Cheney for President!

"The sudden re-emergence on the political scene of former Vice President Dick Cheney is somewhat puzzling. Why would a man who has occupied positions of authority...want to re-enter the arena when he didn't have to? Could it be that he is testing the waters for a 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination? [...] Cheney would unify and perhaps re-energize the Reagan coalition in ways that few if any of the potential GOP candidates could." -- Peter Roff (via Chris Orr)

It would be ironic (and, honestly, a little sad) if the GOP were the first party to run a presidential candidate who supported marriage equality. Still, I think the notion that Cheney could reignite the Reagan Coalition is misguided, as well as insufficient. Two words: Reagan Democrats. What will Cheney appeal to them on? Unclear, but Cheney's never exactly been known for his political sensitivity. Now, politics is always fluid and the Democrats hardly have a lock on these voters, but somehow I doubt that Dick Cheney is going to be the person to reach out to these folks, he of the bad impression of The Penguin.

Truth be told, I'm curious to see where the GOP would start in order to rebuild. In 1980, the GOP's strong spots were in the Midwest, the liberal Northeast (that still gave Reagan an awful lot of votes), and the libertarian West--California, before 1992, voted Republican for president with the same frequency as Idaho. Nowadays, those regions range from marginally Democratic to staunchly Democratic. The country has changed, and so must any possible center-right coalition. The idea that "just bringing the base together" will be enough to win suggests that the right really has begun to believe its own bullshit about how this is a center-right country, and that people have been bamboozled by liberal media bias and Obama's charisma. This is always the danger when one deals in spin.

Apologies?

"Fox News' Steve Doocy told viewers this morning that "some" are referring to the president's visit to the Middle East "as President Obama's Muslim apology tour. "Who are these "some"? Doocy didn't say. If pressed, the Fox News personality would probably have to point to the frequent references to an "apology tour" on his own standards-free network." -- Steve Benen

Ah, yes. Because in the minds of the neocon gallery, explanation is tantamount to apology. To a lot of these folks, even having to defend our policies is a sign of weakness and cowering before the world. Not only is the American way of life not open to debate, it isn't even open to discussion. Take it or leave it. For us or against us.

But let's just take this idiocy at face value. Let's say that President Obama were to publicly apologize for the War in Iraq while abroad. It seems far from obvious to me that this would be indefensible. Regardless of the intentions of the people who started the war, it is now pretty difficult to dispute that the war was prosecuted incompetently for a substantial period of time. Hell, even Bill Kristol said that Don Rumsfeld was a terrible Defense Secretary on the Daily Show a few years ago. Would it be wrong to apologize for how poorly the war was prosecuted initially? I suspect that intellectually honest neocons would be able to accept that. Taking this further, what if Obama were to apologize for the outcome of the Iraq War and that it was ever waged? After all, it hasn't exactly worked to spec. Would the neocons have a problem with apologizing for that inconvenient fact? I suspect so. After all, we liberated the Iraqis, no? Sometimes one reads grumbling from neocons about how ungrateful Iraqis are at being liberated, though this is sort of like expecting the family in the Cat in the Hat to thank the Cat after messing up their house, liberation or no. Going from a stable, if dreary, existence to an unstable, "free" one is still going to be a net negative for actual Iraqis who can't fulfill their basic needs. An even stronger statement would be to apologize for the broad thrust of American foreign policy in the Middle East since Mossadegh was ousted and admit that it was motivated by America's insatiable need for oil. This would have the virtue of being mostly true, and this seems to be what Doocy is suggesting Obama is saying. This is, however, not at all what the Cairo speech says. That something so manifestly obvious can only be stated by the Noam Chomskys of the world is a hint of its correctness--why would both the mainstream right and left be so angry at this assertion, were it not substantively true in such a way that implicated them both in a disastrous and immoral foreign policy?

One suspects that neocons don't want a discussion (let alone a debate) on their ideas because their ideas do not withstand scrutiny. The only reason why anyone signed up for their vision in the first place was because the Bushies scared the bejesus out of Americans after 9/11. Hence the heavyhanded deployal of a patriotic litmus test with respect to aggressive war and "democracy promotion", such as it is. Anything less than that would have allowed critics to pick apart the glaring contradictions in the neocon worldview and conclude that they relied upon ridiculously oversimplified models of civilization and human nature and that they simply had no idea what they were talking about. Democracy is not the default style of governance for humanity--before the 18th century, it was practiced very little, save for the examples of the ancient Greeks and, for a time, the Roman Republic. And yet, this is one of the core assumptions in the neocon worldview. How defensible can the rest of it be? Trotting out the apology insult seems to be an attempt to defuse any detente between America and the Middle East, as the possibility of some less costly and less belligerent way of dealing with the Middle East and the terror threat will necessarily make their conflict-centered model less attractive to a war-weary populace. I will by no means predict that neoconnery is in its final throes--such declarations tend to backfire on the issuers--but it's certainly on the run, and its supporters are desperate.

This should be interesting

Pennsylvania will consider the gay marriage issue.

Ladies and gentlemen, our esteemed Senate Majority Leader

Yeah, Conor is right--this quote from Harry Reid is pretty disgraceful. One need not wonder why presidents have felt the need to accumulate more power in the executive branch when one reads stuff like this. I honestly don't understand why he's still in the leadership at all--ever since he caved on Iraq funding I've known that he's worthless--someone more bark than bite, who won't stand firm when the chips are down. That he's not terribly bright compounds matters. Either Durbin or Schumer would be marked improvements.

Speaking of Minnesota Republicans...

He's not good enough, he's not smart enough, and doggone it, people just don't like him. And he won't go away:

"The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that an interesting name has popped up among the people being speculated about as Republican candidates for governor of Minnesota, now that incumbent Republican Tim Pawlenty isn't running again: Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman -- the man who is still litigating his defeat against Al Franken in the photo-finish 2008 Senate race."

The idea of Coleman as governor is delusional. If he wanted it, he should have thought of this earlier before destroying his popularity and reputation in the state. Not that he had much to begin with: he lost to Jesse Ventura for governor in 1998, barely beat Fritz Mondale for Senate six years ago, and has now lost to a guy famous for portraying a formerly overweight self-help host. It's rather clear that Minnesotans don't like the guy. Couple this with the scorched earth campaign he's currently waging and the corruption allegations, and it's just puzzling.

Don't Minnesota Republicans have anyone else? Don't they have some congresspeople (aside from Bachmann)?

My guess is that he's telling the truth

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty: "I'm going to do whatever the court says. If the court directs me to sign that certificate, I will."

If one assumes that Pawlenty is to run for president, I see little reason why dragging out the process helps him. Sure, maybe it makes Jon Cornyn and Mitch McConnell happier, but the GOP (wisely) doesn't do superdelegates and if the Republican establishment could still anoint candidates then Mitt Romney would have been the GOP standard-bearer last year. Signing the election certificate might annoy some activists, but this is something of a local story and it's hard to believe that obeying a court order will be seen as disqualifying to most Republicans.

Actually, I think that it's entirely possible that the consequences of not signing the certificate would be far worse. I tend to think that politicians that can't deliver their home state in a national campaign don't really have a prayer. Mitt Romney is sort of a proof of this. He was never really in the game, and aside from maybe siphoning off some Mormon votes in the west and maybe, maybe, in Michigan it was unclear what he was going to bring to the table for the Republicans, electorally. Meanwhile, there were polls that showed Romney losing Oklahoma, nearly tied in Alabama with Obama, etc. Pawlenty's ability to deliver Minnesota--in fact, to help turn around the Midwest in general--have to be among his greatest assets, and he's not going to do it by alienating every Democrat and independent in the state by doing something like this. It's all a numbers game, really.

A broad assessment of Pawlenty as a candidate suggests that he could be competitive--I suspect he could play in Ohio, Indiana, and possibly Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Michigan as well. He'd do well among Southerners. He's the right image for the GOP to cut--younger, more blue collar, evangelical, sane, conservative but with a hint of Sam's Club. The Republicans could do much worse.

Positive and negative liberty, again

Jon Henke: "Recently, Democrats have won on promises to "empower" people. But Democrats are much more concerned with entitlements than empowerment. Progressives mostly succeed in making progress towards Washington, DC."

Will the right never learn the meaning of positive liberty? I really think it would help the debate if we could realize that freedom doesn't just run in one direction. Taxing the wealthy to create social programs that increase social mobility ultimately increases liberty--not for the rich dudes, but for the poor people who otherwise wouldn't have had a shot. This is fundamentally what positive liberty is, and while negative liberty isn't invalid by any means it would be nice to know that the smarter voices on the right at least understand this distinction.

Now, admittedly, positive liberty can get out of hand, and I think it's a good idea to have a party with the opposite conception of liberty to balance things out. However, conservatives actually love positive liberty when it comes to everything except for taxing the wealthy. In fact, on questions of social and foreign policy it is the Democratic Party that sees things in terms of negative liberty, while it's the GOP that believes that government can rule the world and get teens to stop fornicating--tasks that have eluded centuries of aspirees--but the very notion that government could do a decent job running a health care system is not only immoral but insane to them. I guess it's not really possible to be absolutely positive or negative due to the complexities of life, and some sort of mixture is necessary. But conservatives seem to think that the evils of big government don't apply to virtually everything they believe in. Maybe they should figure out what they really do stand for before trying to win power again?

The bloggy abortion debate and my take

There's an interesting abortion debate going on in the blogosphere--Mark Thompson recaps it--and the question is basically about the Tiller killing and how we should respond to it. I tend to agree with Thompson--I think that Hilzoy is wrong to say that the proper response to this killing is to repeal restrictions on late-term abortion and make training on the subject mandatory for all baby doctors. I think that this is both politically and substantively misguided.

I'm a pro-choicer, but I will admit to being somewhat conflicted about the subject personally. I'm fine with abortion through the end of the second trimester--once viability occurs, and once the fetus is able to live on its own outside the womb, it is no longer a fetus but a fully living child. This isn't some sort of craven third-way stance on the issue--it is essentially the view of Roe itself. Before that, my view is similar to that of someone being kept alive by artificial means: it's a personal decision that the next of kin have the right to make. The analogy isn't perfect, as with a Terri Schiavo there's no hope of a change in the situation, while a fetus will, all things being equal, become a person. I acknowledge this shortcoming readily. But this is what I believe.

So, the implications of this put me in the mushy middle of the issue. I support a ban on partial birth abortion for personal reasons but also for political reasons. I know a lot of pro-choicers oppose such a ban (I know Ezra Klein's made this argument before) because it would be "chipping away" at abortion rights in America. I find this argument to be as silly as the wingnuts' argument that legalizing gay marriage means that soon guys will be marrying goats. It's the same slippery slope logic: that redrawing the line just a little bit is tantamount to erasing the line altogether. It's also a weak argument--it would be better for such folks to argue that life begins at birth, and that before that one can do whatever one wants to the fetus. Not my belief, but it would have the advantage of being coherent. And, politically, it would be a hard sell, though taking the stance that partial birth abortion ought to be legal has cost pro-choicers a lot of support among younger people who grew up watching pro-choicers defend the right to dismember and abort recognizably human babies. Conceding the partial birth position would have left the pro-choice movement in a stronger position to fight, say, spousal notification (which I oppose) or parental notification (which I support, so long as there's a judicial bypass). The pro-choice movement, like many interest groups, played to its ardent supporters on partial-birth instead of trying to convince skeptical moderates, and ultimately fought the wrong fight for the wrong reason. And they lost that fight.

So, I guess I'm sort of in the mushy middle on abortion as it is today, but the irony is that the supposedly "divisive" issue of abortion appears to have more or less morphed into a broad-based, durable consensus: the vast majority of people want abortion to be generally legal and want Roe to stick around, but they also want the partial-birth ban, parental notification and spousal notification. In short, they generally want abortion to be legal, but with a few restrictions in place to keep the whole family involved in the process and to avoid some of the more gruesome procedures. Polls on these specific issues all yield 60-70% in favor of each proposition. If such policies were enacted, it would put us roughly in line with the rest of the West, perhaps even a bit more on the liberal side of things than Europe. The American people have already made up their minds on this, and the results are fairly coherent. Somehow, though, I don't think this is going to make the exercised activists on either side of the debate quiet down, or even admit that they're each in a fairly small minority on at least some of these issues. I'm actually somewhat annoyed at this--clearly, the public has made up its mind on these issues, and I don't think people who disagree with this consensus should just shut up and go away, but I would like to hear officials and media types tell the truth on abortion instead of pretending that roughly half the country are in favor of abortion on demand while the other half want to bomb abortion clinics. I'd like to see an honest discussion about public sentiment on these issues, and an honest and durable official consensus made to echo the unofficial one, so that this issue could stop strangling every other one in our august republic. Given the money raised for both parties based on these issues, though, I suspect the kabuki will go on for quite some time to come. But the "debate" about abortion is over and has been over for a long time. Now it's just empty theater.

(P.S. Oh, and the less said about the argument that making abortion illegal would eliminate the right to privacy, the better. Seriously, why does this issue--and seemingly only this issue--turn smart liberals into total idiots?)

I guess Sotomayor might say, "borkarse"?

The suddenly-omnipresent Manuel Miranda:

Sam Alito — soft-spoken. John Roberts — affable and soft-spoken. Sanda Day O’Connor, Ruther Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, all of them, soft-spoken. This nominee’s more like Judge Bork. She has a temper. She has an attitude. She could come across as hubristic in the hearings, as arrogant. And so she could Bork herself. It’s very possible.

And you'll never guess where he got this idea: “I’ve read Jeff Rosen’s piece ["The Case Against Sotomayor"],” he said, “and that’s what I’m going on. I haven’t met the lady.” Look, I know that liberals tend to bash TNR quite a bit. I understand that--the magazine often tends toward the wankerish side of things. Nevertheless, they generally do an excellent job, especially with respect to their blogs. But they really bollixed this up. The Rosen piece ought to have never been published, and after publication, after it became clear what was going on, the magazine ought to have retracted it and issues Judge Sotomayor an apology. But they hunkered down, so here we are--just as everyone predicted, the article has been used as fodder for right-wingers to slam Sotomayor. Nice work, liberals!

Seriously, between the GOP's obsessive quest for total loyalty at all times and the Democrats' complete fractiousness at all times, there has to be some sort of workable middle ground. I'm a Democrat but I'm well aware of the problems--historic, endemic ones--with my particular party. With Republicans, loyalty--being a good foot soldier--is a cherished commodity. With Democrats, it's independence and iconoclasm. Hence congresspeople already trying to weasel out of supporting President Obama's call for Israel to keep its own word on settlements. For a lot of these folks, I'm sure it never occurred to them to support Obama because it's the right thing to do. It's all about showing their independence, generating some headlines, maybe getting a little pat on the back from AIPAC or whatever. It's partly a problem of traditionally weak leadership among Democrats but in a greater sense it's a function of a Democratic Party that's still, in large part, left over from the Clinton years of triangulation in which the Democrats' motto seemed to be, in the words of a fictitious campaign manager, "Please. Don't. Hurt. Me." Even now they're cowering when Obama wants to close Gitmo, shaking under the weight of the now-impotent Republican message machine. I mean, really, it's a new meme every day with them, and none of them has come even remotely close to sticking. And yet the likes of Harry Reid are deathly afraid of that nexus. If Obama wanted to leave a real legacy for his country, he could start by purging the Democratic Party of its, for lack of a better term, lame wing and recruit actual people of conviction. This isn't necessarily even about ideological purity. Aside from Obama, there aren't many Democrats out there that really make my proud of my party affiliation. I'm a fan of Nancy Pelosi, but she's not exactly the public figure type--she's a great backroom type, though.

In any event, Miranda's comment can safely be ignored as borderline racist. Sotomayor's one public appearance was classy and restrained (she seemed endearingly shy), and she'll no doubt be able to control herself in confirmation hearings--the stereotype of the sassy Latina being just that (you have to love the self-loathing minorities that the GOP finds--people like Miranda and Steele who are more than willing to mount racist or near-racist attacks on the hope that their race will excuse them). It's ultimately far more likely that the GOP's activist corps will be completely unable to control itself, and thus self-Bork with Hispanics. What I find fascinating is how Miranda--who apparently was fired for unethical actions from the Bush Administration--still manages to have a job in the conservative movement. Being fired because of an ethical violation by the Bushies is like Ozzy Osbourne being canned by Black Sabbath for doing too many drugs. Just how much do you have to do...how badly must you screw up?...And even that's not enough to get him excommunicated from the wingularity. Sometimes, I wonder what an honorable, sane, and genuinely conservative Republican Party would look like. I also wonder what a conviction-centered Democratic Party might look like. I don't suppose I'll ever know.

This is what they call "weak spin"

Michael Steele, on the government's GM deal: "This is a very sad day for the autoworkers and their families whose financial well-being will be directly affected by this clear act of an overreaching UAW and overbearing government."

I don't think they'll be sad. Well, the ones that are going to lose their jobs will be sad, but many more will keep their jobs, and they'll probably be very happy that they can do so.

I understand the conservative argument against things like this: that government intervention impairs the optimal functioning of the free market system and that deals like this prevent a stronger, more efficient economy from taking hold. Fine. Let them make that argument, instead of trying to reduce every single issue to another right-populist jab. Then again, after running all the intellectuals out of the party, all Republicans can do is find faux-populist arguments for what they want to do. And Michael Steele can't even do that.