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Besides being paranoid, the idea that McCain’s genuinely weak “Celeb” ad draws from Triumph of the Will is remarkable for something else: its implicit contempt for modern Germans. It is not much better than the pro-war German-bashing that took place during 2002-03 when war supporters frequently complained that the Germans had lost their former enthusiasm […]
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Filed under: politics
Despite its great importance for U.S. interests in Afghanistan and the region, the failed, rather clumsy attempt by the Pakistani civilian government to rein in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and place it under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior has not received nearly as much comment as it should. Coming in the […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Not enough has been said about John Schwenkler’s fine TAC essay on culinary conservatism, and unfortunately too much of what has been said has been ridiculous, so it is gratifying to see my Scene colleague Alan Jacobs taking up the subject in this first of two posts. Before I say anything more about the essay […]
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Filed under: politics, culture, food
The campaign controversy of the moment seems to be whether McCain has been telling lies about his opponent, with the additional accusation from the opposing camp that he is also engaged in race-baiting. Of course, he is telling lies, and he isn’t engaged in race-baiting, but in this bizarre election cycle you can be sure that he […]
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Filed under: politics
Over the course of the last few months, Rasmussen has been tracking attitudes about voting for a black candidate for President. What they have been finding is that the public is gradually becoming more willing to support such a candidate, but what is most striking in the three surveys they have done is how constant and […]
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Filed under: politics
It never ceases to amaze me that the convergence of major candidates on some of the most important questions of policy can be described as evidence of so-called post-partisanship. Gerald Seib writes today:
And clearly some of that is going on. But in this election year, the movement has deeper meaning.
These are two candidates whose histories […]
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Filed under: politics
At the TAC main blog, Clark Stooksbury points us to this gem from Limbaugh:
How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are […]
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Filed under: politics, economics
Glenn Greenwald has a pointed, smart post about the responses to his call to oust Blue Dog Democrats from the party. One of the observations he made that applies equally well to the mentality in both parties was this:
Blind, uncritical allegiance to one’s Party — and to all of its officials — is the defining […]
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Filed under: politics
The most remarkable part of Rich Lowry’s column today was this line:
Berlin at times sounded as much like Obama’s coming-out party as the candidate of a transnational progressivism — in which global norms are more important than sovereign nations — as his audition as commander-in-chief.
What struck me about this passage was its implicit pretense that […]
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Filed under: foreign policy
Speaking of the “surge,” I heartily recommend my TAC colleague Kelley Vlahos’ post on the “surge”-as-Republican loyalty test, but I would just add that there is nothing terribly new about this test. From the moment that the plan was announced, it became an article of faith among the tiresome enforcers of movement and party purity […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
The American Prospect has assembled a number of assessments of the reasons why violence in Iraq has declined relatively over the past year and a half. Lost in the frequent back-and-forth over whether John McCain understands what the “surge” was or whether he knows when the Anbar Awakening happened (answers: apparently not and no) is the more […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
As Ross said last week, the Pew numbers on white evangelical support for the major presidential candidates do show that McCain appears to be running poorly among these voters when compared to the support Bush received at this time four years ago. Then again, according to a Post survey earlier in the year McCain was […]
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Filed under: politics, religion
At The American Scene, my colleague Peter Suderman has some interesting remarks on Obama’s cosmopolitanism that James Poulos and I critiqued last week. Peter doesn’t think the phrase “citizen of the world” has much importance one way or the other, and characterized Obama’s use of it as an expression of this “trendy sentiment”:
a mildly left-leaning liberal […]
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Filed under: politics, economics
They may have been unaware of it, but Matt and Ross have stumbled upon some old Orthodox Church wisdom in their rejection of fourth marriages. While even second marriages were discouraged by the Orthodox Church, particularly in the Byzantine era, the canons did permit some flexibility and oikonomia in practice, and third marriages were allowed in extreme […]
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Filed under: history, culture
Gregory Scoblete outlines a number of ways that Obama could adopt foreign policy views he will never adopt to reassure wary antiwar voters. This was perhaps the most striking:
He could, for instance, echo the arguments made by Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the British magazine Prospect, and argue that […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Of course, this is pure nonsense. Maistre hated scientists most of all? He was a philosopher of science and wrote a serious critique of the materialism of Bacon, so to say that he hated scientists is absurd. Meanwhile, no one with an iota of understanding about modern American conservatism could confuse its views with anything Maistre […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
As James is being attacked from all sides (most especially in his own comboxes) for ridiculing the phrase “citizen of the world” as nonsense, I have to say a few more things beyond what I have already said. The least compelling arguments advanced against James’ view are that former Presidents have used this same phrase. […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Like clockwork, McCain’s campaign is responding to Obama’s Berlin speech in almost exactly the way I expected they would:
While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a ‘citizen of the world,’ John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election […]
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Filed under: politics
A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. I’m not sure people understand that `surge’ is part of a counterinsurgency. ~John McCain
Blogging will be light today and tomorrow, but this deserves brief comment. This has already received a lot of derision, but what I found striking about McCain’s intransigence over […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. ~Karl Rove
Rove is remarkably clumsy in his defense of McCain on his changed position on tax cuts. The official McCain mantra today is that McCain (always heroically) opposed Bush’s tax cuts because they were not offset with spending cuts. His reliable stooge on talk radio, Michael […]
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Filed under: politics
When I am not advancing arguments for an “insular” foreign policy, I sometimes brush up on my German, so I wasn’t the least bit concerned that Obama put out his advertisements in Berlin in the native language. I have a little theory that many of the people who endorse our “insular” foreign policy views tend […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Last summer, I noted the numerous references to Nancy Boyda’s abrupt departure from an Armed Services Committee hearing featuring testimony from Gen. Keane. War supporters kept flogging this as evidence of antiwar Democrats’ intransigence and inflexibility in the face of new evidence. Never mind that Boyda’s frustration with administration spin on Iraq was, is, widely shared, […]
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Filed under: politics
Via Ambinder, now for the most important item of the day:
No doubt, there will be a hue and cry about “ageism.” The thing that seems strange to me is that every time someone tries to do a McCain parody of the now-infamous New Yorker cover, they end up denying the intention and context of the satire that […]
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Filed under: politics, idiocy
While FiveThirtyEight still projects that Obama will win Ohio and has an explanation for some of the huge difference between Rasmussen (McCain +10) and PPP (Obama +8) on Ohio, this new Rasmussen poll from Ohio is still pretty startling in the movement that it shows relative to last month. According to the poll, McCain has gained eight points in […]
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Filed under: politics
The strange thing for me about the discussion surrounding this article is how completely centered on Washington it is, as if being a “think tanker” for the opposition party is really “going into the wilderness.” Yes, it’s a common phrase to refer to the party out of power as being in the political wilderness, but what […]
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Filed under: politics