Category: Politics

Everyone and their cousin is gonna be linking to this, but here’s the Newsweek article on the internal struggle over presidential powers in the Bush administration.

It’s a blatantly biased article. Illustrating an investigation of internal debates with a picture of an Iraqi being tortured? It’s my bias, though, and I find the article strokes the pleasure centers of my political brain.

Speaking of sports — actually, first, a note on my previous. When your favorite athlete thanks God for the win? That’s probably not a casual reflex. Read this piece on sports as an avenue of proselytization.

Anyway. Dr. Z writes a column for Sports Illustrated on the NFL. Fun, breezy writer; well respected, he’s been around forever. Here’s a throwaway comment from him this week:

“Come in Mike H. from Wellington, New Zealand, do you read me, over? No, he doesn’t read me because I’m speaking to a piece of paper with writing on it, which shows how much I’m slipping. One more word, before I get to his question. Can you exert any influence to get the Flaming Redhead and me citizenship papers, plus help in opening an account at the Bank of NZ? If they ask what I can do, tell them I can cover rugby and do a really snappy column about the great NZ wines. Last I heard, New Zealand is a country where they don’t torture people, right?”

Just a data point.

Pat Robertson said that God was punishing Sharon by sending him a stroke. We are, of course, horrified. What a cruel thing to say!

Then again, it’s in the same logical category as something that’s said every day, broadcast on TV regularly, and so on. “… and I thank God for helping us win this game.” Which is equivalent to “I thank God for making sure my opponents lost the game.” Which means God’s making choices about who wins and who loses. He’s gotta choose sides there.

Maybe it’s more reasonable to claim that God is making choices about relatively unimportant things like sporting events. But… the culture accepts the idea that God reaches down and affects the outcome of everyday events. We don’t object when an athlete makes that claim. We ought not be surprised when that claim shows up in other arenas.

So Tom DeLay had to appear at the courthouse for a mug shot last week. Now, let’s say you’re a politician in some degree of trouble, and you gotta have your mug shot taken. I’m thinking it’s not too much of a leap of brilliance to say “I better not look like a criminal in the photograph.”

Or maybe that takes “a freaking political genius”. And maybe taking care to look good in your mug shot completely disarms one’s adversaries. I mean, that’s it — he looked good in his mug shot, so the trial might as well be over now.

This is an awfully low bar for political excellence, if you ask me.

Oh, Ann Coulter.

It’s a great column. I mean, you get the usual “liberals are the devil” stuff which of course only coincidentally resembles the rhetoric of extremists who really would like to see liberals dead. You don’t get an Ann Coulter column without that; they don’t have anything without glossy intellectual hatred in it.

But you also get the pit bull going after Bush, a fine spectacle indeed. It’s worth it for that aspect alone. Don’t stop! There’s more.

“I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that’s a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court. … Being on the Supreme Court isn’t like winning a ‘Best Employee of the Month’ award. It’s a real job.”

There you have it. You shouldn’t hate people who go to elite universities when they’re doing real jobs. Mind you, I just elided two and a half paragraphs to produce the quote, but nobody’s perfect.

Speaking of fractures in the Republican Party:

Roy Moore, the Alabama Chief Justice who was removed from office for ignoring an order to remove a representation of the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building, will challenge Republican governor Bob Riley in 2006. Betcha he wins.

My initial read on the Miers nomination is that she’s the big business pick. She spent almost three decades as a corporate lawyer, eventually becoming a partner at one of the biggest law firms in Texas. She worked with Karl Rove on Texas tort reform back when Bush was governor. And, as has been reported just about everywhere, she’s tremendously loyal to Bush.

It reads like she’s part of Bush’s Texas business-oriented crowd to me. This is one of the pillars of Bush’s support, alongside the social conservative bunch. Social conservative is perhaps an oversimplification here; I’m not sure I should be putting anti-government types like Grover Norquist alongside Rick Santorum. But close enough for now; they’ve got more in common than either of them do with Dick Cheney. More to the point, it’d have been possible to nominate a Justice who’d satisfy both Norquist and Santorum.

What’s happening, though, is that Bush has decided he’ll give the business guys a seat at the table before he gives the social conservatives a seat at the table. I think Miers is probably as bad a candidate as a social conservative candidate would have been; she looks a bit better cause I was mentally prepared to get a social conservative strict constructionalist. But I’d be very surprised if she rules against big business often.

This is perhaps unfair of me. On the other hand, it’s difficult to believe that a legal career in which she defended a lot of corporate interests indicates that she didn’t enjoy it to some degree. Which is OK — everyone needs legal defense, even guilty people, and corporations aren’t always guilty. Not sure the Supreme Court needs that kind of inclination, though.

Mostly I’m enjoying watching the fissure between big business and social conservatives. This has been coming ever since Bush didn’t come down hard on the Schiavo case. This is just sort of the final evidence that Bush is not a social conservative at heart.

Sports journalism is often a pretty conservative field, especially when it comes to talk radio. Tank McNamara, the sports-themed comic strip — I say “the.” Maybe there’s another one, I dunno, but it’s the only one I know about. Anyhow.

The current storyline is about Tank McNamara infiltrating the Minutemen, that charming anti-immigration group that’s walking the thin line between citizen activism and vigilante activity. Cause the biggest threat to the United States today is illegal Mexican immigration.

The writer has some fairly stinging things to say about the Minutemen. “Well, some of these guys have gone over the top. They’ve become total whack jobs. And I should know. I’m one of them. A ‘Minuteman,’ not a whack job.” Interesting stuff. I dunno if the comic strip has been this political before, although I have vague memories of it being so from time to time.

I don’t really have much to say about this, I’m just thinking it’ll be interesting to read the strip and keep an eye out for fallout.

The Massachusetts Legislature rejected an amendment banning gay marriage by the resounding margin of 157-39 yesterday. The margin is partially because the extreme right voted no as well — the amendment would permit civil unions, and some of the reps think that’s wrong too. But it’s mostly because gay marriage hasn’t ended the world here in the Bay State.

There’s been an election cycle between the court order allowing gay marriage and now, and gay marriage was an election issue. The opinion of the courts matches the opinion of the legislature, and the opinion of the legislature reflects the opinion of the people. Done and done, as they say.

Tacitus, when all is said and done, is honest. Do I disagree with him? Lots. Do I respect his integrity? Generally, yeah. He’s not perfect. Neither am I. Who is?

The world needs more Republicans like him and John Cole, and more Democrats who can tell the difference between John Cole and John Derbyshire.