What should we say about this Hagee fellow? He insists that God caused the Holocaust in order to initiate a new historical era for Jews and to ensure the establishment of a Jewish state. That He visited Katrina on New Orleans as punishment for rampant homosexuality. That the Catholic Church is wicked and whorish. That the beginning of a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth is imminent.

Who wouldn’t feel comfortable walking away from Hagee’s megachurch mush? But hold on—it turns out he is also a rabid Zionist. When I say rabid, I mean that the strength and integrity of Israel are key pieces of the thousand-year reign theology to which he adheres. So if the U.S. slackens its support for Israel, Armageddon might be delayed. Such support is fairly important to Hagee. He heads up the group Christians United for Israel.

That’s all McCain, Lieberman, and the ADL need.

A spokesman for McCain, Brian Rogers, said, “John McCain’s commitment to the state of Israel is clear, and he respects Pastor Hagee’s commitment as well.

“Support for Israel is something that we should welcome and yet be very much aware of where that support comes from and cautious about it,” said Michael Salberg, the director of international affairs for the Anti-Defamation League. Salberg said Hagee’s political stance on Israel “seems to us to be sincere, genuine and welcome.”

The ADL has a link to this article on its homepage. I guess such press makes them proud.

When my time comes I’ll think twice before pulling a Joe Sobran. Supporting the neocons is so easy, and look at all the stuff you can get away with!

Alex Williams has a sound article on Ron Paul in the New York Times. (Thanks to Max Goldman for an early link.) He writes about hippie-ish Nader fans who have latched onto Paul with singular devotion and remained with him through the primary season, in spite of the routinized Left-Right differences of opinion they have with him. Paul’s inveterate hatred of neocons and instinctive resentment of the centralized state have won the loyalty of plenty of indie rockers.

Such followers are intelligent enough to sense Paul’s authenticity. What should we say when they make sillier gestures, like starting Paulvilles, organizing MLK fundraisers, and earnestly equating Paul’s message with that of the Beatles? I hope the good doctor has managed to organize a movement that can withstand such pangs of naïveté, and that can continue to make significant contributions by occasionally jamming the liberal/neocon airwaves. Prior to Paul, no national figure was challenging the gatekeepers so directly and systematically, or attracting any media attention. It would be nice to think that he has wrought a significant change in the national political imagination. How deep and widespread is that change, however, and can it go further? “Many supporters say that such gestures are not the final gasp of a failed political campaign,” Williams writes, “but a spark for a ‘revolution.’” Skeptics can be forgiven.

Williams notes that Paul garnered 15 percent of the vote in Oregon. He fails to mention Paul’s 16 percent showing in Pennsylvania. And his article appears, not in the news section of the Times, but in “Fashion & Style”. Do they still call that coverage?

Update: Daniel McCarthy has a more hopeful and sophisticated take on the future of the revolution here.

I’ll take mine bizarre and embarrassingly real. Thank you.

“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific, and said, ‘Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission,’” said spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Thanks to DeuceofClubs.

For someone trying to turn liberty a going national concern, how wise is it to make abolition of the Federal Reserve the alpha and omega of one’s platform? Sanity in monetary affairs must be restored as a topic of debate, of course, but Paul might be guilty of overextending himself. My political attitudes are virtually identical to Paul’s on everything including central banking. I’m thrilled that he has achieved a national profile. And I don’t want to encourage rhetorical evasiveness and happy-talk. But I’d like to see a devolutionary force assembled that can’t be so easily dismissed and ignored by the academic/media priesthood. I’m afraid Paul often sounds most dismissible when he’s relating every imaginable detail, from abortion to Zanzibar, to monetary policy. Does the Pauline gospel always have to read like the Mises.org Web log? I’m a happy Mises Institute supporter, but sometimes I put down Human Action and read something else. I suspect other Americans occasionally relax their fascination with business cycle theory as well. Just a guess.

If anyone out there is considering a career as the next Ron Paul, please—know your Austrian School literature, and remain focused on the financial tyranny that necessarily precedes political tyranny. But don’t run those arguments into the ground or allow them to take over every aspect of every political conversation, especially during precious appearances on cable television.

Then again, who am I to criticize? Paul is the lifelong septuagenarian champion of the finest political movement since the revolt of the American colonists. I’m a runt would-be critic desperately clinging to his humble piece of the Internet. Perhaps I shouldn’t be permitted to comment on Paul until I raise $30+ million on an Old Right platform.

“To raise the question,” writes Darcus Howe in the New Statesman, “smacks of political illiteracy and historical bankruptcy” No rivers of blood have flowed in the last 40 years. “Racial attacks? Yes! Citizens, black and white, engaged in mass violence against each other? No.” So Powell was wrong. What is left to say?

Nothing, I guess. Except that everything else Powell said came true, or already was true at the time, a fact admitted by even the most bigoted multiculturalists. “Such predictions as Powell made in his speech,” wrote Roger Scruton two years ago in the New Criterion,

concerning the tipping of the demographic balance, the ghettoization of the industrial cities, and the growth of resentment among the indigenous working class have been fulfilled. Only the sibylline prophecy has fallen short of the mark. . . . It is now evident to everyone that, in the debate over immigration, in those last remaining days when it could still have made a difference, Enoch Powell was far nearer the truth than those who instantly drove him from office, and who ensured that the issue was henceforth to be discussed, if at all, only by way of condemning the “racism” and “xenophobia” of those who thought like Powell.

But let’s stop this useless bickering! Why should we fight over what Enoch Powell said? I certainly don’t need Powell to inform me that rain is wet, or that mass immigration is not a wholly benign pattern. And Darcus Howe doesn’t need Powell’s help to remain willfully ignorant of those realities.

No one is taking this so-called Chaos tactic seriously, I hope. The very idea that the long primary is damaging the Democrats seems to have hardened into media dogma, but it’s not very persuasive. I think Richard’s guess is correct: this battle between Hillary and Obama is elevating interest and enthusiasm among left-brained people, to the enormous benefit of the party. Usually less engaged Democrats I know are monitoring internal party dynamics with a heightened and constant anxiety. And all the hard work the two candidates are being forced to perform in the struggle for primary votes is good for the Democrats as well. When, a friend of mine asks, was the last time a candidate felt a desperate need at this point to campaign vigorously in Montana or Oregon? Effort put into these states now will prove valuable during fall battles with McCain.

Richard is also correct that by the time this is over the victor’s past scandals will seem like old news. The winning Democrat will be a much stronger figure with a much more energized party for having endured this primary season. That candidate will have an advantage of McCain he will not find easy to overcome.

I was listening with all the thrills of boyish hope when Obama told me that the “conversation on race” was about to begin. And I was reading with joyful tears in my eyes when Andrew Sullivan (you know—the conservative!) announced Obama’s campaign as the embodiment of our new national purpose:

I have never felt more convinced that this man’s candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man’s faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian. . . .

I love this country. I don’t remember loving it or hoping more from it than today.

But yesterday Republicans started saying that Obama did a really bad thing, and that I couldn’t believe in him any more. I was upset to the point of sheer panic. I rushed to the sage Mr. Sullivan to find out what it meant.

He patted me on the head and said, well, “These remarks by Obama in San Francisco are, to put it gently, not the most felicitously phrased.” And he admitted that the point Obama was trying to make is debatable. Andrew is worried that this stir gives the forces of division and sectarianism the momentum they need to undo the sacred unity that Obama has built. But it seems he’s still hopeful that change is really going to happen—that it already has happened.

Oh, how I pray he is right. Obama’s campaign has been a treasury of everlasting hope and joy for my buoyant heart!

It was an good day today for the folks at the New York Sun. They set a fine personal precedent by publishing an article by Paul Gottfried, in which he momentarily removes Richard Hofstadter from his establishmentarian throne. They also featured a review by historian Daniel Walker Howe of Walter McDougall’s new book. Howe praises the author wonderfully, and is willing to do so even in spite of McDougall’s refusal to kneel before the usual PC idols. Howe writes that McDougall is “surprisingly critical of even that most exalted of heroes, Lincoln, whom he accuses of alienating Virginia by a premature call for troops to suppress South Carolina’s rebellion.” Howe also tells us that McDougall compares Reconstruction to the current American project in Iraq, and that he has kind words for 19th-century German immigrants.

Has the Sun gone fascist? Should I notify the SPLC? I need guidance.

In addition Sun writer Adam Kirsch reviewed a new book on Theodor Adorno by a praiseful Detlev Claussen. Kirsch’s remarks were sleepy until the following revelation:

“In a real sense,” [Adorno] wrote in 1935, “I ought to be able to deduce fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows…. The five patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him, and when he complained to the teacher, defamed him as a traitor to the class — are they not the same as those [Nazis] who tortured prisoners to refute claims by foreigners that prisoners were tortured?”

Mr. Claussen confirms what should already be plain enough: that the boy who was thrashed by his classmates was Adorno himself. He was the victim of a group of five boys who constituted the so-called “Harmless Club,” and who would set upon their classmate with anti-Semitic cries: “Greetings to Father Abraham!”

Did Adorno make beating up on Germans his life’s work to avenge his playground defeats? An abler historian than myself will have to judge.

On an unrelated note, Jim Kalb has been adding his worthy voice to the paleo, neo-paleo, post-paleo conversation (here and here).

During the opening moments of Obama’s display of Kumbaya transcendence on Tuesday, I was experiencing a nauseating moment of déjà vu. How many times now have I heard about this group of guys with powdered wigs who got together in a Philly garage in the 1780s and decided to form a band called The American Founders? As Obama suggested, they were all ardent democrats, as well as ardent Democrats, and they were really aching to overcome “this nation’s original sin of slavery.” They had to play their rock music discreetly, though, since there were still a lot of bigots around in those early days. Unable to turn their amps up and “rock out” with full public zeal, they had no choice but to leave many of their most cherished projects unfinished in the hopes that future generations would continue what they had started. But luckily—and here only the most hopelessly benighted will fail to sense a special religious meaning—the Founders were visionaries with the power to peer into the hearts of generations of future Americans and anoint those with a similar special understanding. These enlightened ancestors would always know in their bones what the Founders really intended—to form “a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America” in a mass democratic configuration. If you want to locate these chosen people your best bet is always to rummage around the left side of the Democratic Party.

Mel Bradford was one scholar who ridiculed the shameless vulgarity of these sorts of self-serving appeals to a Founding image. “The difficulty with this tendentious interpretative strategy,” he wrote, “is that the student of early American history who goes to the trouble to learn about the private lives of a reasonable number of important public figures in the original thirteen states can discredit it with ease.” As it turns out, those who were involved in the composition of early American political documents like the Constitution had no idea they were preparing the way for a social democracy. In short, they were assembling something they were comfortable referring to as a “republic”—and the question of exactly what this meant had no simple answer. But if you want some idea of what it didn’t mean, take a listen to Obama’s speech in which a multicultural welfare state is imagined as a “more perfect union.”