I'm really trying to back off of making fun of Young America's Foundation. Honestly. But sometimes they make it just too easy. Take, for instance, the poll they put up on their site this week:
Yes, you're reading that correctly. The poll question is, "Why haven't Obama's youth brigades signed up for military service?" The options to answer are, "They prefer telling others how to live their lives," "They are chicken hawks," "They are just chickens," and "All of the above." (The current winning answer, by the way? It's D, winning at 63 percent.)
The question is first of all weird because Obama didn't actually campaign on going to war. In fact, he campaigned on the idea of getting out of Iraq. Furthermore, some on the left are growing impatient with Afghanistan and continuing to protest the U.S. presence there.
But the implication here is obvious. YAF seems to believe that Real Americans ™ enlist in the military when their president is in power. But if that's true, then why did Jason Mattera, YAF spokesman, insist that he didn't need to enlist in the military because he was busy "fighting the battle of ideas"? Watch it:
Obama was his usual, coolheaded self in front of Congress tonight, but he still managed to say to Republicans: You know you’re being assholes, and I know you're being assholes, and I'm about to get really angry. It felt like a reckoning:
If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.
But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out.
The imperative gives me chills.
Also powerful was his quoting of Ted Kennedy:
"What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."
Republicans ears may have perked up at the “M” word, but they undoubtedly resumed plugging their ears and going "na na na" at “social justice.”
4 out of 5 LGBT students report verbal, sexual or physical harassment at school, according to a GLSEN survey.
Today, April 25th, 2008, marks the 12th Annual Day of Silence, a day where students vow to take a pledge of silence to commemorate anti-LGBT violence and bullying and work to make campuses safe for people of all gender and sexual identities.
"The pay is generous. The experience is priceless."
The Leadership Institute is hiring 70(!) representatives to "help conservative students break the left-wing monopoly on college campuses."
"Benefits" include:
Field reps receive $2,500 per month salary, plus $600 per week housing allowance, as well as additional allowances for cell phone use, recruitment expenses, gas, and more.
A free laptop is yours to use throughout the semester. It becomes yours to keep upon successful completion of the program.
Your employment with LI as a field rep is resumé gold. Field reps use the experience and connections they gain from LI’s National Field Representative Program to launch rewarding careers...
With the weird and slightly apocalyptic weather and flooding recently (DC is like 70 right now), I have some disjointed thoughts about conversations that look place after that bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. Here's why: Read More »
Liberals are pointy-headed, creative individualists. Conservatives are money-grubbing family men who don’t care for the “life of the mind.” So goes the conventional wisdom, newly reinforced by an American Enterprise Institute study, “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates.” The study, Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Edreports,
argues that the much debated minority status for conservatives in higher education may be the result of differing priorities of graduating college seniors of different political persuasions. The study presents evidence that conservatives are significantly more likely than liberals — at the point when college students decide whether to apply to graduate school — to value raising a family and having money. In contrast, liberals at that point in their lives are significantly more likely to value writing original works. ...
In today's sceney the-state-of-young-conservatism-today piece in the WaPo, there was no shortage of glowing praise for that eternal conservative flame: Ronald Reagan. Campus Progress recently examined the fixation groups like Young America's Foundation have with the old Gipper. What's aways incomprehensible to me is that when you compare the two conservative two-term presidents we've had, Bush and Reagan, Bush seems to be far to the right of Reagan. Bush exploded the deficit more, fought a real war in the name of democracy, actually legislated a chip on Roe v. Wade, and has done a better job of putting toe-the-line conservatives in high positions. So why is Bush so absent among the rosy speeches that young conservatives make?
Is it just that Bush is that unpopular, even among the youth? Possibly, but I think the real thing here is that we're witnessing is the fundamental problem with conservatism in practice. At the core of their ideology, conservatives believe that the best of life and politics was in the past. First, they tried to hark back to the 1950s and early '60s. Now, it's the '80s. I've no doubt Bush will be elevated to such a position, but his time has not yet come. He's too fresh. Soon enough, though, conservatives will begin to gloss over Bush's errors and hail him as the last man that truly fought for conservatism. Too bad he's not there yet; he could really use the ratings.
People for the American Way's spoof Facebook site, "Right-Wing Facebook" is pretty hilarious and is worth a visit. There's the obvious, like Mike Huckabee's group membership in "I Heart Huckabees" and Mitt Romney's listing of "Big Love" as one of his favorite TV shows, but there are also some hidden gems within the site.
A few highlights include:
Fred Thompson is a member of the group, "My Wife is Hotter Than Your Wife (Unless You're Dennis Kucinich"
Romney comparing a "Poison-style 80s haircut" to his stances on abortion and gay rights
John McCain's status is set to: John McCain is looking for spare change between couch cushions.
Adam Key, a law student at Regent University in Houston Texas, has been suspended "pending a psychiatric evaluation" for posting a picture on his Facebook profile of Regent founder Pat Robertson flipping the bird.
The Regent administration claims that Key was suspended for wielding a gun on campus (which Key denies). Key's response to the request for a psychiatric evaluation:
"I will undergo this psychiatric exam after Regent forces Pat Robertson to undergo one. Truly, what’s crazier… disagreeing with the administration, or hearing voices that tell you about hurricanes that don’t happen, and the impending apocalypse?"
What is it with Roger Williams University? In 2003 the Roger Williams College Republicans, led by our friend Jason Mattera, got on FOX News for a typical silly rightwing stunt: creating a "whites only" scholarship. Now, the chairman of their board has resigned because he used a racist slur to refer to African-Americans in a discussion (ironically) about how under-represented minorities and women are on the board. I wonder what Mattera thinks of this.
Dana does a pretty good job eviscerating David Brooks' silly new column on female pop stars both on his argument and the niggling little matters of, you know, fact that Brooks is wont to ignore. I have to say, Brooks' columns on anything relevant to people under 35 are just so awkward and wrong-headed it makes me feel embarassed and uncomfortable just reading them.
Philip Klein of the American Spectatorcriticizes my post on the New York City aluminum bat ban thusly:
If liberals say that government can regulate "risky behavior" that imposes medical costs on taxpayers, using the same logic, proponents of sodomy laws could argue in favor of banning homosexual sex because it puts sexual partners at increased risk for getting AIDS. To be clear, I am adamantly opposed to sodomy laws, but my opposition is rooted in the same principle that prompts me to oppose banning smoking, trans-fats, and metal baseball bats. That principle is: liberty
While Klein doesn't subscribe to the homophobic policy position, his comparison suggests an awfully backwards view of homosexuality. Since sexual orientation is part of one's intrinsic identity, banning sodomy is more analogous to banning a religious ritual than smoking in bars or swinging metal baseball bats. But apparently to the conservative way of thinking they are equally deserving of protection, at best.
Klein makes his criticism sound like a serious statement of consistent principle, but one would hope he's smart enough to realize the silliness of this comparison and is really just being facetious. First of all, a sodomy ban, unlike bans on smoking in bars and metal bats in high school baseball, is totally unenforceable because of the infinite number of locations where the act can take place. Secondarily, to enforce it would require invasions of people's personal homes, which none of the New York laws in question do, so the infraction on liberty is clearly an order of magnitude greater. I would not support a ban on smoking or consuming transfats in one's home for this reason.
It would be nice if conservatives like Klein debated a policy on its actual merits, instead of invoking this kind of fatuous slippery slope argumentation.
In the new issue of City Journal, the neoconservative urban policy magazine associated with the Manhattan Institute, Paul Beston argues against a new law in New York City banning the use of metal bats in high school baseball. Dismissing it as "nannying," Beston links the law to other recent policies in New York City like the smoking ban and the trans-fat ban. He concludes "Banning bats my seem like small ball. But it perfectly expresses the council's and the mayor's underlying belief: too much liberty is hazardous to your health."
This clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of conservative/libertarian thinking: that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. People who are injured by metal bats, or fall ill from smoking or fatty food, cost the rest of us money. We pay their emergency room bill, their Medicare bills or their Social Security disablity insurance. Only someone willing to forgo those benefits should have the right to also opt out of public health laws like those passed by the New York City Council, or pre-existing ones requiring that motorcyclists wear helmets and drivers wear seat belts. But Beston, like all conservatives, makes no serious suggestion about offering such an option in our society (much less explaining how it would be practically possible.) Instead he merely sneers at the New York City government's efforts to lower the costs that he, like all other taxpayers, will ultimately bear (and that, should rising health costs force the government to raise taxes, Beston and City Journal would surely bray against as well).
Over at the Corner, Jonah Goldberg has apparently made a regular beat out of arguing against taking action to prevent the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. First, last week, he responded to my mockery of National Review's new "Planet Gore" blog and its undue respect for the delusions of novelist and climate change skeptic Michael Crichton. He wrote:
I'm not an enormous fan of Crichton's either, but let us stipulate that he knows a hell of a lot more, and has done a lot more homework, than the scores of Hollywood airhead environmentalists Adler & Co. never seem to have a problem with. Leonardo DiCaprio, I suppose, has a better grasp of the data? Moreover, Adler might have heard that Crichton and two full-fledged scientists recently beat some leading global warming scientists in a debate.
Leave it to Goldberg to bring the denizens of Hollywood into even the most unrelated discussion. For the record, liberals are concerned about climate change because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA have issued reports on its dire effects, not because of what Leo DiCaprio thinks. But the difference between DiCaprio and Crichton that Goldberg ignores is that DiCaprio has the modesty to respect the widely-held scientific consensus, which Crichton does not. Goldberg also fails to note that the audience that voted for Crichton's side in that debate was a random collection of people, not a group of climate scientists. Which means it proves absolutely nothing, except that Goldberg/Crichton's side is good at P.R.
Not content to make just one illogical attack on those of us who seek to save Goldberg's children as well as our own from the predicted ecological and economic disasters that will occur if present trends continue, Goldberg has kept blogging on the topic. Goldberg wrote a post today that simply quotes a Washington Post article on the difficulties associated with the implementation of the European emissions policy. Goldberg seems to think that this constitutes some compelling case against a cap and trade system in the U.S. It does not. First of all, as the article notes, American senators are looking at the strengths and weaknesses of Europe's system in devising our own policy. Goldberg apparently has no faith in the American ingenuity that might allow us to devise a more effective system (not to mention the fact that we have a more centralized federal government than the E.U. does). Second of all, no one is denying that controlling emissions will exact some cost on consumers in developed countries. The point that Goldberg ignores is that alternative energy programs will also generate economic growth, thus mitigating that fact, while the ultimate costs of letting climate change run amok are estimated to be much higher than the costs of reducing emissions. The fact that much of the country shares Goldberg's short-sightedness is a disaster; it would be great if he would stop reinforcing it.
Jon Chaitposts on the Plank that he thinks Ramesh Ponnuru is the most intellectually honest conservative writer. I can't decide if I agree. On the one hand Chait has some strong evidence from Ponnuru's recent blogging on The Corner that, at least in so far as judging Republican presidential aspirants goes, Ponnuru is frank about the strengths and shortcomings of everyone including his preferred choice (John McCain) while his colleagues simply shill for whoever they've chosen. It's also true that when I interviewed conservative intellectuals about whether they believed in evolution for TNR, Ponnuru gave me a very honest and non-pandering reply. He was not alone in this regard (Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan also spoke their mind, although they completely disagree on the topic.) But many conservatives, who shall remain nameless, ducked the interview with feeble excuses, or gave pro-intelligent design answers that sounded more like a political calculation than a seriously considered one.
OK, so why do I have a hard time just giving Ponnuru his due? Because the man wrote a book called Party of Death. And what is the party of death you may ask? Why it's the Democrats, of course. Ponnuru seems to think it's reasonable to infer that support for policies like reproductive freedom, embryonic stem cell research, and physician assisted suicide for the severely ill constitute a pro-death platform as opposed to a pro-liberty platform. This is obviously disingenuous. And furthermore, to score political points, he attributes those views to Democrats as a whole, even though views on those issues vary among Democrats. And Ponnuru knows perfectly well that those liberals who can fairly be said to almost always subscribe to those positions do so out of an affinity for the health and freedom of the living, not a desire to see more dead as such. But he pretends otherwise to rabble-rouse. Where's the intellectual integrity in that?
I know that to be considered a respectable independent thinker, and not a partisan hack, I'm supposed to take conservatives seriously. And I try, really I do. But then sometimes they go and do something so ridiculous that makes it just too hard for me.
Case in point: National Review has started a special blog called "Planet Gore" (how clever!) devoted entirely to stopping any reasonable movement to prevent climate change. Sample post title: "The Admirable Crichton." Yes, they are seriously touting the novelist Michael Crichton as a global warming expert. This struck me as hilarious until I remembered that President Bushdoes too.
Bizarre. Every time I try to describe what my two days at CPAC were like, I inevitably fall back on “bizarre,” which doesn’t really do it all justice. The ridiculous array of groups, from Christian Zionists to Muslims for Freedom (who believe Bush is the true savior of their people), protectionists and anarcho-capitalists (they prefer being called Objectivists, but a spade is a spade), curious oxymoronic things like “Young” or “Black” Republicans, was only the tip of the iceberg.
Still, as I sought to make comparisons between conservative conferences and progressive equivalents (after all, any hotel filled with like-minded people is bound to produce a few colorful deviations from reason), I was most struck by the lack of a real progressive alternative. While Campus Progress’s summer student conferences might be the closest approximation, CPAC is a historical legacy, a monolith whose straw poll is expected to actually bear on the primary elections. Reagan’s 12 speeches at CPAC are no small part of their deification of the dullard and worship of his god-awful presidency. Sure, it’s hard to see how our movement would benefit from a 3-day festival of celebrity-mongering idiocy (Rep. Sensenbrenner’s speech was to a nearly empty banquet hall, while hundreds congregated in an absurdly long queue to be in Ms. Coulter’s demonic presence). But, if nothing else, this proximity between everyday “activists” and party-faithful and the biggest names on the right seemed to generate a sense of tangible reward or return for efforts, and undoubtedly helped keep the movement charged up.
(For a summary of the especially surreal moments, scroll down below the jump).
The conservative movement showed itself to be, as ever, an un-intellectual (if not deliberately anti-intellectual), but ultimately very savvy, ends-driven political machine. Obviously reeling from the results of the midterm elections, often caught in the same tired defenses of indefensible policies (the media just won’t show the good things that happen in Iraq!), they nonetheless seemed to energize the soldiers and the donors with this tired old tripe. Taxes must be cut, flattened. The War must be won. The sanctity of life and family must be protected. Meanwhile, the tax code is regressive as ever, the middle class suffers, the war is lost, and economic insecurity probably does more to wreck the American family than the gay couple living down the street.
The comfort in all their sadly reality-detached absurdity, I guess, is that this is exactly how conservatives charged to their own defeat in the last election cycle, and it's how they'll probably do it all over again.
Well, CPAC managed to gather all four of the black people at this Conference and put them on stage together, for "Conservative Solutions for Urban America."
All the usual gripes and outrage of the more conservative contingency of the black middle class were heard--we can't blame problems on the color of our skin, we must live now and forget the history of oppression, BET is ruining our youth, etc. "Antebellum rednecks have got nothing on MTV and BET, the minstrel show that is pumped into our children's brains daily," said the Congress for Racial Equality's Niger Innis.
Some of these complaints represent common ground with people on the left--for instance, when Campus Progress hosted a showing of "Beyond Beats and Rhymes" in Los Angeles not three weeks ago, the panel including "conscious" rapper Talib Kweli spent much time ridiculing BET's founder Bob Johnson, who Innis maligned by name at this CPAC panel. In fact, Innis even critiqued Fox News for focusing their (albeit negative) coverage on figures like P. Diddy, and the media in general for presenting a warped and narrow vision of black people, as indication of their totally skewed priorities. "We care more about Anna Nicole Smith and what Britney is shaving or not wearing than a war being fought by our young people." I certainly couldn't argue with that.
When they did choose to focus on the past is where they lost me. Mychal Massie, of the National Center for Public Policy: "Slavery is over." Sure. "The civil rights struggle is over." Okay, maybe. Then, "we went from Martin Luther King to Superfly." Weird...what happened to the Black Panthers? Apparently they were part of a "militant movement that glorified a motherland that never existed" and ridiculed Martin Luther King. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of how King did get more aggressive and spoke out against the Vietnam War at the end of his life. "We went from Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg," and, most interestingly, "we went from Shirley Chisolm to Barack Obama." Did I miss something? I guess Obama is a lamentable candidate because his father is from Africa, which doesn't exist.
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