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Yesterday Chris Hitchens linked to a New Republic article on Iran’s brand of Islam. We have that today.
… The roots of Iran’s current divide to a great extent lie at the turn of the century, when the country’s ayatollahs essentially split into two camps on questions of religion and politics. The first was led by Ayatollah Na’ini, an advocate of what is called the “Quietist” school of Shiism–today best exemplified in the character and behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na’ini, true “Islamic government” could only be established when the twelfth imam returned. Such a government would be the government of God on earth: Its words, deeds, laws, and courts would be absolute and could tolerate no errors. But humans, Na’ini said, were fallible and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task of establishing God’s government. As the pious await the return of the infallible twelfth imam, they must in the interim search for the best form of government. And the form most befitting this period, Na’ini argued, was constitutional democracy. The role of ayatollahs under this arrangement would be to “advise” the rulers and ensure that laws inimical to sharia were not implemented. But it would not be to rule the country themselves.
Opposing Na’ini was an ayatollah named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and the rule of law as inferior alternatives to the divine, eternal, atemporal, nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran and sharia. As Ayatollah Khomeini would declare more than once, his own ideas were nothing but an incarnation of Nuri’s arguments. But for the moment, at least, those ideas were on the defensive. It would be decades before they would reemerge to dominate Iranian politics. …
Bill Kristol thinks the American public does not believe in big-government liberalism.
The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying–okay, maybe not praying–for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.
With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.
But did it? Maybe we’re now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.
The stimulus hasn’t worked. Cap-and-trade and health care reform are in trouble. The can’t-we-all-get-along foreign policy isn’t leading to a more peaceful world. And the administration seems to have no idea what to do about Guantánamo.
Congressional Democrats are nervous. Even Obama’s media base is concerned. …
Jennifer Rubin has answers to the president’s WaPo op-ed.
… The reality is that the president’s central task — getting the economy back on track — is not going well. So long as the public sees a worsening economic picture and a president busy on items unrelated to the task at hand (saving and creating those jobs) the president is not likely to foil the criticism with a disingenuous op-ed column or two. People are looking for results, precisely what the president has not produced.
Ed Morrissey too.
When a candidate offers platitudes on the stump and avoids specifics, most people consider it smart politics — keeping options open and offending few. When a President continues to offer the same platitudes after more than five months in office and in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, it becomes clear that the Oval Office has nothing but platitudes to offer. In practically a rerun of Saturday’s weekly radio address, Barack Obama wastes space in the Washington Post by offering a campaign speech and a cheerleader rally for a failed stimulus bill …
Robert Samuelson says Americans are going to have to decide how much government they want.
The question that President Obama ought to be asking—that we all should be asking—is this: how big a government do we want? Without any-one much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
We face an unprecedented collision between Americans’ desire for more government services and their almost equal unwillingness to be taxed. The conflict is obscured and deferred by today’s depressed economy, which has given license to all manner of emergency programs, but its dimensions cannot be doubted. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (“The Long-Term Budget Outlook”) makes that crystal-clear. The easiest way to measure the size of government is to compare the federal budget with the overall economy, or gross domestic product (GDP). The CBO’s estimates are daunting. …
Gawker.com says the press corps is getting cozy with the prez.
Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend. Why didn’t you know that? Because they were sworn to secrecy.
We reported yesterday that Politico’s Mike Allen was spotted milling about as a guest at the White House’s “backyard bash” by the pool reporter, who was allowed into the event for 40 minutes and kept in a pen before being ushered out. When Allen quoted from the pool report in his Playbook column the next day, he deleted a reference to his own name and didn’t bother to tell his readers that he was actually at the party. …
Rick Newcombe, head of Creator’s Syndicate, gives us a peek into what it’s like to do business in LA.
If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It’s no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing.
I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.
But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place. …
Yesterday Chris Hitchens linked to a New Republic article on Iran’s brand of Islam. We have that today.
… The roots of Iran’s current divide to a great extent lie at the turn of the century, when the country’s ayatollahs essentially split into two camps on questions of religion and politics. The first was led by Ayatollah Na’ini, an advocate of what is called the “Quietist” school of Shiism–today best exemplified in the character and behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na’ini, true “Islamic government” could only be established when the twelfth imam returned. Such a government would be the government of God on earth: Its words, deeds, laws, and courts would be absolute and could tolerate no errors. But humans, Na’ini said, were fallible and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task of establishing God’s government. As the pious await the return of the infallible twelfth imam, they must in the interim search for the best form of government. And the form most befitting this period, Na’ini argued, was constitutional democracy. The role of ayatollahs under this arrangement would be to “advise” the rulers and ensure that laws inimical to sharia were not implemented. But it would not be to rule the country themselves.
Opposing Na’ini was an ayatollah named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and the rule of law as inferior alternatives to the divine, eternal, atemporal, nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran and sharia. As Ayatollah Khomeini would declare more than once, his own ideas were nothing but an incarnation of Nuri’s arguments. But for the moment, at least, those ideas were on the defensive. It would be decades before they would reemerge to dominate Iranian politics. …
Bill Kristol thinks the American public does not believe in big-government liberalism.
The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying–okay, maybe not praying–for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.
With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.
But did it? Maybe we’re now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.
The stimulus hasn’t worked. Cap-and-trade and health care reform are in trouble. The can’t-we-all-get-along foreign policy isn’t leading to a more peaceful world. And the administration seems to have no idea what to do about Guantánamo.
Congressional Democrats are nervous. E ven Obama’s media base is concerned. …
Jennifer Rubin has answers to the president’s WaPo op-ed.
… The reality is that the president’s central task — getting the economy back on track — is not going well. So long as the public sees a worsening economic picture and a president busy on items unrelated to the task at hand (saving and creating those jobs) the president is not likely to foil the criticism with a disingenuous op-ed column or two. People are looking for results, precisely what the president has not produced.
Ed Morrissey too.
When a candidate offers platitudes on the stump and avoids specifics, most people consider it smart politics — keeping options open and offending few. When a President continues to offer the same platitudes after more than five months in office and in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, it becomes clear that the Oval Office has nothing but platitudes to offer. In practically a rerun of Saturday’s weekly radio address, Barack Obama wastes space in the Washington Post by offering a campaign speech and a cheerleader rally for a failed stimulus bill …
Robert Samuelson says Americans are going to have to decide how much government they want.
The question that President Obama ought to be asking—that we all should be asking—is this: how big a government do we want? Without any-one much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
We face an unprecedented collision between Americans’ desire for more government services and their almost equal unwillingness to be taxed. The conflict is obscured and deferred by today’s depressed economy, which has given license to all manner of emergency programs, but its dimensions cannot be doubted. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (“The Long-Term Budget Outlook”) makes that crystal-clear. The easiest way to measure the size of government is to compare the federal budget with the overall economy, or gross domestic product (GDP). The CBO’s estimates are daunting. …
Gawker.com says the press corps is getting cozy with the prez.
Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend. Why didn’t you know that? Because they were sworn to secrecy.
We reported yesterday that Politico’s Mike Allen was spotted milling about as a guest at the White House’s “backyard bash” by the pool reporter, who was allowed into the event for 40 minutes and kept in a pen before being ushered out. When Allen quoted from the pool report in his Playbook column the next day, he deleted a reference to his own name and didn’t bother to tell his readers that he was actually at the party. …
Rick Newcombe, head of Creator’s Syndicate, gives us a peek into what it’s like to do business in LA.
If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It’s no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing.
I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.
But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place. ..