Jay Reding.com

ABC has a piece on how retailers are already starting to push Christmas when Halloween hasn’t even finished yet. This is one of my great pet peeves, not only has Christmas become overly commercialized, but it also keeps getting overly commercialized long before it’s due. It’s freakin’ October. There’s just no reason to start pimping a holiday that won’t happen for another two months. Already I’ve seen one commercial for Christmas decorations, which makes me want to find those responsible and beat them over the head with a fiberglass reindeer figure.

Of course, it’s all about the Almighty Dollar:

It’s a phenomenon called “Christmas creep,” according to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Hoping to catch early shoppers, retailers are extending their all-important holiday shopping season, which accounts for 25 percent to 40 percent of the year’s sales.

“The creep has been going on,” said William Cody, managing director of the Baker Retailing Initiative at the Wharton School. “Every year, retailers hope that coming out early is going to reduce the amount of promotions. They’d rather people buy at full price.”

Granted, I’ll defend capitalism any day, but even that has it’s limits. For one, anyone who is doing their Christmas shopping now is probably obsessive-compulsive enough to try to find the best deal anyway. Secondly, at this rate, by December 25th we’ll all be so damned sick of Christmas that we’ll actually want to spend time with our families rather than scurry around the mega-malls like a bunch of shocked rats.

I know, perish the thought that happens…

Cait Murphy argues that a Republican loss in the midterms would be a good thing for the GOP. In a way, she’s right. The GOP has lost its moorings and has become too comfortable in power. Many of the mistakes that have been made have been due to the slow corruption of the Republican Revolution of 1994 to the K Street culture. As Murphy observes:

The Republicans are a tired party right now, in need of a good internal shake-up. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Take Congress - please.

According to a recent poll, only 16 percent of Americans approve of its performance. This, of course, is not entirely the GOP’s fault; after all, there are lots of Democrats filling office space there, too. But fish rot from the head down. Leadership means accepting responsibility, and this is about as incompetent, dysfunctional and trivial a Congress as this proud nation has ever seen.

Then again, does anyone really think that a Democratic congress would be any more competent, and less dysfunctional, or any less trivial? Remember, this is the party that elected Howard Dean as their chairperson.

On the other hand, I do think that the Democrats will take the House, if by a narrow margin. Two years of Speaker Pelosi, the virtually inevitable round of pissant “hearings” pointing fingers at Bush, and the possibility of the Democrats doing what they really want to do and impeaching Bush make one wonder just how low the opinion polls for Congress can go. When Congress has the sort of approval ratings usually reserved for plague rats, one would think that they can get no lower. Well, as a great man once said, “baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

However, there has to be more than political concerns at stake here. The effects of two years of Democratic “leadership” could have disastrous effects at a crucial moment in our national history. We’re at war with an implacable enemy. Our government is taking us all too far down the road to serfdom. World trade is becoming increasingly important to our economy and global stability. The Republicans have done an unspeakably poor job of advancing our interests in these areas. The Democrats stand against them. Yes, a loss would perhaps make the GOP revisit their own core ideas. The question is, will the damage be so great as to erase the gains?

Divided government may help shock the GOP out of complacency without harming the national interest. The Senate can provide a check on the House, and the President will have to use his veto pen less sparingly. However, having the Democrats take over Congress at this point is just too dangerous to the Republic, if not the Republicans.

David Brooks has a fascinating and fair-minded review of Andrew Sullivan’s new book on conservative political philosophy. I don’t agree with Sullivan’s descent into trite Bush-bashing, but he’s a very astute thinker. I haven’t read the book yet, but from what I understand if it Sullivan attacks what he calls the “fundamentalism” that has arisen since the the Bush Administration and has taken over the mainstream conservative movement.

As a caveat, my conservative beliefs are probably closer to Sullivan’s than they are with the Bush Administration. However, I find Sullivan’s distaste for Christian conservatism to be more personal than philosophical. Brooks is right in pointing out that Sullivan ascribes a sense of unity among Christian conservatives that simply doesn’t exist. The “Christianists” that Sullivan attacks are largely a category defined by having position that Andrew Sullivan disapproves of than a coherent political bloc. For instance, there are plenty of Democratic politicians who are opposed to gay marriage and make frequent religious references in their political rhetoric. Sullivan has spent the past two years attacking straw men, which seriously degrades the quality of his arguments.

Brooks has a good, if damning line about Sullivan’s brand of conservatism:

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in this view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths.

Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

I’m sympathetic towards Sullivan’s arguments that the politics of faith can be based on a certainty that doesn’t exist in the greys of the real world. I’m not a fan of religious fundamentalism, I can’t stand the idea that creationism is treated as valid science, I’m agnostic on the issue of civil unions for gay couples, and I don’t particularly believe in ostentatious displays of religious faith. However, I also agree with Brooks that Sullivan’s view of evangelical voters is fatally flawed:

“The Conservative Soul” is imbued with Sullivan’s characteristic passion and clarity. And yet I must confess, if I hadn’t been reviewing this book, I wouldn’t have finished it. I have a rule, which has never failed me, that when a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

That’s the problem with most of the writing being done today on politics and faith in America: they ignore the complexities of the evangelical worldview and focus in on the noisy minority. Granted, that noisy minority wants to believe that it is representative of the majority of evangelicals, but I doubt many traditionalist Catholics give much consideration to the pop eschatology of the Left Behind series. Nor do all evangelicals think alike, or even necessarily agree on all the issues.

Sullivan is a gifted writer and an excellent thinker. Anyone who can read and understand Michael Oakeshott definitely is no intellectual slouch. At the same time, Sullivan constantly rails against straw men of his own construction, and his constant repetition of the same one-sided talking points vomited forth by the Bush-obsessed left doesn’t help his credibility. Andrew Sullivan was once one of the most clear-headed and powerful writers covering our current war. It’s too bad that he seems unable to realize that there’s a manifest difference between the enemies seeking to destroy us and those who don’t share his particular social views. There’s a surefire test to determine whether someone is sufficiently serious about this war: if they make an argument that insinuates that George W. Bush is as bad as Osama bin Laden, they’re simply not serious. Sadly, Andrew Sullivan continues to fail that test.

One of the most endangered Republican Senate incumbents is Conrad Burns, who has been running behind Democratic challenger John Tester for some time. However, a new Mason-Dixon poll has the race within the margin of error, and the movement from the last poll using the same company (and, I assume, the same basic methodology) shows the movement on Burns’ side.

More to the point, Burns’ war chest is 3 times that of Tester, which gives him a big advantage in the waning days of the race.

Burns has been hurt by his association with Jack Abramoff, but it looks like his fortunes are making a late turn for the better. Montana is a very conservative state, and John Tester has the disadvantage of having his name being linked to the left wing of the Democratic Party. An endorsement by the Kossacks doesn’t carry much weight on the Montana prairies. As Montana voters go to the polls, would they risk putting the Senate in the hands of liberal Democrats? I would expect that while much of Burns’ support is indeed soft, he’s not out of this race yet. Tester has run a stronger campaign that I would have predicted, and Burns has made many crucial mistakes. However, Tester has yet to seal the deal, and with time and money running out, this race could go either way.

Robert Kaplan writes that Iraq is on the brink of an “explosion of genocide.” He argues that an American withdrawal would be a massive humanitarian catastrophe that would greatly magnify the problems to come:

Our withdrawal, when it comes to that, must be different. If we decide to reduce forces in the country under the current anarchic conditions, then we are both morally and strategically obligated to talk with Iran and Syria, as well as call for a regional conference. Iraq may be closer to an explosion of genocide than we know. An odd event, or the announcement of pulling 20,000 American troops out, might trigger it. We simply cannot contemplate withdrawal under these conditions without putting Iraq’s neighbors on the spot, forcing them to share public responsibility for the outcome, that is if they choose to stand aside and not help us.

The problem is that neither Iran nor Syria care whether or not Iraq stays together. A destroyed rump state that is a petri dish for terrorism would be in the interests of both Damascus and Tehran — but not in our interest, the Iraqi people’s interest, or the interests of the region as a whole. Trusting Iran and Syria to manage the system is simply too naïve and assumes that those actors are far more trustworthy than they truly are. We’d be taking another bet, and it’s a bet we’d be sure to lose.

I’m not sure what the solution in Iraq should be. I’m not entirely certain that there even is a solution. It may well be that the destruction of Iraq is inevitable and our job will be to safeguard civilian populations when and where we can. However, the one thing we cannot do is withdraw and ensure that the situation becomes bloodier than anything we have seen before. The very idea that withdrawal makes no difference ignores the fact that things could get much worse — we could have a slaughter that’s nearly unprecedented in world history. Worse yet, we could have that slaughter spill over into the rest of the region, which could have profound effects on the rest of the world. The inevitable result would almost certainly be a new safe haven for al-Qaeda and an ideal breeding ground for terrorism.

Ultimately, it’s the Iraqis who will have to decide. Perhaps sooner or later the various groups that are causing trouble will tire of the violence. Perhaps they’ll be suppressed — and finally the al-Maliki government is working to disarm Moqtada al-Sadr’s dangerous Mahdi Army. We need to do what we can to keep the situation as bottled up as we can and try to train the Iraqi military and security forces until they can keep the peace in our stead.

We’re in the unenviable and difficult position of frantically thrashing about for a solution to a problem that we cannot solve. We can only push the Iraqis towards a better solution than fratricide on a nightmare scale. The worst thing that can happen is that we’ll take an action that will push Iraq over the brink, and the harder we push, the greater that risk.

Wired has a provocative piece on “the new atheism” and how it is effecting society. Sadly, this new form of atheism seems to be more like a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism:

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.

The problem is that if one look at recent history, atheism far outweighs religion in terms of the sheer devastation wrought upon the world. The Third Reich used Christian mythology to their advantage, but they sought to supplant religion with the cult of the Führer. The bloody reign of Stalin was expressly and abjectly atheistic — the same with the Cultural Revolution in China. Hundreds of millions of people have been killed in efforts to eradicate religion from society, and that kind of militant atheism is certainly no less odious than the religious movements that the “new atheists” wish to destroy.

As the article continues:

But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

It’s clear that the “new atheism” is innately fundamentalist in outlook. It’s not enough to respectfully disagree with religion, religion itself must be destroyed — to be replaced with a “rationalist” outlook.

The problem with that is what replaces religion? “Rationality?” By whose definition? What these New Atheists seem to be advocating for is a system that is wholly and completely incompatible with human nature. It has been tried, and the results have been disastrous. The reason for this failure is that what inevitably replaces religion is the state. The second the state takes the place of God civil government becomes tyranny. Efforts to create the perfectly rational, perfectly logical, scientifically-based state are invariably horrendous failures because human nature is rarely rational, logical, or scientific.

As Lord Acton so rightly observed, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When the Church is subsumed by the State, the amount of power in the hands of the state increases dramatically. If for no other reason, religion is valuable in society because it puts certain things out of the hands of mere mortals and lets us make categorical statements like “all people have value” and support things like “there are universal human rights.” The modern conception of liberalism and atheism go together so well because both of them predispose a state that controls nearly every level of human society.

What is interesting about the Wired piece is that even the author finds this “new atheism” less than compelling:

Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I’ve decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me.

It is a statement to the power of religion that so much of this “new atheism” has the trappings of religion. The so-called “Brights” might as well call themselves the “chosen people.” Scientists take the place of prophets. Darwin becomes scripture.

Religion has a crucial purpose in society and human relations, so much so that not even these militant atheists can avoid sounding like mere reflections of it. This “new atheism” is little more than the self-superiority of those who think that they know all the answers and everyone else has no choice but to follow along. We already have enough of that outlook as it is.

Barack Obama is weighing a Presidential bid in 2008. Obama is probably one of the nation’s best orators, he’s got a life story that’s nothing less than amazing, and he’s a polished, credible, and strong candidate. However, Obama is also a died-in-the-wood statist liberal. As an orator, he’s by far the best the Democrats have. As a politician, he’ll face a much harder challenge than the token opposition he faced with Alan Keyes’ disastrous run in 2004.

Obama is one of those candidates who is certainly a potential Presidential candidate, but whose policy credentials are iffy at best. In terms of sheer star power, Obama has what it takes. In terms of policy chops, he’s a lightweight. The Democratic far left is hoping for someone, anyone to be the anti-Hillary, and Obama is about their best shot. However, Obama has never had to run in the scorching light of a national campaign, he’s never had to be under the intense pressure that it creates, and he’s never had to articulate a policy position beyond his own admittedly incredible life story. Having a great biography isn’t enough to win the White House, and I’m not sure that Obama has the policy chops to pull it off — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wouldn’t be a formidable candidate for any GOP challenger to beat.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has some interesting thoughts on a potential Obama run.