That’s like saying you should upgrade to disc brakes on your Model T because drum brakes strike most people as old-fashioned. Parliament could mandate that the Windsors drive flying cars, talk to each other over Star Trek-style communicators, and lead mankind’s fight against our robot overlords, and they’d still be “old-fashioned.” It’s a monarchy.

Yesterday, I wrote about what the “Ground Zero” mosque disaster reveals about the Republican Party. In short, it reveals that the Bush administration was a false dawn. Bush, for all his flaws, believed that the GOP should be a universalistic party based on traditional values, a big tent for “faith-based” conservatives of all races and creeds: Muslims, Hispanics, Mormons, African-Americans, whatever. Now it is clear that the post-Bush GOP is a far nastier creature: A party seething with hatred towards vulnerable religious and ethnic groups. Despite the pretense that the GOP’s anti-mosque crusade is based on what Imam Rauf and company believe, it has more to do with who they are. It’s telling that the people Republicans are turning to for their anti-mosque street cred are not “moderate, peace-loving” Muslims, since even Muslim Republicans are disgusted by their party’s actions. The GOP’s new heroes are former Muslims like Nonie Darwish and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That’s one way to escape the new Republican bigotry. Maybe the folks the GOP wants to harass in Arizona should try becoming former Hispanics.

This a great example of two forms of liberal writings. First is the one that everyone who’s been to college will remember is the “People who disagree with me are bigots” genre. Second is the “Why aren’t conservatives today as cuddly as the reasonable conservatives of yore” genre. What’s impressive is that Beinhart a.) weaves these two together so well, and b.) has already lumped W. into the “cuddly conservatives of yore that today’s conservatives can’t live up to” category. That was fast.

But more importantly, Beinhart faults Republicans for siding with Ayaan Hirsi Ali against “vulnerable religious minorities.” When your definition of a “vulnerable minority” excludes a woman who’s had to flee two continents because of violent threats by religious fanatics but includes those fanatics’ coreligionists, methinks the moral compass is a bit off.

In all honesty, the first guy who came to mind as a prime candidate was John Ensign. A guy who did not cross my mind was Mark Sanford. It’s sorta a shame, but always delightful to hear Democrats proclaim from on high that having an affair is, by itself, cause to resign.

From Snoop, Martha, and all the Paupers, Happy Thanksgiving.

“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”

Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.

Could there be a more perfect phrase to describe such imperfection?

First, there’s this from the former Soviet Union:

I think, in that one picture, is an explanation for why Russia and most of its satellite states are collapsing.  A book, frequently someone’s life work, should be treated with more respect.  Books that are well taken care of are a necessary but not sufficient sign of civilization.

Respect for books alone is not sufficient for civilization because it is also possible for books to be treated with too much respect, as it were, and this leads to the second thing that bothered me.  In Holland, they’ve turned a 13th century Domincan monastery into a book store.  From Jonathan Glancey’s article:

But the Maastricht bookshop is Merkx + Girod’s finest work. And its transformation is, I think, a lesson to us all. Yes, we need to think up new uses for old churches, but we must also consider ways of converting them without altering their venerable fabric. A church is a prayer set in stone, and even if we do not use them as they were intended, their very presence is reassuring and comforting, reminding us that there is more to life than getting and spending, trade and toil. The Dominican church in Maastricht strikes just the right note. Its architects deserve a blessing.

It is peculiarly fitting that this abandonded church is in Maastricht, where they signed the treaty that lead to the Euro and started the road towards Europe’s godless constitution.  I seem to recall Christ chasing money-changers out of the temple; one wonders what he would make of chic espresso machines replacing the liturgy of the hours.

Hilaire Belloc once argued, “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.  The Faith is Europe.  And Europe is the Faith.”  In Russia, they desecrate books; in Holland, a bookstore desecrates a monastery.  Something is perishing, and the out of place books are only a symptom.

1. Benjamin Franklin.  An American original, a tremendous polymath.  When he left his post as ambassador to France, and Jefferson became the new ambassador, someone asked Jefferson if he was replacing Franklin.  TJ replied, “I merely succeed him; nobody can replace him.”
2. Alexander Hamilton.  No other founder understood finances at all, and Hamilton ensured that the country wouldn’t fall apart because the laws of supply and demand were ignored.  As a principle author of The Federalist, he wrote what is still our most enduring work of political philosophy.
3. John Marshall.  He wasn’t our first chief justice, but he was the one who ensured that the judiciary would act as a check against the excesses of democracy.
4. William T. Sherman.  A great general (our greatest generals—Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower—all became presidents and are thus ineligible for this list) whose understanding of war was both terrible and profound.  “The crueler war is, the sooner it is over.”
5. Mark Twain.  A brilliant writer, and a proto-type of the national celebrity.  He was, I would argue, the first great American writer who didn’t wish he was European.  We forget that, amongst all the witty things he said, he was profoundly gracious; upon meeting Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, Twain gave a twist to a newspaper article comparing them and said, “I am honored to be the American Sholom Aleichem.”
6. Louis Armstrong.  Jazz is one of America’s great contributions to art, and Armstrong remains a giant in the field.
7. Alfred Sloan.  The genius behind General Motors.  Henry Ford may have pioneered the assembly line, but Sloan invented corporate America almost singlehandedly.
8. Frank Capra.  Movies and Hollywood are how America shows itself to the world.  No movie director so celebrated America as did Capra.
9. Barry Goldwater.  He was never president, but unlike most failed candidates, the movement he started reshaped America and the world.  Without Goldwater, Reagan would never have gotten started.
10. William F. Buckley Jr.  Other scholars may have written better books on traditionalism (like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind) or on economics (Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit) or on strong foreign policy (like Burnham’s The Machiavellians) but only Buckley brought them all together, creating a movement that offers, in my view, the best guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Who’s on your list?

• This time around, though, it took longer than the usual day or two for MT to go away.  “I have places to go and people to see and things to do!  This is no time for MT,” I kept thinking.  Nobody likes being sick, of course, but I was in a hurry to get well.  Unfortunately, we can’t make our bodies heal faster.  Perhaps this is why St. Francis of Asissi called his body an ass.

• So I spent much of the past few weeks waiting.  I loathe waiting, but ’tis the season.  I did my best to stay pleasant, but failed miserably.  At one point last week, a co-worker dropped by with a question.  On the phone, I said nothing to her, but glared and she slunk away.  If I knew how to intentionally look so intimidating, then I’d probably glare like that more often to drive people away when feeling anti-social; it’s probably good for everyone around me that I can’t.  That glare appears in trying times; one resolution for next year is to try not to glare like that even when tried; how long will that last, I wonder?  Probably not long enough.

•  It looks like I’m not the only one feeling a bit down right now.  Part of it is the Winter.  Part of it is the enforced cheeriness of Christmas.  Part of it is missing people we care about.  It’ll be my first Christmas without Grandpa O., and even though he was cantankerous and eccentric, he also cared and did what he could to show it.  So much of his last few years were spent waiting in hospitals and dialysis centers; he doesn’t have to wait in such places any more.  Through the years we all will be together—if the fates allow. . .

• The flags in DC are at half-mast today, probably for Pearl Harbor, 1941.  That lead to Grandpa O. and his family losing everything and going to the Jerome, Arkansas, internment camp until the war was over.  That’s a long wait.  He remembered many things: that the food made them sick (putting MT in perspective right now); that when they were let out to go shopping, Southern bus drivers treated the Japanese—interned as potential enemies—better than blacks; that he wouldn’t have finished high school if he hadn’t been sent to Jerome.  He filled his waiting with education.

• The sermon series during Advent is about waiting.  Advent tends to get excised in the Christmas hoopla, rather like the children Want and Ignorance in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  We don’t like waiting any more than we like the creepy figures that the Ghost of Christmas Present showed Scrooge.  But something is lost when we bowdlerize Dickens and expand the Christmas season to labor day.  Waiting prepares us for greater goodness.  In want and ignorance, we try to rush through: get healthy, get rid of troubles, get open the presents.  The fatherly cliche—that something bad is building character—sometimes does contain a nugget of truth.

• More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. —Romans 5:3-5

Is there such a thing as a propensity to damage yourself? I would like to read a proper scientific study of the subject. Writers are certainly liable, the outstanding example being Ernest Hemingway. Like old Thack’s, his big body was an awkward shape, but he hurt himself badly as a small child, falling with a stick in his mouth and gouging his tonsils. He also caught a fishhook in his back and hurt himself playing football and boxing. In 1918, beside being blown up in the war, he smashed his fist through a glass showcase. In 1920 he cut his feet walking on broken glass, and fell on a boat-cleat which caused internal bleeding. He burnt himself painfully while smashing up a water-heater (1922), tore a foot ligament (1925), and had the pupil of his good eye cut by his son (1927). In 1928, drunk, he mistook the skylight cord for the lavatory chain and pulled the heavy glass structure down on his hand. The result: concussion and nine stitches. The next year he tore his groin muscle, damaged an index finger, was hurt by a bolting horse, and broke his arm in a car accident. In 1935 he shot himself in the leg while drunk and trying to gaff a shark, broke his big toe kicking a locked gate, smashed his foot through a mirror and damaged the pupil of his bad eye (1938). In 1944 he was concussed twice. There was another bad car smash the next year, a clawing by a lion in 1949, a boat accident in 1950 and in 1953 a series of serious accidents in Africa, leading to a fractured skull, two cracked spinal discs, a ruptured liver, spleen and kidneys, and paralysed sphincter muscles. Bad falls, usually while drunk, continued till his suicide.

How did Ernie get any writing done?

 . . . the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.  I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

It’s Guy Fawkes Day, which is a touch inimical to the usual ecumenicalism of Snarky Bastards.  But since we’re defenders of tradition—and how could we pyromaniacs not like the bonfires?—we hope our British readers are enjoying the day.

Or, if you want another less historical but more funny bit of Puritan self-righteousness, try Lady Whiteadder:

Cold is God’s way of telling us to burn more Catholics!

I think that’s enough anti-Catholic stuff for the day.  Perhaps we should pick a day for Protestant bashing.  Any nominations?