I remember reading this Florence King piece on Hillary Clinton during the week of my college graduation in 1992 and I remember being completely blown away by it. At the time, I thought it was one of the most devastating things I had ever read. King always wrote with sharp edges, so I wasn’t shocked by that. But I did think it was--despite (or because of?) its harsh tone-- shockingly clear and insightful. Re-reading it again, after all these years, I still do. I don’t think anyone has ever said it better. Hillary is that smarmy "great girl" and, whether it was in high school or in college we all knew someone like her and we didn’t like her.

Okay, so maybe "hate" is a bit strong, but the always entertaining (but hardly conservative) Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic offers one possible reason why. Remember Socks the Cat? He suddenly burst onto the American scene during the 1992 campaign, when press photographers noticed him outside the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. Suddenly Hillary the non-cookie-baker had a way of connecting with "the vast group of Americans (schoolchildren, mothers, teachers, old folk, simpletons) who share a good-natured, apolitical enthusiasm for the particulars of White House domestic life." Before long Socks was showing up in staged White House photographs and accompanying the First Lady on personal appearances. She even wrote (well, compiled) a book, Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, in which she showcased "the way Hillary wanted to be seen as a first lady...warm, spontaneous to the point of being a little bit silly sometimes; somone who always has a twinkle in her eye whenever children are around." In other words, everything that she very likely is not.

You may be wondering, whatever happened to ol’ Socks? As the Clintons were making preparations to leave the White House in early 2001, the hapless feline was quietly palmed off onto Betty Currie. Of course, Buddy "had barely sniffed his first Chappaqua crotch" before he got loose and was struck and killed by a car--the same fate that befell the Clinton’s previous dog Zeke.

Okay, so Hillary, along with her husband, used dumb animals for whom they probably never had any real affection to score political points. That they’re phonies won’t really strike anyone as front-page news. But what’s worse from Flanagan’s point of view is not that Hillary’s a phony, but a sanctimonious one at that. For Dear Socks, Dear Buddy isn’t just fluff, it’s preachy fluff, full of admonitions never to give pets away, and always to be protective of their physical safety.

Here.

Dean Barnett hearts him here.

Here’s a review of Faith in the Halls of Power, based on interviews with many conventionally successful evangelicals. A snippet:

More than a few writers and pundits, noting the new prominence of evangelicals in American life (not least, that of George W. Bush), warn of a looming theocracy with proselytizing impulses and apocalyptic visions. But Mr. Lindsay, listening to his interview subjects talk about their faith, "found little support for the conspiracy theorists who think evangelicals are plotting to take over America." For starters, the members of the evangelical elite are too divided to embrace a single ideology. Most are Republicans, but many others lean to the left. The first politician profiled in "Faith in the Halls of Power" is Jimmy Carter. Al Gore, Mr. Lindsay notes, participated in Washington’s evangelical prayer groups, too.

Many evangelicals in high positions, in fact, reject the "populist evangelicalism" of the new Christian right. They go "out of their way," Mr. Lindsay observes, to say that they have "never read Left Behind," the series of end-of-the-world novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Instead of celebrating "apocalyptic pot-boilers," one-fourth of Mr. Lindsay’s interview subjects cited C.S. Lewis as a strong personal influence.

Here are two articles written in advance of this weekend’s Values Voters summit, which you can watch, for a small fee, here.

There are three things worth noting from the news coverage thus far. First, as Gary Bauer notes, it’s unlikely that, all of a sudden, there will be clarity about which direction "Values Voters" are moving. Second, although there continues to be some interest in a third party, if RG is the Republican nominee, James Dobson has for the moment backed away from that talk. Third:

"Our voters would rather stay home than vote for half a loaf of bread," said Bill Stephens, the executive director of the Christian Coalition of Florida. "They either want the whole loaf, or they’ll wait for next time."

I hope he doesn’t mean it, or that his group isn’t big or influential (If the former is true, I’m betting also on the latter.)

I just hosted an Oglethorpe alumnus who is on leave from his second tour in Iraq (the first time as a tank and scout platoon leader, this time as an advisor to the Iraqi National Police). The highlights, from the point of view of a liberally educated soldier:

*It’s hard for him to understand a national debate where virtually no one knows what he’s talking about. Shouldn’t our opinions be informed by knowledge?

*Compared with his first tour, the U.S. soldiers this time are infinitely more sensitive to the culture of the people with whom they are dealing. The picture he paints is of a nuanced and culturally sensitive approach to the iraqis with whom they deal.

*Al Qaeda is being beaten very badly in Iraq.

*The proper war analogy is not Vietnam, but Korea, where a long-term U.S. presence stabilizes a situation and permits the economic and political development. Indeed, he seems to think that economic development (successful small business) is the key to political development in Iraq. (Warner Winborne, what do you think of this?)

*"North Korea," in this analogy, seems to be Iran. He has no doubt but that Iran is at war with us in Iraq.

All in all, I think my students heard a lot of good things from a thoughtful and frank soldier who can’t believe how little his fellow citizens know about and understand what he and his comrades are going through. He says he never sees any American reporters, even though he’s all over the Baghdad area (and spends some time in the Green Zone).

Update: A couple of other observations I didn’t have time to include in the original post:

*He’s beginning to see camera mounts on the Humvees (like those on police cars in the U.S.), presumably so that there will be a better record for assessing what went on in particular situations. And he’d have no problem having all his actions in Iraq videotaped.

*He knows of cases in which insurgent deaths are treated as "civilian" deaths because working weapons are quickly removed from the scene, recycled, so to speak.

Here is a version of the argument from Mark Lilla’s new book, with responses from Damon Linker, Philip Jenkins, and Anthony Sullivan. Jenkins is surely right to point to the flaws in Lilla’s history, but I applaud Lilla for stressing the fragility and rarity of our regime, even as I disagree somewhat with his characterization of it.

This article focuses on Obama’s efforts to organize through churches, where he clearly goes beyond just showing up on Sunday and being introduced by the pastor.

He’s also been talking about "creat[ing] a Kingdom [of God] right here on Earth," which doesn’t sit well with C. Welton Gaddy, a liberal Baptist separationist who heads the Interfaith Alliance. Obama’s efforts to organize through churches also come up for some mild criticism here.

This story offers an account of a speech Justice Antonin Scalia gave at this event. Here are some snippets:

"The bottom line is that the Catholic faith seems to me to have little effect on my work as a judge," he declared.

***

"Just as there is no ’Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger," he said to a murmur of laughter, "I am hard-pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic."

Nonetheless, he continued, his Catholic faith obliges him to abide by two "commands" in his life and his work as a judge.

" ’Be thou perfect as thy heavenly Father is perfect.’ And ’Thou shalt not lie,’ " he said.

Those principles, he said, call him to be a strict constructionist of the law, one who does not "distort prior cases" or the Constitution in order to assert that certain rights are guaranteed under law.

Our friend Jim Stoner was also on the conference program. If he has a take, I’d love to hear it.

Update: MOJ’s Rob Vischer wonders about this, and calls our attention to this paper on prudence and judging for a more extended treatment of Justice Scalia’s similar remarks in the past. Might this be an example of Scalia’s adherence to a kind of natural law that informs his judging--not, I hasten to add, the attribution of a natural law background to the Constitution (a la Justice Thomas), but rather an assertion that judges have universal obligations?

Update #2 Rick Garnett parses Scalia:

To be a Catholic judge -- and Justice Scalia is, whether he likes it or not, a "Catholic judge" in this sense -- is to be a judge in the way a Catholic, like everyone else, should be a judge: To take seriously one’s obligation to decide impartially, to submit to the rule of law, rather than one’s own preferences, and to have an appropriate humility about the task one is charged to perform. Obviously, this is not a distinctively Catholic way of judging....

This is the kind of information people need to help them combat breast cancer. But Dr. Miriam Grossman, M.D. points out that there is a strong reluctance to report it. I knew that having babies and nursing them was one good way to reduce your risk of getting breast cancer (and, if you think about it, it’s very logical or even teleological) but I did not realize the extent to which it was true. According to Dr. Grossman:

Numerous large studies have shown that each birth will reduce your risk by ten percent and each year of nursing by at least four percent. So if you start your family early, have three kids and nurse them each for two years, you’ve decreased your risk by about 54 percent.

Our friend the Friar notes this post, written by someone who is apparently no friend of religious conservatives. Here’s the conclusion:

At present, let me float two theories about the relevance of the Evangelical constituency in Republican party elections. When they are united, Conservative Protestants are very necessary, but not sufficient, for a victory. And when they are not united, as Rudy Giuliani is wagering, they are far less necessary.

Fair enough, but the question remains for the general election: without this necessary but insufficient bloc, there’s no Republican road to the White House.

It seems to me that more of this kind of article from Jonah Goldberg is what is needed from those of us who are pro-life. Jonah does not get on a high horse and give us a lecture. He explains his thinking on the matter, admits (and in the end, even embraces) his doubts, and--in general--gives us a very clear and very human accounting of his position. Without working at being persuasive, he persuades. What I like most about it is that his points are fresh and down-to-earth. It is time for a fresh and down-to-earth discussion about abortion. The reason so many people shut their ears when the subject of abortion comes up is because the rhetoric is so over-heated on both sides. There are so many who claim to know more than they know and they are so venomous about it. Regular folks rightly cringe (and if it’s talk radio, they change the dial) when the subject comes up. But I suspect they might have a different reaction to Jonah’s piece.

Those who have too much time on their hands might take a look at Principalities and Powers, the outpost of David Innes, a Toronto and Boston College-trained political theorist who also happens to be an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the OPC, this book is a helpful account of its origins in the modernist takeover of Princeton Seminary.

Full disclosure: I remember David as a too-smart-by-half undergrad when I was in my final years at Toronto.

Canada’s loss is America’s gain.

The fast pace of life and the crowds in Southern California have a way of wearing a mid-Westerner down and, if one is not careful, it is hard to see much good in it. But my son, with his devotion to the Cleveland Indians, reminds me of at least one good thing: the time difference. We got to watch every minute of those last two wonderful games.

Last night’s performance was not as exciting as Saturday’s 11th inning drubbing . . . but it was great fun to see my home state displayed to the rest of the country and to such good effect. Special kudos should be accorded to The Cleveland Plain Dealer for the hilarious "bug faces" they printed in the paper for people to cut out and wear in the stadium (in memory of the great gnat plague God wrought on the Yankees)! What kind of wonderfully twisted mind comes up with a genius idea like that? That and the ladies dressed in bug costumes handing out bug repellent to the fans (!) . . . that’s the good-natured Ohio humor (and resignation to the fates beyond our control) I miss so much.

Our friends at Power Line note this Novak column which looks at a Gallup analysis I can’t find on the web. (Here’s an earlier version of the same sort of analysis, showing that, as of this summer, RG beat HRC among frequent church attenders--including, most importantly, those who are politically independent.) Novak suggests that the Anybody-But-Rudy social conservative leaders are out of touch with their rank-and-file. Perhaps; for the latter, Anybody-But-Hillary might be the more important consideration.

As I was teaching Plato’s Republic yesterday, we came to the passage in Book I where Socrates tells Glaucon that good men only rule so as to avoid being ruled by someone worse. In a city full of good men, he says, there would be an argument over who had to rule, as everyone would prefer to be benefitted rather than to benefit others.

There are (at least) two implications here. First, we should be suspicious of political ambition: people who actually want political power probably don’t have admirable motives. Second, Plato’s Socrates apparently can’t conceive of a "selfless" or "altruistic" motive. What merely appears to be such is really a manifestation of a sense that one has something better to do for oneself. Philosophy emerges in the Republic as the great competitor for, and antidote to, tawdry and self-seeking political ambition.

Of course, that doesn’t leave room for "politics as a vocation" or calling, something that politicians (of whom we’re rightly suspicious) evoke when they speak about a life devoted to public service.

All of this is a long way of introducing David Brooks’s column about retiring Ohio Congresswoman Deborah Pryce, who clearly didn’t like what she had to do to scrape by with a narrow victory in 2006. Brooks admires her, and others like her, for avoiding the principal occupational hazard of political life:

Politics, as you know, is a tainted profession. Professional politicians cannot serve their country if they do not win their races, and to do that they must grapple with a vast array of forces that try to remold and destroy who they are.

There are consultants who try to turn them into prepackaged clones. There are party whips demanding total loyalty. There is a culture of workaholism that strangles private life and private thinking. There are journalists who define them based on a few ideological labels.

And then there is the soul-destroying act of campaigning itself. Active campaigners are compelled to embrace the ideology of Meism.

They spend their days talking endlessly about Me. When they meet donors, they want to know if they are giving to Me or against Me. When they meet advisers and fellow pols, they want to know, do they support Me or not Me. When they think about strategy, it’s about better ways to present Me. When they craft positions, they want to know, what does this say about Me?>

No normal person can withstand the onslaught of egotism and come out unscathed.

And so there are two kinds of politicians: those who become creatures of the process, and those who, like Pryce, resist and retain the capacity to be appalled by what they must do.

An amazing number gladly surrender. “Public people almost eagerly dehumanize themselves,” Meg Greenfield wrote in “Washington,” her memoir. “They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time, they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person.”

These politicians become denatured pantomimes. They have no thoughts in private that are different from the bromides they utter in public. They confuse public image with real self. They talk to you as an individual the same way they would address a large crowd.

Why would any decent, self-respecting person want to do this? There’s the Socratic motive--not wanting to be ruled by someone worse--however rarely the self-esteem implicit in that view is truly justified. And there’s the calling of public service, which I think is genuine, but of which (as I said) we’re rightly suspicious when politicians talk too much about it.

The always interesting and compelling Kay Hymowitz writes about the globalization of the Single Young Female (SYF) phenomenon. Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Eastern Europe, Japan and--increasingly--even in China. Of course, this has all kinds of demographic, social and political implications. How this transformation will be greeted and felt in each country or region will vary--depending upon what preceded it. Hymowitz has some interesting takes on how it all may play out.

Gary Bauer thinks that religious conservatives ought to keep an open mind about Fred Thompson, who is apparently a work in progress. This earned Bauer a rebuke from Randy Brinson, who, by the way, has been playing footsie with "progressive" Democrats (see also this item, where Brinson appears is lots of good "progressive" company).

Hat tip: Power Line.

It is now being more publicly stated that Israel struck a partly constructed nuclear reactor in Syria last month. Note this paragraph:

Today is the birthday of four fascinating Americans: Dwight David Eisenhower, e.e. cummings, Chuck Yeager, and Albert Nock (author of A SUPERFLUOUS MAN). In my opinion, three of these men remain underrated, but one is overrated. To stay out of trouble and keep you guessing, I won’t actually name names.

Fred Barnes offers Rudy Giuliani a version of "safe, legal, and rare" to say to "Values Voters."

I fully accept the fact that the Republican party is a pro-life party. And though my personal view is different, I will make no effort whatsoever to change the party’s stance and I will oppose any attempt by others to do so. If elected president, I pledge to do nothing--either by executive order or by signing legislation--that would increase the number of abortions in America or make abortions easier to obtain. And I will speak out as president to discourage anyone from having an abortion. I further pledge that if reasonable legislation reaches my desk to reduce the number of abortions, I will sign the legislation or let it become law without my signature. And my administration will defend that legislation in the courts if necessary.

I don’t think that’s enough to distinguish him from HRC, who could say much the same thing (after the first couple of sentences, of course). Barnes cites this Rasmussen report to the effect that (right now, more than a year out) 27% of Republican voters would vote for a third-party candidate rather than RG, even against HRC. And he notes:

If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee against Giuliani, that will create a dilemma for social conservatives--but not as much of one as the Giuliani camp might think. Social conservatives won’t vote for Clinton, who they see as intensely pro-abortion. "ABC, anybody but Clinton, is not enough to attract social conservatives" to vote for Giuliani, [FRC’s Tony] Perkins insists.

This is particularly true of young evangelical Christians. They tend to be independents who vote for Republican candidates because they’re anti-abortion. A pro-choice Republican would have little appeal to them, even as the lesser of two evils. "It’s not enough to scare them with Hillary," says [Gary] Bauer.