Another Week, Another Ross Douthat Column

Ross Douthat at NYT:

There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.

But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.

These two understandings of America, one constitutional and one cultural, have been in tension throughout our history. And they’re in tension again this summer, in the controversy over the Islamic mosque and cultural center scheduled to go up two blocks from ground zero.

The first America, not surprisingly, views the project as the consummate expression of our nation’s high ideals. “This is America,” President Obama intoned last week, “and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.” The construction of the mosque, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told New Yorkers, is as important a test of the principle of religious freedom “as we may see in our lifetimes.”

The second America begs to differ. It sees the project as an affront to the memory of 9/11, and a sign of disrespect for the values of a country where Islam has only recently become part of the public consciousness. And beneath these concerns lurks the darker suspicion that Islam in any form may be incompatible with the American way of life.

This is typical of how these debates usually play out. The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.

But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.

So it is today with Islam. The first America is correct to insist on Muslims’ absolute right to build and worship where they wish. But the second America is right to press for something more from Muslim Americans — particularly from figures like Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the mosque — than simple protestations of good faith.

Too often, American Muslim institutions have turned out to be entangled with ideas and groups that most Americans rightly consider beyond the pale. Too often, American Muslim leaders strike ambiguous notes when asked to disassociate themselves completely from illiberal causes.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary:

Granted, the “conservative spot” on the Gray Lady’s op-ed pages comes with plenty of caveats and handcuffs. So if a conservative columnist is going to last more than a year, he will have to suppress his harshest impulses toward the left and a great deal of his critical faculties. The result is likely to be condescending columns like today’s by Ross Douthat.

He posits two Americas: “The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes.” The first cares about the Constitution, and the second is composed of a bunch of racist rubes, it seems. “The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.” Yes, you can guess which are the opponents of the Ground Zero mosque. (I was wondering if he was going to write, “The first America helped little old ladies across the street; the second America drowned puppies.)

I assume that this is what one has to do to keep your piece of turf next to such intellectual luminaries as Maureen Dowd, but it’s really the worst straw man sort of argument since, well, the last time Obama spoke. But he’s not done: “The first America is correct to insist on Muslims’ absolute right to build and worship where they wish. But the second America is right to press for something more from Muslim Americans — particularly from figures like Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the mosque — than simple protestations of good faith.” OK, on behalf of the rubes in Second America, enough!

Second America — that’s 68% of us — recognizes (and we’ve said it over and over again) that there may be little we can do legally (other than exercise eminent domain) to halt the Ground Zero mosque, but that doesn’t suspend our powers of judgment and moral persuasion. Those who oppose the mosque are not bigots or constitutional ruffians. They merely believe that our president shouldn’t be cheerleading the desecration of “hallowed ground” (”first America’s” term, articulated by Obama) or averting our eyes from the funding sources of the imam’s planned fortress.

E.D. Kain at Balloon Juice:

Leaving aside the obvious fact that Muslims have actually been migrating here for many years and sprouting up second and third and seventh generations in the United States, this use of a specific instance – the Cordoba Center – to segue into a larger framework in which American Muslims writ large are not doing enough to assimilate is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. (And are no American Muslims a part of Second America? Then they must all be part of First America…unless we’re working on creating a Third America. That’s possible, too.)

He goes on:

Too often, American Muslim institutions have turned out to be entangled with ideas and groups that most Americans rightly consider beyond the pale. Too often, American Muslim leaders strike ambiguous notes when asked to disassociate themselves completely from illiberal causes.

I wonder what exactly qualifies as ‘too often’? What percentage of Muslim institutions fit this criteria? Furthermore, what bearing does this have on the question of the Ground Zero Mosque?

For Muslim Americans to integrate fully into our national life, they’ll need leaders who don’t describe America as “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 (as Rauf did shortly after the 2001 attacks), or duck questions about whether groups like Hamas count as terrorist organizations (as Rauf did in a radio interview in June). And they’ll need leaders whose antennas are sensitive enough to recognize that the quest for inter-religious dialogue is ill served by throwing up a high-profile mosque two blocks from the site of a mass murder committed in the name of Islam.

They’ll need leaders, in other words, who understand that while the ideals of the first America protect the e pluribus, it’s the demands the second America makes of new arrivals that help create the unum.

Leaders like this guy, perhaps? I mean, if we’re going to just lump everyone of a particular faith together and cherry-pick the ‘leaders’ who we feel best represent them, why not pick the loudest of the bunch?

And if we can identify the group’s leaders, then we can pigeonhole the entire population’s motives. We can attribute the words of the few to the motives of the many. We can rile up “second America” against the fearful Other. And we can do it all quite nicely by calling into question the sincerity of the group’s desire to properly integrate into mainstream culture. It’s their fault, after all, that they haven’t made it all the way. Why would any real American want to build a mosque so near ground zero?

Jamelle Bouie at Tapped:

But this is bad history; the nativists of 19th-century America weren’t much interested in having “new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture,” rather, the nativists of mid-19th-century America wanted to keep immigrants off of American shores. In its 1856 platform, the American Party — otherwise known as the “Know-Nothing Party” — pushed for the mass expulsion of poor immigrants, and declared that “Americans must rule America, and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all State, Federal, and municipal offices of government employment, in preference to all others.”Likewise, nativism in the late 19th century was preoccupied with keeping foreigners out of the United States. Here is a passage from the constitution the Immigration Restriction League, formed in 1894 by a handful of Harvard graduates:

The objects of this League shall be to advocate and work for further judicious restriction or stricter regulation of immigration, to issue documents and circulars, solicit facts and information on that subject, hold public meetings, and to arouse public opinion to the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character.

This seems completely obvious, but nativists and xenophobes have never been interested in seeing immigrants join our nation and culture as Americans. Our modern-day nativists — as represented by the previously mentioned Tea Party activists — see “undesirable” immigrants as pests to be dealt with, not potential Americans:

“Instead of finding bugs in our beds, we’re finding home invaders,” said Tony Venuti, a Tucson radio host who attached a huge sign to the fence that told immigrants to head to Los Angeles, where they will be more welcome, and even offered directions for getting there.

Contra Douthat, nativists and xenophobes have never been integral to assimilating immigrants. That distinction goes to the assimilationists of American life who understood — and understand — that “American-ness” can be learned and adopted. Different assimilationists had different approaches to bringing immigrants into American life, but they were united by a common view of America as an open society.

Jonathan Bernstein:

Jamelle Bouie has a great post up this morning about assimilation and immigration, riffing off of Ross Douthat’s column.  Douthat’s claim is that the America of high-minded ideals is at odds with cultural protectionism, and while the latter is bigoted and small-minded, it also winds up having the virtue of forcing newer immigrants and minorities in general to conform to American cultural norms (including those high-minded ideals).  I think Bouie is a bit harsher than necessary to Douthat, who isn’t exactly warm towards those who he says use discrimination and persecution to get their way.  But I also think Bouie is correct: Douthat’s claim that it’s the nativists who have indirectly encouraged assimilation through intimidation may not be entirely wrong, but it’s a somewhat strained reading of history — the nativists didn’t want assimilation, they wanted (and often got) exclusion.  And Bouie is right that Douthat’s history ignores that those in Douthat’s “first” America (the one with the high-minded ideals) have almost always supported and worked to achieve assimilation.

But I think both of them are missing the main actors here: the immigrants themselves, who in almost all cases have been pretty desperate to assimilate as quickly as possible.  That was true of the great immigration waves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it’s true of the great immigration wave now.  Of course, each group has had various cultural bits and pieces they keep with them (bits and pieces which generally are gobbled up by the larger American culture, so that everyone eats tacos and bagels), and each group has minorities within their minority who resist assimilation, keeping the old language and practices alive (although often radically altered, sometimes without anyone realizing it) even as most of the community drifts — runs — towards America.

Matt Welch at Reason:

Such John Edwards-style reductionism inevitably sends off alarm bells, but this paragraph in particular smelled funny to me:

[B]oth understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

Is this true? To find out I asked an old college newspaper buddy of mine, the immigration historian Christina Ziegler-McPherson, who is author of a recent book called Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908-1929. She e-mailed me back 2,500 words; thought I’d pass along a few of them:

Douthat is full of crap in several ways:

1. […] [F]or much of the 19th century, except in the big cities like New York, immigrants and natives had little contact and less competition with one another, because the country was growing and was so physically big. […]

This is not to discount the nativism (i.e. the Know Nothing party) of the mid-1850s but that was a city phenomenon and was driven mostly by anti-Catholicism inspired by famine Irish immigration. Some people didn’t like “clannish” Germans but as long as they weren’t Catholic, no one complained as much. Nativism in the mid-19th century was basically an anti-Irish phenomenon. AND, in some ways, it wasn’t anti-immigrant, just anti-Catholic, and sought to slow down the integration of immigrants into the polity (i.e., by requiring a much longer period of residency before naturalization, and this was as much an elite anti-machine politics idea as anti-Irish or anti-immigrant).

Also, there was no real “national” culture until after the Civil War (and this developed gradually with industrialism and the spread of a mass media and eventually mass consumption) so there could be no “insistence” on immigrants assimilating. Who the heck is he talking about? […]

2. Nativism, and some aspects of the Americanization movement of the WWI period (especially the more coercive stuff) has always had the effect of making immigrants cling more tightly to their cultures, their languages, traditions. This is both basic psychology and is historically accurate and can be documented for many groups.

Any attack on religion (which frankly, is what anti-Muslim talk is, it’s not anti-ethnic, because there’s no ethnic group called “Muslim”) encourages more orthodoxy, not less, and is totally counter-preductive, because of the 1st Amendment. The American Catholic Church became the authoritarian institution that it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries in large part because of Anglo-American Protestants insisting that Protestantism and Americanism were synonymous and attacking Irish Catholics. […]

[T]he harder you push for “assimilation”…the more you get orthodoxy, extremism, alienation.

3. Post-WWI restrictions were separate from the Americanization movement and were not designed to encourage assimilation (although a few people did realize that assimilation might happen if immigrants were cut off from rejuvenating contact with their home cultures). The 1924 and 1929 restrictions were explicitly racist (and I mean that in the 19th century biological sense, as in, we don’t want our blood being contaminated by alien blood which is different and is incompatible with ours.)…Eugenics heavily influenced the 1924 and 1929 acts and eugenicists were the statisticians who determined the specific quotas for each group. […]

The problem of course with Douthat, besides that he has no idea about what he’s talking about, is he’s so vague. When in the 19th century? Which groups? Where? What created these “persistent ethnic divisions”? Are these institutional, cultural, created by policy? Who the heck can tell?

Alex Knapp:

First off all, you’ll note that Little Italy’s and Chinatowns still exist all over the country. There are neighborhoods on the East Coast where you’re lost if you don’t speak Italian, and neighborhoods on the West Coast where you’re lost if you don’t speak Chinese. There are people living in these neighborhoods who are still hostile to outsiders, and lots of different ethnic neighborhoods share this characteristic.And it’s important to realize that these ethnic enclaves, with their insularity and hostility to integration, not only failed to “swiftly assimilate”, they failed to swiftly assimilate because of discrimination. Because of the law and because of cultural prejudice, Italians, Chinese, Irish, Slavs, Jews and other immigrants were very often not hired by their neighbors. As a consequence, Italians hired Italians, Chinese hired Chinese, Irish hired Irish, etc. Immigrant neighborhoods were often either ignored by the police or shaken down by them for protection money. In either case, in a desperate desire for order, immigrants turned to organized crime for protection from criminals or the police. While the Mafioso were brutal, greedy and ruthless, they also kept order on the streets and took care of widows, etc. (You can actually see a similar pattern in Palestine, where Hamas was voted into power as not only a reaction against Israel and the PLO, but also because while Arafat’s government was growing rich and corrupt on foreign aid payments, Hamas was building schools and medical clinics for the destitute.)

Indeed, the combination of the rise of organized crime and the hositility from “second America” more likely delayed the integration of immigrant communities. That integration really didn’t start to happen until various immigrant populations simply became numerous enough to vote their preferred candidates into office, such as the experience of the Irish in Boston.

Another example of Douthat’s willful glossing over of history comes in his discussion of the Mormon experience:

The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream.

This is a great example of how to write something that’s factually true, but rhetorically false. Given his tone, you’d think that Mormon families were getting some glares and “tsks tsks” at PTA meetings. The reality, of course, is that Mormons were violently persecuted, first by their neighbors in Illinois and Missouri, and then by the U.S. Army after they moved to Utah. The Mormons weren’t “persuaded” to abandon polygamy, they were forced to after the United States Congress disincorporated the Church and seized all Mormon assets. Mormon leaders fought the Act in the Courts, but the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Congress’ Act. It was only then that the Mormons capitulated to the government. And it was a long time before Mormons got over that and became more assimilated into every day American life. And even at that, there was considerable hostility among quarters in the Republican Party against Mitt Romney because of his religion.

I definitely agree that, as a culture, Americans should encourage the integration of immigrant populations into every day life. But that integration isn’t built on fear and peer pressure. It’s built on tolerance, a shared ideal of freedom, and the embrace of new cultures into the rich tapestry of American life. Integration comes from delicious foods at Indian buffets and the required learning about American government before an immigrant takes his oath of citizenship. It certainly doesn’t come from protesting Mosques or putting up No Irish Need Apply signs on the door of your business.

UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf at Andrew Sullivan’s place

Douthat responds to Friedersdorf

Razib Khan at Secular Right

The Oscar Grant Verdict: Trouble In O-Town

Joe Eskenazi at San Francisco Weekly:

Ex-BART cop Johannes Mehserle has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of unarmed BART passenger Oscar Grant.

The jury could have convicted Mehserle of either second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter — both charges that would have required the jury to believe that Mehserle intended to kill grant. That was evidently too much for the jury, which declared its belief that the former policeman didn’t intend to kill the man he shot via its involuntary manslaughter conviction. This carries a sentence of two to four years; a potential gun enhancement could bump that to five-to-14 years .

Heather MacDonald at Secular Right before the verdict was read:

It is true that death at the hands of a representative of the state–in this case, the BART police officer–has an entirely different meaning than death at the hands of a common criminal and produces a far greater sense of injustice.  That sense of injustice is compounded for blacks by the shameful history, now largely corrected, of police abuse.   Still, this one tragically-mistaken killing—BART officer Johannes Mehserle entered a scene of chaos at Oakland’s Fruitvale station on a night in which several guns had already been found along the subway line and thought, according to his testimony, that he was firing his Taser to subdue a resisting, possibly gun-wielding Oscar Grant—stands out from the tidal wave of cold-blooded murders in Oakland by the fact that Mehserle did not intend to murder an unarmed civilian.  Like many urban areas, Oakland has been seeing a retaliatory shooting pattern around vigils for shooting victims.  On June 21, for example, a 17-year-old was shot at an Oakland bus stop; just after midnight the next day, two gunmen sauntered up to a vigil for the bus stop victim and killed a 19-year-old girl and seriously wounded five other teenagers who were attending the vigil.  None of these and the hundred or so other murders a year in Oakland provoke the spectre of riots if their perpetrators are not convicted; indeed, it is often hard to find anyone to cooperate with the authorities in bringing the killers to justice.   The thousands of black-on-black killings a year nationally are treated as a matter of course; so, too, are killings of police officers.

Let’s hope that Oakland residents heed the many calls from community leaders to accept the jury’s verdict peacefully and defeat the sad, but not irrational, expectations of Bay Area law enforcement.

J. Peter Nixon at Commonweal:

I work in downtown Oakland, where many businesses were concerned that the announcement of the verdict would bring a repeat of the civil violence that accompanied the original shooting.  Shortly before the verdict was to be announced, we were asked to evacuate our office building.  I will confess I felt a great deal of ambivalence about this, but as a manager I felt responsible for the safety of our employees.  So I encouraged people to leave.

As I walked to the BART train entrance, the sidewalks were filled with office workers essentially fleeing the city.  I began to feel a sense of shame about this.  It was “white flight” on a concentrated and graphic scale.  I got in line to pass through the BART gates and even had my card out when I just stopped and got out of line.  “I can’t do this,” I thought.

I am probably the least spontaneous person you will ever meet.  The white board in my office has a “do list” ranging across three columns.  I don’t take a vacation without a carefully planned daily itinerary.  And yet there I was, making a last minute decision to remain in downtown Oakland at a time when many (white) commentators were convinced the place was about to explode in civil unrest.

I wish I could tell you it was an act of heroic virtue.  The truth is that I was seized by something outside myself, an irresistible prompting of the Holy Spirit.  I just couldn’t muster the energy to fight against it and keep my legs moving toward that gate.  So I climbed the staircase out of the rail station and walked back down the street against the human tide.  I called my wife to tell her of my decision. She, of course, understood perfectly.

My first destination was the Cathedral, which stands next to my office building.  My hope was that others would be naturally drawn there as a place to keep prayerful vigil while awaiting the verdict.  I’m sorry to say I was disappointed.  It was deserted except for the security guards.  I prayed for a just verdict, not even sure in my own heart what a just verdict would be in this case.  I prayed for a peaceful response, whatever the outcome.  In the Cathedral, an enormous image of Christ in judgment is depicted on the window behind the altar.  I contemplated the image, and prayed that whatever the imperfections of human justice, the city would be able to trust in the ultimate judgment of Christ.

Shortly after 4pm I flipped on my Blackberry and got the news: the verdict was involuntary manslaughter.  It was the least serious offense available to the jury, although it still represents—to my knowledge—the only case to date where a police officer has been found criminally liable in a case of this nature.

I wondered whether I should go downtown and join the demonstrators, who I knew would be deeply angry about the verdict.  The truth was that my own heart was conflicted about the justice of the verdict.  But I felt strongly that the place of a Christian that night was to be present in the midst of the city, not absent from it.  In the Psalms of the Office we pray “the Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom shall I be afraid?”  Did I believe these words or not?

San Francisco Chronicle:

There was outrage, there was looting and there were skirmishes between police and protesters, but that wasn’t the whole story of how Oakland reacted to the Johannes Mehserle verdict.

The trouble Thursday boiled down to a racially diverse mob of about 200 people, many bent on destruction no matter what, confronting police after the day’s predominantly peaceful demonstrations ended.

Sporadic conflicts were quelled quickly early in the evening, but by late night at least 50 people – and maybe as many as 100 – had been arrested as small groups smashed windows, looted businesses and set trash bins on fire.

The violence was contained for much of the early evening within a one-block area near City Hall by an army of police officers in riot gear, but around 10 p.m. a knot of rioters broke loose and headed north on Broadway toward 22nd Street with police in pursuit.

They smashed windows of shops including the trendy Ozumo restaurant, and one building was spray painted with the words, “Say no to work. Say yes to looting.”

A boutique called Spoiled was spared. It had a sign outside and pictures of Oscar Grant with the words, “Do not destroy. Black owned. Black owned.”

On  the verdict, Kevin Drum:

I hardly even know what to say about this. I wasn’t in court and I wasn’t on the jury, so I didn’t hear all the evidence. But for chrissake. Look at the video. Mehserle didn’t look confused and modern tasers don’t feel much like service revolvers. And it’s not as if he was acting under extreme duress. At most there was a brief and perfunctory struggle, after which Mehserle calmly raised himself up while Grant was pinned to the ground, drew his revolver, and shot him. The only thing that even remotely makes Mehserle’s story believable is that doing what he did is just flat out insane. It doesn’t make sense even if he were a stone racist and half crazy as well.

The jury can say what it wants, but it still looks to me like Mehserle decided on the spur of the moment to shoot Grant. I don’t know why, and no explanation really makes sense. But he’s a white cop and the jury apparently concluded that Grant was just black riffraff. The whole thing is just appalling.

Mark Kleiman:

Kevin Drum is upset by the verdict, which he regards as a finding of “semi-guilty.” He joins the victim’s family, the National Lawyers Guild, and a host of the usual suspects in thinking that the officer should have been convicted of second-degree murder instead. As usual, there will be an attempt to organize riots in protest, because of course burning down the stores of black shopkeepers is an excellent way to attack the white power structure.

I haven’t followed the case closely, but when I heard the story my first reaction was “involuntary manslaughter,” which is what the jury decided on. To bring in second-degree murder, the jury would have had to be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that an ill-trained very junior cop, operating at 2am on New Year’s, didn’t make the unforgiveable error of drawing his handgun thinking it was his taser. They would have had to be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that instead he decided at random to murder someone he’d never met before, in front of a big crowd of people and several other police officers.

It’s good to see the people who otherwise condemn the pointlessness of harsh retributive justice making an exception in this case. Perhaps retribution is actually a legitimate function of punishment after all? And of course the silence from the usual denouncers of the criminal-coddling criminal justice system, now that the criminal being coddled is a white cop who killed a black parolee, is deafening.

UPDATE: Via Patrick Appel at Sully’s place, Radley Balko at Reason

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect

Julianne Hing at Colorlines

BeFri 4 Never?

Hilary Stout at NYT:

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

Elizabeth Scalia at The Anchoress:

Unreal. Read the article. The schools and “experts” are intrusive and unnatural. And sad.

This isn’t about what’s good for the children; it is about being better able to control adults by stripping from them any training in intimacy and interpersonal trust. Don’t let two people get together and separate themselves from the pack, or they might do something subversive, like…think differently.

This move against “best friends” is ultimately about preventing individuals from nurturing and expanding their individuality. It is about training our future adults to be unable to exist outside of the pack, the collective. The schools want you to think this is about potential bullying and the sadness of some children feeling “excluded.” But that is not what this is about.

As a kid I was the target of “the pack;” I know more than I care to about schoolyard bullies, and I can tell you that the best antidote to them was having a good friend. One good friend who shares your interests and ideas and sense of humor can erase the negative effects of the conform-or-die “pack” with which one cannot identify, “the pack” that cannot comprehend why one would not wish to join them and will not tolerate resistance.

Marc Thiessen at The American Enterprise Institute:

The absurdity of this approach is beyond measure. For one thing, it is completely at odds with real life. When kids grow up, they’re not going to be “friends with everyone.” In the real world there are people who will like you, and people who will dislike you; people who are kind, and people who are cruel; people you can trust, and people you can’t trust; people who will be there for you in good times and bad, and people who will abandon you when the going gets tough.

Childhood is when kids learn to recognize those different types of people, experience joys and disappointments of different kinds of friendships, and learn the social skills they will need to develop mature relationships later in life. As one psychologist quoted in the article puts it, “No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend.”

Denying kids the opportunity to have such experiences stunts their development. It also teaches kids to develop superficial relationships with lots of people, without learning how to develop deep bonds of meaning and consequence with anyone. Think about it: Who among us would tell their deepest, darkest secrets to “everyone”? Denying kids a “best friend” makes it harder to get through childhood—and makes it harder to be a successful adult one day as well.

Obviously, schools want to discourage cliques, ensure that no children are ostracized or bullied, and help those along who have trouble bonding with their peers. But the solution to such problems is not to discourage kids who do bond with their peers from doing so—or consciously separate them when they do.

This is but the latest misguided effort to protect children from the realities of life that only harms them in the long run. First came the trend to stop keeping score in childhood sports and give everyone a “participation trophy”—discouraging excellence and achievement, and shielding kids from the reality of winning and losing. Now comes a new fad of separating best friends—denying kids the magic of those first special friendships.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner:

The stories are so familiar it makes no need to go into specifics. The experts of the helping professions want to tell you what to eat, what to drink, how to drive, how to talk, how to think. Sometimes they have a point, and as the father of a young child, I’m perfectly willing to concede that cliques and whatnot can be unhealthy or mean. But this really goes to 11.

Lisa Solod Warren at Huffington Post:

I was bulled in middle school and I have written a seminal article on school bullying for Brain, Child magazine a few years ago (well before the topic became so hot) and I say: Balderdash. Bullying is a problem; it can even be a tragedy. But the fact that a couple of kids bond as best friends is not the cause of bullying: stopping best friendships is not going to be the “cure.”

I have always counted myself fortunate to have a best friend as well as a couple of other women in my life with whom I am extremely close. I met my oldest best friend, Patti, when I was eight years old. Now, 46 years later, separated by hundreds of miles, we can still pick up the phone and start a conversation right in the middle. She knows my past and I know hers: all the dirty bits, the secrets, the moments we might not want to remember. She came to my father’s funeral a few months ago and I know that whatever I asked, whenever I asked it, she would be there. She knows the same of me.

She’s been there for me through a whole host of life changes. And those life changes began soon after we met in third grade. Had anyone discouraged me from clinging to her, or her to me, there would indeed have been hell to pay. And to what end? Is there any kind of scientific evidence that proves that being friends with an entire group of people without having one special person on whom one can absolutely rely is preferable? I wonder, actually, why on earth anyone would study this sort of thing in the first place. Bullying is about power. Power and insecurity. It’s something I found is often “taught” or handed down from generation to generation. Stopping kids from having one great friend whom they can trust to have their back is not going to prevent bullying. If anything, when a child doesn’t have someone he or she can trust -someone outside the family–bullying can seem even more onerous and scary than it already is. I never told my parents I was bullied. But Patti knew. And she defended me.

Razib Khan at Secular Right:

The article is in The New York Times. It’s a paper which usually tries really hard to pretend toward objective distance, but I get the sense that even the author of the piece was a bit confused by the weirdness which had infected the educational establishment.

Rod Dreher:

What crackpots. The idea that the way to decrease bullying is to deny children the opportunity to make a special friend or friends is cruel and crazy. It’s like saying that the way to stop school gun violence is to prevent anything that even looks like a gun from being brought to school — like, say, little toy soldiers pinned to a hat. No teacher or school would object to that. Oh, wait…

God Spelled Backwards Is Dog

Michael C. Moynihan at Reason:

Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, was recently told that a scheduled lecture on free speech, to be held at Jönköping Högskolan, would be canceled due to “security concerns.” This, of course, is a common evasion, intended to protect the brittle sensibilities of Muslim students while supposedly standing four square behind the right of free speech.

Alas, the administrators in Jönköping had a point. During a lecture in Uppsala today Vilks was attacked by a pack of feral fundamentalists, one of whom managed to headbutt the artist and break his glasses. Police intervened and waged a short battle with the religious nutters who can be heard in the video below, captured by the newspaper UNT, shouting Allahu Akbar! The AP has a quick report, explaining that “Uppsala University spokeswoman Pernilla Bjork said Vilks was showing a provocative film with sexual content to the crowd when the attacker ran up and hit him in the face with his fists.”

Nathan Hardan at NRO:

Here is stunning video footage of Tuesday’s attack on Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, during a lecture at the University of Uppsala. Listen to the students shouting “Allahu Akbar” while Vilks is beaten.

These are the desperate acts of an extremeist movement that is utterly bereft of moral courage, and awash in its own intellectual insecurity. Look at these Western-educatedstudents in their designer clothes, calling down curses on a man who represents the freedom they hate so much, and yet have benefited so much from

Ace Of Spades:

A few points. Vilks’ presentation was, in fact, provocative, as it deliberately juxtaposed pictures of Mohammad (?) and praying Muslims with gay fetish shots.

But, as everyone on the receiving end of artistic provocations for thirty years can tell you — we’re supposed to understand that ideas may incite, and in fact that is the very point of them, and that our right to not be offended doesn’t trump anyone else’s right to give offense.

That lesson was definitely not taught here, as the Violently Aggrieved won the battlefield they turned this university into only on this day, but on future days as well — the university has decided to put an end to this madness, by which they mean they won’t invite Lars Vilks back for any further lectures.

The lesson taught here is, once again, that if Muslims just get violent and criminal, they get exactly what they want.

I’m just curious – I see the police making few arrests here.

If there had been another crowd here — a fired-up anti-jihad crowd, let’s say, which intervened with the jihadists went wild, and started doing their own face-breaking — how many decades of incarceration do you think they’d currently be facing?

Should the law not be changed to reflect the actual law — that Muslims are in fact permitted to create disturbances of the peace and commit assault? Because if you trick non-Muslim citizens into thinking these things are crimes, and then they intervene, believing themselves to be stopping crimes in progress… then you’re locking them up without fair warning, aren’t you?

Eh. They’ve been warned, I guess. Everyone knows what the real law is.

Allah Pundit:

Everything about this is an utter, unmitigated disgrace — the attack on Vilks, the excruciating passivity of most of the crowd, the sheer thuggery of these shrieking, lunatic, barbarian bastards, and of course the killer moment at around 8:45 when they win. Do note, too, how the Aggrieved alternate between vicious threats and civil rights, warning the cops against brutality and reminding them that they pay taxes too. That’s a familiar pattern nine years after 9/11. They’d have torn Vilks apart with their bare hands if they could have but they’re all about proper procedure, you see.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker:

The fact that so many American media and academic institutions have caved into the imagined fear of such religious fascists is shameful. If the free societies of the world can’t stand up for a person’s right to draw a fucking cartoon without becoming the victim of a multinational assassination plot, well, we lose. And if people’s faith in their god is not strong enough to allow them to laugh off and dismiss an offensive little drawing, they lose. So let’s all get along, or we all lose

Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right:

The disruption was thuggish, and the physical attack on the cartoonist was revolting, but the thing that most struck me about the video footage was the level of  hysteria displayed by some of the protestors, a hysteria made all the more disturbing by the fact that it was not the reaction to some sudden, unexpected shock (the protestors can have seen little at the lecture of a nature that they had not already expected) but was instead a manifestation of a deeper, longer-lasting rage that has long since lost any connection it may ever once have had with rationality.

Michelle Malkin

The Daily Caller:

The home of cartoonist Lars Vilks, infamous in the Muslim community for depicting the prophet Mohammad as a dog, was attacked by suspected arsonists late Friday evening, multiple sources confirm. The apparent plot to set fire to Vilks’ home — which comes just four days after a student attacked him at Uppsala University as he showed a film about Islam – was not successful.

Vilks was not at home at the time, according to the Washington Post, and alert onlookers may have helped put a stop to the home invasion:

It was the latest in a week of attacks on the 53-year-old cartoonist, who was assaulted Tuesday by a man while he lectured at a university and saw his Web site apparently attacked by hacker on Wednesday.

Police were alerted just before noon Saturday, as people passing by the artist’s house noted that several windows had been smashed. When officers arrived, they discovered plastic bottles filled with gasoline and fire damage on the surface of the building. Attackers are also suspected of having tried setting the inside of house on fire, but the flames are thought to have fizzled out.

Vilks has long said he would be ready for such an attack:

Vilks has faced numerous death threats over the controversial cartoon, but said in March he has built his own defense system, including a “homemade” safe room and a barbed-wire sculpture that could electrocute potential intruders.

He said he also has an ax “to chop down” anyone trying to climb through the windows of his home in southern Sweden.

“If something happens, I know exactly what to do,” Vilks told The Associated Press in an interview in Stockholm.

Vilks also owns a guard dog named Mohammad.

New Atheists: The New Coke Of Intellectual Combatants?

David Bentley Hart in First Things:

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

[…]

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?

I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dismissive here. The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture—some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds
of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism.” Hume, for instance, never traded one dogmatism for another, or one facile certitude for another. He understood how radical were the implications of the skepticism he recommended, and how they struck at the foundations not only of unthinking faith, but of proud rationality as well.

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.

What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

The only points at which the New Atheists seem to invite any serious intellectual engagement are those at which they try to demonstrate that all the traditional metaphysical arguments for the reality of God fail. At least, this should be their most powerful line of critique, and no doubt would be if any of them could demonstrate a respectable understanding of those traditional metaphysical arguments, as well as an ability to refute them. Curiously enough, however, not even the trained philosophers among them seem able to do this. And this is, as far as I can tell, as much a result of indolence as of philosophical ineptitude. The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian. He scarcely bothers even to get the traditional “theistic” arguments right, and the few ripostes he ventures are often the ones most easily discredited.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.

Ross Douthat:

Given the durability and predictability of the arguments involved, and the amount of ink spilled on them over the years (and centuries, and millennia), it’s hard to come up with something interesting to say on the question of Christianity versus the “new” atheists. But the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has now managed the trick twice: Once in his slim book “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,” which came out last year, and now in a fine essay for the latest First Things. Here’s his concluding reflection — but do read the whole thing:

If I were to choose from among the New Atheists a single figure who to my mind epitomizes the spiritual chasm that separates Nietzsche’s unbelief from theirs, I think it would be the philosopher and essayist A.C. Grayling … Couched at one juncture among [his] various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that “an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.” Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity.

Ignoring that leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase “life-enhancing,” I, too—red of blood and rude of health—would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man’s shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

Rod Dreher:

You really should read the whole thing, especially Hart’s conclusion. Essentially he respects Nietzsche’s atheism a very great deal, though obviously he opposes it, because Hart sees that Nietzsche understands precisely what repudiating Christianity means.

Kevin Drum:

So: do the New Atheists recycle old arguments? Of course they do. But that’s not because they’re illiterate, it’s because those arguments have never been convincingly answered. All the recondite language in the world doesn’t change that, either, because the paradoxes are inherent in the ideas themselves. In the end, the English language probably just isn’t up to the task of answering them, no matter how hard you try to twist it. To say that God is is best understood as an absolute plenitude of actuality doesn’t really advance the ball so much as it merely tries to hide it.

Later in the essay, perhaps recognizing that he’s exhausted the semantic possibilities here, Hart redirects his focus to the cultural impact of Christianity, suggesting that the New Atheists haven’t truly grappled with what a world without religion would be like. And perhaps they haven’t. But interior passions and social mores work both ways. Did Isaac Newton feel a deeper aesthetic connection with the infinite when he was inventing calculus or when he was absorbed in Christian mysticism? Who can say? Not me, surely, and not Hart either. Likewise, the question of whether Christianity has, on balance, been a force for moral good is only slightly more tractable. Does keeping the servants from stealing the silver really outweigh the depredations of the Crusades and the Inquisition?

But no matter how beguiling those questions are, surely the metaphysical one always comes first. To say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical — assuming you believe that — is hardly enough. You need to show that it’s true. And if you want to assert that something is true, the onus is on you to demonstrate it, not on the New Atheists to demonstrate conclusively that it isn’t. After all, in the end the only difference between Hart and Dawkins is that Hart believes in 1% of the world’s religions and Dawkins believes in 0% of them. It’s Dawkins’ job only to question that remaining 1%. It’s Hart’s job to answer him.

Andrew Sullivan:

Look: human nature being what it is, most religious people will be a dreadful example of the best version of faith you can find. Drum permits what Hitch’s book was: a grand guignol of anti-clerical, fish-barrel-shooting. It’s easy; it’s way fun; mockery of inarticulate believers has made my friend, Bill Maher, lotsa money. But it’s largely missing the real intellectual task by fighting a straw man, rather than a real and living and intelligent faith. Part of that is the fault of believers. We’ve done a lousy job of delineating a living faith for modernity.

UPDATE: Damon Linker at TNR

Kevin Drum

UPDATE #2: Sullivan responds to Drum

Drum responds to Sullivan

Sullivan responds to Drum

UPDATE #3: Kevin Drum

Joe Carter at First Things

Rod Dreher

UPDATE #4: Razib Khan at Secular Right on Carter

She Works Hard For The Money, So Hard For The Money

Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine:

Palin knew there were ways to solve her money problems, and then some. Planning quickly got under way for a book. And just weeks after the campaign ended, reality-show producer Mark Burnett called Palin personally and pitched her on starring in her own show. Then, in May 2009, she signed a $7 million book deal with HarperCollins. Two former Palin-campaign aides—Jason Recher and Doug McMarlin—were hired to plan a book tour with all the trappings of a national political campaign. But there was a hitch: With Alaska’s strict ethics rules, Palin worried that her day job would get in the way. In March, she petitioned the Alaska attorney general’s office, which responded with a lengthy list of conditions. “There was no way she could go on a book tour while being governor” is how one member of her Alaska staff put it.

On Friday morning, July 3, Palin called her cameraman to her house in Wasilla and asked him to be on hand to record a prepared speech. Around noon, in front of a throng of national reporters, she announced that she was stepping down as governor. To many, it seemed a mysterious move, defying the logic of a potential presidential candidate, and possibly reflecting some hidden scandal—but in fact the choice may have been as easy as balancing a checkbook.

Less than a year later, Sarah Palin is a singular national industry. She didn’t invent her new role out of whole cloth. Other politicians have cashed out, used the revolving door, doing well in business after doing good in public service. Entertainment figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and even Ronald Reagan have worked the opposite angle, leveraging their celebrity to make their way in politics. And family dramas have been a staple of politics from the Kennedys—or the Tudors—on down. But no one else has rolled politics and entertainment into the same scintillating, infuriating, spectacularly lucrative package the way Palin has or marketed herself over multiple platforms with the sophistication and sheer ambitiousness that Palin has shown, all while maintaining a viable presence as a prospective presidential candidate in 2012.

The numbers are staggering. Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

But what’s more intriguing than that raw number is the underlying dynamic here: the mutual business relationship between Palin and the East Coast elites whom she rails against with populist invective and who scorn her as dumber than a moose. Money can soften any edge.

David Weigel:

Gabriel Sherman’s sprawling New York magazine cover story on “Palin, Inc.” is actually a fast and breezy read. It being an article about Sarah Palin, there’s no policy to slow it down. We get a brief explanation of how bitter Palin was serving as governor of Alaska while journalist Kaylene Johnson got rich (“I can’t believe that woman is making so much money off my name,” said Palin), especially after Palin realized that her gubernatorial duties would complicate her national book tour. So she quit, and we’re off.

Read it all, but take note of these points.

– According to Sherman, Palin writes her own Facebook posts. That shouldn’t be news, but Palin hired a ghostwriter to finish “Going Rogue”– and some of her early posts, festooned with footnotes, don’t sound like her. According to Sherman, said ghostwriter considered suing over an article by Max Blumenthal that made hay of her collaboration with conservative reporter Robert Stacy McCain.

– Discovery Communications bought Palin’s TV show as the “centerpiece of a strategy that TLC executives see as positioning the network as the anti-Bravo, whose shows like Top Chef, the Real Housewives franchise, and America’s Next Top Model are programmed to a liberal urban audience.” Bodes poorly for boycotters.

Robert Stacy McCain:

A friend wonders why I said nothing about this part of Sherman’s story:

The only real blip concerned her ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, a writer for the Evangelical World magazine, whom Palin chose from a short list of candidates presented to her by HarperCollins. After news of Vincent’s selection leaked, critics seized on a January 2009 pro-life piece she had written for World titled “Black Genocide” — as well as her association with the co-writer of her 2006 book Donkey Cons, former Washington Times writer Robert Stacy McCain (no relation), who had a history of racially charged statements and associations — to claim that Vincent was racist. Vincent, who had collaborated on a New York Times best seller about racial reconciliation, told me that she was deeply hurt by the racism allegation and considered suing the Daily Beast for a piece by writer Max Blumenthal headlined “Palin’s Noxious Ghostwriter.” But when the media shifted its focus to Palin’s next adventure, Vincent dropped the lawsuit idea.

The problem with suing for libel (and as a journalist, I thank God for this) is that under the Sullivan precedent, it’s almost impossible for a “public figure” to win a libel suit. Like politicians and entertainers, an author is more or less automatically a public figure, thus requiring proof of actual malice. And as opposed to, say, a false accusation of criminal behavior, the charge of “racism” is damnably hard to disprove, which is why it is slung around so frequently in political discourse.

So there was no percentage in Lynn suing the Daily Beast, besides which going to court over what was clearly a third-hand guilt-by-association smear wouldn’t help Palin — and helping Palin was what Lynn was hired to do, after all.

And shame on those people who keep spreading malicious rumors that Max Blumenthal was arrested in a raid on a so-called “ladyboy” brothel in Phuket!

Josh Green at The Atlantic:

The article is chock full of Palin porn: her speaking fee ($100,000 a pop, plus diva treatment); her preferred mode of travel (Lear jet); her next headache (Levi Johnston is “writing” a book about her); and, my favorite detail, her three-level, 6000-square-foot, no doubt tastefully decorated new home that was already under construction when Gabe paid a visit. Among other things, the article makes clear that the desire for money, not an imminent scandal, led Palin to quit her governorship.

This all has significant political implications that tend to be downplayed or ignored when discussing Sarah Palin. Toward the end of the piece, Gabe goes right to the heart of the matter:

Why Palin would want to trade the presidency [of right-wing America]–and the salary–for a candidacy that faces possibly insurmountable political hurdles is a question to ponder.
Why indeed? Palin’s prospects in the Republican Party are a good deal dimmer than her star wattage suggests. She’s tallied middling performances in early straw polls and shows no inclination to embark on the grassroots work required of a presidential candidate. More to the point, this article makes clear that, were there any doubt, her preoccupying concern is “building her brand”–less in a political sense than a financial one. Palin may yet make a bid for the White House. But all evidence suggests that when the time comes to choose between earning money and running for president, Palin will choose money.

And she’s hardly alone. The other surprise figure to emerge from the 2008 race, with almost as bright a political future as Palin, was Mike Huckabee. But he, too, is earning serious coin on the book, TV, and lecture circuit, and signaling that he won’t run again. The candidate running the hardest for the White House, Mitt Romney, is also the only one who has secured a fortune. There seems to be developing an inverse correlation between the difficulty of running for president and the easy life that awaits those who fall just short. It’s never been harder to grab the brass ring; and it’s never been easier to quit trying.

Andrew Sullivan on Green:

The political parties are weaker than they once were. The elites cannot control grass-roots Internet-driven phenomena. Look at Obama. He seems a natural president now, but Washington dismissed his chances – as they are now dismissing Palin’s – right up to the Iowa caucuses. And because Palin is such a terrifying – truly terrifying – prospect for the US and the world, I think such complacency, rooted in cynicism about Palin’s mercenary nature, is far too reckless.

Look: what we have seen this past year is the collapse of the RNC as it once was and the emergence of a highly lucrative media-ideological-industrial complex. This complex has no interest in traditional journalistic vetting, skepticism, scrutiny of those in power, or asking the tough questions. It has no interest in governing a country. It has an interest in promoting personalities and ideologies and false images of a past America that both flatter and engage its audience. For most in this business, this is about money. Roger Ailes, who runs a news business, has been frank about what his fundamental criterion is for broadcasting: ratings not truth. Obviously all media has an eye on the bottom line – but in most news organizations, there is also an ethical editorial concern to get things right. I see no such inclination in Fox News or the hugely popular talkshow demagogues (Limbaugh, Levin, Beck et al.), which now effectively control the GOP. And when huge media organizations have no interest in any facts that cannot be deployed for a specific message, they are a political party in themselves.

Add Palin to the mix and you have a whole new machine in American politics – one with the capacity, as much as Obama’s, to upend the established order. Beltway types roll their eyes. But she’s not Obama, they say. She doesn’t know anything, polarizes too many people, has lied constantly and still may have dozens of skeletons in her unvetted closets.

To which the answer must be: where the fuck have you been this past year?

It doesn’t matter whether she’s uneducated, unprincipled, unaware and unscrupulous. The more she’s proven incapable of the presidency, the more her supporters believe she is destined for it. It’s a brilliant little gig she’s devised. She may be ignorant, but she is not stupid. She has the smarts of all accomplished pathological liars and phonies. And this time, she will not even bother to go on any television outlets other than Fox News. She will be the first presidential nominee never to have had a press conference. She will give statements by Facebook. She will speak directly to the cocoon that is, at least, twenty percent of Americans. The press, already a rank failure in exposing her fraudulence, will be so starstruck by the chance to make money that we will never have a Couric-style interview again. it will be Oprah all the time. Because Palin lives in an imaginary world, the entire media world will be required to echo it or be shut out.

Green responds to Sullivan:

Well, I think Andrew is profoundly wrong and borderline nuts on this subject–and if he’s right, and Palin launches a bid for the White House, his nightmare of a Palin presidency is unlikely to be realized. It’s not impossible. Just unlikely. The point of my original post, riffing off this New York magazine piece on Palin’s newfound wealth, was that Palin seems more interested in money than politics. The conventional wisdom in Washington–which Andrew has backward–is that Palin will probably run, though this is less a matter of conviction than a vague sense that she craves the spotlight and won’t pass it up. My mildly contrarian suggestion was that avarice might lead her instead to become a Glenn Beck-like political-entertainment figure, which would furnish her with a platform, a lifestyle, and a way of avoiding the hard work of running for president (a lot tougher than serving a half term as governor).

My point was limited to Palin’s own motivations and desires. But Andrew’s rant doesn’t address that–I don’t think his worldview allows for the possibility that she might not run. He concerns himself instead with lots of black-helicopter sounding stuff about cynical elites and the “media-ideological-industrial complex” and basically stops just short of accusing Palin of fluoridating the water. But after all that, what Andrew has described is not a force powerful enough to elect a president. He’s described (pretty accurately, I might add) elite Washington’s view of the Fox News viewership and then imbued it with a lot more importance than it merits. “Add Palin to the mix,” he writes, “and you have a whole new machine in American politics–one with the capacity, as much as Obama’s, to upend the established order.”

No, you don’t. As Andrew himself points out, the established order of the GOP has already been upended–you wouldn’t have a goofball like Michael Steele as your party chairman if the grownups were still in charge!

DiA at The Economist:

Mr Green is right; she is building a brand. But just so she can be a television hostess? How long would that brand shine if she rebuffed those who will (with very real passion) beg her to run? Yes, she’s uniquely successful at infuriating or terrifying liberals—but that’s because they think that she might still just become president. How does that 2013 contract look when she’s refused to enter the fight? This is hunch-blogging at its most speculative, I confess, but I think she’s in. So over to you. I don’t see someone who’s preparing for a book-writing and lecture-circuit career. What do you see in the estimable Sarah Palin?

Razib Khan at Secular Right:

The profile reduces my probability that Palin will make a serious run (as opposed to a pro forma one) for the highest office in 2012.* It also leaves me impressed by how quickly and efficiently she’s leveraged her celebrity and gone from moderately upper middle class** in income (and in serious debt due to legal bills after the 2008 campaign) to wealthy. Some Republicans are apparently worried about her becoming the “face of the party,” something that crops up now and then in the media, but it doesn’t seem like they really have to worry that much unless the party has no real substance and is rooted only in style and the need to get elected. As for Sarah Palin, whatever you think of her politics or personality, she’s offering a concrete product distributed through the private sector. The article mentions that her book was a major reason that Random House generated a profit last year! Whatever criticisms one might lodge, she’s not getting rich by being a rent-seeker, as so many of our public and private sector elites have become. In fact the article points to a whole industry of liberal critique which has emerged around her, so she’s not even capturing all the wealth that she’s responsible for (spillover effects).

“You Know, I’ve Learned Something Today”

David Itzkoff at NYT:

An episode of “South Park” that continued a story line involving the Prophet Muhammad was shown Wednesday night on Comedy Central with audio bleeps and image blocks reading “CENSORED” after a Muslim group warned the show’s creators that they could face violence for depicting that holy Islamic prophet. Revolution Muslim, a group based in New York, wrote on its Web site that the “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker “will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh” for an episode shown last week in which a character said to be the Prophet Muhammad was seen wearing a bear costume. Mr. Van Gogh was slain in Amsterdam in 2004 after making a film that discussed the abuse of Muslim women in some Islamic societies.

The new episode of “South Park” on Wednesday night tried to revisit this character, but with the name and depiction of the character blocked out. It was unclear how much of the bleeping was Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s decision. In a message posted on their Web site, SouthParkStudios.com, they wrote that they could not immediately stream the new episode on the site because:

After we delivered the show, and prior to broadcast, Comedy Central placed numerous additional audio bleeps throughout the episode. We do not have network approval to stream our original version of the show.

On Thursday morning, a spokesman for Comedy Central confirmed that the network had added more bleeps to the episode than were in the cut delivered by South Park Studios, and that it was not giving permission for the episode to run on the studio’s Web site.

Andrew Sullivan:

I know I’m a broken record, but the two-part 200th episode was about as close to genius – and hardcore fan-pandering – as you can get. Hennifer Lopez, Mr Hat, Mephesto and Stan Tenorman: what more could you ask for? Well: you could ask for a reprise of South Park’s pioneering decision not to pander to idiotic Islamist threats by treating the figure of Mohammed the way they treat every other religious icon. And that’s what Matt and Trey delivered.

They had done it before with no problem. In 2001, they’d already run an episode with the Super Best Friends, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, and Seaman – pronounced SeamAAAn – portraying Muhammed with no fuss or complaints. Then after 9/11, when all media should have been even more insistent on not caving to Jihadist thugs, Comedy Central forbade a reprise in a subsequent episode. Viacom looked really stupid, but that’s hardly unusual.

Then the last two weeks. In the first part of the 200th episode, South Park went to hilarious lengths to have Muhammed but cloaked in various disguises – a U-Haul van, a bear mascot, Santa Claus. But any actual depiction,as in 2001, was covered with a block of black with the word “censored” on it. In some ways, this act of censorship wasn’t too big a deal. It actually helped illuminate the unique intolerance of Sunni Islam among world religions today. SP has long had Jesus and Satan, they have ridiculed Mormonism, eviscerated Scientology, mocked Catholicism and showed the Buddha actually doing lines of coke. None of the adherents of these other faiths have threatened to kill Matt and Trey, but, of course, some Sunni Islamists did so.

Ann Althouse:

Did Revolution Muslim truly threaten Stone and Parker or was it merely warning them? That is, were they indicating that they would commit and act of violence or were they only opining based on their prediction of what others, more extreme than they, would do? Revolution Muslim says it’s just a warning:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a member of Revolution Muslim, repeated the group’s assertion that the post was a prediction rather than a threat. He said that the post on the group’s blog “was intended in a principle that’s deeply rooted in the Islamic religion, which is called commanding the good and forbidding the evil,” tying the group’s complaints about “South Park” to larger frustrations about U.S. support for Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.They have freedom of speech too, so the question is whether it’s a true threat.

ADDED: I have no end of respect for Stone and Parker. What brilliant artists! What political heroes!

Instapundit:

Obviously, Christians — and Sarah Palin fans, and lovers of My Mother The Car — should take heed of this incentive system our modern media is creating. Don’t want things you treasure satirized? Just issue a “prediction” and — voila! Meanwhile, note how entirely real radical Muslim threats and violence are treated as just part of the weather — something you have to adapt to — while nonexistent Tea Party violence is an existential threat to the Republic.

But here’s a warning of my own: Those who have no backbone will do the bidding of those who do.

Allah Pundit:

One mystery lingers: In the final scene, in vintage SP fashion, a bunch of characters gave mini-soliloquies about the moral of the story. The twist this time is that they were all bleeped out — roughly 30 seconds’ worth of airtime, filled with nothing but bleeps. I thought for sure that that had to be a joke — the moral of the story was how absurd censorship can be, and that was a perfect way to show it — but now I’m not so sure. Says the AP, “Comedy Central also censored 35 seconds’ worth of a conversation toward the end of the show between the characters Stan, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus. The network wouldn’t say Thursday whether this contained any reference to the warning [from jihadists].”

New York Times:

The “South Park” creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, have issued a statement in response to Comedy Central’s decision to alter an episode after a Muslim group’s warning:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn’t mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we’ll see what happens to it.

Aziz Poonawalla:

Most other blogs and news sites are not providing a link to RevolutionMuslim.com – which appears to have been hacked, possibly by angry fans of the show – but I think it’s important to let these idiots know that they are being critiqued. And my critique of them is much the same as my critique of Anwar al-Awlaki: they are cowards, who seek to gain publicity for themselves. In a lot of ways, they have much in common with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, except that the latter are at least funny on occassion.

The Prophet SAW has been depicted by non-muslims with respect many times in the past – including a marble frieze of the Prophet as one of history’s great lawgivers, on the South Wall inside the Supreme Court building in Washington DC (photo at right). Muslims themselves, particularly in Iraq and Iran, are fond of depictions of the Prophet, with many public paintings and billboards of him and Ali ibn Talib AS. These are expressions of respect or love, and are not in any way an insult or an undue reverence.

In fact, it is precisely the over-reaction of extremist muslims who wave around threats of violence that leads to more depictions and insults to the Prophet, not less. The right way to inculcate respect for the Prophet among non-muslims is not to act like a barbarian but to simply express ourselves and explain our beliefs – and then excercise our own right, to walk away. It is by their own actions, supposedly in “defense” of the Prophet, that these extremists actually cause greater offense to the Prophet’s legacy than any mere cartoon. After all, the Prophet SAW is judged by non-muslims solely by the behavior of those who profess to follow him.

I don’t watch South Park, and likely never will. But I much prefer their attempt at depiction of the Prophet SAW, which is rooted in a simple need to assert their creative freedom, rather than any genuine intent to defame or insult Islam – quite unlike the Danish newspaper cartoons, which were created with only malice in mind. To understand this, compare and contrast the images of the Prophet as a super hero or a bear, versus a dark figure with a bomb in his turban. The real insult to the Prophet is in refusing to make a distinction at all.

Related: The muslim women lawyer organization KARAMAH visited the Supreme Court to investigate the frieze of the Prophet SAW and have a very nice report on their findings.

UPDATE: A conversation with a reader about muslim sensibilities, assimilation, and tolerance.

UPDATE 2 – it wasn’t Mohammed after all in the bear suit, but actually Santa, according to people who’ve actually seen the episode. This revelation makes me realize that the South Park creators Matt and Trey are, quite simply, brilliant demigods. Well played, sirs. Well played. Of course, that didn’t stop Comedy Central from censoring the episode anyway…

manas at Ijtema:

Fox news seemed to revel at the episode. God forbid, if one of the writers get killed, they get a double bonus. South Park is something they don’t like. Islam too.

It is true that most Muslims believe that the Prophet (SAW) should not be drawn, but drawing him will cause more annoyance than offense or anger. The reason Muslims were offended and angered by the Danish cartoon is not because it drew the Prophet (may peace and blessings be upon him), but rather because it portrayed him as a terrorist.

When the Muslims conquered Mecca, they forgave the persecuting Quraish. They destroyed all the idols that were there in the Kaaba, which was built (or rebuilt) by Abraham (AwS). However, there was a picture of prophet Jesus (AwS) and his mother Mary (may Allah be pleased with her), which the prophet carefully put away.

Muslims love and respect all the other prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus (AwS). Whenever they are ridiculed, we are hurt too. The difference is, as Jesus (AwS) is “shared” between us and the Christians, so we do not feel we (Muslims)  are being picked on.

The episode of South Park in my opinion was not trying to offend. It was trying to engage/incorporate the Muslim faith into the dialogue the way they know how. That’s the problem. Americans do not understand other cultures, not even European ones, and do not attempt to understand them. They expect them to ‘know what we are talkin’ about.‘

It just does not work that way. You can’t converse in Bengali with a Chinese.

Personally, I did find the show a bit offensive. One, because it showed the Prophet (SAW) clad in a stupid teddy bear costume. Two, it made innumerate references relating Muhammad (SAW), Muslims and violence. (Three) nor is Muhammad (SAW) immune from criticism. Even Muslims believe that he was a fallible human. We just believe that overall he was an excellent person- an example for all humanity to learn from. We are open to sincere criticism, but we do not like him ridiculed.

So, in short, I am a somewhat offended by, and a bit dissatisfied with the show, but in no way angry with it. I urge my fellow Muslims to engage the larger society- including the media, and use this opportunity to create some positive atmosphere. I urge the media to talk to representative Muslim organizations, and emphasize that they are such, before talking about fringe groups.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat in NYT

Doug J.

E.D. Kain at The League

Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right

Michael C. Moynihan at Reason

UPDATE #2: Glenn Greenwald on Douthat

Daniel Larison on Douthat and Greenwald

UPDATE #3: David Schaengold at The League

Peter Worthington at FrumForum

Well It’s Got To Be A Newsmax Jesus

Huffington Post:

Correction: Newsmax’s cover story “The Jesus Question” is from April 2009.

The editors of Newsmax might be getting a little impatient for the second coming of Christ.

The conservative magazine’s latest cover story, “The Jesus Question,” is about the son of god’s return to earth as prophesied in the Bible.

Jesus is no stranger to newstands. Biblical history interests plenty of readers. Just ask a few magazine editors. But the text accompanying Newsmax’s Jesus cover story (“Will He Ever Return?”) seems to strike a more plaintive, are-we-there-yet tone, that differs from those of the general interest magazines.

While the article is posted online, a search of the magazine’s web site yields a bulleted outline that will tell many readers what they want to know.

Obama’s armageddon-inducing health care bill isn’t mentioned, but the president’s “globalist” ways are panned in a section devoted to biblical prophesies

Radley Balko:

I think it’s the hint of exasperation that makes this wonderful.

Alex Massie:

Radley Balko thinks it’s the note of (mild) exasperation that makes this cover splendid. I agree. Jesus: Disappointing You for 2000 Years.

As the man put it:

Estragon: He should be here.

Vladimir: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.

Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right

Steve Benen

Mittens And The Brain

First, Karl Rove’s new book:

Daniel Foster at The Corner:

Karl “The Architect” Rove came by the NR offices this afternoon to talk about his new book Courage and Consequence. The conversation spanned from Social Security reform and Medicare Part D to Iraq and the Surge — all topics on which Mr. Rove’s nimble command of even the finest-grained political and policy details helped frame in light of current political battles.

On the domestic politics surrounding the invasion of Iraq, Rove said he made a “critical mistake” in late 2003 by not squarely confronting what he saw as a calculated and coordinated effort by national Democrats to suggest that President Bush had willfully lied in making his case for war.

“I think they polled it and focus-grouped it,” Rove said, noting that, within days of one another, a half-dozen prominent Congressional Democrats had made public comments suggesting the president lied. But Rove said the campaign was intellectually inconsistent.

“You had Ted Kennedy, for one, voting against the authorization of force and then two days later going to Georgetown and saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Rove said.

“If Bush was lying, so were the 60-plus Democrats who said on the floor of Congress that Saddam had WMD,” he observed.

Rove acknowledged that “we weren’t winning the war for a long time,” but said President Bush was “ahead of his commanders” by 2006, both in realizing that he needed to change course, and in expressing interest in the counterinsurgency strategy of General Petraeus.

On the decision to push the troop surge, “Bush said there are two ways for the military to break, either by over-use or by losing a war, and he said it was more dangerous to lose a war.”

Asked if the administration should have replaced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sooner, Rove said they began to “quietly find out our other options,” but that it would have been a mistake to “pull Rumsfeld in the highly politicized environment” leading up to the 2006 midterm elections, a move that would have created messy confirmation hearings.

Rove also talked extensively about the Bush administration’s domestic-policy agenda, especially Social Security Reform and Medicare Part D.

Paul Begala at The Daily Beast:

Rove is witty and smart. He likes hunting and loves Texas. If it weren’t for lying us into a war and leading us into a depression, I might even be pals with Rove. And so I opened his book without the level of hostility most of my fellow Democrats might.

At first, he exceeded my expectations for candor as he wrote about his personal life. Your heart aches for him when you read about the breakup of his parents’ marriage, the disorientation he must have felt when an aunt and uncle casually told him he was adopted and thus the man he thought was his father was no biological relation. His account of his first wife leaving him is unflinching and admirably non-judgmental: “She then looked at me and blurted, ‘I don’t love you. I have never loved you. I never will love you.'” Ouch.

He brings the same unblinking style to the topic of his mother’s suicide: “Like her mother before her in 1974, my mother had dealt with life’s punishing blows by attempting suicide. But unlike my grandmother, Mom succeeded. I was stunned when I got the news but at some deep level I had always known she was capable of this. My mother struggled, even in placid waters, to keep a grip on life.”

Not everyone can confront their family’s failings with such frankness. But when the topic switches from the personal to the political, Rove admits no weakness or mistakes. It turns out (spoiler alert!) that the George W. Bush of Mr. Rove’s tale is strong and brave and wise and kind. He is a man—well, that’s unfair, a god, really, or at least a demigod—possessed of valor and vigor, poise and pluck, humor and humility. His description of his first meeting with the future president sounds like something out of Tiger Beat: “George W. Bush walked through the front door, exuding more charm and charisma than is allowed by law. He had on his Air National Guard jacket, jeans, and boots.” This passage works best if, while you’re reading it, you listen to Donny Osmond sing “Puppy Love.”

One wonders if the admiration was reciprocated. Doubtful. President Bush repaid Rove’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel-like loyalty by bestowing a nickname on him. No, not “Bush’s Brain” as the press called him—nor something cool like “M-Kat”, Bush’s name for the ever-fashionable media man, Mark McKinnon.

Turd Blossom.

Matt Latimer at The Daily Beast:

I sat next to him while he shouted on the phone with some poor soul in Idaho over the then-unfolding Larry Craig scandal. As we landed in Nevada, he pointed out, somewhat wistfully, where he grew up. When the president and First Lady gave him a surprise farewell party, complete with red velvet cake, he surprised everyone with his visible emotion. Then, when Bush came into the airplane’s conference room to question the necessity of an upcoming political event, Rove flatly refused to hear him out. “Never give an inch,” he muttered as the president walked off.

That mantra, of course, was the secret of his remarkable success and the root of his ultimate undoing. An effective advocate when things were going his way—such as rallying support for the invasion of Iraq—he proved needlessly divisive when things went wrong. He, and Bush, suggested that conservatives who opposed his immigration proposals were xenophobes, racists, fools, or cowards, earning lasting enmity in the process. He supported big-government conservatism that alienated many in the base, some of whom joined the tea party movement. He failed to articulate a conservative vision in favor of short-term tactics and maneuvers. “They were determined to run a base mobilization, narrow margin victory,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich recently charged, “largely because they were SO uncomfortable with ideas.” The result was one election in which we lost the popular vote, another when Republicans barely defeated liberal John Kerry, and two disastrous elections in 2006 and 2008. President Bush left office with a 22 percent approval rating and the GOP, as Jed Babbin, the editor of the conservative newspaper Human Events once put it, was left “a smoking hole in the ground.” In short, Rove’s approach left the GOP about as popular as the dress Sarah Jessica Parker wore to the Oscars.

And yet Rove still doesn’t seem to have figured it out. He advised Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to wage last week’s losing campaign against the sitting Republican governor of Texas—wounding both officials and the Texas GOP in the process—to score points in his ongoing feud with Governor Perry. The worst-kept secret in Washington is that his associates are behind many of the anonymous Republican attacks on the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, attacks which by complete coincidence of course always seem to make Rove and his allies come out in a better light. And though he is a useful, sometimes brilliant commentator on Fox News, one hopes that he and his compatriots are not trying to run the network as they ran the White House, by urging bookers to keep disfavored people off the airwaves. One suspects Roger Ailes would not put up with that.

One day soon perhaps Rove, with his love of history, will learn the lesson of the former president he says he reveres. Ronald Reagan kept a sign on his desk that said, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” Reagan, at least, didn’t believe in his own greatness as much as he believed in the greatness of the ideas that he stood for.

Ed Morrissey:

Karl Rove’s long-awaited memoir of his White House career, Courage and Consequence hits the bookshelves on Tuesday. Rove has quite a rollout planned for it. He’ll have a Ustream launch at noon ET, which I’ll embed earlier in the morning. After that, Rove will join me on The Ed Morrissey Show to discuss the book, following Andrew Malcolm’s appearance, which begins at 3 pm ET.

It’s already generating some of the histrionics and nastiness we saw from the media during the Bush administration. Dana Milbank today lets his wit run, or rather crawl:

As a White House reporter during the Bush presidency, I often worried that I wasn’t getting the whole story. Now, Karl Rove has finally given it to me.

His new book, “Courage and Consequence,” promises to “pull back the curtain on my journey to the White House and my years there.” What he divulges nearly made me choke on a pretzel.

That business about President George W. Bush misleading the nation about Iraq? Didn’t happen. “Did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” Rove writes.

Condoning torture? Wrong! “The president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite.”

Foot-dragging on global warming? Au contraire. “He was aggressive and smart on this front.”

I’ve written dozens if not hundreds of blog posts refuting these claims, but we’ll save that for Rove on Tuesday. (Getting bad intel is not the same as lying, Democrats made the same WMD claims from 1998 forward, waterboarding as performed by the CIA is arguably not torture and Congress didn’t object to it as such at the time, and Bush reduced carbon emissions in the US more than Europe did.) Meanwhile, Hot Air readers can get a jump on sales by placing orders now!

John Hinderaker at Powerline:

I’ve just started the book today, but it’s a fascinating and substantial work. It is well written and copiously annotated; not a casually tossed-off memoir, but a book intended as a serious historical document. The chapters on Rove’s youth are touching, and his discussions of campaign strategy are candid and illuminating. I’m looking forward to asking Rove some questions I’ve wondered about for a long time, like: whose idea was it to retract the “16 words,” a decision that began the downfall of the Bush administration? Tune in on Saturday to learn the answer. In the meantime, anyone who wants to understand politics in our time should read Rove’s book.

David Weigel at The Washington Independent:

Rove’s pride and tunnel vision about his campaign tactics aren’t anything new in the Washington memoir genre. Much of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” featured the same sort of finger-pointing about her brief bid for the vice presidency. If anything, Rove takes more obvious relish in attacking the people who made his campaigns difficult — it’s mostly “the kooky left-wing blogosphere” that thinks he ran a dirty campaign against John McCain in 2000, or that only an “imbecile” could have believed the 2004 exit polls that showed a Kerry-Edwards win, and so on.

But unlike Palin — unlike most people with his portfolio — Rove was in the cockpit for much of a consequential presidency that launched two wars and dramatically expanded the size of the federal government. He writes about this the same way he writes about minor tiffs and campaign tricks. He spends a page trying to debunk the idea that Bush ever told Americans to “go shopping” after the September 11 attacks. Technically, he’s right. The closest Bush ever came to using those two precise words — the moment that most people remember as the “go shopping” moment — were his September 27, 2001 remarks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he urged Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” But Rove insists that the “closest he ever came” was a different speech in which Bush praised Americans for “going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball.” Even there, Rove skips past the argument made by critics — that Bush, in a unique position to demand more of Americans, gave an “all-clear” sign and moved on. In writing about Hurricane Katrina, one of his only regrets is “flying over the region in Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than landing.” In one of Rove’s few admissions, he admits that he’s “one of the people responsible for this mistake.”

“Courage and Consequence” is filled with such arguments. Pre-release excepts about Rove’s take on the Iraq War — that his biggest regret was that he should have worked harder to spin the fallout over the lack of WMD in Iraq — foreshadowed the way Rove would tackle most of the controversies of his tenure. At several points, he simply misstates facts. He impugns the character of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his position in New Mexico after not pursuing politicized prosecutions, by claiming that Iglesias was incompetent and gunning for electoral office. Paragraphs later, he claims that the only qualm that Democrats have with former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin — who resigned after negative attention on his own politicized appointment — is that they feared it would help Griffin’s career. Left unmentioned is the real Democratic argument, that Griffin helped the Bush-Cheney campaign challenge the voter registrations of voters in largely African-American, Democratic-leaning areas. But to Rove, the most important Republican political strategist of his generation, Democratic worries about election integrity are basically one big joke. In an unsurprising chapter about the 2000 presidential election recount — revelations are limited to the angry looks and sighs that various players gave to Rove — he refers to the Bush team in Florida as “freedom fighters whose homeland had been occupied as they grappled with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits filed by Gore’s attorneys and street protests led by Jesse Jackson.”

Very little of this should surprise observers of Rove in power or out of power, as a quotable White House aide and then as a Fox News pundit who has reliably attacked the Democrats. Rove’s disinterest in policy or consequences of policy isn’t surprising, either. (”I didn’t pretend to be Carl von Clausewitz or Henry Kissinger, but I knew the Iraq War wasn’t going well,” Rove writes of his thinking in December 2006.) The historical value of the book itself is minimal. It functions, instead, as a test of whether Rove’s combination of pique and pride will be helpful as Bush administration veterans argue that they spent eight years changing America for the better, over the cries of critics, only to watch their work be ruined by Barack Obama and his pack of elitist liberals.

Noah Kristula-Green at FrumForum:

Earlier today, Karl Rove participated in an online chat session to answer questions about his new book.  Viewers were able to tweet questions for Rove to respond to.  The chat was fascinating to watch for two reasons. First, it actually gave an impression of what Karl Rove might be like as a real person, and second, because it validated how online media can be more constructive and interesting then a cable TV interviewer in an echo chamber.

The setting was not glamorous, but that may have helped the authenticity of the event. The lighting was terrible and Rove was not wearing stage make-up.

When Rove was asked what it was like to work on Fox News, he replied that “For every seven minutes that I’m on television, I have to do an hour of prep work.” Yet here he was, for an entire hour, answering questions with little prep work at all. Rove had no way to know what sort of questions he would get from the thousands of followers on Twitter.

Rove seemed fairly relaxed, and took questions on a wide range of topics, including some that were not very serious. One questioner asked Rove what reality show he would most want to be on. Rove admitted that while he was not very aware of the reality TV scene that “I would like to visit one of those ‘real wives of Orange County’ sets, to see if they are real people.” He also noted that the Sci-Fi channel was his favorite source of entertainment, but he didn’t say which shows he watched.

Although some questions were trivial, the strength of the format was that the questions were not part of a predefined topic. This allowed Rove to answer questions that may normally not get asked in the Fox News echo-chamber. When asked straight up “What has Obama done right?” Rove did not miss a beat before praising Obama’s military decisions regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the reauthorization of the Patriot Act and strengthening No Child Left Behind. Rove stated: “We ought to look for things he does right, and support him.”

It’s highly unlikely that Rove would have ever been asked this question on a cable news show. Even if he had, it’s not hard to imagine a left-leaning site (such as the Huffington Post or Media Matters) grabbing the clip, embedding it, and then placing it under the headline (naturally, in all-caps): “WATCH: ROVE PRAISES OBAMA!” This would have left out how Rove then went on to attack Obama’s healthcare plan. When Rove is just chatting with followers on Twitter, there is less attention on him, and he was probably freed up to give more honest answers.

More Morrissey

Kathryn Jean Lopez’s interview with Rove

Spencer Ackerman:

Check this insane idea Rove pursued in advance of the post-2006-election firing of Donald Rumsfeld:

That summer, I looked into whether FedEx CEO Fred Smith, Bush’s original choice for the post in 1999, was now available. He wasn’t.

There but for the grace of God! They went to a FedEx CEO before Robert Gates. I suppose on the other hand he would’ve been better than Rumsfeld… Funny bit: Rove says that getting rid of Rumsfeld — which, of course, the Bush administration ultimately did — would’ve “damaged the military’s faith in Bush as commander in chief.” Actually, you know what really did damage the military’s faith in Bush as commander in chief? Retaining Donald Rumsfeld in the face of failure after failure after failure.

Marc Ambinder:

Mark Halperin and ABC’s The Note helped to build the Rove mythology. We called him “SMIP” — the Smartest Man In Politics. And he was: a walking rolodex and encyclopedia, expostulating about political history and able to drill down deep inside Congressional districts. At one White House meeting with him, he asked why the Poland Springs water bottle he had handed me (yes, I carried Karl Rove’s water, hah hah) was so special.  No idea. He proceeded to give me a political history of the company. He courted reporters, knowing whom to respond to and whom to ignore (he never once responded to my e-mails — kr@who.eop.gov didn’t reply), and he had a very well developed sense about the biases and structure of the traditional media.  A serious appraisal of Rove’s political work can be found here.

He was a brilliant campaign strategist. His singular achievement, I think, was in the way he rendered the George W. Bush persona he helped craft as (a) the heir to the Republican throne, the inevitable nominee, and (b) acceptable to evangelicals AND Catholics. It was always an open question about whether Rove himself was religious or not. Many detractors today point to Terry Nelson or Ken Mehlman or Karen Hughes as the real forces of genius behind the Bush political brand, but it was Rove who knew someone everyone, who was plugged in, who used his intergovernmental affairs portfolio to harness the Bush campaign machine to government. Rove had little to do with the national security policies and consequential decisions about Iraq that enemies suspected, but he designed and implemented the successful strategy that played upon Americans’ fear of terrorism to portray the Democratic Party as feckless. (The Dems were feckless — about standing up to Rove.) And Rove knew how to recruit candidates, he knew how to scare (some) members of Congress. He was an enforcer of discipline. And of loyalty: there are many GOP operatives today who owe Rove their thanks for their careers.

I will read his book, and I’m sure I’ll learn much from it. I bet it will be better than critics might think — more personal, certainly.   But for me, it will be less than it might once have been.

And now on to Mitt Romney’s new book

David Frum has a multitude of blog posts on the book. Here’s the list at FrumForm. Frum:

But here are the final thoughts as one puts it down:

No Apology is the work of a highly intelligent, very well informed man with a proven record of successful executive leadership. Romney was much disliked by the other Republican candidates in 2008, but as a pro-McCain friend joked to me: “I have to admit – Mitt Romney would make the greatest Secretary of Transportation ever.“

What kind of president would he be?

Peggy Noonan once wrote of the first President Bush that he saw it as his job to sit behind a big desk and wait for important decisions to be brought to him to be made wisely and well.

Romney has some of that Bush spirit, topped up with an additional measure of technocratic expertise.

Yet it’s never been enough for a president to be a very smart guy who is good at running things. America has lots of smart guys who are good at running things. Why this smart guy of all the possible smart guys?

That’s the question that remains unanswered at the end of No Apology – and maybe the core weakness of the Romney political campaign.

Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent:

Romney’s central contention is that there are four “strategies” for global power: the United States’ blend of benevolent, market-based hegemony; the Chinese model of political autocracy and unrestrained industry; Russia’s energy-based path to resurgence; and the “violent jihadists,” an agglutination of scary Muslims. Trouble in paradise, according to Romney, comes from President Obama’s “presupposition” that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.” As a result, Romney must warn the nation to continue to lead the world, lest one or more of these competitors overtake America. “[T]here can be no rational denial of the reality that America is a decidedly good nation,” writes Romney, or perhaps a third grader. “Therefore, it is good for America to be strong.”

So many things are wrong with Romney’s view of an imperiled America that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, the idea that the U.S. is locked in a struggle for global supremacy with “violent jihadists” overlooks the exponential differences in economic resources, military strength, and global appeal between America and an increasingly imperiled band of Waziristan-based acolytes of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda can attack us; it cannot displace the U.S. as a global leader. It manufactures nothing, trades with no one, and has absolutely nothing to offer anyone except like-minded conspiratorial murderers. In order to disguise these glaring asymmetries, Romney has to use an empty term — “the jihadists” — which he cannot rigorously define and with which he means to absorb the vastly different aims and ambitions of rival terrorist groups and separate nations like Iran.

“Violent jihadist groups come in many stripes across a spectrum,” Romney writes, “from Hamas to Hezbollah, from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda.” But al-Qaeda exists because it considered the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt too accommodating of the Egyptian government; Hamas has literally fought al-Qaeda attempts at penetrating the Gaza Strip; and Sunni al-Qaeda released a videotape just this weekend that derides “Rejectionist Shiite Hezbollah.” There is absolutely nothing that unites these organizations in any programmatic manner except Romney’s ignorance, and the expansion of ignorance is insufficient to topple an American superpower.

Daniel Larison:

Ackerman also draws attention to Romney’s bizarre view on how to conduct U.S. diplomacy, which seems to boil down to having one diplomatic attache for each regional command around the world. Ackerman writes:

Such an individual would “encourage people and politicians to adopt and abide by the principles of liberal democracy,” something that “would be ideal if other allied nations created similar regional positions, and if we coordinated our efforts with theirs.” That’s it for diplomacy, and he doesn’t have an agenda for global development. Why the world will simply do what America says simply because America says it is something Romney never bothers to consider. High school students at model U.N. conferences have proposed less ludicrous ideas.

Then again, those high school students have probably given the subject more thought. That is what I find most inexplicable about Romney’s decision to spend any time at all trying to fill in gaps in his record on foreign policy that he and everyone else know are there. He seems to think that making enough of the conventional noises on the right issues will persuade doubters and fence-sitters that he really does know what he’s talking about. As a political matter, this is folly. Bush was and remained famously clueless and incurious on foreign policy, but during the 2000 campaign he did not waste time trying to match Gore on national security and foreign policy credentials. He covered his glaring weaknesses by playing to the strengths that he did have. Romney seems to be intent on doing the opposite.

Ackerman also notes that the war in Afghanistan receives no mention in the book. As Romney still cannot make up his mind whether Obama has handled Afghanistan well or poorly, it is no surprise that he has not yet figured out how to demonize Obama for doing something that was promised and which Romney would normally support.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner:

If you had any doubts about who he is, you’re seeing the real thing now. Watching Mitt Romney on the No Apology tour thus far, he’s talking about what he wants to talk about, what moves him: being a Mr. Fix-It businessman — on the economy, on diplomacy, on health care. He wants to do this because he believes America is great and should and can continue to be. He appreciates — in a firsthand and in a practical, sociological way — that families are the building block of a great country, and he sees how good policies help them. And that’s what he wants to talk about.

And if a social issue hits his desk — based on his Massachusetts record — he’s going to do what he can to preserve families and life. (And that, by the way, makes a huge difference. We don’t, for instance, have such a person in the White House right now. And it can have a chilling effect: in executive orders, in the courts, on staffing, in health care, etc.) No matter if doesn’t happen to be what gets him up in the morning — stuff like the opportunity to talk about D.C. gay marriage, for instance.

Speaking of his Massachusetts record: It seems clear that he is not going to apologize for trying to tackle the health-care problem there. Their final plan was clearly imperfect, but it’s more right than what Washington is doing now. He’ll be stubborn in defense of it because governors tackling health-care reform — with the input of the likes of the Heritage Foundation, by the way — is to be encouraged.

And so, on Letterman last night, you didn’t see pizazz or stand-up. You heard dorky jokes — the rapper on the plane broke my hair — and a serious guy. That’s who he is. His CPAC speech this year and his book reflect that. He’s uncomfortable changing his emphases to fit Iowa or anywhere else, and he doesn’t pull it off convincingly when he tries it. If he runs again, don’t expect him to.

Allah Pundit:

Granted, it won’t sell remotely as well as Palin’s book did, but for a guy who sometimes seems lost in the shuffle of outsized conservative personalities, it’s a nice prize.

Romney’s book tour has, so far, attracted pretty large crowds, serving — along with the book sales — to reassure his supporters that, though he may not draw Sarah Palin style hordes, he’s a figure of genuine popular interest. He reportedly attracted more than 1,000 people to a book signing in Naples, Fla. last night.

That’s the good news for Romney fans. The bad news is that Mitt 2.0 is starting to sound like Mitt 1.0 again, which is also surprising since he appeared to have learned his lesson lately by not flip-flopping on RomneyCare in interviews. Click the image below to watch the clip from this morning’s Imus of Mitt claiming he’s never really called himself pro-choice.

[…]

I honestly think the perception of opportunism is a bigger liability to him than RomneyCare, which will, one way or another, be off most people’s radar screens come late 2011. And the worst part is that his record on this subject is so well known to conservatives that there’s no point in being weaselly anymore; just own up to your prior record, say you’ve changed your mind, and let it lie. Fudging the facts only gives people an excuse to make it an issue again.

I’ve always liked him personally, but between stuff like this and “true conservatives” hammering him for endorsing McCain, I get the feeling that he’s being set up as the Charlie Crist of the Republican presidential primary. Although if that leads him to accuse Huckabee of waxing his back, it’ll all be worth it.

Robert Costa at National Review:

Romney does not mean to scare his readers with No Apology, and the book’s tone is far from polemical. But he does intend to be frank: “As long as there are people out there, politicians in particular, that say ‘no worries, no problems, all we have to do is adjust the taxes a little bit and things will get better,’ then I think people are not getting the straight story.”

[…]

The most notable aspect of No Apology is how, for its first third, the book functions as a rumination on the nature of American power. Romney does not see international relations as a web of competing nation-states seeking a balance, but as a competition between four models of geopolitical order — the American model of freedom and democracy, the authoritarian and commerce-heavy Chinese model, the Russian authoritarian energy-based model, and the violent-jihadist model. To win, he writes, America must “be wary and vigilant,” because “by mid-century, out grandchildren may well view Russia with the same concern which we and our parents once did.”

[…]

While Romney is an avowed supporter of military power, he also spends time in No Apology advocating “soft power.” President Obama, he says, has misunderstood that term’s meaning.

“The greatest shortcoming between our ability and our performance in foreign policy comes in our exercise of soft power,” Romney says. “Our inability to sway and influence affairs in the world without military might has been disappointing over the past year. It is extraordinary to me that we have not been able to dissuade Iran, for instance, from its foolish course. Or North Korea, a nation that is puny in its capabilities, from their course. It just underscores our inability to effectively use diplomacy, the sway of our economic vitality, our cultural advantages — we’re just underperforming in those areas. If we were to organize our effort as effectively in the diplomatic sphere as we do in the private sector, we’d have a lot bigger impact.”

While working on his chapters about foreign policy, Romney found that objective measures of power were hard to come by. So, he developed his own, calling it the “Index of Leading Indicators.” He is the first to say that his model is “easy to criticize,” but hopes that his 14-point outline on everything from GDP levels and tax levels to health-care costs and national-security preparedness is a move toward providing some sort of “corrective” for future leaders trying to make sense of America’s place in the world.

“I really wanted to be able to go back 25 years and calculate for each one of the indices, to see what they said then and see what they said today,” Romney says. “To be honest, I found it beyond my capacity as a writer to get all that data. It was really hard to try and go back 25, 50 years and pull out that data. But we can certainly collect it now. If others have other points they’d like to add to the data index, great, but I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to try and actually track the progress that we’re making in preserving our values and shoring up the foundation of our national strength.”

Shawn Healy at Huffington Post:

Romney also writes about education policy and laments the relative decline in America’s competitiveness, embracing standardized testing, merit pay, mechanisms to remove incompetent educators, charter schools, school choice (though he questions its political viability), and distance learning. He reserves terse words for teacher unions, bodies he considers detrimental to requisite educational reforms.

His energy policy relies on alternate energy sources including nuclear power, natural gas, clean coal, even hydrogen. He holds solar and wind power as promising complimentary energy sources, but doubts that either represent a panacea. In an early bid for support in the Iowa Caucuses, he touts his support for ethanol subsidies and production. Romney is highly critical of the cap and trade legislation passed by the House last year, and also dismisses the wisdom of a more direct carbon tax. However, he does tout the potential of a carbon tax coupled with reciprocal tax offsets in sales or payroll taxes.

No Apology is a serious work that departs from standard campaign biographies. Indeed, its closest parallel is arguably Obama’s Audacity of Hope. Romney intersperses brief biographical footnotes throughout, but its policy-orientation reigns. While he shares anecdotes from his failed 2008 presidential run, he avoids ex post facto analysis, and also strays from foreshadowing a future run for the nation’s highest office. This means there is no dissection of how his Mormon faith proved an obstacle among conservative Christian voters, or his repositioning on major social issues that led many to conclude that he was a “flip-flopper” of convenience. He does make several references to his faith, and reaffirms his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

The irony is that Romney’s 2008 campaign largely trumpeted social and military issues, peripheral to his core competency as an economic turn-around agent. In No Apology, he takes the opportunity to press the reset button, recasts himself as a more centrist, pragmatic technocrat, and lays the groundwork for a repeat presidential run during the most devastating economic times since the Great Depression.

Paul Waldman at Tapped:

Foreign policy is not really Romney’s wheelhouse, but I suppose he feels the need to check off the “Grrr…I hate terrorists!” box. Look for him to pivot away from foreign policy, particularly since Republicans are having a hard time saying Obama is destroying our standing in the world. The GOP primary will be about the domestic scourge — the socialist tide oozing from the White House — and who can capture the spirit of the aggrieved, bitter, angry white man. Romney could make an argument about why, with his managerial experience and business success, he’d be a better steward of government and the economy than his opponents. But that’s not the ground on which they’re going to be competing.

I imagine Romney looks at his probable opponents with frustration, knowing that he’s far more capable of being president than your Palins and Pawlentys. Though we have yet to locate the depth of pandering to which Mitt won’t sink, his efforts at identity politics just don’t come as naturally as they do to the others. But he’s certainly going to give it the old college try

Razib Khan at Secular Right:

Here are my odds: I think Mitt Romney has a 1 out of 5 chance of gaining the nomination in 2012 for the presidency if the Democrats do not pass health care legislation. This is in my estimation the modal probability in the field for individuals which we know of. That is, I think this is better odds than any other potential candidates currently on offer (remember, I think there’s a serious chance that a “dark horse” may rise to prominence and win the nomination, so I would still put “someone-we-don’t-know/aren’t talking about” as a higher probability than any of the “top-tier”). If the Democrats do pass the individual mandate I put Romney’s odds at 1 in 20, and would guess that other 2012 hopefuls such as Tim Pawlenty would now have a greater probability of gaining the nomination (for what it’s worth, I think Sarah Palin’s odds are around 1 in 20 with our without health care).

UPDATE: David Frum in FrumForum on Rove’s book

Flashback To Our Mystic Past

Luke Timothy Johnson at Commonweal:

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all best known as exoteric traditions, each with the full array of formal worship, religious law, sacred books, and codes of morality. Yet each has also contained, from the beginning, a strong element of mysticism. The Judaism that formed in the second century on the basis of a strict interpretation of Torah, demanding observance of all the commandments, including dietary and purity regulations, also expressed itself mystically through the heavenly ascents accomplished by the adepts of Merkabah Mysticism, riders of the heavenly throne-chariot. The earliest Christian books contain a powerful visionary composition (Revelation), while Christian mystical impulses found early expression both in Gnostic literature and among the desert fathers and mothers; and in Islam, the Sufi movement, dedicated to the quest of God through renunciation and prayer, grew together with the exoteric framework of the Shari’ah, the system of Muslim law and observance. It is among the Sufis where we find the passionate pulse of early Islam, as in the words of the female saint Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya (d. ca. 801):

“I love thee with two loves, love of my happiness, and perfect love, to love thee as is thy due. My selfish love is that I do naught but think on thee, excluding all beside; but that purest love, which is thy due, is that the veils which hide thee fall, and I gaze on thee. No praise to me in either this or that. Nay, thine the praise for both that love and this.”

Exoteric and esoteric religious impulses coexist in tension with one another: the mystic’s tendency to derogate the visible can lead to neglect of external forms in the name of purity of heart, while the lawyer’s concern for common standards can encourage the suspicion and even suppression of private devotion. The great monotheistic religions have not found it easy to reconcile their exoteric and esoteric sides. The Gnostics’ esoteric religion posed a direct challenge to the early institutional church, and Irenaeus, the second-century bishop and theologian, responded with Adversus haereses, attacking the “heresies” of such groups with an argument for a public Christianity based on creed, canon, and the apostolic succession of bishops. Eventually the extreme forms of Christian mysticism fled to a more congenial home in the new religion of Manichaeism. The mysticism of the desert fathers and mothers, in contrast, was thoroughly orthodox, and the mysticism that so invigorated medieval Catholicism gladly embraced the exoteric forms of the Christian faith.

Like Christianity, Islam early on faced the challenge of a radical esoteric movement that threatened the authority of the Shari’ah. The earliest Sufis were adventurers of the spirit who sought immediate union with Allah, and some issued statements that pushed the implications of ecstasy to the limits. The Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj was executed for his claims of union with the divine, which outraged the fundamental conviction that Allah has no partners. “I am al-Haqq,” he is reputed to have said, “I am the Truth.” Reconciling the esoteric and exoteric within Islam was the monumental intellectual labor of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a man whose absolute devotion to the Sufi way—he said it saved his soul—was matched by his commitment to the Shari’ah as the framework of true devotion: “I saw that Sufism consists in experiences rather than in definitions, and that what I was lacking belonged to the domain, not of instruction, but of ecstasy and initiation.” Al-Ghazali held that the mystic’s knowledge did not consist in new revelations, but in an ever deeper penetration of the truths disclosed by the Qur’an. This principle, once established, helped Sufism flourish at the heart of Islam, becoming at times the dominant expression of the religion.

Of the three great monotheisms, Judaism has proved most successful at harmonizing exoteric and esoteric expression. The masters of the heavenly throne-chariot were among the greatest scholars of the early rabbinic tradition, and demanded of the mystic the punctilious outward observance of Torah. The medieval German chasid Eleazar of Worms (d. 1230) declared, “The root of love is to love the Lord. The soul is full of love, bound with the bonds of love in great joy. The powerful love of joy seizes his heart so that at all times he thinks: How can I do the will of God?” Similarly, practitioners of Kabbalah from the twelfth to the twentieth century assumed as the ground for their speculation a total immersion in the practices common to the community of faith. The early Hasidic movement aroused concern for its apparently antinomian tendencies, yet quickly became integrated in the exoteric tradition, and is found today among the strictest of observant Jews.

The benefits of the exoteric to the esoteric forms of religion over the ages have been clear to see. The framework of law and worship, creed and Scripture, provided both a social meaning and shared social practices that enabled individual mystics to thrive. They shared with their nonmystical fellow believers the public practice of prayer, the study of sacred texts, and the deeds of charity. Their passionate quest for the experience of God through prayer was the more secure because it pursued the God proclaimed publicly in synagogue, church, and mosque. Their asceticism was not an exception to, but rather an intensification of, the strict rules of behavior followed by the exoteric community. Mystics were able to swim freely, and dive deeply, in an ocean bounded by public profession and practice.

In return, mysticism enriched the outer tradition, providing a medium for impulses of passionate devotion, producing generations of saints who represent the best within each religion. By recognizing all visible forms as less than ultimate, mysticism challenges the claims of religious law to total control over humans, and stands as an anti-idolatrous witness within exoteric religion. It makes clear that religion is not simply another version of politics, but a form of faith that in its essence seeks to serve the living God; and that religion’s efforts to stabilize the world are not solely about the assertion of human power, but about the service of humanity. Because everything in religion must be measured by God, mysticism insists, and because God is not a controllable or even a fully knowable entity, religion must always be measured by a reality beyond definition. Asserting the ultimate reality and power of this invisible presence, and willingly sacrificing pleasure in this life for the sake of a future life with God, mysticism reminds the exoteric that it too is called to a service larger than itself.

Ross Douthat in NYT:

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly at Commonweal:

Together, Johnson and Mujica’s articles explore some of the questions Douthat raises today. And of course, there’s more on these topics in our archives. Lawrence Cunningham’s February 2006 overview of “Catholic Spirituality” is worth revisiting, as is Luke Timothy Johnson’s own 2006 take on popular religion, “Keeping Spirituality Sane.” Is there anything else you think Douthat’s readers should check out while they’re here?

Rod Dreher:

I’ve always been mystically inclined in my spirituality, but also lazy and impatient. When I’ve hungered for a numinous experience of the divine, I’ve tended to see it as a matter of reading the right book to discover the secret. There is, of course, no secret wisdom that will help you plug in to the divine without much effort. Anything that promises you that is a false mysticism, is a lie. From my own experience, I’ve only been able to have truly transformative numinous experiences after submitting to a prayer discipline of some time. It’s like that with my body, too: in the past, whenever I’d be sick of my slack belly, I’d look for some fad diet that promised to help me shed pounds quickly and easily. It’s all a lie: the only way to lose weight in a healthy way is to both diet and exercise. Similarly, absent a rare road to Damascus moment, you’re not going to experience God mystically unless you seek Him earnestly through regular prayer, fasting and ascesis.

The Orthodox Christian way is the way of ascesis and mysticism. I hadn’t understood this from the outside, but once you enter Orthodoxy and take it seriously, it is not so much a set of rules to be obeyed as it is teaching to bring you to spiritual health. I was reading around in a book over the weekend in which an Orthodox bishop taught that there are no good people and bad people, there are only those who are suffering in various degrees from sickness, and those who are healed (the saints). Orthodoxy is to be seen as the authentic way of healing the soul. From an Orthodox point of view, you cannot really know God unless you know him mystically, through prayer. The word Orthodox theologians use to describe this way of knowing God is “noetic,” meaning, “related to the nous.” This is a good short introduction to the Orthodox mindset, and this from OrthodoxWiki explains what “nous” means in Orthodox spirituality.

In Orthodoxy, we can only be healed (= sanctified) through constant purification of the nous, through prayer, fasting and other forms of asceticism. Ascesis is not considered optional, or something only for monks, nuns and other spiritual athletes. It is, in Orthodox teaching, the normal way of Christian spirituality (though certainly the severe acts of ascesis practiced by monastics, especially on Mount Athos, are extraordinary). Mind you, many, many Orthodox Christians don’t know about this, or don’t care. But to be a normal Orthodox Christian is to be mystically inclined, and mysticism of the soul cannot be separated from “orthopraxis,” or right practice. The exoteric and the esoteric must live in balance. The thing I’ve observed from living and practicing Orthodox Christianity for nearly four years is how absolutely central mysticism is to the life and thought of the Church. You may live as a Protestant or a Catholic and never deal directly with the mystical dimension of the Christian faith, which includes ascesis. But I don’t know how you can do that as an Orthodox Christian.

The book, by the way, for curious laymen to read on this is “The Mountain of Silence” by Kyriacos Markides. It’s a fantastic introduction to Orthodox spirituality, very engaging and approachable.

Jason Kuznicki at The League:

Given that in the meantime our culture discovered magic mushrooms and LSD, I am hardly bowled over. This is not as flippant as it sounds. Research from my alma mater confirms what the hippies were only just discovering back then — that a single dose of magic mushrooms will commonly turn into one of the most important mystical experiences of a person’s entire lifetime. Yes, it really is that easy, as even proponents of the psychedelic experience, like Aldous Huxley, were wont to celebrate. (Not to condemn, but to celebrate. Mysticism for the masses — Huxley wasn’t born in America, but he probably should have been. He sure knew a typically American turn of mind when he saw one.)

I’m not presumptuous enough to rule one way or the other on the sincerity of drug-induced mystical experiences. I’ll just say that in 1962, the vast majority of Americans were either unaware of them or unwilling to consider them legitimate. Now, however, we read of a noted author who had a mystical experience after dental surgery, and it’s not all that shocking to us. Some of us may even have had similar experiences in similar perfectly legal and socially approved settings, and we feel comfortable calling them mystical in a way that our grandparents certainly would not.

And Douthat again, almost as if to prove himself a conservative:

[It may be that] something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

I have a hard time seeing anything other than snobbery here. America is a mass-produced society, the first and the most resolute of the type. You want full-time mystics? We do happen to have those by the dozens. You want a weekend — but only just a weekend — of mystical transport? Heck, we invented that trip.

Chris Dierkes at The League:

Whether Ross is being a snob I’m not sure (maybe? partially?); I’ll leave that to the readers to make up their own minds.

But I think a similar or related critique of pop mysticism could be made that wouldn’t be intrinsically snobby.

To wit, Ram Dass (nee Richard Alpert), one of the godfathers of the LSD mystical hit turned pilgrimage to India, author of the magisterially trippy (Remember) Be Here Now (from which the above picture is taken), said the real issue was “altered traits not altered states.”

I would further say (contra Ross and seconding Jason) that the American phenomenon of religion, from its inception, is, as Harold Bloom argued, spiritual experientialism:  Pentecostalism, Revivalism (out of which grew Joseph Smith and the uniquely American religion of Mormonism), The Great Awakenings, The Shakers, New Thought movements, Esalen, William James and the scientific study of mysticism, pre Vatican II “High” Roman Catholic Eucharistic Adoration and Liturgy, Spiritualism, Billy Graham stadium spectacles, and now since the 60s the entrance of Eastern forms of mystical experience.

America , as Jason says, is a mass-produced society and so we mass produce mystical experiences–whether in sports, sex, even cooking.  And of course in various meditation practices, retreats and so forth.  (I’m 2 out of 3 on that scale, which, as they say, ain’t bad.).  And of course drugs as temporary ecstatic states, technically exogenous mystical states (which I definitely have never experienced).  Meditation-induced states are labeled endogenous.

Still, these are all leave open the issue of altered traits, not altered states.  As in, a person can have all kinds of altered states but if their traits aren’t altered, what’s been gained really?

This isn’t snobbery but to ask, “What’s the point?” Or in 1980s language, “Where’s the (transformative) beef?”  Though I’m not sure that later question will go over with a lot of would be seekers, (of the Eastern-influenced variety), given the popularity of vegetarianism in such circles.

Mystical states are generally higher potential capacities of the human body-mind.  I would say they are only “higher” insofar as humans haven’t yet adapted to them as common occurrences as a species.  [You might call that view a naturalized mysticism if you like].  That means they have a relative value and can be good things, but they can also be (as mystics of all traditions have long pointed out), just another source of egocentrism–in fact arguably an even more pernicious form of egocentrism as now you are (as a friend of mine once said), “Enlightened yes, but still an asshole.”

But it leaves open the question of an Absolute Awakening (often incorrectly called mystical/spiritual).  What Ram Dass above calls Absolute Compassion and therefore a changed way of being human at fundamental levels of identity, emotion, speech, bodily action, and thought.  As opposed to temporary groovy experiences or “getting spiritually high” (with or without actually getting high).

More importantly the necessity for such an Absolute awakening to occur in the context of cultures dedicated to life–that’s what I think is missing from the current scene, not that it’s too “bourgeois” or whatever.

UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right