RINOs

Ron Paul is an interesting candidate on the surface. A Republican, he voted against the Iraq war, and against the Patriot Act. Democrats are starting to support him. Michael, a left-leaning blogger who writes the "Blog For Arizona" blog from my own state, talks about why Democrats should support Paul:

[link] I don't want to see another Republican President any more than the next Democrat. But I do want to see a Republican nominee who stands up for civil rights, who speaks sensibly about America's place in the world, who insists on the rule of law and rejects the exceptionalism and emergency powers advocated by every other GOP candidate. I want to see the Republican part rally around a voice that is not encouraging them to tear apart the Constitution in fear of terrorism. I want to see a Republican nominee who will enable the American people to experience a campaign of hope and ideas, not of fear and McCarthyism.

But does St. Paul really stand up for our civil rights? What about the first one? What exactly is his position on the First Amendment, for example? Separation of church and state and all that stuff?

[Ron Paul] The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.

Well. Isn't that special? Apparently he thinks it's a dandy idea to have government-sponsored prayer in schools - as long as it's the state's decision, not the Federal government's decision. You know, because when the state forces you to pray to a magical man in the sky that's A-OK.

Not to mention that his supporters come across as - how should I put this delicately - fucking nutballs when they are defending his honor against the heathens who dare to be critical of St. Paul.

"Godless" from the No God Zone, has an excellent analysis of Ron Paul's position on the First Amendment. And Paul's position does not fill me with confidence, to say the least.

[link] But how well does he know the Constitution? He wrote:

[Ron Paul] The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.

Let us put aside for a second his opposition to "rigid separation between church and state" and concentrate, not on Constitutional theory, but on Constitutional facts. Mr. Paul claims that the Constitution is "replete with references to God". Now replete means abundantly supplied or filled. So if the Constitution is abundantly filled with references to God how many are there? Let's get precise. How many times is God mentioned in the Constitution?

Zero! And if you don't believe me you can go check Ron Paul's own congressional website where he has a copy of the text. Go to the page and read it yourself. It is worth reading now and then. But if you don't have time do a page search for "God" and see all the abundant references on your own. All zero of them.

(Tip of the ballcap to UTI commenter McMillan.)

First of all I'd like to point out that I really do appreciate Michael Novak's attempt to bridge the gap, as it were. He is unfailingly polite in his writing about atheists and atheism.

However, the problem for me is that he uses 1000 words when one will do, and creates an argument where - by his own admission - there should not be one.

In a recent article Mr. Novak responded to atheist writer Heather Mac Donald. Miss Mac Donald made the very good point that from the outside looking-in, from an objective standpoint, it was very difficult to tell whether or not a person was an atheist or a believer.

[Heather Mac Donald] I wonder whether religious conservatives can spot the atheists among them by their deeds or, for that matter, by their political positions. I very much doubt it. Skeptical conservatives do not look into the abyss when they make ethical choices. Their moral sense is as secure as a believer’s. They do not need God or the Christian Bible to discover the golden rule and see themselves in others.

More below the fold...

Hat-tip to The Commissar: Doug at Below the Beltway links to an article on RealClearPolitics predicting that the Republicans are going to lose the interior west to the Democrats because of the region's libertarian streak and the GOP's excessive social conservatism.

[Link] In fact, it's looking more and more likely that the eight states of the Southwest and the broader interior West -- Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming -- are on their way to becoming the next great swing region in American politics. As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism.

Why? The interior West is not the South -- not by demography and not by ideology.

The article goes on to explain why the Republicans are slowly losing the interior west, and gives some evidene of Democratic gains in that region. An additional fact it doesn't mention is that in most of the interior West, Bush did worse or no better in 2004 than in 2000, despite a 2% improvement in the national popular vote.

The article also does not mention a fact that helps explain the Democratic gains in Colorado and Montana but goes against the author's admitted libertarian view: environmentalists are finally connecting to American voters outside New York and San Francisco. Voters in the interior west are slowly realizing that mining corporations don't have their best interests at heart, and environmentalists are learning to hash out policies that clearly help average people.

Via Majikthise: Chafee said he'll vote against Alito. Obviously, this is good news, mainly since it shows moderate Republicans can crack under pressure, so if Chafee can do it, so can Specter, Snowe, and Collins. In particular, if more than 6 or 7 Republicans are turned, then the DNC might be able to pressure Democrats to vote against the confirmation.

Commenters on Lindsay's thread said that Chafee was just pretending to be moderate because he voted for cloture, i.e. for a straight up-or-down vote. But the people who adopt a filibuster-or-death attitude get two crucial things wrong: one, there is no way a filibuster will get 40 votes; and two, the modern filibuster is a way for a Senate minority to get its way once in a while instead of never. A majority yielding to a filibuster in effect says, "Okay, this one time you can have your way, since we get ours 80% of the time." When the majority is as passionate as the minority about the issue, it will destroy the Senate before yielding to a filibuster.

The attitude that Chafee is secretly anti-choice because he won't filibuster is no different from the attitude some warbloggers express that if you don't support torture, you support the terrorists. The facts that there's some other issue at stake - human rights in the case of torture, and legal tradition in the case of a filibuster - and that torture/a filibuster won't work go in one ear and out the other of such people.

If the religious right is feigning indignation over Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in order to get liberals to acquiesce to this move, it is doing a remarkably good job of keeping up the act. If with Roberts a few ultra-conservatives such as James Dobson expressed concern that he wasn't a homophobe, with Miers it seems that the Religious Right is entirely up in arms.

The San Francisco Chronicle documents statements by several key conservatives who beg Bush to withdraw her nomination. It's not just James Dobson this time: it's failed Reagan judicial nominee Robert Bork, an unnamed Republican Senator, The Republican National Coalition for Life, the director of the Christian Defense Coalition, Operation Rescue, and William Kristol.

When Roberts refused to disclose his judicial philosophy beyond vague statements about being merely an umpire, the American liberal blogosphere said it was still certain he was a Rehnquist-style conservative because unlike Souter, he had had judicial experience and clear conservative cred. Curiously, now the same bloggers who emphasized well-formed judicial views have changed their litmus test for an obvious conservative, now that evidence that Miers is a true conservative is scant.

If you worry about Miers' being a conservative hack, remember that Stevens, Souter, O'Connor, and Kennedy were all supposed to be reliably right-wing. Again, we see Bush snub the religious right, which will predictably support his party yet again in 2008 like a battered wife who always goes back to her abusive husband.

Update: The Anti-Americans have arrived to beat up some more on Peace Mom ... They lasted all of thirty minutes and hightailed it back to the Air Conditioned comfort.

On the left, Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey Sheehan KIA, Sadr City, 4/4/04. Bush 'sympathizes with her' but she's not 'very important' and besides, she's being 'used by the left'; Cindy is not worth a five minute drive and ten lousy minutes in the middle of Bush's five week vacation?

On the right, the helpless, withered body of what was once Terry Schiavo, strung up to wires like a human meat puppet and paraded by the Neo-con Clerics, dancing a jig marionette style to the right wing agenda against her own husband's wishes; so important Bush left his vacation ranch in the middle of the night and flew to DC to sign "Terry's Law"?

Just when I think the modern GOP has gone completely off its rails and there is nothing left, some hint of hope, a trace of dinity, arises. Via Markos, fellow moderate conservative The Cunning Realist gets it right.

According to the New York Times, John Roberts advised gay rights activists in 1996. He helped the side of gay rights on Romer vs. Evans, the 1996 gay rights case that began the shift toward more judicial protection of gay rights, which was made complete in 2003's Lawrence vs. Texas. More precisely, he gave the plaintiffs' chief lawyer pro bono advice on how to argue in such a way that it would convince conservatives.

Subject to the caveat that pro bono advice is weaker evidence than judging the case, Roberts' support for gay rights is indicative of how weak the religious right really is. The NYTimes article quotes James Dobson as strongly disapproving of his overall record. And other blogs, such as Majikthise, have dealt with how he is more of a corporatist than a social conservative. It's one thing to oppose the Lemon test and support slightly stronger restrictions on abortion; it's a whole other thing to want to force women to be stay at home moms, criminalize abortion and contraception, turn homosexuals into second-class citizens, and destroy separation of church and state.

Bush nominated him knowing that he is not much of a social conservative. James Dobson hates him; he isn't the candidate of the religious right. Despite claims of victory for social conservatives, Bush ignored them at the moment of truth. The only explanation for that that I can think of is that the religious right has painted itself into irrelevance by being so reliably partisan. When a group so consistently votes for one party, the party it votes for can get away with only giving it scraps; the same process happens inside the Democratic Party, which takes blacks' votes for granted.