Setting Up A Community Clean-Up Day Is Slavery

I normally wouldn't bother with Jonah Goldberg, whose best-selling book Liberal Fascism: There Are Funyuns Stuck To My Typewriter! is enough evidence to give him a lifetime of shame and self-loathing. But today he prints a very strange op-ed in the LA Times that suggests calling for a goal of voluntary service is akin to keeping public school students of all ages down on the plantation.

"There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.
For those who don't remember, the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States."

I guess in Obama's mind it must be a crime to be born or to go to college.

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year."

He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory."

First of all, Goldberg's meal ticket and the founder of National Review Bill Buckley called for the exact same kind of program. Second, as hilzoy notes, public school itself is compulsory. That's why they have truant officers. I don't expect Goldberg to remember as far back as that to a time when he was graded poorly for his reading comprehension skills, but they actually make you take tests in schools. And gym!

Attaching community service to education dollars is no different than, say, attaching mandatory school prayer to education dollars. Which Goldberg would doubtless find some hoop to jump through and justify as entirely non-fascist. I could add that, what's more, community service actually has an effect, but I wouldn't want to be sacreligious.

Buckley

I suppose I have to say a word or two about William F. Buckley, though admittedly I have a better memory of Robin Williams' impression of him than the man himself (also, while Christopher Buckley's conservative writings leave me cold, his novel Thank You For Smoking was entertaining).

This is of course another case of the conservative whitewash. After death you cannot find anyone to say a bad word about the guy, even his adversaries, and the hagiography is amped up to ridiculous heights. While Rick Perlstein gave a moving tribute this morning, it seems to me that little is spoken about the man who believed AIDS patients should be tattooed, who opposed World War II, who was the greatest defender of Joseph McCarthy in America, and whose National Review was a cornerstone of opposition to the civil rights movement. Buckley, having spawned a conservative movement that left him behind, became almost sympathetic at the end of his life, and the conservatives praising him today weren't singing the same tune just a few short months ago.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning." The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Of course, everyone who doesn't cotton to the agreed-to tenets of conservatism must be tossed aside, even the... founders of conservatism. But I don't hold that the enemy of my enemy is my friend in every case. I wish his family to have some peace, but I'm disinclined to raise a glass for the likes of William F. Buckley. Unless you can find me any instance of him raising said same glass for anyone below his station.

...I should also add that the main reason Buckley's passing makes me sad is that we don't have any public intellectuals anymore. I'm not one who thinks the culture has been "dumbed-down" necessarily, but the time where someone could be famous for having ideas has clearly passed. And that's ultimately not a good thing. To the extent that the blogosphere represents a return to that in a different venue is somewhat hopeful, but it's, you know, still the Internets. That Bill Buckley's intellectual ancedent is Jonah Goldberg should bring shrieks of horror to pretty much everyone.

Creating Their Own Reality

On the heels of Conservapedia now comes QubeTV, the conservative YouTube. Apparently watching videos has a well-known liberal bias.

I've got an idea, why don't they just take over a little chunk of Alabama and call it "Conservamerica," because their prospects in this actual country are remote:

President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party, making it harder to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

Some of the GOP's top choices to run for the House next year have declined, citing what Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) called a "poisonous" environment. And Republicans' fundraising edge, an important advantage over the last five years, has dwindled.

With GOP clout diminished after November's election losses, the Republicans' national committee and their House and Senate campaign committees together raised the same amount as the Democrats in the first quarter of the year — and Democrats ended the period with more cash in the bank. At this point four years ago, Republicans had more than twice the money Democrats did.

"The reality is the Republican brand right now is just not a good brand," said Tim Hibbitts, an independent Oregon pollster. "For Republicans, the only way things really get better … is if somehow, some way, Iraq turns around."

Considering there's been no discernable change in strategy; considering that even the "good news" from Al-Anbar is nothing more than proof that Iraqis want foreign elements out of their country, including the US; considering that the Iraqi security forces have little training and less money; considering that leader of the Iraqi government is pursuing a shadowy, theocratic, Shiite sectarian agenda by using a secret office to override Interior and Defense Ministry dictates;

Well, good luck with "Iraq turning around."

And it's clear to anyone who's not a rabidly partisan Bush defender that this is the case, that the failure in Iraq will cost the GOP dearly for decades to come. Bob Novak is publicly predicting a loss of GOP seats in 2008, which would be unprecedented after such a big victory like 2006. And David Brooks sees blood in the water as well.

On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P. They are like people quietly marching to their doom.

And at the presidential level, things are even worse. The party is blessed with a series of charismatic candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting. Instead of offering something new, each of them has been going around pretending to be the second coming of George Allen — a bland, orthodox candidate who will not challenge any of the party’s customs or prejudices.

To Brooks, who is right in this column, the fealty to various conservative interests has put the party into gridlock, unable to reverse course on Iraq or anything else. And none so less a leading conservative light as William F. Buckley had this to say:

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war [...]

It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. All those bombings, explosions, assassinations: we are driven to believe that they are, so to speak, spontaneous.

When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease? The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.

General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, “I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort.”

The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

The need to create a new reality is so great for Republicans because the current reality is so bleak. They can say that the election of 2006 proved that the middle is ascendant, and that Democrats are taking extremist positions, but honestly their heart doesn't even seem in it anymore. Republicans used to thrive in the minority but now they are just sad figures, marking time until they are completely out of
power.

UPDATE: This reminds me, I should get my tickets for the Failure of Conservatism Conference. Maybe in an alternate universe some Bush defenders will put together a "Failure of the Party that Just Won Power in the Congress" conference.