"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
hilzoy Via all sorts of people: Here’s an ad placed by an organization called USA Next on the website of the American Spectator: The New York Times had a story on USA Next this morning: “Taking its cues from the success of last year’s Swift boat veterans’ campaign in the presidential race, a conservative lobbying organization … Read more
Because I am a copycat, I too have updated my blogroll. Brief descriptions below the fold.
by hilzoy
Yesterday our own Charles Bird linked to this comment by Paul Cella:
“The principle behind the idea of the Open Society is this: all questions are open questions — even the question of whether the open society should endure. On its own logic, the Open Society cannot silence any opinion, no matter how heinous. It cannot say to the Islamist: “your opinions are not welcome here.” It cannot say to the Communist: “we will not protect your freedom to advocate the overthrow of our society.” It cannot say to the Nazi: “you will keep silent about your views or face various legal disabilities.”
The moment that the Open Society decides that certain opinions are unacceptable, and thus worthy of social, political and legal sanctions against them, it ceases to be an Open Society. It has closed certain questions and renounced its creed.
The basic problem with the Open Society is that it will allow a polity to simply talk itself into civil war. The examples we have are not pretty: Spain before her Civil War and Weimar Germany.
Fortunately, the United States never has been, is not, and (please God) will never become an Open Society. We have always been willing to proscribe certain opinions, to place a high enough price on holding certain views that most people simply give them up; we have, in short, always been willing to offer to subversives the choice that Athens gave to Socrates: silence, exile, or death.
That George Soros is trying to overturn this American tradition does not speak well of him. “
Charles described this comment as an “astute observation”. I respectfully disagree, and I want to explain why.
From the Washington Post:
“Following through on a promise he has made repeatedly since his victory in November, President Bush yesterday renominated 12 candidates for federal appeals court seats whose confirmations were blocked by Senate Democrats during his first term.
The renomination of the judicial candidates promises to once again ignite an intense partisan battle with Senate Democrats. They have vowed to thwart Bush’s nominees, whom they consider too conservative. (…)
Among the most controversial nominees are Terrence W. Boyle, a federal district judge in North Carolina and nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, whom Democrats have criticized for his stances in civil rights cases; Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Richman Owen, a nominee for the 5th Circuit, whose jurisprudence in abortion, civil rights and environmental cases has been criticized; California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, nominated to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who Democrats say has referred to the New Deal as a “socialist revolution”; and William J. Haynes II, who served as Pentagon general counsel when controversial detainee policies were set that allowed enemy combatants to be held indefinitely without charges and access to counsel. He was again nominated for the 4th Circuit.”
I’d like to explain why I think that two of these nominees should be rejected. (I don’t know enough about the others to say.)
Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been musing on the following problem: America is devoted to democracy and human rights, and we would like to share these ideals with the rest of the world. He notes our recent attempts to spread freedom by force, but thinks this is likely to be counterproductive. What to do? My … Read more
This is more or less an open thread, whose pitiful excuse for existence is that, as the title says, the Poor Man is so funny that I have to quote him (them?) here. First, while I have resisted the temptation to post about Jeff Gannon — easy to do, since the temptation in question is … Read more
It’s grey and cold here in Baltimore, with tiny bits of snow falling now and again, so I wondered: what could I post that might liven things up a bit? And for some reason my thoughts turned to peculiar saints. In the same way that some people (myself included) love reading atlases, I love reading … Read more
Wampum is putting up finalists for the Koufax awards, and we are in the running in two categories. You can vote for ObWi for best group blog here, and for Katherine’s series on extraordinary rendition here. Alternately, you could vote for someone else, but then we would be crippled by insecurity and have to go … Read more
Via TAPPED: I’ve been vaguely aware that there’s a bill moving through Congress that gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to set aside any laws he pleases if he decides it’s necessary to do so in order to build a border fence, but I only just got around to actually looking up the … Read more
Chris Mooney pointed me to a survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The survey was sent to more than 1400 scientists working for the US Fush and Wildlife Service; 414 of them responded. Among its findings: “Nearly half of all respondents whose work is related to endangered species … Read more
The Washington Post reports that a Pentagon investigation has confirmed the reports of female interrogators at Guantanamo using sexually provocative behavior as an interrogation tactic, and smearing prisoners with what they said was menstrual blood. “Female interrogators repeatedly used sexually suggestive tactics to try to humiliate and pry information from devout Muslim men held at … Read more
I was going to sleep, honest I was, but I had to do one last thing with my computer, and I decided to look at this morning’s Washington Post, and there was this horrible, horrible headline: Medicare Drug Benefit May Cost $1.2 Trillion: Estimate Dwarfs Bush’s Original Price Tag. “The White House released budget figures … Read more
When I’m arguing about Social Security, there comes a point when I just know that someone is going to bring up the fact that even Bill Clinton said there was a Social Security crisis back in the late 1990s. Every so often, it crossed my mind that I might write something about why he said … Read more
In the message to Congress that accompanied his FY2006 budget, President Bush wrote: “By holding Federal programs to a firm test of accountability and focusing our resources on top priorities, we are taking the steps necessary to achieve our deficit reduction goals.” This is a joke. The President’s budget omits all spending for the wars … Read more
From the Chicago Sun-Times: “A frozen embryo destroyed in a Chicago fertility clinic was a human being whose parents are entitled to file a wrongful-death lawsuit, a Cook County judge ruled Friday. (…) Alison Miller and Todd Parrish hoped to conceive a child with help from the Center for Human Reproduction, but the one fertilized … Read more
I have only watched the Super Bowl once in my life. It was my first year living in Baltimore, and against all odds, the Ravens were playing. The whole town had gone delightfully insane: the buildings were floodlit purple (for those of you who don’t live here, that’s the Ravens’ color); cars had sprouted all … Read more
Elizabeth Anderson has a post on Left2Right that makes a really good point. “President Bush boasts, as one of his major policy achievements, that he has “cut” taxes. Virtually all media outlets and partisan sources, including Bush’s critics, follow Bush in calling his tax policies tax “cuts.” But Bush has not cut taxes. He has … Read more
A few points about the President’s plan as outlined in his State of the Union speech and in a White House briefing by an unnamed senior administration official, that Atrios helpfully posted on his website: About its cost. This from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: “The senior official said the borrowing costs over … Read more
I recall one of my very first posts here at Obsidian Wings. It was shortly after the Abu Ghraib story broke, and I said something like: “The Republicans have brought shame on this country.” And Moe (I miss Moe!) got very angry; if I recall correctly, his response began: I am a Republican… Now, I thought then that my post pretty clearly referred to the leadership of the Republican Party, especially since Moe and other rank-and-file Republicans were obviously not responsible for Abu Ghraib, and I didn’t exactly see the point of objecting to it. Nonetheless, it was his site, so I apologized and all was well.
Sometime around the time I was asked to join the site, I decided that I had been wrong, and that Moe’s rule (no generalizations about ‘the right’, ‘the left’, etc.) was a very good one. It avoided all sorts of pointless arguments, for one thing. It also seemed to me that making such generalizations was a form of intellectual laziness: when I was tempted to make them, I was not going to the trouble of actually figuring out who I was talking about, and it was therefore much easier for me to imagine stereotypical versions of my opponents than it would be if I had to actually say: I am talking about Sebastian or Von or Moe. I had always tried to avoid those stereotypes, but Moe’s rule forced me to.
This is all a preamble to the following question: when people talk about “the Left”, who, exactly, do they have in mind? I have no idea. And I suspect that the idea that there is something called ‘the Left’ which is large enough to be worth talking about is often simply a figment of the various writers’ imaginations, and that they can only believe this ‘Left’ to be a real, significant group because they do not force themselves to identify who they are talking about more precisely. If they were precise, they would (I think) have to conclude either that ‘the Left’ is a tiny group of people, or that much of what they say about it is not true. But because they are not, they can say all sorts of things about it without ever running the risk of being proved wrong.
Via Atrios and Kevin Drum, a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
“As a graduate student in public affairs at the University of Minnesota, I recently heard an in-class presentation by John Hinderaker, who, with partner Scott Johnson, runs the Powerline blog. Powerline played a role in breaking the Rathergate affair and was recently named “Blog of the Year” by Time magazine.
Prior to Hinderaker’s presentation, the week before the November elections, I visited the Powerline site. To my surprise an Oct. 27 post covered alleged voter fraud in Racine, Wis., my hometown. The charges involved the registering of illegal aliens to vote. The story seemed outrageous, so I made a few phone calls to check it out.
What I discovered was troubling. There was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations. Powerline posted the story based on the word of a single individual employed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). This was hearsay at best, posted as “news” at a time when voter registration efforts by the Democrats and 527 groups were coming under fire by conservatives.
At class I asked Hinderaker if posts to Powerline were fact-checked. He was dismissive of the question, so I asked if he was aware that the Racine voter fraud story was inaccurate. He stated that he was not, slapped his hands together and stated that the blogosphere was all about speed and therefore did not allow for fact-checking. Mr. Hinderaker went on to say, “Our readers let us know when we get it wrong.”
And therein lies the cautionary Catch-22: Bloggers may serve as media watchdogs, but who will watch the blogs? Do you have time to fact-check what you read online?”
Hindrocket disputes this:
“The piece accuses us of a failure to fact-check. The author refers to a news story we linked to last October which related to voter fraud in Wisconsin, and says that she “made a few phone calls” and determined that “[t]here was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations.” No hint as to whom she called, or what information she learned that demonstrated that the allegations in the news story were false.
We are, of course, preparing a response. It will focus, I think, on the fact-checking that the Strib did before they printed Ms. Gage’s attack on us. I talked to Commentary Editor Eric Ringham today, and he acknowledged that the Strib didn’t do any fact-checking at all before they accused us of not fact-checking. That’s right: None. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. And Ms. Gage, if that’s really her name, has no knowledge about the voter fraud scandal which has now resulted in a federal criminal investigation.”
Since he has not posted the promised response yet, I don’t know whether he will also dispute Gage’s account of what he said. This is important: if he did in fact say that “the blogosphere was all about speed and therefore did not allow for fact-checking”, that is, in my view wrong, and it should also be very important to Powerline’s readers. If not, that would also be good to know. One way or the other, I hope he addresses this question.
It’s also worth noting that I haven’t found any evidence that the allegations he discussed in the post Gage refers to have “resulted in a federal criminal investigation.” (There was a federal investigation into other allegations of voter fraud in Racine, which has resulted in criminal charges.) As far as I can tell, this was the response to the allegations Gage was talking about:
“Also Thursday, the Racine County district attorney’s office said it has had difficulty proving allegations by a Michigan organization that Racine members of Voces de la Frontera, a group that aids migrant workers, committed any violations in registering voters.
The Federation for Immigration Reform alleged that two of its members posed as people who are not eligible to vote who then worked through Voces de la Frontera to register voters in Racine and Milwaukee.
The district attorney’s office said in a statement that an audiotape from FAIR purporting to document the violations is difficult to hear and contains “no clear evidence that a crime was committed.””
Leaving these issues aside, however …
While everyone is preoccupied with Social Security, another Bush agenda item is moving quietly forward. From the LA Times:
“Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century.
In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers — instead of looking to employers for health insurance — would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.
Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed. (…)
Critics say the Republican approach is really an attempt to shift the risks, massive costs and knotty problems of healthcare from employers to individuals. And they say the GOP is moving forward with far less public attention or debate than have surrounded Bush’s plans to overhaul Social Security.
Indeed, Bush’s health insurance agenda is far more developed than his Social Security plans and is advancing at a rapid clip through a combination of actions by government, insurers, employers and individuals.
Health savings accounts, known as HSAs, have already been approved. They were created as a little-noticed appendage to the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill.
HSAs have had a strong start in the marketplace. Although regulations spelling out how they would work were not issued until mid-2004, as of Sept. 30, about 440,000 people had signed up. And more than one-quarter of employers say they are likely to offer them as an option.
The accounts are available only to people who buy high-deductible health insurance, either through an employer or individually. Consumers can set aside tax-free an amount equal to their deductible. Employers can contribute to workers’ HSAs but do not have to. Unused balances can be rolled over from year to year, and employees take their HSAs with them when they switch jobs.
The idea that losing one’s job would not automatically mean losing protection for medical costs has bipartisan appeal. “Portability” was a key feature of President Clinton’s ill-fated healthcare reform plan. But the GOP approach is significantly different: Whereas Clinton would have required all employers to chip in for universal health insurance, Bush wants to leave responsibility primarily to individuals.
“This is certainly getting a lot of attention from employers,” said Jack Rodgers, a healthcare analyst for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
One reason is potential cost savings to employers.
A typical catastrophic health insurance plan carries an annual deductible of about $1,600 for an individual when purchased through a large employer. That means the worker pays the first $1,600 of healthcare expenses each year. By contrast, under the more comprehensive, employer-provided health insurance programs common today, the company begins to pay after about $300 in expenses have been incurred. Deductibles for families are considerably higher under both types of plans.”
This is a very, very significant change. One of the considerations driving it is a desire to do something to contain the cost of medical care. Oddly, though, this shift does not affect the health insurance plans the government actually runs. What it does affect is the health insurance available to the rest of us through our employers.
Via bioethics.net comes news of a National Geographic News article called “Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy”. The article is, in my judgment, really confused: confused in a way that makes it much more sensationalistic than it should be, and obscures the really interesting questions that human/non-human chimeras raise.
For instance, it says that “at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.” Now, I don’t know what, exactly, they are planning to do at Stanford, though I can guess. But it’s really unlikely that they are going to try to make mice with human brains. Why? Well, for starters, think of the size problems. You have a little mouse body a few inches long, weighing maybe an ounce, and then attached to it a mouse head big enough to house an entire human brain, weighing a couple of pounds. Leaving aside such questions as, how would it walk? How huge would its neck muscles have to be? and so forth, just ask yourself how, exactly, a human brain is supposed to fit inside a mouse cranium, even assuming that crania have some capacity to expand early in development.
You might at this point be thinking: silly hilzoy! Obviously, what the article means is that they will create a mouse with a mouse-sized human brain, just as, if someone said they were going to build a Matchbox car with a working automobile engine, they would mean a Matchbox-sized engine, not a regular one. But how would this work? A mouse-sized brain made of human neurons would not be (what we normally think of as) a human brain, any more than something small enough to fit into a Matchbox car chassis, but made of (a small number of) normal-sized engine parts, would count as a normal working engine. The obvious solution would be to make the engine, or the brain, out of tiny replica parts. But we don’t have tiny little replicas of human neurons. Nor is there any reason to think that it’s even possible to create a tiny version of the human neuron that works the way a human neuron works, so that if we arranged those tiny neurons the way normal neurons are arranged in the human brain, they would work (a) at all, or (b) the way a human brain does. So the idea of a mouse with a human brain, in anything like the normal sense of that phrase, is just a non-starter.
Likewise, the article raises this (im)possibility (quoting a bioethicist who should know better):
“an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice.”
Just try to imagine how the logistics of this might work. The two mice mate, and conceive a child. It begins to develop. Then what? Presumably, one of two things happen: the fetus dies, or the female mouse bursts. What could not possibly happen is that a female mouse could actually, literally, carry a human infant to term and then give birth to it. (Through a mouse pelvis? After spending the better part of the entire mouse lifespan pregnant with a child that would, at birth, weigh on the order of a hundred times as much as she does? Please.)
As I said, though, all this just serves to obscure some interesting questions, to which I will now turn. (Warning: it’s going to be one of my wonky posts. But it will be interesting to me to see whether anyone makes it through, and if so whether they think I’m right.)
Katherine linked to this AP story in a comment on an earlier thread. It concerns allegations in a manuscript written by a former translator at Guantanamo. I post excerpts without comment. Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear … Read more
Back in December, Scientific American had an interesting article on self-esteem which von wrote about before I could get to it. Now its authors have written an article in the LA Times (via Kevin Drum, and this time competitive me is determined to be the first to pounce on it. From the LA Times article:
“Here are some of our disappointing findings. High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that’s because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.
Self-esteem doesn’t make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better — even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low self-esteem peers — but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.
Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don’t support their self-flattering views. If anything, people who love themselves too much sometimes annoy other people by their defensive or know-it-all attitudes. Self-esteem doesn’t predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.
It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.”
The conclusion: “After all these years, I’m sorry to say, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.”
A group of bloggers, many of them past and present contributors to Daily Kos, have drafted a petition for bloggers opposed to the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. It’s quite good, and I am signing on (on behalf of myself, obviously, not ObWi as a whole.) Some quotes: Gonzales’s advice led directly to … Read more
A few days ago I found an AP story that I meant to write about, but didn’t:
“President Bush is readying a new budget that would carve savings from Medicaid and other benefit programs, congressional aides and lobbyists say, but it is unclear if he will be able to push the plan through the Republican-run Congress.
White House officials are not saying what Bush’s $2.5 trillion 2006 budget will propose saving from such programs, which comprise the biggest and fastest growing part.
But lobbyists and lawmakers’ aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, say he will focus on Medicaid, the health-care program for low-income and disabled people. Medicaid costs are split between Washington and the states.”
When I read this, I just didn’t know what to think. I said to myself: wasn’t George W. Bush supposed to be a compassionate conservative? Didn’t he just tell us that “we know that in a culture that does not protect the most dependent, the handicapped, the elderly, the unloved, or simply inconvenient become increasingly vulnerable”, and that to prevent this he was “working with members of the Congress to pass good, solid legislation that protects the vulnerable”? Is it protecting the vulnerable to cut health care for the poor and disabled? Imagine that you are trying to raise your kids on a minimum wage job. If you are, say, a maid at a motel, you probably don’t have access to health insurance that’s remotely affordable. If you or your kids get sick, what are you supposed to do? I tried to make sense of it all, but I couldn’t; and I was so confused.
Then today I read a post by Josh Marshall, and it pointed me to a story that made everything clear.
“Bush tried to get ministers and other leaders of the black community behind his agenda in an earlier private meeting that lasted more than an hour. Attendees said Bush told them his plan to add private accounts to Social Security would benefit blacks since they tend to die younger than whites and end up paying in more than they take out. Private accounts would be owned by workers and could be inherited by loved ones after death.”
So it turns out that there’s a good side to African-Americans’ shorter life expectancy: their private personal Social Security accounts won’t have to last as long. Of course, this won’t help if they have already converted their private personal accounts to annuities, but African-Americans are also disproportionately likely to die before they reach retirement age, and so proportionately more of them will be able to pass on their private personal accounts in their entirety to their heirs, without having had the chance to spend a single cent on themselves.
Here’s where the cuts to Medicaid come in. Since African-Americans are more likely to be poor than other Americans, they are disproportionately represented among Medicaid enrollees. That means that by cutting Medicaid, President Bush will give even more of the benefits of reduced life expectancy to African-Americans. And unlike many of his proposals, this will give those benefits to the poor and disabled, who need them most. The result? More poor and disabled African-Americans will die before they have a chance to touch their private personal Social Security accounts. This means that their children will inherit the money in those accounts, and will thereby become members of President Bush’s ownership society. Of course, they will have to enter that society without their parents, but no one ever said that we could have ownership without sacrifice.
I feel so much better now.
Katherine’s series on Maher Arar and extraordinary rendition has been nominated for a Koufax award. Here’s where to go — but remember, you only get one vote for each of your multiple personalities.
Via Brad DeLong comes news of an article in the National Review that is, if possible, even dumber than the one in which John Tamny told us that trade deficits didn’t matter. In it, Donald Luskin writes: “FactCheck.org also cited concerns about public perceptions of the $11 trillion deficit number in the 2003 report of … Read more
Via Instapundit: There’s a wonderful competition at Fark: best photoshopped version of Mars pictures. Predictably, there are lots of variants on the “there’s someone else in the picture” theme; my favorite is this: I also like this: But in the end, I agree with Instapundit: this one takes the cake: Even if they did misspell … Read more
From the LA Times: “All human embryonic stem cell lines approved for use in federally funded research are contaminated with a foreign molecule from mice that may make them risky for use in medical therapies, according to a study released Sunday. Researchers at UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La … Read more
My cat Nils is not very smart. (Although he wishes me to add that he is a mighty hunter and slayer of mice. Among the phrases he recognizes is: Nils! viscera!) In the past few days he has developed a new and charming addition to his repertoire of not-very-smartnesses. Namely: My house has two doors: … Read more
From Ha’aretz via LeanLeft comes news of quite possibly the biggest idiots I have ever heard of, which is saying a lot: the The White Israeli Union, creators of the first ever Israeli neo-Nazi web site: “The site is well organized. It has text and pictures showing the activists of the organization, “The White Israeli … Read more
As some of you may have noticed, I keep track of various anniversaries, since I’ve always thought that there are certain things that one should reflect on on a regular basis, and anniversaries are as good a time as any. Most of them are happy: the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, for instance. This … Read more
From the New York Times: “On the heels of electoral victories barring same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. “Does anybody here know SpongeBob?” Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a … Read more
I was reading RedState, as I sometimes do, when I cam across this post, by Thomas, called ‘What It Means To Be A Republican’. Here’s what being a Republican means:
“It means a belief in ordered liberty — that human beings can reach their greatest potential with minimal government influence; but that men, never angels, still need some bare rules in which to work. It means a belief in the rule of law, not of men. It means believing that, generally, the fewer rules and taxes laid down on human enterprise, the better.
It means a belief that not only are all Men created equal, but also that it is an innate condition of human beings, not an arbitrary gift of government. It means that all humans carry within them, inseparably and without any need for government affirmation or provision, certain basic rights, not the least of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It means that we believe America is a shining city on a hill, the last, best hope of Mankind. That though America is not perfect — and never will be — we are the best thing going. That “American exceptionalism” is a good thing, and not a slander. It means that we believe America can achieve almost anything, if it puts its collective mind to it. It means that when and if America eventually falls, the world will be a darker place — and it means that we know it.
It means remembering that Americans are not a weird mishmash of competing interest and ethnic groups, but a people bound together, not by blood, but by common dreams and beliefs and hopes, and by a belief that some truths are self-evident.
It means knowing that politics ends at some point, and the important things in life — hearth, home, faith, family, community — resume.
It means knowing that sometimes the dark and terrible things of the world can and should be allowed to die their own deaths, and sometimes, rough men must gather their arms and march into battle to defeat them.”
Now, I was a Republican back in 1980, when I registered in order to vote for John Anderson in the primaries. But I didn’t know that I was a Republican today. Apparently, though, I am — mostly, at any rate. Here’s how I see it.