For the youtube, see here

Iraqi legislators said Sunday that parliament had voted to lift the immunity of a Sunni Arab lawmaker who visited Israel.

Alusi at the funeral of his two sons who were killed in an assassination attempt in Baghdad in 2005.

The parliament has also banned Mithal al-Alusi from traveling outside Iraq or attending parliamentary sessions, they said.

Sunday's punishment was confirmed by Osama al-Nujeif, a Sunni Arab lawmaker, and Haider al-Ibadi, a Shi'ite lawmaker.

Standard answers to this question in the literature are that these voters are in love with hierarchy, rigid, fearful of change, worshipful of authority, or just plain stupid.

I've long wished I could point out to these researchers that another answer to this question is right under their noses: maybe these people don't vote for you and your boys because they don't like smug, patronizing, narrow-minded, stuck-on-themselves jerks like you. This is an amateur opinion, though, based on no empirical research, so no one has any reason to take it seriously.

Haidt and his fellow researchers have come up with an answer that is the first cousin of mine: This phenomenon is about differences in values and in moral character. They have come up with evidence that conservative voters and liberal voters tend to view life through ethical categories that are profoundly different.

Briefly, liberals tend to think of people as individuals bound together my consensual relationships. Morality is a entirely about how one treats others, and is governed by norms like justice and reciprocity. Conservatives think this way as well, but they also think of morality, Haidt says, as something the binds people together into groups. Conservative moral responses are often governed by norms like authority and loyalty, as well as sanctity, purity, and the sacred. Liberals are Millian, conservatives are Durkheimian. Liberals are individualists, conservatives to some extent are tribalists.

Liberals and conservatives, according to Haidt, fail to understand each other because they are speaking different moral languages. Conservatives tend to use more of the full spectrum of moral responses that are available to human beings, and liberal discourse accordingly often has a thin and tinny sound to them.

I find this fascinating, but I am a little worried that Haidt has not interpreted his findings rightly. He argues that liberals might be able to get more conservative votes if they use more of the full spectrum of moral concepts -- apparently including, if I understand him rightly, seeing the criminal justice system as having a "quasi-religious importance" and seeing the state as "guarding the precious coherence of the whole" of society. I don't think that this would be to speak to conservatives in their own language at all.

Let me put it this way. Suppose that he had asked his informants to rate from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" a statement like Public officials have our best interests at heart, or maybe People who run governments are more likely to have good intentions and be well informed than people who head other sorts of organizations, such as families or business corporations. This is only a guess, of course, but I bet that liberals would agree with such statements more than conservatives. If that is so, I would take this to mean that liberals are the ones who are most likely to think of heads of state as a morally privileged priesthood.

It is true enough that conservatives sometimes seem to base policy initiatives on religious considerations. It is partly for religious reasons that they want the state to pursue, capture, and punish doctors who perform abortions (and perhaps the women who have them performed as well). Religious considerations might also be part of the reason why they are so interested in having the state torture and kill jihadists. But they don't think that these policies would bring more virtue into the world, nor that they would in any other way make the world a positively better place. These policies are purely negative moves against (as they see it) injustice and evil.

Of course the values they associate with the family are important to them, but that is why they have families. They want to get in touch with the sacred, but that is why they go to church. They don't go to the state for such things.

On the other hand, liberals do seem to see the state as closely associated with virtue and moral purity, and as a source of not merely happiness but to some extent of the very meaning of life itself. Conservatives often allow the state to overlap with the church, while liberals want the state to be a sort of church. I am just guessing here because, as may be obvious, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative myself, but this, it seems to me, is part of the difference between them.

Palin's comments yesterday on foreign policy, however, show her complete agreement with John McCain. The only difference is that she was relatively more candid than McCain in her hawkishness.

Although the ludicrously primitive Iraqi drones had no capacity whatsoever to harm the American public, the lethality of U.S. drones is another matter. Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles now provide the U.S. government with a means of flying over territory that U.S. ground troops dare not penetrate, observing activities on the ground, and killing people there with, shall we say, a minimum of due process.

In November 2002, for example, BBC News reported: “America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out an attack in Yemen that killed six suspected members of Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, according to US officials. The men died when the jeep they were travelling in was hit by a missile fired from an unmanned CIA plane - believed to be a Predator drone, the US sources said."

U.S. forces have also used the Predator actively in Afghanistan and, most recently, in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. Today, I read an account of a drone attack near the town of Miramshah in North Waziristan that is reported to have “killed at least 14 people and injured 12 others,” including “at least six women and children.”

In Afghanistan, such aerial attacks, not always by drones, of course, have created a ticklish dilemma for the Karzai government as it pretends to be a real government, rather than the U.S. puppet it actually is. Official protests have become increasingly vociferous, though I have seen no evidence that the U.S. forces intend to change their operations in response.

What an awesome power the president and, with his authorization, his subordinate officers possess: they can kill people at will, including those persons’ wives and children, with no risk whatever of receiving return fire or other retribution. Surely this is the long-sought culmination of the Republican’s quest to establish “law and order.”

What leads me to remark on this matter, however, is not its technological nuts and bolts or its connection with master-puppet relations in southwest Asia, but rather the complete insouciance with which the American public greets reports of deaths by drone. I do not exaggerate if I say that the general reaction is “ho-hum.” Well, the average American says, that disposes nicely of another “bad guy.” The gratuitous murder of the bad guy’s family members, neighbors, and other innocent persons in the vicinity appears to create no blip on the average American’s moral radar screen. Perhaps Americans do not consider Yemenis, Afghanis, and Pakistanis to be real human beings whose right to life we are obliged to respect?

Is death by drone simply another occasion when the president’s having labeled a set of actions as a “war” establishes his moral authority to dish out death and destruction willy nilly?

Of course, reports of drone attacks usually refer to militants, Taliban forces, or al Qaida members. To this information, we might well respond: yeah, who says? If we are content to assume that U.S. intelligence agents, who nearly always get their information from collaborators in the target territories, really know whom they are targeting, then we are certainly easily satisfied. One does not have to make an extensive survey of U.S. government claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places in southwest Asia over the past seven years to see that for the most part the U.S. commanders, from the Commander in Chief on down to the sweatiest noncom on patrol, are either more or less clueless or the biggest liars on the planet. I do not rule out that they are both.

The upshot is that the people who cooperate in getting to the point at which someone pushes the button to send the Hellfire toward its selected target may in fact not know for sure whom they are about the kill, or how many others will be killed along with this ostensible “enemy” or who those others are. Without launching into a massive geopolitical inquiry, we might well pause from time to time to ask, What are U.S. forces doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan anyhow? Surely they are not there to capture or kill the persons responsible for the crimes of 9/11, because they have already proved beyond all doubt that they are incapable of doing so (as Osama bin Laden’s videos periodically remind us). They are, however, all too capable of diverting their energies from that objective toward unrelated goals, such as attacking and occupying Iraq.

We Americans find ourselves, then, observing with extreme moral disengagement as the president and his subordinates murder persons whose identities remain uncertain along with assorted others whose only crime is being in the same area as the targeted individuals–after all, the Hellfire, which makes a very big blast, can scarcely be described as a surgically precise killing instrument.

Moreover, the president’s use of this remote-control-execution device apparently has no geographical limits, because, as he assures us, the “war on terror” has none. Today, a dirt road in Waziristan; tomorrow, the Santa Monica Freeway. It will be interesting to see, when drone attacks are carried out in this country, whether the American public gives a damn.