Something to Consider

Linda Chavez's latest article takes on the question of how her race impacts her work, and whether some of the criticisms she's received for being a Latina conservative are fair. Unsurprisingly she says they aren't.

We rightly condemn stereotyping when it maligns whole groups of people. We know that it's bigoted to use terms like shiftless or lazy or greedy to describe racial or ethnic groups.

. . . We ought to relegate terms like Uncle Tom, sell-out, and traitor-to-your-race (or sex) to the same category we do racial and sexual epithets. They reflect the same root prejudices. Anytime we assume that we know something fundamental about how a person behaves or thinks based on race, ethnicity, or sex, we're exhibiting our own biases. People aren't good or bad, hard-working or irresponsible, smart or dull, liberal or conservative based on the amount of melanin in their skin or the number of X-chromosomes in their DNA.

Fair enough as far as it goes. But let's be honest. A certain amount of Chavez's marketability comes from her Latina status. A white male saying the same things that Chavez says would not be quite as valuable to those who employ Chavez. You see most conservatives, like most people, don't want to think of themselves as racist. And Democrats have occasionally been too free with accusations of Conservative racism. And at other times they have accurately pointed out Conservative Racists. So it is obviously very comforting for Conservatives to listen to or read Latinos, blacks, women and so on who largely agree with them.

That said, I, being a white male, may not be the best person to write on this.

Immigration Rex

Linda Chavez has been generally out of step with her colleagues in the Republican Punditocracy on Immigration, and her latest article mourns the death of the Immigration Reform Bill.

Immigration reform is dead. But before conservatives who killed this bill start popping champagne corks, they ought to consider the following.

Our borders will be less secure, not more. Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won't have the tools to do so. The 12 million illegal aliens who are here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration policy 20 years ago will just get worse.

All of that is pretty undeniable. She also points out that this increases the possibility that Democrats will write eventual immigration reform (if they pick up wider majorities in 2008 and the White House, for example). That sounds like good news to me, but what do I know.

I admit to being no expert on Immigration. I do know that this Immigration bill pissed off a lot of people I don't like; people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others. Part of me says that if Ann Coulter is against it, well, I should be for it. On the other hand, many smart liberals are also against it. So I don't know whether killing the immigration bill is a good thing or a bad thing.

Linda Chavez's readers at Townhall seem to be more in the Limbaugh Hannity camp than hers. I particularly like this comment by BIGbelly.

Hey Linda, my question to you is, What happens to Americans when they get caught in Latin American countries breaking the law?
Because as you well know with this Pyrrhic Victory it makes us all racist, jesus forbid I sneak over the border to check out the babe and her horse in Tijuana and accidently runs over Vincente Fox's rose bed.

Couldn't have said it worse myself.

The Clintons - True Believers or Rotton Hypocrites?

Wait, why not both! I mean there's no reason they can't passionately fight for ideals while greedily grabbing every dollar they can grab right? Or such is the take in Linda Chavez's latest piece of crap.

Like some 16th-century Antinomians who believed that they were anointed by God and could therefore ignore the moral laws that applied to the rest of mankind, the Clintons seem to think that they can do whatever they want in pursuit of some greater good. But the more ambitious and greedy they become, the less likely they'll get away with it.

I'd like to make a point here - I'm very pissed off and depressed. My initial take on this was to just unload a stream of invectives and call it a day. IJt would make a nice change of pace from my normal way of reading these articles and then commenting on them in a rational frame of mind. It'd be funny - to me anyway (and when you are pissed off and depressed, who gives a crap about anybody else?) It'd be easy, fun, wouldn't require a lot of thought; it's win win win!

I say this because of another article today, by John Hawkins, which takes material from several Liberal blogs (including Firedoglake, The Smirking Chimp, and Wonkette (as well as James Cameron's biography on Jesus's bones)) to prove that Liberals despise Christians. Some of the posts quoted are full of venom and somewhat embarrassing, although the authors are careful to note that they are talking about fundamentalist or radical Christianity, not Christianity in general. I presume John Hawkins, like most Radical Christians, is unable to to see the distinction.

Bloggers have off days - and nobody edits us. When I say something stupid it stays. I'm tempted to go back and change stuff on occasion but I rarely do it, because that's not the point to Blogging. It's not like an article that you live with for a couple of weeks or a book that you live with for a couple of months / years. It's this moment in time.

What Hawkins wants to do, and others of his stripe, is take that one moment of weakness and make that the total summation of Firedoglake or Wonkette. It's a form of objectification, taking a person and making them nothing more than a single action (not even the sum of their actions). Making Firedoglake or Wonkette nothing more than those few paragraphs where they took a bit of a piss at Radical Christianity. As if now and forever that's all they will do - like a little dutch boy forever with his finger stuck in that damn dike, moving neither forward nor backward.

I'm probably over thinking this - Hawkins was just trying to make his Radical Christian Readers feel good about themselves.

I will point out the awful quotation from The Smirking Chimp isn't really that awful at all.

Religious fanaticism is simply institutionalized psychosis and if we ever needed all the help we could get from reality folk (mystics) and courageous scientists, it's now. Our planet cannot be pummeled much longer by these nut cases without passing infinitely tragic points of no return.

Certainly if you are religiously radical that's not a great quote. On the other hand, the religiously radical, including, presumably Hawkins, believe that God is waiting to torture people who disagree with them for all eternity, which seems just as hostile if not more so.

Back to Ms. Chavez and the Clintons. Since I'm not going to just give a string of invectives I guess I'd better say what's wrong with her formulation. First of all, if she is going to complain about an occupant of the White House believing that God has ordained all that he does to be correct, I'd think that there's another person on that list.

Secondly when we Liberals complain about Bush taking large fees for speeches to Conservatoids (assuming he does so), I have little doubt that she will defend him. In other words it's not the money the Clintons are getting, it's the fact that they are Liberals and, well, the Clintons.

The War

Reading scolding columns from Conservative columnists about how we have forgotten September 11th is giving more credence to the thought that we live in a 1984 style society.

Or to put it another way, compare the following two passages, the first from Linda Chavez's latest article and the second from George Orwell's 1984.

Unless we learn to see our enemies for who they are, we cannot hope to win this war. We've got to stop treating our own government as the enemy. We have to quit worrying about whether the rest of the world will love us when we take actions to protect ourselves. We have to give up the illusion that if we just retreat from the world or abandon Israel the Islamist fanatics will leave us alone.

We must recognize that it took most of a century to defeat communism and it may take much longer to vanquish Islamofascism.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

We won't win the war against Islamic Terrorism any time soon and thus it will remain a constant justification for Republican power, intrusions into our privacy, and military adventurism around the globe. And given the nature of our enemy we'll never really know if we've won or not.

I don't think we are living in a 1984 style country yet. And I am comforted to suppose that most Conservatives would be opposed to going that far just as I would.

Neo-Conservative Shell Games

I thought the Republicans had dropped this particular canard; but they haven't. Neo-Conservative means Jew. When Liberals rail against Neo-Conservatives, it's not because Neo-Conservatives have led us into one botched war (Iraq) and are eager to involve us in another (Iran/Syria), it's because we're anti-Semitic.

Linda Chavez's latest article criticizes Mel Gibson's latest performance (as an anti-Semitic drunk), but then bridges the gap from Hollywood to Washington D.C.

Gibson's claim that Jews have caused all the world's wars is only a less subtle and more grandiose version of the current mantra that "neoconservatives" have led us into war in Iraq. Make no mistake, most critics on both the left and right who inveigh against "neoconservatives" really mean "the Jews" or "Jewish influence" has caused this war. Old-fashioned anti-Semitism used to blame "Jewish bankers" for controlling the world, now, apparently, it's Jewish intellectuals who pull the strings. The Rothschilds have been replaced as villains by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

Part of me can't believe I'm reading this; Neo Conservatives planned to invade Iraq and many of them were given positions in the Bush Administrations. They crafted the intellectual rational for why we should invade Iraq. And yet somehow it's as insane and bigoted to blame them for this as it is to blame "jewish bankers?" I mean they left a pretty large paper trail.

The heart of the matter is why are the Neo-Conservatives doing this.

Many liberals, who recognize anti-Semitism when Mel Gibson is spewing it, however, are less willing to tackle the new anti-Semitism that blames Jews for involving the United States in the current war in Iraq. These modern conspiracy theorists are simply reworking ancient stereotypes to fit a new mold. In this bigoted view, Jews are only interested in themselves, have no loyalty to the nation of their birth or citizenship, and are willing to sacrifice others' lives to advance an agenda that benefits their co-religionists. You can hear these sentiments, barely veiled, when Pat Buchanan or Air America start spinning stories about the neoconservatives and their supposedly wild ambitions.

Well I'm sure Pat Buchanan does provide plenty of evidence of Anti-Semitism; I'm just not sure he proves liberal Anti-Semitism.

Of course, the current situation does lend a little more weight to this argument, so I'm not surprised to see them trotting it out again. But a ridiculous argument is a ridiculous argument no matter when it happens to be expressed.

The Argument

There are two arguments you can have over the wire taps.

Argument number one is, "Should the President be allowed to spy on terrorists in order to keep Americans safe?'

Argument number two is, "Should the President be required to act within the law, even when claiming to protect the American people?"

Obviously the first argument is the one that most conservatives prefer to engage in. They are much less interested in the implications of whether or not the President has the legal authority to do what he is doing (he doesn't). They don't want to have to grapple with this question - "The President could get all the warrants he needed through the system as it is set up. Why did he have to go around it?"

Well we get one answer from Linda Chavez's latest article.

Which of these two alternatives will make America safer? The United States government will intercept communications from al Qaeda operatives overseas and their agents or enablers in the United States in the fastest, most efficient way possible, even if it means not obtaining a warrant beforehand. Or, if the government wants to intercept phone calls or e-mails between al Qaeda operatives overseas and their agents or enablers on American soil, government lawyers will have to spend hours, days, perhaps even weeks compiling legal arguments and factual evidence of the kind and quality that would hold up in court should any of the parties ever later be charged with a crime in U.S. courts.

This is a smokescreen of course, but it is also an answer. I think Democrats have been pretty good about explaining that you can get a warrant up to 72 hours after the wiretapping, and that these requests for wiretaps are seldom refused, so the substance of this argument would appear to be, it's just a lot of extra paper work.

Well that's to bad. But, as I saw on a bumper sticker once, freedom isn't free.

The Problem

Let it not be said that I am not willing to, once in a blue moon, praise a conservative. Linda Chavez's latest article is quite well written and makes several good points. She covers why the White House's defense of Harriet Miers as a evangelical Christian and sure to vote the right way on issues is kind of a miscue, coming so soon after the Roberts confirmation (where Robert's Catholicism was not supposed to be part of the debate and he didn't provide his views on anything).

And Ms. Chavez argues, correctly I'd say, that what is of far more importance is how she comes to her decisions. That's why her review of Miers career is a bit troubling to me, and possibly equally troubling to her (and other conservatives).

Harriet Miers is doubtless an able lawyer, but her career gives us no indication that she has the requisite knowledge and skill to be an effective justice. We know she has been ambitious and successful and can assume she is very bright. But she has largely chosen administrative and managerial roles in her legal career. She was the managing partner of a large Dallas law firm -- the first woman to achieve that distinction, as the White House keeps reminding us. We should assume that she is good at bureaucratic in-fighting or she would never have climbed so high in her firm or in the local and state bar associations, where she became president -- again the first woman to do so.

OK here's the problem from the liberal side of the fence. Harriet Miers is skilled at "bureaucratic in-fighting" which largely consists of knowing whose butt to kiss and how hard to kiss it. And for the last several years Ms. Miers has worked for President Bush. So presumably she's in the habit of telling him what he wants to hear. This might come in handy if a case on, say, the outing of Valerie Plame or the Rights of Prisoners not to be Tortured.

The problem from the conservative side springs from this; she's been skilled at climbing administrative ladders. But there's really no higher for her to climb. So there's no reason to keep kissing butts. She's free now to expose her real feelings about the issues as she likes. This would be true of any nominee, to a certain extent. But someone who had come up as a judge with a firm judicial philosophy would be far less likely to change that philosophy. Someone who's philosophy largely consists of doing what the boss says, well, they are going to need a new philosophy for a new job. So it's problematic.

My Secret Life as a Non-Hillary Hater

Interesting article by the conservative writer Linda Chavez in which she admits that she doesn't hate Hillary Clinton. I'll pause a moment while you try to get your heads around the idea of a conservative not hating Hillary.

At first I was skeptical myself, figuring it was some kind of rhetorical trick. But then I got to her last few paragraphs (where one would expect the old switcharoo to take place). Instead I found this;

Frankly, I've often thought that conservatives might be partly responsible for Hillary's success. Conservatives and liberals are locked in a weird, symbiotic dance with Hillary. By demonizing her, we've elevated her importance and encouraged liberals to rally around her. And there is no question that all the vituperative attacks on her book have increased sales.

In truth, Hillary Clinton hasn't been nearly the wild-eyed radical some predicted she'd be if elected senator. From a policy standpoint, I doubt she'd be a worse president than John Kerry or Howard Dean or John Edwards, or any of the other Democrats running.

Ms. Chavez's comments have the virtue of being largely true, but still it is gratifying to see.

Comments on Lott

Senator Lott will do his party and his country a service if he steps down. If he does not, the Party must remove him.
David Horowitz

Notwithstanding the circus atmosphere, Lott has not committed sins as grievous as multiple Senate Democrats. But that doesn’t make Lott fit to lead. At this point, he can fight in vain for the next three weeks, or he can step aside to spare his party—and the country—a political blood bath. It’s up to him.
Joel Mowbray

This is why Lott must not continue as Leader. He will be used as a tool to advance the liberal Democrat agenda, not the agenda of President Bush and his fellow Senate Republicans. He will always have to prove himself to others who oppose Republican policies, and this is what makes him damaged goods.
Cal Thomas

Lott was on the wrong side of the civil rights divide in the 1960s, and he now appears willing to switch to the wrong side of the current debate over racial preferences to keep his job as majority leader. His Republican colleagues can display more principle than Lott has by choosing someone else to lead them.
Linda Chavez

Republicans, like nearly all Americans, are completely anti-racist. In 2002, it shouldn't even be necessary to say this. The Republican Party can salvage the situation only by moving swiftly to remove Lott from the leadership. This crisis is a teachable moment.
Mona Charen

But, make no mistake, the Republicans have already paid a price -- and it is only the down payment. That Senator Lott did not step aside himself is a greater disqualification for leadership than anything that he said.
Thomas Sowell

Well, I guess a crisis lets you know who your friends are.