I followed the crowds to RFK Stadium last night to see Washington’s new obsession, the Nationals, play my Atlanta Braves. It was a good game (and I didn’t really mind the Nats winning), if you like old-fashioned, pre-1990s baseball where a couple of key double plays, rather than six or seven home runs, decide the thing. And RFK, for all its decrepitude, felt right, with a bit less of the constant artificial noise and commercialism that spoiled my last trip to Camden Yards.The seats were great, except for the fact that they landed me in a nest of Young Republican Hill Staffers, who spent most of the evening networking and showing off their new spring wardrobes instead of watching the game. But in the top of the ninth, when the Nats choked off a Braves rally, even the Brats around me joined in the chant of “D.C.! D.C! D.C.!” that shook the old stadium, and for a few minutes, even the old anti-Washington populist in me was seduced.

David Brooks offers up another fine bit of sophistry in today’s New York Times. And yes, it’s another example of what I call the Dover Beach column, wherein the lofty-minded pundit sadly surveys the madness of partisan conflict from a spot high above the fray, and then proceeds to offer a lofty-minded solution that happens to coincide with one party’s agenda.In this case, the subject is abortion, and here is the gist of the Brooksian argument: (1) Roe v. Wade whisked abortion policy from the legislative to the judicial arena, making compromise impossible and empowering extremists on both sides of the issue; (2) legitimately frustrated Republicans who can’t pursue legislative remedies on abortion are now poised to Do the Bad Thing and assault both the judiciary and the essentially conservative traditions of Senate debate; and thus (3) the solution is to give Republicans what they want by overturning Roe. Neat, eh?As is generally the case with Brooks these days, his transition from bipartisan-sounding analysis to endorsement of a partisan position is greased by a big fat planted axiom of extremely dubious quality: the idea that making abortion a legislative issue will facilitate “democratic debate,” compromise, sweet reasonableness, and in general, a de-emphasis of the issue in our political system.Give me a break. Without Roe, abortion politics would be a 24-7 preoccupation of both Congress and many state legislatures, with those determined to eventually outlaw abortion altogether offering an infinite variety of incremental, poll-tested restrictions. How do I know this? Because that’s precisely what’s happened in the limited sphere of legislation allowable under Roe. Look at the last “reasonable compromise” offered by Democrats in Congress, the Daschle Amendment of the late 1990s, which would have banned third-trimester abortions with an exception for the health of the mother. It was not only opposed by some abortion rights advocates, but by right-to-lifers and Republicans generally, who weren’t interested in any “solution” other than their own contrived “partial-birth” ban, which recognized no exceptions.Moroever, look at what’s happening in the U.K., one of those wise jurisdictions where abortion policy is set through “democratic debate.” The Tories have made abortion a big issue in the current parliamentary campaign by proposing an incremental restriction of the period where abortion is allowable, in an overt attempt to peel off Labour-leaning Catholic voters.The truth is that abortion politics are toxic not because the courts have intervened, but because the issue involves very fundamental differences of opinion on matters that are more important to some people than politics itself. It’s possible to make the argument that letting “democratic debate” decide abortion policy is the right thing to do, but Brooks’ idea that it will reduce the passions involved in this issue, or keep right-to-lifers from demonizing judges or seeking to override Senate traditions, is absolutely wrong.We just learned in the Schiavo saga that conservatives are willing to demonize judges if they don’t interpret federal and state statutues to suit them. Accepting, as Brooks does, the thread-bare argument that they are only interested in reasserting the right to “democratic debate” is tantamount to total surrender to the GOP position, which is, of course, where Brooks would have us go.

Popes aren’t elected every day, so those of my dear readers who have expressed annoyance at my frequent posts on religion lately will just have to put up with one or two more.Those of you who are interested in the greater meaning, religious and political, of Pope Benedict XVI may have run across Andrew Sullivan’s agonized posts today. Here’s a pertinent excerpt aimed at his readers who are tired of all the Pope-Talk:

I was trying to explain last night to a non-Catholic just how dumb-struck many reformist Catholics are by the elevation of Ratzinger. And then I found a way to explain. This is the religious equivalent of having had four terms of George W. Bush only to find that his successor as president is Karl Rove. Get it now?

Yeah, that’s a pretty scary vision. But you also have to understand that Sullivan has some real history with the new pope, having written a very perceptive analysis of his theology in The New Republic back in 1988.To use a shorthand that some of you will find illuminating and others inscrutable, Sullivan’s take on Ratzinger back then was that he represented the marriage of the German Augustinian tradition (the same tradition that produced great Protestant theologians from Martin Luther to Karl Barth) with papal power, along with an unhealthy attitude about sex and gender. It’s a very toxic combination, producing a very political agenda in the guise of the non-political sovereignty of the Church. That’s why Andrew ultimately compared Cardinal Ratzinger then, and compares Benedict XVI now, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: a man driven by the logic of theology to, and perhaps beyond, the limits of Christianity itself.I hope Sullivan is wrong about the new pope, but there are unsettling analogies in his Catholic analysis of Ratzinger to the strangely un-Christian tendencies recently apparent in so many conspicuously Christian U.S. religious and political leaders.

Today pretty much everybody in Washington thought John Bolton’s confirmation as ambassador to the U.N. would slip out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a party-line vote, with clear skies ahead on the Senate floor. But at the last minute, it appears, Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich threw a big sack of sand into the gears, saying he had missed a lot of the hearings and needed to hear more before he was comfortable voting for the fiery Bolton. The objects of the whole Democratic strategy for derailing this confirmation, Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel and Linc Chafee, also looked kinda wobbly.I’ve been publicly and privately unhappy with the Mean Mister Mustard approach of Foreign Relations Democrats to Bolton, who has a rich record of questionable attitudes on nuclear proliferation, humanitarian interventions, and the value of alliances and multilateral organizations in general. They obviously knew something I didn’t know.But with a three-week delay (at a minimum) in the committee vote, and more hearings a certainty, I do hope the case against making this guy our spokesman in the most visible international forum gets broadened into his philosophy and record, giving Democrats not only a chance at a “win,” but also the opportunity to score some serious points about the right way to protect our national security in a world far more complicated than George W. Bush will ever acknowledge.

I’m not Roman Catholic, so my views on the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI don’t much matter, but I do want to make one simple point about the likely American reaction based on Ratzinger’s reputation as a “conservative.”Like much of the non-American hierarchy these days, the new pope’s orthdox views on cultural and theological controversies appear to be completely integrated with an anti-capitalist and not-so-secret anti-American attitude on global economic issues. Here’s how The New York Times’ Laurie Goodstein and Ian Fisher put it in Sunday’s profile of the German cardinal:

Based on Cardinal Ratzinger’s record and pronouncements, his agenda seems clear. Inside the church, he would like to impose more doctrinal discipline, reining in priests who experiment with liturgy or seminaries that permit a broad interpretation of doctrine. Outside, he would like the church to assert itself more forcefully against the trend he sees as most threatening: globalization leading eventually to global secularization.

Ratzinger, by all accounts a brilliant theologian, is a systematic thinker, so I don’t think we are going to hear just one side of the equation he draws between economic globaliation and “the dictatorship of relativism.” Assuming he doesn’t intend to just be a caretaker pope (a very safe assumption), all those American conservatives, Catholic or not, who are high-fiving each other right now over the election of a “conservative pope” may be eating their words before long. Over at National Review’s The Corner, Kathryn Lopez says: “CHAMPAGNE IS FLOWING.” You’d best keep the bubbly on ice for a while, KLo.

There’s been a lot of buzz about NBC’s mini-series “Revelations,” a sort of mainstreamed version of the Left Behind novels. The Washington Post’s TV critic Tom Shales pretty much buried the series as television drama. And in a more ideological corner of the media, The New Republic’s TV critic Lee Siegel tauntingly suggested that this saga represented the secular cooptation, and potential taming, of the fundamentalism so rampant in U.S. politics in recent years.I’m prejudiced on this subject, being sympathetic to Martin Luther’s view that the Revelation of St. John should be expelled from the canon of Holy Scripture as “fundamentally un-Christian.” And I’ve also been influenced by the New Testament scholars who tell us that Revelations was not a prophecy, but a classic apocalyptic text motivated by the incredible trauma of the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple, at a time when Christians had not definitively separated themselves from Judaism.Still, the obvious fascination of American Christians with what can only be described as a predictive interpretation of Revelations is impossible to ignore.I’m not sure at what point the premillenial theology of The End Times, with its antinomian interpretation of Western Christendom as actively Satanic, escaped its pentecostal and adventist ghetto and began to conquer ostensibly postmillenial Calvinist turf in the major fundamentalist denominations, such as the Southern Baptists. Maybe it coincided with the decline of the confident, triumphalist Moral Majority and the rise of the pessimist, counter-revolutionary Christian Coalition, and more recenctly, its openly seditious cousin in the radio ministry of James Dobson.Lee Siegel views “Revelations” as the potential beginning of a secularly-induced cooptation and corruption of militant Christian Fundamentalism. I personally view much of contemporary militant Christian Fundamentalism as secularly motivated in itself, a misuse of Holy Scripture, including Revelations, to support a secular cultural conservatism that has little to do with the Bible or with Christianity. And the premillenial trend among historically postmillenial denominations may simply represent this same process of secularization, without any help from popular culture.Watch Revelations if you wish, but if you want to see a truly interesting presentation of premillenial theology set against the worst features of secular culture, rent a copy of The Rapture, Michael Tolkin’s bizarre and fascinating 1991 film, featuring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, which alternates between graphic couple-swapping sex and a very literal depiction of the The Tribulations, with a morally and theologically challenging twist at the very end.

I have promised several correspondants not to “blog about blogs” very often, but there is a basic reporting function I think I need to offer to readers: how many of them are there?This question was prompted by a MyDD post, based on an inscrutable primary source, that ranks political blogs by weekly page-views. There are all sorts of disqualifying factors for the rankings, and being institutionally sponsored (like this blog and The Moose) seems to be one of them. But I’m happy to report that our traffic appears to put both of us comfortably into the top 35 or so–New Donkey is regularly getting about 90,000 page views a week, while The Moose usually tops 100k–establishing both these blogs as Mid-Majors. Not bad for centrist blogs that have only been up for about seven months, and that don’t boost page views with comments or diaries. Thanks to all of you who visit this site for putting it in shouting distance of the Big Berthas, and I’ll try to earn your continued interest.

Today’s papers are full of campaign-style coverage of the conclave now solemnly assembled to elect the next Pope. But aside from quotes from a handful of American Cardinals who are in this faction or that (or more importantly, who will speak to American reporters), you’d think the United States and its 60 million or so Roman Catholics are pretty much irrelevant to the whole thing. Apostate Europe is important; so too are those inhabiting the endangered Catholic turf of Latin America and the promising battleground of Africa. But not America.This treatment of the papal election is, to put it mildly, in sharp contrast to the U.S. coverage of John Paul II’s legacy in earlier weeks, which insistently focused on the Vatican’s relative indifference to the clerical abuse scandal that has roiled the American Church. And it leads one to think that U.S.-based media are finally tumbling to the truth that We Just Don’t Matter in terms of the immediate future direction of the Catholic Church.That’s why I recommend that those of you interested in that future direction read an impressive piece by Notre Dame church historian John T. McGreevy, just up on The New Republic’s site. His argument, basically, is that to the extent the Vatican pursues or even intensifies John Paul II’s battle against worldwide trends inescapably identified with the U.S.–secularist individualism, capitalist globalization, and a hedonistic popular culture–it must come to grips with what Catholics in the belly of this particular beast should do.I’ve already published my own view that the Catholic Church has decisively cast its lot with the global South (a view that’s beginning to creep into coverage of the papal election), but McGreevy advances the argument to another level. If the universal Church is becoming fundamentally anti-American (despite its tactical alliance with U.S. conservatives on abortion, gay marriage, and Terri Schiavo), are American Catholics doomed to a choice between their own country and culture and Rome? Will U.S. Catholics be pushed into a reverse kulturkampf? And if so, will the flash points be those teachings which discomfit the Left or the Right?This is probably a more fruitful issue to discuss than all the pre-election handicapping about which man will get to wear the Shoes of the Fisherman.

For years, as a conscientious Christian, I have tried to understand the point of view of those fundamentalists, supposedly guided by nothing but Scripture, who seem to believe the Bible clearly instructs us that Human Life begins at conception; that homosexuality is a major threat to godliness, and that equal rights for women represents a rebellion against the divine order. Sure, you can nitpick your way through law, prophets, Gospels, and Epistles, like one of those “activist judges,” and justify this point of view, but it hardly seems obvious, much less obligatory for Bible Believers. Still, there is some support for their position in the letter of The Word, even if I personally think it violates its spirit. But the current effort by Christian Right activists and the Grand Old Party to suggest that conservative evangelical Protestant Christians have a religious obligation to oppose the use of Senate filibusters against judicial nominations goes so far beyond any conceivable scripture-based approach to public life as to be actively hilarious. (Catholics, of course, are a different matter, since their tradition makes church teachings, the Early Fathers, and Natural Law important sources of moral guidance alongside scripture, and indeed, keys to interpreting scripture. But American Catholic leaders, much as many of them may desire a judicial revolution that could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not likely to join this particular partisan campaign). The patent absurdity of pretending that evangelicals have to go so far in the tank for the GOP as to support their parliamentary tactics probably explains why the proponents of this campaign have adopted so paranoid a message. This is not just a matter of obedience to scripture or to God’s Will, they say: it’s an act of self-defense against a judiciary that hates Christians and is determined to stamp out religious freedom. Never mind that a majority of federal judges were appointed by Republican presidents; this is a life-or-death matter for faith itself. I think these fanatics are egregiously over-reaching on this subject, and are also offering Democrats a big opening for outreach to people they normally don’t talk to. It’s a great opportunity for Democrats to simply say to conservative evangelical Christians: we don’t hate you, we don’t support judicial actions that abridge your rights, and by the way, you might want to take a long look at the leaders who would subordinate your faith to partisan politics. Let the GOP try to explain to people of faith why the filibuster is the worst threat to Christian religious freedom since Julian the Apostate. And don’t give them the illegitimate ammunition of buying into the idea that Phil A. Buster’s fate is a struggle between religious and non-religious points of view.

I guess I’ve made it clear by now that I don’t think John Bolton should become Ambassador to the United Nations, on compelling national security grounds. But I have to admit I had a moment of sympathy for the guy while reading a Style Section piece in The Washington Post today, that lectured him about his haircut and fashion sense.The word “lecture” should be emphasized. At first, I thought the piece was just going to be a snarky little shot at Bolton’s rather noticeably eccentric personal touches, like his walrus mustache; this kind of stuff goes with the territory of being a public official. But no, Robin Ghivan was angry at Bolton about his appearance; furious at the “lack of respect” it showed for the Senate (that well known repository of sartorial splender and good grooming, right?); triumphant in the discovery of a class photo from 1970 in which Bolton had a nice, short haircut. I half expect a sequel in which Ghivan agonizes over the poor impression Bolton would make at the U.N., humiliating Americans in the eyes of the natty French and the expensively-tailored Italians.Maybe this Fashion Fascism just hit too close to home, since I generally get the same treatment on those rare occasions when I foolishly go on television. Let me tell you, people get livid about out-of-date hairstyles (ah, but no more, now that I regularly visit Jose of Capitol Hill for an au courant clip).But I hope Democrats don’t get on board this particular bandwagon. There’s an important swing demographic of Disheveled Male Voters who are watching this closely on television, sloppy hair spilling over untrimmed ears as they slosh beer on their cheap shirts.Let’s stick to Bolton’s record, which exemplifies the worst diplomatic impulses and national security lapses of the Bush administration. Forget his hair; the man’s got a sloppy and disrespectful point of view,