Recently in Donkeys and Elephants Category

For many years I took the position that a society was best served by a government that allowed anything and a culture that encouraged the right thing. Only this, I thought, would produce the right incentive to do the right thing.

Rand Paul attempts to bring this approach, condemning racism while saying it's not his place to ban a business from practicing it. It is intellectually defensible.

The rub is that we all know that, if we let people do things we don't want them to do, they'll probably do them no matter how much we cry. That's why so many conservative evangelicals, who claim in theory to want small, non-meddling government, in practice are on crusades to ban abortion pills, gay marriage and so on. They know that they'll never control the culture enough to squelch such behaviors -- and even if they did, those behaviors would go on anyway.

Cigarette smoking is on the decline in California, but not because of the social pressure, but because the various bans and the pressure together affected behavior. It might be coercive, but it kinda works.

Yet in the South, a century and a half of forced freedom for the black man still hasn't resulted in the vast majority of white people becoming color blind. Imagine how bad they'd be, then, if government hadn't meddled.

That's the problem with libertarian ideals. A democratic citizenry steps back and lets its social groups and institutions do what they want -- and eventually the democratic citizenry has to get involved.

That's when those social groups and institutions start claiming that the democratic citizenry is a fascist or totalitarian state. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it....?

I'll disagree with Gail when she worries that "this country is going to lean so far to the left we're going to fall into the Pacific Ocean." There's no reason to believe that Elena Kagan is going to be more liberal than John Paul Stevens, and her appointment has disappointed liberals who wanted an anti-Scalia.

Give Obama credit. He's within his rights to pick an uber-leftist as long as he's president. I hope people will eventually crawl out from under their beds and breathe a sigh of relief that, come to think of it, he's just not an uber-leftist.

Gail writes, "What we need is a good war that all the men fight in to kick the sensitivity out of us and toughen us up."

Unfortunately, the last time American men were expected to fight in a war (whether or not they wanted to), many of the guys who wiggled out of combat turned out to be the chicken hawks who would later win votes by acting tougher than many men who did fight. So I'm not sure war toughens anyone up. It sounds nice, though.

It's become clear that we can't keep forcing Southerners to remain a part of an America that they just can't believe in. We must let them be "South America," as it were.

I bear no ill will to the good men and women of the South, who have fought for our nation in numbers far disproportional to the American population.

But their hearts just aren't in it anymore. Southerners have agreed in principle to let go of slavery, but they just can't let go of their fondness for the good old days, captured in Virginia's Confederate History Month and the vigorous defense of it by other Southerners.

If we let the South secede, it will no longer present a conundrum to GOP leaders who can't decide whether to bow to hard-right Southern whims or to the inexorable urbanization and minoritization of the larger US. The South is the one area that is most inclined to believe that the US president holds office illegitimately. Whites in the South are 12 percent more likely than whites in the rest of the country to join Tea Party movements claiming they've been held hostage to fascists.

Clearly this "union" just isn't working, so we should adjust. In a gesture of good will to Mexico, I propose we give Texas back to them, to do with as they please. The rest of the South should be allowed to be its own nation, and to wave its Confederate flag proudly. And since we've freed the slaves, our own duty to the citizens of that region has been discharged admirably.

A secession will require a gracious but firm foreign policy on the part of the "real" United States:
1. We will need to offer visas and asylum to minorities and pointy-headed liberals who feel threatened within the New Confederacy.
2. We will need to cede some nuclear weaponry to the New Confederacy. We must be firm in threatening massive retaliation. But we can be reasonably sure that the men and women with the know-how to deploy those weapons will leave Duke and Rice and immigrate to the U.S.
3. We may need to work with Mexico and Central American nations to keep New Confederacy imperialism in check.
4. DHS will need to screen Confederacy citizens carefully for ties to gun groups before issuing visas to allow them to visit Boston or San Francisco.
5. And we will certainly need to send Fox News packing from New York to some more suitable location.

Such a foreign policy might seem to be a difficult venture. But the other option, that the South would come into the 21st century willingly, is far more preposterous.

I'm not sure Obama has "suddenly" given up on bipartisanship in the face of "Hell no" opposition from the GOP.

He didn't get his efforts to create a bipartisan tone in Washington off to a good start a year ago, because he was too meek in dealing with Democratic leaders in Congress. Anyone who intends to be bipartisan can't hand the wheel over to your own activists while then expecting the other side's activists to sit quietly in the back.

Obama seemed a bit tough with Republicans in his first few months as president, at times with cause. And he's tough now, at times again with cause. But I don't see this as a triumph as much as a regrettable mess that he helped cause. My hope is that, as he continues to feel his way into his presidency, he'll ultimately find the right balance that allows sensible Republicans (in other words, the branch that repudiates Michelle Bachmann) to align with him in good conscience.

I know, I know, it's only liberals who are uncouth. Still, this shows something about the temper(s) of our times.

It's funny how, just 18 months ago, it was largely Democrats who railed about the growing deficit. Republican loyalists had a variety of explanations and rationalizations for it. Today the roles are reversed.

Is this hypocrisy on both sides? Of course it is. And it's irrational in the way that loyalists on each side complain that the other side is a tad more hypocritical. Tea Partiers may have legitimate grievances, but they seem to be all friction and heat and no light. Some want lower taxes, some want a lower deficit, some want Medicare untouched, some want less government, and so on.

Obama and progressives have set themselves up for this because they haven't shown any seriousness about the deficit, even while offering legitimate and necessary short-term fiscal stimuli.

And polarization, "with us or agin' us" politics has overwhelmed the system, seen again when the media attempted to reduce the recent health-care summit down to which party "won" more political points. Must the media be so foolish, so hellbent on crushing helpful discourse? Of course they must. They, like the politicians of both parties, seek only short-term gain.

Far be it from us to have a genuine discussion about what to do with Medicare, preexisting conditions and deficit reduction. Instead, let conservatives pretend that lower taxes will balance the budget and liberals pretend that spending more will keep us from going bankrupt.

A democracy indeed gets the government it deserves. But it's a helluva thing to stop and realize we deserve so little at this point in our history.

I'll agree with Earl that the Palin Effect is beneficial to an adrift Obama administration.

Their best-case scenario is a GOP nomination of Sarah in 2012, but even less than that will help them politically. Sarah's inability to get out of the spotligiht will finally trigger the explosion of the long-simmering tensions within the GOP's libertarian-moderate-teaparty-theocracy-warhawk Big Tent.

Republicans are unified right now only in opposing Obama and in refusing to help him get any victories, even at the cost of our nation's progress. That camouflages the huge battles happening under the surface of the GOP. But those battles will come out into the open inevitably, in a way that will probably hurt them in a few years if not by the midterm elections.

This may be good for Democrats' political expedience, but it's not good for the American republic, which is in desperate need of a sane and sober conservatism.

My new book is finally here, and it's available right over here. I'll share more information about it in coming days. But in a nutshell, it discusses my background in both conservative Islam and conservative Christianity--with an eye on how both religions have been compromised by their roles within contemporary politics and nationalism.

No, he's not "the most polarizing president in history," he's merely the president at the most polarized moment in our lifetimes. That's why his staunchest critics manage to deride him both as a bumbling do-nothing and as a shrewd devil who's instituting socialism in calculating fashion.

To be more effective, Obama should move toward the center in some areas (debt reduction, tort reform and so on), but he needs to move away from the center in other areas, such as his ineffective Bush-era approach to addressing extremism overseas.