An essay just posted in Dissent notes two ominous ironies in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's demand to add a virtual War on Poverty to his counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

First, it seems that this warrior-monk discovered "soft power" while on a National Security Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School in 1997, a decade after Barack Obama moved from community organizing to Harvard Law. (He graduated in 1991, when McChrystal was coming off Desert Storm.)

This means that while the general knows warfare better than the President, the President understands soft power more deeply. The question is whether Afghanistan is the place for a meeting of minds - and if so, with what balance of butter and guns.

The second irony is that advantages of "butter" have just been discovered by McChrystal's Dickensian neo-conservative heralds (Dr. Maximum Boot, Sir David Donnybrooks, etc.) -- and never mind that, unable to contain their partisanship, they still write as if they can't wait for Obama to rebuff McChrystal's demands so they can accuse him of betraying the country.

These jingoists, who have suddenly become such doe-eyed idealists about organizing the people that they sound like Hugo Chavez, bear a lot of responsibility for the United States' present incapacity to do for Kabul what they kept it from doing for New Orleans or Detroit.

Thanks to them and the politicians and policies they've supported, the big new swamps of rage and despair that need draining are here in America, not only there in Afghanistan. The enemy is among us and within us, at Fort Hood and in a generation pitifully unfit for military service, according to retired generals John Shalikashvili and Wesley Clark, who actually held a press conference last week to warn that 70% of potential recruits are too over-weight and/or too under-educated to serve. Indeed, the enemy is us.

Footnote: Far be it from me to credit Harvard, that bleak citadel of global management on the Charles, with an understanding of counterinsurgency more sensitive than Yale's. But things don't turn out well for Yale grand strategists who boosted Bush's gratuitous militarism in Iraq and learned even later than McChrystal that we can't advance democracy while destroying our own economy and polity. Read the Dissent essay and laugh, or cry.

Now that we know that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was steeping in a kettle of Islamicist paranoia and rage, Joe Lieberman will hold hearings to examine the dark brew. And David Brooks, wired just like Lieberman, fans the fumes this morning to embarrass hapless liberals, therapy addicts, and merciful Christians who tried to understand Hasan as a troubled individual or lost soul.

Lieberman and Brooks are absolutely right, but only as a stopped clock is absolutely right twice a day. Where were they in 1994, when a Brooklyn Jew, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron? Did they condemn and examine the Jewish paranoia and rage that drove him and that cranked up Holocaust victimology to excuse his deeds? They didn't, even though Lieberman was a senator then, too, and Brooks a writer (for The Weekly Standard).

This isn't a tit-for-tat point. We misunderstand it at great peril. Even before Goldstein struck, I wrote Brooks' own column for him -- concept for concept, condemnation for condemnation -- against politically correct apologetics for a deranged killer, Colin Ferguson, who'd internalized a lot of public black paranoia and rage before gunning down white riders on the Long Island Railroad.

In The New York Daily News, I presented new evidence that Ferguson's delusions had been stoked by paladins of ethno-racial revenge. And when Goldstein struck a few months later, I sketched the Jewish zealotry that had fed his delusions. "I am nothing if not consistent on this," I wrote. "This time, Jews have some soul-searching to do." Read it for yourself.

The stopped-clock metaphor means that one may be absolutely right about something even while presenting it in bad faith, for purposes unjustified or dishonestly explained. Lieberman's and Brooks' record of selective prosecution and selective silence is contemptible. It's as lethal to Jews and democracy as the Palestinian rage it provokes. Maybe there should be hearings on it.

Last year here I criticized enlightened denizens of the Chattering Classes Zoo for trying to rehabilitate David Brooks, an ingratiating neo-con who's as doomed as a charming, brilliant vampire to suck the blood of the American republic while thinking he's in love. (It's Halloween, okay? But this is dead serious, too.)

In his Times column today Brooks gives us yet another sinuous warm-up for the strength-sapping passion that drives his comic lines and citations from "experts." Linking Afghanistan's dark prospects to doubts about Obama's "tenacity" against real evils, Brooks tries to seduce us into a real war. As with Iraq, he's sublimating primal fears and resentments that fuel his and other neo-cons' great undertakings.

But mightn't they be right this time? Afghanistan isn't Iraq, and Obama isn't Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they're jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they live to fight wars with other people's blood, while currying Established Power's favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us -- and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:

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American religious historians have identified three Great Awakenings since the 1740s. In each, a lot of the country was swept up in torrents of enthusiasm that rattled defenders of established order (including churches that joined altar to throne) and dismayed the secular, Enlightenment-minded, too.

Some say that a fourth Great Awakening crested in 2004 but was deflected into America's "civil religion" in 2008, thanks to Barack Obama's biblical cadences. G.K. Chesterton called the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church," and Obama massaged it enough to win Pastor Rick Warren's blessing at the Inauguration.

But if Obama is carrying on Martin Luther King, Jr's. religious republicanism, he's also one part Harvard neo-liberal and one part Chicago pol. Only a stronger, cannier faith can get us past these parts' inadequacies right now. The faith needn't be "religious" but it must be deep enough to face down great dangers and seductions. And many of us will have to share it, as I suggest in a World Affairs Journal essay I hope (against hope?) that you'll read. Here's why.

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A couple of years ago The Nation's Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? -- although I've had fun exposing what I called "Wile E. Coyote conservatives" who were rushing off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming liberals for ousting Lawrence Summers from the presidency of Harvard (the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation did it, and not for politically correct reasons) and for enrolling a former Taliban rep as a special student at Yale (an older, more conservative Yale foreign-policy network blessed it).

Now comes a Chronicle of Higher Education debate on whether and why liberal academia still spurns conservative scholars. Never mind that the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities show them to have been far more captive to market riptides than to leftist doctrines; in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla writes that on many campuses a pervasive ideology still normalizes "liberal" views that are rather narrow and arbitrary. Boston College's Alan Wolfe agrees that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he says conservatives are part of the problem.

Others add brief observations, mine noting that what's actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn't very "liberal," as most Americans use the term. Baiters of tenured radicals -- the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz -- can't so easily claim, as David Brooks claimed in 2002, that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.

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Two events this month suggest a transition from one conversation about the American republic to another. The old conversation -- often little better than a shouting match or a dance of snarky repartees -- is petering out with the passing, at 89, of Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of neo-conservatism. A different conversation is renewing itself in a voice coming from the center of the old republic, thanks to Nicholas Thompson's gripping, stirring new book, The Hawk and the Dove.

Writing about the half-century-long rivalry and friendship of arms-race "hawk" Paul Nitze and Cold War strategic "dove" George Kennan, Thompson shows that even bitter antagonists can remain friends if they care more about the civic-republican spirit that is the secret of this country's true strength than they do about themselves or their grand strategies.

It's not an obvious or easy truth, but Thompson makes it live. Let me say a few words about the old conversation, though, before taking you to the even-older one that Thompson has revived.

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Maybe it's just that Barack Obama took heat this summer for saying that Sgt. James Crowley had acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but I think that the real reason he's down-playing Jimmy Carter's alarm about the racism in recent right-wing histrionics is that his better, savvier side is at work.

Racism is at work, too, of course, and Carter's reasons for crying "Fire!" in our crowded racial theater are deeply grounded. But so are Obama's for not joining him. Carter's condemnation works only when balanced by Obama's reserve, because far more than racism is at stake.

Free of Carter's penitential moralism on the subject, Obama sees the swifter, deeper currents driving the screamers. He knows they'd be frothing just as furiously were Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or John Kerry in the White House. In Sunday's Washington Post I explain what we risk losing by writing them off as racists. The Post has already put the column online here.

Last week the New York Times Review front-paged TPM contributor Robert Reich's clarion call for universal health care in a magisterial review on the subject.

And this week the Review showcases New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's equally magisterial -- and, from the Times Book Review, equally unexpected -- put-down of his old friend Norman Podhoretz's unrepentantly neo-conservative tract, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Have the Book Review and Wieseltier changed for the better? Or are the editors just doing neoconservative damage control via feints toward the left, and is Wieseltier just trying to cover his past blunders, this time by turning on a friend?

The record doesn't augur all that well, for there is more (or less) to the editors' and Wieseltier's gestures than meets the eye. Of Wieseltier's review it needs to be said that he is right about Podhoretz, but dishonestly so, while Podhoretz is honest about what he believes, but woefully wrong. Hoping for better from the Book Review and its reviewers, let's take a closer look.

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As I listened today - and as you can right now --to Supreme Court justices questioning the proponents and opponents of a suit to overturn campaign-finance regulations, the main point of contention was whether the McCain-Feingold law and previous rulings violate the free-speech "rights" of those non-citizens and non-persons we call corporations. Listening in made me an enthusiast for audio (and, someday, video) coverage of the Court's public sessions.

For one thing, it was downright inspiring -- at least to me as a civic republican -- to find the formidable conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts so willfully ignorant of political and corporate life. Justice is properly blind, but not as small-minded as the justices, who sounded as if they had no understanding of what it takes to run for office or to run a corporation.

Liberals on the court are inexperienced at this, too (although Justice Sonia Sotomayor knows the corporate world firsthand). But it was conservatives who fastidiously lifted their hems above the muck of real political and economic life to justify sweeping away regulations that keep big-corporate money from overwhelming the democratic electoral and legislative process. They also all-but dismissed legal principles and doctrines as different as stare decisis and "original intent.

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Amid all the nail-biting over Obama's health-care speech on Wednesday, a quieter but no less fateful challenge to the republic will unfold the same day as the Supreme Court hears new arguments that Citizens United -- a murky non-profit that made the swift-boating "Hillary: The Movie" -- was unfairly restrained in distributing it by campaign-finance laws curbing corporate "speech" in elections.

We're for free speech here, aren't we? So says the ACLU, which has joined with the National Rifle Association in this case to support Citizens United, a Trojan Horse for big, publicly traded, for-profit corporations that want to use the wealth we let them amass to "crash" public debate to enhance their own bottom lines and public subsidies protections.

That's not "free speech." It's bought, over-determined speech. Conservatives who profess loyalty to the Constitutional framers' "original intent" are being hypocritical in supporting Citizens United, which isn't remotely the kind of speaker the First Amendment's framers intended to protect. The Roberts court may turn such intentions upside down.

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Is town-meeting craziness genetic and exclusive to right-wingers? The left-activist historian Rick Perlstein implied so recently in an engaging summary of their eruptions over the years. But to really unpack the orchestrated, perverse passion we've just seen, analyze this:

As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, "Racist Koch, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide." As they pelted him with eggs, Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.

An isolated incident? Progressive "boomers" who disrupted public meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify political insanity as never before.

Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the mirror. It'll show that while progressives got some things right that the right gets wrong, those differences weren't always very clear.

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I've not been reticent about the sinuous, the serpentine, and the sophistical David Brooks, whose star never dims for the great lights who run The New York Times' op ed page, PBS' News Hour and NPR's "All Things Considered."

But this time I'm wondering what you make of Gail Collins' response, in a recent Times "conversation" blog, to Brooks' latest attempt at re-positioning.

In this mercifully brief exchange, he and Collins mention the pros and cons of partisanship -- a worthy subject in its own right. But, then, after all Brooks' attempted political make-overs, she tells him, especially in her last couple of sentences, to crawl back into the hole he dug so deftly for himself and credulous fans across 15 years, six at the Times.

I'm inclined to pass the torch, the microphone, the podium, the floor, and every honor of Polemicist Laureate to Collins for addressing Brooks as I've never seen a Times columnist address another Times columnist before.

Maybe I'm reading too much into her tweaking. But even if, say, Ralph Nader was right about both parties, isn't it a bit late in the day for Brooks to flutter his eyelashes and ask, "Who, me, a raving partisan?" What do you think?

Few if any who recall the uproar over Mahmoud Amadenijad's appearance at Columbia University two years ago can recall the uproar over the appearance at Columbia of Hans Luther, the first Nazi ambassador to the U.S, in 1933.

But one TPM reader could, because she'd been carried across W. 121st St. on Dec. 12, 1933 by two cops after circulating anti-Nazi handbills during the speech.

She was "a blonde, hatless, quiet, and, it seemed to me, imperturbably valiant freshman [who] stood her ground firmly but undemonstratively," wrote James Wechsler, a reporter for the Columbia Spectator, years later in The Age of Suspicion. "I knew her name was Nancy Fraenkel and that her father was a Civil Liberties Union lawyer. I saw her much more frequently after that evening which, I learned later, was her seventeenth birthday. We were married the following October."

Nancy Wechsler, who died Monday, at 93, never stopped showing how to stand your ground imperturbably in an uproar - a piece of political wisdom that grows from character and civic culture more than from intelligence or ideology.

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Barack Obama's invitations to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley to visit with him at the White House vindicate his election by reminding us, as perhaps only Obama could in this case, that ultimately this is a country, not a courtroom.

The case shows well that, although law is indispensable and decisive in framing, prodding, and enforcing our reckonings on race, the law and those who execute and enforce it aren't the only or even the best framers or deciders.

It's sometimes painfully necessary to remind lawyers of this, especially in matters touching race -- and precisely because, in those matters, law sometimes does offer the only hope for justice. With his phone calls, especially to Sgt. Crowley, President Obama -- a black man who is a former professor of constitutional law, activist, and legislator -- is reminding all of us that law is a vitally necessary but not a sufficient condition of justice.

So, what would be "sufficient"?

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After living through and writing about many constabular and reportorial mishandlings of racially charged cases, I know a seasoned assessment when I see one. Here's the best I've seen in the matter of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge, MA police Sergeant James Crowley -- a post on Crooked Timber by a New York City police captain and PhD student who's been following the case. (For the link I thank the writer George Scialabba, a Cambridge resident and a true sage in that village of pedants.)

I've known more than a few very good cops, as well as some bad ones, and, based on what I've learned about Crowley, my own not-so-Solomonic assessment is that both he and Gates are decent men who behaved wrongly in a highly charged situation. Gates made it worse, but the larger wrong was Crowley's: He shouldn't have arrested Gates. We won't get anywhere, though, if we don't try to imagine why he did.

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