Posted on August 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Bush said that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman “understood that the sacrifices of Allied forces would mean nothing unless we used our victory to help the Japanese people transform their nation from tyranny to freedom.”
“There were many doubters,” Bush said. “American and Japanese experts claimed that the Japanese weren’t ready for democracy.” ~The Los Angeles Times
There […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.
The president, standing against a backdrop of the USS Ronald Reagan, the newest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Ray Nagin, the mayor of devastated New Orleans, said Wednesday he fears thousands of residents may have been killed by Hurricane Katrina. ~USA Today
Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisianna, called on the city of New Orleans to evacuate as waters continued to rise. “We absolutely must evacuate the people in the dome and other shelters in […]
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on August 29th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
In further comparison to the wars of the past, our casualties in the Iraq war seem even smaller still. In a single day during a single batter (the battle of the Bulge) in World War II, it is estimated that over 5,000 U. S. soldiers died. Throughout the course of World War II, the greatest […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 29th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
A fastidious editor of other people’s copy as well as his own, Roberts began with the words “Until about the time of the Civil War.” Then, the Indiana native scratched out the words “Civil War” and replaced them with “War Between the States.”
The handwritten document is one of tens of thousands of pages of Roberts […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 27th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
President Bush’s remark the other day that the theory of ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside the theory of evolution brought howls of derision from his detractors in Europe and the United States. It was, they said, one more piece of evidence that America is populated by fundamentalist zombies who are potentially as dangerous as […]
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on August 25th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
For instance, and this is a hat tip to Josh, an article at LewRocwell.com calls the neocons theory “childish.” Of course, this is just an insult when one can’t interat with the facts, at least the way the opponent sees them. It only takes three paragraphs for the seething hatred of Bush to emerge. He […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 25th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, insist that the founders of the republic were all pious Christians. In fact, few of the men who led the revolution or drafted the constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. Washington was an ordinary Anglican, which even in the 18th century meant very little, while John […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 25th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Does anyone remember April and May of 2005? And the months preceeding them? The Orange Revolution? The Arab Springtime? The Cedar Revolution of Lebanon - all of them seeming to have a fire lit under them, a wonderful fire of liberty. Remember Revolution Babes?
All around the globe, there was a spirit of something that felt […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 25th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Iraqi factional leaders struggled again to reach a consensus on a new constitution before a self-imposed target of midnight Thursday, but parliament did not meet and officials said there was no plan for a future session on the charter.
The negotiators tried to reach an agreement on a draft by the close of a 72-hour […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 24th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
You know you talk about the Sunnis rising up. I mean the Sunnis have got to make a choice. Do they want to live in a society that’s free or do they want to live in violence and I suspect most mothers, no matter what they’re religion may be, will choose a free society so […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 24th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And […]
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Filed under: religion
Posted on August 24th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Andrew Sullivan just called me a paleo-con. That’s hitting below the belt. As I’ve explained before, I am a Russell Kirk-style Tory crossed with Michael Novak/Richard Neuhaus-style Catholic neo-conservative, with a mild dash of libertarian for seasoning. But I’m definitely neither a paleoconservative like Mel Bradford or Pat Buchanan nor a paleolibertarian like Lew Rockwell […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
On the evidence, the administration of George W. Bush has failed to discharge this first duty in the area of immigration law and border security. The evidence, also, points to a willful negligence — in short, it points not to incompetence but to treachery. When the highest officer of a republic, in the […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
It’s time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
According to the interim constitution, the permanant constitution should have been presented to parliament and passed by August 15. There should have been two readings of it, two days apart, before the vote. Otherwise, parliament should have been dissolved and new elections called. Parliament avoided this fate with a last-minute amendment of the interim constitution, […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
IN A dramatic midnight turnaround, Iraq’s ruling Shia pulled back from threats to force the new constitution through parliament, putting off a vote to buy more time to win over Sunni Arabs who had threatened civil war if it was passed.
Shia and Kurdish leaders had agreed to a draft constitution laying out plans for a […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 22nd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
“There is no doubt that all the people here will say no to the constitution because nobody here trusts the Government and nobody wants the country to be divided the way the other groups want it,” Mr Samaraai said. Jamal al-Shimari, a neighbour, agreed. “It’s not going to be a constitution. It’s a conspiracy to […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 22nd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Reportedly backed by Kurdish negotiators, Iraq’s ruling Shiite Islamists prepared on Monday to force a draft constitution through the interim parliament they dominate, brushing off fierce objections from Sunnis as they raced to beat a midnight deadline.
A draft prepared without the participation of minority Sunni Arab delegates appeared nonetheless to give ground to some […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 22nd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The United States yesterday finally abandoned the fading dream of turning Iraq into a beacon of secular democracy in the Middle East, as it backed demands for the new constitution to enshrine Islamic religious law.
This raises the prospect of new laws being assessed against verses from the Koran, and risks alienating the country’s non-Muslim minorities […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 20th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
In a wider sense, though, I would want to argue that it is precisely this “irrelevance” that makes John Paul’s theology truly relevant (in another sense) to contemporary bioethics. I must say that what I, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, find most exhilarating about the Theology of the Body is not simply that it is […]
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Filed under: religion
Posted on August 20th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
One must surely grant the importance of largeness in the free enterprise system—for diffusion of risk, accumulation of venture capital, and economies of scale. But I cannot see how liberty is best preserved in the implacable swallowing up of small, autonomous firms into vast bureaucratic corporations. I cannot see the sanity in preferring the huge […]
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Filed under: economics
Posted on August 20th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
With 72 hours to go until the latest deadline for Iraq’s political leaders to agree a new constitution, tension spilled on to the streets yesterday with mass demonstrations and reports of gunfire.
Thousands of supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the militant Shia cleric, marched in Baghdad in opposition to plans for a more federal state. ~The Daily […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on August 19th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The cover story for the last summer edition of American Conservative (Aug. 29 issue), “Defining Conservatism Down” by Austin Bramwell, seemed to promise a tale of how ‘the Right’ has lost its former intellectual vivacity and become the complacent steward of an intellectual legacy about which relatively few, if any, contemporary conservative ‘intellectuals’ have many […]
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted on August 19th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
As much as I admire Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, I can read hundreds of pages of their work, and wonder “how does this translate into policy today?” This, I believe, is a certain shortcoming of many traditionalist conservatives. Their philosophy is vague enough that they focus their attention to Gnosticism, pre-Hellenic philosophy, […]
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Filed under: politics
