Whether or not you think al Qaeda is still capable of launching another major terrorist strike on the United States, it’s clear the loose network inspired by Osama bin Laden has significantly morphed since 9/11. Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as al Qaeda’s primary training ground and deployment center, and increasingly, its leading figure is Abu Mus’ab al Zarquawi rather than Osama himself. In a fascinating new article in The New Republic, Joseph Braude suggests al Qaeda is beginning to undergo a second transformation based on its emergence in an urban rather than rural setting. He focuses on a little-known but increasingly savage al Qaeda-based Islamist resistence to Quaddafi’s regime in Libya. And he goes on to suggest that the same conditions–a weakening militarist regime with a poor grip on tribal and religious loyalities, and a growing urban lumpenproletariat fed by military downsizing–exist in abundance in Syria.My first reaction to this hypothesis was to think: “Al Qaeda’s new targets are Quaddafi and Assad? Excellent!” But as Braude points out, an urban-based Islamist resistance linked to global terrorism could easily spread to less unsavory Muslim regimes in the greater Middle East. Moreover, al Qaeda’s modus operandi in both Afghanistan and Iraq–importing, training, using and then re-exporting “foreign fighters” to wreak havoc elsewhere–seems to be happening in Libya right now. At any rate, check out Braude’s piece, and see if it makes you more or less concerned about the future shape of the terrorist network that the Bush administration is beginning to think of as a spent force.

The intellectual and moral incoherence of George W. Bush’s position opposing federally funded embryonic stem cell research is a topic that many have written about, including Matt Yglesias, the DLC, and myself. But in a new posting on the New Republic site, Michelle Cottle adds another count to the indictment: the insight that the in vitro fertilization process that Bush and his fellow stem cell research demonizers stubbornly refuse to address is an element of the downside of the “culture of life” they claim to be defending. People who desparately want to be parents are the ones generating all those excess embryos without which we wouldn’t be having this debate. Check it out.

I have often written about the twisted religious roots, and the disturbing political implications, of the belief of many leaders of the Cultural Right that the United States of America is a fundamentally evil society thanks to the nefarious (and increasingly imaginary) power of godless, baby-killing, marriage-hating, Christian-persecuting liberals.Well, it looks like these folks may have themselves a candidate for president: Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, said to be eying a 2008 run.I knew Brownback was a pretty strange dude, and popular on the Cultural Right, and did notice his comments during the stem cell research debate about the “killing of young human beings.” But not until I stumbled on George Will’s puff piece on the Kansan in a recent Newsweek did I know how fully he has internalized the America-as-Nazi-Germany logic of the most serious and extreme anti-abortion advocates.According to Will, Brownback believes the effort to extinguish abortion rights will succeed because:

[T]he youngest voters, ages 18 to 25, are the most pro-life cohort. They were born, he says, when abortion rates were highest, so “many of them feel they’re the survivors of a holocaust: one in four of their compatriots are not here.”

I don’t know where Brownback is getting his polling data on young voters. But aside from that, this little quote indicates exactly what the man thinks of the rest of us who have somehow managed to get through the years since Roe v. Wade without acknowledging we are NARAL’s Willing Executioners.(A footnote to Brownback’s use of Holocaust imagery is that his 1996 Senate campaign was accused, though never with any concrete evidence, of complicity in a whispering campaign about the Judaism of his Democratic opponent Jill Docking).The other thing I quickly learned about Brownback is that he’s a recent convert from Methodism (albeit the George W. Bush-style conservative wing of that denomination) to Catholicism–and not just any old Catholicism, but Opus Dei Catholicism. Yes, like columnist Robert Novak, he entered the Church via the hyper-conservative ministry of D.C.-based Opus Dei priest John McCloskey, a man who believes “liberals” have no place in Christianity, much less Catholicism.So it looks like Brownback is the perfect vehicle for those who believe Christians have a religious obligation to be politically conservative and activist Republicans.One thing is for certain sure: if Brownback emerges as the powerful candidate of the Cultural Right in 2008, two men in particular are going to become even bigger celebrities than they are now: Dan Brown, author of the Opus-Dei-centered novel The Da Vinci Code, and Thomas Frank, the preeminent analyst of the peculiarly virulent strain of Kansas Cultural Conservatism that lifted Brownback to the U.S. Senate.

There’s something sad and quaint about the massive coverage the Washington Post is giving to the revelation that an FBI official named Mark Felt was the legendary Deep Throat: the primary source for the Post’s own Woodward-Bernstein revelations about the Watergate scandal. It’s kind of sad because WaPo is having to acknowledge being scooped on this story by Vanity Fair, which must really hurt. The Post’s coverage of Watergate, after all, is what basically established it as a national Newspaper of Record right up there with the New York Times.The coverage is quaint because it serves as a reminder of a very different era of political journalism, and of journalism generally. Unless you are old enough to really remember Watergate, you might have trouble understanding the extent to which this one story dominated newspapers and network news for months and months on end. Nowdays the only story that can approach this kind of media obsession is a celebrity trial (or, following the American Idol template, a trial of “ordinary” people who play culturally stereotypical roles). The only political story out there now with the potential to morph into something vaguely approaching Watergate is the Casino Shakedown Scandal, which for sheer drama, irony, and symbolic resonance is actually a lot more interesting than Watergate itself. And again, it’s the Post (with recent assists from the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) that’s putting the story together, apparently without any assistance from a Deep Throat. Maybe lightning will strike twice for the Post, but more likely, the Deep Throat revelation is the last news from the last truly dominant political story of our times.

This is in many respects the most ironic of American holidays (with the possible exception of the orgy of consumption commemorating the birth of that preeminent anti-consumer, Jesus Christ). Established to honor those fallen in war, Memorial Day has become a signpost to the advent of the langorous season of summer, marked by such un-martial and non-sacrificial past-times as beachcombing and barbecuing. Certainly some have argued that these activities are among the blessings of liberty and prosperity for which American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have sacrificed. But that’s too easy a rationalization, much like George W. Bush’s injunction after 9/11 that Americans could best fight terrorism by shopping and traveling.Many of us have reason on Memorial Day to remember family members of the distant or recent past who have died in combat. And all of us should spend at least a few moments thinking about the countless, often nameless young men (and increasingly, young women) who were sent into the shadow of the Valley of Death on our behalf, and never came back.But we should also think about the responsibility we have as citizens to make such journeys uneccesary: to create a world where young people don’t have to go into strange lands and enter the ultimate lottery of random injury and death, usually at the hands of enemies they hardly see.Those of us who are indifferent to politics and civic life should reflect on the simple fact that virtually every war reflects the failure of politics and civic life; the breakdown of peaceful arrangements painfully developed over time; and the incompetence or ideological excesses of politicians on one or both sides of most wars.I won’t go into a long history of modern wars, but think about this:The deadliest war in American history was the Civil War, which was touched off not by impersonal forces or irrepressible socio-cultural conflicts, but by the self-absorbed idiocy of a few hotheads in South Carolina, drunk on the prose of Sir Walter Scott, who dragged their region and ultimately their country into a battle over the doomed and evil institution of slavery.And the deadliest World War (at least for combatants), World War I, was a maddeningly pointless war caused by the incompetence of politicians and diplomats who developed a pattern of alliances that gave a handful of Serbian nationalists and Austrian militarists the ability to pull five continents into the trenches.The great military strategist Clausewitz once memorably defined war as “politics continued by other means.” A better definition would be that war is the failure of politics continued by other means.So as we honor those who have died for America in good and ambiguous wars, for clear and hazy purposes, let’s remember this: we owe each and every one of our fallen heroes, and those we place in harm’s way today, a politics aimed at making these sacrifices less numerous, and at reducing the sway of homicidal folly in the politics of every country on earth. That may well mean a more active and even militant U.S. foreign policy. But it definitely means we must, in honor of our heroes past, present and future, remain vigilant against the folly that great superpowers so often embrace.

I’d guess most of my regular readers also habitually visit Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo site. If so, you probably know Josh is about to launch a whole new site, TPMCafe.com, that will probably rival DailyKos as an all-purpose, multi-faceted portal for progressive discussion, with a different tone: less agitprop and abusive language, and more diversity of views. Both sites will have their loyalists, and many readers will regularly visit both, but the competition will be healthy.A centerpiece of Josh’s new site will be a group blog called The Coffee House, which will be frequented by yours truly, by my colleague The Moose, and by a truly distinguished company that ranges from polymath Michael Lind to deep blogger Mark Schmitt to policy entrepreneur Karen Kornbluh to bestseller socio-religious author Annie Lamott. The Coffee House goes live on Tuesday, May 31, and while I intend to be an active participant, NewDonkey will continue to offer its distinctive take without interruption or distraction. I hope you will visit the new site, but stick with me here as well.

Well, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and having already departed from political commentary by touting the stylistic excesses of one piece in the current online edition of The New Republic, I might as well mention another: a stunning review of Lucinda Williams’ musical development by David Jaffe. If you are interested in Williams’ music, the southern musical idiom, or simply the painful irrationality of human relationships, Jaffe’s piece is a must-read. His basic hypothesis is that Lucinda’s power as an artist has increased as she has aged and has begun to replace musical virtuosity with the savage intensity of her rage against the bad men she incorrigibly loves. And his writing is as raw and disturbing as Williams’ music has become during her powerfully libidinous mid-life crisis.

Most writers have a favorite stylistic vice, a practice that stubbornly violates the canons for reasons of emphasis, clarity, or just plain self-indulgence. Mine is the long and sometimes awkward clinching sentence that seals an argument with a strong and snarky punch. Having made it through college without once taking a composition or journalism course, I toss these off with the primitive innocence of the self-educated.I mention this to introduce an outstanding example of my favorite stylistic vice, penned by freelance writer Christopher Hayes, that appears in an unfriendly review of a right-wing book (Steven Malanga’s The New New Left) in The New Republic. After scathingly analyzing the author’s dismissal of latter-day organizers for the working poor as “special interests,” Hayes offers up this line, which is the verbal equivalent of a boxer delivering a long overhand hook for the knockout:

Malanga thinks that janitors who clean buildings for eight dollars an hour are a special interest, while I tend to think that middle-age white guys whose cushy sinecures at conservative think tanks nicely insulate them from the vicissitudes of the same free market they so fetishize are a special interest.

Elegant? No. Faithful to Strunk and White? Hell, no. Would the New York Times have published this sentence? Of course not. But I like its style.

This morning, when I was still trying to get the fog out of my brain, I started getting all these congratulatory emails, enclosing a crumb from today’s edition of the Washington Insider’s Daily Bread, ABC’s The Note:

RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman travels to Virginia to endorse Ed Kilgore’s gubernatorial bid. Mehlman then participates in an ed board meeting with African American reporters. DNC Chairman Howard Dean is in New York City.

Before asking the DLC press office to email Mark Halperin and demand a correction of “Ed” to “Jerry” (it was changed on the web, and tomorrow’s Note will include a formal correction), I did indulge in a brief fantasy. Wouldn’t a NewDonkey/Tim Kaine gubernatorial contest be a real breath of fresh air for the Ol’ Commonwealth of Virginia? We could have a vibrant debate over my proposal to put out an All Points Bulletin to the State Police to intercept Grover Norquist if he crosses the Potomac to engage in tax-cut demagogeury. Our platforms would also differ considerably, with Kaine laying out a detailed policy blueprint covering property taxes, education, and the budget, while I stuck to my simple message of “Mark Warner–What He Said.”But in the end, I did the responsible thing and issued a Sherman Statement, which native Georgians rarely do.Still, it’s got to trouble the Attorney General of Virginia that among the omniscient political junkies of The Note, he didn’t win a word association contest when the name “Kilgore” popped up.So I will repeat my earlier challenge to Jerry Kilgore: to avoid further confusion, one of us should change his name. Since I had it first, it’s only fair that you do the right thing and pick a new monniker.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

There, above the fold, in this morning’s Washington Post was a photo of George W. Bush performing that most hackneyed ritual of the politician: kissing a baby. The baby in question, it transpires, is what certain life-begins-at-conception advocates call a “Snowflake”–a child that develops from an embryo “rescued” through adoption from a fertility clinic.This photo-op was designed to dramatize Bush’s threat to veto a stem cell research bill passed yesterday by the U.S. House, and that is certain to pass the Senate as well. But what it really does is to graphically illustrate the intellectual incoherence, moral relativism, and political opportunism of his position.Matt Yglesias has a good summary of the manifold absurdities of Bush making this the first veto of his presidency. But the worst of these absurdities is at the very center of his allegedly “principled” stand against federal funding of research on new embryonic stem cells obtained from embyros scheduled for destruction at IV fertility clinics.He’s not for banning federal funds for research on existing stem cells, mind you–even though the “moral complicity” arguments applies as much to old as new stem cell lines. He’s not for banning research so long as it’s funded by somebody other than Uncle Sam. And most importantly, he’s not for banning the deliberate creation and destruction of embryos at fertility clinics, even though that is where all of the “destruction of human life” goes on.But those aren’t all the “anti-life” practices George W. Bush doesn’t seem to be against. The only possible rationale for his position on federal funding of stem cell research is that he shares the hard-line Right to Life movement belief that human beings deserving the full protection of the law exist from the moment of conception. So why isn’t he calling for ban on IUDs or “morning after” pills? (To be sure, his FDA is trying to make it harder for women to get morning-after pills, but if there’s been any talk of a ban, I haven’t heard it). All these practics, in addition to the creation of “excess” embryos at fertility clinics, and surgical abortion procedures, are part of what the moment-of-conception people regard as a vast slaughter of innocent human beings far worse than anything that has happened in recorded history.So George W. Bush’s “deeply principled” response to all this alleged homicide is to take it out on scientists who are at least trying to get some positive, pro-life healing from just one of these practices?That’s why this is perhaps the worst of many cynical panders that Bush continues to make to the Cultural Right. He’s with them, he says, so long as it does not discomfit the vast majority of Americans who may be troubled by the number and nature of some abortions, but who think, if they think about it at all, that the life-begins-at-conception positionis metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that defies common sense.So on the stem cell issue, Bush does not deserve praise for being courageous or principled. He’s just another baby-kissing pol who thinks he’s found a convenient way to appeal to one group without completely alienating others.