The case for healthcare reform, in a nutshell

From Sullivan, what I think, in the end, is the single most persuasive argument for healthcare reform that one can make to a conservative:

One final thing: most Americans do not want people dying in the streets.

If you have guaranteed emergency room care for the uninsured at public expense, you have already effectively socialized medicine. It makes no sense not to bring these people into the insurance system, and to offer less expensive, long-term preventive healthcare.

That, to me, is it right there. We already socialize an ER visit for someone who can't pay--a free market, in that case, would just be letting the person die. And that's unacceptable to us. But by the time you're socializing the ER visit, which is very costly, it makes more sense to let that person have access to the much less expensive routine care that can prevent that costly ER visit in the first place.

We create our own reality

Sullivan distills the danger of a government that uses torture to extract "information":

And so Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was first captured by the US and tortured by CIA surrogates in an Egyptian cell. Apparently, they beat him and put him in a coffin for 17 hours as a mock-burial. To end the severe mental and physical suffering, he confessed that Saddam had trained al Qaeda terrorists in deploying WMDs. This evidence was then cited by Colin Powell as part of the rationale for going to war in Iraq. Bingo! And we wonder why torture is such a temptation. Which politician wouldn't want to be able to manufacture evidence to support what he wants to do anyway?

In a strange way, the torture program was the logical--if horribly unethical and illiberal--extension of the post-modernization of truth that was movement Conservatism's modus operandi. They created their own shadow version of every truth-seeking institution that didn't produce the results they desired: so you had think tanks instead of academia, Fox News instead of the mainstream media establishment, Alberto Gonzales instead of an independent Justice Department, a political hack going through scientific reports on global warming with a red pen.

The torture program was in the same mold: the traditional institutions and methods weren't generating the right results, and so they created their own alternative institutions and methods on the fly--Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, torture--justifying all of it, I'm sure, with the sincere belief that the old institutions had been long ago compromised by Liberals and their anachronistic, "pre-9/11" mindset.

"We are governed by fools"

John Derbyshire at the conservative blog site The Corner laments:

There are some spectacles that are at once tragic and farcical. One such has been the sight of Georgian troops scuttling back from assisting us in whatever it is we imagine we are doing in Iraq, to help defend their homeland, while Condoleezza Rice stamps her foot, George W. Bush watches a basketball game, and John McCain says that he will do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

We are governed by fools. At least Putin knows what he wants, and how to get it. If only freedom had such leaders!

Always interesting to watch grandiose internecine battles being played out between the different elements of the conservative camp. I think it's a testament to the Bush administration's sheer political power in the early 2000s that they were able to steer the nation onto the radical and reckless course of world-domination-for-democracy over the objections of liberals and a large swath of conservatives (the so-called "foreign policy realists" of the George H.W. school).

A war criminal, according to some

Kind of striking when you realize this is coming not from some MoveOn/Kos type, but a conservative:

Some of the least superficially awful techniques - such as the Gestapo-perfected "stress positions" and "hypothermia" - can actually be the worst in terms of suffering. There is no doubt at this point that the president of the United States is a war criminal. The only question is whether he will ever be brought to justice.

Well, more a libertarian, really. And an Obama-supporting one, at that. So maybe not all that striking.

Conservatism, Bush, and Obama from the--er--gay HIV-positive conservative libertarian Catholic perspective

Andrew Sullivan's views of conservatism, Bush, and Obama in a nutshell:

Conservatism, at its core, is about the frailty of human goodness, the limits of human knowledge, the virtue of self-doubt when that is required, restraint on government executive power, and the correction and admission of error when necessary. What has happened to conservatism under Bush is that it has become a messianic, ruthless, totally certain imposition of ideology (fused even more lethally with theology). Obama is not the answer to this conservative predicament. He is a "progressive" liberal - but his liberalism contains more conservative elements of reason and prudence and restraint than the current Republican party.

I don't think the word "conservative" conjures up a rational and skeptical worldview in the heads of very many Americans, liberal or conservative--which is too bad. We'd all be a lot better off if it did.