Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing in this Handbasket?

On the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought perhaps I could use my latest bumper sticker purchases to substitute for commentary I haven’t been writing. Here’s a pretty good summary:

A Low-Key Response to a Terrible Problem: Real Property Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The most recent upsurge of violence in Israel and Gaza has called to mind a book I read last summer, “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East,” by Sandy Tolan. It’s the chronicle of the unusual relationship between a Palestinian who as a boy had fled with his family from their home during the 1948 war concurrent with the creation of the state of Israel, and an Israeli woman who thereafter grew up in the house with her family after the newly-formed Israeli government assigned the property to them. I’m not a fan of lawyers stretching the law and the judicial process to address issues more appropriately dealt with through legislation or international relations, but this situation suggests a straightforward issue of an individual’s legal rights, and a straightforward remedy: why not sue to get your property back?

More about the book: It’s an account by an American reporter about a house in the town of Ramle a/k/a al-Ramla, Israel and the two families that had occupied it over the past several decades.

Five Things About the Economy on Which We Should All Be Able to Agree

So, another day, another plunge in stock prices, another wave of aspiring moochers descending on Washington, and another God-knows-how-many billions set to be doled out under the Treasury’s “TARP” program.  (“TARP” is an acronym, of course, which stands for “Totally Arbitrary Rewards and Penalties.”  The goal of the program is to render unreliable the economic signals that have guided business activity for centuries, like interest rates, or profits or the lack thereof.  By replacing these traditional signals with totally arbitrary rewards and penalties, policy makers can simultaneously pretend to “rescue” one group after another while vastly expanding their power over the livelihoods of private citizens.)

Treasury Secretary Paulson, who in September told us that buying troubled assets from investment banks was the only way to avoid a total financial meltdown, now says that buying troubled assets was not the only way; in fact it wasn’t really a very good way after all so it’s time to try something different. 

Don’t Waste Your Vote! (Third Parties Turn the Tables)

Anyone who has ever considered voting for an independent or minor-party candidate has probably been vigorously admonished by his Republican or Democratic friends not to “waste” his or her vote.  Yesterday, the Libertarian ticket turned the tables by sending out an e-mail arguing, in effect, that a vote for John McCain would be wasteful in precisely the same sense.  The e-mail, which came from Bob Barr’s Campaign Manager Russ Verney (former Campaign Manager for Ross Perot), carried this subject heading:  “McCain is guaranteed to lose . . . so what does that mean for America?”  Here’s the rest of the e-mail:

The VP Debate, the Expectations Game, and Eight Questions for the Candidates

Everyone is playing the expectations game in advance of tomorrow night’s Biden-Palin debate.  Most of it is just self-serving blather, but Jed Lewison’s piece on the Huffington Post stood out to me as an exception because Lewison included video of Palin’s prior debates.  Anyone who is expecting a complete face-plant by Gov. Palin may be disappointed.  See for yourself.

Split Persianality

National Geographic has a feature this month on the continuing pull exerted on Iranian culture by the Persian Empire of 2500 years ago. Because it’s National Geographic, the pictures are wonderful. And although (or perhaps because) I know almost nothing about the ancient Persian Empire or modern Iranian culture, I found the article fascinating as well.

I had never heard, for example, of

Ron Paul, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”

Last winter, when I donated to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, I made the mistake of buying a Ron Paul sweatshirt but no Ron Paul T-shirt. I do not remember whether that was simple inadvertence on my part or whether it reflected a conscious prediction that Dr. Paul would likely be irrelevant by the time it was too warm for the sweatshirt. Either way, it was a mistake, because Ron Paul’s role in the presidential election is today very much the same as it was back in January. He is a man who will not be president, but who will not stop asking some of the most important questions about the course our nation is on. It is perhaps no coincidence that he also provides the most philosophically coherent package of answers.

Consequentialism and Integrity (or: Why People Disagree About Iraq)

A few weeks ago, toward the end of a spirited exchange on Iraq, abortion, Catholic social teaching, and the presidential election (we like to keep the topics narrow enough to be manageable on this blog), I expressed some thoughts on consequentialism that I was leaving unfinished because I needed a book from my shelf. Today, I give you the coda to that discussion, which of course I hope will turn out also to be a prelude to other discussions. Discussions about Iraq? Yes, and other things.

Bush on McCain

The Washington Post’s online headline really grabbed my attention this time:

Bush: McCain a ‘Conservative’

My immediate, involuntary reaction was, “How would he know?”

To be fair to the President, there is currently no consensus on what conservatism is all about. I’ve tried to suggest a few important elements of authentic conservatism on this blog from time to time, including

• an ability to see (and a desire to hear) the principles at stake on both sides of a contested issue without feeling compelled to follow one set and discard the other;
• a healthy skepticism about utopian worldviews;
• a deep-seated humility about the limits of our knowledge at any given time;
• an appreciation for the hundreds of years of human experience embedded in our constitution;
• a fundamental commitment to the rule of law; and
• a preference for incremental responses rather than abrupt departures from tradition.

Catching up with the New York Review of Books

I spent a lot of time on my back this week due to a freak dog-washing injury. But I’m a silver-lining kind of guy, so instead of writing about the stabbing pain I’m writing about the fact that I got to catch up — a bit — on a few unread issues of the New York Review of Books, which always seems to give me so much to think about.

From the September 27 issue, I enjoyed Christopher Jencks’s review of Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency, a book we also discussed on this blog a few months back, and also Janet Malcolm’s article “Pandora’s Click,” an uncharacteristically brief review that provides a timely reminder about the perils of e-mail and that medium’s own special contribution to our incivility. I also finally got around to reading the piece Jim Walsh recommended in the October 11 issue, Bill McKibben’s review of four books on climate change.  But what really held my attention in the October 11 issue was this fascinating excerpt from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s journals of 1966 and 1967.

It’s called “The Turning Point,” and it’s all about LBJ’s fateful decision to escalate rather than withdraw from Vietnam.