Michael Medved, back at college, used to be a liberal. Michael got wiser as he grew older.

Some partisans on the left… (resist being described as unpatriotic), insisting that they love the United States just as much as any right winger. The distinction, progressives regularly aver, involves their affection for a perfected America that might, through hope and change, come into existence sometime in the future, or else their nostalgic reverence for an America that once was, but ceased to exist through some malevolent influence (greedy businessmen, the religious right, conniving conservatives, take your pick).

Anyone with a modicum of experience in human relations will tell you that a devotion based on what your love object might become, or may have been in the past, is a suspect and toxic form of affection. If, in a moment of insecurity, a wife asks a husband, Honey, do you love me? the last thing she wants to hear is, Actually, I love the idea of you if you changed completely. In other words, its not advisable to tell the woman in your life that you’d adore her if she’d only lose fifty pounds, submit to liposuction and breast augmentation surgery, get a new set of gleaming white caps for her teeth, and complete a post graduate degree so she’d offer more intriguing conversation.

Roddy MacKenzie leads at the moment on Triton Light in the Banbury Cross and Foxboro Farms Maiden Hurdle, but Jacob Roberts (3rd from the right) on Maximize went on to win

Karen and I were working yesterday at the Blue Ridge Fall Races a charity event held annually the last three years for the benefit of our local hospice organization.

Click on the above picture for a link to Karen’s preliminary photo essay

photo: Karen L. Myers

click on photo to link to photo essay

Our 11-week-old puppy, Uhlan, is a Tazy, whose mother is from Kazakhstan and whose father was bred in St. Petersburg, one generation removed from Kazakhstan.

Tazy is just the preferred name in Kazakhstan for the local version of Saluki, known earlier in the West as the Persian Greyhound.

Tribal dogs like ours are prized by sighthound enthusiasts for their strong natural hunting instincts. Karen’s photos of Uhlan in action demonstrate that this puppy may be a little too keen.

Paul Marshall reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West in the Wall Street Journal.

In his reflections on Europe’s slide into a sort of secular suicide, Mr. Caldwell notes the key role played by that most religious impulse: guilt. He argues that the dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was “repentance for two historical misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.” Over the decades, guilt has festered into “a sense of moral illegitimacy” and a “self-directed xenophobia” that now shapes the continent’s response to immigration.

Originally, the reasons given for encouraging mass immigration to Europe were economic—a means of remedying Europe’s purported labor shortage and, eventually, of bolstering economies obliged to fund generous pension plans. Immigrants “would emerge from the desiccated and starving hamlets of the Third World and ride to the rescue of the retirement checks and second homes, the wine tastings and snorkeling vacations, of the most pampered workforce in the history of the planet,” Mr. Caldwell writes. Such economic rationales proved to be chimeras, though. Nowadays, with majorities in many countries consistently opposed to immigration, a new justification has had to be found: the flat assertion that immigration and asylum policies are “nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on,” or perhaps even discuss.

Except that there is nothing “purported” about a domestic labor shortage in modern Western countries.

Free education and social mobility afforded the respectable portions of the former working classes a ready path to white collar employment. Egalitarianism and the doctrines of the left supplied excuses to avoid manual labor for the ineducable, and generous social welfare policies assured that those who would not work would still have color televisions.

The consequence has been everywhere in Europe and America a drastic shortage of manual labor of domestic origin, and massive Third World immigration to fill the gap.

We are much luckier in America. We get Roman Catholic Hispanic immigrants, who are highly assimilable. Europe is getting hostile Muslims.

John Hinderaker listens to another democrat apologizing for America.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world. ... The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said. America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,’ the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Arnold Kling sees the culture wars spinning further and further out of control and experiences despair.

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand. However, I think, also, that the progressive elite is making a last stand. My guess is that doubts are mounting among many independent voters about whether they want such a highly-charged politics. I am sticking with my bet that the Democrats will hold onto their House and Senate majorities as well as the Presidency through the elections of 2016, but relative to six months ago I feel that I am depending more on Republican incompetence than overall political trends to win that bet.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

Debkafile, which reported August 29th a leak (apparently from Polish sources) that plans were underway to substitute defense facilities in Turkey and Israel for those originally intended to be sited in Poland and the Czech Republic, is now telling us that Obama has made a deal to site US missile defense systems on a Russian military base in Azerbaijan (!).

DEBKA also, with a note of contempt, reveals that the Israeli based systems is already in place and “working perfectly.”

DEBKA characterizes the Obama Administration’s move as a “surrender to Moscow.”

As Wired’s Nathan Hodge explains, Barack Obama is completely reconfiguring US missile defense plans in deference to Russia’s self-proclaimed right to point loaded and ready-to-fire weapons of mass destruction at neighboring European countries.

President Barack Obama yesterday announced that he would scrap George W. Bush’s plan to park missile-defense interceptors in Poland and place an X-band radar in the Czech Republic. Speaking yesterday to reporters, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the new rationale.

“Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles,” he said. “We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors. These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.”

In addition, Gates noted the Navy’s considerable test success with the missile-shooting Standard Missile-3 (pictured here), which has seen eight successful flight tests since 2007. Sea-based interceptors, he said, offer a much more flexible option than a fixed site.

Intriguingly, the new plan might include deploying an X-band radar to the Caucasus — the region sandwiched between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea — to keep an eye out for missile launches from Iran. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright said stationing a radar in the Caucasus might reassure Russia, which was vehemently opposed to the Bush administration’s plan to place assets in Eastern Europe.

“The X-band radar is a single directional,” he said. “In other words, when you put it down, it points in a single direction. And it will be very clear that it is pointing south towards Iran.”

It’s easy to speculate about which countries in the region could potentially host an X-band radar. The United States has close military ties with Georgia. And neighboring Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, has received U.S. funding for the construction of radar installations.

The idea of stationing an X-band radar in the Caucasus, however, is not new. Back in 2006, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) published a fact sheet that said mobile sensors for ballistic missile defense might be placed in an unnamed country in the Caucasus. The agency subsequently scrubbed the fact sheet to remove any mention of possible locales, although MDA spokesman Rick Lehner told me at the time that the region would be a “good location for a small X-band radar to provide tracking and discrimination of missiles launched from Iran.”

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Ben Smith, at Politico, says: There has to have been a behind-the-scenes deal here, involving a major change in Russian policy toward Iran in return for so enormous a concession, doesn’t there?

Republicans talked of President Obama “appeasing” Russia,” “betraying” Poland, and bringing back the Carter administration. They didn’t like his decision Thursday to scrap plans for a missle defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic, and they dusted off some vintage Cold War anti-communist rhetoric and endorsements of missile defense to express it.

Obama and his aides cast the decision as almost a technical one. But for a president who has said repeatedly that he wants to return U.S. foreign policy to the hard-headed pursuit of national interests rather than scoring ideological points, it was also tangible evidence that he meant what he said.

Some members of Obama’s own party, however, had a simple question for the administration: if this was a return to realism, and a concession to Russia’s long and vocal opposition to the missile program, what, exactly, was the U.S. getting in return for fundamentally changing it?

And almost certainly, the answer leads back to Iran.

“If it turns out that the Russians now are willing to take a very tough stand on the next round of sanctions on Iran – for instance, in the Security Council — then you can say , ‘Hey, it’s a trade and it’s a good trade,” said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If the Russians don’t deliver something pretty substantial back, it does raise questions about what do they think they were achieving.”

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But Barack Obama, while he was at Columbia, was an enthusiastic supporter of the nuclear freeze movement, organized internationally by a variety of Soviet front organizations, as this article published in a student newspaper in 1983 attests.

He liked unilateral disarmament back then, and it would not exactly be surprising to find that he likes it now, too.

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In fact, Russian press statements, with a certain ill-concealed glee, actually dismiss the idea of some kind of bargain with contempt.

RIA:

Russia’s NATO envoy has cautioned against “childish euphoria” over recent Washington’s decision to scrap plans for a missile shield in Central Europe. ...

“We are already hearing voices in the West…that it is a huge concession to Russia. But I wouldn’t want us to become overwhelmed with some kind of childish euphoria,” Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with the Vesti television late on Thursday.

The diplomat said Washington had simply corrected its own mistake and had chosen a more flexible and efficient approach to its global missile shield allegedly aimed against the ballistic missile threat from Iran.

The Washington Independent admiringly quotes a good line from Harvard’s Rory Stewart aptly summing up the approach of both the current and previous adminstrations on Afghanistan.

Rory Stewart, the Afghanistan-war skeptic who heads the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, has one advantage over his fellow witnesses at this Senate panel: he’s better with quips. Stewart compares the Obama administration’s twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with “an angry cat and a tiger,” after Brookings’ Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.’s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

“We’re beating the cat,” Stewart said, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”

A Kern County Animal Control crackdown on unlicensed pets targeted 83-year-old Dottie Elkins over her dog Wolf.

Unfortunately, the dog authorities spied sitting near her door was a stuffed toy.

1:45 MSNBC video

Hat tip to Smartdogs for the better link.

In New Republic, Jonathan Chait, uses the purported review space for two new biographies of Ayn Rand—Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (to be released October 27)—to deliver instead an attack on Rand and her philosophy of which Ellsworth Toohey would be proud.

Admirers of Rand will enjoy reading this relatively sophisticated analysis of her influence, and will probably also perversely enjoy (in the mode of intellectual pathologist) the ingenious and sophistical rhetorical ploys Chait uses to defend his own leftism.

We’re really squabbling over nothing, Chait explains in a particularly artful pair of paragraphs. Accept Chait’s numbers (if you do, come see me about a bridge I’m selling), and it all becomes clear: the difference between conservative and liberal tax policies amounts to a tiny, scarcely significant, percentage.

Most of the right-wing commentary purporting to prove that the rich bear the overwhelming burden of government relies upon the simple trick of citing only the income tax, which is progressive, while ignoring more regressive levies. A brief overview of the facts lends some perspective to the fears of a new Red Terror. Our government divides its functions between the federal, state, and local levels. State and local governments tend to raise revenue in ways that tax the poor at higher rates than the rich. (It is difficult for a state or a locality to maintain higher rates on the rich, who can easily move to another town or state that offers lower rates.) The federal government raises some of its revenue from progressive sources, such as the income tax, but also healthy chunks from regressive levies, such as the payroll tax.

The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent—slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush.

Excellent reading for train rides through Rocky Mountain tunnels.

On liberal editorial pages and across the left-side of the blogosphere, conservative opposition to drastically increased government spending and Health Care Reform proposals, dissent at Town Hall meetings, and last weekend’s massive protest in Washington have all been diagnosed and interpreted as “anger” and “extremism” on the part of “White Males.”

David Harsanyi admires the left’s preemptive definition of political opposition as racism.

Who dictates what level of anger and dissent is allowable? Who decides what a clandestine racist sign looks like? Maybe someone like MSNBC’s Carlos Watson, who wondered if “socialism” was really about the nationalization of industry and hyper-regulation of the private market, or if it was just “becoming the new N-word.”

None of this has anything to do with the left’s paranoid belief that America is an inherently racist nation. It’s just that if you oppose more government dependency and expansion, you might as well be a Confederate infantryman. No, it doesn’t matter what you say, because we know what you really mean.

Read the whole thing.

Former conservative Mark Lilla, in Chronicle of Higher Education, welcomes the University of California at Berkeley’s opening of a “Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements” (which is obviously destined to link Edmund Burke, William F Buckley, Jr., and Adolph Hitler in a common pattern of pathological aversion to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful), expressing guarded optimism over the possibility of its getting “professors and students to discuss ideas and read books that until now have been relegated to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”

The unfortunate fact is that American academics have until recently shown little curiosity about conservative ideas, even though those ideas have utterly transformed American (and British) politics over the past 30 years. A look at the online catalogs of our major universities confirms this: plenty of courses on identity politics and postcolonialism, nary a one on conservative political thought. Professors are expected to understand the subtle differences among gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, but I would wager that few can distinguish between the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, three think tanks that have a greater impact on Washington politics than the entire Ivy League.

Why is that? The former left-wing firebrand David Horowitz, whom the professors do know, has a simple answer: There is a concerted effort to keep conservative Ph.D.’s out of jobs, to deny tenure to those who get through, and to ignore conservative books and ideas. It is an old answer, dating back to the 1970s, when neoconservatives began writing about the “adversary culture” of intellectuals. Horo witz is an annoying man, and what’s most annoying about him is that … he has a point. Though we are no longer in the politically correct sauna of the 1980s and 1990s, and experiences vary from college to college, the picture he paints of the faculty and curriculum in American universities remains embarrassingly accurate, and it is foolish to deny what we all see before us.

Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That’s why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.

Contra Horowitz, the blackballing of conservatives and conservative ideas is by now instinctive and habitual rather than self-conscious, reflecting intellectual provincialism more than ideological fervor. I recall being at a dinner in Paris in the late 1980s with a distinguished American historian of France who had gathered her graduate students for the evening. The conversation turned to book printing in the early modern era, which she was studying, and the practice of esoteric writing, which was more widespread than she had imagined. I mentioned that there was a classic book on this subject by Leo Strauss. She searched her mind for a moment—this was before the Iraq war made Strauss a household name—and then said, “But isn’t he a conservative?” In a certain way he was, I said. Silence at the table. She smiled that smile meant to end discussion, and the conversation turned to more-pleasant topics.

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Nonetheless, Lilla quarreled with David Horowitz’s “anti-intellectual” “dumbing down” indictment of exactly the same liberal dogmatism and intolerance he himself recognizes in an obviously more becoming and appropriate rueful tone which differs from Horowitz by its passive acceptance of the situation.

But even Lilla’s comparatively timid public recognition of the left’s tyrannical regime within most American universities provoked liberal pooh-pooh-ing in a follow-up exchange.

Bruce L.R. Smith, nearly inadvertently, finds real world practical considerations making denial just a bit awkward.

Lilla states that there is not a single conservative at Columbia University. I can assure him that this is not so. In 2000, I returned to Columbia after a 20-year hiatus as a fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. Over the next five years I renewed friendships and acquaintanceships with many colleagues (and met new ones), some of whom can fairly be called conservatives. Perhaps I will prove Lilla’s point by forbearing to mention them by name, other than myself.

Marc Garlasco moved from targeting terrorists for the Defense Intelligence Agency to a role as senior military advisor for the leftwing Human Rights Watch.

Garlasco’s new job made him some enemies, and the extensive criticism (example) of Israeli military actions in Garlasco’s reports ultimately provoked some unexpected retaliation.

Omri Ceren, a USC grad student blogging at Mere Rhetoric, on September 8th, exposed Garlasco as a German WWII militaria collector, explicitly associating criticism of Israel with a penchant for collecting Nazi war trophies.

The following day, a Tel Aviv daily, Ma’ariv, quoted the blog posted, describing Garlasco as “a compulsive collector of Nazi insignia and memorabilia.”

Garlasco wrote in his own defense, September 11th, on Huffington Post:

I’ve never hidden my hobby, because there’s nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren’t fascinated by military history. Precisely because it’s so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things. Thousands of military history buffs collect war paraphernalia because we want to learn from the past. But I should have realized that images of the Second World War German military are hurtful to many.

I deeply regret causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts (including American, British, German, Japanese and Russian items). Other comments there might seem strange and even distasteful, but they reflect the enthusiasm of the collector, such as gloating about getting my hands on an American pilot’s uniform.

But it appears the politically correct stiletto strike to the kidneys remains one of the most devastatingly effective techniques for incapacitating an opponent in the modern era.

The New York Times today announced that HRW was suspending Garlasco.

A leading human rights group has suspended its senior military analyst following revelations that he is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, “pending an investigation,” said Carroll Bogert, the group’s associate director.

“We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know,” she said.

Reason TV 1:11 video

Hat tip to John Cole. Thanks, John. It’s a good one.