Feed: The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - AggScore: 82.9
Spencer Ackerman nails it. It's the think-tank lunch:
Here I'm going to reveal an open secret in Washington. The best free lunch in town -- by far -- is at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. I remember a panel discussion on Iraq a couple years ago at which AEI wheeled out a massive amount of succulent, just-grilled chicken shwarma. Rice that had been seasoned. With almond slivers! The whole thing displayed a stunningly real Middle East expertise, or at least what a Washington Jew thinks passes for real Middle East expertise. And that is how you succeed in this town...
Are you ready for some straight talk, my friends? Ladies and gentlemen, you need to go back to your parent organizations and tell them to step their cook-game up. The CAP chicken-salad wraps? With mayo? From Corner Bakery or whatever-the-fuck? It's at least partially responsible for the decline of liberalism in the age of Bush.
I have to disagree. One of the biggest problems the intellectual right has had, in my view, is the cozy camaraderie of its think-tank culture. Those great lunches build friendships and relationships within the context of ideology. And so it becomes socially very hard to break with that ideology when necessary. The conservative intellectuals are too friendly with one another, too civil, too social. One reason why I've been able to stay relatively immune to the Bush era's groupthink is because I have almost no friends in the conservative world (and those I had ... well, only a tiny few remain). So I can take issue with people's public commentary with no social inhibition. The last thing liberals need in power is the same kind of chummy self-reinforcing but very well-fed cocoon that helped lead conservatives over the cliff.
Eat Chipotle at your desk, my ex-friends. And be rude more often.
"Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn't have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him," - Dick Morris.
Isn't it staggering how honesty breaks out just after it could make a difference?
"This is all funny stuff. But I submit that the true genius of lolcats lies in their tragedy. In one classic example, one cat is crying, and another is hugging it and saying, "Don't crai. We'll get cheezburger someday." It's sweet and poignant and wistful all at the same time. Life can be hard, it says, and we don't always get what we want, but even as we long for things we may never have, we draw succor from the reassurances of those we love. Sure, it's ridiculous that what the cat is yearning for is a cheeseburger. But the cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger -- it's a symbol," - Jay Dixit, Salon.
Ezra Klein is ecstatic:
You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform.
Jonathan Cohn is also excited. I find the idea of getting excited by Tom Daschle a little esoteric myself. But the liberals won this one. They get to have their thrill in whatever unlikely form it takes.
Freddie DeBoer makes a prediction:
As homosexuality becomes less and less differentiated from conventional life, and there are more and more victories for gay normalcy and gay acceptance, there will likewise be less reason for a gay rights movement. And as gay people become fully integrated into the American experience as equal participants, the need for gay people to ally with any one partisan or ideological apparatus will shrink.
What do you think we've been working for for the last couple of decades? I'd love to shut down the gay rights movement. I hope to help do so in my lifteime. Freddie continues:
One of my frustrations with conservative opposition to grievance politics and special interest groups is the fact that some groups of people actually have legitimate grievances (like being denied marriage rights). Sometimes certain groups of people actually have special interests, and as democracy is a system of individuals and groups competing for their own best interests, it's natural to have affinity groups dedicated to pursuing those interests. So the cure for minority politics is to remove the complaints of the minority groups in the first place.
The Economist puts the boot in:
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.
"Ruled by dynasties" is a nice touch.
The American Family Association puts out a DVD showing how homosexuals have a plan to infiltrate and take over every small town in America in order to construct a new Sodom to terrorize your children. Or something like that. Is it my imagination or has the far right, salivating over their three anti-gay victories in the last election, decided that fear and loathing of homosexuals is now the fundamental tenet of American conservatism?
Tocqueville understood the genius of American Christianity better than most Republicans today:
"I have no belief in the virtue or durability of official philosophies, and when it comes to state religions, I have always thought that, though they may perhaps sometimes momentarily serve the interests of political power, they are always sooner or later fatal for the church.
Nor am I one of those who think that to exalt religion in the eyes of the people and to do honor to the spirituality of religious teaching, it is good to give its ministers indirectly a political influence which the laws refuse.
I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them."
These people will kill Christianity before they get to enforce by law the fantasies of their own neuroses.
Joe Klein explains. It feels so good to finally be winning the p.r. war against these murderous theocrats.
Ross makes a prediction:
On an awful lot of issues, the Obama foreign policy will end cutting to the right of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which was already more center-left than left.
Even with the GOP brand in the toilet, Republicans are still trusted as much or more than Dems on foreign policy, mostly for somewhat nebulous "toughness" reasons. So why give the Right a chance to play what's just about its only winning card, when you can satisfy your base with a phased withdrawal from Iraq that's scheduled to happen anyway while waxing hawkish on Pakistan, Afghanistan ... and who knows, maybe Iran as well? (I have a sneaking suspicion that a President Obama will be slightly more likely to authorize airstrikes against Iran than a President McCain would have been.) Meanwhile, on detainee policy, wiretapping, etc. you can earn plaudits from liberals for showily abandoning the worst excesses of the Bush era, while actually holding on to most of the post-9/11 powers that the Bushies claimed. Obama already made fans of Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake; by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if he's converted Max Boot as well.
Ross is not wrong, but the "left-right" rubric is dated, it seems to me, especially in foreign policy, where any return to realism after Bush means, on the old compass, a hefty shift to the right. And that toughness schtick? Too right it's nebulous. What Obama offers is a soft-power-hard-power mix that is also more lethal against the enemies we still face every day. I think we can all hope for the best in that, without labeling it.
Goldfarb compares them:
Perhaps Lieberman was more committed to the fight than his counterpart on the Obama campaign, Chuck Hagel, but any sense of proportion has been lost by the hysterics leading the anti-Joe lynch mob. And there are no pitchfork wielding Republicans intent on burning Chuck Hagel at the stake. There was hardly a peep from the right over his heresy because nobody cared.
Hagel didn't endorse Obama. And he has been anathematized by Goldfarb's friends and fellow apparatichiks. Jason Zengerle has more considered thoughts.
The far right entertainer was classy as ever upon David Foster Wallace's death.