I’m rather intrigued by Spitzer’s use of the pseudonym “George Fox” when he would take part in his expensive assignation down as the Renaissance Mayflower. The Times reports that “Client #9” actually has a “friend and donor” who goes by this name. One wonders whether Spitzer ever had an escape plan in which if the feds started closing in, he might let old George take the rap. I wouldn’t put this past him, but it seems unlikely.

I think instead that the choice of names was a bit of irony on Spitzer’s part: the phony public crusader probably often chuckled to himself while visiting a prostitute using the name of the pious 17th-century dissenter who founded Quakerism.

This wouldn’t be the first time the “steamroller” mixed self-righteousness with sleaze and topped off it with grand hypocrisy. According to the Times:

“[I]n 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island. ‘This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.’”

As an update to Taki’s valid character assessment of Gov. Spitzer—he won’t resign. He certainly wouldn’t want this “personal matter” to get in the way of his using the state to force doctors to offer abortions, all part of his “vision of progressive politics,” of course.   

Regarding Justin’s last post, since Daniel and I are both arguing pretty much the same thing, I’ll respond.

My point in highlighting the interventionist tendencies of Samantha Power, Obama, et al. is to bring to the fore the fact that no current Democrat represents any real opposition to the Bushian-McCainian war party. Sure, stationing “peace keepers” in Darfur might be less expensive than an attempted transformation of the Middle East, but even if Obama (or Clinton) begins to slowly pull the troops out of Iraq, there’s absolutely nothing to lead us to believe that 4 or 8 years later our military commitments abroad, or the gargantuan military budget that has little to do with national defense, would be any smaller. Nor would American foreign policy loose its “democratization” thrust. Thus what are we really hoping to gain by supporting Obama? 

Besides, expectations that Obama will pull out of Iraq any time soon should most definitely be curbed after Power’s recent “best case scenario” comments. 

I’m glad that Justin has cleared up my misunderstanding about his position toward the foreign policy of Samantha Power. He knows her for what she is—the princess of the global do-gooders.

But at the heart of my posts yesterday was not merely Samantha Power—whose interventionist fantasies are dismissed easily enough—but the problem of traditional conservatives’ supporting Obama as a “not so bad” option.

Generally speaking, I think Justin is backing Obama for the right reasons. Despite his claims of being a cultist, having a “man-crush,” and suffering from Obamania, he actually doesn’t go in for any of the gooey, transcendental crap that attracts the vast majority of Obamaniacs (and the Obamacons).  At the very least, I think Justin is the first to quote Garet Garrett in an endorsement of the Illinois senator (!). 

All of this is fine, but Obama’s connection with Samantha Power should stand as warning to all traditionalists, paleos, and libertarians who dare see Obama as a lesser-of-two-evils choice in November.

Obama’s actual statements about foreign policy have been rather vague. All we know is that he’s “willing to talk” and wants to “end the war in Iraq.” It’s plausible that these sentiments would materialize as a sane foreign policy—perhaps even that “humble foreign policy” Governor Bush promised us years ago. 

But then it’s equally plausible that Obama would go on a Samantha Power trip and pursue a whole new set of “liberventions” in Darfur, Kenya, the Congo, Burma… With a crushing defeat of McCain in the general and the popular will behind him, Obama would certainly have the political capital to attempt such wild schemes. And his supporters—both the Obamaniacs and Obamacons—would not do much to hold him back. Obama voters of all sorts seem to believe that the senator from Illinois is a messiah sent down to us from some secular leftist god. Obama himself seems to concur, clearly infatuated with the image he and his supporters have fashioned. None of this leads me to believe that the election of Barrack Obama would herald a return to realism.   

Dan McCarthy documents a trend that I, too, made note of not too long along—the rise of Obama conservatives.

I find that this new voting block can be divided into two distinct groups—defensive, tactical Obama voters and true Obamaniacs. 

The first group I generally sympathize with. These are people like Justin, Jeff Hart, and perhaps Dan himself who appreciate Obama’s opposition to Iraq, think that he’d invade fewer countries than Clinton or McCain, and find his health-care proposals to be less totalitarian than Hillary-care part II. When I visited Justin in San Fran the other week, he said that “questions of war and peace” trump all else. Particularly since one can’t count on Republicans to stave off socialism at home, I think this is a valid position—although I’m not at all convinced that Obama would actually be as non-interventionist as some presume (if his selection of Samantha Power as a foreign-policy adviser is any indication).       

This defensive, tactical camp is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty tiny, composed mostly of dissident Right intellectuals. 

The real Obamaniacs are a different story altogether. They are ex-Bushites, like Mark McKinnon, and other Republicans of the Gersonian variety. There are others, like Rod Dreher, who are evangelical Christians with some conservative credential and who criticize Obama’s policies, but then simply can’t help but be charmed by him. No one in this group is particularly impressed about the fact that Obama opposed the Iraq war—to the contrary, most of them supported it—nor do they take a “he’d be less totalitarian than Hillary” line.

They like Obama because he speaks their language. Sentiments that electing the senator would miraculous lead us towards “authentic racial reconciliation,” give birth to post-partisan national unity, or make all the world love us again usually compose the political language of the pinkish, over-educated cultural elite. But with a little tweaking, such phrases are commonly dropped at the local Megachurch, the conservative gathering, and wherever Joel Ostein is read. They “put their faith” in Obama as a transcendent leader. One very surprising development of the 2008 election will be the number of former Huckabee supporters who go for Obama in the general. 

Unlike the defensive, tactical Obama supporters, the real Obamacons number in the millions. 

With sadness I announce that Ron Paul has ended his presidential campaign … well, I think he has … maybe… Lew Rockwell, who usually knows all this stuff, senses that it might very well be over … perhaps. Here’s the video—if any of you all out there can make heads or tails of it, I encourage you to comment. 

Throughout the Cold War, a whole industry of Kremlinology popped up in which PhD-ed analysts would interpret the significance of who was sitting next to the Great Leader at the latest Great Harvest festival in an attempt to understand the inner-workings of the opaque Soviet regime. I think we might need similar efforts in exegesis to understand what the hell the Paul campaign is actually doing. At any rate, the fact that major news organs are going with “it’s winding down” as a newsbite does not speak well for the campaign’s efforts in communications.     

So, it will all “soon wind down”—but when? In the next few weeks? In November? why announce this? And then there’s the equally ambiguous, “I will make every effort to visit any state where the enthusiasm for liberty exists.” OK…

After thoroughly confusing us about his presidential run, Paul goes on to thoroughly demoralization those who want to build a broader movement. 

Paul says, “Let’s hope that one day we can look back and say that this campaign was a significant first step that signaled a change in direction for our country.” But then he offers little in the way of direction. Paul “still likes the idea” of a major march on the DC mall, but then senses that this might be a logistical hassle for the campaign—another quasi-indication that he’s still running for president, sort of—and thus hopes that his supporters will arrange it.  Perhaps sometime in June would work?

Yes, the freedom movement should be a “grassroots effort” and not a “top-down, rigidly controlled operation.” But there’s a difference between inspiring the troops and passing the buck—Ron Paul is clearly doing the latter. 

The groups Paul says will be the new institutions of the broader movement, the Liberty PAC and the FREE Foundation, are both based in Lake Jackson, TX, Ron’s home district, and have actually already been around for years. FREE is run Mark Elam, the campaign’s “media director” who, judging by the embarrassing back-to-the-’70s quality of the official videos, won’t exactly be remembered as the Leni Riefenstahl of the freedom movement. Elam seems to hold multiple posts under the Ron Paul umbrella—state coordinator for Texas, national media director. Why exactly Paul would entrust this man—who can’t put together a coherent YouTube video—with so much responsibility is beyond me.

The campaign succeeded in online fundraising and it was generally competently run by Lew Moore and Kent Synder—who were able to grab up some delegates in caucus states even if they never developed a real ground game in New Hampshire. But the Paul campaigns forays in traditional PR and communications cannot be considered anything but an absolute disaster. 

While the aesthetically challenged Elam was hired as media director, the campaign never brought in a team of professional speech-writers and opinion journalists to help craft talking points and a clear message that would have appealed to Republican voters. Thus when Paul was given the opportunity to directly confront John McCain in a nationally televised debate, he asked a tedious, soon-forgotten query about the president’s working group on financial markets. Only rarely did Paul speak of being the only “real conservative” in the field, and more often allowed himself to be defined as a Daily-Kos cut-and-run liberal—sometimes even playing this up such as when he mentioned on “Leno” that he has much in common with Kucinich and is well-liked among Obama supporters.

Only well after the great opportunity of New Hampshire had passed did the campaign hire a full-time blogger and writer, the rock-solid paleo-libertarian (and Taki’s contributor) Dan McCarthy. Most other campaigns had had bloggers and staff writers for over a year.

Should we be surprised that the end result of a year of slap-dash public relations and cronyism is a major public statement on the future of the campaign that no one really understands? 

My friend Dan McCarthy has an excellent take on the recent White House scandal in which the president’s “liaison to the conservative movement and religious Right” was caught plagiarizing his guest columns at his local paper—a little skullduggery so brazen and ham-fisted that a crusading blogger was able to uncover the charade with merely a few clicks on google.

”One might wonder why there seems to be an unusual number of conservatives lately getting nabbed for things like plagiarism and shoplifting. I think the mixture of power-mania and personalized religion that mainstream conservatives have embraced in recent years has something to do with it. (If you know you’re on the side of the angels when it comes to big matters like the GWOT and abortion, what does it matter if you cheat a little — especially when you have a close personal relationship with Jesus?)

I think Dan is definitely getting at something here—although perhaps it’s not exactly accurate with respect to Goeglein. 

As Dan mentioned, Goeglein actually sent a note to a “paleo professor” (perhaps Taki readers might guess who this is) congratulating him on the publication of his book, and “a certain paleo editor received a cordial invitation to lunch with Goeglein.” This last person was I, and I must say that I actually enjoyed talking with Goeglein about the GOP and conservatism over Bratwursts in a restaurant just a block away from the White House. Whatever the Left wants to say about him, Goeglein struck me as more than a Rovian Machiavel interested only in mobilizing the megachurches and the ’vangies to vote Bush. He actually seemed to have a genuine sense that the conservative movement was something distinctive from the GOP and possessing its own literary tradition—a tradition he seemed reasonably well-acquainted with. He told me that many Bush haters often told him, “you’re not one of them.” Perhaps he wasn’t. 

In this line, it’s worth comparing Goeglein’s crimes with those of other Bushites gone wild. Take, for instance, the revolting Jeff Gannon, who appeared nude on gay escort-service websites and then had a short-lived career brown-nosing Scott McClellan. Then there’s the shop-lifting former White House aide Claude Allen. Goeglein’s compulsive cribbing is risible—it’s the kind crime one would expect to find in a college dorm. But then he did have the good taste to copy from a movement stalwart like Jeffrey Hart. Is there a term for a hack with grand pretensions? 

Reports of Ron Paul’s demise were greatly exaggerated (as were those of the ascension of some pro-war hack named Chris Pedan). The AP is reporting victory.   

Among the neocons’ gushing, mostly interchangeable eulogies to WFB that have been circulating around the net, William’s Kristol’s is particularly worthy of deconstruction.

A sentence from paragraph two jumps off the page:

It’s true that he saw in conservatism a set of doctrines that transcended any one nation, or any one time, and that approached the status of political, even metaphysical, truths.

Kristol doesn’t tell us what these “truths,” metaphysical and otherwise, exactly are… He doesn’t seem to be referring to Buckley’s Catholic faith, which informed but never defined his foreign policy, but instead some transcendental “conservatism.” 

It’s likely that what Kristol has in mind is something like what he and Robert Kagan wrote 12 years ago in their outline for a “Neo-Reganite Foreign Policy”:

The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, “self-evident” truths. That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives’ war against a relativistic multiculturalism. For conservatives to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the Western tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad, is an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart of conservatism.

Before accepting Kristol’s comments about Buckley, it’s useful to look and see what Buckley actually wrote regarding America’s spreading of “conservatism” abroad:

“The dogmatists’ assumption that democracy tends to wash away the exorbitant sins of its people is otherwise disturbed by a knowledge of history.” (July 16, 1991)

In reference to beltway eggheads’ desire to install parliamentary democracy in Haiti:
“But just as Woodrow Wilson was set on making the world safe for democracy, breeding instead Stalin and Hitler, we rail against despotism and breed public chaos.” (Dec. 1, 1987)

“[D]emocracy does not necessarily usher in virtuous governments or tolerable human conditions. …[P]articularly in its currently accepted, fanatical application (one-man, one-vote), [democracy] is nothing more than a Western superstition. We are entitled to our superstitions and to our taboos, but it does not make much sense to assume that they are readily universalized.” (Feb. 13, 1986). 

There doesn’t seem to be much “to end tyranny in our time” here.

Kristol lets out why he truly appreciates Buckley when he mentions that WFB “welcomed many kinds of conservatives, old and new, into the fold at National Review.” Yes, and it’s only because Buckley allowed the neocons in through the gates at NR that someone like Kristol could be considered a “conservative” at all. 

Kristol is right to be grateful to Buckley, but his depiction of the man’s political philosophy couldn’t be more wrong.   

Not too long ago, Derb mused on one of P.J. O’Rourke’s anthropological insights: “a sure indicator of the dynamism of any political movement is the number of hot babes at gatherings of supporters. Possibly I’ve been reading too much evolutionary psychology, but this strikes me as a nontrivial observation.” It surely is, and Derb directed the audience’s gaze to evidence of some attractive young things attending Ron Paul rallies. 

There was, of course, the presence of another social type at Ron Paul rallies that is also worth noting—a social type that spends hundreds of hours making something like this:

In the geek universe, Cam Cameron (“electibility, do you have any, sir?”) and focus-group guru Frank Luntz finally get their ass kicked! For this, we’re willing to forgive the opening quote from Noam Chomsky and the sentiment that average Americans must be liberated from themselves. The über-geek who made this is the kind of man who thought up the “money bomb” idea, who embarrassed Hannity by helping Ron Paul win the text-message poll after ever FOX debate, who updated Ron Paul’s Facebook account… etc. etc. Who needs sultry coeds! (They probably gravitate to Obama anyway.)

We should also remember that the Geek who spent hundred of hours photos-shopping heads onto live-action video is also not the kind of person who spent much time canvassing and knocking on doors in New Hampshire. This the Paul people did not do nearly enough of. 

Last night, I attended a pre-party for the annual “politics online” conference. At this shindig, entitled “Bloggers meet booze,” the crowd was decidedly Left, honeycombed with a few from Townhall. My girlfriend remarked about the many libertarians who designed and programmed the web platforms on which all the lefties collected at the party were blog blog bloging away. Despite our talent, we’re somehow losing.