Old sailors never die; they just lose primaries. Anchors aweigh and good riddance, There'll be no "moaning of the bar" when this old has been is set adrift.From The Wall Street Journal
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republicans' standard-bearer in 2008, is facing a surprisingly strong primary challenge from the right, evidence that even party leaders aren't safe from the swell of conservative activism heading into the 2010 midterm elections.
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Steve Schmidt, the political "genius" behind the McCain for President campaign.
From Fox News/Politics
John McCain's top adviser from the presidential campaign urged fellow Republicans on Friday to warm up to gay rights and warned that the GOP risks becoming the "religious party" with its opposition to same-sex marriage.
Steve Schmidt, in his first political appearance since the election, spoke at the Washington, D.C., convention for the Log Cabin Republicans -- a grassroots group for gay and lesbian Republicans.
He urged Republicans, in the near-term, to endorse civil unions and stop using the Bible as rationale for gay-marriage opposition.
"If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party," he said. "And in a free country a political party cannot be viable in the long-term if it is seen as a sectarian party."
Schmidt, whose sister is a lesbian and who supports same-sex marriage, said he understands the Republican Party probably won't reverse its resistance to same-sex marriage anytime soon.
But he suggested that the party will be increasingly marginalized if it sustains that opposition long-term.
"If the party is seen as anti-gay, then that is injurious to its candidates" in Democrat-leaning and competitive states, he said.
President Obama also stops short of supporting gay marriage -- he supports civil unions -- but states across the country are moving toward extending such rights to gay couples.
Schmidt predicted gay marriage will create a bigger and bigger divide between the GOP and the electorate in the years ahead. He said that as young voters age, they may adopt conservative views on the economy and national security -- but they will not abandon liberal, social beliefs.
This would put the Republican Party at odds with a swath of voters, Schmidt said.
"I believe Republicans should re-examine the extent that we are being defined by positions on issues that I don't believe are among our core values," he said, while still calling social conservatives an "indispensable part of the conservative coalition."
Schmidt's position is not new. Schmidt recently asserted his support for same-sex marriage rights in March during an interview with the Washington Blade, a newspaper that covers gay and lesbian issues.
But Schmidt's advice to his party took a different tone than the social platform trumpeted Thursday by McCain running mate Sarah Palin -- the Alaska governor gave an out-of-state political speech for the first time in months Thursday, to an anti-abortion group in Indiana.
There she chastised Obama for supporting abortion rights and defended her abortion opposition.
Schmidt also said Friday that Republicans need to reach out, not only to gay voters, but young voters and Hispanics.
"The rapid growth of the Hispanic-American population for instance could soon cost Republicans the entire southwest if we don't recover our previous share of the vote," he said.
FOX News' Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report.
The U.S. Senate yesterday confirmed David Ogden as the next deputy attorney general, ignoring a flood of protest against Ogden's extensive record in defending pornography. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) joined the senators in voting in favor of Ogden, despite having been chief sponsor of the Children's Internet Protection Act, an act designed to keep porn off public library computers that Ogden opposed.
From The New Republic
By Noam Scheiber
You may recall that Lindsey Graham has been strongly intimating we should nationalize our banks. Not only that, but he says several other Republican senators are open to it.
So why won't Democrats, many of whom feel the same way, at least discuss it with him? Obviously one issue is the enormous complexity, which everyone would like to avoid. But the bigger hold-up is that Democrats just don't trust Graham. The same senior Senate aide I spoke with yesterday told me, "I think they’re betting on failure. I don’t know what his angle is. I’m hesitant to give him credit given my severe loathing for the guy."
Then today, another senior Democratic source elaborated, suggesting Democrats think Graham's nationalization comments are designed to talk down the banks' stock, making it impossible (as opposed to just extremely difficult) to attract private capital and making nationalization more likely. That is, the fear is that Graham wants to force the Democrats' hands. “These people say ‘free markets,’ ‘leave everything alone,’ ‘let them fail,’” says the source. “Now all of a sudden they’re saying ‘nationalize the banks?'” The cynicism is just incredible.”
For what it's worth, I'm personally torn. There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Graham and the Republican caucus. But he did sound genuinely exercised about the situation when he spoke to the Financial Times last week. (Graham’s office didn't return a call seeking comment.) And even Democratic senators like Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer have inadvertently talked the markets down with comments about nationalization.
John McCain met with Barack Hussein Obama today and announced that he will work closely with the in-coming administration. As Rush Limbaugh put it: "That scares the hell out of me!"MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (CNN) — South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on Friday became one of the first high-profile Republicans to publicly criticize John McCain following his electoral defeat, blaming the Arizona senator for betraying conservative principles in his quest for the White House.
The conservative senator, speaking to a group of GOP officials gathered in Myrtle Beach at a conference on the future of the Republican Party, described how the party had strayed from its own "brand," which, according to DeMint, should represent freedom, religious-based values and limited government.
"We have to be honest, and there's a lot of blame to go around, but I have to mention George Bush, and I have to mention Ted Stevens, and I'm afraid I even have to mention John McCain," he said.
DeMint offered a long list of complaints about McCain's record in the Senate and on the campaign trail.
"McCain, who is proponent of campaign finance reform that weakened party organizations and basically put George Soros in the driver's seat," DeMint said. "His proposal for amnesty for illegals. His support of global warming, cap-and-trade programs that will put another burden on our economy. And of course, his embrace of the bailout right before the election was probably the nail in our coffin this last election. And he has been an opponent of drilling in ANWR, at a time when energy is so important. It really didn't fit the label, but he was our package."
From the Western Standard (Canada)Certain friends (and, naturally, enemies as well) of mine are eager for the “fall of the American Empire.” They chortle with glee at the present economic troubles of the United States. They delight in the basically declinist views of Senator Obama and imagine an end to American exceptionalism – an America that “rejoins the world” after the Bush years. Well, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw, they may be about to learn that there are two tragedies in this life – one is not getting your heart’s desire, the other is getting it.
Yes, America is down. Yes, the United States has troubles. But what my friends fail to understand is that the present situation is not at all analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire. (Indeed, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire was not even the end of all of that – Byzantium endured for another thousand years). The very real prospect with which we are faced is not the fall of the American Empire but rather of the American Republic.
LEON TROTSKY's The Russian Revolution does not occupy a high place in the literature of conservatism. But the old Bolshevik could on occasion be perceptive. Analyzing the improbable rise of Rasputin, he noted how frequently shamanism flourishes in the bowels of a decaying oligarchy, when the languishing elites crave the stimulus that only a certain kind of messianic figure can give. The commissar had a point. In the fourth Eclogue, Virgil beguiled the patricians of the collapsing Roman republic with a vision of a miraculous child who would inaugurate a golden age. Eighteen centuries later such charlatans as Mesmer and Cagliostro practiced their mystic arts in the salons of the ancien regime. True to the morphology of exhausted elites, it is the privileged element in the American polity that has proved most susceptible to Barack Obama's appeal. Historians of the future, seeking to understand this enthusiasm, may well conclude that it was a kind of despair, the despair of those who, having lost their faith in the traditional remedial institutions of their culture, embraced a mirage.
T. S. Eliot put his finger on the problem when he compared the poetry of Dante to that of the modern age. Dante's poetry, Eliot said, stood for a "principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe." Eliot suggested that the old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture, Werner Jaeger showed in his classic study, Paideia, grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. Fletcher of Saltoun expressed the Greek view when he said that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."
Already in the 19th century, Nietzsche detected in Europe a "brutalization and decay of rhythm." Generalizations are over-simple, but the culture that has to a great extent replaced the old poetic culture values cacophony rather than harmony, brokenness rather than wholeness, and ungraceful forms of order rather than those grounded in poetic rhythm. The new culture--a significant force in education, popular entertainment and the arts, and modern architecture and town planning--has much less unifying power than the old culture; its perfection lies not in the organic whole but in the isolated fragment. Eliot, indeed, formed The Waste Land out of poetic fragments in part because he was attempting to render, in verse, the effect on the mind of the desolate and fragmented waste land he found modern life to be.
Whatever its merits, the new culture has failed to give people the tools they need to amalgamate disparate experience and perceive what the Greeks called the "wholeness of life." Dissatisfied and profoundly isolated, confined, in Tocqueville's image, "within the solitude of his own heart," the modern man, and in particular the modern man who comes from the well-to-do and predominantly agnostic classes, seeks consolation in the various and always inadequate intellectual and spiritual opiums on sale in the philosophical markets--Marxism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, Weatherman-style radicalism, the pharmaceutical eucharist of the anti-depressant tablet.
Obama is, if not quite the messiah of this new culture, certainly an artifact of it. He discovered early that what he calls his "story," that of a multi-racial prophet equally at home at Harvard and in the slums, struck the profoundest chords in desolate upper-caste hearts. Middle America, by contrast, has mixed feelings about the new culture. It has embraced television and adjusted to a new set of musical rhythms, but it remains suspicious of other elements of the modernist and progressive sensibility. Obama's healer-redeemer qualities, which find so warm a reception in the hearts of the elites, make Joe Six-Pack uneasy. Were it not for the coincidence of his candidacy with a stock-market panic, the Democratic nominee's campaign for the White House would almost certainly end in failure. But the stock market crashed, and as a result Obama is, at this writing, the front-runner.
The conservative case against Obama goes beyond both questions of policy and questions about his record and background. Obama is widely regarded, by his supporters, as a visionary statesman, yet nowhere in his rhetoric does he bring this visionary power to bear on the most pressing problem of the age, the vulnerability of the old culture of the West, which is the ultimate source of its freedoms.
The omission is disconcerting. Like Obama, I am a graduate of Columbia College. I arrived on the campus in the fall of 1984, a little more than a year after he took his degree. I understand that he almost never speaks of Columbia, and to do him justice, there was much that was grim in pre-Giuliani Morningside Heights. But Columbia nevertheless had (and still has) its Core Curriculum, a group of obligatory courses in literature, art, and music that force the student to come to terms with the miracle of Western civilization--with the Greeks, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; with Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Smith, Marx, and Mill; with Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. Of course you don't take it all in at 18 or 19, but even so the Core is bound to be one of the memorable intellectual experiences of a thoughtful person's life.
Yet the Core seems to have made little impression on Barack Obama. Its themes find no echo in his reflection on politics, The Audacity of Hope. Thucydides, describing the plague at Athens, showed that the virtues which characterize Western civilization at its best--freedom, a sense of fair play, a consciousness of the dignity of human life--cannot be taken for granted. Obama is much less attentive to the fragility of the West's peculiar culture. In Berlin he spoke of tearing down the walls that separate Western nations from the rest of the world: "People of the world--this is our moment. This is our time.... There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.... The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand." This wall-wrecking sentiment is in some ways admirable, but those with a heritage as unique as ours can consent to such a demolition only if we are certain that the culture that has made us what we are will afterwards be safe.
Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871.
Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper column. ‘Join me in calling upon Mary in this month of the rosary. In In 1571, in the midst of the Battle of Lepanto, when the future of Christian Europe was in the balance and the odds against them were overwhelming, prayer to Our Lady of the Rosary brought the decisive victory. We ask her now to watch over our country and bring us the victory of life.’ ‘Our Catholic moral principles teach that a candidate’s promise of economic prosperity is insufficient to justify their constant support of abortion laws, including partial-birth abortion, and infanticide for born-alive infants,’ Bishop Finn noted. ‘Promotion of the Freedom of Choice Act is a pledge to eliminate every single limit on abortions achieved over the last thirty-five years … I ask you to join me in invoking the Guardian Angels of 47 million babies lost through abortion in our country in the last thirty-five years. This horrendous loss of life remains one of the greatest threats to human civilization we have ever faced.’
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