Newt's Defining Foment

Robert Wright recalls Newt Gingrich's 2010 demagoguery about Muslims and declaration of war on the First Amendment:

Gingrich said they shouldn't be able to build a mosque within a few blocks of the World Trade Center site just as "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington." Surely Gingrich is smart enough to see the problem with this analogy. (Hint: The 9/11 attacks were organized by a terrorist group called al Qaeda, not by a religion called Islam.) But he knows that people who hate Muslims won't fuss over details--and if the Nazi comparison amps up their hatred, so much the better for the politician who champions their cause.

Time For A Hard Liberalism

As Islamist parties coalesce into a parliamentary majority in Egypt, Leon Wieseltier urges democracy's real adherents in the world to pay close attention:

The Islamists do not agree that a codification of rights is a condition of democratic life, and regard it instead as an outcome of democratic life that they wish to avoid. But rights are prior or they are not real. So a hard liberalism is needed now, respectful but suspicious, coldly resolute, undeceived by the bliss of passing solidarity, aware that the party of the open society has too often assisted in its own demise.

Space Clipper...

...is what a majority of Nixon aides polled wanted to call NASA's new adventure instead of "space shuttle," which one said connoted "second class travel."

Bob Felt Strongly

A top FBI official, Mark Felt gave law enforcement secrets to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and helped destroy Richard Nixon's presidency. One authority, Ivan Greenberg, recently called it a coup, asserting that at least three others at the FBI were involved. Did Felt, who died in 2008, want to save his country from White House abuses or to get back at Nixon for passing him over for J. Edgar Hoover's job as FBI director? Historian and journalist Max Holland promises to answer the question in his new book, Leak, due in March. Thanks to Max posting on Facebook, here's an excerpt from the jacket copy:

Holland critiques all the theories of Felt’s motivation that have circulated over the years, including notions that Felt had been genuinely upset by White House law-breaking or had tried to defend and insulate the FBI from the machinations of President Nixon and his Watergate henchmen. And, while acknowledging that Woodward finally disowned the “principled whistleblower” image of Felt in The Secret Man, Holland shows why that famed journalist’s latest explanation still falls short of the truth.

Holland showcases the many twists and turns to Felt’s story that are not widely known, revealing not a selfless official acting out of altruistic patriotism, but rather a career bureaucrat with his own very private agenda.

While Woodward kept the secret for a generation, Nixon and his aides always suspected it was Felt. In 2009 Holland promised to reveal the identity of the person who tipped off the White House. Presumably that nugget will be in Leak.

In an April 2008 post, I plotted the Felt connection between the Nixon and Obama eras:

If everyone knows that William Ayers and his comrades in the Weather Underground were planning to set bombs to murder innocent people, why didn’t they do time?

Because the investigation against them was muffed thanks to the illegal activities of the Washington Post‘s favorite Watergate answer man himself, Mark Felt — aka Deep Throat.

In 1972-73, FBI official Felt and his colleague Edward S. Miller authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of Weather Underground members. When the black bag jobs became public, the federal government decided it couldn’t prosecute the alleged terrorists. Indicted during the Carter Administration, Felt and Miller were tried in 1980 in Washington. Ever the patriot, former President Nixon voluntarily testified on the defendants’ behalf, but they were convicted anyway and pardoned by President Reagan in March 1981.

Mr. Nixon’s gesture was especially gracious in view of his suspicions in the early 1970s that Felt had been the Post‘s famous source. When J. Edgar Hoover died, Felt had hoped to be named FBI director, but Mr. Nixon passed him over, whereupon the author of the FBI’s illegal campaign against the Weathermen developed a more finely-tuned sense of righteousness when it came to White House efforts to limit the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Behind the back of his rival and boss, acting director L. Patrick Gray, Felt used the press to undermine Mr. Nixon by dishing confidential information to Bob Woodward. He and the Post kept the secret of his identity and motives until 2005.

Now we know the truth. If it hadn’t been for Mark Felt, President Nixon might have finished his second term, and William Ayers might have gone to jail.

A Double-Barrelled Canonade

My best clergy buds have been writing up a storm this Christmas. First it was the Rev. Canon Greg Larkin in the LA Times, keeping Frank McCourt out of baseball. The Rev. Canon Bob Gaestel showed up in the Wall Street Journal keeping Christ in Christmas, even on Sunday. You go, Fathers!

The Dignity Of Certain Human Lives

My Diocese of Los Angeles bud the Rev. Susan Russell on the Santorum surge:

This week I had sad news from two long time friends. One was a clergy colleague who lost his wife of 55 years to a long illness on New Year's Eve. The other was an [Episcopal Church Women] friend who lost her partner of 23 years on Christmas Day.

Both are now coping with their own grief and loss while planning services to celebrate the lives of their beloveds as they claim the resurrection promise that in death life is changed -- not ended -- and the sure and certain promise that God's love never ends.

And one of them is also having to deal with frozen assets in bank accounts while trying to pay funeral expenses; "proving" her next-of-kin status in order to carry out the last wishes of her beloved; facing the financial challenge of no "standing" in terms of Social Security survivor's benefits.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Republican presidential poster child for political homophobia Rick Santorum proclaims: "Ask me what motivates me, it's been the dignity of every human life."

Unless it's a gay or lesbian life. In which case, he argues that gay relationships “destabilize” society, wouldn’t offer any legal protections to gay relationships and has pledged to annul all same-sex marriages if elected president.

"Are You Tired Of Me Darling"

Answer only with your eyes. Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, and Iris DeMent. Hat tip to No Depression.

Santorum: Harsher Than Netanyahu

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for this exchange about Israel and the Palestinians between Rick Santorum and an outgunned if well-meaning young interlocutor. Santorum makes a manifest destiny argument: Israel won the West Bank (in a war neither man dates correctly) and gets to keep it. Watch this and you'll be whispering lines to the kid: Unlike the U.S. with Texas and New Mexico, Israel has never sought to annex the West Bank. Or try this: What good is it when someone wanting to be president takes a harsher view than Netanyahu? Or: Saying "There's no Palestinian" is ignorant, cruel, and dangerous. Or even: Hey, Rick, you argue like a teenager in a dormitory.

Far-Right Statist Warmonger?

Andrew Sullivan goes to work on Rick Santorum.

Or Working-Class Hero?

"The Economist" questions whether Rick Santorum's just another not-Mitt:

David Brooks had a widely read op-ed yesterday praising the former senator's concern for the working class: "I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system." Ross Douthat concurs that Mr Santorum has his strengths: "He has deep blue-collar roots, a more substantial legislative record than many of his rivals, and his campaign has been the only one to even try to hit the right-wing communitarian notes that Mike Huckabee struck so effectively four years ago." And as Dave Weigel notes, Rick Santorum spent $1.65 for every vote he received in the caucus; Rick Perry spent $817. That would seem to suggest that Iowa voters were drawn to Mr Santorum's particular message, despite the shoestring budget.