Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
Lileks has an excellent rant today. A sample:

Keeping the country united? Good luck. Imagine FDR running a war with a press composed of cynical snickerers who derided the president as a rich old cripple who thought the best way to defeat Tojo was a war in North Africa and preached defeat every day through the hard slog of the Pacific theater. Imagine running a war with an entertainment industry that declined to make a single movie about the conflict - why, imagine a "Casablanca" where Rick and Sam argue about whether America started it all because they didn’t support the League of Nations. Imagine a popular radio drama running through the early 40s about a smart, charismatic, oh-so-intellectual Republican president whose bourbon baritone mocked FDR’s patrician whine, a leader who took no guff from Stalin OR Hitler! Lux Soap brings you, The West Wing of the White House! Imagine Thomas Dewey’s wife in 1944 callling the WW2 a war for oil; imagine former vice presidents insisting that FDR had played on our fears after Pearl Harbor. Imagine all that.

Those people may well want the country united -- but only if it's united behind them.
posted by Thomas at 11:30 AM

 
So Elizabeth Edwards says there won't be post-election riots "if we win."

Columbia's Todd Gitlin says "I would not be surprised to see outbursts of political violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the Weather Underground of the 1970s" in the event of a Bush victory.

Republican campaign headquarters are being vandalized, stormed, shot up, and burglarized across the country on almost a weekly basis. (I'm waiting for some heads-up Democrat to direct me to reports of Democratic offices getting the same treatment; given that "everyone does it" seems to be their standard response to charges of election fraud, the only explanation for their not making that tu quoque argument here is that they can't.)

New left-liberal motto: "Terrorists: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"
posted by Thomas at 11:26 AM

 
I try to keep up a little on events in Utah, where I went to school. Probably because of the state's dominant, conservative Mormon culture, many other churches tend to the liberal end of the religious spectrum, if only to keep them from getting lost in the background noise.

Utah's Episcopal bishop, the Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, is of the liberal Episcopal persuasion, which is almost a redundancy (at least as far as that church's clergy and leadership are concerned), but isn't so everywhere.

The Episcopal Church -- the American branch of the Anglican Communion -- is a little off the Anglican reservation these days over the issue of homosexuality. The Anglican Communion recently called (politely) on the American church to apologize for appointing an openly homosexual bishop, which the larger Anglican organization still considers to be inconsistent with binding scripture and church teaching. (The Anglican Communion is full of Anglicans from Third World countries, whose conservative religious philosophy Western liberals tend to find primitive and unsophisticated.) The Episcopal Church responded politely by saying, in effect, sorry for the trouble, but we're not going to change. The Episcopal statement justified its stance on homosexuality by saying the subject is "openly discussed and increasingly acknowledged." I'm still not quite sure what that's supposed to mean, unless the Episcopal Church sees its mission as reflecting the general culture instead of helping guide it.

In any event, the Rev. Irish of Utah defended the Episcopal declaration of not-budging with a statement that included a reference to her being unwilling to "turn back the clock" on this issue.

That's what got my goat. The Episcopal Church can do as it pleases. Even if the Bible is pretty emphatic on the kind of sexual relationships that are recognized as morally admirable (a really short list that doesn't include gay sex), it's not as if anyone, even the most conservative Christians, accept everything in the Bible as binding. It's always possible to interpret some things as having gone out of the gospel at the time of the New Testament, or to interpret others metaphorically. Some of the interpretations require strain-inducing mental gymnastics to justify, but in more skeptical moments I have to ask, what in religion doesn't?

No, what bugs me is the reference to a "clock." Clocks tick inexorably from one hour to another (unless my little daughter knocks my alarm clock off my nightstand and I discover this after my alarm doesn't go off, causing me to oversleep and be late for a morning court hearing and get scowled at by a judge). People have no effect on the march of time; morning goes to noon which goes to dusk no matter what we do.

The Rev. Irish, and the (inevitably) liberals who use the phrase "turn back the clock," seem to view history the same way -- that time and human events roll on regardless of human inputs, with the fulfillment of liberal philosophy the inevitable and uncontestable result. That view is lazy, arrogant, and complacent, and for such a well-educated bunch as your standard-issue NPR/PBS pride-in-critical-thinking liberal, it's inexcusable.

There is no clock. History is shaped by the people who live it. Sometimes they shape things right, and sometimes they make mistakes. A better analogy would be that people are navigating a tangle of highways. If they drive a few miles in what they later determine to be a wrong direction, it's perfectly acceptable -- even necessary -- to go back to the fork in the road and take the other -- or, more often, cut across some surface streets and try to pick up the road not taken further along.

"Progress" isn't inevitable. I dispute whether the "progressive" liberal agenda is even progress, since I believe it rests on unsustainable, fantastic illusions. It's up to us to keep civilization alive and improve it, and if that means acknowledging mistakes and making them right, it's no shame to change our minds about a decision made in the past, the liberal "clock" notwithstanding.
posted by Thomas at 11:06 AM

 
Working in the legal profession, I'm surrounded by conventional-wisdom NPR/PBS left-liberals. Over and over again, they express wonderment at how I could possibly be a conservative, being far too well-mannered, well-read, educated, physically fit, etc. (I'm starting to think they're just flattering me to get me to take on more of their work.) They honestly seem to think that conservatives are all drawling, irrational, bad-haired and big-bellied hicks.

George W. Bush is hated by these people not for what he's done, but for what he is. Except the "what he is" that these people hate, is a caricature. Respectable left-liberals hint darkly that he's setting the country on a course towards fascism or theocracy -- fever-swamp slanders made with increasing frequency, and in increasingly respectable quarters, by people who either don’t recognize or don’t care that they’re slandering millions of their neighbors at the same time.

If Kerry wins, the Democrats won’t question their myths. Left unchecked, they will strengthen and fester. Democracy requires that the side that comes in second has to be willing to accept the verdict of the voters. When you honestly think the other side is fascist, that's impossible. You don't accept government by Nazis, ever, democratically elected or not. Perpetuation of left-liberals’ conceit that theirs is the only respectable opinion is a real threat to republican government – a more fragile thing than I think many left-liberals assume.
posted by Thomas at 3:15 PM