In Nouvelle Orleans

I am not a good person to talk about tragedies. Mainly, I think body count, big explosions and/or fire, smashing waves, buildings collapsing -- the more it looks like movie FX, the "happier" I am. Not that I go all James Wolcott and gloat over the dumb red-state crackers getting whupped by Gaia, or Pat Robertson, saying God is smiting gays. There's not a lot of humanity in tragedy; it pretty well remains pictures on TV to me. Since I know intellectually that isn't true, I donate to the Red Cross and Salvation Army, and I pray, knowing God has more mercy than I do.

When Katrina came calling, I was kinda bummed because it didn't make landfall as a category 5 and that it veered far enough east to miss the Pontchartrain, which I had been promised would be sucked up and dropped directly in the French Quarter, and that sounded just awesome. And I really didn't want the much-maligned, little-regarded, totally innocent Mississippi to get thwacked when the totally debauched New Orleans was sitting there, blithely sipping daiquiries and begging to be smacked. After a couple of the wee morning hours on Monday, though, and I was ready for a good Old-Testament-styled spanking to New Orleans, with the people filling bars on Bourbon Street in a julep-soaked breakfast waiting for the storm, thumbing their noses intentionally at everyone who warned them differently. The audacity, the smugness, the small-minded selfishness that made them and their stomachs bigger than the world around them. I wanted a dramatic (albeit ultimately harmless -- maybe just some buildings collapsing without people inside them, that kind of thing) storm, a gullywasher that would wake them up. And nothing seemed to happen.

Then Tuesday morning, I found out that the levees, that had been leaking but otherwise stable on Monday, had burst and that the city had flooded. On the one hand, I felt a tremendous surge (oops, bad word choice) of justification -- why didn't you just listen? See what you could have avoided? You were warned! A thousand times warned! Naturally, I felt guilty.

But now I don't. Not when things like this are happening. Not when a man was shot five times during the hurricane on Monday, and his body has been left floating in the floodwaters for three days since. Not when looters try to break into a children's hospital(because yes, Virginia, a mob showing up to loot because they thought looting was already in affect does, indeed, count as a mob showing up to loot, misinformation aside). Not when they shoot a police officer in the head for trying to stop them. Not when the police officers themselves help people break into a Wal-Mart and take the best DVDs for themselves.

Good God, was this city not hit hard enough? With the dead literally bobbing in there with the looters and the city dead and broken around them -- what the hell is the matter with these people?

Ya think?

I love the Left because they teach me about faith. Blind faith, tunnel-visioned, fact-free, based in a personal and unassailable knowledge that cannot be known. Today, my lesson in faith came from John Nichols in The Nation, via CBS News (h/t RealClearPolitics).

To sum up (although this is pretty short, so wade through it yourself, if you want), John Nichols believes that Bush is ahistorical in saying that our Constitution and democracy were formed in chaos so we should be patient with a chaotic beginning for Iraq. John Nichols writes that, from his richly-nuanced quasi-socialist Midwestern political heritage, he has been "imparted a rich faith in the perfectability of the American experiment and a keen awareness of the folly of telling the peoples of other lands how to organize their governments. As such, the president has little familiarity with what I happen to think is the healthiest of American political traditions."

See, we can be made perfect (hence the Utopian social engineering). But Iraqis? Not so much. The premise is -- we had a cool democracy made by brilliant scholars and thinkers of yesteryear, in a glorious word-dance of discovery. Which, by teh way, I think is true. This makes our democracy the greatest experiment in the history of mankind. Again, true. However, since the Iraqis are getting their contitution and freedom at the point of American bayonets, it is as illegitimate as Floridian vote tallies, and their ddemocracy is a doomed, faked failure in the making, and we should recognize its inherent inferiority and just quit.

In fact, there were no foreign troops prodding the process along. The French, who played a critical role in helping the American revolutionaries throw off British colonial oppression, exited quickly. The Marquis de Lafayette, as good a friend as the American rebels had, did not return to the new republic until 1824.

To be sure, Lafayette had ideas about how the Continentals ought to organize the American experiment. But he was smart enough to recognize that constitutions are organic documents that cannot be written under timelines imposed by foreign powers, just as he recognized that democracies cannot form or flourish under occupation.

Actually, I sort of agree with him -- stunning news: a liberal just agreed that all societies are not equal! Multiculturalism has failed like Communism, on the ash heap of history, as the glory of Western civ marches into the future! Huzzah! We have the greatest form of government, despite its quirks and (because we're all human) inherent imperfectness. This really is God's gift to mankind. And Iraq, particularly weith a culture that is barbaric, prone to xenophobic religious zealotry, a disregard for human life, much less human dignity adn rights, will never fully create a free democracy with equal rights and religious equality and women's rights and free expression the way that a free market, predominantly Christian yet secular society has.

But you know what? That's still okay. It's better for us, and them, to make a free beacon out of their country such as it is than to throw up our hands, leave our bayonets in our pockets, and truly let Iraq descend into a hellish quagmire. I would hardly term this as an occupation -- this is nation-building. And nation-building has long been messy. And it has always been American.

Britain occupied countries and remade them in their image. Kenya and Hong Kong and India and Australia (and us) are all better for it. British culture rocks. But it's still British culture.

Like Germany, Cuba, Japan, Russia, and others, we do not go out and occupy and create little pockets of America. We lay down some ground rules -- respect for life and limb as starters -- and let them find their own way. Of course their way isn't as good as ours. Yes, it is inferior. But unlike Mr. John Nichols of the Nation, I am not willing to call it valueless. Freedom, any breath of it, is still a gift.

And that, Mr. John Nichols of the Nation, is, in fact, very historical.

Snarky Seipp

Normally, I enjoy Cathy Seipp's writing. Not that I always agree with her, but I generally don't vehementally disagree with her. Today's article for NRO, though, is just pointlessly snide against Southerners.

Opening graf:

Whenever liberals remind us that not all Muslims are terrorists or anti-American rioters, I always think that not everyone in the pre-civil-rights south was a church bomber or member of the Ku Klux Klan. Even then, there was lots to like about the south. Southerners always have been known for charm and hospitality — rather like Palestinians today, whom the foreign press finds much more appealing than brusque and bossy Israeli soldiers.

Did you get that? We Southerns -- up until when, the Reagan years? -- were all like Palenstinians. We may not all have been in the KKK, but, y'know, a good black-church-burning or lynching was always good for a laugh of a Saturday evening. We usually made it potluck.

And then there's paragraph number two!

It's fair to say, however, that despite the existence of many decent people and even the occasional Atticus Finch type, southerners a generation or two ago were not exactly unsympathetic to ideas the Klan had about uppity blacks or busybody federal lawmakers trying to come in and destroy their way of life.

Yep, we had our Uncle Toms, er, I mean Atticus Finches (like that uncle, the one we never talk about), but in general, it was all about the potluck lynchings.

[Aside -- anyone else see the hypocrisy of a chick more libertarian than I making a crack about anyone resenting "busybody federal lawmakers trying to come in and destroy their way of life"? Isn't that the whole point?]

Then there's paragraph three (honest to God, this should have been in the NYT):

Certainly I realize that there are differences between the pre-civil-rights south and Islamists today. The animosity of segregationists was focused on blacks; Islamists especially hate Jews, but also aren't fond of Americans, Christians, women, homosexuals, Buddhist statues, Hindus, irreverent Dutch filmmakers or the entire Western way of life.

I am so glad, really, that she realizes there are at list one or two differences between my home and terrorists. But, um, really? Coulda sworn that the KKK also hated Hispanics, Indians, "papists," Asians, and anyone else not white and Protestant, and tolerated as children white women. If this sounds like a reversal from my position, it's not, because the KKK and every wannabe were and are the extreme crazy-loon fringe that no one save Robert Byrd liked or accepted. It was poor white trash, the ignorant, the social outcasts who were (and are) clansmen. Yeah, there were issues (understatement) in the South about races, but no uncomparable to the North -- remember those huge race riots in, where was it, Detroit? LA? Maybe the segregated black and Spanish Harlems? South Bronx?

Tail end of paragraph three:

And even at its worst, the segregated south wasn't expansionist, at least not in the 20th century.

And what century were we expansionist? What, like, Missouri? Was wanting Missouri as a slave state 150 years ago expansionist? If that's not what she means -- what, exactly? Can she tell me where? Where was the South expanding?

Well, in case you couldn't tell from the clear and relevant opening grafs, she liked a documentary about 9/11 by National Geographic which contributors, it turns out, think Osama had a point, the Jooos are to blame, we deserve whatever we get because of our stance on Israel/Saudi/Iraq, and 9/11 remains, ultimately, an "unsolved homicide." See the connection with the American South? Oh, well, what do you expect. She's from California.

Because there's nothing wrong with that!

Join the team, Conservative Bloggers who Support the Gay John (/Judge/Justice) Roberts.



Because he's probably not...but there's nothing wrong with him if he is!

It's so scary.....

....because it's so true!

George W. Bush invaded Iraq so that white men and oil companies could invade The United Nations.

H/t the Corner.

The Dread Pirate Roberts takes no survivors

The confirmation process is gearing up, this summer's DC games. The contender is John Roberts. Who may be...conservative. There are clues, delicious clues, salacious clues that hint he may be...conservative. A) He worked for Ronald Reagan. B) He worked for Ken Starr. C) He has been nominated by not one but two Bush Presidents. D) He may or may not be a member of the shadowy league that is the Federalist Society.

To determine whether a man who may or may not be a FedSoc conservative should sit on the highest bench devised by the wisdom of man, there is a process. The purpose and method of the process differ depending on where in the stream of politics you are. Conservatives want someone literate. That's it. Someone who can read the Constitution. Theoretically, this type of justice would decide little court things on whether the issues at hand was actually in the Constitution primarily by reading it, a theory called strict constructionism. The procedural criterion then is technical competence. Liberals, as we all love about those quirky li'l devils, want someone who can emanate and/or translate penumbras. Much like chakras, penumbras are not literal; they radiate from the flowing lifeforce of our living Constitution. The primary procedural concern for liberals is ideology; they have to see into, probe, even flay the soul of the candidate either to discern his merit or break him and keep him out of office.

John Roberts is even now enwrapped in the gelatinous ooze of our beautiful mating ritual that is judicial confirmation. That means he will be grilled. Grilled over an open flame. In front of CSPAN. And Fox. And Democratic constituents. To show that they know his soul, this tiny band of Democrats will question his toddler's sexual orientation and criticize his wife's fashion sense. They will deride him for being Catholic. They will fault him for both the conservative and liberal cases he has worked. A la Boxer and Rice, Democrats will confirm him through an endless series of random soundbites and buzzwords, repeating the pointlessly and ad nauseum so that everyone on the Daily Show is impressed with their persistence. The unbiased defenders of the living fetal creature that is the Constitution.

Michael Comisky makes the case for grilling Roberts (the Dread Pirate Roberts!) in today's Baltimore Sun. In a nutshell (not that the article wasn't light enough), why is this necessary? Because the President, and all those that agree with him, must be taught a lesson.

But the best reason for rejecting these claims is that our constitutional system is based on checks and balances. And when presidents try to load the Supreme Court with people who share their political philosophy, senators cannot check and balance the president unless they also consider nominees' views.

If senators do not consider nominees' political views when deciding to confirm or reject them, only 10 people - the president and the Supreme Court justices - can have a real say in the debate over what the Constitution means.

Umm, yeah. So many places to start. First, "checking and balancing" doesn't mean "aimlessly thwarting." The sky is not immediately orange just because the President said it was blue, and pure contrariness isn't a reason for a self-congratulatory "check" on his unilateralism. Second, the majority of both electors and voters, by handy margins each, elected this President, knowing that justices would be retiring. They knew what they were doing in electing a conservative. Just like they expanded the Republican majority in the Senate. Again -- the voices of the people are in how they vote. So you have a tiny handful of people trying to block the majority will. In a democracy, only two groups matter. The majority and the individual. The minority does not matter and should not. Everyone has already played their part in forming the Supreme Court. It is not only right but fair to let the President do his job in selecting and the Court their job in deciding. It's not directly up to us anymore.

There are drawbacks to a political confirmation process. A struggle over Sandra Day O'Connor's successor could turn ugly and further alienate a disaffected public. Public confidence in the Supreme Court and Congress could fall as a result. These are the risks we run in a democracy.

But past battles over nominees' ideologies, as distinct from other issues, did not damage the court or Congress, even during the heated clashes over nominees Robert H. Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991.

Yeah, no one thinks this isn't going to be ugly. But, hmmm, I notice a trend in those two hearings. Could it be -- why, they were both conservatives! Nominated by Republicans! With Democratic Senates! Perhaps the divisiveness and hatred turned so very ugly not because of the political bias of the nominees or the nominaters, but because of the Democrats who tried to thwart it. Hmm. I notice he didn't bring up the Lani Guinier nomination debacle (incompetent) or that of the, ahem, partisan ACLU-lovin' Ginsburg. Maybe because, despite being vehemently and rightly opposed to everything Ginsburg believed ideologically, Republicans voted for her (hear that? not just didn't filibuster -- actually voted for her!) because she met their only criterion: competence.

If you'll pardon my boldness, the "risks we run in a democracy" don't include an incivil, hateful, and utterly groundless attack on a man and his family in a grand-standing display down for the fever-swamps of DailyKos. The only risk in a democracy is losing an election. Y'know, the democracy part of the republic. Otherwise, I expect the functions of the Constitution to kick in. The "risk" to liberals is apparently circumventing the system to make a 15-second sound clip on CNN.

Most Americans seem to prefer the risk of an unpleasant confirmation fight over the alternative of allowing just 10 people to decide what the Constitution means. Two cheers for democracy.

Sigh. Perhaps those cheers would be louder if the majority of the voters in that democratic election were allowed to be heard without a prolonged and “unpleasant” hearing.

And the sun comes out again

I thought a moment of rhetorical flourish -- not seen since the Federalist Papers had an illicit liaison with Jane Eyre -- had again vanished from the earth. I thought that the india-ink speckled pen of Fatima Abdrabboh had fallen silent in a world waiting for a silent spring.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin, I heard again those dulcet tones -- behold! Abdrabboh has returned!

As those of you who sludged through the heavy-handed NYT article will recall, Ms. Abdrabboh wears a headscarf -- a Muslim hijab that has become the single most self-consciously-worn piece of clothing since Hester Prynne's scarlet A. Well, she is still huddling in pride under that headscarf, though The Man that controls Cambridge, Mass., still is judging her:

I can't help wondering if the fact that I'm identifiably Muslim through my hijab, or scarf, is so potent that the only response I evoke is anger.

Well, as we know, the headscarf is that angrily potent. Just the other day, she got lost at the airport and rolled down her window to scream for directions at the car next door. And the woman rolled up her window and left her in a racist cloud of bigotry and greenhouse gas.

It was broad daylight. I had not - before then - considered my appearance frightening or abnormal. Apparently she did.

Of course she did. This is white Christian America, which just declared a global jihad on all things Islam. Then again, this sentence set me back a little, because she was writing not too long ago about how the hijab makes her feel self-conscious and how people hate her and it because it's so visually Muslim. And this has been the theme of articles featuring her for four years now. But whatever.

Then there was a religious studies fundraiser where Harvard students gave middle-Americans advice on religion, and this crazy nut from Texas called, demanding with Bolton-esque brusqueness that she condemn terrorism. She "tried to explain that the matter was far more complicated than simply blaming the beliefs of a billion people and that it was misguided to blame Islam for the actions of its fringe extremists," but he would have none of it. He called her a "wishy-washy" Muslim and hung up -- without donating to the program.

After such vicious attacks on her personhood, her very sanity, any one of us would be driven to ask the question she posed at the beginning:

Thinking through recent incidents, I try to assess the validity of my feelings - am I overreacting, or paranoid?

And we would reach her same conclusion: the paranoia is completely justified. "Of course not everybody reacts to Muslims this way," she wrote with a brave magnanimity. "But I'm convinced it's the reality - not my paranoid view - that many do."

There is no brave Al Gore to pick up her keys -- or give her proper directions from the airport -- in this article to give it a happy ending and restore her faith in America. The terrorists blew up more than 57 people in London last July. They suicide-bombed Fatina Abdrabboh's sense of self-worth and her place in the great American tapestry we call hyphenated-American-identity. She cannot be fully Muslim as terrorists can, in fact, blow her up as randomly as anyone else. She cannot be fully American because she wears a 'do-rag and buys special food at special markets for a crazy diet. She is caught between two worlds and, as such, deserves nothing but our pity.

She does defiantly and poetically "categorically condemn terrorism" before she asks the American people to, like, finally move on. Get over it already! She has more stuff to say about how she has an iPod and jogs a lot (knew that from the first article) and plays the guitar and, um, buys halal meat market food! She's a whole person! Not a scarf! Not someone who has to condemn anybody just because some people in her faith blow up random people for not being and/or sitting next to people not being Muslim! Stop the condemnation already!

Now, will my fellow citizens in America hear more of what I have to say?

Honestly, between the circulations of the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, too many of us have already heard what she's had to say. For the love of God and all that's holy -- we've heard enough!