The GOP's Primary Quagmire

The race for the Republican presidential nomination is enough to make anyone's head hurt. Here's Josh Marshall returning to the inevitable conclusion that none of 'em can get nominated:

On the Republican side, I think the money numbers are entirely secondary to news from the Giuliani campaign. Rudy still supports public funding of abortions. Apprently we're still supposed to be in that pretend place where we believe that Rudy Giuliani can be the Republican nominee. But let me go out on a limb. Nobody who supports public funding of abortion is going to be the nominee of the Republican party. Say all you want about Rudy's 'leadership uber alles' campaign platform: I'm not buying it. So I don't think Rudy can be the Republican nominee. And I think it's increasingly unlikely that John McCain will be either -- he's becoming a cliche.

So who? Romney? I'd have to say that seems like the most likely scenario at the moment. But only because the other scenarios don't seem possible.

See, that's why I was thinking Romney for a while, too. But he's at three percent in the polls and spiraling fast into self-parody.

So you get Fred Thompson, who seems to be emerging as a conservative favorite but who has no organization and hasn't even really committed to running. The 2004 Clark campaign taught us that someone can be a brilliant candidate on paper but if he doesn't do his homework, he's an also-ran.

There would be an argument for Gingrich here: another conservative hero, but one who has spent the past several years carefully building a national network that he could transform into a presidential campaign. And it just might happen. At the same time, it's just hard to imagine Newt as a candidate.

And maybe all this helps Giuliani. In any normal cycle, no pro-choice, anti-gun candidate could win the Republican nomination. But that assumes there's at least one other solid candidate in the picture. In this case, there might not be. Rudy could win almost by default.

At any rate, he's now backing off his recent statement of support for public funding of abortion, insisting that he never said he'd seek to change the Hyde Amendment. But you have to think the damage has already been done. He's spent the last few months trying to convince conservatives that his aggressive support for freedom of choice was all in the past - another time, another context. But now it's recent. It's like the signs you see at construction sites: "X Days Since Our Last Accident." It was a good run - but now he has to re-set the sign to zero.

Labels: 2008, Josh Marshall, Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:36 AM 0 comments

  L'Etat, C'est Dubya

Josh Marshall on the divine right of George W. Bush.

It reminds me of the thought process that eventually led to my work on this blog: I really do believe that, in certain aspects of modern movement conservatism, we may be seeing the first serious adherents of an American monarchism.

Update: Coincidently, google "monarchism" and this previous post by Marshall comes up on the first page of results. A must-read.

Labels: George Bush, Josh Marshall, monarchism

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 5:06 PM 0 comments

  Papier-Mache Grandeur and Death

I wasn't going to say anything about the execution of Saddam, in part because to do the subject justice (no pun intended) would mean pursuing any number of threads that would go well past the purview of what I'm trying to do on this blog. My own initial reaction was just a sort of puzzlement that something so serious and complex could ultimately just feel so tacky. But Josh Marshall gets to the heart of it:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us. [...]

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. [...]

Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?

I have nothing else to add.

Labels: Iraq, Josh Marshall, Saddam Hussein

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:00 PM 2 comments