Posted on September 30th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The folks at The Weekly Standard don’t know when to quit. Not cowed by the established public record that the Iraqi government under Hussein had no substantive relationship with al-Qaeda, and not embarrassed by the manifest falsehood of claims to the contrary, the Standard has rehashed much old news (why, did you know that Hussein encouraged […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 28th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the US House of Representatives, has been charged with criminal conspiracy by a grand jury in Texas. Mr DeLay has relinquished his post but not his seat in Congress.
The second-ranking, and most assertive Republican leader, was accused of a criminal conspiracy with two associates, John Colyandro, a former […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 28th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Indeed, the administration’s mixed signals, alternately condemning and lauding the regime, have done little to rein in the Janjaweed marauders who keep the Darfur people from leaving fetid camps to plant crops and rebuild their shattered villages. And one reason the administration has not acted more forcefully is that the potent Christian groups involved in […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 27th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Turkey did murder about 2,000,000 Armenians and 350,000 Greeks, the first such extensive genocide of the last century (the first was the German slaughter of 65,000 Herero in Namibia in 1904). I know, I know, my figure of Armenian’s murdered far surpasses the 1,500,000 most often given by Armenian and genocide scholars, but they are […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
As a very brief follow-up to the last post, I wanted to add a separate observation. Mr. Rummel’s simplistic theory of “democratic peace” reveals something about democrats and democratists that is not often commented on. There is in this theory the naive faith that there is a type of regime that guarantees an […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
How do we know this? Because we know empirically from history and verified theory that democracies don’t make war on each other, and therefore we can predict that between any two democracies there will be no future war. However, war can well occur between two if one or both are not democracies. Moreover, the probability […]
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted on September 23rd, 2005 by Daniel Larison
According to Justin Raimondo, the Cato Institute has sent its defense policy studies director, Charles V. Pena, packing:
The earlier purge of Ivan Eland, who is now with the Independent Institute – and a regular Antiwar.com columnist – was a portent of things to come, and Pena’s departure is but the latest sign that Cato is […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 21st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
This would be admirable if it were true. But we are not providing security in southern Iraq. The rescue mission to free two undercover soldiers from the clutches of local gunmen was a measure of how anarchic Basra has become. The police ignored both the Army and their own national government when requested to hand […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 21st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
[Michael] Oakeshott didn’t have a political program and never trusted those who did. His bête noire was what he called “rationalism in politics” (the phrase became the title of a book of his elegant essays) — the desire to use government for ends it could never achieve, at least not without sacrificing the good […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 21st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Most perverse among the war essays (and it was a strong field) is David Gelertner’s “The Holocaust Shrug.” The catalogue of Saddam’s crimes and the fact that we could stop him from committing them is argument enough for intervention. To not exult in our victory is morally equivalent to shrugging at the Holocaust. What is […]
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Posted on September 21st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
If one drills deeper, the results are even worse for the CDU and Ms Merkel. In many of the states in which the SPD had lost elections in recent years because of Mr Schröder’s economic reforms, the party has again pulled ahead of the CDU, notably in North Rhine-Westphalia (with 40% compared with 34.4% for […]
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Posted on September 17th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Support for the war is at an all-time low. Forty-four percent now say the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, the lowest reading since the question was first asked more than two years ago.
A majority, nearly 60 percent, now disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling […]
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Posted on September 17th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Ecumenism certainly has declined in recent times. The key goal was ably expressed back in 1961 at a WCC New Delhi gathering. It noted that unity “is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Savior are brought by the Holy Spirit into […]
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Filed under: religion
Posted on September 16th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Merkel’s sense of grim purpose may suit the moment. After spending four months with a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls, she suddenly finds herself in a dogfight with Schröder.
The likelihood is still that Merkel, 51, will become chancellor after the vote Sunday. But she may have to settle for leading a “grand coalition” of […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 15th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Should he [Scott Richert] choose to continue the discussion, I would be very interested to hear what he might have to say to two of the points that I raised:
1. If the just price concept is to play a moral restraining function and not be identified from or solely from the free market price of […]
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Filed under: economics
Posted on September 15th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Finally, Mr. Richert takes exception to my characterization of the Middle Ages as impoverished compared to modern times. His response is that modern times are spiritually impoverished compared to the Middle Ages.
This is quite true. The faith among the Christian population was stronger then and suffused their culture in a way it does not today. […]
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Filed under: economics
Posted on September 14th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
So much attention has been paid to these false determinants of administration policy that a different political dynamic has been underappreciated. Within the Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 13th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
President Bush’s job approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in the AP-Ipsos poll, reflecting widespread doubts about his handling of gasoline prices and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Nearly four years after Bush’s job approval soared into the 80s after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was at 39 percent […]
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted on September 13th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Man is made in the image and likeness of God; he is not Homo economicus. Where Mr. Akin and I disagree is on whether you can interpret the Church’s social teaching in light of an economic theory that celebrates the self-interest of man and is itself predicated on a philosophy that regards men as individuals […]
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Filed under: economics
Posted on September 12th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 12th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
But depressing as it is, there is nothing surprising in the failure of the officials in one of America’s most corrupt states. The truly baffling element of this breakdown of American leadership has been the lacklustre performance of the commander-in-chief. For a politician whose greatest talent is supposedly for rousing the nation in its darkest […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 12th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
What Bush has done to conservatism is align it with big government moralising, big government spending and big government inefficiency. He hasn’t vetoed a single spending bill. Pork-barrel spending — on projects often unneeded — has taken precedence over real needs in a Republican-run Congress with a Republican president.
Republicans and Democrats in gerrymandered districts […]
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Posted on September 12th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The fight against corruption, one of the principal promises made in the heady days of Ukraine’s revolution last December, has come to a standstill. Christopher Crowley, the United States Agency for International Development’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe, complains that Ukrainian businesses continue to maintain double sets of accounts — one real and one for […]
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Posted on September 12th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Stung by sliding opinion polls six days before a general election, German conservatives warned on Monday that a vote for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s rival Social Democrats (SPD) could bring ex-communists to power.
“People have to know, anyone who votes for SPD does not know what they are getting,” Volker Kauder, campaign manager for the conservative Christian […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on September 8th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The poll conducted this week by independent opinion research institute Forsa showed Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD) with 34 pct — up three points from last week with just 11 days to go until the Sept 18 general election.
The Greens, junior partner in the ruling coalition, were unchanged at seven percent.
The telegenic chancellor’s strong […]
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