Roland has some commentary on Bill Kristol’s recent return to advocacy for “national greatness conservatism.” You have to love Matt Welch’s assessment of this event in title: “Big-Government Conservative, After Helping Big-Government Conservatism Fail, Advocates Big-Government Conservatism.”
Roland is more sympathetic, but the political philosophy of the Bush administration is as dead as detente in the Republican Party. Apart from Kristol, no one in the party is looking longingly on the age of Nixon. Reaganism is in renaissance.
Michael Totten has a succinct yet informative post up from the Georgian capital of Tblisi: And my translator, whose husband works for Georgia’s ministry of foreign affairs, made a similar guess that the West helped save the capital. “The night they came close to Tbilisi,” she said, “Bush and McCain made their strongest speeches yet. The Russians seemed to back down. Bush and McCain have been very good for us.” RTWT.
My guess is that if I were a liberal, I would find Obama to be an attractive candidate. Surely the man is well spoken, charismatic – and whatever else you may believe negative about him, Obama is nobody’s fool. Even if I were liberal, I might be a bit concerned about his inexperience. But – I imagine he would get my vote anyway.
Thus, I find this bit of news/gossip almost difficult to take seriously. Some people think that Obama is going to select John Kerry as his running mate? The same guy who couldn’t beat George W. Bush when his ratings were on the downslide? The fellow who lost an election you would think that 74% of Democrats could have scooped up with relative ease?
You may not realize this, but the House Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings (of a sort) in an attempt to impeach President Bush. Guys, he is gone in six months. I love this line:
“I am really astonished at the mood in this room,” commented one witness, George Mason University School of Law professor Jeremy Rabkin.
“The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented,” Rabkin said. “You should all remind yourselves that the rest of the country is not necessarily in this same bubble in which people think it is reasonable to describe the president as if he were Caligula.”
The inscrutable and vainglorious Boi from Brazil weighs in to explain why Republicans find Obama’s candidacy “scary”:
Conservatives love to claim that Obama supporters have excess reverence for their candidate and see him as some sort of transcendent messiah figure. There is a small minority of Obama supporters — as is true for most candidates and political movements — who probably expect more from Obama than it is healthy to expect from political leaders generally.
But listening to this objection from the right-wing movement is the ultimate irony. There has not been a political figure in a long, long time who was revered, worshiped and transformed into a grotesque Icon of Transcendent Greatness the way the Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, has been. For years and years, the Right sustained itself as little more than a glorified Cult of Personality around the Great, Conquering War Hero.
Greenwald goes on to detail what he supposes is evidence of George Bush’s cult of personality, consisting entirely of hagiographies written about the President by conservatives, and remarks from politicians. That there are Bush’ophiles in the Republican Party is no big surprise, nor particularly indicative of anything other than party loyalty to a beleaguered President. That Greenwald thinks that is commensurate with a video supporting Obama’s candidacy by having celebrities chant the man’s name is more than silly. Indeed, the Puppet-master’s analysis has all the depth and weight of a ratty old sock, worn thin at the heel and sporting massive holes.Rick Moran makes this abundantly clear:
For one so hysterically inclined to exaggerate, to denigrate, to posit the most outrageously ignorant motivations for conservative actions, our man Mr. Ellison simply lacks the ability to evaluate anything in an adult manner. Instead, he reminds me of a teenage girl in the way he dramatizes the most insignificant events and statements from conservatives as sinister and evil. A true drama queen of the left, he is incapable of the kind of balanced, nuanced judgement ascribed to most grown ups who write about politics and politicians.
Lambchop cannot tell the difference between political hyperbole as given by politicians above and the raw, emotional, slavish, worshipful, and fervent idolatry that millions of Obama supporters demonstrate on a regular basis. They can’t tell you why they are for him. They can’t tell you why they faint and weep in his presence. They can’t tell you why they believe he can “change the world” when he can’t even change the politics of Chicago.
Obama supporter Kathleen Geier writes that she’s “getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama’s supporters. On listservs I’m on, some people who should know better – hard-bitten, not-so-young cynics, even – are gushing about Barack…
Describing various encounters with Obama supporters, she writes, “Excuse me, but this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign. The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity – the Obama volunteers speak of ‘coming to Obama’ in the same way born-again Christians talk about ‘coming to Jesus.’…So I say, we should all get a grip, stop all this unseemly mooning over Barack, see him and the political landscape he is a part of in a cooler, clearer, and more realistic light, and get to work.”
Joe Klein, no Republican hack, is also quoted in the Political Punch piece:
Joe Klein, writing at Time, notes “something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism” he sees in Obama’s Super Tuesday speech.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said. “This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of you.”
Says Klein: “That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is. “
I actually disagree with Klein that Obama has not put any substance on the table, but he is correct that the fervency of the Illinois Senator’s support is not derived from his policies, but from a visceral reaction to his candidacy.
No one has ever accused George Bush of being a rock star. No one has ever said that Bush causes the hearts of women to palpitate uncontrollably thus causing them to pass out.
And yet Lambchop, in what can only be described as one of his more desperate leaps of illogic, tries to assign equal value to the Obama phenomena and the small number of Bush-bots who I’ll bet never thought any impure thoughts about George.
Rarely in recent American history had a political leader received such a visible testing ground for the character of his leadership. Giuliani projected a profound, steely calm, and an all-encompassing competence—announcing the latest street closings or bus service changes one minute, pledging resolve and stressing American unity the next, reassuring New Yorkers all the while. He also provided Americans with a lesson in the old-school stoicism that is rapidly passing from our national life. Yet it was a stoicism that left no doubt about the suffering inside. Asked for an update on casualty figures at one point, he shook his head and said unforgettably that the losses would be “more than we can bear.”
It was in the ruins of Ground Zero, of course, that Giuliani’s presidential ambitions became plausible. His mayoral record in New York prior to September 11 more than justified a presidential run, but New York mayors, even great ones, are never considered presidential timber, barring some unique and monumental circumstance. Giuliani’s campaign difficulties have been well documented—from his moderate stands on social issues to his messy personal life, from his questionable primary strategy to his sometimes baffling passivity as a candidate. But his departure from the presidential field represents, in the end, a symbolic break from the preeminence of September 11 in our national consciousness. The psychologists tell us that we need closure—as if anything short of death ever wraps up conclusively—and one way or another, we have all long since moved on personally from that day. But Giuliani’s absence from the campaign will remove a visceral political reminder as well—a flesh-and-blood mayor who stood, covered in ash, and spoke to the nation’s greatest city on its darkest day. None of the remaining candidates can match his standard of leadership and record of accomplishment; one hopes that we choose wisely in his stead.
Perhaps Giuliani should blame Bush for his campaign’s demise. If Bush had not been so successful in preventing another domestic terrorist attack, Giuliani’s relevance to voters would be painfully obvious, and his deviations from party orthodoxy less compelling. Instead, he and Bush, the two public figures most associated with September 11, will watch from the sidelines as America turns the page.
I remain frustrated, a little angry – and saddened that Rudy is out of the race. If only….
Every time war footage from Lebanon flickers across the flat screen television in my apartment on the 30th floor of a high-rise in mid-town Manhattan, I am overwhelmed by a deep feeling of sadness. When I scan through the news on the Internet each morning, I’m overtaken by anger. The result is confusion: I go to sleep at night thinking I am a dove and wake up in the morning to find out I am a hawk.
It’s gotten so bad that I have even started missing Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister of Israel who has been lying in a coma for the past six months. I find myself writing screenplays in my mind: Sharon wakes up, stares at the TV screen, and sees Israel invading Lebanon. Sharon, I think, would presume he has landed in hell where he is damned to relive the most dreadful moments of his political career.
The very fact that I am reminiscing about Sharon is shocking — many people of my generation can’t stand him. The man led Israel into its traumatic “optional war” of 1982 when we invaded Lebanon — an experience that left behind numerous scars on the Israeli population, both physical and psychological. The soldiers who fought in southern Lebanon then did not understand why they where there; why they lost their friends, their youth and their innocence; why they had to fight against an unknown enemy and patrol the streets of Lebanese cities — passing by civilians who were drinking coffee and playing backgammon in the cafes.
