Conservative Cool

What young person would be a conservative in Britain? That is the question that Nigel Farndale asks in the Daily Telegraph.
The answer, unfortunately, is nobody. The problem is the David Starkey test.

Dr Starkey once said that, as a young man, he felt more embarrassed about coming out as a Conservative than he did about coming out as a homosexual.

Hmm. And that is just the half of it. Your average impressionable Brit is deeply affected by his favorite rock stars and comedians. One leading comedian asserts on his website that he is “committed to non-violence and is an active campaigner for CND and the Campaign Against Arms Trade.” Thank goodness.

But here in the United States things are a little different. There is a feeling—tell me if you have felt it too—that there is something risky, something edgy, something transgressive about being a conservative. It must help that we have a genuine conservative movement with campus chapters and all. And then there are the conservative rites of passage, being hauled before the diversity Star Chamber for conducting a diversity bake sale, and having the conservative speakers you bring to campus heckled by the Angry Left.

If you are a conformist, a girl for instance, you listen with rapt attention to your professors railing away against the evil Bush and the awful Halliburton. If you are a guy, you just cannot be a man and just let yourself be covered in ordure by some pimply lefty.

But how can we help our Brit fellow travelers get some backbone?

Irish to Observe Easter Rising: Brits Keep Stiff Upper Lip

For the first time since 1969 the Irish are going to observe the Easter Rising of 1916 with a military parad. They will celebrate the Easter Sunday when Irish patriots (or terrorists) rose in rebellion against the Brits and seized the General Post Office. The result was the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and independence from Britain for the Irish after centuries of oppression.

In the Daily Telegraph Tom Peterkin reports that

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister, has said that the parade is an opportunity to build on the Easter Rising's legacy and pay tribute to those who built the republic.

and also identify his Fianna Fail party with Irish nationalism, as opposed to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, which has reached 10 percent popularity in Ireland.

But some say that it “will romanticise the violent rebellion used by the Provisional IRA.”

Back in Britland a Telegraph editorial about the event keeps a stiff upper lip and commends the Irish.

We hope the weather holds, and the participants enjoy themselves. As we often observe in the context of Orange marches, the ideal ought to be of a society where such parades can happen uncontroversially.

Then comes the little dig.

We hope that Unionist politicians will attend the ceremony in future years; and, by the same token, that Northern Ireland's republicans will turn out to applaud their Orange neighbours' parades.

The parade will feature a march past by the Irish Defence Forces so presumably there won’t be a flap over whether the Irish gays and lesbians get to demonstrate their Irish pride.

Pope Walks Way of the Cross

Back in 2003 the Slovakian government signed an agreement with the Catholic Church “to let doctors and health-care workers in Catholic hospitals decline to participate in abortions as a matter of conscience.” Let no good deed remain unpunished. This year “the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights... ruled Slovakia in violation of its EU 'obligations,'” according to Daniel Henninger. Tolerant, those Euro-secularists, aren’t they?

It is evident that Pope Benedict XVI understands the stakes. According to George Weigel, biographer of Pope John-Paul II,

"Ratzinger has been thinking about Europe for 25 years," Mr. Weigel told me. "He needs to address the problem of a Europe in which consciences are being coerced by transnational institutions. This is the cash-out of what he means by the dictatorship of relativism. It's a real issue with real world consequences."

Can the Church hope to make headway against the fierce secularism of Europe? Henninger thinks he may. In 2004 as Cardinal Ratzinger he had a debate with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the pope, if you like, of Euro-secularism, and Habermas emerged from the dialog to create

a mini-sensation by suggesting that religious communities deserve respect for having "preserved intact something which has elsewhere been lost."

In Italy there has been a renewal of interest in the monastic life among educated young women.

Today Benedict XVI lead the Way of the Cross procession in Rome. Opening with a prayer, Benedict said Jesus' suffering "is the whole of human history, a history where the good are humiliated, the meek assaulted, the honest crushed, and the pure of heart roundly mocked."

On Sunday he will celebrate Christ’s resurrection for the first time as pope.

Meaning of the Passion

What is the meaning of Christ’s Passion? What does it mean when God sacrifices his Son to show that He loves the world? And what are we trying to say when we observe the curious events that took place on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago?

In the London Times Gerard Baker reminds us of the human at the center of the Passion: St. Peter.

It is Peter who most truly compels our attention as the flawed human in the narrative: not the good or evil figure sleepwalking his way towards fate, but the man with choices who can’t get them right; who oscillates between the inner angel and the demands of the flesh.

First he tells Jesus that he’s going to be right there with Him, rashly attacking one of the soldiers sent to arrest Him. Then a day later, he is busily denying all knowledge of Him. It is right after Peter’s denial in Bach’s Matthew Passion that the alto sings the haunting (Win) (Real), Erbarme dich, Mein Gott: Have mercy, O God.

Yet it is the flawed St. Peter who becomes the official founder of the Church, the guy who talks the talk but can’t quite walk the walk the walk.

Is the Squeeze on for al Sadr?

What is really going on in Iraq these days? Are things really in an impasse as the Iraqis fail to come up with a new government? Or is something going on under the blanket?

Austin Bay thinks that they may be putting the squeeze on Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi militia. And Shia Ayatollah Sistani may be at the center of it.

Wishful thinking? Who knows? But let us give the Iraqis credit for being more than just American stooges. After all, the translation of “national rescue coalition” is “everyone gets a share of the loot.”

Back in August 2004 Sadr thought he was going to put the interim government out of business by taking over the mosque in Najaf. Instead the US forces mauled his fighters, the inhabitants of Najaf welcomes the US as liberators, and Sistani negotiated a face-saving withdrawal for Sadr and his fighters.

in the January elections Sadr supporters won three dozen seats in the Iraqi parliament, and he obviously felt he was going to be a king-maker in the new government.

But that status appears to be short-lived. One indicator is the March 26 attack by Iraqi commandos on a Mahdi militia facility in Baghdad. The predictable media outrage lasted less than a week -- and Iraq's Interior Ministry pointed out it had acted to stop sectarian vigilantes. Sadr lost "street face" to the Interior Ministry -- and it appears Sadr's political position has subsequently deteriorated.

And yes, are our MSM dumb or something? Couldn’t they see what was going down when the Iraqi special forces took out Sadr’s pals and afterwards when he squawked like a banshee and staged his fake demonstrations?

Or as Mike Wallace might have said in his heyday: You mean to say that the Iraqi army is now “stood up” enough so it could be used to teach Sadr and his militia a lesson?

The truth is, of course, that we ordinary mortals don’t have a clue what is going on in Iraq behind the curtains.

Fighting Against Economic Reality

At bankrupt Delta Air Lines union pilots who earn an average of about $150,000 a year are resisting 18 percent wage cuts to keep the airline flying. In France students riot in the street to protest the idea of postponing for two years the French guarantee of lifetime employment. In Italy Prime Minister Berlesconi is voted out of office (just) after failing to pass legislation in his five year period in office that would make Italy’s labor market for flexible and Italy more competitive. And, let us not forget the German electorate that nearly died of fright last fall when an advisor to candidate Angela Merkel proposed tax rate cuts.

Now George Will writes about the agonies of General Motors, a corporation that pays $100,000 to $130,000 a year to keep 14,700 laid-off workers in a “Job Bank.” And the United Auto Workers union is threatening a crippling strike if bankrupt Delphi gets the bankruptcy court to cut wages of its members.

What goes up comes back down, especially in the marketplace. But the welfare state is founded on the notion that a government can legislate economic relations and that people should never have to suffer unemployment or reduction in wages.

The beauty of the market system is that is spreads risk around. The danger of the political system is that it concentrates risk, and it encourages people to resort to political power to avoid losses and setbacks.

The history of the industrial era teaches us that it is essential for the market to adjust to new conditions every day. If you try to resist economic change you just put it off, so that the eventual change becomes wrenching, or even catastrophic.

But some people never learn.

Enough of the Self-Servers on Iraq

Should we have sent more troops to Iraq? Did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld criminally omit to plan for the Iraq occupation? Right now, observes Victor Davis Hanson there is a plague of retired senior officers plugging books on TV. And they

offer sharp interviews about our supposed strategic and operational blunders in Iraq — imperial hubris, too few troops, wrong war, wrong place, and other assorted lapses.

Imagine if we had talking heads second-guessing every action in World War II!

Then there is Iran, for which there are three “bad” options, and

on which talking heads can blather about the dangers of "preemption," but without either responsibility for, or maturity in, advocating a viable alternative.

In Iraq we might have sent more troops. But more troops doesn’t necessarily mean a better outcome. “More troops may have facilitated Iraqization — or, in the style of Vietnam, created perpetual dependency.” Who knows?

What we need, then, are not more self-appointed ethicists, but far more humility and recognition that in this war nothing is easy. Choices have been made, and remain to be made, between the not very good and the very, very bad. Most importantly, so far, none of our mistakes has been unprecedented, fatal to our cause, or impossible to correct.

And in any endeavor, let us never forget, there are always going to be mistakes. It comes with the territory, as Dan Rather used to say.

It’s easy to play the game of outrage politics, and dish out blame on national TV. But in the real world people have to make decisions based on the information they have at the time. After they have made the decision the facts on the ground change, and it turns out that many of the decisions were wrong.

It may be, for instance, that the whole Islamo-fascist eruption is an ephemeral flash in the pan that will soon fade away. Or it may turn out to be a titanic clash of civilizations.

If you were the leader of the United States, the nation preeminent in the world for the idea and the vision of a global commonwealth of democratic capitalism, what should you do? Take Islamism seriously as a force to be stopped, or just ignore it?