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. [Read more]
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).
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.
1/ From Michelle Cottle’s “External Flame,” at The New Republic this week:
[T]his alliance may be an even shrewder move for [Caroline] Kennedy Schlossberg than for [Barack] Obama. It’s been 45 years since the fall of Camelot, and the family brand has begun to fade. A growing portion of the electorate was born after the deaths of John and Bobby and has a tough time relating to the Kennedy fixation of its elders. Under such conditions, what’s a committed custodian of the family legacy to do? Hitch her clan’s wagon to the hottest political star in decades. With a little luck, even as that old Camelot magic rubs off on Obama, the candidate’s energy and relevance will help sustain the Kennedy brand for a little longer.
The Kennedy name is the gold standard in Democratic politics, and it will remain so as long as John Kennedy’s assassination is a part of living memory. But the youngest people to vote for him in 1960 are 68 today, and seven out of eight Americans are too young to remember him as anything more than a historical figure, no more or less real than Roosevelt, Lincoln or Jefferson.
Edward Kennedy himself is 75. Besides his son, no third-generation Kennedy holds national office.
And thus, when Kennedy said Obama would not be trapped by the patterns of the past, it might not be because he was comically or tragically unaware of his own or his family’s position. It might be exactly the opposite: Perhaps he was too aware of that position. If that’s the case, then last week’s endorsements should be seen as an acknowledgment of just how fragile the patterns of the past can be.
By midnight Tuesday [i.e. February 5], after more than 20 states have weighed in on the Obama-Clinton race, we’ll have a better sense of how the Kennedy calculus affects the election in the
short run….
But in the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised if the endorsements do as much to help the Kennedys as they do to help Obama. Casting Obama in the Kennedy mold offers him authority, but it also offers the Kennedys a future, a way to keep the mystique alive.
QUICK UPDATE (7/1): Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me.
The burden of identifying and confronting the Bush legacy necessarily falls on Obama. Although for tactical reasons McCain will distance himself from the president’s record, he largely subscribes to the principles informing Bush’s post-9/11 policies. McCain’s determination to stay the course in Iraq expresses his commitment not simply to the ongoing conflict there, but to the ideas that gave rise to that war in the first place. While McCain may differ with the president on certain particulars, his election will affirm the main thrust of Bush’s approach to national security.
The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.
By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration’s entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country’s vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.
