Chris Lehmann

THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT: THE RISE OF THE NEOCONS
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday, 319 pages, $26

The wizards of modern brand management have nothing on the obstreperous group of warrior intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. After all, the neocon movement is closing in on its fifth decade (its precise date of origin, like many of its core doctrines and streams of influence, remains maddeningly elusive)—but it still retains a prefix that signifies novelty. And like a good viral marketing campaign, the brand seems to have a knack for being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: Here inveighing against the excesses of 60’s-era black nationalism and student radicalism, there cozying up to the culture-war broadsides of the Christian right—and of course, most notoriously, stage-managing the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, in smug defiance of reliable intelligence reports, international law and coherent policy making.  read more »

As the bromides and bunkum of primary season lurch into caucus-eve overdrive in Iowa, the rest of the world has upstaged the election-addled news cycle. A new Osama bin Laden video, a Colombian hostage crisis and—most of all—the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto have made weary onlookers newly aware that there will be a long, grave to-do list awaiting whichever candidate prevails in the cartoonish 2008 presidential race.

Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S.  read more »

Gullible voters keen to treat the onset of the 2008 primary season as a hale sign of life in the American democratic system had best avert their gaze from Capitol Hill this week. For as Congress winds down the year’s business with earmark-laden appropriations bills and unsightly cave-ins to Bush prerogative after Bush prerogative, the governing metaphor is not the campaign scene’s notorious horse race—something that, for all its by-the-numbers familiarity, at least connotes forward motion.  read more »

It used to be such a simple thing for Republican candidates to position themselves as modern conservative leaders of the faith.

You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly denounce the activist courts, and their bids to treat abortion and euthanasia as counterculture party favors, while de-Christianizing the schools and the public square. Introduce symbolic variations as needed: NEA-funded blasphemies in the museums, gay marriage as mortal threat to civilization, secular tolerance as coddling of “Islamofascists,” the special Congressional session on the Terri Schiavo case, the “war on Christmas,” etc.  read more »

For George W. Bush, “the speech was the thing,” writes Michael Gerson. “He used major speeches to push his own policy processes for new ideas; to clarify his thinking as he edited; to announce his commitments in serious detail; and to drive the news of the day.”

Like much of the fawning insider anecdotage collected in Mr. Gerson’s new book—indeed, like the book’s sonorous title—this sounds at first like an agreeable virtue, until you start to consider just what the writer is actually saying. What, for example, does it mean to “push … policy processes” in the hope of fleshing out new ideas? Shouldn’t the ideas be in place before policy processes are pushed, so that the pushers have a basic sense of what they’re up to? Shouldn’t the time for clear thinking come before a chief executive edits, not as he careens through the text with his blue pencil?  read more »

The Democratic primary field seems to operate under a hidden dictum of reverse momentum: Anytime the battle for early advantage in the race tightens, the actual content of the struggle goes slack.  read more »

Mr. Obama is obviously up to mounting a much more content-driven appeal to voters—and has indeed been admirably direct in developing one in the “retail politics” forums of Iowa and New Hampshire.  read more »

Faith in the Halls of Power, Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay’s new study, demonstrates that evangelical believers have gradually stockpiled influence in four major arenas of American life: national politics, higher education, the entertainment industry and the business world.  read more »

Valerie Plame Wilson's Fair Game speaks volumes about how business is done among the lords of Washington consensus. The native dialect of journalists at the court society of the Bush administration is the argot of the deal.  read more »

It was like watching a mechanical rabbit spring onto the rail of a greyhound track: Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register reported the results of an October poll showing Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton pulling away from her two main competitors for the Hawkeye State’s January caucus vote.  read more »

It’s certainly no news to New Yorkers that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a taste for the theatrical.  read more »

The most vital propaganda arm of the surge is largely the handiwork of former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.  read more »

'Where's Ed Levi now that we need him?'  read more »

It’s true that August is a bad time for a product launch, as Andy Card famously said of the American invasion of Iraq.  read more »

All the conspicuous alarm over the first-ever YouTube presidential debate becoming terminally inane now seems quite overblown.  read more »

For all the author’s heroic mike-pointing, he delivers at best a two-dimensional portrait of a genuinely complicated statesman.  read more »

Mr. Giuliani has won both the polls and the money sweepstakes by default.  read more »

Commutations come with quite explicit guidelines of their own – promulgated by the department of Justice back in the days before it became a Rove-branded house of patronage and prosecutions to solidify G.O.P. tactics of voter suppression.  read more »

The Democratic primary field can’t seem to go about the basic business of negative campaigning without generating unruly heaps of sanctimony on all sides.  read more »

Here’s one simple measure of how out of sorts the Republican Party is these days: Nearly all of its aspirants to the 2008 Presidential nomination are keen to brand themselves in the image of Ronald Reagan­—the only G.O.P. President of the postwar age to remain popular for two full terms in office. But candidates find themselves tip-toeing around his immigration policy.  read more »

Carl Bernstein traces the evolving religious commitment of a politician partial to triangulation.  read more »

If anyone has the right to fulminate on the irrationality of American political debate, it’s Al Gore.  read more »

In virtually any other Presidency, Alberto Gonzales—a clumsy prevaricator, a talentless hack and a dangerously indifferent advocate of the rule of law—would be a dead man walking. In the Bush White House, though, he is the walking dead—a curiously lifeless drone who seems to draw strength from the leadership vacuum surrounding him.  read more »

A new set of OpSec (operational security) directives that the Army promulgated last month seem likely to severely limit active-duty blogging.  read more »

Hey! Rich Little Routine Was Really Savage, Brechtian.  read more »