The Moose offers kudos to some Senate solons.
It was a rare moment. The lion laid down with the lamb. Or in this case, it was the donkey holding hands with the donkey. The Moose is referring, of course, to the tentative Senate immigration deal.
The uncertain compromise was a rare moment of bi-partisan accomplishment. It was a Solomon-like agreement that could result in an actual achievement for this Congress. That is extraordinary news. David Brooks put it so well, "the action moved over to the Senate, where pomposity generally has a restraining influence on stupidity."
Senator Leahy and Reid deserve credit for a brilliant political move. By agreeing to this compromise, all the pressure is now on the White House and the House Republicans to produce. In Marxist terms, Reid and Leahy are heightening the contradictions within the GOP between the immigration exclusionists and inclusionists.
In the next few weeks, the Republican immigration divide will be on full display. And the right wing full mooners will be in a full throated rage over the Senate deal. If President Bush signs a law that contains a guest worker program, the Republican base will be deeply divided and partially dejected and demoralized going into the November elections. It would be deeply ironic if the President' s most significant legislative achievement of his second term could contribute to the GOP losing control over Congress.
The deal, however, may not make it past the Senate. And if it does, the House yahoos will obstruct with all their might.
Clearly, however, the Democratic Senate leaders did the right thing in the political as well as in the policy sense. The center held... at least temporarily.
* Update (9:17 am)- The Moose has just heard disturbing news that some in the Democratic Senate leadership are obstructing the compromise for a false short term political gain.
**Update (11:23) - Alas, the center did not hold and the compromise is dead for now. This failure is yet more evidence that political rather than public gain is more important to some among our governing class. And this "political advantage" will likely prove to be ephemeral. -- | 
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Thursday, April 06, 2006
The Moose observes that the right is falling out of love with the Bugman.
David Kirkpatrick has a lovely unintended satirical piece in today's New York Times titled, "Conservatives Wonder How to Fill Hole Left by DeLay."
It seems that the right wing is just one Lonely Hearts Club now that they are discovering the manifold faults of their old lover. You see, the Old Bugman from Sugarland thought he could resume his love affair with his conservative bride after his fall from grace. But, evidently he is no longer a heart throb with the right wing!
Golly gee, DeLay is corrupt!
Kirkpatrick,
"But several prominent conservatives balked at Mr. DeLay's assertion in an interview, posted on Time magazine's Web site, that "the conservative movement is leaderless" and that he aimed to become "a strong leader to pull the movement together." Some said his legal problems showed how his work incorporating the conservative movement into Washington's power structure was already carrying the movement away from its principles.
"We have seen this cycle before," said Marvin Olasky, editor of the Christian conservative magazine World, invoking Psalm 107's account of the Israelites' decline into decadence before they turned back to God. "The question in my mind is whether conservatives will look at this situation and realize there has been a corruption by power, and try to return to their decentralized, small-government roots."
Goodness gracious, DeLay is a big spender!
"Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Mr. DeLay had built an "unparalleled" track record at pushing through conservative legislation. But he argued that Mr. DeLay's victories had often come at the expense of the conservative call for small government and tighter federal spending.
"He was a master, and developed, in many ways, the art of earmarking," Mr. Franc said, referring to the process that allows a lawmaker to add local projects to a big spending bill. "He saw the political value in that. He justified it in conservative terms, saying it was a form of local control and individual members knew best what was best for their district rather than the judgment of some nameless, faceless bureaucrat. And he drove it as far as he could, to the point where we now have about 14,000 earmarks, up from below 5,000 when Republicans took over in 1994."
Lord forgive us, DeLay might not be the righteous one!
"Mr. DeLay has also hinted that he intends to start a career as a speaker for conservative Christian audiences, saying that it was the warm response to a speech about the country's Christian heritage that had persuaded him to give up his seat. But Wes Yoder, president of the Ambassador Agency, a major booking agency for Christian speakers, suggested that such a move might be premature.
"When you have questions of ethics circle around someone as they have around Tom DeLay, I think the church needs to pause a moment before they start inviting someone to speak," Mr. Yoder said. "When someone's been in Washington in the corridors of power, sometimes their ethics need to be refreshed."
It such a sad moment when a relationship goes bad. Mooseketeers, please be gentle to our conservative brethren - they are going through a traumatic time.
Breaking up is hard to do. -- | Email
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The Moose comments on a health care breakthrough.
As the Moose has indicated, he is a strong supporter of universal health care coverage. One of the major obstacles to achieve that objective has been conservative opposition to business or individual mandates. Back in the nineties, many on the right suggested that Hillary-care mandates would result in the end of freedom and impose heavy costs on government, business and individuals.
That is why it is so significant that a conservative Republican Governor has embraced a law imposing an individual mandate and a quasi employer health insurance mandate. Yesterday's Washington Post,
Gov. Mitt Romney (R) supports the proposal, which would require all uninsured adults in the state to purchase some kind of insurance policy by July 1, 2007, or face a fine. Their choices would be expanded to include a range of new and inexpensive policies -- ranging from about $250 per month to nearly free -- from private insurers subsidized by the state.
Romney said the bill, modeled on the state's policy of requiring auto insurance, is intended to end an era in which 550,000 people go without insurance and their hospital and doctor visits are paid for in part with public funds.
"We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance," Romney said in an interview. "And cars are a lot less expensive than people."
When the Heritage Foundation proposed a universal plan with individual mandates, it was chastised by many on the right as a socialist deviation. Now, Governor Romney, who has Presidential aspirations, has endorsed that very "left wing" concept.
Previously, employer mandates were viewed by conservatives as driving the economy to the darkest depths of the Great Depression. The right wailed that it cost jobs and was the equivalent of a huge tax increase on the private sector.
Will the embrace of this mandate ridden plan cost Governor Romney support on the right? Or have conservatives "grown" and have come to reconcile themselves with the inevitably of universal insurance?
What is clear is that health care access and affordable is an issue that will not go away. And no longer will Republicans be able to get away with the phony palliative of medical savings accounts.
The Massachusetts breakthough is a significant milestone in the health care debate. The question is whether the Republican Party will continue to stand athwart history yelling stop.
Or will the right finally acknowledge that Hillary was a prophet ahead of her time? -- | Email
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Wednesday, April 05, 2006
The Moose reveals the vast Zionist conspiracy.
Two academics, Walt and Mearsheimer, writing for the JFK School of Government at Harvard have created quite a stir with their recent paper that charges that there is a vast Zionist, neo-conservative, Christian cabal directing our Middle East policy. That is not a new theory and has its adherents across the political spectrum.
The Jewish conspiracy to control world events is as old as time. The Moose will not bother to refute the claims in the paper - others have. As Marty Peretz notes, there is a synergy between Israel's values and our own that needs no conspiracy to mobilize support for the Jewish state,
"Support for Israel is, deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself. Mearsheimer and Walt clearly have no clue that U.S. support for the Jewish restoration, rather than a result of Zionist machinations, dates back to the Puritans. And it carries through Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman to, if you'll forgive me, George W. Bush. But rarely without colossal struggle."
What is interesting to the Moose is how the allegiances have switched on attitudes toward Israel between the right and the left. Since the 1967 war, the right has generally become reliable supporters of Israel while the left has been the state's most ardent critics. Much of that attitude swing is attributable to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is no longer perceived as the "underdog" by the left while the right views her has the most ardent defender of Western values in the region.
Consequently, when the Washington Post was looking for a defender of Walt and Mearsheimer, it turned to one of the most popular lefty bloggers, Juan Cole. The Post,
"And they are not without academic support. Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, suggests the authors make commonplace points -- that U.S. Middle East policy is driven disproportionately by those who favor Israel, and that this lobby resorts to all manner of vile accusations to discredit opponents.
"There's nothing intellectually wrong with arguing that U.S. policy in the Middle East is dislodged from its natural moorings by the power of a domestic constituency," Cole said. "But most people are timid -- they don't want to be smeared and risk having their lives ruined."
And when the subject of Joe Lieberman is mentioned on a left wing blog, the conversation on the discussion threads quickly turns to accusations of dual loyalty. And it was only a couple of years ago that a Democratic congressman raised the venomous canard that the Jews drove us to war in Iraq.
Of course, the irony is that American Jews are the most reliable liberal group in America. And while Israel is not without its imperfections, compared to its neighbors it is a democratic paradise (including the treatment of its Arab citizens who are the most free in the Middle East).
It wasn't always so that the most reliable friends of Israel were on the right. The Moose's youthful liberal heroes - Humphrey and Scoop - were rock-solid.
In truth, the greatest animus toward Israel lies in the realist center. Indeed, the two academics who wrote the Harvard report are not crazy lefties, but rather "realists". But, what we are witnessing in the great foreign policy debate is a merging of the realist school and the left. Since the Bush Administration has rejected stability, everyone from the Saudi reactionaries to the realist center to the paleo con right to the lefty bloggers can blame a shadowy neo-con, vaguely Jewish cabal for our woes.
Eliot Cohen eloquently explains what is going on here - anti-semitism, pure and simple. Addressing the Walt and Mearsheimer study,
"Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic."
The Zionists Occupying Government lives on! -- | Email
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
The Moose avers that it was not just about the fall of a man, but the demise of a movement. The millions of good conservatives outside of Washington should understand that their leaders have betrayed them. By alingning with the forces of Mammon, the conservative Beltway Blowhards have betrayed their movement. Tom DeLay is a symbol of conservatism run amuck. Republicans are running for the hills in their desperate attempt to distance themselves from DeLayism. But the smell of corruption will linger in the air.
The Delayicans have lost their leader - mighty Tom DeLay has called it quits. It is likely that Delay himself recognized both the possibility of his own indictment and the harsh judgment of the voters, and stepped down. He may also sense that the GOP is about to lose its control over the House.
The Era of '94 is over, done, kaput.
It was just a year ago, that the denizens of the right rallied behind their leader. The Washington Post of April 10, 2005,
"The resistance was launched two weeks ago when DeLay flew back to Washington from Texas during Easter recess to speak to a group of about 30 conservative leaders who had gathered in the conference room of the Family Research Council for a call to arms on his behalf... Email
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Monday, April 03, 2006
The Moose weighs in on the donkey's attempt at a hawkish stance.
While the Moose was roaming for the past few days, he noticed that the Congressional donkeys issued a "real security" plan. It contains some commendable elements that are worthy of a party attempting to flex its national security muscles.
However, as Fred Hiatt points out in the Washington Post, the document reflects a party that is without a world vision other than a critique of the incumbent. Hiatt,
"The Democrats do indeed attack the failures and promise an end to incompetence. But they also reveal a different world view, one that is far more cramped and inward-looking. While reassuring voters that they will keep "foreign interests" out of "our national security infrastructure" -- including "mass transit" -- the Democrats do not find space to mention democracy even once...
"Throughout the plan, in fact, there is no discussion of values, of liberty or generosity, of free markets or foreign aid -- of any purpose for American leadership larger than self-protection. The pollsters may be satisfied, but John F. Kennedy would not recognize his party."
The difficulty for the donkey is that, all protestations to the contrary, it is becoming branded as the anti-war party. To one degree or another, the Democrats are increasingly united in their opposition to the war.
Setting Iraq aside, it is not even clear if many Democrats believe that we are engaged in a global struggle against Jihadism. Their loathing of Bush blinds many Democrats from seeing the very real threat to freedom from radical Islam. And even moderate Democrats are silent or even embracing the notion of censuring the President for directing the NSA to listen in on enemy communications. Will the American people really believe that this is the party of strength?
Of course, at the moment, the American people have soured on Iraq. And the Democrats' opposition may profit them handsomely in November.
Despite short-term political gains, the party may pay a stiff price in the long term. Over three decades ago, Democrats opposed another unpopular war and the party has still not recovered from the perception that it is weak on defense and will cut and run.
The anti-war Democratic left is emboldened. They are attempting to purge one of the party's foremost national security leaders - Joe Lieberman. Undoubtedly, his opponent will be awash in Hollywood and blogosphere money. The internet is aflame.
Should lefties realize their goal, they will take a giant step in branding the party as soft on national security and unwelcome to hawks. And no "real security" document will be able to counteract the damage inflicted on the donkey. -- | Email
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