Be Very Careful Marco

Rising Republican Star, first-term Florida Senator Marco Rubio yesterday offered his full support for the US intervention in Libya.  In fact, he one-upped President Obama by calling unequivocally for regime change.  He even went so far as to send a letter to the Senate Majority and Minority leaders calling for congressional authorization for the use of military force.  Unlike the president, Rubio managed this with just enough clarifications and qualifications to make his appeal, for me anyway, both reasonable and palatable, save for one very important exception.

Senator Rubio:

“If we believe that the rise of this new attitude among young people and others seeking a new life and a new way in the Middle East is a positive thing, and I believe that it is, then it serves our national interest to see that happen...The last thing you want is for someone like Muammar Qaddafi to get away with crushing something like that through brutal force. Because what he does is create a blueprint for how Syria should handle this, Iran should handle this, and everyone else should handle this.”

While I'm sympathetic with this line of thinking--what friend of freedom wouldn't be?--it does not for that reason override the need to be extremely careful about encouraging uprisings.

Most rebellions, however noble their underlying causes, fall very short of their stated goals, even their most immediate one of throwing the dirty, rotten, SOBs out.  Unfortunately, there is one quite dire and very predictable consequence of coming up short:  a brutal, murderous, and wide-ranging purge by the still-ruling tyrant.

If and when this happens, and it will happen as often as not, are we then both willing and able to intervene even more directly?  If not, are we then prepared to live with the blood of the doomed rebels at least partly on our hands as well?

With all due respect Senator, these questions, and a host of others like them, must be answered before we decide to get too deeply involved.

Blessed Be the Ties that Bind

Eugene Volokh of the blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, has penned a provocative piece for NRO titled "Multiculturalism: For or Against?"   In it he challenges conservatives by making the case that some undeniably very good things are a direct consequence of multiculturalism, things like federalism, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and parental rights among others.

While it's easy to take his larger point, I do think he confuses a society that acknowledges its mutlicultural reality and governs accordingly with multiculturalism.  The latter is an ideology, an ideology with a pedigree, and a pedigree replete with characters unmistakeably hostile to the American experiment.

That experiment is one of government by consent in which liberty is optimized.  That is, liberty is of a higher priority than equality, and especially higher than elusive contemporary notions of equality whether they be called positive liberty, social justice, or whatever.

But any society that is predicated on securing liberty above all has an inherent, and very serious, problem:  Optimizing liberty can and often does strain the very bonds that make the society possible in the first place.  As Volokh mentions, the Civil War is the terrible instance in our own history when those bonds actually broke for a time.

This problem is so serious that, especially given all the liberty-securing provisions of our consitution, it is absolutely crucial that some irreducible cultural homogeneity always describe and define our society.  Political scientist Louis Hartz, famous for The Liberal Tradition in America, argued that our constitution was so liberty-securing that it was actually a recipe for gridlock, then disaster, and then chaos, save for the very important fact that free to do as we pleased, we Americans could more or less always be counted on to do pretty much the same thing.  For Hartz, the irreducible cultural homogeneity was provided by a pervasive and abiding Lockean liberalism.

I would add English-speaking Judeo-Christianity to that irreducible list, but the point is that there absolutely must be something there.  A society that tries to be all things to all people is a society that does not and cannot exist.

As a result, those who understand multiculturalism as a mortal enemy of this country and who also fret constantly about the underlying level of cultural homogeneity that defines it, must not be dismissed simply as bigots, racists, chauvinists, jingoists, or any other handy epithet.  Instead, they should be appreciated for highlighting and worrying about a central problem of any liberty-loving society.

Irresponsible

To continue the theme of party discipline, it strikes me that, although I didn't focus group test it,  "irresponsible" might be a very good word for the GOP to use against the Democrats with respect to the immediate task of passing a budget or shutting down the government.

If the Dems were as genuinely concerned about the effects of Republican-proposed budget cuts as they now pretend to be, they would have passed a plan more to their liking while they controlled the whole of the legislative and executive branches over the past two years.  But they didn't, and that was irresponsible.  Instead, with the nation on the brink of economic disaster, they handed off to the GOP the heavy lifting of fashioning a budget that at least appears to be fiscally sane and all they can be counted on to do is obstruct the process and carp from the sidelines.  That is irresponsible. 

Republican spokesmen should use that word every chance they get, use it, in fact, to the point of it becoming trite.  Sure, in short order, journalists will begin to roll their eyes and mutter "yeah, yeah, yeah" when they hear it.  But also very soon, if they persist in using it nevertheless, if they remain disciplined as a party in using it, the American people will begin to associate "irresponsible" with the Democrat Party...and rightly so.     

I Feel Your Pain

Speaking of Chuck Schumer, The American Spectator's Jay Homnick confesses that although he's charged as a journalist with practicing at least a modicum of disciplined detachment and objectivity, when it comes to the senior senator from New York, he finds that standard absolutely impossible.

As someone who feels a similar revulsion at even the site of our 42nd president, I can definitley relate.

Disciplined in the "Extreme"

By now you've heard the reports of New York Senator Chuck Schumer, unknowingly caught on an open mike, revealing that the Democrat caucus had instructed him and his colleagues to use the word "extreme" when referring to GOP-proposed budget cuts.  I'm guessing it was a focus group-tested word.  While it's easy to cluck at the underlying cynicism this also reveals, frankly, I was more than a little impressed by it as well.

"I belong to no organized party, I'm a Democrat."   Will Rogers could once use that line to great effect, but, to me anyway, it hasn't felt anything like the truth for some time now. On the contrary, the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the elite media are nothing if not disciplined in advancing their vision for the country.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh will from time to time demonstrate this aspect of that discipline for comic effect.  Take the word, oh I don't know, "incoherent", for example.   As in, "the Bush policy in Iraq is incoherent."  Rush's team will splice together soundbites from the day before's newscasts, tapes of journalists, pundits, and Democrat politicians, in which they all, in seemingly choreographed fashion, use the exact same word over and over again.  It's funny, but it's also amazing, and, I suspect, at least somewhat effective as well.  By doing this they help frame the issue in a manner more favorable to liberal Democrats.

By contrast, if the Republican caucus does anything like this, counseling, for example, the public use of the word "extreme" to describe Democrat Party policies, they can count on Senator McCain using instead the word "excessive", "extravagant", or "outrageous", if for no other reason than to retain his status as a maverick.   

"Exceptional" After All

President Obama tonight defended and explained (sort of) his order of US military intervention into troubled Libya.  His appeal rested largely on, get this, "American Exceptionalism", something he and fellow traveling liberals typically disdain.  Nevertheless, he used words and phrases like, "unique", "who we are", "our values", and "the United States of America is different" throughout the speech.

Is he coming around or is his appeal more than a little, as the Church Lady used to say, "convenient"?

(If you're too young to remember the Church Lady, google it.)

"Dictatorships and Double Standards"

Wasn't a famous neo-con once mocked for that phrase?

Anyway, if you're looking for, if not consistency, then at least a pattern of behavior from this Administration, shucks, from any liberal Democrat, well here it is:  Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime American ally, simply had to go, but Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is not only tolerable , he's a “reformer”.