She behind in states won, deligate count, popular vote, and more recently, behind in electabilty.

If she wins, it’ll be a sad, sad day for the democratic party.

-Adam
http://www.worldfightsite.com

I apologize for switching from the Hillary discussions. I was annoyed at Neel K’s comment–but it’s the sort of annoyance that just leads to pointless, repetitive arguments–is so! isn’t so!–so I shouldn’t have indulged in my annoyance. I like being a conservative voice on your blog comments, but I’d just as soon be so on issues where there’s some vague chance of a meeting of minds. (I.e., anything having to do with the Iraq War seems to be right out.) Any chance for a new posting from you, on some other subject?

I very much enjoyed your link to Wil Wheaton, FYI; so did my wife.

The government got its “evidence” against Jose Padilla by torturing people until they made up allegations, and then imprisoned him for three and a half years without bringing charges against him. This detention was solitary confinement, with extend periods of sensory deprivation, plus of course the usual sleep deprivation and stress positions. The government only brought charges when it began to look like the Supreme Court would rule about the legality of his detention, so that they could make the case moot. The charges they have at long last filed against him conspicuously do not involve any of the dirty bomb charges they made when they announced his detention in 2002, precisely because they don’t have any evidence that can stand up in court.

If you really believe he was engaging in terrorist actions against us, I have a bridge to sell you — I even promise it will collapse when terrorists drive over it.

I fail to find any cause and effect relationship between prudence and faction as you claim. I did find prudence 31 times in the entire set of Federalist essays and none of them hinted of any connection between prudence and faction.

Good luck to you in your writing.

So far as it goes, I am quite willing to have our government torture foreigners to prevent nuclear bombs from going off in our cities. Since I am willing to endorse such actions, I know how considerably distant Bush administration policy is from them–how gentle and restrained it is. You may, of course, have some ludicrously loose definition of torture in mind. Maybe it now includes spanking.

The sleep of England was an unwillingness to recognize the Nazi threat, not an unwillingness to support POUM.

The second line of Lockean influence led through Madison’s commentary on the Constitution in The Federalist. Madison, of course, was centrally concerned with the prudential goal of stability: “Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.” He was equally concerned with the danger that prudence, and hence faction, posed to stability:

The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice …. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils [by faction], have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.

Madison was equally aware of the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian solutions to faction: “There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” He rejected both: liberty was a sine qua non, and Rousseau’s proposed utopia both impractical and, on Lockean grounds, undesirable.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other: and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and view of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties. [New paragraph.] The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.

Finally, and with stunningly swift dismissal, he rejected the Hobbesian and Lockean gesture toward sovereign reason.

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the right of another or the good of the whole.

In effect, Madison recurred to a Machiavellian theme. The prescription of reason suited only ‘imaginary republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality.’ There was no escape from prudence and interest: “The parties are, and must be, themselves the judges.”

Having dismissed all alternatives, Madison decided that the problems caused by prudence and interest could only be solved in turn by the proper deployment of prudence and private interest: “The causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” Madison therefore took from Locke, and Montesquieu, the idea of a balance of interests within government—but, unlike Locke, he no longer attempted to moderate or balance the operation of prudential judgment itself. Instead, he radically intensified the operation of prudential judgment and interest within the operation of government itself. The different branches of government parcellized not only sovereignty but also prudential judgment, and gave each branch and office a fraction of both. Moreover, while the people were taken as formlessly equal in their capacity for prudence, (a shade of Rousseau,) the different offices were designed to be unequal in strength and function—individual and particularized. This variation of offices institutionalized prudential particularity into the very structure of government.

This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
There was no unitary sovereign, no monist consensus, no sovereign reason; but plurality, parcellized sovereignty, and dispersed prudential judgments. The next generation would add the explicit avowal of political party as the productively factional spirit to operate this machine and produce the public interest. The people would exercise a democratic and universal prudential judgment—the public exercise of critical prudence—and their judgment, passions, and interests would generate the exercise of sovereign power by this prudential discourse alone.