Obsidian Wings

Good Neighbours

by von

The title simultaneoulsy calls to mind Fred Roger's "Neighborhood of Make Believe" and a certain long-running Australian soap opera; yet, there's much to admire in the latest exercise in odd-couplish group blogdom, "Good Neighbours" (H/T Totten):

Welcome to Good Neighbors! Here you will find a communal effort designed to increase dialogue and understanding between all of the neighboring countries in the Middle East including Jordanians, Lebanese, Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iranians, and Syrians on a cross-country level, as well as to increase understanding, respect and dialogue among the various strata of society within our countries. This is a first of its kind region-building initiative and we invite you to pull up a chair and help make it a success!

Worth keeping an eye on.

Thank You, Chris Dodd

by hilzoy

Chris Dodd has introduced a bill (pdf, thanks to TalkLeft for hosting it) that does the following things:

• Restores Habeas Corpus protections to detainees
• Narrows the definition of unlawful enemy combatant to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the United States who are not lawful combatants
• Bars information gained through coercion from being introduced as evidence in trials
• Empowers military judges to exclude hearsay evidence they deem to be unreliable
• Authorizes the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to review decisions by the Military commissions
• Limits the authority of the President to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions and makes that authority subject to congressional and judicial oversight
• Provides for expedited judicial review of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to determine the constitutionally of its provisions

He adds:

“I take a backseat to no one when it comes to protecting this country from terrorists,” Sen. Dodd said. “But there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. It’s clear the people who perpetrated these horrendous crimes against our country and our people have no moral compass and deserve to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But in taking away their legal rights, the rights first codified in our country’s Constitution, we’re taking away our own moral compass, as well.”

For the last six years, when I wake up in the morning, check the papers, the only question I have really had is: what new horrible thing has the Congress and/or the administration decided to do? It's a wonderful thing to be able to have some hope, however small, that the Congress is going to do something good for a change.

Thanks, Senator Dodd.

Hoyer v. Murtha

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"House Democrats elected Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) the new majority leader yesterday over strong opposition from Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), exposing a deep political divide even before the party takes control.

The 149 to 86 vote for Hoyer over Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.) was viewed by many in the party as a repudiation of Pelosi's strong-arm tactics and a recognition of Hoyer's tireless work to elect a new Democratic majority for the first time in 12 years. If the Hoyer camp's head count was correct going into yesterday's secret balloting, Pelosi and her allies may not have swayed a single vote for Murtha, a close associate. (...)

"Basically, she got spanked," said a House Democrat close to both Pelosi and Hoyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. "She got taken to the woodshed. If she doesn't get it, this is going to be a big problem over the long run."

"Maybe it will help Nancy understand the use of power, the time and place for it," said a senior Democrat with close ties to Capitol Hill.

But others think the dust-up may have been useful in clearing the air between Pelosi and Hoyer. "Here's the deal -- she's apparently been irritated by a perception that Steny has been undermining her, and it's an incorrect perception," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). "Look, someone told me she hasn't liked him since 1963, and it has had zero effect on how well they have worked together. We don't have to guess at this. We have seen it. They can and will work well together as we move forward.""

It probably goes without saying that I'm happy about the outcome of all this. I'm not exactly wild about Steny Hoyer, and I wish there had been a better third candidate, but given a choice between the two, I pick Hoyer every time. What might not go without saying is that I'm not particularly distressed about the process that led to it. I flipped on the news as I was eating dinner, and there were various CNN-droids talking in grim tones about what this might mean for Nancy Pelosi's speakership, and what it might mean for the Democrats to have a speaker who had been so badly wounded so early. To which I say: Bah.

I would have preferred that Pelosi not pick this particular fight, both because it would have been smart to pick only fights she could win, and because picking a fight for the sake of Murtha, of all people, seems like a particularly bad idea. That said, I can't see that this will cause any lasting damage. As Barney Frank said, Pelosi and Hoyer have not liked each other for a while, and that doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of their working together effectively. And their ability to work together is what matters.

More importantly, though, I like the fact that the Democrats work out their differences in this messy way. I could try to explain why, but since Mark Schmitt said it better than I could back in early 2005, in a post called "What The Republicans Could Learn From Hayek", I'll just quote him:

"A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than "government sucks," they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday."

Whatever Winston Churchill thought, democracy is not the worst possible system except for all the others. It's a wonderful self-correcting system. Dictators can slice through opposition like butter, but for precisely that reason, there is nothing to prevent them from lapsing into absolute madness and taking their country down with them. When a dictatorship falls apart, it does, as Mark Schmitt said, tend to fall apart completely: not only do those who have lived under it lack the habits of responsible self-government, but dictators tend to try to break any of their subjects who show any talent for leadership, or at least to render them powerless. When a dictator falls from power, there is no fallback mechanism for making decisions, and generally no one who is ready and able to lead.

We could have a party like that, if we were prepared to do what it takes to maintain absolute party discipline. The Republicans went that route, and I'm glad we aren't following them. What we just saw was precisely the sort of self-correction Mark Schmitt was talking about: Nancy Pelosi made a stupid call, and the rank and file blocked it before it could do serious damage. That's exactly what ought to be happening. So while I wish Pelosi hadn't backed Murtha in the first place, I'm not the least dismayed either by the fact that she didn't get her way, or by the rather messy way in which she didn't get it. Given a choice between our somewhat fractious arrangement, which gives CNN's anchors a lot more occasion to pull long faces and say ominous things, but actually gets into a lot less trouble, and a well-oiled machine that sails smoothly off a cliff, I'll take the former any day.

Guest Post: The Philippines And Iraq

Note (by hilzoy): what follows is by our commenter dr. ngo.

Hilzoy pointed me to the following passage, by Josh Treviño (Tacitus), which refers to the Philippine-American War as part of his argument for staying the course in Iraq:

"The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were. But patriotism, pride, and honor are nonetheless still present in the American character. It is the American political class that lacks them in corresponding measure."

She thought, and I agree, that since I am a historian of the Philippines (and of imperialism in general), it might be useful for me to respond to this comparison. I'll try to limit my nitpicking on nomenclature (no one not soaked in imperial nostalgia refers to the "Philippine [not "Philippines" here] Insurrection" anymore) and spelling (it's "augurs," actually), as well as my thoughts on the Boer War, which I know much less well. Here, then are some comments.

- The "grinding conflict" in the Philippines lasted effectively from February 1899 to mid-1901 (officially, after the surrender of Emilio Aguinaldo) or mid-1902 (unofficially, after the surrender of Miguel Malvar and Vicente Lukban). The Iraq conflict has already gone on longer than this. (To be fair, the Philippine-American War was preceded by a "phony war" against the Spanish in the latter half of 1898, and followed by fighting - much of which was carried out by Philippine Scouts or the Philippine Constabulary - on the fringes against a few diehard insurgents and the conquest of the Muslim south, virtually a separate war.)

- The Filipino resistance, brave though it was, was seriously outgunned and under-trained for the conflict, so actual American casualties in combat - as opposed to victims of disease - were few. Many of the resistance fighters had no firearms at all, but were "bolomen," fighting only with machetes (bolos). The few rifles the Filipinos had were obsolete and ineffective, compared with the Krag-Jorgensens deployed by the Americans (as in the comic marching song, "Damn, Damn, Damn the Filipinos . . . Civilize 'em with a Krag . . ."). Worse, from their perspective, was that the Filipinos didn't have enough ammunition to practice marksmanship, and most of them did not know how to use the sights on their rifles, so that it was estimated (by Americans) that more than 90% of the shots they actually took in battle went over the heads of their targets.

- "Patriotism, pride, and honor" may well have been part of the American character then, but so were racism, which was widely and nastily displayed at this time (both in the field and in comments and cartoons at home), and a propensity to torture, including the "water cure" for captured or suspected "insurrectos." (There were extensive Senate hearings on the latter in 1902, if anyone desires documentation.) The will to conquer was predicated on the belief that it was perfectly acceptable to do horrible things to lesser peoples, which we did, as did the British, who developed "concentration camps" to deal with the Boers. (NB: I'm well aware these were different from what the Nazis later developed under the same name, but still . . .)

- The United States made a public commitment to stay and rule the Philippines indefinitely, if not permanently, and was backed in this by other imperial powers. (Cute factoid: Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "The White Man's Burden" was written as a direct response to this conflict, urging the US to accept its imperial responsibilities in the Philippines.) This had some effect on the resistance. Perhaps such a commitment is what Tacitus wants us to make in Iraq, but my sense is that a century later most Americans, and the rest of the world - to say nothing of most Iraqis - would be reluctant to see us to shoulder such a semi-permanent "burden" again.

- Most significantly, I believe, in the world before 1900 Third World nationalism was far, far less developed than it became over the subsequent century. Throughout Asia and Africa Western powers were able to conquer and control scores of polities, millions of people, who simply were not raised to believe that they had a right to rule themselves and a collective capacity to resist foreign incursions effectively. Thus in the same period, just within Southeast Asia, the French were able to conquer Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the British Burma and Malaya, and the Dutch Indonesia, all with minimal casualties.

The Filipinos were actually ahead of the curve in terms of nationalism, but it was still very much a recent concept, not widely or deeply implanted. Many Filipinos, who had lived under Spanish colonial rule for more than three centuries, proved happy to accept the rule of a more benevolent master, rather than insisting on self-rule, a fact deplored by the hard-core "insurrectos." (Virtually all of the revolutionary leadership, in fact, eventually came to terms with American rule, swore allegiance to it, and wound up in comfortable positions within colonial society.)

Yet just half a century later, the Vietnamese were able to fight the French to a stalemate and then force them to withdraw, the Indonesians won their independence from the Dutch, and the British got out of Burma in large part because they knew they couldn't hold it against Aung San without the use of Indian troops, which would be denied them by Nehru's soon-to-be independent India.

In each of these cases, it might be (and, indeed, was in some quarters) argued that the old imperial "will" was lacking by the 1940s-50s. This is to some extent true, but such an imperial "will" had in the first place been built on an often-unspoken calculus, that wars in far-off countries could be fought cheaply and quickly, and could always be won eventually. (Never, so far as I know, did imperial powers commit themselves to "pay any price" to conquer a distant society; whenever things went seriously wrong the public conscience or the bureaucratic bean-counters always said, at some point, "The cost is too great, it's simply not worth it," and pulled back.)

Once the indigenous resistance was stronger - more politically conscious, better armed and trained - this unspoken calculus no longer applied. Instead, the "home field advantage" came back into play. No longer could small numbers of well-armed foreigners dominate much larger numbers of "natives" on their home soil, as they had been able to do during the 19th century. (But not, interestingly, before this, at least in most of Asia, where not just China and Japan, but smaller countries like Siam, Burma, and Vietnam had shrugged off Western plans for conquest prior to 1800.)

The USA, having chosen for its own reasons to give the Philippines independence in 1946, did not learn this lesson until (at the earliest) the Korean War and the Vietnam War, both of which, fifty years earlier, would have been won in weeks. It appears that some have still not learned it.

- Having said all this, the question of exactly how the USA effectively "pacified" the Philippines, turning it from "bitter foe to steadfast friend," remains an interesting one, which has engaged me for more than thirty years of my scholarly career. (My first articles on it were published in 1971 - god, I feel old.) I just wouldn't expect any answers we might arrive at to be applicable to the radically different political-military landscape of a century later.

dr ngo
16 November 2006

Politically Incorrect? No, Just Offensive.

by hilzoy

Back in the day, when political correctness was a lot bigger than it is now, I found it incredibly exasperating. On the one hand, as (for instance) a feminist from way back, I can get really annoyed by people who say stupid, demeaning things, and I think it's both blind and churlish to imagine that saying such things does no damage. On the other hand, those few years in which waiting for someone to say something one could take offense at became something of a sport among undergraduates were really silly at times. (My personal favorite was the time people decided to protest because some student organization that was having a picnic involving burritos put the phrase "spend a lazy afternoon listening to music and eating burritos" on its poster. Apparently, using the words "lazy" anywhere on a poster advertising Mexican food was a subtle allusion to the stereotypical view of Mexicans as lazy. Ye Gods.)

(I also used to wonder why the students who had developed such quivering sensitivity to the subtlest shadings of words in one context couldn't do the same thing across the board -- in my classes, for instance, where they regularly used words like 'refute' and 'reject' interchangeably, leading me to think that as far as arguments were concerned, they were like Tarzan when he could only say: Bread: Good! Fire: Yeaaargh! When my students confronted an argument, all sorts of quite different words seemed to function like "Yeaaargh!", a word that subsumed every possible negative response, from a bad gut reaction to a detailed refutation.

But I digress.)

One of the things I minded about the whole political correctness thing was precisely that people were confusing genuinely hurtful comments with all sorts of innocuous things, they way people who describe any episode in which people die as 'another Holocaust' do. As someone who really objects to the genuinely hurtful comments, I thought that this confusion could only have bad results, especially if people began using 'politically incorrect' to mean something like: daringly contrarian. And lo and behold, bad results appear:

"BECK: Thank you. I will tell you, may I -- may we have five minutes here where we're just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table?

ELLISON: Go there.

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I've been to mosques. I really don't believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I -- you know, I think it's being hijacked, quite frankly.

With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, "Let's cut and run." And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."

And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

Um: no. This is not 'political incorrectness', in the sense of casting off the bonds of convention and saying something daring and clever and insightful, though slightly out of bounds. This is accusing a newly elected Congressman of treason, on the grounds that (a) he is a Muslim, and (b) he holds a view about Iraq that is shared by a significant chunk of the American people, and (c) he's a Democrat. (Nice to have the idea that being a Democrat helps to make one presumptively treasonous stated so explicitly.)

Or maybe Beck is kinda sorta not accusing him of treason, but just saying that he feels like saying: "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." Frankly, I'm not sure I really understand this distinction. If Beck is really just divulging his own personal feelings, why on earth should he think that they are of any interest at all to us? If, on the other hand, he is expressing his feelings because he thinks that maybe they're onto something, and that that something might be worth talking about, then he does not get to hide behind the claim that he's not saying what he thinks, just what he feels.

In either case, this is truly ugly, and no attempt to camouflage its ugliness by going on about how much he loves mosques can obscure that. Beck should apologize, and meditate on the distinction between being willing to buck conventional wisdom and just being vile.

UPDATE: Via Pandagon, one more person I'm not the least sorry to see out of power:

"Although some glitz has come off Mr Rove, Republicans have been more eager to blame botched campaigns and individual ethics scandals. “Bob Sherwood’s seat [in Pennsylvania] would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled,” said Mr Norquist. Any lessons from the campaign? “Yes. The lesson should be, don’t throttle mistresses.”"

Calling the police after someone tries to strangle you = whining. I'll try to bear that in mind.

Raising The Minimum Wage

by hilzoy

Since the Democrats are talking about raising the minimum wage, I thought it might be a good time to round up some good discussions of the question: does raising the minimum wage cause employment to fall? As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that, other things equal (and assuming that demand is not perfectly inelastic), when you raise the cost of something, demand for that something tends to decline, and thus that raising the minimum wage should have some negative effect on employment. As far as I can tell, no one disputes that; and so when people argue about the effects of the minimum wage, it's generally not helpful to point out that raising the price of something obviously causes demand for that something to drop. As an a priori argument about what happens when other things are equal, it's true, and no one I've been able to find seriously disputes it.

The argument for the claim that the minimum wage does not cause employment to fall grants this basic point, but goes on to say: in the actual world, other things are not equal, and so we need to ask: does raising the minimum wage by the kinds of amounts people normally propose have other effects on employment that tend to counterbalance or even outweigh this negative effect? If it does, then arguing that since (other things equal) raising prices tends to lower demand, raising the minimum wage must reduce employment would be exactly like arguing that since, other things equal, cutting someone open with a knife tends to make that person less healthy, surgery can never improve your health. As I can attest, having an appendectomy does have negative consequences for your health. I was laid up for ten days after mine. But someone who kept pointing to the fact that opening someone's abdomen up with a knife necessarily harms that person would be missing the point of appendectomies, namely: that those negative effects are vastly outweighed by the benefits of not having your appendix rupture and kill you. Same here.

Whether or not raising the minimum wage does have effects that outweigh its costs is, of course, an empirical question. Luckily, Kash Monsour has assembled some of it in a series of posts. He explains his starting point at the outset; I think it's exactly the right one:

"When I started my graduate studies in economics, I was perfectly accepting of the classical economic analysis that illustrates why a minimum wage should cause low-income people to lose jobs. But by the time that I had finished grad school, I had learned that there are economic theories that lead to different conclusions, and I felt that I had seen enough evidence to call into question the classical prediction of the effects of raising the minimum wage. Since then, the additional evidence that I’ve seen has tended to generally confirm that minimum wage laws only have a very small negative impact (or very possibly no impact at all) on employment.

This is a subject on which I have tried to let the empirical evidence guide my opinion. And personally, I'm persuaded that the benefits of a higher minimum wage for low-income individuals (and the distribution of income more generally) outweigh any possible negative employment effects."

He then presents some of that empirical evidence, which I'll summarize below the fold (with helpful graphs, which I copied from him.) If you prefer arguments from authority to annoying graphs, you could just read this statement (pdf), signed by 650 economists, including five Nobel laureates.

I lost all my thoughts of angels in an aspirin billboard.

by von

After the "thumpin'"; after the return of Senator-the-Lott's sail barge from the pit of Sarlacc (insensitive and unprincipled; sign us up!); and after some truly idiotic drivel from Tom Delay at RedState (thank God that Adam C. has kept his head) I am, of course, absolutely thrilled that Rudy Giuliani has formed an Presidential exploratory committee for '08.  Giuliani is my current first choice for the Republican nomination and the Presidency; these two pieces show part of the reason why (H/T Sullivan).  What other candidate is likely to have that rare combination of liberal social views and a conservative fiscal policy?  This is as close as it gets to a no-brainer for me.

Yet .....

I'll cop to being a bit queasy from Giuliani's lack of foreign policy experience.  We've had six years of not-wholly-successful-on-the-job training for our last foreign policy neophyte; only the terminally dense or determinedly uninformed have found the experience enjoyable.  While there's reason to hope that the Baker Commission finally cause a "maturation" of US policy (Djerejian is spot on in his assessment), it's not wholly certain that the adults will be invited to stay after they've delivered. 

Moreover, if Giuliani tacks to the realist camp after Baker, its not entirely clear that he can survive the GOP primaries (admittedly, he still might not). Indeed, the moment that Giuliani demonstrates some maturity in his choice of foreign policy advisors -- by, f'instance, choosing people who have done that sort of thing before -- he could face a rebellion among the "more rubble less trouble" crowd.  Given that Giuliani has no other natural constituency in the Republican party, any such perceived weakness could very well end his Presidential aspirations. 

Thus, though it's far too early to issue endorsements, I have an excellent chance of keeping my streak alive:  Tsongas in '92; Dole in '96; Anyone but Gore or Bush in '00; Lieberman in '04.  Regrettably, but:  "Giuliani in '08" wouldn't look out of place on that list.

Ah well.  Such is life.

Keep On Making Those Outreach Efforts, Republicans

by hilzoy

Why oh why aren't the Republicans' much-publicized efforts to appeal to African-American voters working? Ken Mehlman apologizes for the Southern Strategy; Mike Tyson appears with Michael Steele; heaven only knows how many culturally conservative black ministers various GOP functionaries have met with; some Republicans even hired rappers to cut songs with titles like "Liberal Democrat Education Is Wack". So how on earth could anyone doubt the GOP's sincerity on racial issues?

Well:

"Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was ousted as Senate majority leader four years ago because of racially insensitive remarks about America's segregationist past, was elected to his party's No. 2 spot in the chamber today by a single vote."

Trent Lott, 2002:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Platform of the States' Rights Democratic Party, 1948:

"4: We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to learn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.

5: We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiatt, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.

6: We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national orgin in appreciable numbers."

Strom Thurmond, 1948:

"There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

(Note about that one: Timothy Noah notes that if you listen to the actual tape, it sounds as though Thurmond might actually have said 'the nigger race.' I'm inclined to agree; judge for yourselves.)

Strom Thurmond, 1948:

"There are forces at work in this country today which would lead our people down the same pathway to the total state that was traveled by the people of Germany, of Italy, of Russia. Harry Truman, Tom Dewey and Henry Wallace are birds of one feather. All three are kowtowing to minority blocs by advocating the so-called civil-rights program. This time they can not fool the people and especially the Democrats of the South. The Jeffersonian Democrats have spewed out of their mouths that mongrel outfit which captured our party at Philadelphia."

Strom Thurmond, 1948:

"Nor was Thurmond any longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who had invited audiences to ponder working for a company or belonging to a union forbidden by law to discriminate against blacks. "Think about the situation which would exist," he said back then, "when the annual office party is held or the union sponsors a dance."

Nor was Thurmond any longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who, when it was revealed that he had invited the governor of the Virgin Islands to visit him without knowing that he was black, hastily explained, "I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro. Of course, it would have been ridiculous to invite him.""

Those quotes, and that platform, are exactly what Lott was talking about back in 2002. That's exactly what Lott thinks would have spared us "all these problems". Note to GOP: if you're going to make a highly publicized attempt to reach out to black voters, it might help to make sure your party doesn't elect people who praise flat-out segregationists to positions of leadership. It would probably work better than condescending rap records.

Just a thought.

Idiots! Kick Yourself While You're Down Edition

Trent Lott elected to GOP Minority Whip

Great move!  I'm sure GOP Senate members were thinking to themselves:  "Huh, the Democrats seem to be attracting a lot of attention with some corrupt members of the House.  What can we do to compete with that?  Hey, I know!  We could re-elect Lott, the guy drummed out of leadership for being affiliated with racists, to a position of power.  That will get some attention.  It will also do wonders for our base since Lott has said of the fiscal responsibility group "PorkBusters":  'I'll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I'm getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina. We in Mississippi have not asked for more than we deserve. We've been very reasonable.'"

ARGH!

ARGH!

AAAACCCCCCKKKK!

Senate Republicans.  They're so flexible, they can kick themselves when they're down. 

Europe Is Doomed! And Islam Is Teh New Gay!

by hilzoy

For a while now, I've been needing a new lunatic-on-call: a site where I can go when, for some reason, I want to read someone who is completely unhinged. For a while it was Jeff Goldstein, but he seems to have dwindled away and been replaced by an army of less interestingly insane people. Then it was PowerLine, but recently they seem to me to have gone downhill; besides, their obsession with their hometown paper bores me. But I think I've found a replacement. Mark Steyn: where have you been all my life?

Consider this, from an interview I found via Crooked Timber:

"I was told by some French guy that 4 out of 5 converts in Islam in Europe, to Islam, are women. I don't know what basis he produced that statistic. When I talk to people, they don't actually disagree with it if you ask around.

I get the feeling here without wishing to be any more homophobic than I'm normally accused of, but in my part of country, almost every lesbian you run across tends to be someone who's just been in a couple of really bad marriages and despaired of men and I notice that in Europe, a sort of similar trend is that women who have been in a couple of bad marriages with western men basically embrace Islam as a way of, you know - and again, whether it's your sort of boorish English soccer lout or your kind of sweet, you know, new male that, "I'll do the ironing, darling" type, that it does seem that the women up here in the north country embrace lesbianism just as a kind of general weariness with the available range of males. So I noticed that there's something similar with the women in Islam in France and Belgium. (laughs)"

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it? I mean, I have met one (1) lesbian who claimed to have decided to take women for lovers after several dreadful relationships because, as she put it, "I thought: why not date people who are actually interested in figuring out their emotions?" Stacked up against the much larger number who didn't feel they had any choice in the matter, and whose sexual preferences had precisely nothing to do with their experiences with men, this doesn't seem like evidence of anything except the endless variety of humanity.

But even if sexual preference were something most people chose on the basis of previous bad experiences, why would someone who had had a string of disappointing boyfriends decide to convert to Islam? I mean: aren't Islamic men, well, men? And if so, how would dating Islamic men, as opposed to other men, solve the problem? Is there any reason at all to think that converting to Islam would in any way improve one's disastrous romantic life, as opposed to leaving one to confront the same old problems while wearing a headscarf? And if not, what would explain the act of mass lunacy that Steyn attributes to European women?

Leaving this mythical mass conversion aside, though, there's also lots of fun stuff about the coming Islamicization of Europe. (Sort of like Paul Cella without the lugubriousness, or Tac without the bombast.) From the interview:

"John Hawkins: Give people who haven't read your book yet a quick description of what you think Europe is going to look like in, let's say, 20 years because of declining birth rates, the enormous social benefits they pay out, and the enormous number of unassimilated Muslims they're bringing in to try to fill the gap.

Mark Steyn: Well, my view of Europe in 20 years' time is that you'll be switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired -- and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them."

From an article in the WSJ:

"Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West. (...)

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world. (...)

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction."

Um: this is crazy. Europe is not going to institute Shari'a, any more than its women are going to convert to Islam an masse because they are tired of sensitive new age guys. I suppose I don't have any evidence, since it's a claim about the future, and I haven't been there yet. But I'm willing to bet my reputation against Steyn's on this one. I'll also bet on some similar propositions, like: whatever we do or don't do about immigration, the United States will not rename itself Aztlan, nor will the Congress decide to start all its sessions with prayers to Quetzalcoatl. It's risky to make such predictions, I know, but hey: I like to live dangerously.

Besides, it's not as risky as it seems to bet, about Europe, with someone who can write: "The guys in Gitmo, for example, that Dick Durbin makes a big fuss about, actually live in nicer accommodations than a lot of these Muslims do in Clichy-sous-Bous." News flash: there is no suburb of Paris named Clichy-sous-Bous. For that matter, there is no such noun as 'bous' in French. 'Boue', maybe, although it would be odd for a town to be named 'Clichy-beneath-the-mud'. 'Bous' is the 1st/2nd person present tense of the verb 'bouillir', to boil, but it would be even odder for a town to be called 'Clichy-beneath-the-am-boiling'. If Steyn had ever visited the town whose accommodations he's describing, he'd know what its name actually is; and Clichy-sous-Bous is a mistaken version of it that would only suggest itself to someone who had never heard the actual name (Clichy-sous-Bois) pronounced, and moreover didn't speak French. Which tells you something about how well he knows his subject.