From the New York Times’ point of view, the Council for National Policy (CNP), is some sort of slightly sinister and secretive conspiratorial organ of the Religious Right. When I Googled this organization, and read over the names of members and officers, my own impression was the CNP appeared to be a slightly more diverse networking group of influential and activist movement conservatives, including many famous names. Some, but not all, were prominent figures in the Religious Right.

Not surprisingly, this group of activists did a certain amount of saber-rattling over the possibility of the Republican Party nominating Rudolph Giuliani.

Alarmed at the possibility that the Republican Party might pick Rudolph W. Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate.

The threat emerged from a group that broke away for separate discussions at a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative networking group. Participants said the smaller group included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps its most influential member; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer; and dozens of other politically oriented conservative Christians.

Almost everyone present at the smaller group’s meeting expressed support for a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate,” participants said.

The participants said that the group chose the qualified term “consider” because it had not yet identified an alternative candidate, but that it was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, became the nominee. The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the Council for National Policy meeting and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the smaller group intended to publicize the resolution.

The CNP leak to the New York Times focussed on the Abortion issue, but I’d say that’s merely one of a number of important reasons that the movement conservative core will never support the former New York City mayor.

Giuliani’s record is that of an opportunist, statist, and populist politician. He originally came to prominence via a series of questionable prosecutions of prominent figures in the financial industry, conducted ruthlessly and in the spirit of class warfare.

Giuliani was so liberal that, back in 1994 when nearly everyone mistook George Pataki for a conservative, Giuliani tried to torpedo his gubernatorial candidacy with a last-minute endorsement of Mario Cuomo.

Neither opponents of abortion nor defenders of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms can have confidence in Giuliani’s current promises or future court appointments.

Nominating Giuliani would be a far greater disaster than nominating Nixon was. A Giuliani nomination would reverse the results of the Conservative Movement’s long and ultimately victorious struggle for control of the Republican Party, and return national control of the party to Northeastern liberal Republicans-in Name-Only.

Giuliani is an unacceptable Republican nominee, period. Real conservatives, both libertarian and traditionalist, will not support him.

The failed cloture vote dooming the deeply-flawed Immigration Bill was not necessarily, practically-speaking, a bad thing.

The bill represented an incoherent compromise between the political forces seeking to close the gap between reality and our currently unenforceable immigration laws, and the forces seeking to raise barriers and “secure the border.” I don’t think that bill effectively embodied any compelling logical solution, and it would have made partisans of neither side on the issue happy.

I think the country needs to think about all this some more, conduct a serious debate on the subject, and then craft a better solution. The Immigration Bill was an unholy mess, and I think we’re better off giving that one a miss, and trying again another year.

But the Senate vote obviously did manifest some discernible response to the groundswell of anti-immigration popular emotion successfully drummed up by certain segments of the political right. Our nativist law-and-order simpletons won one, and they ought to have been feeling good, but unhappily some members of the right blogosphere’s reaction to their own success at the far-from-difficult feat of evoking a little political cowardice on Capitol Hill was less than attractive.

Rather than celebrating winning a small skirmish in what will undoubtedly be a long war (one in which they are ultimately going to get their butts kicked), a number of bloggers on the right were name calling and demonstrating their own lack of familiarity with how the Wall Street Journal really works. link

Many of our fellow conservative friends are just wrong on this one.

It isn’t difficult to enforce laws against real crimes, against things like murder and robbery which everyone knows are wrong. The laws which are hard to enforce are the laws against things which are not intrinsically wrong, the kinds of laws which ordinary decent people are willing to violate, and which decent law enforcement officers are not eager to enforce. When existing laws prove unenforceable, the right answer is not to redouble efforts at enforcement. The right answer is to change the law to bring the law’s content into better conformity with Americans’ legitimate desires.

Conservatives ought to recognize that when spontaneous, voluntary, mutually beneficial economic transactions between human beings occur, that is a good thing, not a bad thing, and government should get out of the way, and not try to interfere on the basis of anybody’s theory of what the country ought to look like.

Over at National Review’s The Corner, those jolly little tricoteuses Andrew McCarthy and John Derbyshire were having a pleasant time chatting yesterday as Scooter Libby’s tumbril rolled by.

McCarthy was conflicted because he has friends on both sides (!), and besides he just wasn’t sure that Libby wasn’t really guilty after all. After all, the prosecutor, the New York Times, many of his friends, and a DC jury all said so.

Witnesses have varying recollections, and juries sort it out. The evidence that Libby lied, rather than that he was confused, was compelling.

And class-warrior John Derbyshire just couldn’t see getting bent out of shape over the fate of somebody like Libby.

..compare the likely plights of Libby and the two Border Agents.

When state power rolls over little people like Compean and Ramos, my sympathies are stirred. Libby’s not a little person. He’s rich and terrifically well-connected. He’s not going to get beaten up in jail (as Ramos has been). He’ll have plenty of lucrative work opportunities after release. He will… be all right.

I wish the world were free of wrongs, but it isn’t, and never will be. In the scale of wrongs, and consequent suffering, that I read about every day, this one doesn’t seem worth bothering with.

Meanwhile Susan Estrich, speaking from the left, no less, took a considerably more intellectually and morally responsive position.

I suppose I should be pleased about the tough sentence handed down by Judge Reggie Walton, sentencing the vice president’s former Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to serve 30 months in prison. After all, he’s a Republican, and I’m a Democrat; I’m an opponent of the war, and he worked for one of its architects. I’m certainly no fan of his boss, Dick Cheney, one of the toughest hardball players to occupy the office of vice president. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson was practically gloating this morning when asked to comment on the sentence, declaring it a victory for the rule of law.

Maybe.

Having taught law for more years than I want to count anymore, and criminal law in particular, I know all the arguments about how the rule of law depends on everyone telling the truth, cooperating with criminal investigations, not trying to protect their bosses or those around them. I understand that people in high places have as much responsibility, or more, than the rest of us to follow the law and give their evidence, and that when they don’t, their years of public service are no excuse.

Being chief of staff for the vice president is a bruising job, but also an exciting one. If Scooter Libby hadn’t messed up, he’d be sitting pretty in a high-priced law firm right now, making a fortune not because his legal skills were better than anyone else’s, but because his contacts and connections were. So with the good goes the bad; with the visibility goes the scrutiny; with the fame comes the price. Valerie Plame’s career has been ruined. Why shouldn’t his be?

The only problem here is that there was no underlying crime. The answer to the question Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was initially appointed to investigate — had anyone violated the law in disclosing Ms. Plame’s name in their effort to discredit her husband’s criticism of the administration’s war policy — was no. No one violated what we used to call the “Agents Law.” Dick Armitage, the guy who admits he gave out her name in the first place, isn’t facing time; nor are Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or any of the reporters or news organizations who didn’t hesitate to disclose her identity.

Libby is in trouble not for what he did, but because he wasn’t as careful as the others during his interviews and grand jury testimony.

If he’d just said, “I don’t recall” a hundred times, or even invoked the Fifth (whether properly or not, following the Monica Goodling approach), he wouldn’t be bankrupt, ruined, disgraced and heading to prison.

There is something troubling about prosecutors using perjury and obstruction of justice to turn into criminals people who haven’t committed any other crime. Instead of using the grand jury as a tool for investigating other criminal activity, it becomes the forum for creating criminal conduct. The role of the FBI and federal prosecutors becomes one of creating criminals instead of catching them. Technically, I know, it’s not entrapment, but it’s still different than the usual business of tracking down those who have violated the law and punishing them for their bad acts. The investigation doesn’t solve the crime; it creates it.

This time it was a pro-war Republican caught in the snare, which is why many liberals are cheering. But what goes around comes around, and I wonder if my friends would feel the same way if this technique were used to indict, convict and imprison one of our friends.

Not a good day for the NR punditocracy.

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Hat tip to David L. Larkin.

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy quotes Reagan’s 1989 Farewell Address:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. (emphasis added)

and concludes himself:

Reagan’s positive attitude towards immigration was not just an isolated issue position, but was integrally linked to his generally optimistic and open vision of America. I would add that it also drew on his understanding that America is not a zero-sum game between immigrants and natives – just as he also recognized that it is not a zero-sum game between the rich and the poor. Immigration could promote prosperity and advancement for both groups in much the same way that free trade benefits both Americans and foreigners. Reagan probably did not have a detailed understanding of the economics of comparative advantage which underpins this conclusion. But he surely understood it intuitively. Those who reject Reagan’s position on immigration must, if they are to be consistent, also reject much of the rest of his approach to economic and social policy. Today’s conservatives can argue for immigration restrictions if they so choose. But they should not claim the mantle of Reagan in doing so.

Ann Coulter’s recent playful little exercise in trangressive speech has provoked a veritable stampede of conservative bloggers to the Politically Correct Amen-corner to warble forced hallelujahs to tolerance of “the love which hardly ever shuts up these days,” and to establish each and every one his (or her) own credentials as respectable, properly-behaved little boys and girls, distancing themselves from the taboo-violator who said a bad word.

Little Miss Attila has turned into Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, and is sermonizing and making “a stand for political civility” by publishing a PC-Loyalty Oath for rightwing bloggers to sign. We liked her better in barbarian mode.

Bah, humbug! We always thought the basis for being conservative, rather than liberal, was having a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

Besides, as the left is always explaining to us, transgressive statements which epater les bourgeoisie are supposed to applauded for their courage, and looked upon as highly therapeutic forms of truth-telling, vitally-needed to shake up the hypocrisy of Society.

Moreover, since none of these right bloggers actually used the naughty word publicly themselves, what on earth are they apologizing for?

It is a sad commentary in itself that one mischievous blonde can, simply by including a pejorative (which everyone knows, and everyone has used) in a throwaway quip, provoke these pathetic public displays of groveling in the direction of conformity and political correctness.

Actually, if one considered the matter properly, a joking reference to certain epicene characteristics observable in one particular democrat candidate by the application of a pejorative is not required to be construed as ipso facto insulting to every member of the entire class of persons to which such a term could potentially be applied.

If Ann Coulter had referred instead to Mr. Edwards professionally, as a “shyster,” would you feel obliged to apologize to every attorney in the country? Presumably not. One naturally assumes that attorneys actually do exist who do not really merit that pejorative epithet.

We would contend, in precisely the same way in the present context, that there is no necessary reason to assume that everyone who is an X is also inevitably a Y.

photo by Linda Davidson — The Washington Post

Today’s Washington Post profiles the Conservative blogosphere’s female answer to George Patton, our own lovely and talented Michelle Malkin, offering this (overly mild) representative quotation:

The donkey party,” she wrote last fall, “is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me. Put simply: There are no grown-ups in the Democrat Party.”

Read the whole thing.

Ralph de Toledano, circa 1950

Ralph de Toledano, one of the most prominent figures of the Conservative Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, died in Washington on Saturday at 90 years of age. He wrote a major newspaper column, appeared on radio and television, was one of the founders of National Review, served for twenty years on the editorial board of Newsweek, and published 25 books.

Toledano was born in Tangier, Morocco to American parents of Shephardic Jewish descent. He attended Julliard, and graduated from Columbia University in 1938.

In the 1930s, he joined the Socialist Party of America, and was made youth leader of its anti-Communist “old guard” faction. He became editor of the old guard magazine New Leader in 1934. Under Toledano’s editorship, it became one of the most forceful and effective anti-Communist journals of that era.

He served in the US Army, and in the OSS during WWII.

Toledano was one of the most prominent of a very small number conservative voices in 1950s and 1960s America. He was an extremely prolific journalist and his nationally syndicated column was highly influential in the rise of the Conservative Movement. He deserves to be remembered with affection and respect for his passionate anti-Communism and devoted service to the cause of Liberty.

New York Times

Washington Times

Wikipedia

Mark Bauerlein, in Chronicle of Higher Education, sounds a lot like David Horowitz, describing the academic left’s policy of apartheid concerning conservative ideas, thinkers, and scholars.

Just as an example, he compares the status of Hayek with Foucault:

Decades ago a thinker who’d witnessed oppression firsthand embarked upon a multibook investigation into the operations of society and power. Mingling philosophical analysis and historical observation, he produced an interpretation of modern life that traced its origins to the Enlightenment and came down to a fundamental opposition: the diverse energies of individuals versus the regulatory acts of the state and its rationalizing experts. Those latter were social scientists, a caste of 18th- and 19th-century theorists whose extension of scientific method to social relations, the thinker concluded, produced some of the great catastrophes of modern times.

Here’s the rub: I don’t mean Michel Foucault. The description fits him, but it also fits someone less hallowed in academe today: Friedrich A. von Hayek, the economist and social philosopher. Before and after World War II, Hayek battled the cardinal policy sin of the time, central planning and the socialist regimes that embraced it. He remains a key figure in conservative thought, an authority on free enterprise, individual liberty, and centralized power.

And yet, while Foucault and Hayek deal with similar topics, and while Hayek’s defense of free markets (for which he won the Nobel prize in economics in 1974) influenced global politics far more than Foucault’s analyses of social institutions like psychiatry and prisons, the two thinkers enjoy contrary standing in the liberal-arts curriculum. Hayek’s work in economics has a fair presence in that field, and his social writings reach libertarians in the business school, but in the humanities and most of the social sciences he doesn’t even exist. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, a week didn’t pass without Foucault igniting discussion, but I can’t remember hearing Hayek’s name.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

AJStrata has a good word to say for George W. Bush and the Conservatism of the Bush Administration, and urges the rest of us to refrain from jumping ship.

Let me describe what I think is an attractive conservative vision. It begins with supporting and respecting our President and all his accomplishments. And since I and many others still have unflinching support and admiration for the man, I decided to steal some from the commenters here and dub this conservative view “Bush Conservatives”.

Bush Conservatives not only believe in Reagan’s 11th commandment to not speak ill of fellow conservatives – we live it. From the Gang of 14, to Harriet Miers, to Dubai Ports World and to the immigration issue – there has been a brand of Republican which eschewed the 11th commandment. So let the Republicans be defined by that group – Bush Conservatives will be defined by their antithesis. Bush conservatives are not afraid of the word ‘compromise’. They despise the word ‘failure’. If there is a good idea, we do not care what party gets credit – we care that the good ideas get enacted. It is not Party uber America anymore.

Read the whole thing.

Beth agrees with him, and takes a firmer line with the Paleocons:

I’m still very, very angry at the Buchanan Conservatives/neo-right/cannibals/whatever you wanna call ‘em. It is THEY who I blame more than anyone for the GOP/conservative loss in the election. I suppose it’s irrational to blame them first, but they are the ones with whom I have the most contact, if you will, or at least the most in common (in that we are bloggers). They worked for over two years, slandering everyone on their own side whenever there was a point of disagreement. How the hell did they think the media wouldn’t lap that up? Dissension within the conservative ranks? A gift to the liberal media! And as a result, rather than putting real pressure on those who needed it, they simply allowed the left’s sound-bite slogans, “culture of corruption” and “pork-loving Republicans” to penetrate the usually-disengaged voters’ minds.

A college classmate this morning sent me a link to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne‘s somewhat premature attempt at dancing on American Conservatism’s grave.

Dionne is not entirely wrong, of course. He notes correctly that George W. Bush never was a real conservative in the Goldwater, Reagan, or Gingrich sense. But, personally, I wouldn’t waste my time constructing elaborate theories about Hamiltonian “big-government conservatism,” or using “government as a means to achieve conservative ends.” It’s really much simpler than that. George W. Bush is simply an old-fashioned garden variety practical politician (what we used to call an Eisenhower Republican), bringing to his Presidency his family’s traditional flexibility in governing, flavored with just enough red-state populism and Republican impulses to secure the GOP base’s support.

The American left has remained mobilized and afflicted with a paranoid sense of wrong ever since their favorite son’s sexual scandals metastasized into perjury and impeachment. Disappointment with the outcome of the 2000 election and US military actions following 9/11 have continued to keep the left as angry and active as a nest of red ants thoroughly poked with a stick. The larger part of George W. Bush’s perceived conservatism really amounts to mere reciprocated animosity.

Dionne is not inaccurate in describing this Congress.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

The Republican Senatorial majority unfortunately includes a number of liberal Republican-in-name-only senators, and has been effectively paralysed by joys-of-incumbency induced timidity and the democrats’ willingness to abuse the filibuster.

Dionne contends that the repeal of the death tax failed “because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.” Rubbish! There certainly is a majority in this country in favor of not taxing away a family’s assets simply because someone has died.

Poll after poll proves it.

a 1999 poll by Worthlin Worldwide found 70 percent of voters favoring a phase-out of the estate tax. — A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent of voters supporting elimination of the inheritance tax. — A 2001 CBS News/New York Times poll also found 71 percent of people opposing imposition of an estate tax at death.

Dionne would like to believe that libertarian versus traditionalist divisions are in the process of splitting the right on issues like immigration and stem cell research. Sorry, Mr. Dionne. It’s true that I disagree strongly with Michelle Malkin and Victor Davis Hanson about immigration, but our differences do not materially diminish my admiration and respect for those two traditionalists, nor are they likely to persuade Michelle, Victor, or myself to start voting for democrats. I don’t have a problem with stem cell research myself (being irreligious), but I believe President Bush was quite right to veto spending the tax dollars of religious people funding things they find morally repugnant. Let’s just finance this kind of research privately. There’s no shortage of rich atheists or leftists.

Dionne is off-base looking for a conservative split over religious issues these days. I’ve had plenty of differences within the Conservative Movement with religious traditionalists in days gone by, but there is no particular Religious Right agenda we libertarians have a major problem with today. I do have problems with organs of the left, like the ACLU, waging intolerant campaigns to eradicate any form of private religious expression in the public space, eliminating religious symbols, or persecuting the Boy Scouts for political incorrectness. In short, I expect most of us making up what Dionne calls the “big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives” are likely to continue to vote with the ordinary hometown Americans rather than with the coastal community of fashion indefinitely on into the misty future.

He’s right in saying this Congress is a disaster, and many of its members deserve to be defeated. I’ve said the same thing repeatedly myself. But what will lose in November will not be conservative principles, but the exact opposite. The losers will be the unprincipled, the compromisers and trimmers, and the opportunists.

The Conservative Movement, Mr. Dionne, has experienced setbacks and electoral defeats before. Those of us who lived through the Goldwater campaign of 1964 are not especially perturbed by the prospect of this coming November. We will be back.

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Hat tip to Steve Wagenseil.

Fellow old-time Movement Conservatives will be amused to read Josh Trevino‘s comparison of the impotent and unhappy state of today’s Left with that of post-New Deal American Conservativism, viewing Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) as those poor lefties’ Robert Welch.

There was once a movement, born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. This movement saw itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it sought to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. But because the movement did feel embattled, and because it did view itself as the victim of powerful forces, it chose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It saw the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they could just crack the code — if it could grasp the very methodology of victory — then they would turn the tables, and victory would be theirs.

The American left today is not quite in the position of the American right circa 1960. But it is suffering nonetheless, having been in slow decline for the past quarter-century. Even when it wins the Presidency, it loses the Congress: and even when the President is the inept, uncommunicative George W. Bush, it still cannot make a dent in the ascendancy of its enemies. The end result of this is a group of Americans, identifying as members of the left, that is strikingly similar to the conservative movement of a generation past: inchoate, angry, and prone to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”..

Consider the average member of this group. He (or she) remembers the era of leftist dominance of American politics — and he remembers the beginning of its end, on election day 1980. He is around 50 years old. He is professional living in a coastal enclave, mostly on the Pacific coast or the northeast. His political consciousness was formed by the McGovern and Carter campaigns — and of course the American retreat from Vietnam. He may have grown up in Iowa, or Texas, or Missouri, or Utah — but he went to college elsewhere, and fell in love with the people in California, or New York, or Boston, who were so much more progressive and intellectual than the hayseeds back home. His initial concept of conservatives, which he’s never really abandoned, was formed by Nixonian malfeasance: they’re all crooks and corrupt, in his mind. The ascent of Reagan in 1980, and later the 1994 revolution, came as a profound shock — how could America forget so soon? He is well-off: and the bulk of his working career — and hence the font of his personal prosperity — was spent in the boom markets of the 1980s and 1990s, under Republican national governance in one form or another. He doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

But for all his generally good circumstances, he’s been on the political and cultural losing side all his adult life. He’s tired of it. And he’s found a website which, at last, makes him feel empowered. He is, in short, the typical member of the so-called netroots: the left-wing movement, organized around blogs, that seeks to “take back” this country from its usurpers. The netroots is a movement born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. It sees itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it seeks to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. Critically, it choose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It sees the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they can just crack the code — if it can grasp the very methodology of victory — then they will turn the tables, and victory will be theirs.

Sound familiar? It is — to us. To the left, it’s all very exciting, and all very new. And so we see the self-proclaimed netroots go through a trajectory very much like what the Birchers went through, albeit in highly compressed time. The elements are all there: the resentment, the conspiracy-mindedness, and especially the leaders with stupefyingly poor judgment married to Napoleon complexes. I’ve noted before that they are “frank proponents of outright mimicry of the mechanisms of GOP ascendacy.” Add to this the horrifying, alienating statements ranging from the mockery of dead Americans at war to the derision of political opponents’ personal sorrows. Add to this the demonization of the very people who should, in a sane world, be their friends — The New Republic chief among them — and the formula is complete. Messianism and paranoia marry to make this.

There’s already some evidence of pushback. The journalistic establishment won’t take the abuse forever. The purported agents of the Communist — sorry, the vast right-wing conspiracy won’t endure the smears indefinitely. And the left’s political establishment won’t kowtow endlessly — and certainly not so long as the netroots keep losing. For the sake of American civic life, one hopes this is true.

But for the sake of the enemy — we conservatives of all stripes — we need merely note that whereas they have a pint-sized Welch, they have no Buckley.

And, more importantly, no Rand.

Another 51 conservative rock songs identified by John J. Miller at National Review.

And Robert Godwin offers a short list of the greatest liberal rock songs.

If you can’t be with the one you love,
Love the one you’re with ? If you say so.

Miller’s first Top 50.