Regular read­ers know that I don’t like to get too per­sonal within the con­fines of this blog-​like entity. But I won’t hes­i­tate to con­fess that one of the found­ing arti­cles of my faith is that the state of the world is, as ever, the bane of sane men everywhere.

Today’s proof? Pres­i­dent Bush had to apol­o­gize to Silvio Berlus­coni yes­ter­day for telling the truth:

The Hokkaido G8 meet­ing has pro­duced a diplo­matic faux pas of unprece­dented pro­por­tions. Now George W. Bush has had to apol­o­gise to Silvio Berlus­coni and to the Ital­ian people. But why? To find out, you merely have to glance at Mr. Berlusconi’s biog­ra­phy in the press kit issued by the White House to accred­ited journalists.

“Berlus­coni was one of the most con­tro­ver­sial lead­ers in the his­tory of a coun­try known for gov­ern­men­tal cor­rup­tion and vice”, the pro­file points out.

…Read More…

Crazy NYT Ad Week con­tin­ues here at dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion. Today’s install­ment: a group billing itself as America’s Lead­er­ship Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Plan­ning has an ad on page A15 of today’s Times that lays the blame for America’s envi­ron­men­tal trou­bles at the feet of ille­gal immigrants.

Huh? you say.

Check it out:

[T]he bull­doz­ers keep on coming, rip­ping up some of the most beau­ti­ful farms and forests in the world and turn­ing them into con­crete and asphalt sub­urbs. But with U.S. census pro­jec­tions indi­cat­ing our pop­u­la­tion will explode from 300 mil­lion today to 400 mil­lion in thirty years and 600 mil­lion before 2100, bull­dozer sales should keep on boom­ing. Unless we take action today. The Pew His­panic Research Center projects 82% of the country’s mas­sive pop­u­la­tion increase, between 2005 and 2050 will result from immigration.

Accord­ing to the South­ern Poverty Law Center, the ALTL­R­PIRP is a front for five anti-​immigration groups funded by John Tanton, whom the SPLC and other have called “the puppeteer” behind the modern anti-​immigrant cru­sade. SPLC has named three of these groups as hate groups “for their links to white suprema­cists and pub­li­ca­tion of big­oted materials.”

What’s scary is that a rap­proche­ment between the anti-​immigrant right and the green left is less unlikely than it sounds.

My buddy Ben Cal­houn put together a great story for WBEZ on why Obama’s polit­i­cal suc­cess has had every­thing to do with choos­ing Hyde Park as his Chicago home. It does a nice job of answer­ing one of the key ques­tions left open by James Merriner’s “Friends of O,” (Chicago Mag­a­zine) and Andrew Ferguson’s “Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood” (The Weekly Standard).

Rick Perl­stein, yesterday:

Nearly every con­ser­v­a­tive has some ver­sion of this–some way of saying that if self-​identified con­ser­v­a­tives fail or fall short, it’s because they’re not “really” con­ser­v­a­tive. But the stan­dards of what is a “conservative” are sub­jec­tive, shift­ing, self-​contradictory, and always self-​serving. A con­ser­v­a­tive will always give him­self the out of saying “conservatism has never been tried.”

What always gets me about this defense is that it’s a page straight out of the old Marx­ist play­book. Crit­i­cize Marx for what the Soviet Union had wrought and you got a stan­dard answer: don’t mis­take “actually exist­ing Communism” for “true” Communism.

I sup­pose in gen­eral that this rhetor­i­cal ploy is one every utopian move­ment needs for that inevitable moment when his­tory refuses to coop­er­ate with the best-​laid plans of mice and men. (And don’t for a second doubt the utopian sub­text of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.) As Perl­stein says,

This single blunt fact cannot be over­stated: here was the first chance in the modern era con­ser­v­a­tives have had to prove them­selves. And they failed. Imag­ine if some­how Leon Trot­sky had sur­vived and was restored to the lead­er­ship of the Krem­lin, after gen­er­a­tions of “Trotskyists” had built an entire cul­ture around the notion that if only they were in the Krem­lin, the rev­o­lu­tion would have suc­ceeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psy­chic wounds would be pro­found. The dis­ar­ray, mutual recrim­i­na­tion, con­fu­sion, anger, are only to be expected.

But Perlstein’s little thought exper­i­ment encour­ages the thought that there might be some­thing more direct (and less meta­phys­i­cal) than his­tor­i­cal irony at work in the con­ser­v­a­tive par­rot­ing of a cen­tral Marx­ist apolo­gia. The thought, for instance, that they actu­ally did learn it from Marxism.