Also via New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, a recommendation that I read a “powerful critique” that “should be embarrassing to true feminists.” It’s by Christina Hoff Sommers in The Weekly Standard. The headline is “The Subjection of Islamic Women” but, obviously, neither Sommers nor the Standard nor Peretz actually cares about Islamic women. Rather, the subhead — ” And the fecklessness of American feminism” — captures the point she’s trying to make:

If you go to the websites of major women’s groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women’s centers at our major colleges and universities, you’ll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam.

Ah, yes. Certainly no U.S. feminist groups have set up a Help Afghan Women site or anything of that nature. And, of course, American feminist leaders have famously failed to call on American women to “Stand With Our Sisters in Iran”. Back in the real world, American feminists ignore the poor state of women’s rights in Muslim countries in much the same way that Western human rights groups ignore North Korea — only in the imagination of bad-faith conservative critics.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, most often takes note of women’s severely subordinate status in many Muslim countries when Republican presidents are hoping to collaborate with Islamist governments in order to block women’s rights treaties.

Sure, sure Paul Wolfowitz is guilty of some low-grade corruption, but isn’t the truth of the matter that New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz is right that “the real Wolfowitz scandal . . . is how Wolfowitz is being treated by his slimy critics,” that he was doing good work to improve the World Bank from its current status as a “joke.”

Well, no. Shockingly enough, it turns out that the editor in chief of this publication, well-respected until the rise of bloggers who can’t handle its truth-speaking ways, has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about and is just recycling right-wing talking points. But don’t take my word for it. Check out Sebastian Mallaby’s column, as Sam Rosenfeld says “he’s much meaner than I am.”

Chris Cillizza writes up an interesting Third Way study aiming to understand the demographic and opinion profile of the voters who backed Democrats in 2006 but not in 2004. This turns out to be a fairly Third Way-ish group of people — whiter, maler, and richer than average.

What’s interesting, is that they say Dems won these people over not primarily by moving right on economics or on culture, but on the strength of hostility to the Iraq War. To me, at least, this continues to be the key to the 2008 election; Democrats need to put forward a credible national security message that doesn’t let the GOP nominee weasel away from things and just distance himself from Bush personally. The opposition party needs to be able to make the case that Iraq has turned out disastrously because it was the consequence of a disastrous strategy for the country, a strategy Republicans favor and that Democrats propose to replace with a different, better strategy.

Jim Henley and Scott Lemieux are feeling it for Paul Bremer after reading his Washington Post self-defense article. Personally, my sympathy for Bremer goes down whenever he publishes anything. I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there’s been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything’s fine, it’s just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.

The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he’s refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has — that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It’s not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn’t an error, it’s just that having done things the other way ’round wouldn’t have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce. He wound up making pro-chaos decisions because the country had, as a matter of national policy, chosen to adopt unrealistic and incoherent — yet strangely vague — war aims. The only real blunder Bremer made was agreeing to take the job under those circumstances.

Ross takes a look at what really matters to the GOP base:

When asked to name the issue they care most about, 31 percent of Republican voters picked the War in Iraq, another 17 percent picked terrorism, and another 8 percent picked “foreign policy.” More potential GOP primary voters picked Iraq, in particular, than picked the economy, health care, education, abortion, and immigration combined.

As a result, Republicans have no choice but to actually compete with one another to adhere ever-more-tightly to GOP orthodoxy on the party’s single weakest issue. It seems to me that a lot of folks in Democratic circles are thinking of this dynamic primarily as an opportunity to run a campaign focused on domestic issues — seizing advantage of Republican weakness to shift the conversation to friendlier terrain — but I see it as more of an opportunity (if the party chooses to seize it) to directly challenge the Republicans on security.