magnificent

The extended Edition of The Two Towers was... magnificent.



I'm still collecting my thoughts for my review... stay tuned. But I can vouch immediately that the extended footage makes the changes to Faramir's character not just defensible, but essential. And if you hated having elves at Helm's Deep, take solace that the trees were there too.

kudos to Bush

I've been thinking about the GWB visit to Iraq, and found to my surprise that it was difficult to achieve clarity of opinion at first. But I've had some time t think on it and I think that the main thing that should be said about the surprise Thanksgiving visit is: well done.

There's a single reason why it deserves praise. Because for the troops in Iraq, it was an uplifting moment. Regardless of the soldiers' political or religious beliefs, hardships incurred from the long deployment, or problems awaiting them when they return, they are professionals and Bush's visit gave them their due.

Bush is a divisive, politicizing figure, so it's no surprise that his trip to Iraq is being spun hard by left and right. The conservatives see it in tones best described as "reverent-macho". The trip sets historical precedent, these are epic times, Bush is a fearless warrior. Etc.

There's no shortage of inane leftist commentary (see this comment thread at Calpundit for examples). But the conservative defenders of Bush's trip struggle mightily to paint legitimate critiques of the trip as identical to the craven loony bin. Tacitus for example pokes fun at Matthew Yglesias' complaint that no Democrats were invited - but notably doesn't address the more cogent points: that photo ops are nice, but good policy and leadership are better, and the President has no reserve of benefit of the doubt left given all the other craven political stunts he has pulled (including lying about the Mission Accomplished banner, and ridiculously transparent photographic maneuvering). Nor is the fact that the Bush visit was planned in October, but Hillary Clinton's Iraq trip was planned (and publicized) in September. It should be noted that Clinton's trip lasted significantly longer, including an overnight stay, and an actual visit to Baghdad rather than confined to the airport.

The President did a good thing for the troops. Extrapolating it to promote his personal virtue, or his vice, is nonsensical.

I take issue with the claim that Bush's trip is the first by a President to a war zone. I don't see why Bush's supporters feel the need to push this, because 1. it's irrelevant to why Bush's trip should be praised (unless you rank mythologizing Bush's courage as a higher goal than the troops' morale), and 2. it's completely false. Bill Clinton visited Kosovo four years ago in 1999, the former president Bush visited troops in Saudi Arabia prior to the first Gulf War on Thanksgiving 1990, President Nixon went to Vietnam in 1969 and Lyndon Johnson also visited Vietnam twice, and Eisenhower visited the Korean front in December 1952.

Guilty until proven innocent

Alt.muslim provides the best summary of the Yee case:

After three months of detention on suspicion of terror-related er... stuff, James Yee was released from prison only to be slapped with unrelated adultery and pornography charges, leaving his family and friends feeling both relief and outrage. When Yee was arrested on Sept. 10th, the media-fanned (and leak-motivated) outcry implied the worst - a sensitive military position abused by a Muslim "fifth column." Only afterwards was Yee charged with significantly minor offences - transporting classified material without proper security containers. Now that the classified material happens to be downloaded porn (which would doom scores of other military men), Yee's many Muslim and Chinese-American supporters see it as a face-saving gesture by the Army at the expense of law-abiding Muslims in the military. "Porn can be downloaded on a computer without the user even knowing it. How did they come up with these charges?" says Cecilia Chang, president of the Justice for New Americans, who led a coalition of Arab and Asian American groups to free Yee. "I don't know why the government would pursue these charges, except for the fact that it's embarrassed by the implosion of charges it originally asserted," agreed Eugene Fidell, his lead attorney. The charges mirror the after-the-fact sentencing of John Walker Lindh for crimes unrelated to his arrest. The Army seems to agree - asked whether Yee's case was still espionage-related, Southern Command spokesman Raul Duany said, "Based on the charges, obviously it's not."

The whole affair is a replay of the Alligator Alley accusations and the case of Samyuktha Verma.

the light is brighter when seen through the tunnel

Essential reading - the NYT carries a powerful op-ed from a man in saudi Arabia who talks frankly about the atmosphere of religious oppression and the damage being done to his country by its Wahabi symbiosis.

The most recent government crackdown on terrorism suspects, in response to this month's car-bombing of a compound housing foreigners and Arabs in Riyadh, is missing the real target. The real problem is that Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques, which have become breeding grounds for terrorists. We cannot solve the terrorism problem as long as it is endemic to our educational and religious institutions.

Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him "guilty" of an interest in philosophy and put on probation.

During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews � and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims.

I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims. As the recent attacks show, now more than ever we are in need of support and help from other countries to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture, which discriminates against its own religious minorities, including Shiites and Sufis.

Even more essential reading - read the letter with Dan Darling's in-line commentary.

Grand Old Plebiscite: Towards a Corporate Welfare State

as a follow-up to my earlier post, here is a Bob Novak column on the tactics that the GOP mafia used against their own party members in order to force the passage of the Medicare boondoggle:

Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures. Major contributors warned Rep. Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called Rep. Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him.

Intense pressure, including a call from the president, was put on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney. As speaker of the Florida House, he was a stalwart for Bush in his state's 2000 vote recount. He is the Class of 2002's contact with the House leadership, marking him as a future party leader. But now, in those early morning hours, Feeney was told a ''no'' vote would delay his ascent into leadership by three years -- maybe more.

The GOP isn't even the party of conservatives anymore. The fact that the economy has done better under the Democrats than under the Republicans for the last 40 years is well-documented (see Dwight Meredith's "For the Record" series). And the behavior of the GOP in the past few years of total control has been extravagantly pro-spending. Excluding defense and security, the GOP has been the worst offender in terms of spending earmarks and pork projects:

The subject of the report is earmarks, which are specific pet projects inserted into bills by congress critters who are eager to funnel some federal dough directly to their own districts. Bottom line: everyone does it, but Republicans do it a lot more.

In the Labor-HHS-Education bill, as the chart shows, the number of earmarks has gone up from zero in 1995, when the Republicans took over, to 1,857 this year.

In the annual transportation bill, Democrats inserted 322 earmarks in their final bill in 1995. Republicans inserted 1,818 this year. In the defense appropriations bill the number has gone from about 300 to 1,800 and in VA-HUD from 265 to 921. Earmarks in the Commerce-Justice-State appropriations bill have skyrocketed from 45 to 966.

Put it all together, and in just these five appropriations bills the number of earmarks has risen from about 900 in 1995 to 7,362 this year.

You can read the on the House Appropriations Committee's full report on Republican addiction to pork right here (PDF).

Conservatives have many ideas I respect. Unfortunately, their party doesn't share my view of their principles. And as a political ideology, the GOP's true corporatist colors are ultimately a serious threat to conservativsm itself. As Matthew Yglesias notes, the Democrats can't carry water against the GOP onslaught alone:

Ultimately, it seems to me that the Democratic Party is just helpless when faced with the prospect of a GOP that isn't even going to try to stand for conservative principles. A party organized as an alliance between Big Government and Big Business just has too many big guns on its side. The only real question is whether or not conservatives will try and take their party back from the Rove-DeLay-Frist domestic policy agenda and return the GOP to advocating something that resembles a small government philosophy.

emphasis mine. The GOP is the party of Government-Corporate collusion - expecting such an entity to act with fiscal sanity (let alone fiscal conservatism) is counter to common sense. And as Matt points out, the resources available to such an alliance are prodigious in the extreme.

And Bush is nothing like Reagan. As Kevin points out, the right has fooled themselves into wishing it were so, but there isn't any coherent ideology driving Bush's presidency at all, other than simple electorial interest-group politics:

I think that both liberals and conservatives have made the mistake of convincing themselves that Bush is a hard right ideologue � conservatives because they were so eager for a conservative president after eight years of Bill Clinton and liberals because it gives them a convenient object of hatred. But if you look a bit more closely you'll see that he's not.

It's true that Bush is temperamentally conservative, and it's also true that he sometimes does things that conservatives like: lowering taxes, for example, or invading Iraq. What's more, he talks the conservative talk pretty well, and all of this has fooled conservatives (and many liberals) into thinking that he does what he does out of deep devotion to conservative principles.

But he doesn't. I suspect that conservative eagerness for a conservative president has caused them to project their own views onto Bush, but Bernstein is right: Bush is just playing electoral politics. Tax cuts reward his rich contributors, invading Iraq was a crowd pleaser, the energy bill helped out his business pals, tariffs helped him with steel workers, the Medicare bill helps him with seniors, and the partial birth abortion bill helps him with the religious right. None of these things were truly driven by any kind of ideological purity.

Some conservatives are catching on, but as long as their discontent remains at the hand-wringing angst stage rather than actually fighting for their principles and sending a clear message by their votes, it will continue. Such conservatives have marginalized themselves by making a great case against Bush but then asking with great (feigned?) tremulous concern, "how can we stop this?" Simple answer: vote Democrat, and send a message.

There's really only one way to fight this. By creating an alliance of the many - and that's why Howard Dean's candidacy holds such promise. Conservatives need to realize that they can have more influence on policy under a Democratic Dean administration, rather than being paid lip-service by a GOP that takes them for granted and prostitutes their support to further their own radically anti-conservative agenda.

religious loyalty test

Go read Zack's responses to Daniel Pipes' "Moderate Muslim Questionnaire". The list of questions is designed to trap Muslims in contradiction, force them to accept second-class citizenhood, undermine their religion, and accept collective responsibility for the actions of a few. Zack treats them with the appropriate level of respect.

UPDATE: Kynn provides a test for identifying Christian moderates. Note that I think it's valuable in highlighting the bias in Pipe's questionairre, rather than an actual test that Christians would be expected to take. The entire point is that these tests meet an impossible standard and reject the integrity of faith, forcing the person who answers to sacrifice belief for political sanitization. As Zack's responses and Kynn's recasting of the entire thing towards a Christian target demonstrate, Pipe's questions are fundamentally an attack on the very act of believing in Islam.

party rule: plebiscite, not parliamentary, democracy

There are a number of assumptions that are needed for American governance to work. One is that the legislative branch is the realm of debate and compromise. The need for such debate and dialog is the foundation of government (and the root principle that also gives rise to such secondary concepts as freedom of speech).

The Republican Party has rejected this model utterly. Rather than compromise between majority and minority, the new rule is "plebiscitary democracy" - the small cadre of leaders of the Majority party decide policy unilaterally, and the entire Party membership is coerced into voting as a single block. Thus the Party ideology trumps all other concerns, including those concerns of the people whose interests representatives were elected to serve.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the GOP tactics to pass the Medicare bill:

If anyone doubted the rules had changed, House Republican leaders ended all illusions in the early hours of Saturday morning by holding open a 15-minute roll call vote for an unprecedented two hours and 51 minutes. At the end of the normal time for voting, Republican leaders faced defeat on the drug bill by a two-vote margin. Eventually, two Republicans were hammered into switching their votes.

"I don't mean to be alarmist, but this is the end of parliamentary democracy as we have known it," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. The new system amounted to "plebiscitary democracy" in which leaders of the House have imposed such a strong sense of party discipline that they will ultimately pass whatever legislation they bring to the floor. "The Republican Party in the House is the most ideologically cohesive and disciplined party in the democratic world," Frank said. In response, House Democrats were more united in opposition to the bill than Democratic senators, who are operating as if the older system of give-and-take were still in force.

Edward M. Kennedy was one senator who believed the old system could still work. He had urged his colleagues to pass an earlier version of the drug bill on the assumption that Republicans would agree to a compromise acceptable to Democrats.

Instead, House and Senate negotiators pushed the Senate bill to the right by adding in Medicare privatization experiments, big HMO subsidies and medical savings accounts. These and other changes pushed Kennedy to lead the last-ditch fight against the final version of the bill.

When the majority party decides it has the votes, and can bend the roll call itself to ensure that the votes are there, we are only one step away from the party deciding that it holds the votes of its members as proxy, and dispensing with the roll call altogether.

And after that, why bother with the formality of voting at all?

UPDATE: more on the history of the 15-minute rule, and comment:

The Medicare prescription drug vote -- three hours instead of 15 minutes, hours after a clear majority of the House had signaled its will -- was the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated the longstanding tradition of the House floor's being off limits to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor during the vote to twist arms -- another shameful first.

The speaker of the House is the first government official mentioned in the Constitution. The speaker is selected by a vote of the whole House and represents the whole House. Hastert is a good and decent man who loves the House. But when the choice has been put to him, he has too often opted to abandon that role for partisan gain.

Democracy is a fragile web of laws, rules and norms. The norms are just as important to the legitimacy of the system as the rules. Blatant violations of them on a regular basis corrode the system. The ugliness of this one will linger.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.