Tuesday, 4 May 2004 - 1:53 PM EDT

George Will laid out something that he's been nibbling around the edges with for a few weeks now. The administration has got to stop approaching Iraq ideologically and instead must take a more realistic (what he calls "conservative" rather than "neo-con") approach.

It's a quintessentially brilliant Will piece, a must-read.

Tuesday, 4 May 2004 - 9:00 PM EDT

The Moynihan quote is money:

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

The kind of liberal democracy we take for granted is more than a bunch of laws and documents. It is the product of hundreds of years of unique cultural developments. It's pretty farfetched to believe that it can be imposed on a people who have known nothing but despotism for their entire history. Postwar Germany and Japan were special cases - both societies were utterly destroyed by war. Iraq did not undergo the kind of total destruction that would cause those who survived to embrace a radically different way of life.

It's one thing to talk a lot of Wilsonian hooey about democracy and such - Reagan did the same thing. But Reagan was not shackled by his rhetoric. Reagan was willing to back plenty of unsavory characters - UNITA, the mujahideen, the Contras - to get the job done. We can (and have) done a lot worse than installing a stable, not-quite democratic regime in Iraq.

Tuesday, 4 May 2004 - 9:17 PM EDT

I just read a good Cato Institute piece attacking President Bush for implementing George Will-esque "Big Government Conservatism". The author, Gene Healy, dubs Bush's proposed Mars mission "spacecraft as soulcraft". That's funny stuff.

Wednesday, 5 May 2004 - 10:30 AM EDT

The president, who hasn't vetoed a single spending bill...

I check the Cato page every now and again and I read the National Review when I can, and I've found no shortage of conservatives bitching about the President's spending. But I don't buy, for one second, that they're gonna do anything about it. It seems unlikely that they'll vote for someone else, or even stay home on election day (although, if there is to be action, that seems the most probable). Further, conservatives haven't yet been successful in sending Bush a message by sending any of his big-spending Congressional buddies out of town. Conservatives' failure to get Arlen bumped from the nomination and install staunch conservative Pat Toomey is a good indication that they're complaints are as good as toothless.

If Bush is spending like no president since Johnson (which he is), then why don't conservatives find somebody else? Is their tenuous but undeniable loyalty to Bush in the same vein as the left's seemingly incomprehensible yet nonetheless exuberant hatred for Bush? In short, is the right's support of Bush as devoid of logic as the left's hatred of him?

Thursday, 6 May 2004 - 9:18 AM EDT

Will's piece points out Bush's desire to label those that believe Iraq is incapable of American democracy "racists." But's it's not just their skin tone that makes it difficult to believe (and it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe) that Iraqi democracy as the administration plans it is nothing more than a pipe dream.

When communism fell toward the end of the 1980's, democracy was hearlded as "returning" to the Balkans. Alas, the Balkans never knew democracy, save for a brief period between the two world wars. They were always under the thumb of this empire or another, including the Nazi's and the Russian Communists (not to mention the Ottoman's and your friend and mine, the Hapsburg's).

And this lack of experience with even the basic concepts of liberal democracy proved to be quite a roadblock for the countries in the Balkans. (As Marc pointed out to me yesterday, the Russians are having a hell of a time with democracy as well.) What I'm saying is, it's a little intellectually dishonest and more than a litle Democratic (used with a big "D" and as a pejorative) to label those that disagree with the administration's position on Iraq as racists. Not only is it corrosive to public debate, but it's just plain wrong.