Right Wing Nut House

There are several commentators who are tossing around the idea that this situation is so outrageous (or simply undeserved at this point) that the president should humbly decline to accept the prize.

I don’t think that is realistic, but some of the reasons given resonate.

On the right, Yuval Levin:

The prize, and the question, also risk awakening with a vengeance the notorious good sense of the American public, and its democratic intolerance for pompous arrogance and nonsense. In its fatigue with Republicans, and its unease with John McCain’s erratic and empty campaign, the voting public gave Obama a comfortable victory last year, but only the young and the silly really went in for the whole cult of personality. It has seemed at several telling moments this year, however, as though Obama himself and his circle were among those that believed it all, and remain so: Their enormous faith in the power of Obama as a messenger and presence, the sense that the world would change its attitude about America simply because he was there, the endless stream of first person pronouns. We might have thought the falling poll ratings would check this attitude somewhat, but Obama’s words and deeds — the Olympics fiasco, for instance — suggest otherwise. Now this odd moment could force the administration to face the matter one way or another. It compels all reasonably sensible people to say “come on, really?!” and it challenges Obama and his circle to assure the country that they are not delusional. It’s hard to know quite what the right response would be, but it would probably require a self-effacing show of humility (including declining the prize) that our president may not even be able to fake, let alone actually exhibit. It is a dangerous thing for a president to become a joke, and between his Olympic Committee trip and this peculiar honor, he’s getting there fast, and in a way that could do him real harm.

I wonder if any commentator, anywhere on the political spectrum, will offer a genuine straight-faced defense or case for this prize. Whoever does will no-doubt win next year’s Nobel Prize for literature.

Actually, a survey by NBI just came out that showed America being the most admired country in the world again. I have no doubt that is the direct result of President Obama being elected - as well as his humble approach to foreign policy that, by his own admission, seeks to minimize the power of his own country.

But Yuval is on to something. The reaction is almost universally one of astonishment - at least among ordinary people. All but the most mindless Obamabots are surprised and not a little puzzled. There is gladness on the left, but it is not universal nor is it uncritical of the committee.

John Dickerson of Slate:

Having worked at Time magazine when it occasionally named a Person of the Year who evoked a similar “Huh?” reaction, I recognize this language: It the sound of words groaning for a rationale. The committee can, of course, pick whomever it wants. But in his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

“Shall have done,” seems a tricky piece of language to write around. This makes the committee’s statement sounds more like a wish list. It’s not that Obama has done nothing. It’s that so much about his presidency is preliminary. (I’m not counting the beer summit.) Other recipients—Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, and Lech Walesa—seem more aptly to hit the “have done” mark. Others who might not be household names, like Muhammad Yunus, make sense on inspection.

On the other hand, Obama may fit the bill more than some other recipients. At least he hasn’t actively been engaged in making warfare, as were previous recipients Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat. Then again, Obama is considering whether to send more troops into Afghanistan, one of America’s two wars.

That is disingenuous by Dickerson. Obama has personally ordered drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed dozens if not hundreds of civilians. As the Nobel Committee was making up his mind, the president has been contemplating sending more troops to Afghanistan. There is a chance that in the coming months, we will have to reengage in Iraq to some degree.

And is bombing Iran completely off the table?

But even Dickerson recognizes the fact that there is nothing in particular that the president has accomplished that merits this high honor. And comparison to other winners certainly falls flat, doesn’t it?

This may sound overly harsh, but there are people who have risked their lives for peace, have stood up to the same thugs and tyrants that Obama is embracing, who have gone into war zones and sought to mediate conflicts, and who have, with great courage, stood up against the forces of darkness in order to bring light to the innocent.

And Obama is elevated above these? Here’s a small sampling of obviously more deserving people from Mary Katherine Ham at the Weekly Standard:

Sima Samar, women’s rights activist in Afghanistan: “With dogged persistence and at great personal risk, she kept her schools and clinics open in Afghanistan even during the most repressive days of the Taliban regime, whose laws prohibited the education of girls past the age of eight. When the Taliban fell, Samar returned to Kabul and accepted the post of Minister for Women’s Affairs.”

Ingrid Betancourt: French-Colombian ex-hostage held for six years.

Handicap International and Cluster Munition Coalition: “These organizations are recognized for their consistently serious efforts to clean up cluster bombs, also known as land mines. Innocent civilians are regularly killed worldwide because the unseen bombs explode when stepped upon.”

“Hu Jia, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, who was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison term for ‘inciting subversion of state power.’”

“Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China’s communist system. He now lives in the United States.”

“Dr. Denis Mukwege: Doctor, founder and head of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has dedicated his life to helping Congolese women and girls who are victims of gang rape and brutal sexual violence.”

Any one of these courageous individuals would have been a more inspirational choice than someone who talks a good game but has done nothing to back up his words at any risk to himself whatsoever.

Michael Binyon at the TimesOnline:

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

A rather harsh assessment but unless you are totally in the tank for the guy, it is difficult to argue with its conclusions. One thing that is arguable is the notion that this is causing “consternation” in many capitols. From what I can see, most governments are sending words of congratulations. How they really think may be another matter. But given how the president has now been encouraged in his program to de-emphasize American power and subsume our interests to those of other nations, I can’t see them being too full of “consternation” for Obama’s continued quest to downgrade our power and influence on the world stage.

The president will not turn the prize down. Nor do I think he should. He is being rewarded for the kind of foreign policy choices that sit well with a world that is enamored of gestures and atmospherics. This kind of foreign policy works very well - as long as no one challenges the comfortable illusions it represents.

There will come a time in the next 8 years when most of those congratulating the president’s weakening of American power and influence will have need of her strength. And when that day comes - as it always has given the history of the last 100 years - those in need of that strength are simply going to be Sh*t out of Luck.

UPDATE: IN THE INTEREST OF FAIRNESS…

This is from Robert Naiman at Huffpo and is the first take I’ve read in support of the award that actually makes sense:

The Nobel Committee gave South African Bishop Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his leadership of efforts to abolish apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid wasn’t fully abolished in South Africa until 1994. The committee could have waited until after apartheid was abolished to say, “Well done!” But the point of the award was to help bring down apartheid by strengthening Bishop Tutu’s efforts. In particular, everyone knew that it was going to be much harder for the apartheid regime to crack down on Tutu after the Nobel Committee wrapped him in its protective cloak of world praise.

That’s what the Nobel Committee is trying to do for Obama now. It’s giving an award to encourage the change in world relations that Obama has promised, and to try to help shield Obama against his domestic adversaries.

Interesting that Mr. Naiman sees it as a plus that the Nobel Committee would see fit to interfere in our domestic politics. In fact, he seems downright satisfied that foreigners want to butt their noses into our business. (Wonder how he’d feel if they did something similar for a conservative Republican?)

Other than that, however, his analysis makes sense.

This is the 4th in a series of 5 articles on the state of intellectual conservatism. Here’s Part I. Part II. And Part III.

There is a terrific exchange of views on the health of conservatism over at Slate between conservative writer Reihan Salam and Sam Tannenhaus (author of Death of Conservatism). Salam is author (with Ross Douthat) of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream[ that was not very well received by movement conservatives. He is also the Schwartz Fellow at the decidedly unconservative New America Foundation.

I suppose for many on the right, this kind of background disqualifies Mr. Salam from having anything relevant to say about conservatism. No matter. I find Salam's writing to border on brilliant at times, and his insights into modern America fresh and thought provoking. I'm sure this exchange with Tannenhaus over the latter's new book will not change anyone's mind.

Salam offers a brief summary that will also familiarize readers here with the substance of Tannenhaus's book:

To summarize briefly, you offer a sharp distinction between rigidly ideological movement conservatism, which you describe as more Jacobin than Burkean in its tone and in its anti-democratic ambitions, and the more modest and restrained "Beaconsfield position" advocated by Whittaker Chambers, a man whose courage, intellect, and independence you plainly admire. These two strands, revanchist and realist, have been present throughout the history of the American right and, as you vividly demonstrate in the case of William F. Buckley Jr., often coexist in the work of leading conservative intellectuals. The book ends with the revanchists triumphant as even neoconservative intellectuals, once the arch-realists, find themselves overtaken by ideological zeal.

"Beaconsfield" refers to the peerage of Conservative Party Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) and his school of mid-19th century reform conservatism in England that embraced measures expanding the government's purview into areas where it was previously unknown. Tannenhaus admires Disraeli, holding him up as the kind of conservative to which the right should aspire. But today, he would probably be seen as a "Big Government" conservative by the base given the numerous reforms that brought government in to play a role in education, and worker safety, while committing the definite conservative no-no back then of expanding sufferage to include almost all male heads of households.

Disraeli is usually referred to as the "Father of Modern Conservatism" - and for good reason as this 2005 piece by David Gelernter makes clear:

THUS DISRAELI FOUND HIMSELF in a position to rebuild the Tory party. How did he go about it? Reverence for tradition was central to Toryism and to Disraeli's own personality. He wanted his new-style Tory party to embody respect for tradition--wanted it to be new and old, to be a modern setting for ancient gems, a new crown displaying old jewels. This was a popular idea in 19th-century Britain, where "the future" and "the past" were both discovered, simultaneously.

Disraeli's approach was like Barry and Pugin's in designing a new home for Parliament. The old one burned to the ground (except for a magnificent medieval hall and a few odds and ends) in 1834. The new structure, it was decided, should be built of modern materials and work like a modern building with all the conveniences--but should look medieval. The intention wasn't play-acting or aesthetic fraud; it was to use the best ideas of the past and present alongside each other.

The result was wildly successful, one of history's greatest public buildings. Disraeli aimed to accomplish something similar for the Tory party. His underlying thought, which defined Disraeli-type Toryism and reshaped conservatism for all time, was that the Conservative party was the national party. Sounds simple and is. But everything else followed. If you understood "national" properly, then (on the one hand) the Tories must be a democratic, "universal," progressive party that cared about the poor and working classes--since the party was national it must care for the whole nation, for all classes. But the Tories must also be a patriotic party that revered ancient traditions and institutions, again inasmuch as they were the national--and therefore honored profoundly the nation's heritage and distinctive character.

He put it like this:

"In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."

I present intellectual conservatism at its most lucid and sublime.

Perhaps here is where the schism between movement conservatives and reformists is most pronounced; the very idea of "change." Not the revanchist view that the United States should return to some unrealistic, impossible to achieve, 19th century "small government" paradise - before there was a New Deal or Great Society. But rather the idea that conservatism at its best manages change so that ultimately, it is based on the traditions - "the manners, the customs, the laws" - that are the best of any society.

Even Russell Kirk embraced this view of change in his 10th Conservative Principle:

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

[...]

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

I would hope that our liberal friends read the preceding and understand why conservatives cannot and will not support the Obama version of national health care reform. It is decidedly not connected to our traditions, or our customs, and in no way can be supported since it posits “change” as some kind of mythical “progress.”

Neither, however, should many on the right believe that change should always be opposed simply out of opposition to the majority. This is mindless nihilism, and is also decidedly “unconservative” if you believe that society should be constantly trying to improve itself.

I took this detour into Disraeli and the notion of “change” because it is at the heart of Tannehaus’s critique; that movement conservatism has short circuited the connection between intellectuals and themselves by rejecting logic and reason, substituting paranoia and an incipient anti-intellectualism in its stead.

Salam responds this way:

I have a slightly different interpretation of conservatism’s excesses. For good reason, you place the conservative intelligentsia at the heart of your story. I tend to think intellectuals belong on the margins. The revanchism you lament is not the invention of conservative elites. My view is that it is rooted in the considered judgments of a small but intense and vocal minority of American voters, many of whom are white evangelical Christians living in the Southern United States. As labor economist Stephen Rose argued in 2006, these are voters who are very tax-sensitive; they tend to settle in regions with a low cost of living, where self-reliance seems more plausible than it does from my vantage point as a lifelong city dweller. Social conservatism arguably has a totemic significance; because rural red America suffers from scandalously high rates of divorce, the sanctity of marriage is a live issue. Far from resenting public moralism, the voters I have in mind consider it a vital part of a decent, well-governed society.

What you see as conservative decline strikes me as a structural consequence of our permeable democracy. In Britain, for example, large majorities of the public back the restoration of the death penalty—more, according to some polls, than in the United States, where we’ve experienced its many downsides—but an elite cross-party consensus keeps the issue off the table. For better or for worse, our system gives the most intensely committed voters a voice that can’t be ignored. We remember the movement to impeach President Clinton as the wild-eyed crusade of out-of-touch congressional leaders, yet it was also fueled by the outrage of rank-and-file conservatives. And in a similar vein, Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I’m sure he found distasteful. President Bush himself could barely stomach talking about the issue. Yet talk about it he did, in deference to the need to press every advantage.

Is it an accident that southern evangelicals (and those who sympathize with their social agenda nationwide) are the most reliable GOP voters and play such a prominent role in conservatism today? I hesitate to agree with Tannenhaus that these grass roots conservatives exhibit reactionary traits but it is hard to escape the fact that much of the right’s social agenda - anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage (and gay rights), school prayer (”God in the public square”) - is predicated on the belief that attitudes in society that have changed to varying degrees on these issues can be rolled back. I don’t know if this is “reactionary” although I don’t believe that social conservatives are desirous of the kind of “change” that would have been supported by Disraeli or perhaps even Kirk.

I hasten to add that this doesn’t make these issues illegitimate. But they don’t represent my kind of conservatism, nor that of many others.

Tannenhaus’s response is interesting:

Actually, what you call a polemic means to be an interpretive history that makes the opposite case from the one described in your account. Revanchist conservatism did not originate as a form of populist protest. Rather, it was the brainchild of the very elites you say have no influence on our politics. It was conservative intellectuals who argued that the “managerial elite” (James Burnham), the “liberal establishment” (William Buckley), or the “new class” (Irving Kristol) had seized control of American politics and later our society. This argument, in its inverted Marxism, gave theoretical shape to the unarticulated anxieties and suspicions—anti-government, anti-institutional, antinomian—of the “small but intense and vocal minority,” many of them “white evangelical Christians,” who today populate the eroding island of movement conservatism. Even today the right insists it is driven by ideas, even if the leading thinkers are now Limbaugh and Beck, and the shock troops are tea-partiers and anti-tax demonstrators.

In other words, the movement has thrived not as a top-down operation, nor as a bottom-up one, but as a convergence of shared prejudices and cultural enmities. Thus, the right’s first great modern tribune was Joe McCarthy, whose theatrical “investigations” of “enemies within” were either endorsed or indulged by each of the intellectuals mentioned above.

The same antagonisms continued through the Bush years. Your reading of that dismal period seems rather wishful to me. Bush and Rove built their presidency on revanchism. This isn’t surprising since Rove’s number-crunching following the 2000 election—when Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 or more—suggested that the GOP ticket had failed to exploit the evangelical base that might have yielded a majority. No wonder Bush devoted so much of his presidency to courting social conservatives—remember stem cells, intelligent design, the faith-based initiative? Nor was Rove taken aback by opposition to same-sex marriage. On the contrary, he made it a centerpiece in the 2004 election. It is the politics of the excluded middle, or center, and it defines the right today on every stratum.

Tannenhaus believes that the intellectuals who supplied much of the substance and heft to conservatism in the 1970’s ended up embracing ideology as a means to political power, igniting the passions of the base by focusing on “enemies” and “antagonisms.” He calls it a “convergence” of the elites (most of whom are not intellectuals I might add) with the base. Who was driving whom? I agree more with Salam on this one. The entrance into politics of evangelicals, motivated by TV preachers like Jerry Falwell, was definitely a grass roots phenomenon and one of the more significant political events since World War II. Reagan largely gave lip service to the Christian right (as Roosevelt gave lip service to the far left agenda during his administration), and George Bush 41 stupidly rejected them.

It was left to Bush 43 to pander shamelessly to the evangelicals, increasing their power and influence, while running a corporatist, big government administration. He was supported by conservatives largely because of his social conservatism and his hawkish foreign policy. Also, the alternative of John Kerry was unpalatable to almost all on the right.

But did this “convergence” lead us to the sorry state of intellectual conservatism today? Salam replies to Tannenhaus by positing a different explanation:

And as I suggested in my first entry, I really do think that something structural is going on: In the past, the democratic marketplace was less “efficient,” and that was in a sense a very good thing for writers and thinkers and public-spirited elected officials, who had the freedom to defy movement discipline. Our more fragmented media landscape has far lower barriers to entry, and it allows passionately engaged citizens, as well as cranks, to organize and even intimidate. When you consider that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa fears a hard-right Internet-enabled primary challenge, his otherwise puzzling behavior in the health reform debate starts to make sense.

Throughout the book, you draw on political analyst Samuel Lubell to argue that America’s party system consists of a dominant sun, a majority party that sets the ideological agenda, and a minority moon. And like many observers, you suggest that after a long period of Republican dominance, during which Democrats came to embrace conservative insights as part of a new consensus, we have now entered a progressive era. And so conservatives face a choice: Either a new generation of Republican Disraelis will champion a Bismarckian welfare state, a view that Irving Kristol championed as late as 2003 (I disagree with your interpretation of the late Kristol, but I digress), or the movement will be doomed to snarling insignificance at the margins of our political life.

That’s a pretty stark choice but, I believe, an accurate one. Salam said in his first piece that he believed the anger of the base would “steadily work its way out in hundreds of thousands of roiling conversations in office parks, shopping malls, living rooms, and lecture halls.” And, I might add, the voting booth. It is there that movement conservatism will finally meet its own “Waterloo.”

I believe it inevitable that even if the GOP mounts some kind of comeback in 2010, it will be shortlived. The systemic contradictions inherent in the movement as well as a continued disconnect with the concerns of ordinary voters will spell defeat of what will almost certainly be a movement candidate for president in 2012. Then, the excuse that their candidate wasn’t “conservative enough” will ring hollow and they will be faced with the yawning chasm opening beneath their feet that their angry, paranoid, illogical worldview is not shared with many outside of the cocoon they have created for themselves.

This is the third in a series of 5 articles on the state of intellectual conservatism. Part I can be found here. Part II.

Few speechwriters of the modern era can match the record of Peggy Noonan when it comes to memorable presidential addresses. Teddy Sorenson was of a different era but managed several significant, and remembered speeches for JFK, including Kennedy’s inaugural address which is often considered one of the best. Ray Price and Pat Buchanan added a combative style to presidential addresses (Price was especially good at sticking the knife in). James Fallows penned some good speeches for Carter that were delivered atrociously.

But Noonan was lucky enough to work with a president who was not only a dynamite speaker, but a wordsmith in his own right. Her best efforts with Reagan were collaborative, as Noonan would shoot the Gipper a draft, who would return it with numerous notations and changes. She had a great sense of Reagan’s speaking cadence which was evident in one of the best speeches of the 20th century; Reagan’s D-Day address to the “Boys of Point du Hoc.” Rarely has the moment so gloriously reflected the words uttered by an American president.

But Noonan the political analyst? Most conservatives have dismissed her columns on conservatism as elitist, and not all that conservative to begin with. She has said nice things about Obama. She has said bad things about movement heroes like Rush Limbaugh. She has criticized the inchoate rage of the extreme right.

In short, she has been reasonable, pragmatic, desirous of engaging the opposition, and doesn’t see the president with horns and a tail.

Heresy, that.

Yes, Peggy Noonan is an elitist. Yes, she has misread the pull/push relationship between populists and reformers, ascribing opposition to her brand of conservatism as a nascent anti-intellectualism. She is befuddled about why the base hates her so, considering the fact that she was working for the conservative cause while most of her detractors were still in books, or not even born. This makes her somewhat pathetic in my opinion. She hasn’t much of a clue about the real conversation that is going on right now and this is reflected in her writings.

She is clueless about engaging on the internet. Her website is a simple repository for her numerous articles. She famously devoted an entire column following one of her more clueless articles, bemoaning the loss of civility in internet comments. Why anyone would be surprised in this day and age about the viciousness of anonymous posters is indicative of a kind of quaint, child like innocence about the world that is both attractive and gobsmackingly dense.

But she is still a great writer. And she usually has something to say that is somewhat relevant, although it is usually a hit or miss proposition.

Here’s a definite “miss” as she comments about the loss of William Safire:

Anyway, everyone there knew we’d suddenly lost one of the great ones, the Elders, and there is lately a sense of a changing of the guard.
***

Who are the Elders? They set the standards. They hand down the lore. They’re the oldest and wisest. By proceeding through the world each day with dignity and humanity, they show the young what it is that should be emulated. They’re the tribal chieftains. This role has probably existed since caveman days, because people need guidance and encouragement, they need to be heartened by examples of endurance. They need to be inspired.

We are in a generational shift in the media, and new Elders are rising. They’re running the networks and newspapers, they own the Web sites, they anchor the shows. What is their job?

It’s to do what the Elders have always done, but now more than ever.

You know the current media environment. You think I’m about to say, “Boy, what’s said on cable, radio and the Internet now is really harmful and dangerous.” And you’re right, and it is. Some of the ranters don’t have the faintest idea where the line is. “They keep moving the little sucker,” said the William Hurt character, the clueless and unstoppable anchorman, in “Broadcast News.” They’ve been moving the little sucker for 20 years. But it’s getting worse, and those who warn of danger are right.

This is nonsense, obviously coming from someone who is not only clueless about the “generational shift” in the media but its true significance as well. New “elders” aren’t being created. There are no more elders, or youngers, or tweeners. Such designations are irrelevant in a media landscape with literally thousands of outlets, and many thousands of writers who are just as qualified, just as smart, just as talented as Noonan herself or any other “elder” who ever lived, scratching out their opinions, paid and unpaid.

The “elders of which she writes came of age when the Saturday Evening Post was still a viable publication; when Life, Look, and Time Magazine sold tens of millions of copies; when there were perhaps a half dozen newspapers where “elders” sat on high and pontificated to the rest of us; and where there were only three gigantic TV networks.

This is not to say that excellent writing and thinking doesn’t rise to the top of the ziggurat and is recognized, or that there aren’t any writers with influence. But compared to Noonan’s “elders” the effect of today’s media stars is extremely limited. The fact that no one publication can attract millions of Americans to read what they put out is a direct cause of why print media is dying. Even syndicated columnists like Noonan, Will, Krauthammer, Samuelson, or Dowd can only reach a fraction of the readers of those who came before them.

But does Noonan have a point?

A few days ago, I was sent a link to a screed by MSNBC’s left-wing anchorman Ed Schultz, in which he explained opposition to the president’s health-care reform. “The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They’d rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for us.” Next, a link to the syndicated show of right-wing radio talker Alex Jones, on the subject of the U.S. military, whose security efforts at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh show them to be agents and lackeys of the New World Order. “They are complete enemies of America. . . . Our military’s been taken over. . . . This is the end of our country.” Later, “They’d love to kill 10,000 Americans,” and, “The republic is falling right now.”

This, increasingly, is the sound of our political conversation.

It is not new to call this kind of thing destructive, though it is. It is a daily agitating barrage that coarsens and inflames. It tears the national fabric. But it could wind up doing worse than that.

Of course she’s right. It is a fact that in order to stand out in this fractured, media multi-verse, the louder and angrier you are, the more you resonate on an emotional level with the audience.

Noonan believes this to be “dangerous.” I’m not sure of that at all. It may be sad. It may be pathetic that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck actually enjoy the respect and admiration of so many - those who think that because they “sound” like they are making sense or they “feel” that what they say is true is indicative of wisdom and logic. An entire subculture of conservatives have grown up believing that strawman arguments, hysterical exaggeration regarding one’s opponents, fear mongering, shallowness, and even hate is a substitute for reason, for thinking.

How can anyone possibly mistake this typical rant from Limbaugh for reasoned, rational, discourse?

The people that run our country now have a much closer proximity and they’re much closer to the world’s tyrants and dictators than they are closer to the people who founded the country. This is not accidental. They have chosen it. This is the ideology that they have chosen. This is what’s best for them. And you’re going to learn this if you stay focused and stay interested and keep learning as you grow older, you’re going to learn this. You’re gonna learn that they’re not innocent idiots. They are dangerous, devious central planners who have designs on everybody’s liberty and freedom. That’s what matters most to them because that’s where they derive their power.

I have to say it because Limbaugh either believes this, or knows his audience too well; he is saying all of this about our fellow Americans; that they are “closer to tyrants” than Thomas Jefferson; that they are “dangerous, devious central planners who have designs on everybody’s liberty and freedom” - as if their motives were to enslave us.

This kind of rant hits all the emotional buttons of Limbaugh’s listeners while eschewing logic and promoting fear. Nearly 20 million people listen to this crap every day and nod their heads in agreement, thinking how “true” this sounds” and how it feels like an intelligent analysis of liberalism.

Now, a visit to just about any liberal website will reveal similar things said about conservatives and conservatism. But the point made by many on the left - that Limbaugh is considered so mainstream and respected that even political leaders cower in fear of his influence with the base - is well taken. When some pissant lefty blog, or the equally invisible Olbermann/Maddow/Schultz trio at MSNBC (which is the nexus of lefty kookery) spout off about conservatives, you don’t find too many Democratic Congressman imitating them (although Alan Grayson sure tries hard, doesn’t he?).

But hey! Beck got Vann Jones fired and Rush arms his dittoheads with talking points that they can take into internet forums and chat rooms to do battle against evil. Surely there is some good that comes out of this, isn’t there?

There are those who have been telling me that conservatism needs these populizers to excite the troops and motivate them to achieve political victory. What kind of “victory” is it worth to lose your mind to gain a majority?

And that, dear readers is the bottom line. This is why it is imperative that intellectual conservatism - or at least a reasonable, hard headed, tough minded approach to political combat - is so far superior to the Limbaugh/Beck/Savage school of slash and burn, take no prisoners conservatism that dominates today.

Public intellectuals like Richard Posner, Yuval Levin, and other, younger thinkers like Conor Friedersdorf and Reihan Salam - whose critiques of liberalism are every bit as devastating as anything Limbaugh et al can conjure up - are whispering in a typhoon of irrationality and bombast. While it may be true as Richard Viguerie and Steven Allen point out in an Examiner op-ed today that conservative intellectuals (”elites” Viguerie calls them) in the past never really enjoyed much cache with movement conservatives, the fact is they were always there to add depth and legitimacy to the national political conversation.

Would that it were so today.

This is the second in a series of 5 articles on the state of intellectual conservatism. Part I can be found here.

Should conservatives pay any attention to liberals who attempt to critique us?

I actually sympathize with those conservatives who reject out of hand any effort by a liberal to tell us what’s wrong with us. Sympathize - but neither do I brush off such criticism without reading and digesting it for myself.

There are a few liberals who actually make a living looking seriously at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and ideology and, through rigorous examination, while using logically sound arguments, have something important to say that I believe conservatives should take very seriously.

I should note that I don’t necessarily believe it when a liberal says they are offering their critiques because they believe it important that their philosophical opponents get back on their feet intellectually or politically so they can “challenge” liberalism. That’s stretching things a bit, boys. Let’s just leave it at acknowledging a sincere attempt by reasonable people to honestly look at history and conservative philosophy, and, in an academic sense, offer reality based criticism from their point of view.

I am in the process of writing a long, hopefully readable review of Sam Tannenhaus’s Death of Conservatism. I wish I could have done it sooner but I am a slave to time, and such an interesting, thoughtful, although ultimately flawed book deserves a serious effort. Besides, I get to crib from best conservative reviews of the book since I am so late to the party, thus making my job a little easier.

But today’s lesson comes to us via Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the Slate Group, former editor of Slate Magazine, and author of the book In Defense of Government. His liberal credentials impeccable, Weisberg wrote a piece a few days ago in Slate that mourned the loss of Neocon Irving Kristol and the fact that the intellectual conservatism he represented died off decades ago:

In the heyday of Kristol’s influence in the 1980s, Republicans styled themselves the party of ideas. Whatever you thought of those ideas—challenging Soviet power, cutting taxes, passing power back to the states, ending affirmative action, cutting off welfare benefits to the undeserving poor—they represented a genuine attempt to remodel government around a coherent vision. Today, as during the pre-conservative stage of Kristol’s career in the 1950s, the Republican Party takes itself much more lightly. It has fallen back upon what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures”—crankily rejecting liberal attempts to come to grips with the country’s problems without offering any plausible alternatives. Since the last election, it has been the brain-dead home of tea parties, pro-life amendments, and climate-change denial.

Are tea parties any more “brain dead” than anti-war protests? I had my doubts that any kind of mass protest movement at the grass roots could ever arise among the highly individualistic conservatives. At this point, I have been proved wrong although I am waiting for the inevitable absorption of the tea party movement into the Republican party. All that energy has to be channeled somewhere. And since a 3rd party would be futile, there’s really only one place for the movement to go; a de facto alliance with the GOP in 2010.

Already there are signs that tea partiers are endorsing candidates for office, raising money, and will no doubt supply volunteers to some of these candidates.

I doubt there will be many Democrats on the list of tea party endorsed candidates.

I have written often of what I believe the tea party groups are really all about. It’s not really about taxes, or even gargantuan deficit spending. It is something that few liberals can grasp, although I have seen some analysis on the left come close. The kind of “change” that Obama seeks to bring to America may seem overdue to many on the left but is seen by most conservatives as an attempt to replace an America they know with an another America, one that rejects the values of their ancestors and substitutes what appears to them to be an alien vision of what America should be.

I disagree with conservatives who say the president’s race doesn’t play a role with a small, but significant minority. But those who issue blanket condemnations using that meme are clueless about what is driving this protest; it is the abandonment - or seeming abandonment - of what conservatives see as “First Principles” that includes a basic outline of the Constitution.

It can be argued that fear of change is a fact of life for conservatives but I reject that as a primary motivation because what the president has done is, in fact, revolutionary. Perhaps not to the educated and urbane who believe us far behind the social democracies of Europe in creating a welfare state. But to millions of patriotic, god fearing Americans, they feel they are losing their country and will fight to keep it.

Is this brain dead? No more so than anti-war protestors who believed that Bush was in league with big business to bring perpetual war to our shores. Or that Bush went to war in Iraq to enrich his friends and cronies. Or that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was riotously abused and that the government was spying on Bush opponents wholesale. Excessive ideology leads to excessive paranoia on both right and left. That is the lesson of America in the modern age.

In fact, Weisberg acknowledges this - at least on the right:

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Alliances with the religious right skewed their perspective on a range of topics. They went a little crazy hating on liberals.

Over time, the two best qualities of the early neocons—their skepticism about government’s ability to transform societies and their rigorous empiricism—fell by the wayside. In later years, you might say Kristol and the neoconservatives got mugged by ideology. Actually, they were the muggers. “It becomes clear that, in our time, a non-ideological politics cannot survive the relentless onslaught of ideological politics,” Kristol wrote in 1980. “For better or for worse, ideology is now the vital element of organized political action.”

Reformists - and I include intellectual conservatives in that mix - have, as neoconservatives have done, accepted the New Deal and many elements of the Great Society. But their overall critique of both lies not in a rejection of the role the state must play in a modern industrialized society as so many movement conservatives do, but in the belief that value based reforms as well as more efficient allocation of resources can be achieved without destroying the “safety net” while promoting virtues such as self reliance and independence. In short, conservative reformists want to alter the liberal culture in the bureaucracy that seeks to expand their clientele rather than reduce it.

Is this a “liberal lite” approach to government? Is there enough contrast with Democrats to parlay these ideas into a successful political platform? Movement conservatives do not think so. But I believe they are viewing those toward the center through a darkened prism where attempting to address the many serious problems in our country by working with the opposition is tantamount to a betrayal. How can the application of conservative principles to the serious business of government be a betrayal - unless you believe either there are no problems to solve or the solution is to be found in dismantling government hell bent for leather.

I have been asked several times if I understand the 10th amendment or whether I believe in federalism. Sure I do - and a realistic application of the 10th as well as a healthy federalism when it comes to dealing with our nation’s problems can go a long way toward easing the crushing presence of the federal government in our lives.

But you’re kidding yourselves if you believe it will result in lower taxes or even less government. The more responsibility you pile on the states, the higher the taxes go. It would not be logical to expect as the federal tax burden is reduced, the state tax burden wouldn’t increase.

We all believe that there are many programs at the federal level that could easily be transferred to our state legislatures. Just don’t expect taxes to go down because most of those programs have constituencies of ordinary Americans that depend on them. Weaning people “for their own good” from government would be received contemptuously - and well it should be - from those who benefit directly from federal programs some would wish to do away with.

Sorry for the digression but I think part of the problem with movement conservatives and their attitude toward reformists is that they misunderstand motives and intent. The widespread belief that reformists have no principles is laughable - and fighting words if you try and accuse me of such a ridiculous notion. Applying conservative principles to the operation of government is a worthy and - dare I say - principled goal. The confusion comes in identifying “issues” as principles - a trap ideologues fall into regularly. Substituting dogma, which by its nature can be transient responses to momentary openings offered by the opposition, for immutable principles which, by definition, are unchanging, is what ideologues in the movement are all about.

In short, it is not I who lack principles, my ideological friends.

Weisberg correctly, I believe, diagnoses the switch from intellectual principles to ideological dogma and gives us a turning point of sorts while incorrectly observing the reason why a principled conservative could never support Obamacare:

There was no clearer sign of that shift than the effort by Kristol’s son, William, to prevent any health care reform legislation from passing in 1993—on the theory that the political benefit would accrue to the Democrats. Today, that sort of Carthaginian politics has infected the entire congressional wing of the GOP, which equates problem-solving with treasonous collaboration. Though the president has tried to compromise with them in crafting the last missing piece of the social insurance puzzle, even allegedly moderate Republicans are not interested in making legislation more effective, less expensive, or in other ways more conservative. They are interested only in handing Obama a political defeat.

That’s a pretty shallow, partisan analysis of why Obamacare is being opposed. I agree there is that partisan element to the opposition, but it is obvious Mr. Weisberg lives a sheltered life. Otherwise, he would have noticed that health care reform town hall meetings held by Congressmen were just chock full of people who could care less about Obama being defeated, and cared a great deal more about liberals fiddling with the most intimate, and personal part of their lives; their own health.

I have argued that there was much fear mongering on the right (and some on the left as we have seen with Mr. Grayson and several liberal ideologues) that contributed to the anger. But Weisberg is only fooling himself if he didn’t recognize the underlying reason why people who had never taken a stand on anything in their lives showed up at these meetings and howled bloody murder. If it comforts Weisberg and other liberals to believe it was all astroturfed mobs of rabid, enraged, fearful conservatives - fine. Fooling oneself is not a fault confined to the right.

But Weisberg has a point about how political opposition has deteriorated into a mindless nihilism that offers little in the way of alternatives (although the GOP health care reform plan was both substantive and ignored by the media and Democrats) on issues that need to be addressed.

For health care, as long as Democrats insist on offering a “solution” that will ultimately result in a single payer system of insurance and decisions made by government that are better left to a patient and his doctor, conservatives will oppose them with every fiber of their being. We do not see national health care as the “the last missing piece of the social insurance puzzle” but rather as an insidious attempt by government to control the personal lives of citizens - as fundamentally against conservative principles and our concept of individual liberty as anything that has ever been proposed by an American congress.

I agree with much of what Weisberg has written about intellectual conservatives and their failure to either fight the ideologues politically or challenge their dogmatism. Richard Posner saw this months ago:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Nor, I trust, will they have one anytime soon.

I’ve had one of my justly famous “Whither Conservatism” posts scrambling my brains for the past three days but haven’t quite focused on it and given it the time it deserves. Perhaps tomorrow I can tie the threads together from 4-5 separate articles and essays I’ve read recently and make prime rib out of the hash.

Instead, there are a few more things that need to be said about Obama pitching the Chicago Olympics and the reaction on both right and left to both the junket itself and Obama’s failure to sway the IOC to give Chicago the nod.

First, I think the left has a point about misplaced righty triumphalism regarding Obama’s failure. It is unseemly. And regardless of whether you believe the left had similar gloats during the Bush years, this particular effort - one I criticized before Obama even left - did indeed reflect a rejection of America itself. So cheering the failure is akin to cheering a failure of America.

Now, if I were a lefty, I would be extremely careful about asking why America was rejected. Let’s play with a hypothetical; suppose there was the president of a country, newly elected, who went around the world, in venue after venue, telling anyone who would listen about the numerous faults, mistakes, missteps, and evil perpetrated by his own country. These words would fall upon ears eager to hear about that nation’s dirty laundry because it reinforces their own skewed view of what that nation is all about.

Then suppose the same newly elected president showed up at a forum where it was important that the positive about his country be emphasized to the exclusion of the negative so that a group of judges chose his country to play host to the world at an important event.

He speaks in glowing terms about his country and how the world would be welcomed in his hometown. But the judges aren’t idiots. They have heard this same president speak of his own nation’s many shortcomings for nearly a year.

In all honesty, ask yourself why those judges should choose this president’s country to host an event when they have heard so many negative things about it?

I am not saying that the president’s habit of reciting his version of American history - both recent and ancient - played the decisive role in Chicago’s rejection. But if it played any role at all - and I fail to see how it couldn’t - then the president has himself to partly blame for this failure.

I am put off by the happiness shown by the right over this personal failure by the president. And I am snickering over the left’s charges that the right “hates” America because they are gloating over it.

Excuse me, but we just spent 8 years being told that it was the right’s uncritical patriotism - love of country - that got the United States into so much trouble and fostered the notion that it was the left that actually hates America. Are we to take seriously the idea that all of a sudden, the right hates America because Obama was elected? The premise is laughable on its face. Equating Obama with the country itself is an error made by partisans and those infected with excessive ideology. The president is not America; he is a servant of the people. You can oppose or even hate the president and not be considered traitorous to the United States - unless the Constitution has been changed when I wasn’t looking.

Now it is unhealthy for the nation for a large part of the opposition to hate the president. Unhealthy, but not illegal. And I can understand the left’s eagerness to tar the right with the “unpatriotic” meme. They had to put up with it for 8 years so payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?

Allow me to say once again for the benefit of both sides; trying to quantify how much someone loves the United States is pathetic. Both liberals and Conservatives love America. They just show that love in different ways. This is how I explained it one Fourth of July a few years ago:

Herein lies the great chasm that separates liberals and conservatives when it comes to defining the word “patriotism.” The right sees patriotism as a physical, emotional connection with the past; an open acknowledgment and tribute to those who came before us and guaranteed with their blood, sweat, and tears that we, their progeny, would live in freedom. We are aware that America is not all it could be but rather than dwelling on our imperfections, we celebrate all that is good and decent in this land and its people.

The flip side of the same coin is how liberals define patriotism. They seem to intellectualize their love of country. They distrust outward displays of patriotic emotion, tending to equate fervor with patriotism’s evil twin - nationalism. Liberals see a problematic past for America and are not shy about pointing out where America has fallen short in its promises of liberty and equality.

But does this mean that liberals are less patriotic than conservatives?

Is it unpatriotic to want your country to live up to its extraordinary ideals? Is it unpatriotic to criticize what liberals see as hypocrisy in our history, where we celebrate freedom while keeping millions in bondage? Or speak glowingly of Native American culture while treating them abysmally?

It is nonsensical to have these arguments about who loves America more - or less. We are two sides of the same coin - both liberals and conservatives need each other to complete the essence of what America was, is, and should be. Our view of America and how we love her complements each other - while fostering a healthy contrast that keeps us striving to live up to the best of our ideals.

Aside from this idea that the right “hates” America because they wished Obama to fail, I am at a loss to explain where all the “good government liberals” have gone in recognizing that giving the Olympics to Chicago in the first place would have been a travesty.

Used to be that “progressive” and “good government” went hand in hand. Politicians like Hubert Humphrey, Paul Simon (former senator from IL), and William Proxmire would have been outraged that the president had gone to Denmark to plead the case for investing billions in a city as corrupt and venal as Chicago unless they had some way to make sure that the money was given to the city without it being tainted by contact with the Machine.

So where are the “good government” liberals opposing this monumental opportunity for graft that would have come Chicago’s way if the president had succeeded? At one time, these men and others were not afraid to speak up and challenge their own party when it came to corruption. Recall Connecticut’s feisty, governor Abraham Ribicoff shaming Richard Daley the elder at the podium during the 1968 convention riots in Chicago.

This kind of boondoggle would have been tailor made for good government liberals of the past. But has partisanship so infected both parties that opposition to Obama’s trip to fill the coffers of Daley cronies and friends (not to mention the surety that organized crime would have been in for a slice of the pie), was left to conservatives?

I heard a few liberals after Obama’s failure say he shouldn’t have gone to begin with - for the same reasons that John Cole evidently finds so incredible. Outside of this piece in The Nation, I can find no opposition on the left to the idea of bringing the Olympics to Chicago because of the inevitable cost overruns due to corruption.

This triumph of partisanship over what many believe is an issue of supporting good government is truly sad. It reveals how truly sick our political culture is at the moment. As for a remedy, I have none. Nor, do I suspect, does anyone else.

Apropos of my piece from yesterday about calling out lunacy on the right being necessary, John L. Perry of Newsmax, with exquisite timing, makes me look like a combination genius and soothsayer:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

Ah, the old “civilized coup” in America trick. I guess that’s where the Joint Chiefs are invited to lunch at the White House by the president and they all sit down to a hearty meal of Chateaubriand and scallops with a tasty Cabernet Sauvignon to put just the right edge on what would almost certainly be the most fascinating conversation in American history.

Of course, right wing military coup’s are nothing new - in American literature anyway. I pointed out in a post that commented on a potential coup on the show 24 that there never seems to be any good movies or books about left wing coups. Why?

And while we’re on the subject, can you think of one movie or TV show that ever showed a left wing plot to take over the government? Of course not. That too would never happen in a million years. The plotters would be too busy sitting around arguing about the make up of the post-coup government and could never come to an agreement. Besides, liberals talk too much. All those angst-ridden soliloquies about what they were about to do would put the audience to sleep in about 15 minutes. There would probably be more action in a movie detailing the mating habits of Three Toed Sloths than in a left wing coup film.

On the other hand, the granddaddy of all right wing military coup films, Seven Days in May, based on the bestselling book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, had plenty of action and suspense:

The equally engrossing movie starred some of Hollywood’s most prominent liberals at the time; Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Frederic March. Lancaster played an Air Force General James Matoon Scott who, angry with the President (played by March) for signing a nuclear arms treaty with the Russians, plots to take over the government with the backing of a shady conservative Senator as well as some other generals. The hero of the movie, Jiggs Casey (Douglas), senior aide to the general, discovers the plot and brings it to the attention of the President who then must counter General Scott, trusting only his Secret Service protection and a drunken Senator marvelously underplayed by Edmond O’Brien.

Complicating matters was General Scott’s mistress, the lovely Ellie Holbrooke, played by the ravishing Ava Gardner. She has in her possession some love letters from Scott that Jiggs is tasked to steal so that the counter-plotters have some ammunition.

Of course, being liberals, they are much too principled to use the damning letters and in the end, the President does what he should have done 5 minutes into the movie; fire General Scott and save the republic. Jiggs, who also thought the President was a loon for trusting the Russkies, ends up getting Ava Gardner in the end so sometimes I guess it pays to be the conservative hero in a liberal movie.

According to Perry, the left doesn’t need the military to take over the government and destroy the Constitution. They get themselves elected:

So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America’s troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

The “scenario” fisks itself. Any comments I would make addressing specific portions of this idiocy would only distract from the totality of ignorance, the aggregation of asinine, puerile imbecility demonstrated by the writer.

Perry’s description of America under Obama sounds eerily like the details in the plot of Allen Drury’s overwrought but hugely entertaining Come Niniveh Come Tyre where a Carter-like President faces mounting challenges and incursions from the old Soviet Union. Each time he backs down, he’s cheered on by liberals and the MSM as a man of peace and “vision.” Finally, realizing he’s destroyed Americas position in the world (and after a clumsy effort to remove him by the Joint Chiefs) the Russians come calling. The President commits suicide and the reins are handed over to his Vice President, a Soviet agent.

Joe Biden: Moscow stooge? You might note that Perry never mentions the vice president in his little coup scenario. Such inconveniences never seem to disrupt the ravings of lunatics when they’re on a roll.

Here’s the topper:

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America’s military leadership is lost in a fool’s fog.

Okay, lemme get this straight: I’m the one “lost in a fool’s fog” because I think the notion that anyone - responsible or irresponsible - in our military who has even had this idea cross their idle minds - say, when sitting on the toilet with the latest edition of Guns and Ammo - is batsh*t crazy with a capital “C”?

Here’s why this fellow should be put in a straitjacket, and locked up in a nice padded room with plenty of stuffed animals so he he can work off his misplaced aggression against President Obama by tearing off their heads with his teeth:

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

Ok - I just shrugged my shoulders and said “We can always worry about that later.” Seems to me the republic is still here. Oh sure, Obama is a pifflehead and he wants to nationalize health care but really now, shouldn’t there be like a, you know, good reason to just toss the election results from last year out the window and put General Fiddle Faddle or Colonel Tootie Frootie in charge? No domestic unrest because of this action? What to do with all those very angry liberals and Democrats? It might be emotionally satisfying for some to see our opponents marched off to those detention camps Haliburton built in Utah and Nevada, but gawd, we’d never hear the end of it.

Perry is an old man - served in the Johnson Administration and his bio says he was one of the first journalists allowed into Russia following the death of Stalin. He has got to be in his mid 80’s. He talks of the military performing what amounts to a “family intervention” to remove the duly elected, constitutionally legitimate, president of the United States.

I think his own family should heed that advice and retire this fellow before he hears the laughter directed his way for being such a monumental ass.

There is little doubt that the nation’s newspapers are in deep trouble. And not just a few rags here and there. The entire industry is in the process of going extinct with the exception of a few papers funded by individuals with very, very deep pockets and can absorb the millions in losses incurred by running a modern, metropolitan daily newspaper.

Why this is so, is a trickier question and not conducive to simple, one sentence answers. You can say the internet is killing the daily newspaper and that would be true, but not the whole story.

You can say blogs are killing newspapers and you would be indulging in wishful thinking. They have certainly affected newspapers but most bloggers need newspapers more than newspapers need blogs.

You can say political bias is killing newspapers and you would be picking nits. Bias in reporting only makes the political class angry. No one else really notices or cares.

You can say that the standard business model for the daily paper does not reflect the reality of the marketplace and you would be correct - except most papers have already tried to adapt to the internet age and are finding it very tough going.

The number one reason newspapers are dying is because they cannot compete in a rapidly changing information marketplace. The print editions are not as immediate as television. The web editions are hard to navigate and difficult to find the information for which you are looking. Advertising revenue for both is dropping as marketing whizzes use social networking sites and techniques to drive conversation about products and services that were once full page ads. The huge falloff in revenue from classified ads moving to websites like Craig’s List has also contributed to the decline.

People’s reading habits are changing. Audio books and Kindle are revolutionizing the way we read and web sites like Memeorandum make it a simple matter to pick out information that the reader feels is necessary to know or in which he is interested. Newspapers are becoming superfluous - an unwanted appendage that doesn’t fill any need except that of tradition and continuity.

Blogs and message boards do a better job of informing about sports, style, even business. Ditto for what used to be called “opinion journalism” and is now simply ranting, for the most part. Such opinion columnists don’t marshal arguments, illuminate options, and recommend a course of action. They have - with very few exceptions - become creative writers, trying to outdo blogs in their use of colorful invective and snarky sarcasm.

If Rupert Murdoch gets his way and readers are forced to pay for the privilege of accessing on-line newspaper content, it will only hasten their demise. The New York Times “firewall” experiment proves that. Not enough people are willing to pay to read opinion - even if they are usually in agreement with the columnist. They can get pretty much the same thing for free on blogs. And sometimes, the writing and thinking is superior to that which is found at newspapers, online or otherwise.

That leaves paying for “news” stories. This presupposes that no one will step in and offer for free what these newspapers want to charge money for. The Army of Davids who would eagerly dive into the void and “report” on various news stories using what they discover on local blogs, YouTube, or even Twitter would doom to failure any attempt for newspapers to alter their revenue plans to include charging for online access - even if it’s only a “nominal” fee.

I love newspapers - both online and dead tree. But they belong to another age, much like the elegance of a horse drawn carriage or the friendliness of a Mom and Pop grocery store. What exactly is it that newspapers do that would justify their continued existence?

“Investigative” reporting? Most newspapers don’t do that anymore - too expensive. And even if a paper has an investigative reporting department, is that reason enough to pay for the privilege of access when these stories make up such a small percentage of news reported during the course of a year?

“In-depth” analysis of issues? Anyone who is interested in an issue or a story can find a dozen websites ranging from think tanks to university professors who would do an equally good job of giving context, history, and analysis to any issue.

There are niche areas where newspapers could thrive. I can see an ESPN or IDB, or Wall Street Journal remaining viable as long as their price for access was reasonable and commensurate with the value of the content. Ditto for websites that report on fashion, or movies, or any other department found in daily newspapers. I wouldn’t doubt it if there weren’t already websites that contain obituaries. Many would pay for access there too.

But why pay to read about New York sports teams in the New York Times? If you’re from New York, you could get equally good coverage and analysis on any of a dozen blogs. Sports talk radio would give the sports fan access to the same news with the bonus of it being free.

As long as newspapers were the gatekeepers for information and commanded the attention of the masses, they could charge advertisers enough money to make a profit. But with such diluted information streams coming from all points, and advertisers finding alternatives that are cheaper and actually promise to promote their products better, newspapers have become entities in search of a mission. They are casting about desperately, trying to manufacture reasons to remain relevant. And no one - not readers or advertisers - is buying it.

Nothing I’ve written so far is news to anyone who follows the newspaper industry. Nor is the idea that somehow, the government must step in and “help” newspapers survive. Direct subsidies would be ridiculous. The government should not be in the business of subsidizing opinion. The slippery slope there is so obvious a 3 year old could see it.

But what about indirect subsidies in the form of tax breaks for newspapers that reorganize themselves into non profit organizations? The Hill reports:

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue.

In early May, Gibbs said that while he hadn’t asked the president specifically about bailout options for newspapers, “I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it.”

Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

The president obviously doesn’t spend 10 hours a day on the internet like the rest of us. If he did, he would have known that there are many websites and blogs that already offer mostly unbiased analysis and fact based opinion. The idea that these qualities are solely the province of old school journalists found in the newsrooms of America is absurd.

Sadly, many on both the right and the left read only those blogs and websites that reflect their partisan tilt (this is less true on the left but there is still a very significant percentage of liberals who will read only liberal blogs.) It is not that the kind of information the president is talking about isn’t already available, it is that the number of people interested in non-partisan or less partisan reading is relatively small.

And perhaps the president would like to tell us how newspapers have promoted “mutual understanding?” Newspapers have historically promoted their own biased viewpoints, from Hearst to Ochs. Until relatively recently, newspapers were basically organs for one party or the other. Some still are.

If newspapers believe they can investigate corruption, fairly analyze politics and culture, and offer fact based opinion pieces that seek to inform rather than inflame, then by all means give them the tax breaks.

But you and I know that won’t happen. In fact, it is the profit motive that restrains newspapers from being too overtly biased in their reporting. Currently, newspapers must attract as many people as possible regardless of their political biases or party affiliation. If they were to go non-profit, what would be the incentive to be fair? There would be some, of course, who would respect the idea that they were in the business of informing their readers in as neutral a way possible of the issues and politics that are newsworthy. But such nobility would be even rarer than it is today. Without the incentive to make money, newspapers would de-evolve and revert to their past practice of being openly partisan or ideological. Remove the profit motive and you remove the one thing that governs content.

In the last 5 years, I may have read half a dozen dead tree newspapers. My reading habits have changed and the time spent perusing a newspaper could be better spent googling what I want to know. That’s the bottom line and I see no way that newspapers - online or traditional paper editions - will ever to be able to overcome the problem that the meteor has already struck Chicxulub and there is nothing they can do to save themselves from catastrophe.

I penned a special column for PJ Media on the 9/12 protests yesterday, pointing out the historical significance of the event; that it represents the first truly mass movement of conservatives in American history.

A sample that will no doubt bring the wrath of the right down on my head:

It is definitely an opposition movement, however. Certainly there is mass unhappiness with President Obama and his policies. And there is opposition to the Democrats in Congress. But does this really translate into electoral strength for Republicans? I am going to go out on a limb and say no. The anger here is a reaction (reactionary?) against a growing government, higher taxes, and the sense that the country that they grew up in is slipping away right before their eyes.

This is all fed, of course, by the pop conservatives on talk radio who have ginned up outrage against Obama and the Democrats. I say “ginned up” because what the president and his party have already done doesn’t need the added fear mongering being promoted by Beck, Hannity, Rush, and Savage in order for conservatives to rally. Raised taxes, cap and trade, health care reform, bailouts and takeovers, and other liberal agenda items should be sufficient to outrage anyone on the right and motivate them to protest these horrific policies. It is unnecessary to brand Obama a “communist” or even a “socialist” to realize that his policies spell disaster for individual liberty and the free market economy.

Getting caught up trying to guess the number of attendees at Saturday’s protests (as I and many others are doing today and will continue to do) is irrelevant. This is history in the making, something the United States has never seen: a genuine grass-roots conservative mass movement, activated by the new technologies, communicating effectively using the new software and hardware — and it is growing.

I received an email from a long time reader yesterday who was concerned I couldn’t see that the protests were, at bottom, “anti-American, racist, and dangerous…” There’s nothing “anti-American” about protesting anything. We are, after all, a nation born out of protest, nurtured in the bosom of contrarianism, and defining progress by going against the grain in order to right significant wrongs in our society. This is not “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination - except to the comfort of the elites who always believe it dangerous when the hoi polloi become restless and disagree that only they in their superior wisdom are fit to tell the rest of us what to do.

As for the charge of the protest being “racist,” well, that’s nonsense. If you’re going to tar an entire movement with that epitaph based on the beliefs of a tiny fraction, then you should have no trouble referring to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s as a “Communist” movement since the CPUSA played a prominent role in the SCLC and other civil rights organizations. The same holds true for the anti-war movement where you couldn’t attend a protest without tripping over a Communist or two.

This protest movement encompasses the right in all its contradictions, it’s factions, and its various conceits. From far right nullification supporters to Rand Objectivists, conservatism in all its glory was on display. The dominant theme as it appeared to me was “Don’t Tread on Me” - the words emblazoned on the iconic Gaddsen Flag. This is both a warning and a statement of fact. The truth is, whether due to agitation by talk radio hosts or the very real belief held by millions that President Obama is going too far, too fast, in his quest to “remake” America, there is a sizable segment of the population who has stood up and said “enough.”

In their struggle to define what it is they don’t like about the direction Obama and the Democrats are taking the country, I believe they mis-identify their concerns as fighting “socialism” or “Communism.” But at bottom, I believe above all else, that they wish to “conserve” their own vision of what America is and what it should aspire to be. This vision is no more invalid than that of the presidents’ despite attempts on the left to delegitimize it. It is Burkean in its roots, and has to do with classic conservative values that have been at the root of conservative thought for as long as the republic has endured.

Change is coming to America. Change always comes to America because we are a dynamic society that stands still for no one. But the value of conservatism has always been that, in Bill Buckley’s words, conservatives “stand athwart history yelling Stop!” It is always better to manage change, to channel the revolutionary nature of our society into acceptable, and accepted paths that lead to consensual change. Any other path leads to blood and revolution. Just ask the French.

President Obama and the Democrats are moving too far, too fast. They have exceeded the comfort level for change that many Americans - perhaps most - believe is right and proper. You can argue the merits of the president’s agenda. That’s politics. But the pace of change is structural in our society. We aren’t set up for the kind of rapid, dizzying alterations that Obama and the Democrats are proposing. This is especially true because some of what the president advocates would change the fundamental relationship citizens have with the government.

“Small moves, Ellie. Small moves…” was the advice that Elenore Arroway’s dad gave to the youngster as she fiddled with the dial of her ham radio in the film Contact. By moving the dial in small increments, she was much more likely to be rewarded by making contact with another ham radio enthusiast.

Hundreds of thousands of people at the Capitol yesterday gave President Obama the same message.

The president went before Congress last night with an almost impossible job facing him; 1) calm the public’s fears and anxieties; 2) try and get some GOP cover for his fellow Democrats; and 3) move the ball forward on reform.

First, looking at the speech from the standpoint of political theater and speechcraft, it was as good as he’s ever been. James Fallows:

- Conciliatory: You Republicans want to talk about tort reform? Let’s hear your ideas.
- Tough: When you tell lies, we will call you out.
- Clarifying: For the first time ever, I felt as if I glimpsed a “larger idea” behind the Obama plan.
- Big picture: The role-of-government soliloquy at the end, including the connection to the moral and social-contract histories of Social Security and Medicare.
- Emotional, sans schmaltz: As he got ready for the end, I feared that he would tell the story of all the Lenny Skutnik figures in the First Lady’s box. Instead, he told Ted Kennedy’s story, with allusions only to Kennedy’s Republican friends.
- Simple performance dynamics: Well delivered, including at crucial points talking over the applause to keep the rhythm going.
- Manners: Will it pay off for the Republicans to have booed him and, in the case of Rep. “Gentleman Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, to have yelled “you lie!” at the President? We’ll see.

I would agree with most of that analysis. Obama implanted his vision of government’s role in society in the public mind - something he didn’t dare do during the campaign for obvious reasons. I disagree with that vision, but it has its roots in neo-liberal thought and modern social democratic philosophy. I can see Nicolas Sarkozy nodding his head in agreement through much of it. It is clear he had thought deeply on the subject and it was also clear that his experience as a community organizer informed at least some of his thinking.

I don’t think either Bush (father or son), or Clinton, had such a well developed political philosophy. Got to go back to Reagan to find someone who had given even more thought to the role of government in a free society. Reagan was older so no criticism of Obama is intended by that. Both men used their experience interacting with ordinary Americans to reach their almost opposite beliefs.

(Note: Critics of Reagan tend to forget that he spent nearly two decades on the “rubber chicken” circuit as both a conservative speaker and, more importantly, a spokesman for GE. Morris believes more than anything, this rubbing elbows with ordinary Americans helped change Reagan from an FDR Democrat to a Goldwater conservative.)

I must say, however, that his calls for “civility” and his outreach to Republicans rang a little hollow. I didn’t hear much criticism coming from the White House at the time as Congressional dems savaged Republicans for their opposition. Evidently, the president agreed with all the talk of “angry mobs,” and “racists,” and “fascists.” But going on national TV, he extends his hand in hopes that he can get cooperation from the other side?

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. It is unrealistic for the president to ask the GOP to support him on issues like the public option, or a “trigger” for the public option (if you believe the triggers will be designed to do anything except lead to an eventual public option, I got some swampland in Florida you can buy). Either provision is a deal killer. It would be political suicide in the party not to mention that it violates fundamental principles of conservatism. You wouldn’t expect Democrats to support and entirely free market approach to reform. Neither should the president expect the GOP to support the public option.

Co-ops are a little different story but I don’t think we need worry about them being in any final bill passed by the Democrats. My personal belief is that eventually, most of the co-ops would fail and necessitate a takeover by the Feds thus bringing us single payer insurance by default.

But it is the “If you tell lies, we will call you out” statement that I have the most trouble with.

Regular readers know that I have taken a dim view toward most of the slippery slope arguments advanced by Republicans and the right. But in the history of government entitlements, if anyone can show me where the law of unintended consequences didn’t emerge - and rather quickly - following their enactment, I would be most appreciative.

Obama is saying that if it’s not written into the bill that a public option will lead eventually to a single payer system, then you cannot draw logical conclusions that such would be the case. I totally reject that idea, based not only on the way the system is set up but also because several liberals have made absolutely no bones about the fact that this is exactly what the public option is for. When your opponent admits that your slippery slope argument is true, why would it be a lie?

The same holds true for the few other slippery slope arguments I believe are legitimate. For instance, is it possible for a bill (HR3200) that contains provisions to create 53 new panels, committees, and boards with regulatory or statutory authority over health care in America really, really lead to more “efficient” and “cheaper” health care?

Not in this universe. And the logical result of reducing Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals means one of two things; either those health care entities will stop or reduce the number of Medicare patients they take on or they will reduce services - i.e., “ration” care. If there is another conclusion that can be drawn from that, I am willing to hear it.

Again, there will be nothing in any reform bill that will mandate that behavior by doctors or hospitals, but the results are inescapable - unless you believe that they are stupid and will perform the same work for less money. Would you? Why should they?

But President Obama says that if anyone makes that argument, the White House will “call them out” for their lies. This is unreasonable and bad government to boot. The reason for Congressional hearings on such important matters is to flesh out these slippery slopes and write legislation that minimizes the chance they will be realized or eliminate them entirely.

Of course, we haven’t had any hearings on the most important social legislation in nearly 50 years so why bother now? These bills - including the president’s version - have been written in secrecy, negotiated behind closed doors. How much input have lobbyists had? How much has the opposition contributed? Who is for what? Who is opposed to which?

This is “good government?”

It’s not that there aren’t some good ideas being put forward, as I made clear in my post yesterday on the Baucus bill. But both sides have certain red lines that cannot be crossed, and for either side to insist that it’s their way or the highway on these deal breakers is unreasonable.

Obama might uncouple some Republicans with the co-op option if certain provisions relating to how they must operate are included while also incorporating some kind of tort reform in the final bill. He will lose liberal support, but probably gain a good 12-18 Republicans in the House and 6-8 GOP senators in the bargain. Not impressive, but considering the partisan nature of our politics today, it would be a significant achievement.

I would look very closely at such a bill if it included a more carefully crafted co-op provision, and meaningful tort reform, along with some of the measures in the Baucus bill I outlined previously. There is a need for health care reform - not a crisis by any means and certainly, not because Obama’s nauseating demagoguery from the speech that made passage a matter of life and death. But somebody somewhere has got to get a handle on skyrocketing costs. And I agree with the president that this is the moment for it.

A bill that may help cut the rate of growth in health care spending while doing minimal damage to the private sector, and improving the quality of care is a bill that I and many Republicans who want to see action on this might be inclined to support. But the chances of that happening are just about nil. The gargantuan mess that the Democrats have created of reform will now be bludgeoned to fruition by the president with several provisions that will be included that are bad for health care, bad for the people, and bad for the country.

I am getting old.

I’ll be 56 in January and I realize that the days behind me are beginning to far outnumber the days before me. I have lived a lot of history in those years and have seen just about everything in politics imaginable; huge upsets, the triumph and fall of conservatism, a presidential resignation, culture wars - exciting times to have lived.

But I will never understand this:

Van Jones was one of the good guys. A really, really good guy. He used his education and his passion to combat police brutality and the massive, wasteful incarceration of so many of this nation’s young, brown people. Having fought in the trenches for so long, he saw an opportunity to build hope and jobs and tangible communities as the world responds to the climate crisis. He connected the dots and inspired action and had a vision. He was the rare outsider who got a chance to move inside, and move he did.

This same blogger referred to health care opponents as “psychological terrorists.”

The way that some on the left bandy about the word “terrorists,” it sincerely makes me wish that they would demonstrate equal fervor in combating the real thing. Imagine if those who refer to conservatives as “terrorists” in any context would renounce the idea that the “War on Terror” is a made up political gambit of the Bush Administration and support the idea of stopping these fanatics before they attack us. As it stands now, we are geared to respond to terrorism after the fact - a very uncomfortable position to be in when one recalls we live in a world where the day is close at hand when using a weapon of mass destruction in a terrorist attack will be realized.

And then there’s this from Keith Olberman:

I don’t know why I’ve got this phrasing in my head, but: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck,  Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes.

No, even now, I refuse to go all caps.

No, sending me links to the last two Countdowns with my own de-constructions of his biblical vision quality Communist/Fascist/Socialist/Zimbalist art at Rockefeller Center (where, curiously, he works, Comrade) doesn’t count. Nor does sending me links to  specious inappropriate point-underscoring prove-you’re-innocent made-up rumors.

Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enablers, Ailes (even though Ailes’ power was desperately undercut when he failed to pull off his phony “truce” push).

This is more understandable considering the source. Olbermann enjoys frolicking in the sewer of American politics. He and Larry Flynt should start a mutual admiration society.

And what in God’s name is Jane Hamsher so riled up about?

Now he’s been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.  Well, that and calling Republicans “assholes.”  I’m pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.

So where are all the statements defending Van Jones by those who were willing to exploit him when it served their purpose?  Why aren’t they standing up  and defending one of their own, who has done nothing that probably the majority of people in the Democratic party haven’t done at one time or another?  Is he no longer “one of their own?”

Let me get this straight: It’s ok for Van Jones to be a Truther nut because 35% of the Democratic party are Truther nuts? Holy Jesus, save me from the logic of liberals.

What has me so perplexed this morning is that these liberals and other Democrats are upset that this racist conspiracy mongering Truther is out of a responsible position in government.

It just absolutely boggles my mind that these and most other Democrats have no problem with a guy who is an admitted Communist (”Former” communist? Would that be anything like a “former” racist like Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, and other conservatives?), a man who pushed the conspiracy theory that white people want to deliberately murder black people by degrading the environment in the ghetto, who supports the cop-killer Mumia, and who signed a 9/11 Truther petition, claiming he didn’t know what he was signing thus making him a liar or an idiot.

They are defending this crackpot?

I don’t see how anyone can rationalize support for someone that the overwhelming majority of American people would agree is unfit to serve in any capacity in government. Forget Glenn Beck and Fox News. This guy was hoisted on his own petard of far left, radical statements and beliefs. For me, it had nothing to do with calling Republicans “a-holes.” I refer to many GOP’ers in such colorful language frequently.” But I draw the line at those who see shadows in the mist around every corner in America. There is no place in government for those whose minds have been captured by paranoid conspiracy theories. Such thinking colors everything else they believe and as such, interferes with sound judgment - a prerequisite for serving the people.

The Jones fiasco highlights how “movement liberalism” is so out of touch with ordinary people - treating those of us in flyover country with such nauseating contempt - that they are totally blind to the sensibilities of the majority.

The American people tolerate a lot in their politicians - in both parties. But they will not put up with conspiracy mongering communists. That’s a bridge too far and Obama and the left should have realized that before putting Jones up for such a prominent position in government.