Gerson's Continuing Condescension

You might think that the nation's dumbest columnist would hesitate before being condescending to his readers, but no... today he even gives his brand of condescension a fair label, Faith-Based Condescension.

My regular readers (all three of you? ;-) ) may recall this suggestion from a few weeks back - a campaign ad poking fun at McCain's attacks on Obama's credentials:

I appreciate your work for civil rights. Me, I've fought my entire life for equal rights for everyone. But aren't you being presumptuous? You did some good things as a lawyer back in Illinois, but you're trying to become commander in chief. These are troubled times, my friend, times of war. You've never been on a battlefield. You've never commanded soldiers. What makes you think that you can govern a divided nation and defend our way of life?

Sorry, Mr. Lincoln, I just don't think you're qualified.

That was then, this is now. Lincoln is now used to defend Palin's lack of qualification:

There are reasons to question the choice of the commander of the Alaska National Guard as a prospective commander in chief (though there were equally serious reasons to doubt the military qualifications of another backwoods candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who served for a few months as a private and a captain in the Black Hawk War).¹

See? She's just like Lincoln, so she's qualified.

Except "Honest Abe" would not have pretended his military record qualified him for the Presidency. It takes a great deal of chutzpah to argue that being in a state that's near Russia, or being commander in chief of a state's national guard but not making any decisions pertaining to state or national security, qualify you for higher office.

Now Gerson could have addressed the issue of Palin's qualifications honestly, but that would presuppose that he's an honest man. His brand of faith-based condescension does not involve honesty:

But instead of engaging this issue, liberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized -- like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper -- toward criticizing Sarah Palin's religion.

Well... No. The mainstream coverage has almost exclusively focused on her qualifications. Her religious beliefs and questions they implicate have been raised, but not with any greater disrespect than those questions raised by the polical right about Sen. Lieberman's observation of the Sabbath back in 2000. And certainly nothing like the suspicion poured on JFK over his Catholicism. Sure, you can find people who will say and argue pretty much anything, but we're talking about the mainstream here, aren't we? Well, obviously not - that would be the honest approach, but it doesn't suit Gerson's purposes.

Gerson gives one quote - only one - to show the unfair treatment of Palin, and of course he doesn't attribute it. And, can you believe it... he's quoting the professionally ranting rabid athest, Christopher Hitchens.

She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with god." Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be "cured."

Hitchens is his best example of a "liberal" who is unfair to Palin? And why is he only complaining that Hitchens was unfair in describing Palin's church as opposed to her beliefs? Wasn't that part of what Hitchens sad vastly more relevant than whether he was fair in his description of her church? Gerson also lies by omission, failing to note that Hitchens also attacked Obama's religion:

Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs.

Gerson gets even less honest from there. After suggesting that it's unfair to even ask Palin about her religious beliefs, he speaks of the role of religion in the advancement of "liberty, tolerance and pluralism". Yet even here he's internally inconsistent:

And, of course, Palin is portrayed as a "theocrat" -- a Muslim fundamentalist in lipstick.

If religion, per se, leads to these advancements, Gerson might have a point. But Gerson is also implicitly condemning Islam, and particularly Islamic fundamentalism. Gerson doesn't want Palin questioned because he agrees with her, but makes it obvious that he has no faith in other faiths - if she were Muslim, he would be among those waving a torch or a pitchfork. And so the lies continue:

Democratic politicians press their appeal to blue-collar workers and the working poor -- while liberal intellectuals and pundits express their disdain for the religious values and motivations of the poor and middle class themselves.

Except it's not onlyDemocrats and "liberal intellectuals" who are concerned about the role of religion in the political sphere. And that's true even if we presuppose that all of the founding fathers were Democrats and liberals. There are conservatives who are skeptical of Palin. And as we just discussed, when the shoe is on the other foot Gerson is among the first on the attack. His faith-based condescension toward secular values seeps out of his every word. His faith-based disdain for the religious values and motivations of Muslims is also patent. His leading concern is Christianity, and moreso his own personal brand of Christianity. Condescend toward any other belief, and you're still okay in his book - in fact, you're following his lead.

Meanwhile, in case you're taking notes, beyond his self-parodic comarison of Palin to Lincoln, Gerson never got around to actually telling us that he sees Palin as even slightly qualified for national office.
___________
1. Lincoln was not involved in military action during his brief enlistments.

Tails, You Lose

A while back I proposed,

If you wish to assert that something is not torture, you subject yourself to the technique at the hands of those who disagree. If, after a standard application of the technique, you continue to insist that the technique is not torture, you win! If you confess that it is torture, even if just to get things to stop, you lose.

Although my challenge likely fell far below his radar screen, other similar challenges did not - and Christopher Hitchens decided to prove the challengers wrong.

The "official lie" about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it "simulates the feeling of drowning". In fact, "you are drowning - or rather, being drowned".

He rehearses the intellectual arguments, both for ("It's nothing compared to what they do to us") and against ("It opens a door that can't be closed"). But the Hitch's thoroughly empirical conclusion is simple. As Vanity Fair's title puts it: "Believe me, it's torture."

I'm a bit surprised that it took the experience of being waterboarded for Hitchens to recognize something so obvious, and if he refreshes his memory on the history of waterboarding he will discover that this is one of the techniques we have historically complained about "them" doing to "us", and some of our ideas were taken from "them" (even though "they" used the same techniques on "us" to elicit false confessions), but I'll give him credit for being honest about his experience.

How long did it take between the start of the exercise and when Hitchens signaled "unbearable distress" causing the exercise to stop? Approximately 16 seconds. He relates,

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia.

His realization,

Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Almost in the next breath, he retreats from those words:

When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Hitchens continues, explaining why he still (now) comes down against waterboarding. But he seems to have forgotten another point of history - the forms of torture that don't leave marks were developed in no small part because they are as effective, or more effective, than those that do, by regimes that wanted plausible deniability when western groups challenged them as torturing political prisoners. Also, how much thought does it take to realize that torture that leaves you "unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time" is likely to be far more beneficial to your interrogator than torture that leaves you unresponsive or kills you.

Hitchens' voluntary sixteen seconds (and a second round of an undisclosed duration) gave him hints of post-traumatic stress disorder. What if he couldn't have called off the exercise - if he would have been waterboarded again and again until he disclosed whatever it was his interrogators sought to learn (whether or not he had that information)? Wait - let's ask Hitchens (from the video):

It would be bad enough if you did have something ... but what if you didn't have anything? What if they'd got the wrong guy? Then you would really, you'd be in danger of losing your mind very quickly, I think.

Because if it makes you lose your mind but doesn't leave a scar, it's not "real" torture?

Liars, Liars Everywhere....

Is anybody else tired of the silly accusations that are launched back and forth between Clinton and Obama supporters? With every mistake of memory, large or small, cast as an evil lie that totally disqualifies the candidate for office? Take this example from the latest of the tiresome streams of anti-Obama screeds on TalkLeft. In 1996, twelve years ago, Obama scrawled a few notes on a questionnaire about his political positions. An aide completed the questionnaire and returned it. Somebody apparently asked Obama about the differences in his opinions as expressed on the questionnaire and those expressed in public, and the difference was attributed to the aide's submitting the questionnaire without review. So we get, "Ah hah! If we take the least consistent interpretation of his notes, and insist that the only way a 12-year-old memory of a forgettable moment can deviate from the truth is due to intentional deception, Obama is a liar!"

Wow. How compelling.

A lot of this "he's a liar" stuff is being kicked up in response to Hillary Clinton's rather amazing story of her trip to Bosnia. That inspired my earlier post on the vagaries of memory, although it was not meant as a perfect defense. When memory departs from historical fact, you're not "lying" when you misremember. CWD commented that he wouldn't much care for a politician whose memory was quite that malleable, particularly in relation to dramatic moments experienced as an adult. That's a fair position to take, although peripheral to my point about memory.

In the Obama example, he may be lying. Perhaps he did review the answers before they were submitted. Perhaps at the start of his career he did take a slightly different position on issues of gun control and the death penalty, whether out of personal belief or political expediency, and his needs or views have changed. Perhaps an aide really did misunderstand his scrawls, then completed and returned the questionnaire in a manner not entirely consistent with Obama's views. If Obama's being dishonest, it's a pretty standard version of dishonesty for a politician - shading or moving away from past political positions that may harm the present campaign. But he may also be telling the truth, or recounting the story as he remembers it.

In a lot of these cases, conception seems to matter more than reality. In some contexts, the preconception of the opposing candidate leads to an exaggerated response to a "lie" (real or perceived). In other contexts, the response to the "lie" is a deliberate effort to try to shift popular perceptions against a candidate - classic, Karl Rove style gotcha politics. To see both in action, let's turn to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. March 5, before the Bosnia blowup:

Hugh Hewitt: 20 seconds, who’s going to be the next president of the United States?

Christopher Hitchens: Hillary Clinton.

Hugh Hewitt: Oh…because of yesterday?

Christopher Hitchens: No, no, I’ve feared it for a long time, and there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power.

Hugh Hewitt: The Mummy is back.

Christopher Hitchens: …people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.

Hugh Hewitt: Mordor. Christopher Hitchens, a pleasure. Thank you for joining us from Vanity Fair.

Hitchens is entirely consistent here - he's been bashing the Clintons pretty much since day one. The Bosnia claims are a useful tool, but get jammed into his pre-existing narrative. So now we get,

The first [form of lying] involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

(Is Hitchens "the thinking man's Ann Coulter"? Some smart people seem to like him, despite his preference for invective over honest debate.)

Hitchens argues that landing in a war zone under fire is unforgettable, then makes the leap of illogic that since he can't forget his own experience landing under fire it is impossible for somebody to believe it has occurred when it has not. He then goes on to suggest that Hillary Clinton was the driving force behind the delayed U.S. military intervention in Bosnia, because intervention would supposedly overshadow her healthcare initiative.

Hitchens assures us, that's exactly the way he remembers it. I'm sure it is. But he needs to consider that he views his memories through his prism of Clinton-hatred. If he doesn't realize that, perhaps he believes that his childish name-calling serves as a clarion call. If he does, this is just strongly worded political advocacy. Maybe he's just preaching to the choir.

To me, though, this also raises questions about Hitchens, as it appears that despite the Iraq debacle he still perceives military intervention as a humanitarian obligation. He reinvents history, sometimes quite literally, to advance a particular agenda. The Iraq war had to be fought for humanitarian reasons, and every flaw in its planning, execution, and in the subsequent occupation should be ignored - if everything had been done "correctly" it really would have been "candy, flowers, and democracy breaking out all over." You can't let such mundane things as reality interfere with your good intentions. There was no reason good enough for Bill Clinton to not immediately intercede in Bosnia, as to Hitchens no such reason can possibly exist.

Through his Clinton-hating prism, he attributes failure to the most vain and petty of motives, and to the extent that other interpretations may exist he is happy to disregard political, practical and diplomatic realities. And when confronted with reality, rather than dealing with the facts he bristles and responds with a series of condescending insults and bromides.

Doesn't that make him a pretty good example of everything he claims to hate about the Clintons? His worship of power is more acceptable, because he wishes to direct that power at causes he perceives as righteous as opposed to selfish?

An honest case can be made that Hillary Clinton's memory raises serious questions about her candidacy. But that doesn't justify anti-Obama "your candidate's a liar, too" exaggerations, nor does it justify pushing the story into overdrive (hyperdrive) to advance an almost conspiratorial anti-Clinton agenda.

Hitchens And The Dreaded "Islamist Menace"

Does Christopher Hitchens simply make stuff up, or is there something behind this seeming nonsense?

Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was.

It's the political left who characterizes Muslims as dark-skinned and backward? It's the political left who was (and is) unaware of Palestinian Christians? And I'm not sure how he came up with his prattle about India. But it gets better....

And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

I only occasionally see reference to the term "Islamophobia", but I do see frequent use of the similar "stupid neologism", Islamofascist. What would Hitchens make of that....

Why are people like Hitchens so eager to scrap every value and principle of the West in order to save it from a perceived Islamic menace?

Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

Right. Because the propaganda is so convincing, that it's worth throwing away such conceits as free speech and the First Amendment in order to protect Hitchens' sensitivities. And there's no better way to demonstrate the freedoms and resilience of Western culture than by engaging in censorship and speech bans.

A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

By what definition does "self-determination" mean, "You need to be a permanent minority population in a state that probably won't be particularly respectful of your rights, except while it remains under the point of our gun"? Ah, but true self-determination would be "defeat under another name", so sorry Kurds, Hitchens wants you to settle for this false kind, but wants you to rest assured that if you end up landlocked in the midst of hostile neighbors, and potentially excluded from your former nation's oil wealth, the U.S. will defend your borders.

Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future.

Should we assume that Hitchens believes it is the political left that would ridicule his ideas for rapprochement with and massive aid to Iran?

A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture - especially its once-famous vines - has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Sorry, Hitchens, that sounds like a... pipe dream. Which pharmaceutical companies are complaining about a shortage of opium poppies? (I will grant, if we turn the opium into medications which we then provide at bargain prices to the developing world, supply might not outstrip demand - but it'll cost us at both ends.) As Hitchens supposedly wants to support India, what would this policy do to Indian opium farmers who presently supply much of our legal demand? What will we pay for the poppies, and will that truly match what the drug cartels will pay? Will we hang around the farms afterward to provide an armed defense to the farms, whose sales will surely anger the "warlords and Talibanists" who receive money from the illicit market? How will we ever get out of this business - what legitimate crop is going to provide farmers with even a tenth of the revenues of opium poppies?

It's not that Hitchens has no valid points in his essay. But, as usual, he buries them in claptrap.

But If We Look To Other Commonalities....

When I think of the word "fascism", I think of traditional definitions such as this:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

The colloquial alternative meaning, "a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control", also comes to mind, but I think it is fair to criticize that use as being... well, let's use the words of Jonah Goldberg's publisher,

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers” - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale.

The first part is nonsense, of course - such accusations are occasionally made by a few people, but the assertion is an absurd overgeneralization. In terms of popularizing the meaningless, overbroad use of the term, people like Goldberg lead the field - "But who are the real fascists in our midst? writes his publisher in support of his evolving book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Alright then - so in one breath the use of the word "fascist" is an unfair tool used to impugn somebody's politics, and in the next, "By the way, liberals are fascists" - his "striking parallels":

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Goldberg apparently believes that by finding commonalities between two political ideologies, they somehow merge.

• Liberalism is not the same thing as socialism;
• The idea that "free health care", instituted in Germany under Otto Von Bismarck in 1883, emerged from Nazism defies both history and common sense, while Italy long ago emerged from fascism yet has chosen to maintain national health care despite its being introduced by Mussolini;
• I don't know of any liberals who believe in "guaranteed jobs";
• I don't know any liberals who believe in confiscating inherited wealth, nor of any in the mainstream who support any form of confiscatory estate tax;
• I am not sure what it means to expend "vast sums" on education, but I'm not aware of any mainstream conservative movement that admits to wishing to defund public education, of any mainstream "liberal" movement to significantly increase spending on public education, or of any appreciable difference in state education spending which follows from a transition from Democratic to Republican governance;
• To characterize Nazi programs of eugenics as "pro-choice" in nature verges on the obscene; outside of that context, the Nazis encouraged population growth and large families;
• The Constitution, which long predates the advent of fascism, separates church and state, although I'm sure if they were around the Founding Fathers would be the first to apologize for offending Goldberg's sensitivities (and, sorry, liberalism is not working to advance paganism);
• To the extent that some on the political left support gun control as a means of reducing crime and gun-related accidents, there's a world of difference between their methods and motivations and those of a totalitarian regime which wishes to suppress specific individuals and groups;
• The Nazis opposed smoking... and drug use, sure, as part of their goal of "bodily purity". Goldberg focuses on a nebulous, poorly implemented, and in no small part bipartisan "war on smoking", yet disregards the "war on drugs";
• The number of "liberals" who can be reasonably deemed to "loathe the free market" is infinitesimal;
• Fascists, like every developed country, offer some form of "pension" to the elderly? The horror;
• Goldberg would equate quota systems meant to advance discrimination against disfavored minorities with affirmative action?
• Goldberg would equate modern "speech codes" which protect conduct which the Nazis deemed punishable by death with Nazi-era totalitarianism as extended to University campuses?
• Because Nazis liked organic farmers, organic farmers are Nazis?
• Because Hitler was a vegetarian, vegetarians are Nazis?
• Because Himmler was an animal rights activist, animal rights activists are Nazis?

It's easy to ridicule, as it's absolutely ridiculous. Himmler was interested in Astrology - does that mean, in Goldberg's mind, Nancy and Ronald Reagan were fascists or Nazis?

The publisher's note also tries to get some mileage out of people it deems as being on the political left, yet sympathetic to totalitarianism. "W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song." No mention of Prescott Bush? It's just silly.

And yet others, who have perhaps advanced less on nepotism than Goldberg, make similar arguments in advance of the concept of "Islamofascism". Christopher Hitchens, who loves that term, argues,

The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

It's interesting how there is zero overlap between what Goldberg deems to be the key aspects of fascism as applied against liberals, and what Hitchens deems to be the key aspects of fascism as applied against Islamic fundamentalists. It is interesting that Goldberg defines fascism as a tool to separate church and state, while Hitchens sees it as a tool to advance theocracy.

It is probably unfair to juxtapose Hitchens with Goldberg in this manner, given that Hitchens is trying to articulate a coherent argument whereas Goldberg's book is perpetually in progress (with the evolution of its tag line being something of a joke). However, it is fair to observe that in advancing the concept of Islamofascism, Hitchens takes a view of fascism that is at odds with any conventional concept of liberalism:

• Hostility to modernity;
• Hostility to other religions (not ot mention what they deem as inferior versions of their own religion);
• Leader worship;
• Adherence to "the power of one great book";
• Sexual repression and misogyny; and
• Advocacy, and sometimes overt acts, of censorship of the arts and literature.

The overlap he sees is largely a tendency toward totalitarianism, intolerance and dogma. It is perhaps also interesting to note that what Hitchens sees as key aspects of fascism are much more consistent with religious fundamentalism - any religious fundamentalism - than they are with fascism.

As for more traditional hallmarks of "fascism", "Islamofascism" is not associated with any particular race or nation - for those who don't know, the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arabs. It is not associated with any centralized autocratic government and, although the Taliban's example suggests it would be as autocratic as the regimes it seeks to topple, holds particular animus toward totalitarian Islamic regimes that it deems as being untrue to Islam. Advocacy of social regimentation? Happy to forcibly suppress opposition? Obviously. Advancing economic regimentation? Control of industry by the central authority? Not so much.

When you look only at the commonalities under a traditional definition of fascism, you're really speaking of autocracy, centralized control, subversion of opposing political and religious viewpoints, and subordination of the individual to the central authority.... That is to say, totalitarianism.

In short, as defined by Hitchens, the religious aspects of "Islamofascism" can be found among extremists in any major religion. (I will grant that the numbers of such extremists vary significantly, and concede that Islam has a disproportionately high number of powerful extremists as compared to other major religions, but this phenomenon is simply not unique to Islam.) The political aspects of "Islamofascism" are not fascist, but are totalitarian. And so you are left with a term which isn't actually descriptive of either Islam or fascism. But it sounds scary so, if for no other reason but your deep respect for the work of George Orwell, ya gotta stick with it.

... But How Unfair Is It?

Listening to George Bush recently, it's interesting to hear how six years of experience have made him a much better public speaker. I'm still not buying the sales pitch, reminiscent of a famous SNL skit about Reagan, that he's somehow astonishingly brilliant and articulate in person but somehow loses his magic whenever he's in the presence of an electronic recording device. But there may be reasons why that might appear to be the case.

Over at Fragmenta Philosphica, Paul Craddick recently related an insult issued by Christopher Hitchens to Bill Maher's "Real Time" audience for laughing at jokes about Bush's intelligence. The insult, more or less, was "If you laugh at jokes about Bush being stupid, you're stupid." As I've noted in the past, and this hasn't changed, I'm still waiting to be impressed by Hitchens. Unless I'm supposed to find it sufficient that he comes up with witty insults and uses them to avoid substantive debate - he's good at that.

You know what I think? - this is now the joke that stupid people laugh at. It's the joke that any dumb person can laugh at because they think that they ... can prove they're smarter than the president (like the people that make booing and mooing noises in your audience ... none of whom are smarter than the president).

But how fair is his comment? I think jokes over Bush's intelligence are tired and overdone, but what about jokes about what Bush is saying? Jon Stewart's jokes on the Daily Show tend not to be "Bush is stupid" as such, but tend to be a reductio ad absurdem where he plays a Bush quote and adds a few extra lines to highlight the problems with a position Bush has taken. Sure, the jokes depict Bush as stupid, but primarily as a consequence of his making public pronouncements that are absurd and very much deserving of ridicule.

Here's a slightly different spin on it - Bush talks down to the American public, spinning carefully scripted and packaged positions which are designed to advance his agenda while satisfying the largest possible number of likely Republican voters. If you accept that he believes what he is saying, some of those positions can make him seem stupid. This can even help explain some of the "he's wonderfully articulate in private" contradictions. In a private, off-the-record moment he is freed from his script and can actually address the facts and issues as opposed to hiding behind insipid sound bites. (Surely he does have a better plan for Iraq than "adapt to win", even if that's all he seems to say when asked about the situation in public.)

When you choose a "man of the people, blue collar, weekend cowboy, guy you want to have a beer with after work" image, you're fashioning a persona that will come across as less erudite than that of, well, the sort of guy who might make a documentary about global warming. And if you choose to take public positions on issues which are at significant odds with the facts and with science, even if you're smart enough to know better than to believe yourself, you bear significant responsibility for how that makes you look in the eyes of others. As politically brilliant as it may have been for him to adopt a public persona that can appear credible to a majority of Americans even as he openly rejects logic, fact and science, those positions make him an appropriate target for criticism - and for jokes.

If it's just play-acting then yes, it's not proof of itself that the people who think they are smarter than Bush are in fact smarter, and I would venture that Hitchens is correct that many are not (although "all" is an overstatement). It's a bit like thinking you're smarter than Michael Richards because your knowledge of him is limited to his Seinfeld character, Kramer. Perhaps Hitchens should try a different tack - rather than once again insulting people who disagree with him, perhaps he should instead attempt to convince Bush to break from from character. (The problem with that? Once the public knows you're intelligent, you can't go back.)

Getting To Know George Galloway

A few months ago, George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens were on Bill Maher's HBO show. Following some of Hitchens' trademark invective, this rather unimpressive exchange followed,

GALLOWAY : You have a rather unhealthy personal obsession with me. Can we talk about the issue instead of me?

HITCHENS: It's unhealthy – it's unhealthy to have to consider, Mr. Galloway, if you put it like that.

GALLOWAY : Nobody here even knows me. Why don't we talk about bin Laden? And talk about Al Qaeda; talk about issues.

HITCHENS: We're not going to talk about him as if he's our fault, Mr. Galloway, however slimily you put it.

GALLOWAY: You're a United States man now?

HITCHENS: We're not going to blame him for -

GALLOWAY : I thought you were here as a Brit.

HITCHENS: - we're not going to blame ourselves for -

MAHER: I love it when the British fight. [laughter] [applause]

KAY: But you still have -

HITCHENS: There's nothing British about -

MAHER: There's only one better fight, and that's a chick fight. I think we all know that.

HITCHENS: There's nothing British about Mr. Galloway. He's a fifth-column run from the Middle East in British politics.

MAHER: Wow.

While Hitchens could have fared better in that particular meeting of the minds, and by all reasonable measures should have fared better, it seems implicit within Galloway's comment, "Nobody here even knows me," that to know him is not necessarily to like him. He's right.

So Much Self-Righteousness In Such A Small Space....

Fans of Christopher Hitchens, assuming such creatures still exist, may want to change the channel.

A recent Hitchens piece in Slate was, well, typical of his work. Which is to say, unimpressive except it its ability to rationalize, self-justify, and demonstrate Hitchen's tireless ability to pat himself on the back. Now, you might think he was going to address an unexpected subject, or demonstrate a bith more thoughtfulness than usual, as he explores the unfortunate shooting of Iraqi news correspondents by U.S. troops. But... well, you know better already, don't you.

But the truly sobering reflection is that crimes and blunders of this kind are committed, in effect, by popular demand. It is emphasized every day that Americans do not want to read about dead soldiers. So it is arranged that, as far as possible, they will read (or perhaps not bother to read) about dead civilians instead. This is the price that a "body-bag" mentality exacts.

See - it's in no way the fault of the military that innocent people die as a result of military policies that emphasize troop protection. It's the fault of lily-livered Americans who can't stomach the notion that our troops might be injured or killed. But for these weak-kneed Americans, presumably our soldiers would be proudly dying all over Iraq in order to present a friendlier face to the locals. If only liberals would share Hitchen's apparent belief that troops are pawns - cannon fodder, if you will - the Hitchens vision for Iraq might come to fruition.

But wait a minute. It isn't the liberals Hitchens is impugning. It is the conservatives and their "liberal hawk" peers (even if he doesn't want to come right out and say it). Why do I say that? Because if the government and military were playing to the sensitivities of people who thought this war was a bad idea from day one, we wouldn't be in Iraq. Hitchens is accusing the military of conforming its policies to the expectations of people who supported the war, but expected it to be quick and easy, and (like the liberals he loves to impugn) don't like the idea of Americans coming home in body bags.

Hitchens tells us, surprise, that Hussein and his fellows were nasty people, they did nasty things, and that they hoped that high troop casualties would weaken American resolve. Well, how do I say... duh? But last I checked, Hussein was in prison, his buddies weren't running the show, and the easy victory that was all-but-promised by the war's strongest supporters has faded into a violent insurgency that the Bush Administration would like us to believe is in its "last throes"... even if those "last throes" might last, oh, ten or twelve more years. (It is curious that Hitchens, after depicting a Machiavellian Hussein, plotting to undermine popular support for the war through suicide attacks on troops at checkpoints, can't resist undermining his own argument with a gratuitous addendum to his column, describing Hussein as "deluded and deranged during the final days of his despotism". He always wants to have it both ways)

Military and civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are a test of something beyond themselves. They are part of a design, by those who boastfully claim to be unmoved by killing or by being killed, to evoke in us an emotion that they themselves negate. This terrible quandary cannot be escaped by leaving our civilian allies unprotected, let alone by shooting them if they don't wave quickly enough.

Well, yes, it would seem that leaving our allies unprotected, or shooting them, would be bad policy. It is hard to believe that we have been unable to formulate a system by which our allies can be better identified by our troops, so as to avoid unfortunate "friendly fire" deaths. But as for the rest... what the heck?

Military and civilian casualties are not a test of our fortitude, or of our commitment to a cause. Also, military and civilian casualties caused by enemy activity should not be confused or conflated with military and civilian casualties caused by our mistakes. We are to believe that there are people "who boastfully claim to be unmoved by killing or by being killed", and they are testing our fortitude by somehow forcing our military to respond to domestic political concerns by creating policies of self-protection which at times result in unnecessary civilian casualties? Even if I accepted that argument, how does it support Hitchen's thesis? (Perhaps he hopes his readers will, by this point, forget that the deaths under discussion weren't caused by suicide bombers?)

I don't want to seem like I'm being unfair to Hitchens - I do understand the points he is trying to make. I am simply astounded that he makes them so poorly and that, with even the slightest reflection, he should realize that he is undermining his own past and present positions. Hitchens would also do well to address the public relations strategies that made many of the war's most vehement supporters believe that the Iraq invasion would be a quick, easy war with few casualties, and candy and flowers for everyone.

As for his comments on Professor Ellis? It's hard to speak to them without seeing the letter at issue. But I do think it is fair game to ask, of all the nations in the Middle East, and of all the nations which have well-documented connections to anti-U.S. terrorism or more specifically the 9/11 attacks, why did we choose to attack Iraq? You can easily regard the attack on Afghanistan as a frontal attack on Islamic fanaticism in its own homeland, and as being in retaliation for the attack on ours. Iraq? C'mon. If that's in fact what we wanted to do, shouldn't a considerable number of other nations been way ahead of Iraq on our "to invade" list?

Slate would do well to dump Hitchens in favor of, say, Paul Craddick, who (whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions) obviously puts a great deal more thought into these issues for a weblog than Hitchens is willing (or perhaps capable) of extending even when paid.

And I thought Brooks Was Bad....

I issued some criticism of David Brooks a couple of days ago for his thinly reasoned, self-serving editorial about the present situation in Iraq. But Brooks ain't got nothin' on Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens first criticises those who were opposed to the war, but supposedly now argue that they would have supported it had the invasion force been larger. His examples prove that an overstatement - he references E.J. Dionne who does not argue that he would have changed his mind on the invasion, but instead suggests that had we not had an enormous post-war security void subsequent events might have gone more smoothly. It might be possible to find somebody who disagrees with Dionne's larger point, but it would take some work. Hitchens' argument is an absurd straw man.

Further, there would be nothing wrong with opposing a war on the basis that the proposed invasion and occupation force was too small, while supporting a war which would utilize a larger invasion and occupation force. A great many hawkish voices were airing concerns about whether the number of troops proposed by the Bush Administration would be sufficient to hold the peace after the war and - although Hitchens can't bring himself to admit it - they were right. The present troop deployment is significantly larger than the White House proposed, and it is presently being increased because even that larger number of troops is inadequate.

Worse, Hitchens misrepresents what Dionne argues, claiming "E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post has just instructed his readers that Fallujah and the Sunni triangle would more likely have been under control the first time around, except that we refused the offer of help from the Turks." Dionne in fact argues the opposite: "And when Turkey denied our troops the chance to invade from Iraq's north -- those troops might have pacified the now violently unstable regions of the country -- Bush did not pause or delay." How can Hitchens possibly justify his misinterpretation of a plain English sentence describing how Turkey declined us aid we requested, and pretend that the author wrote that we declined aid Turkey offered?

Hitchens then presents a reductio ad absurdem about de-Baathification:

Now we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on?

I have yet to hear anybody argue that de-Baathification should not have occurred. The argument is that de-Baathification was handled in an clumsy (perhaps incompetent) manner, resulting in the exclusion from employment of large numbers of qualified individuals who had no real ties to the Baath party beyond obtaining membership so that they would qualify for particular jobs or careers. There is a huge difference between what is now widely accepted - that a more judicious de-Baathification would have better served our post-invasion needs and the needs of the Iraqi people - and the claim that no de-Baathification should have occurred.

Hitchens adds another layer of absurdity - the false dichotomy that the Iraqi military had to be dissolved in its entirety or not at all - suggesting that it was only through dissolution of the entire military that it became "impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup" - yet I have never heard anybody argue that (above a relatively low rank) the officers of Hussein's military would have been retained, let alone that retaining them would be a good idea. As expected, Hitchens doesn't identify any.

Hitchens then rambles about the threat Hussein was believed to pose, and the fact that he once had some nasty weaponry. I can't tell quite what he intends to argue - perhaps that it was okay to use 9/11 as a subterfuge for attacking Iraq because Hussein was so nasty. If that is his point, I am not sure how it relates to criticism directed at the disingenuousness of the government in pressing for the war. If the case for war against Iraq could have been made on its own merit, why did the Bush Administration find it necessary to mislead the public, and why would any journalist complain that it is somehow unfair for people to demand honesty from their elected leaders - particularly on matters as important as going to war?

Hitchens confesses only one small mistake himself, which he self-servingly describes as "the thing that least undermines the case" - the extent of Iraq's religiosity. Hitchens doesn't explain himself on this point, perhaps with good cause. After all, it appears that Iraq is likely to elect a theocratic government in about a year, assuming elections are held, at which time the invasion will have successfully removed a secular regime and replaced it with an Islamic theocratic regime (ideally, one which nonetheless accepts religious and political plurality). To the extent that Hitchens endorses the Iraq war as a crusade which delivered the Iraqi people from the evil clutches of Islam, it is not yet clear that the war didn't do the opposite. [nb: I am not describing Islam as evil, but am merely describing an inferred mindset.]

Hitchens then reverts to bashing the "anti-war Left", pretending that everybody on the anti-war left had previously wished to gratify Hussein by unconditioinally removing sanctions from Iraq. I don't recall any such unity on the anti-war left, and as is usual none is documented by Hitchens. I do recall criticism of the sanctions as being harmful to the Iraqi people, as helping to consolidate Hussein's grip on power, and thus that different alternatives should be considered - but that's something apart from what Hitchens pretends.

Hitchens next criticizes France and Russia for "acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed." Okay - let's accept that the oil for food program was corrupt (seemingly another argument in favor of the reform Hitchens just told us were a bad idea), and that France and Russia were leading profiteers. Why then, Mr. Hitchens, did Russia and France advocate for reform or elimination of the sanctions and the associated oil for food program, from which they were supposedly profiteering? No explanation? That's okay.... I didn't expect one from you.

Reverting to his bashing of the "anti-war Left", Hitchens pretends that those who favored any change in the sanctions were arguing that removal of the sanctions would automatically result in regime change. Again, no examples provided. (Ironically, he argues that during the decade between Gulf Wars "a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party" - while overlooking the role of the sanctions in empowering Hussein to create that underclass.)

Hitchens' conclusion isn't any better.

When fools say that the occupation has "united" Sunni and Shiite, they flatter the alliance between the proxies of the Iranian mullahs and the Saudi princes. And they ignore the many pleas from disputed and distraught towns, from Iraqis who beg not to be abandoned to these sadistic and corrupt riffraff. One might have seen this coming with greater prescience. But it would have made it even more important not to leave Iraq to the post-Saddam plans of such factions. There was no way around our adoption of Iraq, as there still is not. It's only a pity that the decision to intervene was left until so many years had been consumed by the locust.

His flawed reasoning is obvious at the outset: He posits that if you recognize the fact that Shiite and Sunni militias have been cooperating in taking up arms against "coalition" forces, you are a fool who ignores the fact that most Iraqis want peace. Surprise: It is possible to recognize both facts.

While I'll grant Hitchens the point that it is unfortunate that it took so long for Hussein's regime to be toppled, and extend it to argue that if we did have to occupy all of Iraq the better time to have done so would have been at the end of Gulf War I, that small point doesn't save him from himself. Hitchens apparently lives in a world of false dichotomies, where things either had to be exactly the way they presently are, or we would have had to do absolutely nothing at all. Even Brooks was able to recognize how mistakes and mismanagement have complicated the occupation and transformation of Iraq. Hitchens, obsessed with proving his critics wrong, seems to have lost any ability to reason.

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