Re: Sent gifts to your dad

Charles Krauthammer

    Even if we look very hard, we find nothing truly funny in service to fascism or communism. But we may find that communists and fascists have otherwise promoted their totalitarianism by way of great and glorious contributions to film, music, and the performing arts - which is to say that anti-individualistic political persuasions may produce fine works of aesthetics, but apparently not humor.

   This may lead us to suspect that humor is not subject to whatever strings together the totalitarian-accessible arts. It may also lead us to be wary of a political movement that has lost its ability to put forth comedic works in defense of itself and in opposition to its opponents. Political humor is heavily dependent on the ability to perceive and present irony; if a political population consisting of tens of millions of people cannot produce at least a few competent political humorists, we might draw some insulting conclusions about such a population.

    For over a decade, the finest political humorist in America was P.J. O'Rourke, a reporter and veteran of National Lampoon who had made a gradual transition from Maoism to conservatism. O'Rourke's conservatism was never of the populist strain; he simply favored free market economics and a somewhat hawkish foreign policy stance in such situations as that a hawkish foreign policy stance might be in order. One of the more common elements of O'Rourke's earlier, readable work was scorn for the histrionics of mass politics, and particularly the empty ritualism of marches and protests. Conservatives, he asserted on several occasions, did not attend protests because they have jobs.

   But in 2009, when the ongoing descent of conservatism into populism and anti-intellectualism brought us to the extraordinary farce of the Palinist tea party movement, the same humorist who had so consistently mocked the mentality of the protest-goer could now find no humor in large gatherings of misshapen, chanting people. Instead, he criticized those media outlets that had been insufficiently respectful of such things, beginning an August Weekly Standard piece with the following paragraph of populist boilerplate:

Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."

    "Burkean" is probably not the first term I would use to characterize large demonstrations by self-described "regular folks" in opposition to some perceived contingent of political elites, but then O'Rourke is certainly entitled to his hilarious delusions.

    He goes on to complain about a sidebar by Alec MacGillis in which the reporter begins with the assertion that "[h]ealth care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive." O'Rourke chooses to take this, as well as the entire piece, as some sort of elitist assault on his Burkean masses, to which he responds with a sarcastic quip that is supposed to summarize the intent of this Post piece: "All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home."

    This is an odd interpretation of the article in general and that first sentence in particular, as the very next sentence of MacGillis' piece goes on to say: "Reform proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity," and the rest consists of a summary of the major elements of health care reform proposals that were then under debate - who was objecting to what and why and what compromises were likely to be reached as the process continued and that sort of innocuous thing. But O'Rourke repeats his bizarre characterization of what this is supposed to convey: "But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so."

    One must read between the lines, apparently. Still, the Post did indeed assign a reporter to compose a sort of political fashion piece in which is detailed the particular slovenliness of the heckler crowd, as O'Rourke relates:

Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes... Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."

We learn, then, that making fun of other people's clothes now constitutes "idiocy" according to O'Rourke. This is a new development.

O'Rourke once began an article on the 1990 Nicaraguan elections with a multi-paragraph critique of the sort of clothes worn by those visiting American liberals who supported the Sandinistas. He included similar critiques of liberal dressing habits in an article on the 1994 Mexican elections. He spent a good portion of an essay on the general increase in world travel decrying the fashions of tourists in general and the French in particular, and elsewhere took issue with the appearances of those among the Great Unwashed who now fly on commercial airliners. He made fun of those who appeared before the Supreme Court in opposition to a flag burning ban for their general ugliness. He spent much of the '90s mocking youngish leftists for wearing nose rings and black outfits - in fact, he did this so much as to actually ruin it for everyone else through overuse - and did so on at least one occasion in the pages of The Weekly Standard itself. He's written an entire article in which he and his girlfriend roam around an Evangelical-oriented theme park and make fun of everyone present for their general tackiness. And he once asserted that Hillary Clinton should stop messing with her own hair and instead "do something about Chelsea's."

He was right. Aging liberals who run around Latin America and Mexico dress like idiots. Half of the people one today encounters on a domestic flight would have been rightfully barred from the plane by the captain in a more civilized age. I don't even know where to start with the sort of French people who wander Manhattan in August. Earnest young leftists should be wearing suits or at least a button-down shirt instead of whatever the fuck they think they're doing now. You can probably imagine what a bunch of Middle American Evangelicals look like when they're at the mall.

Seeing William Kristol pretend to admire the innocent primitivism of the sort of people with whom he would rightfully never associate is one thing; Kristol has always been worthless. But O'Rourke was once the greatest political humorist of the conservative movement, as well as a strong advocate of taste back when taste still favored Republicans. Today, he must defend the people he once despised; the GOP is now filled with little else.

If we agree that the inability to produce humor on its own behalf is a sign of degeneracy on the part of a political movement, and if we identify the modern American conservative enterprise as being incapable of producing viable political humor relative to its counterparts, and if we understand humor to be dependent on irony and understand irony in turn to be a sign of intellect, we may reasonably conclude that the actual intellectuals produced by such a movement as this will be rather mediocre. But perhaps we should check just to be sure.

Like O'Rourke, Charles Krauthammer is a refuge from liberalism who eventually became a highly effective advocate of conservatism. Unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer is just as talented today as he's ever been. Also unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer was never particularly talented to begin with.

These things being relative, he is today considered - rightfully - to be among the Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets. In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate him. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.

Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they are as likely to turn to our chapter subject as to anyone else. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:

I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

    In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence in the arena of foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is actually the case.

    In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that begun thusly:

On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of his little Kosovo war.

    Our columnist seems to have since changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that no such thing as genocide is actually taking place. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer asserts that NATO intervention thus far has failed to prevent "savage ethnic cleansing, executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than 100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that some sort of genocide is taking place.

    Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clark's answer, in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that - which, of course, it did.

    Even after Clinton's "little Kosovo war" proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that "the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late 2009, Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.

    Like most others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into the Afghanistan war in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. When New York Times contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple wrote a piece in late October proposing that the conflict could develop into a "quagmire," our columnist ridiculed him for using a term that he himself had wrongly applied in his own Balkans-as-Vietnam column from earlier in the year. The Apple article in question proved to be among the more prescient compositions of that period; unlike Thomas Friedman, who was in those days proclaiming that Afghans don't really mind having bombs dropped on them and was otherwise engaged in the inexplicable application of scare quotes around the word "civilians," Apple predicted that civilian casualties would become a major source of discontent among the population and that this might very well be problematic for U.S. efforts to win such people over. He ended the piece by pointing out that there exists "a huge question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier." And, of course, he was right.

   Long after others had abandoned the illusion of quick and longterm success in Central Asia, Krauthammer was still mocking anyone foolish enough to express concern over whether the illusion might be illusory. "Before our astonishing success in Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some very recent history," Krauthammer politely suggested in a December 2004 column. "Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.... What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies." This was indeed noted by liberals of the time - along with a whole range of other concerns that Krauthammer does not bother to address, with one exception:

The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole country. Again the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a central government weak by Western standards.

But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls Kabul, most of the major cities, and much in between. And he is successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new military.

As it turns out, this "deeply respected democrat" won the 2009 election by deeply undemocratic means, further de-legitimizing himself in the eyes of Afghans already angry over the corruption that marks not only Karzai's cabinet but also certain members of his immediate family. The former monarch's authority, meanwhile, has not so much been "gradually extended" as it has retracted. American analysts of both the private and public sort are now virtually united in their contempt for the fellow.

Krauthammer also explains to us the following:

What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle. Afghanistan had suffered under years of appalling theocratic rule, which helped to legitimize the kind of secularist democracy that Karzai represents.

The "secularist democracy" of Afghanistan proclaims Islam to be its official religion, holds that none of its civil laws may violate the teachings of Islam, and punishes conversion from Islam by death - all of which was the case at the time of Krauthammer's writing.

Elsewhere in the column we find the following declarative interrogatory: "T

he interesting question is: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?"

The Interesting Question: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?

Answer: Because our nation's foreign policy was informed in large part by people who thought we had succeeded in Afghanistan.

***

Modern American conservatives possess what they believe to be an intellectual sector, this being a collection of think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and scholar-jurists such as Charles Krauthammer. The purpose of this sector is, of course, to generate and distribute information that might assist in efforts to advance conservative legislation or to deter that which is put forth by non-conservatives. Ideally, the information is accurate, but at any rate it flows into the public consciousness by way of a number of routes.

   "[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get married," evangelical kingpin James Dobson told a typically credulous Larry King in November of 2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed marrying in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now something greater than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don't get married."

   If what James Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge trouble, and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. Of course, James Dobson is wrong. But whereas James Dobson generally contents himself with simply being wrong in his priorities, sensibilities, instincts, historical perspective, theology, and manners which is to say, wrong in a mystical, cloudy sort of way he has here managed to be wrong in such a blatant sense that his wrongness can be demonstrated with mathematical exactitude. In fact, we should go ahead and do that. It'll be like an adventure - a math adventure.

   First, let's prepare our variables. X is any country "where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," as Dobson manages to term these nations with just a little clarification from us. Y is the all-importantmarriage rate among heterosexuals before country X has "tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," andZ is the all-important and allegedly damning heterosexual marriage rate that exists after ten years of gay civil unions. Now, the Dobson Theorem, as we shall call it, plainly states that "if X, then Y must be greater than Z." Or, to re-translate it into English, "if a nation allows for civil unions, the marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this occurs will be higher than it is ten years later," because the marriage rate among heterosexuals will of course decline for some reason.

   Let us now test this Grand Unified Dobson Theorem, as I re-named it just a second ago when you weren't looking. Now, like most things with variables, the Grand Unified Christological Dobson Super-Theorem of Niftiness (which needed more pizazz) requires that X be substituted for various things that meet the parameters of X in this case, northern European countries. Luckily, Dr. Dobson himself has provided us with some. During the Larry King interview, Dobson mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian countries" as fitting the description. We'll also need values to punch in for Y and Z. These may be obtained from all of the countries in question, which have famously nosy, busy-body governments.

   Conveniently enough, these numbers may also be obtained from the October 26th edition of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. It seems that William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York investment banker, had recently written a book called Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned From the Evidence, and had chosen to present the thrust of their findings in op-ed form.

   Denmark, the authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989. Ten years later, the heterosexualmarriage rate had increased by 10.7 percent. Norway did the same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexualmarriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995. Ten years later, the heterosexualmarriage rate had increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually lasting. During the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.

   As the Reader will no doubt have determined at this point, the Dobson Theorem or whatever it is that we've decided to call it is obviously bunk, since it stated that countries which allow gay civil unions will see a decline in the marriage rate among homosexuals, when in fact the opposite is true. But since we've already gone to the trouble of expressing Dobson's goofy utterances in the form of a theorem (or rather, since I've gone to the trouble you were no help at all), we might as well punch in these figures just to make absolutely sure:

if X, then Y will be greater than Z

We punch in Denmark for X, Denmark's marriage rate in 1989 (n) for Y, and Denmark's marriage rate in 1999 (n + n(10.7)) for Z:

If Denmark, then n will be greater than n + n(10.7)

   Well, that's obviously wrong, since n is not a greater number than n plus any other positive number. It is, in fact, a smaller number. If Denmark's policies reduce marriage, the residents of Denmark have yet to realize this and act accordingly.

   The ridiculously false information that was conveyed to millions of citizens during the Larry King broadcast and in countless other manifestations as well was first concocted by Heritage Foundation gadfly Stanley Kurtz, who took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back in 2004, before they were published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses them as "unpublished" not once but twice in the course of his own National Review article, in which he nonetheless uses their numbers; now that these findings have appeared more formally, Kurtz will no doubt praise them as "published"). Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to."

   Brushing aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to 1996, Kurtz countered that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark." He failed to note that they were down in 2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of course had no civil unions anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access to the figures, he couldn't have known that both American andScandinavian rates went back up in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be, but at any rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in fact constitute a sign of "the institution's decline." So Kurtz's position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are younger people getting married at a higher rate, but older people are as well. I don't know what Kurtz gets paid per word, but I'm sure it would piss me off to find out.

   Kurtz also wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce rate than the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of calculation that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8. Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.

   Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage is lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry after having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course of predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions continue to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.

   Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do with gay marriage unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." Of course it was more disturbing to Kurtz. By the mid-'90s, the Scandinavians had all instituted civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the homos simply by establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was obviously going to be reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing," and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays. By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth. Sure, that population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down. Of course, this is faulty reasoning by virtue of its unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly Standard has actually done its part to keep world population down.

   Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper federal agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps they'll all die. Or perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.

***

Three weeks into the Iraq conflict, Krauthammer was hailing it as "The Three Week War" and mocking those who weren't. Six months later, he was calling for perspective.

On the reconstruction of Iraq, everybody is a genius. Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done. Everybody would have had Iraq up and running by now, and as safe as downtown Singapore. Everybody, that is, except the Bush administration which, in its arrogance and stupidity, has so botched the occupation that it is "in danger of losing the peace" - so sayeth John Kerry, echoing Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy and many others down the Democratic food chain.

A bit of perspective, gentlemen.

The last time Krauthammer had called for perspective was two weeks into the Iraq conflict:

The first gulf war took six weeks. Afghanistan took nine. Kosovo, 11. We are now just past two weeks in the second gulf war. It's time for a bit of perspective. This campaign has already been honored with a "quagmire" piece by the New York Times' Johnny Apple, seer and author of a similar and justly famous quagmire piece on Afghanistan published just days before the fall of Mazar-e Sharif and the swift collapse of the Taliban.

I try not to resort to numbered lists, but fuck.

1. Afghanistan did not so much take nine weeks as it did eight years and counting as of this writing.
2. Kosovo did indeed take just 11 weeks, during which time Krauthammer kept calling the whole thing a "quagmire" and comparing it to Vietnam and continued to do so for years afterwards.
3. Krauthammer makes fun of Johnny Apple for having written an earlier piece warning that Afghanistan might develop into a "quagmire."
4. Krauthammer makes fun of Johnny Apple for having written a more recent piece warning that Iraq might develop into a "quagmire."
5. Krauthammer makes a passing reference to the "swift collapse of the Taliban."
6. The paragraph itself does not really flow all that well.

The column that Krauthammer wrote six months into the Three Week War ends with the following taunt:

Losing the peace? No matter what anyone says now, that question will only be answered at the endpoint. If in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated.

This was in 2003. In 2005, Krauthammer penned another column in which he acknowledged that his errors had assisted in the promotion and failed perpetuation of one of the most terrible foreign policy mistakes in American history, and of course he stopped making sarcastic attacks on those other commentators and public figures whom he had previously mocked for their far more accurate predictions. Having done a great deal of soul-searching and realizing that he had been dreadfully wrong about the three most recent American wars, and recognizing that the distribution of poor information harms the ability of voters and policymakers to make wise decisions regarding matters on which the lives and well-being of millions are at stake, he also decided to refrain from providing further commentary on military affairs. Then he blew up an Iranian missile silo with his mind.

Just kidding. Instead, he eventually took to denouncing retired military figures as the I-know-better generals for second-guessing Rumsfeld, whom he continued to support well after even William Kristol had begun calling for the defense secretary to be dismissed. "Six of them, retired, are denouncing the Bush administration and calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary of defense," he noted in the April 2006 column. "The anti-war types think this is just swell. I don't." He then explains the various things that he knows better than the "I-know-better-generals":

In his most recent broadside, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste accuses the administration of "radically alter(ing) the results of 12 years of deliberate and continuous war planning'' on Iraq. Well, the Bush administration threw out years and years and layer upon layer of war planning on Afghanistan, improvised one of the leanest possible attack plans and achieved one of the more remarkable military victories in recent history. There's nothing sacred about on-the-shelf war plans.

More like General Wrong Batiste, amirite? Man, these guys aren't just generals - they're I-know-better generals! Whatta buncha maroons!

The failure of so many retired military men to understand things they obviously understood perfectly well was eclipsed by another, deeper concern on the part of our intrepid military historian:

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the current administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare themselves as to which camp they belong?

Nope.

***

Charles Krauthammer, Stanley Kurtz, and other, similarly scholarly figures within the conservative enterprise serve two unconscious functions within the greater structure. The first involves the production of informational collateral that appears on the surface to be rigorous and reasonable but which often turns out to be haphazard and disingenuous; as with the nonsensical gay marriage piece discussed earlier, such things are then disseminated to the public by way of other conservative figures with greater visibility, thus going on to influence the opinions of millions of voters and thereby reemerging in some cases as actual policy, policy being more or less the result of the opinions held by those millions of voters.

The other role of the conservative intellectual is to obscure the fact that the conservative enterprise has become an essentially anti-intellectual force - populist, superstitious, fueled by tribalism, and increasingly subject to the unwholesome desires represented in particular by certain of our Catholic and Evangelical fellow-citizens. Being of a relatively secularist bent and not awaiting any particular messiah, Krauthammer and others like him serve as a reasonable face for a movement that has become increasingly unreasonable, that has abandoned such things as scholarly essays extolling the benefits of free enterprise in favor of historical revisionism of the sort that makes Puritan zealots of the Founding Fathers and Founding Fathers of Puritan zealot.

Back in October of 2006, the wonderfully-named Family Research Council held a televised event entitled Liberty Sunday which, although vague in its billing, was supposed to have something to do with homosexuality, and which was consequently expected to draw some high level of attention. As FRC President Tony Perkins put it, with characteristic exactitude, We've got thousands, literally millions of people with us tonight.

Viewers were first treated to a suitably campy video-and-voice-over presentation in which Mr. Perkins waxed nostalgic on the virtues of John Winthrop, the original governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and an apparently fond subject of the Christian dominionist imagination. Perkins quoted Winthrop as having warned his fellow Puritans that the eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. Winthrop's prescience is truly stunning; the early Puritan colony of Salem did indeed become a byword for several things.But an obvious gift for prophecy notwithstanding, Winthrop is perhaps not the most judicious choice of historical figure upon which to perform rhetorical fellatio at the front end of an event billed as a celebration of popular rule. If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, Winthrop once wrote, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel," and was right in saying so. He went on to add that a democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government, and most people did in fact, uh, account it so. Furthermore, to allow such a thing would be a manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment, which charges us to honor our fathers and mothers, all of whom are presumably monarchists.

Solid as these age-old talking points may have been from a Biblical standpoint and they seemed solid enough to Biblical literalists ranging from King David to King George to King Saud it wasn't the intention of Perkins to discuss his buddy Winthrop's anti-democratic sensibilities (of which Perkins is probably unaware anyway, not being a historian or even properly educated); rather, this was meant to establish a narrative of contrasts. On the other side of the Massachusetts time line from Winthrop and his gang of roving Puritan theocrats, as Perkins tells us in slightly different words, we have the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court of the early 21^st century. This far more modern, considerably less blessed body had recently handed down a majority ruling to the effect that the state could not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as to do so would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Massachusetts constitution. These four judges discarded 5,000 years of human history when they imposed a new definition of marriage, Perkins said, not only upon this state, but potentially upon the entire nation. Note that Perkins is here criticizing the judiciary for not giving due consideration to the laws and customs of the ancient Hebrews when interpreting United States law; he elsewhere criticizes the judiciary for providing consideration to the laws and customs that exist right now. It's also worth mentioning that the Founding Fathers discarded those very same 5,000 years of human history when they broke away from the British crown in order establish a constitutional republic, thus committing that manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment which so worried John Winthrop.

But the mangling of history had only just begun; still in voice-over mode, Perkins was now on about Paul Revere. When Revere made his ride for liberty, the lanterns indicating the manner of British approach (one if by land, two if by sea) were placed in the belfry of the Old North Church by what Perkins described as a church employee. This, Perkins pronounced, was an early example of the church [giving] direction at critical moments in the life of our nation. And here, in the present day, we have the homosexuals laying siege to American life with the public policy equivalent of muskets, ships-o-the-line, and archaic infantry formations. Once again, people are looking to the church for direction. Because back in 1776, you see, people were literally looking at this particular church for guidance. That's where the signal lanterns were kept. The actual soldiers were kept in whorehouses.

The video clip ended. First up among the live speakers was Dr. Ray Pendleton, senior pastor of the Tremont Temple Baptist Church, Liberty Sunday's storied venue. The good doctor acknowledged that the evening's events had garnered some degree of controversy they were, after all, holding a hard-right, Evangelical-led gay bashing event in downtown Boston, of all places but, as Perkins noted, This church is not foreign to controversy.

No, indeed we're not, Pendleton agreed, very much in the manner of a Ronco pitchman who's just been prompted to confirm the utility of a juicer. From the very beginning, we've been part of concerns for liberty and freedom. We were part of the Underground Railroad, the first integrated church in America. Wild applause. I think the abolitionist's message is pretty clear. Actually, it was pretty clearly in opposition to the Bible. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, was aware of this, even if Dr. Pendleton is not, and once noted that the peculiar institution of slavery was not peculiar at all, and had in fact had been established by decree of Almighty God and furthermore sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation. Davis was right, of course; and not only is slavery justified in the New Testament book of Ephesians as well as within several books of the Old Testament, but the proper methodology of slave beating is even spelled out in Exodus 21:20-21: And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall surely be punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his property. Which is to say that one may beat his slave without punishment, assuming that the slave in question does not die from his wounds within the next couple of days. Tough but fair. Never mind all that, though; Pendleton's point was that this church had been opposed to slavery 150 years ago, that it was now opposed to gays with equal vigor, and that we should draw some sort of conclusion from this. My own conclusion was that they were right the first time purely by accident.

Next up was yet another prerecorded video segment, this time featuring some fellow named Peter Marshall who was standing next to Plymouth Rock. All of us were taught in America that the Pilgrims came here as religious refugees running away from persecution in Europe, Marshall tells us. That really isn't true; they had no persecution in Holland where they'd spent 12 years before they came here. Marshall is correct; by the Pilgrims' own account, they left Holland not due to persecution directed towards themselves, but rather because they found the free-wheeling and numerous Dutchmen to be difficult targets upon which to direct their own brand of persecution. The truth, Marshall continues, is that they - the Pilgrims, not the fortunate Dutch, who appear to have dodged a bullet - had a much deeper and broader vision. The Lord Jesus had called them here, as their great chronicler and governor, William Bradford, put it, 'because they had a great hope and an inward zeal of advancing the cause of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the earth.' And from this it is clear that the United States was indeed founded upon Christian dominionist rule, particularly if one sets the founding of the United States not in 1776 when the United States was actually founded, but rather in 1620, when a bunch of people suddenly showed up in the general area.

Of course, if the founding of a nation really occurs when people arrive on a parcel of land, as Marshall seems to be implying, and if the characteristics of a nation are really determined by what said arrivals happen to be doing at the time, as Marshall is certainly implying, then the United States was actually founded a few thousand years earlier when Asiatic wanderers crossed the Bering Strait in search of mammoth herds or whatever it is that induces Asiatic types to wander around. By this reckoning, the U.S. was meant to have been characterized by the Indian practices of anthropomorphism and the cultivation of maize, rather than the Pilgrim practices of Christianity and nearly starving to death because you're a stupid Pilgrim and you don't know how to farm properly.

But there does exist a more profound defense of the Pilgrims and their claim to American authorship, one which Marshall neglects to mention but which I will provide for you in his stead simply because the Pilgrims need all the help they can get. In the early stages of the relationship between saint and savage, God seems to have signaled his displeasure at the practices of the latter, while simultaneously signaling his approval of those of the former. At least, Tony Perkins' boyfriend John Winthrop seems to have thought so. But for the natives in these parts, Winthrop wrote in regards to what was left of his heathen neighbors, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection. Of course, God didn't get around to doing all of this until a group of European colonists brought smallpox to Massachusetts in the first place. Timing is everything.

Back in the present day, our new friend Peter Marshall continued to elucidate on the motivations of our blessed Pilgrim overlords: The vision was that if they could put the biblical principles of self-government into practice, they could create a Bible-based commonwealth where there would truly be liberty and justice for every soul. Except for the witches among them, who had no souls. That was the vision that founded America. Morally and spiritually speaking, our nation was really founded here by the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came to Boston about 30 miles up the road.

Next up was a series of taped interviews with various American theocrats ranging from the notable to the obscure. C.J. Doyle of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League tells us that when religious freedom is imperiled, it never begins with a direct frontal assault on the liberty of worship. It always begins with attempts to marginalize the church and to narrow the parameters of the church's educational and charitable activities. The Catholics would be the ones to ask; the parameters of the church's educational and charitable activities have indeed been narrowed quite a bit since the days when said parameters encompassed the globe and included the enslavement of the indigenous population of South America, the theocratic dictatorship of as much as Europe as could effectively be controlled, the burning of heretical texts and heretics along with them, several Crusades, scattered inquisitions, and the wholesale persecution of those Protestant religious denominations whose modern-day adherents were now assembled at Liberty Sunday, nodding in sympathy at the plight of Mr. C.J. Doyle and his Church. Of course, Protestants can now afford to let bygones be bygones, the temporal ambitions of Rome having since been relegated to the feeding, clothing, and molestation of children. Sic transit gloria mundi.

***

When the surge was proposed in 2007, Krauthammer was among the few conservatives to come out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that the strategy will fail due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government. "If it were my choice," he wrote in January, "I would not 'surge' American troops in defense of such a government. I would not trust it to deliver its promises." The guy was pretty down on Maliki for a while, in fact, elsewhere asserting that the U.S. "should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government" and call for new elections. "As critics acknowledge military improvement, the administration is finally beginning to concede the political reality that the Maliki government is hopeless," he elsewhere observed. "Bush's own national security adviser had said as much in a leaked memo back in November. I and others have been arguing that for months."

Later in the year, the surge had become a reality and Krauthammer had become a convert, his original objections having disappeared in the face of what was beginning to seem like a viable strategy. Meanwhile, though, a number of his congressional co-ideologues had adopted his own past objections:

To cut off Petraeus' plan just as it is beginning -- the last surge troops arrived only last month -- on the assumption that we cannot succeed is to declare Petraeus either deluded or dishonorable. Deluded in that, as the best-positioned American in Baghdad, he still believes we can succeed. Or dishonorable in pretending to believe in victory and sending soldiers to die in what he really knows is an already failed strategy.

That's the logic of the wobbly Republicans' position. But rather than lay it on Petraeus, they prefer to lay it on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and point out his government's inability to meet the required political "benchmarks." As a longtime critic of the Maliki government, I agree that it has proved itself incapable of passing laws important for long-term national reconciliation.

But first comes the short term.

When Petraeus proposed the surge, Krauthammer opposed it - which is to say that by his own logic, Krauthammer himself must have likewise considered Petraeus to be "either deluded or dishonorable" insomuch as that our columnist believed that the surge would be a failure and thereby waste American lives. And he does not bother to note that he himself opposed the strategy that nobody else must now oppose less they insult Petraeus in the same manner that Krauthammer apparently did. He also doesn't bother to note that he, like all these "wobbly Republicans," also considered Maliki to be incapable of making use of any surge. Instead, he here deems the surge as falling under the category of "short term" reconciliation and that Maliki is capable of it - without, of course, admitting that he himself had argued the exact opposite case seven months before.

Krauthammer today considers the strategy to have been a success after having initially predicted its failure. Thus it is that this most respected of conservative commentators may be the only pundit in the country to have been wrong about every significant U.S. military question of the last decade.

***

Charles Krauthammer is not always wrong, of course. He is only sometimes wrong.

Here's a goofy old riddle: "I am telling you a lie." But, wait! Isn't that a lie, too? Does this mean he is actually telling the truth? But then he would be lying about telling us a lie? Zounds!

Imagine some fellow tells you, "I am always wrong." Is this, too, an impossible riddle? Never! We determine that he must be sometimes wrong, as to have been always wrong would have precluded him from correctly conveying his universal wrongness and to have never been wrong would preclude him from being wrong in telling us of his allegedly universal wrongness. Never!

Riddles of this sort are not particularly fleshed-out in terms of plot and character development. When we confront this hypothetical Fellow who Claims to be Telling us a Lie, for instance, it is only a brief encounter with an abstraction. We are too busy trying to figure out what this all means to wonder about how such a person as this goes about his life, whether his relationships are forever in chaos or perpetually calm, although we'd probably assume the latter since some women need to be lied to.

The Fellow Who is Sometimes Wrong is more reliable than his ever-lying counterpart, whom we would obviously not consider employing as a columnist with the newspaper we run in our hypothetical world (we run a newspaper in our hypothetical world). Rather, we have an antechamber filled with sometimes-wrong people who are here to apply for that position. Knowing that each applicant is sometimes wrong to some varying extent, just as in the real world, and being concerned only with the applicant's ability to be right (remember that we are fantasy-world publishers), how do we make a decision? There are a variety of ways depending on the perimeters, i.e. whether we can we ask them questions about past events or otherwise test them. But this is already getting complicated, so let us devise another scenario. Let us say we are publishers and that we long ago hired three columnists out of our original pool of people who sometimes get things wrong. Our intent is for the columnists we employ to be as right as possible as often as possible, and we are fully capable of finding new columnists to replace our existing ones. How shall we proceed?

One way would be to look over all of the columns that each of our columnists have written for us thus far and see if they're all full of shit, in which case we should fire the columnist in question and replace him with a new one. Notice how extraordinarily obvious this solution was.

***

Back at Liberty Sunday, former Mormon bishop Mitt Romney was introduced by his Mormon wife Ann, another graduate of Brigham Young University. Romney, of course, was here to speak about why traditional marriage is a sacred and inviolable practice consisting of a single man and a single woman - a concept that his church had vigorously opposed until several showdowns with Congress in the late 19th century ended with a conveniently-timed new revelation to the effect that God had changed his mind about polygamy.

After Ann Romney had announced to wild applause that she herself was a direct descendant of the splendid William Bradford, Mitt Romney took the podium to say his piece. The nation's values, he said, were under attack. Today there are some people who are trying to establish one religion: the religion of secularism. Unfortunately, the religion of secularism's operations have yet to be declared tax exempt, which is why I can't write off all of my Gore Vidal novels, tweed jackets, and imported coffee.

A bit into his speech, Romney went off-message when he noted that our fight for children, then, should focus on the needs of children, not the rights of adults, thus admitting that the point of all of this was to limit rights, rather than to protect them. But if our Mormon friend went on to elaborate regarding his advocacy of federalized social engineering, I wasn't able to catch it, and neither were the thousands, literally millions of others watching via the telecast; the transmission broke up in mid-sentence, and didn't resume until after Romney had finished speaking. Apparently, Yahweh does not approve of his True Church being rendered unclean by the presence of Mormons, who believe, among other things, that Jesus and Satan are actually brothers. A message from the Family Research Council came up asking me to click stop on my media player. Then restart it, and to repeat this. Not a word about prayer. Later on, after the transmission had been fixed, Tony Perkins took the stage and said something about someone having pulled a power cord. Never fret, though: We know where the real power comes from! Then there was applause, presumably for the engineer who plugged the cord back in.

James Dobson appeared via a recorded tape. He was in Tennessee on that particular evening. Tennessee has an open senate seat, he explained. Fair enough. Dobson cited some scripture, as well he might. 'For this cause,' he quoted, referring to the cause of matrimony, 'a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.' It certainly sounds as if Yahweh has stated His opposition to letting the in-laws move in. Judeo-Christianity is not without its charms.

More than 1,000 scientific studies conducted in secular universities and research centers have demonstrated conclusively that children do best when they're raised by a mother and father who are committed to each other, Dobson asserted. In his 2004 book Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle, Dobson had written something similar: More than ten thousand studies have concluded that kids do best when they are raised by loving and committed mothers and fathers. How that figure managed to shrink from ten thousand to one thousand in the space of two years would be an interesting question for a theoretical mathematician or quantum theorist. How do 9,000 things go from existing to not having ever existed at all? Actually, this is a trick question. The trick answer is that those 9,000 things never existed in the first place, and it's doubtful that even 1,000 did, either. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America once tried to figure out exactly how Dobson had arrived at his oft-stated more than ten thousand figure, which has since been cited by a couple of politicos on the lesser cable news programs. It seems that Dobson was referencing some books and articles to the effect that children are at a disadvantage when raised by a single mother, although none of the studies cited dealt with the question of whether or not mothers and fathers were necessarily preferable to two mothers, two fathers, or a mother and a grandmother (I myself was mostly raised in this last fashion, and I don't believe I'm the worse for it, but, then again, I'd never thought to ask James Dobson). But even aside from Dobson's slight misrepresentations regarding the nature of the studies that actually do exist, the 10,000 figure is ludicrous anyway; as Media Matters put it, such a number could only be possible if a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past 27 years. This does not appear to be the case. Nonetheless, Dobson was back to citing the 10,000 figure just a few months later.

Eventually, Dobson was called out on this particular instance of nonsense by two researchers whose work he referenced in a December 2006 essay that was published in Time and cutely entitled Two Mommies is Too Many. Until this point, neither of the researchers in question had been aware that Dobson was running around citing their work in support of his contention that gay marriage was the pits; they had, in fact, no reason to expect this, as their work supported no such contention. New York University educational psychologist Carol Gilligan requested that Dobson cease and desist from referencing her work, and Professor Kyle Pruett of the Yale School of Medicine wrote him the following letter which was reprinted on the gay advocacy website Truth Wins Out:

Dr. Dobson,

I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission.

You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.

Kyle Pruett, M.D.
Yale School of Medicine

To its credit, Time later published a response to Dobson's essay, entitled (almost as cutely) Two Mommies or Two Daddies Will Do Just Fine, Thanks.

Dobson had more concrete matters about which to be livid. It seems that there's a book called King and King floating around the nation's public schools. The plot concerns a prince who decides to marry another man, Dobson tells us, and then, visibly disgusted, adds, It ends with a celebration and a kiss. Dobson thinks this to be very bad form, and, for once, I agree with him. I wouldn't want my children being taught that the institution of hereditary monarchy is some sort of acceptable alternative lifestyle, either. If I caught my kid reading any of that smut by John Winthrop, for instance, I'd beat him with a sack of oranges until my arm got tired. I'm just kidding. I don't have any kids. Yet.

Dobson's list of grievances went on. A school in Lexington, Massachusetts, had sent students home with a diversity bag which included some materials to the effect that homosexuals exist and are people. In response to the inevitable parental complaint, the district superintendent had said, We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed. Dobson read the quote and then delivered the following pithy retort: Well, maybe, sir, you have no business running a school system in the first place!

Tony Perkins had gone into some more depth regarding the Lexington Diversity Bag Heresy in a recent e-mail newsletter. You may remember us reporting last year on David Parker, the Lexington, Massachusetts father who was arrested because of insistence on being notified by school officials anytime homosexual topics were discussed in his son's classroom, Perkins wrote at the time. He made this reasonable request after his six-year-old kindergartener came home from school with a 'diversity' book bag and a book discussing homosexual relationships. Obviously, Mr. Parker wasn't arrested because of his insistence on anything; he was arrested on a charge of trespassing after refusing to leave the school office, even after having been asked several times by the principal as well as by police. And Mr. Parker had indeed been notified about the bags, along with all of the other parents, twice. A sample had even been displayed at a PTA meeting at the beginning of the year, where it was made clear that children were not required to accept them. But, hey, whatever.

Dobson had another one. And did you hear two weeks ago that a 13-year-old girl at Prince George's County Middle School was silently reading her Bible at lunch time, when a vice principal told her she was violating school policy and would be suspended if she didn't stop? This actually did happen; the vice principal apparently didn't understand school policy, which clearly states that students may read religious texts. They can also start religious clubs. The problem seemed to be that the vice principal in question mistakenly believed otherwise, perhaps because Evangelicals like James Dobson (and Catholics like William Bennett) are always running around claiming that it's illegal to pray in public schools.

Then, all of a sudden and apropos of nothing, Dobson warned us that our country is in great danger from the radical Islamic fundamentalism, which is telling us now that they plan to destroy the United States and Israel, and I'm convinced they mean it. Really puts that diversity book bag thing into perspective, huh?

The video ended and it was back to the Liberty Sunday live feed. Perkins noted that the DVD version of the event could be ordered from the FRC website, and that it included bonus material.

A bit later, Massachusetts Family Institute president Kris Mineau came on. The leadership of this state is beholden to the homosexual lobbyists, he said. Homosexual money is flooding into this state to deny the citizens the right to vote, to deny our freedom of speech. The homosexual money in question was apparently too limp-wristed and faggy to actually accomplish any of this, though, seeing as how Mineau was exercising his freedom of speech at that very moment and the 2006 mid-terms had yet to be canceled by the Homosexual Agenda Electoral Commission.

Wellington Boone took the stage. This made me very happy. Boone is a black Charismatic preacher with a penchant for shooting his mouth off about faggots and sissies, as he had done at the recent Values Voter summit, explaining at that event that he is from the ghetto, so sometimes it does come out a little bit. The crackers in attendance had eaten this up with a spoon.

Like most Charismatic types, Boone comes from the Arbitrary Implementation of Vague Biblical Terminology school of ministerial presentation, whereby a preacher selects an apparently random verse or even just a phrase of the Old Testament and then ascribes to it some sort of special significance, mystical as well as practical. The most popular item of fodder for such a sermon is the sowing of seeds, which invariably entails that the sermon-goer should give the preacher a hundred bucks, because God will totally pay back him or her (usually her) at a rate of return that makes a Reagan-era share of Apple look like a Roosevelt-era Victory Bond. In a way, the sowing of seeds was also the subject of tonight's presentation, insomuch as that everyone had gathered to advocate the supremacy of vaginal intercourse over its lesser, non-child-yielding counterparts.

Boone was right out of the gate, noting that God does not play concerning righteousness."

We know what a family is, continued Boone. My wife said to me this morning, she said, 'Well, okay, then. It's sodomites because they're not gays; it's a misnomer. They're sodomites.' That's a pretty clever thing to say, and so it's understandable why Boone would be sure to relate this to everyone.

There were sodomy laws in this country all over from [the] 1600s and it was [at] one time a capital offense, he went on. How could we make it a capital offense? Because most lawyers studied from William Blackstone, who was the foundation of it was a foundation book that helped those lawyers get a clue as to how they should govern and how they should practice law. Where did he get it from? The Bible. The Bible was the book. It sure was. It was a foundation book.

Then came what I consider to be the best moment of the evening. So if this is just a small matter, I'll tell you what let two women go on an island and a whole bunch of all women, if you're sodomites, go on an island, stay by yourself, all women, put all the men on another island this is my wife talking to me this morning let them stay. I'll tell you what: 'We'll come back and see you in a hundred years.' There was total silence in the auditorium, as opposed to the approving laughter that Boone had no doubt come to expect from his wife's anecdotes. The problem, he seemed to have thought, was that the subtlety of the joke had gone over the audience's collective head, and so, like any good comedian, he explained the punchline: Do you get it? Because a man and a man and a woman and a woman will not make a child.

Though a failure at comedy, Boone's real function for the evening was to provide cover for the event's anti-homosexual sentiment by showing everyone that he himself, as a member of a group that has been persecuted, was more than willing to lend his support to the persecution of yet another group, and that this modern-day persecution was, ipso facto, hardly akin to the earlier persecution of blacks to which he himself had obviously been opposed and to which most of the crackers assembled were pretending to be opposed as well. To this end, Boone noted the various ways in which blacks had been persecuted over the years. Now, if you tell me your issue is the same as that issue, he said, addressing any gays who might have been watching the anti-gay event, I'll say you better get a clue. Get out of here. You're not getting over here. There was wild applause. And you're not getting on that. You're not getting any of that. No sir. Perhaps Boone has a point. If so, he refrained from making it. If I was making a speech about gays, and if I was planning to spend the fifth minute of said speech claiming that gays have no license to compare their struggles to that of the blacks, I would probably have refrained from spending the third minute pointing out that gays used to be executed on the basis of Biblical law and that I thought this was a swell thing, as Boone had done, nor would I have menacingly added, If you're in the closet, come out of the closet and let God deal with you and let the nation deal with you and don't hide out, as Boone also did. If you're a homosexual, don't listen to Boone. It sounds like a trap. Stay in the closet with a shotgun.

Boone was also upset that Condoleeza Rice and Laura Bush had recently presided over the induction ceremony of the new, gay Global AIDS Initiative director Dr. Mark S. Dybul, was particularly peeved that Dybul was sworn in with his hand on a Bible held by his homosexual partner, and was quite unhappy indeed that Rice had referred to Dybul's partner's mother as Dybul's mother-in-law during the ceremony. Boone had a real problem with that. As he explained a bit later, That ain't no family!

The incident had riled up a good portion of the Evangelical hornet's nest for a variety of reasons; a few days before Liberty Sunday, an FRC spokesman had told the media that [w]e have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house, because, I suppose, gay people like to eat AIDS, presumably for brunch.

***

When Barack Obama began positioning himself as a presidential aspirant toward the end of 2006, Charles Krauthammer offered some encouraging words. Obama, he wrote at the time, has an affecting personal history. More importantly, he had something in common with another once-popular presidential aspirant, Colin Powell; both, it turned out, were black. Race is only one element in their popularity, Krauthammer noted, but an important one. A historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African-American ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of African-Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in American life. The column made a strong case for Obamas candidacy in terms of his identity but included not a word concerning what the first-term Senator might bring to the table in terms of policy.

Less than two years later, Krauthammer was expressing disgust with those who would make the case for Obamas candidacy in terms of his identity, rather than his policies. The pillars of American liberalismthe Democratic Party, the universities and the mass mediaare obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender, he helpfully explained, adding that the 2008 Democratic primary represented the full flowering of identity politics. Its not a pretty picture.

In his earlier Obama column, our columnist set out to explain that, should Obama run, he will not win. The reason is 9/11. The country will simply not elect a novice in wartime." He provides the senator with the following advice:

He should run in '08. He will lose in '08. And the loss will put him irrevocably on a path to the presidency... He's a young man with a future. But the future recedes. He needs to run now. And lose. And win by losing.

Obama actually did end up trying this, although it didn't go as planned. In the meantime, Krauthammer predicts, the White House will probably go to a Republicansay, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani. Krauthammer also warns that the reflexive anti-war sentiments of the left will prove disastrous for the Democrats in the long runthe long run beginning as early as November 08.

The 2006 race, meanwhile, "was an event-driven election that produced the shift of power one would expect when a finely balanced electorate swings mildly one way or the other... Vietnam cost the Democrats 40 years in the foreign policy wilderness. Anti-Iraq sentiment gave the anti-war Democrats a good night on Tuesday, and may yet give them a good year or two. But beyond that, it will be desolation." The 2008 election ended up being event-driven, too.

***

When not criticizing homosexuals, the nation's Evangelical leadership is making excuses for them. It could use a little more practice in this. The Evangelical response to the Mark Foley scandal was so bad that it was still being bad long after the Foley scandal was over. A few weeks after Foley had escaped into rehab, when the Ted Haggard scandal arrived on the scene to help break up the monotony, Tony Perkins apparently decided that it would be of sudden and marginal convenience to attack Foley. The media is attempting to politicize the incident by comparing Ted with Mark Foley, he wrote, in reference to the prominent Evangelical leader who had been snorting meth and fucking gay prostitutes. On MSNBC yesterday I said that there is no comparison. After Foley was caught sexually pursuing minors, he publicly declared his homosexuality as if it were a potential defense. Ted did not try to change the rules of conduct to match his behavior and submitted to the decision of the overseers to remove him from the church he started, at least after he'd been caught lying five or six times.

But just a few weeks before, Perkins' good buddy Dobson had decided that Foley had instead handled everything well and that everyone should have thus shut up about it. A representative who has been a closet homosexual for years, apparently, was finally caught doing something terribly wrong and when the news broke, he packed up his things and went home, he wrote. Having been merely a gay political sex scandal occurring on the cusp of an election, Dobson was saying, the story certainly had no legs of its own and thus shouldn't have been reported. Nonetheless, the media and the Democrats saw an opportunity to make much, much more out of it, impugning the morals and character, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress.

Whereas the media and Democrats wanted to make much, much more out of it and impugn the morals and characters, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress, Tony Perkins wanted to make much, much more out of it and impugn the morals and characters, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress in a fun, paranoid way that might have helped to raise funds. It seems that Perkins had unraveled a high-level homosexual conspiracy in which the GOP was complicit. The ricochets of the Foley scandal continued to whistle overhead this weekend, Perkins wrote in one of the delightful e-mail newsletters to which I subscribe. As a guest on Fox News Sunday I again raised last week's report by CBS's Gloria Borger about anger on Capitol Hill that 'a network of gay staffers and gay members protect[ed] each other and did the Speaker a disservice' in the Foley scandal. On Friday, an internet site quoted a 'gay politico' observing that '[m]aybe now the social conservatives will realize one reason why their agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.' Sunday's New York Times revealed that a homosexual former Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, was 'among the first to learn of Mr. Foley's' messages to pages. The Clerk's job is described as a 'powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the page program.' This raises yet another plausible question for values voters: has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder. This was the first House to pass a pro-homosexual hate crimes bill. The marriage protection amendment was considered very late in the term with no progress toward passage. Despite overwhelming popular approval, the party seldom campaigns as the defender of marriage. The GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be the party that defends the traditional moral and family values that our nation was built upon and directed by for two centuries. Put another way, does the party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?

That's an interesting question, but Dobson had already decided that no such questions should be asked. And he was still asking why everyone was still asking about things. What Mark Foley did was unconscionable. It was terrible, he noted. Thankfully he's gone. But tell me now that he's gone, why is it still with us? Why are they still talking about it? Why are they trying to blame somebody for it? It is because they are using that to suppress values voters.

Actually, it was because then-Speaker Dennis Hastert himself had ordered a House ethics committee investigation into the matter. And Tony Perkins wouldn't shut up about it, either. I would like to see all the facts, he said on CNN. I hope they're forthright and forthcoming in the next 48 hours and present this information to the American public. Why Perkins was apparently trying to suppress values voters is a mystery. But when he wasn't apparently trying to suppress values voters, Perkins was also agreeing with Dobson that the media was trying to suppress values voters, too. Story after story on the elections seem to repeat the same spin that conservatives are too turned off to turn out the vote, he wrote. And when Perkins wasn't agreeing with Dobson that the media was trying to suppress values voters by claiming that conservatives would be too turned off to turn out the vote, Perkins was elsewhere claiming that conservatives would be too turned off to turn out the vote. As he told the country, again on CNN, I think this is a real problem for Republicans... This is going to be, I think, very harmful for Republican turnout across the country because it's inconsistent with the values that the Republicans say that they represent.

If there was such a lack of coordination between Dobson and Perkins that neither could make a statement on the issue without contradicting the other (and if Perkins couldn't even make a statement on the issue without contradicting himself), it should hardly be surprising to find a lack of coordination between Dobson and Perkins and the larger social conservative pundit battalion. Those truly interested in protecting children from online predators, Dobson stated, should spend less time calling for Speaker Hastert to step down, and more time demanding that the Justice Department enforce existing laws that would limit the proliferation of the kind of filth that leads grown men to think it's perfectly OK to send lurid e-mails to 16-year-old boys. At this point, those calling for Hastert to step down as Speaker included the ultraconservative, Evangelical-friendly Washington Times, the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly Bay Buchanan, and the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly Paul Weyrich (who eventually changed his mind after a phone conversation with Hastert, who explained to Weyrich that he didn't feel like stepping down), among others. And it's not entirely clear what sort of filth Dobson was talking about, unless he was referring to the Catechisms or something; when Foley, who is Catholic, released a statement to the effect that he had been molested by a priest as a young man, Catholic League president and occasional Dobson ally William Donohue wondered aloud, As for the alleged abuse, it's time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it, Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys won't allow themselves to be molested. These are all good questions, and I certainly agree with Donohue that any young boy who expects to find himself alone with a priest should be prepared to fight when the priest inevitably tries to molest him. But, again, Dobson had already decided that to continue to talk about Foley was tantamount to trying to suppress values voters.

The Evangelical punditry is at least admirable for its decentralized nature; if everything that every Evangelical leader says contradicts everything else that every other Evangelical leader says, one can hardly accuse the Evangelicals of toeing a single party line. Instead, they decentralize their disingenuousness so that each particular disingenuous assertion can compete in the marketplace of disingenuous ideas until one eventually proves viable and may then be generally agreed upon. This is sort of like how capitalism works, except that capitalism works, whereas the decentralized nature of the Evangelical punditry simply reveals a rhetorical opportunism that is too incompetent to properly disguise itself as collective moral clarity. Or, as Focus on the Family Vice President of Public Policy Tom Minnery put it to James Dobson during an October radio broadcast, I fear that we're in a society in which you will be held to the standards which you claim.

This is the sort of thing that Krauthammer is protecting.

***

The following excerpts are taken from two columns Krauthammer wrote in 2001:

As the Bush administration approaches a decision on stem cell research, the caricatures have already been drawn. On one side are the human benefactors who wish only a chance to use the remarkable potential of stem cells-- primitive cells that have the potential to develop into any body tissue with the proper tweaking--to cure a myriad of diseases. On the other side stand the Catholic Church and the usual anti-abortion zealots who, because of squeamishness about the fate of a few clumps of cells, will prevent this great boon to humanity.

There is a serious debate about war aims raging in Washington. And then there is the caricature debate in which, on the one hand, you have the reasoned, moderate, restrained doves who want very limited war aims. And on the other hand, you have the unreconstructed hawks--those daring to suggest that the war on terrorism does not stop with Afghanistan--aching for blood and continents to conquer.

This is probably one of the stupidest rhetorical tricks I have ever come across, and I have across plenty of them in studying Krauthammer. Two days after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, for instance, he appeared on Fox News in order to allege that the Korean-born perpetrator was in fact a symptom of the problem of Islamic terrorism - a problem long underestimated by many of his ideological opponents, as he has explained at length elsewhere:

Krauthammer: And he did leave the return address Ismail Ax. Ismail Ax. I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.

Brit Hume: Which was, My name is Ismael.

Close enough, Brit. But in his very next column, Krauthammer denounces the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage," ending the piece with the only moderately catty hope that "in the spirit of Obamas much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder."

He also announces that some people who advocate gun control have been trying to turn the shooting into a debate concerning gun control. Now Krauthammer is forced to join the debate as well.

It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly. Nonetheless, we should have no illusions about what laws can do. There are other ways to kill in large numbers, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated. Determined killers will obtain guns no matter how strict the laws. And stricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

He pauses long enough to lament that it "is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage."

***

In preparation for this chapter, I have spent several hours pouring over Scandinavian marriage statistics. So have a number of other people. This tells me that Scandinavian marriage statistics are very important things over which to pour. These other people seem to agree. The pro-gay marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian marriage doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake of gay civil unions, the United States shouldn't fret about gay civil unions, either. The anti-gay marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian marriage doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake gay civil unions, we just aren't looking hard enough or interpreting the results with adequate degrees of intellectual dishonesty, and that anyway we shouldn't allow gay civil unions because our gods do not care for them. The general consensus, though, is that the manner in which adult American citizens choose to conduct their personal lives is the government's business, and that such things as divorce rates are so important that they must be kept down even by excluding some groups from participating in the institution of marriage.

Well, so be it. If there is some sort of War on Marriage to be fought, let us fight it. But because you and I lack an army or even political power (I'm assuming you don't chair any significant Senate committees, seeing as how you're reading a book), we will instead have to settle for what is called a war game. A war game is a make-believe exercise of the sort that is often conducted by the Navy and the editors of The Atlantic for the purpose of testing various scenarios, most of which seem to involve the invasion of Iran. Since I've never been invited to one of these, I'm not entirely sure how they work, so we'll just have to improvise a bit.

It is the year 2012, and I have seized control of the United States, declaring myself God Emperor. All engines of the State are at my command. I have cybernetic arms.

Pardon me, God Emperor Brown...

What is it, High Priest Dobson? Can't you see that I'm oiling my cybernetic arms?

My apologies, Dobson mutters, his eyes downcast lest the sun shine off of my shiny cybernetic arms and blind him. It's just that the people, sir. They are discontented.

Well, that's understandable. They've all been put into forced labor camps.

No, my liege. They're worried about the state of American marriage.

Why? I married two hundred slave girls just last week.

"Me, too," said Mitt Romney.

Oh, snap! interjects Court Jester Wellington Boone. That reminds me of something funny my wife said to me this morning...

Too many people are getting divorced, Dobson interrupts. The American people would like to see lower divorce rates.

Hmm, I say to myself, stroking my chin with my long, cybernetic fingers. High Priest, bring me the following records from the days of the Old Republic...

A bit later, Dobson and I are looking over U.S. Census Bureau statistics from 2003.

The key here is to identify the root of America's high divorce rates, I explain to Dobson, who is sitting next to me, and to Boone, who is sitting next to me and beating a gay man to death with a hammer. This is actually quite simple, as the numbers indicate marked regional variances. For instance, notice how the Northeastern states have exceptionally low divorce rates. Also observe that Massachusetts, the most gay-friendly state in the Union and the first to allow for gay marriage, has the lowest divorce rate of all.

But it is impossible! cries out Dobson. There are ten thousand... er, forty million studies that indicate otherwise!

And just as you'll find the lowest divorce rates in the relatively secular Northeast, you shall find the highest divorce rates in the relatively religious Bible Belt. Notice how Texas, for instance, has one of the highest in the country. Now, what does the Bible Belt have more of than does the Northeast, aside from illiteracy and exorcisms? Bibles! And possibly belts.

But the Bible strengthens marriage, says Dobson. It says so in the Bible.

Apparently not. Here's a major study done in 2000 that shows the rate of divorce among born-again Christians to be 27 percent second only to Baptists, with 29 percent. The lowest divorce rate is found among atheists and agnostics, with 21 percent. This is in accordance with other studies.

At that moment, Stanley Kurtz arrives. He had been off in Sweden again, trying to rescue the Swedes from the Swedes.

Perhaps these divorces are occurring partly among older people, says Kurtz. Then they wouldn't count for some reason known only to me, Stanley Kurtz.

But in any case, says Dobson, these married couples were probably getting divorced before they accepted Christ.

Actually, I point out in my wisdom, it says here that the vast majority are getting divorced afterwards. And thus we have only one option. In order that we might have a lower divorce rate, the State will no longer grant marriage licenses to Baptists and Evangelicals. So it is written; so it shall be done. Dobson!

Yes, my liege?

Bring me Slave Girl #146. I shall receive her in my... private quarters.

Y-yes, God Emperor. It shall be as you say.

And with that, I crush my solid gold goblet and raise my cybernetic fist into the sky.

All hail to Baal, fertility deity of the Carthaginians!

Be sure to check me out at National Review Online, says Stanley Kurtz.

***

Sorry about that. Anyway, to hell with Charles Krauthammer.