Once again Matthew Continetti is using his considerable writerly talent to laud Sarah Palin, the Alaska politician who resigned her governorship to focus on cable news appearances and paid speaking gigs. Daniel Larison ably explains why Mr. Continetti’s commentary on the foreign policy elements in her speech are an embarrassment to a man of his intelligence.

I’ll therefore focus my commentary elsewhere, and in doing so, I must admit that he gets this exactly right:

Sarah Palin’s speech to the Tea Party convention in Nashville showcased all of the former Alaska governor’s strengths. She was confident, funny, down-to-earth, at times emotional–and she took a scalpel to the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

Read that passage carefully, and you’ll see that Mr. Continetti acknowledges, whether slyly or inadvertently, that Ms. Palin’s strengths are limited to confidence, humor, down-to-earthiness, and an ability to attack the opposition party. Conspicuously missing from her list of strengths are intelligence, prudence, foreign policy experience, self-awareness, impressive achievements, patience, perseverance, integrity, intellectual honesty, and rhetorical precision.

Normally intelligent writers refrain from touting politicians who lack these qualities, but not Mr. Continetti, who continues to marshal his considerable talent in Ms. Palin’s service. The second paragraph in his piece is a small example of how far he is willing to go as her sycophant:

The timing of the speech was also significant. Palin used the talk, broadcast live on Fox News Channel and C-SPAN, to respond to the president’s State of the Union address from last week. Palin’s mention that today is Ronald Reagan’s birthday positioned her squarely among his heiresses.

So talented is Mr. Continetti that I almost read right past that without pausing, but wait a minute — can politicians now position themselves as heir or heiress to Ronald Reagan, the political figure most beloved of conservatives, merely by mentioning his birthday? Perhaps Ms. Palin can also give speeches on the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, F.A. Hayek and Winston Churchill, positioning herself as their heiresses too. “The media are playing into Palin’s hands,” Mr. Continetti writes. “They’ve used her celebrity as an excuse to cover her relentlessly even though she holds no office–and yet the attention helps her communicate to her supporters and reach out to audiences who may be giving her a second thought.” It is truly jaw-dropping to see Mr. Continetti of all people slag the media for covering the former governor relentlessly despite the fact that she holds no office.

In my latest piece at The Daily Beast, I excoriate the Obama Administration for its contention that it possesses the power to kill American citizens if they are determined by unknown persons in the executive branch to be imminent threats to the United States or its interests. The whole piece can be found here, and it includes links to pieces by Dana Priest, Eli Lake, and Glenn Greenwald, three talented journalists to whom I’m indebted on this story.

Frankly, I am flabbergasted that the practice is as uncontroversial as it seems to be. Over the weekend, I Tweeted back and forth on the subject with Jon Henke, a razor sharp libertarian whose thinking and writing I am always eager to consume. He argued that this is an inherently difficult subject because there are a lot of “problems, subjective judgments and gray areas” at play. I agree to a point. Obviously I don’t think that an American citizen squaring off against the United States Marines on a battlefield need be arrested. So does a heavily armed terrorist cell holed up in a Baghdad apartment occupy a war zone? What if they’re holed up in a Hamburg apartment? An apartment in Charleston, South Carolina?

But I cannot believe that blurring lines makes it constitutionally permissible to assassinate citizens who aren’t on a battlefield, or sitting armed in an apartment that serves as the equivalent.

As Mr. Greenwald puts it:

The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

In my piece in The Daily Beast, I argue the following: “That this power helps us to eliminate a few dangerous men in the short term hardly justifies the imprudent folly of indulging an unchecked power so extreme it can only end in corruption.” I stand by this position. How many Americans can there possibly be who are a) terrorists who pose an imminent threat; b) impervious to being captured alive; c) capable of being killed.

But even if you believe that our situation is so dire that American citizens must be killed without having been charged, tried and convicted of anything, shouldn’t you at the very least want this extraordinary, unprecedented power checked by someone in another branch of government? What is the counterargument against that added safety? If these killings are actually free from abuses, surely the president possesses ample evidence that the person targeted actually is a terrorist who poses a grave threat. Is it too much to ask that a three judge panel agrees? And that Congress reviews all killings periodically? Shouldn’t the folks at The Claremont Institute, who champion the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, be arguing that those men would’ve made sure to build checks against such a significant power into other branches of the government?

The balance of my piece is here. As always, I’m eager to hear critiques, and especially curious to hear the argument against oversight from those who insist that this is a necessary practice. Takeaway lesson: no one who rises to the presidency can be trusted to limit himself to powers afforded his office by the Constitution properly understood.

Pleased as I am to be The Weekly Standard’s designated foil for Roissy in DC, I can’t help but quibble with how the talented Charlotte Allen puts this in her enjoyable but flawed argument about modern dating, sex, and marriage:

Earlier that year Roissy got into an online contretemps with Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent guest-blogger for Andrew Sullivan, over the “neg,” a pickup artist tactic that involves teasing an especially attractive woman about her looks instead of complimenting them, on the theory that she probably gets so many compliments that she brushes them off. It’s an updated version of Lord Chesterfield’s dictum to his son that “a decided and conscious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to her beauty only as her due, but wants to shine and to be considered on the side of her understanding.” Friedersdorf, however, declared that the negger’s intention “is to reduce her self-esteem, or even worse to play on her insecurities with the knowledge that some women react to that technique by having sex or hooking up as a coping mechanism.” Roissy responded by making fun of Friedersdorf’s name.

In the Roissy approach, the neg isn’t reserved exclusively for “especially attractive” women. It is a standard ploy used during average pickup attempts. Furthermore, the neg isn’t an updated version of Lord Chesterfield’s dictum! The technique doesn’t consider a woman “on the side of her understanding.” It assumes that regardless of the woman’s intellect, she’ll react to a put down in a manner favorable to the pursuer. Insofar as she is given credit for possessing intelligence at all, it is deemed a non-factor. And I doubt Roissy himself would disagree with my observation that those who use the technique are deliberately trying to reduce the self-esteem of their targets — he talks of taking them off their pedestals — or that “pickup artists” are sometimes coached to target negs at what they perceive to be the particular insecurities of their targets.

My larger objection to Ms. Allen’s piece is how readily she accepts the pseudo-science of the pickup artist community. For example:

If it all sounds cheesy, tedious, manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it’s because it is. But here’s the rub: This stuff works. If you think men who peacock look ridiculous and unmanly, click onto the photo-website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, where spectacular-looking babes hang on the pecs of preening rednecks and “Jersey Shore”-style guidos sporting chest-baring shirts and product-stiffened fauxhawks. Watch the video “Learn Enough Guitar to Get Laid” on YouTube (three chords, max). In June 2005, Craig Malisow, a reporter for the Houston Press, trailed 24-year-old Bashev, a Bulgarian-born graduate student in engineering at Rice University and self-styled pickup expert, to a series of bars and clubs in Houston. Bashev had no intention of telling the 20-something HBs he met that his day job consisted of working with multivariable calculus. Instead he pointed to his shoes and informed them that he was a “foot model.” Then he launched into his canned opener: Did they think reality shows were “really real”? Sure, two groups of females on whom Bashev tried that line rolled their eyes and smirked, but three bars (and the same routine) later, he was relaxing in a lounge chair reading a shapely brunette’s palm (chick crack plus “kino,” a Mystery-ism that refers to getting a woman to crave your touch), and soon enough “her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists,” Malisow observed. Within minutes, Bashev had not only number-closed but gotten a date for the following Wednesday.

That’s her proof that “this stuff works”: a guy approaches several groups of women at multiple bars, strikes out time after time, and eventually finds someone willing to give him a phone number and a first date. Is anyone else underwhelmed? Show me the control group where a man utterly unaware of the pickup artists spends a night doggedly approaching women at multiple bars. I’ll bet you he gets a phone number and a date by the end of the night too.

Elsewhere in the piece, Ms. Allen notes that some argue “it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.”

It is an argument she ultimately embraces:

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace.

A declining marriage rate alone is partly evidence for the proposition that beta men and women in today’s sexual marketplace are having more trouble than before “finding and securing long-term mates.” Yet it is the only evidence on offer for a proposition central to the article’s thesis, and the worldviews of numerous men in the pickup artist community.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance. I do not believe that in the Bush administration, the United States was effectively governed by its Constitution. The forms were still there, but the reality wasn’t. Beneath it all, the desire for despotism ran, fueled by the despot’s greatest ally, fear. Fear of foreigners, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of immigrants, fear of the inevitable uncertainties of real reform.

Although I share his dismay at actions taken by the Bush Administration and supported by a frightening number of Americans, I cannot help but think that the assessment he offers here is too dire. Ours is a nation that won a war against the British Empire before its colonies even agreed on a sustainable way to close ranks. Its early years saw the spread of slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and a campaign against Native Americans that approached genocide. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus to win a war that pitted Americans against one another on actual fields of battle. The highest murder rate ever recorded in this country came in San Francisco in the years following the gold rush. That same city was utterly destroyed in an earthquake, home to Chinese laborers who were treated little better than slaves, and was once seized by vigilante businessmen with a private army who informed the mayor that they’d impose marshal law — and did so! Woodrow Wilson’s affronts against civil liberties alone dwarf anything done by the Bush Administration, World War I began a long period when fear of foreigners radically curtailed the ability of newcomers to arrive here, the fear of immigrants seen now is tame compared to all sorts of historical moments, the internment of Japanese Americans most prominent among them, and gays are thankfully more accepted now than at any time in American history. Indeed, they are a generation away from full marriage rights and perhaps months away from the ability to openly serve in the military.

Every obstacle and injustice to American flourishing that I’ve cited required citizens to speak up for positive change. On issues including torture, gays in the military, foreign adventurism, the war on drugs, and the deficit, I share Mr. Sullivan’s concerns, applaud many stances he’s taken, hope for progress, and lament our polity’s inability to adopt more sound public policies.

But we’ve overcome greater challenges than this in the past, the progress this nation has made even in the last couple generations is stunning, and it is flatly incorrect to say that we’ve passed the point of no return for civil, constitutional governance. It’s worth putting things in perspective because it is precisely hyperbolic assertions about how the center cannot hold that pushes nations toward undue panic.

Later in the same post, Mr. Sullivan writes:

…this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses – or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country’s ability to overcome it.

I reject the notion that the United States of America is in a position so dire that it can only be saved by a particularly noble leader. Arguments for that proposition could be made for the tenures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and maybe even FDR. It is notable that even those men never behaved as if that proposition were true, and anyway the challenges we face, however grave, pale in comparison to their burdens. Would anyone trade our challenges today for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II? I wouldn’t even trade places with the Americans who endured the Carter Administration.

Mr. Sullivan concludes:

I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe – because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force, but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.

Among other mistakes, this gives Roger Ailes and Karl Rove far too much credit. Lord knows that their cynical, brazenly dishonest brand of self-aggrandizing propaganda does damage to our society, but these are men who influence a small minority of Americans who obsess about cable news, treat politics like a team sport, and play a minuscule role in the lives of most ordinary Americans. I am not among those who argue that men like this should be ignored, but in exposing their wrongheaded rhetoric and indefensible behavior, we must keep perspective, else they damage America by driving those that oppose them to overreact. There is a strong case to be made that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are dysfunctional in ways that render them incapable of governing well. That is certainly my belief. It is also my contention that reacting to this circumstance by putting all one’s hopes in Barack Obama is an unwise and unnecessary overreaction.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There seems to be some confusion among Barack Obama supporters about why he is less popular now than he was upon winning Election 2008. As someone who wanted him to win that election (I didn’t vote, but only because I never got my CA absentee ballot) but disapproves of his tenure so far, I can at least articulate my own reasoning.

I thought that the Iraq War, the torture of detainees in the War on Terror, the GOP’s unnecessarily bellicose foreign policy rhetoric, and the notion that Governor Sarah Palin is a qualified occupant of the White House all needed to be repudiated in the strongest possible terms. Thus it made sense to support candidate Obama despite disagreeing with much of his domestic agenda.

Since I’ve long thought that President Obama is a temperamentally cautious pragmatist who conforms to existing power structures rather than challenging them, I never bought the rhetoric about “change you can believe in,” but it is nevertheless disappointing to watch a candidate who campaigned against the pernicious influence of special interests submit so utterly to them. Perhaps the financial crisis demanded bailouts and a stimulus package, but it surely also called for prudent structural reforms. I’m utterly unconvinced that those are a priority for the current administration, though I am eager to be proved wrong.

On health care, I don’t object to helping more folks to get insurance — indeed I think that improving the health care system for the worst off among us is worth doing even if it’s all that we do, and I’d happily sign on to this more ambitious plan if we lived in a world sane enough to offer it up as an option. Instead I’m asked to support a plan rife with giveaways for insurance companies, exemptions for unions, lots of dough for a single Midwestern state, and a double-down on the deeply dysfunctional employer based system. I’d prefer piecemeal reform to a massive restructuring that combines the uncertainty of sweeping legislation with preserving most of the status quo’s worst features.

I’m a great fan of Kevin Drum’s blog. His position on health care is defensible enough: a) major legislation that covers lots of presently uninsured people is a good idea; b) getting it through Congress requires holding our noses at the kinds of bribes and giveaways to special interests that are prerequisites for moving big legislation. c) The benefits are here worth the cost. Indeed I cannot entirely fault Congress for approaching major legislation in that fashion. There are powerful structural incentives for them to do so.

On the campaign trail, however, Obama didn’t campaign as an establishment pragmatist. He didn’t say, “Health care reform is important, so I’ll hold my nose, cut deals with a lot of special interests, and get more Americans covered in a very imperfect way.” Nor did he try to communicate that message in more politically palatable language. Instead he made being a change agent the foundation of his appeal. He talked, as they all do, about a broken system in Washington DC, noting that issues like health care reform were too important to be addressed in the same old way. Again, I didn’t particularly believe any of this, but having my cynicism justified isn’t winning President Obama any points.

Perhaps a down economy is the biggest reason that President Obama’s numbers are down, but I cannot help but wonder if his slip isn’t also due to a lie at the heart of his campaign. This man is calculating politico, as comfortable as anyone we’ve got at navigating Washington DC as it exists today. It’s a style of leadership that is perfectly defensible. But he sold himself as an idealistic agent of change whose special contribution would be fixing a broken status quo.

When you’re talking approval ratings, overall impressions like this one are far more important than most specific issues, and Obama supporters who took the man’s rhetoric seriously have reason to feel misled on everything from Gitmo to gay rights to bank bailouts to health care deals cut with industry players to courting special interests generally. That they’d still prefer him to McCain/Palin, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck eventually begins to register as damning with the faint praise that it is. Obama defenders are perfectly within their rights to point out that sane alternatives to the president’s agenda haven’t many GOP champions. But let’s raise the bar a bit. Is there anything President Obama has accomplished that we couldn’t have expected from a President George H.W. Bush or a Bill Clinton?

Exceptional rhetoric + mediocre performance = falling approval ratings.

So it goes.