Am I the only one who giggles uncontrollably whenever Chris Matthews refers to momentum as "the Big Mo"?

Just me, then?

David Frum:

Not so Mr. Romney. Analytic and data-driven, always prepared to change his mind when circumstances change

Most bloggers are stupid ignorant fucks. Barely more coherent or content generating than their inane commenters. The New York Times is way better than 95% of the blogs on the Truth Laid Bear top 250. But Maureen Dowd doesn't post her hate mail like Michelle Malkin....

If you're staring at the November California ballot, here's a table to help you out.

Proposition	Republican	Democrat	Libertarian
73. Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy	Y	N	no position
74. Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status. Dismissal	Y	N	Y
75. Public Employee Union Dues. Restrictions on Political Contributions. Employee Consent Requirement	Y	N	Y
76. State Spending and School Funding Limits	Y	N	Y
77. Redistricting. Initiative Constitutional Amendment	Y	N	Y
78. Discounts on Prescription Drugs	?	N	N
79. Prescription Drug Discounts. State-Negotiated Rebates	?	Y	N
80. Electric Service Providers. Regulation	?	Y	N

A generation ago Iriving Kristol declared that a neoconservative was a liberal who'd been "mugged by reality." After the past 4 years I don't know if we can say that anymore. It seems to me that the foreign policy of the hard-core neoconservatives is rather idealistic, a form of muscular Wilsonianism (I find the posturings of some the liberal hawks at The New Republic in the way they try to distinguish themselves from necons on foreign policy rather facile). The neocons descend from a group of intellectuals who were generally supportive of the New Deal, and even the Fair Deal. But they reacted negatively to the Great Society overreach of LBJ, and in the 1970s began formulating a realist response toward the social crises that emerged from the synthesis of The Great Disruption and the welfare state.

In response to the hard-headedness of the Right the Left half of the political spectrum seems to have generated three primary camps. Moderates, typified by the DLC and Bill Clinton in the latter half of the 1990s (i.e., the Welfare Reform Bill Clinton, not the Universal Healthcare Bill Clinton) accepted many of the criticisms of the neocons, and formulated a "Third Way" which attempted to mix & match conservative means with liberal ends. Others retreated into bizarre identity politics or fixed themselves on the political margins and became rather irrelevant (though the Nader campaign of 2000 was not irrelevant at all one could say). And of course there was the old bull post-Great Society liberalism still in play, typified by Ted Kennedy, serving as a counter-weight to the DLC moderates.

For the past generation it seems that many liberals have not only wanted to preserve the welfare state in its Great Society form (note the cries of betrayal during Welfare Reform), but they have fantasized about expanding the scope of government intervention. With no real possibility of implementation, as the moderate Democrats would block them within the party and they would receive no succor from the Republicans, dreams could spin out of control. Some on the Left still seemed to harbor the idea that all humans had infinite potentialities, that job training and universal college educations would free up the native genius of individuals. Skeptics of this panglossian perspective on human nature of course didn't buy into this program.

Then came G.W. Bush. In many ways Bush is a conservative, with his tax breaks and moderate social policies...but, in many ways he is not. The No Child Left Behind Act was to my mind Bush's inadvertant ploy to call the far Left's bluff, and raise them one. I have had personal experiences with many individuals who work in school systems, or around them, who can't believe the expectations that some children, and their teachers, are put under. I even talked to a woman who worked in the adminstrative wing of a school district, who tentatively supported the NCLBA because she told me, "...the students in this school district are doing really well, but a few kids are getting left behind, and they tend to be poor, minority...." In the Best of All Worlds no child can be left behind, no matter that they are drooling on the school carpet and need the special attention of two attendents to make sure that they don't mess their diapers too often.

I joked to a friend that for 25 years some liberals have been dreaming of a program that would send a crew of Down Syndrome adults to the moon, since with the right programs and right mind set, anyone can do anything! G.W. Bush agrees, and now liberals are having to figure out how they will actualize their dreams of Down Syndrome doctors and astronauts, using raw will power to drive themselves forward across the fields of self esteem.

Speaking of the attraction of many liberals pre-March 2003 to the Iraq War, Matthew Yglesias noted:

Packer, like a lot of liberal intellectuals, was essentially swept up in this wave of applause. But how much sense did this line of thinking ever make? Extremely little, it seems to me. Nobody who was actually being asked to put themselves on the line would find this reasonable. As I've said before, it's the equivalent of playing poker with someone else's money. When it's not you who needs to do the fighting, why not choose hope over wisdom?

In many ways the Iraq War project appealed to the idealism of many liberals. Who doesn't want to liberate a nation from a loathesome dictator? Who doesn't want to bring democracy to the masses? The neoconservative project fundamentally appealed to many liberals because of its idealism and high hopes for human nature. I was rather struck how many anti-war liberals had to engage in strange cognitive contortions to remain the idealists, they were the ones who really cared about those brown people. Arguments were made, and have been made, that from a utilitarian angle the Iraqis will have suffered more under the Americans than under the dictatorship. From a short term perspective, this might be true, but over the generation I think the Iraqis have really benefited quite a bit. I suspect that there will be long term The Mouse That Roared impacts. Nevertheless, fundamentally, this is going to be a hard slog. Many Americans have died, and we've spent a lot of money on this project. I'm not going to get into the details of whether the war is good or not, I'm skeptical, but not dogmatic about it, ultimately as long as too many Americans don't die and too much money doesn't get spent I don't care too much. But what I've been seeing, in glimmers and flickers, is that many liberals, like Yglesias, are transforming themselves into realists and rationalists. G.W. Bush's sunny optimism is something that revolts them on a visceral level. They can hate his idealism, ridicule it, express their naked contempt for his world building and policing ambitions, because he is a Republican. They can attack No Child Left Behind, mandatory testing, etc. because he is a Republican.

They've been mugged. Now let's see how this plays out.

1. Harriet Miers will be confirmed.
2. She will turn out to be more hostile to Roe v. Wade than Justice Roberts.

Obviously lots of room to be wrong there.

Update: Over the weekend, the futures market on Meirs went to crap.

Steve points me to this response by Matthew Yglesias to those who would question his semi-defense (or non-attack) in regards Bill Bennett's recent statements. This is the important part (for me):

Recent years have seen a frightening rise in right-wing political correctness. If you criticize Israeli policy or the U.S.–Israel relationship, or even use the word "neocon," you're an anti-Semite. If you're against Al Gonzalez you hate Hispanics. If you're against Janice Rogers Brown you hate black people. If you're generally against the social-conservative judicial agenda you hate Christians. If you're against the Iraq War you hate the troops. Most generally, liberalism itself is defined as an anti-American creed, some kind of slur against the Heartland and its delicate sensitivities.

That's all crap, of course, but a defense of rational debate requires some effort at consistency of purpose. The rule that the criterion of acceptibility is not accuracy, but sensitivity merely leads at the end of the day to the hegemony of majority sensibilities, to the most dangerous identity politics of all, those of America's white Christian majority. [italicized bold, my emphasis, -R]

Yglesias is pointing to the big picture here. Garance Franke-Ruta's opinion that Democratic leaning bloggers should get as much mileage out of the Bennett flap as possible, Latin be damned, certainly makes sense in the short term. And in general I don't mind that much when people at Daily Kos admit that they are going to back the Miers nomination on instrumental grounds, Supreme Court nominations are, in this day and age, pure politics. On the other hand, as Brad DeLong's original defense of Bennett implies there are intellectual grounds to not attack him. Granted, for the Left that means ceding some short-term political points. The fact is that the broad majority of Americans probably found Bennett's offhand association somewhat offensive (signalled by the statements put out by the Bush admininstration), and some criticism on those grounds is probably warranted.¹ But some of the hyperboles that Bennett was condoning the genocide of black Americans goes too far, in particular light of the fact that 1 out of 4 detected pregnancies ends in an abortion in the United States in any case, a disproportionate number of them black (it shouldn't surprise us that some black pro-lifers accuse abortion rights folk of aiming for the genocide of their race, something Maggie Sanger would probably not have been totally averse to via negative eugenics).

For a small minority of Americans facts and intellectual consistency matters. The vast majority of Americans are either too stupid or ideologically blinkered to really care, but in a nation that is sliced down the middle, this small minority, often biased toward classical liberalism, might matter a great deal in the overall war.

Addendum: People have different ends for the ideal political order. Myself, an open intellectually vibrant culture is a necessacity for my utopia, so it follows that an instrumentally guided policy with subborns that culture is by definition something I will look askance at, because to uphold the ends of A by the means of !A causes logical difficulties.

1 - I myself don't find it that offensive, the fact is that black Americans and crime have a strong association no matter what people say in public. That being said, even John McWhorter, who isn't know for being particularly sensitive, had a hard time defending Bennett's off the cuff statement. The reductio ad absurdum explanation offered by DeLong, which I think is the most likely primary component (though the association of black people with crime is surely a background assumption), is too complicated and subtle for most Americans to understand. So if you say something that requires several nested layers of concepts, and what you are saying is easily misconstrued by compressing said concepts into one unsubtle layer, don't say it, because the general audience isn't going to be able to decompose the sound bite and place it back in its context.

Michael of Half Sigma adds more detail to the nature of his various blog hoaxes, including Libertarian Girl. This is what I found most interesting:

Meanwhile, I started my next hoax project, Abigail’s Magic Garden. The beautiful thing here was that Abigail was a liberal/left-wing blogger! I figured that no one would connect the two blogs because Libertarian Girl was right-wing.

How did I manage to create the illusion of being left-wing? At first I thought I would have to write a lot of stupid stuff that I didn’t agree with, but I made a truly amazing discovery. I could actually write about stuff that I agreed with and still create the illusion that I was a left winger!

Here are the secrets to convincingly being left-wing: (1) fill up your blogroll with left-wing blogs; (2) always mention how you hate George Bush and how he's doing a lousy job; (3) always bring up Iraq when something goes wrong there.

This doesn't surprise me too much, as a libertarian Michael did have intersections with liberals, and so as long as he addressed commonalities people would just fill in the dots for everything else. It reminds me of an article in The American Conservative which points the extent to which coalitional/tribal considerations obviate the need for genuine agreemant in reference to Christopher Hitchens' recent alliance with the neoconservatives and shift toward the Right, he still remains virulently anti-religion and a Trotskyphile, and yet right-wingers like theoconservative Ramesh Ponnuru tend to give him slack!