Politics
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Quote of the Day: Andrew Bacevich
If the Afghan war then becomes the consuming issue of Obama’s presidency – as Iraq became for his predecessor, as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson, and as Korea did for Harry Truman – the inevitable effect will be to compromise the prospects of reform more broadly. At home and abroad, the president who advertised himself
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Faith, Hope, and Love in a Decadent Age
I see the fundamental gesture of Christian conservatism and its orientation to the past to be a fearful and self-protective, as lacking hope and lacking faith or confidence in the Promise with a resulting small-soulness that lacks the confidence to love the world as it is. This tight-fisted, irritable, I-get-no-respect Christianity is tiresome and irrelevant…
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Conservative Takedown of Reagan’s Conservatism
My contention, though, is that there is no longer ‘living memory’ that we Americans can live from. It simply no longers informs our mainstream culture, and the project to try to sustain or conserve one’s cultural heritage as a given “living memory” is as futile as the Irish trying to sustain Gaelic as their national…
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Obama and Peace Prize??
First Thought: Shouldn't this be about actually having accomplished something? Second Thought: Wow, the "world establishment", so to say, was really freaked out by Bush Cheney, and it wants to do whatever it can to let Americans know about its relief that America has rejoined the more or less sane mainstream again. Third Thought: Has
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Empty Rights
Ivan Kenneally in a comment to a Peter Lawler post at Postmodern Conservative: One could argue, as Delsol has, that the big thing now is a kind of cosmopolitanism without Xn faith, or a peculiarly secular interpretation of the Pauline spiritual unity of mankind. In a sense, today’s cosmopolitanism is easier to theoretically construct since
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Growth Idolaltry
Just saw Douthat's Sunday column on the causes of inequality, so I thought I'd comment on it in the light of my last post. Here's his set up: The latest census figures show the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else widening — rather than shrinking, as some economists expected — during the crash
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More on the Balance between Liberty and Equality
I've been thinking a lot about why this country almost broke apart in the 1860s, and why it's a good thing it didn't, and why the secessionist mentality lingers now as a destructive force in this country. In a globalizing world, the secessionist mentality is analogous to the adolescent who eats his dinner in his
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Heathcare Reform Debate Today
Just listened to Grassley and his argument on C-Span against Rockefeller's public option amendment to the Finance Committee bill. It's hard to believe that this guy was ever taken seriously. He comes across as a senile ideologue. Perhaps in that his electoral charm lies. Any Iowans want to help me understand that better? Hatch, at
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Divided and Conquered
Frank Rich's column on Sunday, and Glenn Greenwald's post today about the wildly incoherent Glenn Beck are clarifying regarding the middle ground between left and right in this country. After quoting Rich's column pointing out that Beck's view that "Wall Street owns our government," and that "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged" is
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Blue Dog Exposure (Updated)
Yesterday I wrote that if in fact the tide has shifted, as I think it has, toward more robust healthcare reform being possible, then Blue Dogs will have an increasingly harder time defending their opposition to a good bill that serves the public interest. Blue Dogs are not moderates, if by moderate we mean having