wander off the ideological plantation…Hardly an “extremist,” Judge Brown…wrote the majority opinion for the court more times that any other Justice in the 2001-02 term…
This is about political power, and overturning the results of the 2000 and 2002 elections…
Senate liberals are in the process of filibustering a rainbow coalition of conservative judges that deserves to become a major Republican campaign issue: One black, one Hispanic, three women, two Southern whites and perhaps soon an Arab-American. Let’s have a 2004 election debate over which party is really the enemy of diversity, intellectual and otherwise.
The Left just doesn’t want any blacks wandering off their plantation. No conservative blacks allowed. No school choice for poor inner-city black kids. The list could go on. Now ask yourself who really believes America should be the land of freedom and opportunity for ALL Americans.
See here for more on the Senate judicial filibusters.
ADDENDUM I:
Peter Kirsanow adds these thoughts about Janice Rogers Brown. Nat Hentoff comments here.
The two local newspapers published last Thursday a new letter to the editor I wrote about the ongoing NEA teachers’ union contract dispute in East Greenwich. The editorial begins:
The issues of retroactive pay and “work-to-rule” are at the heart of the dispute in the East Greenwich NEA teachers union contract dispute. The union expects salaries to be made whole via retroactive pay increases. But if the union believes they will get such pay, then they have no incentive to settle the contract for anything less than their one-sided outrageous demands. Yet, in the meantime, our children will not be made whole retroactively for all the times teachers have, due to “work-to-rule,” refused to do the same things for our children that they did in past years. This is an inequitable situation that needs to be rectified.
The balance of the editorial offers my specific recommendations on how to settle certain key financial terms in any new contract – and it starts with eliminating retroactive pay and dedicating some or all of those funds to providing tutors and other help to our children.
The West Bay edition of the ProJo carried a shorter version of the same editorial, available here for a fee.
Also last week, the newspaper reported that the Town Council did cut the proposed 2005-2006 school budget by $800K – which has the effect of making it difficult for the School Committee to offer retroactive pay in any settlement. In addition, the School Committee has taken retroactive pay off the table, at least for now:
[School Committee member Steve Gregson] said the item has not been specifically discussed in talks, but, like Bradley, said the board, right now, is not willing to offer the pay because of the contract compliance situation. Gregson said the committee, in a unanimous executive-session vote, moved to take the retroactive pay off the table for now.
“The union has decided not to fill their complete obligation,” he said. “We don’t believe they deserve it.”
All of these developments led Roger Ferland, the East Greenwich NEA representative, to do one of the few things he does well – whine:
Roger Ferland, president of the East Greenwich Education Association, said he was confused by the council’s directive and said members should not meddle in the talks.
“It’s unfortunate that the Town Council is trying to put their hands in this,” he said. “I’m not sure why they did that. It’s not going to help things. In fact, it’s a good way to sabotage them.”
Ferland said the members of the School Committee are elected to handle the talks and the council should respect that and let them do their jobs. He said he hoped that there might be some kind of change by the financial town meeting in June.
You can read more about the specifics of the East Greenwich dispute here, here, and here.
You can read more about the broader public education issues here in Rhode Island here, here, and here.
Why these issues matter so much is summarized in this posting about the horrible state of American public education.
I have always failed to understand why our society pays so much attention to the opinions of Hollywood celebrities, as if they have any ability to offer rich insights into the issues of life.
This opinion was reinforced this morning by two separate news articles about Brad Pitt, both coming from the same interview:
In the first article:
Lucy and the GQ gang were invited to Brad’s place for the shoot where he talked candidly about his hopes of one day becoming a daddy.
“He seems very ready for that in a way that he didn’t used to be,” she added. “He knows that there was a time that he was all about the adventure.”
So what kind of father does Mr. Pitt think he will be?
“I’ll be able to figure it out when I get there. I have great faith in that. I’m just really aware of the responsibility of putting your life second, and your job is to show this little one around the world,” he told GQ.
In a second article from the same interview, Pitt also said:
The actor revealed to GQ magazine that he never quite bought the whole “until death do us part” thing in the marriage vows.
“The idea that marriage has to be for all time — that I don’t understand,” Pitt, 41, admits in the interview conducted not long after Aniston filed for divorce in March. “It’s talked about like it failed, I guess because it wasn’t flawless. Me, I embrace the messiness of life. I find it so beautiful, actually.”…
For a guy who has previously expressed concerns over the idea of lifelong monogamy, even before the split when he told Vanity Fair last year, “I’m not sure if it really is in our nature to be with someone for the rest of our lives.”
Brad Pitt thinks he is ready to be a father but staying married to a wife for the rest of his life is unnatural. Sounds like a man whose only experience with children consists of junkets to Africa with Angelina Jolie and her child where Pitt can drop in and play – and then go his own way. All the upside fun, none of the downside hardships, and none of the long-term responsibility and commitment.
A profoundly fake view and understanding of the real world. Kind of like making a movie isn’t it? So, again, why do we pay any attention to what Hollywood people say?
Stephen Green of Vodkapundit offers a striking counter-argument to Pat Buchanan’s editorial entitled “Was World War II worth it?”:
It took 40 years, but today Pat Buchanan hit bottom on the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte…
Shame on Buchanan. We must never let the evil of World War II be whitewashed. I would encourage you to read the entire posting.
[Open full post]Welp, what are we all to make of this?
Mr. Gingrich and Mrs. Clinton have a lot more in common now that they have left behind the politics of the 1990’s, when she was a symbol of the liberal excesses of the Clinton White House and he was a fiery spokesman for a resurgent conservative movement in Washington.
Beyond the issue of health care, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich have forged a relatively close relationship working on a panel the Pentagon created to come up with ways to improve the nation’s military readiness, according to people close to them.
Mr. Gingrich says he has been struck by how pro-defense Mrs. Clinton has turned out to be at a time when other Democrats have criticized President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq. He chalked that up to her experience in the White House, where her husband, as commander in chief, had to deal with grave national security matters.
“Unlike most members of the legislature, she has been in the White House,” he said. “She’s been consistently solid on the need to do the right thing on national defense.”
It was, in fact, during one of the defense panel’s meetings in Norfolk that Mr. Gingrich suggested to her that they join efforts to push legislation on an area of mutual concern: the need to spur greater online exchanges of medical information among patients, doctors, health insurers and other medical experts. That, in turn, led to the press conference that both attended this week.
Political opportunism on both parts? Or could there be something to the idea that a personal relationship can overcome too-often hyperbolic partisan rhetoric? I actually think its encouraging. Though I must confess that there is no way I could trust Mrs. Clinton as President. Nonethless, when she’s right (as she has been on military affairs), she’s right.
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