The Anointed One? Or Angelus?

I've never had particularly negative feelings towards Jonah Goldberg, because I've never been able to take him seriously. It seemed to me that the guy would make a good minor Buffy antagonist -- the devil's nepotism hire, 9-to-5ing it without the venom or diabolical intelligence that would give him real talent for his craft, and producing books that state extreme right-wing positions in such naked absurdity that they make the National Review and the conservative movement look ridiculous.

So I'm surprised to see Dave Weigel write that "Goldberg has had, I'd argue, a bigger influence on the rhetoric and thought of the tea parties than any other single writer." Is this right? My impression was that Jonah was more correlation than causation. But Dave is an expert on this stuff.

The World's Imploding in Like Six Different Directions At The Moment ...

... and someone asked the White House Press Secretary about baseball?

Really? I hope whoever asked the question feels as proud of himself as the WaPo reporter who decided Obama's first East Room press conference merited a question on Alex Rodriguez's steroid use.

Ross Douthat, Instant Replay, And The Divine Right Of Kings

Ross Douthat's argument against instant replay in baseball is a monsterpiece of conservatism. Sure, we've got the technology to make things more fair and prevent bad outcomes by setting up an instant replay system. But "baseball is also a game where history matters, and where continuity — those mystic chords of memory" that bind us to all the great heroes of the past give us reason to keep things exactly as they are. The spectacle of a bunch of noble players gracefully submitting to unfair decisions is something we'd all be poorer for missing out on.

It's the conservative approach to race, gender, and democracy. I like it more in baseball, because there it can do less harm.

Israel As Viewed From The Gelb Nebula

Via Jeffrey Goldberg, Les Gelb has lost touch with reality:

Well, where was all that international outrage and demand for explanations and retribution when the North Koreans sunk a South Korean ship? Where was it when the Gazans attacked Israel? Where, when Afghan men flogged their women for not wearing veils? Where, when Saudi Arabia funds terrorists around the world? This international outrage is highly selective, isn't it? The one consolation is that the international community, such as it has become, doesn't get anything of value done.

North Korea is a country with no allies that everybody thinks is crazy. The only reason we don't go harder on them is that it's tough to figure out what to do about the situation without punishing the innocent victims of Kim Jong Il's tyranny or dumping a massive refugee crisis on South Korea. For almost the last ten years, we've been fighting a big war against the guys in Afghanistan who are flogging women for not wearing veils. We're escalating it now. I'll agree with Gelb that Saudi Arabia deserves more ire, not just for terrorism but for the gruesome state of women's rights. We're shaking the devil's hand because it's oily. But the idea that anybody of significance is treating Israel's violations as worse than those of North Korea or Afghanistan suggests a poor grasp of political dynamics on Earth.

The only reason people don't make more noise about the bad guys in North Korea and Afghanistan is that US policy already takes full account of their badness. You'd be preaching to the choir. And they're so far gone that there's no point in asking them to explain themselves. The Taliban is a vicious enemy, and Kim Jong Il is a mad dictator. There's plenty of room for policy disagreements about the best way to deal with evil forces like this given limited resources and complicated consequences, but everyone agrees on how awful these guys are.

Israel, meanwhile, gets billions of dollars in foreign aid from the United States. If you're going to take large amounts of our foreign aid budget, you'd better give us a reason to think you're the good guys. With the bombing of Lebanon, the blockade of Gaza, the denial of voting rights to the Palestinians, and now commando raids on aid boats, it's hard for me to see why we should regard the Israelis as better than the Palestinians. The casualty ratios are crazy -- 117 Israelis have been killed in the conflict from 2005 to late 2008, comparied with 1754 Palestinians. 12 Israeli children have been killed in that period, compared to 309 Palestinians. People talk about Israel's right to defend itself, but when you're killing 25 times as many of the other side's kids as they're killing of yours, they've got the higher card in the self-defense suit.

There's a very good reason for Americans to hold Israel to a higher standard than North Korea or Afghanistan -- instead of diplomatically isolating them or invading them, we're giving them lots of money! And at a certain level, the demand for explanations is based on a presumption that Israel is a rational ally deserving of our support whom we can ask for explanations. If Gelb is right that we should stop asking Israel to explain itself to us, it's only because that presumption, and the support that goes with it, is making less and less sense.

Don't Become A Republican! They Will Eat You

Parker Griffith, the first-term Alabama Congressman who switched into the Republican Party, just lost his primary tonight. Voting against the Obama budget, the stimulus bill, health care reform, and climate change legislation didn't save him from a 51-33 defeat. He didn't even have a long record of voting for the other party's stuff like Arlen Specter did. If I were a conservative Democrat, I'd be nervous about the tough general election race ahead of me, but I'd be glad that I didn't do a silly thing like that.