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.

 
So George Lucas thinks George Bush is Darth Vader.

The problem with American ignorance of history is that smug, self-satisfied gazillionaire filmmakers can think themselves ever so clever for making comparisons that wouldn't stand five seconds in the face of real historical analysis.

If the almost comically mild measures the Bush administration has taken to step up counterterrorism defenses in this country after the worst terrorist attack in history make George Bush a Sith Lord, then Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would each have been contenders for the title of Evil Emperor. Interning or relocating a whole ethnic group or suspending habeas corpus (Roosevelt and Lincoln's wartime curtailments of civil liberties, respectively) makes allowing delayed-notice records-search warrants seem like chump change, I'd think.

If Lucas really wanted to reflect present political realities in his last Star Wars film, maybe he should have had the movie go like this:

The Jedi council (a hierarchical, self-selecting elite) come to convince themselves that the Republic is becoming a dictatorship. They base this conclusion -- irrationally, because they, as a closed group, close their minds to dissenting opinions -- on the fact that a popularly elected government's enacting wartime measures for which the Republic's history provides ample precedent, and which the independent judiciary does not find inconsistent with the Republic's constitution. They become so convinced of their conclusion, and so desperate that the unwashed masses don't see things the way they do, that they decide that extreme measures must be taken to save the ignorant citizens of the Republic from their blindness. Ultimately, they fatally weaken the Republic's legitimacy and institutions, leading to the installation of a dictator from one extreme or the other.

Weimar Germany, in other words, with the liberal intelligentsia hyperventilating so much over the relative (to them) conservative government that it was too weakened to resist being swallowed by a nasty bunch who really were all those things the center-left accused the center-right of being. posted by Thomas at 4:24 PM

 
Apparently, Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in his continuing scorched-earth campaign against a number of President Bush's judicial nominees, has made a weasely reference to the contents of one of the nominees' confidential FBI files.

There are serious consequences for disclosing the contents of those confidential files (including being booted from the Senate), so Reid didn't actually say what was in the nominee's file -- only that there was a "problem" with it.

That's incredibly chickens**. The insinuation can't be refuted, or defended against, or put in context without knowing what's in the file. Senator Reid is essentially asking us to take his word for it that whatever is in the nominee's file is sufficiently bad as to disqualify the nominee. He's not the most credible judge of this, obviously, being on a crusade as he is to sink those nominees that won't advance a liberal agenda in the courts.

One thing that annoyed me in the article linked to was the statement by a former Republican staffer that "Harry Reid is a disgrace to the Senate and to [his] Church of Latter-day Saints." That last bit is totally irrelevant (and misstates the name of the Church). Sure, Harry Reid is a jerk. And, as it happens, this particular variety of his jerkery has a bit of a Mormon touch to it in his using confidentiality considerations to prevent an accused from defending himself. But for Pete's sake, who accuses Ted Kennedy of being a bad Catholic, or Olympia Snowe of being a bad whatever-the-heck-she-is? Mormons seem to get held, not necessarily to a higher standard, but certainly to a standard that takes their faith into consideration. Ideally, Mormon politicians wouldn't have so much attention paid to their religion. posted by Thomas at 11:07 AM

 
Saints preserve us; the theocrats are coming, according to more and more mainstream liberal voices.

The most legitimate criticism of Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign (aside from its cynicism) was that he had a nasty habit of tarring garden-variety liberals and hard-core Stalinist subversives with the same brush. (Of course, in some of the more cloistered left-of-center quarters, there is a certain denial that there were any hard-core Stalinist subversives at work within the American left in the forties and fifties, which doesn't stand rigorous factual scrutiny.)

The present "Dominionist" red scare is of a piece with McCarthyism on its worst day. The tactic is transparent: (1) Dig up a genuine religious radical from under a rock, whence he's been advocating the death penalty for adulterers; (2) find an issue on which he and a mainstream religious conservative share an opinion, such as preserving the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form; and (3) offer this as evidence that the two people share the same ultimate goals.

One notices a small breakdown in logic between steps (2) and (3). Let's play that game again: Karl Marx advocated progressive taxation and free public education; Democrats also support progressive taxation and free public education; ergo, Democrats are Marxists. (I actually did run across a letter to the BYU newspaper opinion page where a student made that argument. He was an idiot, too.) posted by Thomas at 1:08 PM

 
Saints preserve us; the theocrats are coming, according to more and more mainstream liberal voices.

The most legitimate criticism of Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign (aside from its cynicism) was that he had a nasty habit of tarring garden-variety liberals and hard-core Stalinist subversives with the same brush. (Of course, in some of the more cloistered left-of-center quarters, there is a certain denial that there were any hard-core Stalinist subversives at work within the American left in the forties and fifties, which doesn't stand rigorous factual scrutiny.)

The present "Dominionist" red scare is of a piece with McCarthyism on its worst day. The tactic is transparent: (1) Dig up a genuine religious radical from under a rock, whence he's been advocating the death penalty for adulterers; (2) find an issue on which he and a mainstream religious conservative share an opinion, such as preserving the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form; and (3) offer this as evidence that the two people share the same ultimate goals.

One notices a small breakdown in logic between steps (2) and (3). Let's play that game again: Karl Marx advocated progressive taxation and free public education; Democrats also support progressive taxation and free public education; ergo, Democrats are Marxists. (I actually did run across a letter to the BYU newspaper opinion page where a student made that argument. He was an idiot, too.) posted by Thomas at 1:08 PM