By now, you’ve all read stories like this one. Rod Dreher suggests that our treatment of detainees has licensed this sort of behavior by the Iranians:

What if the Iranians take 15 U.S. soldiers captive. On what moral ground will we stand in expecting that the Iranians treat them according to the Geneva Conventions?

It’s not like the Iranians have paid attention to international law in the past. Consider this, from an article by Mark Bowden:

The higher-level Americans—diplomats, CIA officers, and military-liaison personnel—were sequestered, and taken away one by one for interrogation. Some were beaten; the CIA officers were worked over with heavy rubber hoses under the supervision of al-Islam.

If there’s a reason to adhere to the Geneva Conventions, it’s not because of any reasonable expectation of reciprocity. And let’s not forget that the Third Geneva Convention applies most obviously to "lawful combatants," like the British sailors and marines, and to states, like Iran, that are signatories.

Dahlia Lithwick thinks there’s a confusion between religion and politics implicit in the DoJ brouhaha.

Is there anything wrong with legal scholarship from a Christian perspective? Not that I see. Is there anything wrong with a Bush administration that disproportionately uses graduates from Christian law schools to fill its staffing needs? Not that I see. It’s a shorthand, no better or worse than cherry-picking the Federalist Society or the American Bar Association. I can’t even get exercised over the fact that Gonzales, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers had their baby lawyers making critical staffing decisions. The baby lawyers had extremely clear marching orders.

No, the real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s. Probably not a lesson she learned in law school. The dream of Regent and its counterparts, such as Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, is to redress perceived wrongs to Christians, to reclaim the public square and reassert Christian political authority. And while that may have been a part of the Bush/Rove plan, it was only a small part. Their real zeal was for earthly power. And Goodling was left holding the earthly bag.

In the end, Goodling and the other young foot soldiers for God may simply have run afoul of the first rule of politics, codified in Psalm 146: "Put not your trust in princes, in mere mortals in whom there is no help."

Turns out that there’s insufficient religious zeal--and too much politics--in the White House, which isn’t the line we were hearing a couple of years ago. People are longing for the good old days of John Ashcroft, "a devout Pentecostal who forbade use of the word "pride," as well as the phrase "no higher calling than public service," on documents bearing his signature."

Thank you, Capt. Schramm – it’s a pleasure to be aboard the good ship Ashbrook. I was welcomed by several thoughtful comments to my posting on nuclear energy. One issue in particular deserves discussion: Would conservatives really sign on to the high level of government activity necessary to make heavy reliance on nuclear power safe and feasible?

My short answer is “Yes.” My longer answer is that conservatism is often described by its enemies, and sometimes by its less helpful friends, as being “anti-government.” Not so – conservatism is much friendlier to government than liberalism. Conservatives favor limited government but oppose ineffectual government. We want the government to succeed at the things governments must do – secure the borders, win wars, jail criminals, build infrastructure. One requirement for that success is that we keep the government from squandering its time, money and moral authority on enterprises it can’t possibly do well, such as building Model Cities, promoting self-esteem, or guaranteeing the “right” to “rest, recreation and adventure,” as FDR’s National Public Resources Board advised in 1943.

The famous sentence from Federalist Paper #51 is, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” During my gloomiest moments I find myself thinking that we’ve somehow screwed up the Founders’ experiment in self-government in both directions: we have a government that manages to be intrusive, expensive and arrogant without being powerful and efficacious.

In the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger recently offered qualified praise to Robert Moses, the city’s mid-twentieth century infrastructure czar. Moses took a wrecking ball to many parts of New York City in order to build monuments like the Triborough and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, the Central Park Zoo and the Long Island Expressway. Robert Caro responded in 1975 by taking a wrecking ball to Robert Moses’s reputation in his monumental, 1,344-page biography, The Power Broker.

A reassessment is finally taking place, one that raises questions the success of Caro’s book had settled – that Robert Moses was a tyrant and a bigot, whose edifice complex caused the charm and vitality to be bulldozed out of every acre he touched in New York. Moses made plenty of mistakes, Goldberger says, but it’s impossible to imagine that city of 8 million people functioning if his successes had never been built. “Robert Moses got things done. In the age of citizen participation, this has become harder and harder. For more than five years, we have been fighting over what to do at Ground Zero, and the future of much of the sixteen-acre site is still unresolved. . . . In an era when almost any project can be held up for years by public hearings and reviews by community boards, community groups, civic groups, and planning commissions, not to mention the courts, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgic tug for Moses’s method of building by decree.”

Francis Fukuyama explains why his ideas can’t be tied to those of the Bush Administration and, in so doing, seems to audition for a job in a Clinton or Obama Administration:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Those last three "retrograde" ideas are surely un-European (though I might quibble about national sovereignty, except that no one seems to want to do what it takes actually to defend it). And Fukuyama seems here to sketching the limits of his "neo-idealism":

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along. But coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

I’m tempted to say that this is the kind of program that a Democratic President could adopt, though it also looks a lot like what the Reagan Administration tried to do in the 1980s (when Fukuyama worked for Policy & Planning). The differences might be less matters of principle than of prudence: when can "military force...help the process along"? When would FF be willing to use military force?

Partly to get the right LINK up here, let me call your attention to Pat’s exposure of the cynicism lurking behind General Motors’ media portrayal of a robot suicide.

I’ve been cheering the critics of Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria from the sidelines, but, after this WSJ editorial, I want to be more vocal. Especially offensive is Tom Lantos’s utterly irresponsible comment: "We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy. I view my job as beginning with restoring overseas credibility and respect for the United States."

The only conceivable good that can come out of this is overreaching in such a way as to make it more likely that no Democrat can win the presidency in 2008.

On the other hand, any interested in protecting the traditional (and constitutional) prerogratives of that office (HRC, Obama, and Edwards come to mind) ought to distance himself or herself from this initiative.

The Pew Forum has a Religion and Politics 08 page up, now featuring r & p maven John Green’s quickie analyses based on this survey (note the headline).

As Green notes about evangelical preferences, they look a good bit like those of other religiously identifiable Republicans, with one exception--more of them remain undecided. (I wonder if, after the news this week about Giuliani’s wobbliness on abortion, even more will migrate into that camp.)

On the Democratic side, this table is interesting: Obama seems to have a bit of a Catholic problem, compared to the other contenders. I’d bet that you could attribute a huge portion of HRC’s overall lead to her 33-12 margin over Obama among non-Hispanic Catholic Democrats. (I will note that Obama is the second choice of a significant percentage of Catholic Democrats, but that wouldn’t help him much unless many of them are anybody but HRC voters.)

The proprietor of another blog, to which I from time to time contribute, regrets the vote he cast in 2004. (He doesn’t say whether he regrets his vote in 2000.) Since he was voting in Georgia, an abstention or a vote for Kerry wouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome, which I regard as a good thing. Unlike him, I don’t regret my votes, given the choices we had. I can’t imagine a President Gore on 9-11 or a President Kerry at any time.

What interests me at the moment aren’t my friend’s reasons (which are relatively nuanced, though I could pick some fights, if I wanted to), but the response he offers to Kate’s comment. Here it is, in full:

[O]ne of the problems with our country is our lack of choices in elections. It is almost impossible for an independent or third party candidate to get on the state ballots. And the deck is stacked against this happening. I think that it is a myth that we have choices in our elections. This is probably one of the primary reasons that many people don’t vote.

Ballot access is a bit of an issue, though plenty of parties and candidates seem to be capable of overcoming it. Indeed, if they can’t, then they don’t deserve our serious consideration.

But there’s something else here, as well. It seems to me that the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all (in most cases) state races, actually makes possible what I would regard as "responsible" third-party voting. In Georgia or any other relatively deeply red state, I could cast a "protest" vote without contributing to the election of someone whose views I regarded as anathema. A liberal voter in New York or Massachusetts could similarly vote Green without making it any less likely that his or her candidate would win the state. Such protest votes enable incipient replacement parties to test their electoral viability, setting the stage for a more sustained challenge to one of the major parties down the road.

In a straight popular vote election, the fact that my vote would "count" would make me less likely to choose an alternative to the Republican candidate, because I would then be a little more directly contributing to something I really don’t want.