This TNR profile isn’t totally a puff piece, but it makes Huckabee seem admirably nuanced. He lacks foreign policy gravitas, but that distinguishes him only from Giuliani and McCain (and maybe Duncan Hunter) among all the aspirants, and he has the advantage of not having had to cast a vote for or against anything the Bush Administration has does anywhere in the world.

I’ve long ridden this hobbyhorse and am happy to see the NYT join the good guys, even offering this cool interactive graphic.

For me the bottom line is this: it’s ironic that a program often touted as being good for education relies, first of all, on the economic ignorance of its "core" customer base (quick: what’s the expected value of a dollar "invested" in a lottery ticket, compared with a dollar put in an interest-bearing bank account?) and, second of all, on an attitude (wishfully thinking that one can get something for nothing) that is antithetical to the connection between hard work and self-discipline, on the one side, and reward, on the other that we’d presumably wish to cultivate.

To me, lotteries indicate a failure of political leadership: they’re a so-called "voluntary tax" imposed by legislatures unwilling or unable to make the case for spending more public money on education. What are they afraid of--that the voters can’t be persuaded that the public education as it’s currently constituted is less marketable than the exploitative "entertainment" of a scratch and lose (er, I mean scratch and win) ticket?

Bill Kristol last paragraph in praise of Clarence Thomas’ My Grandfather’s Son: "Thomas’s memoir raises fundamental questions of love and responsibility, family and character. His book is a brief for the stern and vigorous virtues, but in a context of faith and love. It’s a delightful book--you really can’t put it down--but it’s also a source of moral education for young Americans. It could be almost as important a contribution to his beloved country as Clarence Thomas’s work as a Supreme Court justice. And it suggests one more contribution he could make. Thomas in 2012!"

I’ve been curious for some time about paleocons’ rejection of American exceptionalism. I originally raised this question as a comment on another thread, but never received a response, so I thought I’d try it here.

My question is simply this--how can the refusal to believe that America is exceptional be squared with support for an anti-interventionist foreign policy? I understand that anti-interventionism has a long history in the United States, but it has generally gone hand in hand with the argument that the nation can avoid foreign entanglements specifically because it was exceptional. There was a strong strain of this thinking in Jefferson--that America was an "empire for liberty" that, thanks to its very nature, was able to rise above the power politics of the old world. Hence his admonition that America avoid "entangling alliances." Generations of anti-interventionists since then, from William E. Borah to Pat Buchanan, have echoed this theme.

Of course, not everyone believed this, even during Jefferson’s day. Alexander Hamilton--as well as George Washington--believed that the United States had to play by the time-honored rules of international politics. This is why Washington in his Farewell Address rejects "permanent alliances" (after all, these were inconsistent with a strategy of realpolitik) but at no point denies the need for foreign involvement in general. Similar attitudes could be found in men such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, who were great admirers of Hamilton. For them it was because the United States was not exceptional that it needed to form alliances with foreign powers.

Michael Gerson writes a very good and thoughtful piece on the "not so new" trend of posting anything and everything on My Space or Facebook. I think he is exactly right in his criticism of the thing. But I also like that he maintains a sense of humor about himself and begins with this great line: Conservatives, ever allergic to fashion, have a habit of encountering social trends long after millions of their fellow citizens, then pronouncing themselves unamused. You have to admit (even if begrudgingly). . . that is SO true! Even so, Gerson does admit that these networking tools can be useful and thus (as in so many things) it’s not so much the technology as it is the users of it that are the problem. As for me, I think this can all be explained by this dreadful lack of reserve in our popular culture and which I noted here. What explains this lack of reserve? That’s too complicated. I’ll leave that for you all to discuss.

I’m a few days late in posting it, but I keep coming back to this article from Jonah Goldberg that appeared in the LA Times on Tuesday. I like it because I think it nicely summarizes the differences between the left and the right in America--but, more interestingly, it begins to bridge the gap between different elements on the right. Goldberg nods to the idea of America as an idea but, unlike the left, he does not reject out of hand the other idea that America is a nation born out of habits and customs. In fact, both ideas are true and they are not mutually exclusive. What does that mean in a practical sense? Goldberg illustrates with the clear logic and beautiful prose of Mark Steyn:

As the host of the "Today" show in 2003, Couric said of the lost crew members of the space shuttle Columbia: "They were an airborne United Nations -- men, women, an African American, an Indian woman, an Israeli. . . ." As my National Review colleague Mark Steyn noted, they weren’t an airborne U.N., they were an airborne America. The "Indian woman" came to America in the 1980s, and, in about a decade’s time, she was an astronaut. "There’s no other country on Earth where you can do that," Steyn rightly noted.

Robert D. Kaplan argues that soldiers are not victims, and the media (or anyone else) shouldn’t treat them as if they were.

Marci Hamilton offers the ridiculous suggestion here that the six Supreme Court justices who attended the Red Mass may have created the appearance of impropriety, raising ethical questions. Appropriately, she retreads the tired and blatantly anti-Catholic argument of University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, who criticized the fact that the recent partial-birth abortion decision was decided by a Catholic voting block. She then praises President Kennedy, who she paraphrases as saying that he would not take his marching orders from Rome, and suggests that it would be "illuminating" if the justices were this open about the relationship between their faith and their jobs.

First, it is worth noting that six justices attended. For those of you keeping count at home, there are only five Catholic justices. Hamilton acknowledges that Breyer, who is Jewish, attended, and she can’t quite figure out why, surmising that he did so perhaps out of solidarity with his brethren. This seems likely enough to me, but it also suggests that the Red Mass is not an event where marching orders are given and received, and that any feigned perception of such is dubious at best. Indeed, aside from her argument that the Red Mass is somehow special because of its focus on the beginning of the judicial term, the criticisms that she mounts about the content of the homily, which included references to life issues, could be (and perhaps tacitly are being made) about virtually every mass conducted in the DC area. It is not just homilies at Red Mass where issues such as the sanctity of life are raised, but rather priests commonly address these issues. Priests, particularly those in the DC area, commonly pray openly at their masses admonishing those in positions of power to respect life. Does this mean that no justice should ever attend mass, lest it somehow offend the Marci Hamiltons of the world that they hear these prayers? And what of liberal denominations that overtly praise abortion rights and gay marriage in their services, and read NYTs editorials from the pulpit (I am not kidding--I have seen it done)? Should we prohibit justices from attending those services?

Moving to her retread of Stone’s arguments, and his flaccid attempt disguise his musings as something other than anti-religious sentiment, I’ll leave those claims to Ed Whelan and Jan Crawford Greenburg and Rick Garnett, who have already thoroughly refuted them.

Finally, her claim that it would be good if the Catholic justices were transparent, in the spirit of President Kennedy, makes it clear that she hasn’t done her homework. Justice Scalia is constantly asked about his Catholicism and judging (a two-minute Lexis search will confirm this), and he frequently notes that his job is to uphold the Constitution. If upholding the Constitution at some point meant that he would have to disobey a binding moral teaching of the church--the example he gives is if imposing the death penalty were determined to be a sin--then he would resign, because he would not impose his religious views on the Constitution. I only wish that liberals on the Court who use the law as a vehicle to express their own, sometimes religiously-held policy preferences, would be so transparent.

James C. Dobson (everyone I know calls him "Dr. Dobson") adds his two cents’ worth about the upcoming election, in the NYT, no less.

New York Times Magazine featured an interesting article this weekend, highlighting the ever-increasing cost of higher education, and asking the more basic question of what students, their parents, and the public (who in some measure subsidize both public and private institutions) are actually getting for that money. The answer, in large measure, is much less than they should be getting. Thus, the author suggests that professors are too-often interested in their own self-promotion, and institutions focus merely on teaching classes, rather than on producing educated citizens. On this count, the article notes that:

Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, made the shocking observation that "faculties currently display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education and one urgently needed at this moment in the United States." Bok was right on both counts—the neglect and the urgency—but he relegated his statement to a footnote. It should have been a headline.

Not long ago, I had a discussion with a friend who teaches at Harvard, and he asked me whether he should include Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus in a 300-level class he was offering. It is a difficult book, he told me, and he wondered whether Harvard juniors could be expected to understand it. It is a difficult book, and I wondered aloud whether his students would be up to the task. But I replied that I assign the book to one of my classes—and assign them to read it cover-to-cover. He was astonished—"Your juniors can handle that?" No, I replied, this is what I assign for our freshmen. You see, it is still possible to get a good, liberal arts education.

Appropriate to my conversation with the Harvard professor, the NYT’s article ends:

As our children go through the arduous process of choosing a college and trying to persuade that college to choose them, it will be a sign of improved social health if we can get to the point of asking not about the school’s ranking but whether it’s a place that helps students confront hard questions in an informed way. If and when the answer is yes, that’s a college worthy of support, and all the alumni gifts and tax breaks can never be enough.