Chief Justice Roberts

An interesting point by Jeffrey Toobin in Slate: In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

This is, in a nutshell, my primary discomfort with the modern GOP. Surely there are some times when the powerless deserve some help against the powerful?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/25/090525fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all

Daniel Larison on target

Larison is one of the best of the new conservative voices. Pointing out the imperviousness of the GOP party regulars and movement conservatives to their plight he notes they refuse to listen.

Nowadays, if they acknowledge mistakes at all, mainstream conservatives are keen to pin responsibility on anyone but themselves while tarring anyone who points out the obvious errors of the last decade as treacherous or some crypto-liberal eager to score points with the media.

They are so stupid it hurts

As Greenwald points out as the Right Wing suddenly rediscovers the dangers of unbridled governmental power: All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State -- from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA "reforms" to massive increases in domestic "counter-Terrorism" programs -- are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

They are really so incredibly stupid that it hurts to even think of it. For years I have wondered why they thought this was a good idea. Did they ever stop to consider if they wanted Hillary to have this kind of power, for example? They're just lucky it's Obama.

Excellent Frum

Note in the comments that many don't get it.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/28/david-frum-lies-about-me-and-the-lying-liars-who-tell-them.aspx

Obama is boring

At least that's the meme on the Right.

What I don't get is how this is supposed to be a bad thing. Last year all they could talk about was how exciting Obama was and how his supporters were just being swept away with emotion. Back then that was supposed to be a bad thing.

Logically the Right should be happy that Obama is now boring.

Of course, logic has been banished from modern conservative discourse. It's far too inconvenient.

Gutfeld is gutless

A little-known conservative "comedian" named Gutfeld made a crack insulting the Canada and the Canadian armed forces (who have lost more troops in Afghanistan than any US ally) apparently doesn't have the balls to actually apologize when he says something stupid. That's evidently beneath his dignity, although apologizing is not beneath the dignity of the President of the United States (Special Olympics).

Sullivan makes more good points on the implications of the torture memos

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics".
Something is rotten in a country where this can happen with such impunity - and when, even now, highly regarded and respected journalists and commentators simply move on or roll their eyes or sigh world-weary sighs.
What we just lived through was an attack on the Constitution of the United States, conducted by the president and vice-president and an array of apparatchiks.The theory undergirding it renders the entire constitution subject to one man's prerogative. The conservative blogosphere - who resolutely ignored this in deference to their Caesar - now bleats about Obama's alleged threat to the constitution!

Whole thing here: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/criminals-in-th.html

Good luck with that

Frum:

But what about the rest of the party? Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:
On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.
And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

Update: Steele grovels to Rush: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19517.html

Completely off the deep end

Pat Robertson was quoted criticizing Rush Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" comment on a "conservative" Web site. Surprising enough, but even more surprising are the comments that follow.

My Lord, they are full of hatred, bile and nasty criticism of Robertson!

There's every indication that the "right" in this country is collectively melting down and losing their marbles.

Climate "truthers"

From The Reality-based Community:

Most of the glibertarians, cultural conservatives, and gadget-heads who constitute the useful idiots around the core oil-and-coal-company global-warming denialist constituency would be horrified to imagine themselves playing the role of 9/11 Truthers, or RFK Jr. pumping the thimerosal/autism link, or Thabo Mbeki claiming that AIDS isn't caused by HIV. But all four "movements" are alike in depending on compete mistrust of actual scientific experts. (Holocaust denialism is similar in that respect, but different in being almost entirely insincere: the Holocaust deniers seem to be saying, "Hitler didn't kill all those Jews, and I'm glad he did.")

Reagan wouldn't recognize this GOP

Mickey Edwards, former Republican congressman explains why the Republicans are so lost:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-edwards24-2009jan24,0,3344794.story

Key point:

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater's speeches in the mid-'60s, or to Reagan's in the '80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year's presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism's worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation's public affairs

Andrew Sullivan, the "liberal"

Key quote on Forbes defining him as a "liberal": For the record: self-confident political groupings seek converts - look at Obama. Failed and failing political groupings seek to punish and list heretics. I'm resigned to being a heretic given the state of the current conservative movement. And as an independent writer, it mercifully can't hurt me much. I just don't think conservatism will revive until it stops thinking that way.

The whole thing is here: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/forbes-definiti.html

Powerline's bizarre retrospective on Bush

The Powerline Bush retrospective is full of questionable comments, but this one caught my eye:

President Bush leaves office mostly unloved, with some poll respondents saying that they consider him one of our worst presidents ever. This in itself is odd. Generally, our worst Presidents have been one-termers, for obvious reasons: James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover (if you buy into the myth). But George W. Bush was re-elected rather easily in 2004. Thus, if he really was one of our worst Presidents, either the electorate was subject to mass hypnosis, or something must have gone seriously wrong in his second term.

Easily re-elected? If I remember correctly , if just a few thousand votes had gone the other way in Ohio then Kerry would have been president. That's "easily" for an incumbent president? What, pray tell, would have barely winning re-election looked like?

Reqium for a Maverick

Excellent Rolling Stone piece on the election

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24375710/requiem_for_a_maverick/print

P.J. O'Rourke on how conservatives blew it

Long, but worth the read: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15791&R=13CD722B2E

Whither the GOP?

While some of the more intellectual conservatives are starting a promising examination of where conservatism and the Republican Party may be going in the wake of Tuesday's stunning rejection, there's very little evidence that any of that thought is making it down to the Wingnut Base.

Indeed, judging from the blogs, talk radio and some of the GOP leadership (Boehner) the prevailing mood seem to be that all the GOP needs to do is be more conservative.

There's a lot of talk about how the U.S. is a "center-right" country, which may ore may not be true, but even granting that it's broadly correct the Wingies seem to be forgetting that the key word in that compound modifier is the CENTER. Moving more to the RIGHT by definition means moving away from the center.

This really makes no sense, whatsoever, but the Right has been suffering from mass delusion for quite a while now. While most see that Iraq was a mistake, Bush a failure and Palin an embarrassment, the Right remains out of step with the rest of the country to an alarming degree. I mean, we have people buying guns because they're afraid that Obama will take them away and putting ads on Drudge about joining the resistance!

I mean, really, Obama hasn't said anything about taking guns away and, indeed went out of his way to reassure gunowners. Even if he were so inclined, it's hard to imagine him spending any political capital on a futile, divisive and ineffective gun seizure plan when he's got a war to end, a war to win and an economic crisis to solve.

On top of all that, it would have been nice for all these gunowners to have been more concerned about the Bush administrations erection of a regime that claims the power to throw anybody it deems an enemy combatant (even citizens) in jail without judicial review for as long as it wants and, oh yeah, torture them. If these fools think they little guns will protect them from that kind of power then they haven't been paying attention. Remember Waco? No private party can hope to defend itself against the federal government by force of arms alone.

A tiny voice of reason

From the American Conservative site blog Eunomia:

I rehash all of this not to dwell on Palin’s problems, which are increasingly irrelevant as McCain heads towards defeat, but to implore conservatives to stop ignoring reality just because they happen to like a candidate’s personality and biography. Besides being bad for the quality of conservative thought, it embraces the caricature that conservatives are indifferent to knowledge and have no use for expertise, which has become an all too legitimate critique of how conservatives have responded to the misrule of the Bush administration. That was not always the case, but if conservatives insist on making elaborate arguments that understanding and knowledge are not significant criteria when choosing our top elected officials they will lose whatever credibility they may still have. More than that, they will be crippled by their embrace of cheerful ignorance when it comes time to oppose the policies of the Democratic administration that is surely about to be elected.

William F. Buckley has died

William F. Buckley is almost single-handedly responsible for my respect for conservative intellectuallism. Watching him as a teen on Firing line, I was always impressed by how he seemed to have the better of the argument. It was fascinating to watch him.
One of the saddest legacies of the Bush years is the resurgence of Yahooism in conservative circles, where emotion trumps reason, fear overcomes logic and core conservative principles are barely understood, more than simply abandoned. Here and there someone like George Will keeps up the good fight, but for the most part it looks like conservatives are likely to return to the wilderness for a while, and deservedly so. Having no clue about the root cause of Obama's appeal, they're likely to find themselves marginalized by him in a way not seen in a generation.
Buckley, himself, has raised objections to various aspects of Bushism, but the toll of advancing age meant he was unable to be a vigorous opponent. We can only hope that another strong advocate will emerge in due time. Liberalism will benefit from a proper critic.

Under what definition is Bush a conservative?

It's certainly not one that includes respecting the Constitution.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/01/30/bush_asserts_authority_to_bypass_defense_act/

Bush asserts, baldly, that he doesn't have to follow Congress' explicit instructions on spending money related to defense. He asserts that some "theory" of inherent powers trumps the explicit and plain language of the Constitution. Unfortunately for the Republic Congress seems to have little interest in protecting its powers.

What conservatism has come to

Mark Shea:

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

What it means to be "one of us" in Today's Rubber Hose GOP

"I don’t see how [McCain] wins the Republican nomination. I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us," - Kathryn Jean Lopez

If that's what conservatism has mutated into, you can include me out. As with the Dem devotion to abortion, the Right's dalliance with torture is no longer played as an ugly thing they are ashamed to name and in a hurry to deny with euphemism. I can remember how Linda Chavez telescoped the whole Faustian process in her column a few years ago" torture. She began by calling for "rational debate" and ended with a demand that we get over our squeamishness and get on with the safe, legal and rare torture. Some of you may remember the Dems following a similar process a few years earlier with another embrace of evil.
So now, for those who wish to be "one of us" according to the canons of what used to be a conservative journal, the *first* thing you must embrace is not free speech, low taxes, the dignity of the individual, nor smaller government. No the first thing that makes you one with the alleged standard bearer of conservatism is zealous defense of Caesar's power to torture. And in this day and age, that means Caesar's power to torture anybody he deems an illegal combatant.
And this swinish definition of conservatism as prostitution to the power of Leviathan is used to exclude a man who heroically endured torture at the hands of the Viet Cong.
Despicable. Utterly, utterly despicable.
http://www.markshea.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html#2636605701574017493