Onward and upward in Iraq? So says John McCain. And Lindsey Graham says the “surge” is probably the most successful counterinsurgency program in the history of the world. But what about political reconciliation? And when do we leave exactly? Catch up on the latest spin in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …

Watch this episode on Blip.

It’s official. The White House has agreed with al-Maliki on a blueprint plan for keeping US troops in Iraq permanently.

A lot of you probably already heard about or saw Will Saletan’s nauseating foray into ‘black genetic inferiority’ pseudo-science a week or so back. On the key issue, I think Matt Yglesias, Henry Farrell and Brad DeLong have said about all that need be said and about as well as it can be said.

But there’s another aspect to this embarrassing episode that’s been rattling around my head.

Saletan writes …

If this suggestion [i.e., the genetic mental inferiority of Africans] makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.”

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible’s literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn’t break your faith.

This is quite a statement. The theory of evolution is the cornerstone of modern life sciences. Its central claims have been abundantly confirmed in fields ranging from genetics to paleontology, geology, cosmology and archeology, among others. To Will, to deny the reality of evolutionary theory is on a par with resistance to claims that blacks are innately intellectually inferior to whites — claims based on studies that range from the rankest pseudo-science peddled by open racists to work on the margins of mainstream science that have never been accepted by most experts in the relevant fields.

But the two are pretty much the same, since right-wing inability to come to terms with modernity and modern science must be equalled by something on the other side of the aisle.

It’s an equation of almost unparalleled absurdity. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more nonsensical example of that TNR-originating disease of facile contrarianism for its own sake.

(ed.note: In fairness to TNR, I would say the current crew running the place suffers from the disease far less than past editorial teams. So there’s some unfairness in labeling it thus. But like many syndromes and maladies the disease can’t help but carry the name of the location of the original outbreak.)

When I was thinking about Will Saletan’s essay on the supposed innate mental inferiority of Africans, I thought about this comment from behavorial geneticist Eric Turkheimer over at Cato’s blog …

If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups? Nothing anti-semitic, mind you, just a rational investigation of the scientific evidence. It wouldn’t be difficult to measure interest in money and materialism, and it wouldn’t surprise me if as an empirical matter Jews scored a little higher on the resulting test than other groups. As a behavioral geneticist I can assure you without reservation that the trait would be heritable, and, if anyone bothered to take the time to find out, specific genes would have small associations with it. Of course, this research program has already been carried out, at least to the extent the relevant technology was available in 1939. While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians.

Yes, just so. Actually, as Will noted in his piece in Slate, Jews have substantially higher IQ scores on average than the baseline white population in the United States, by something like a dozen points. Do we think they’re genetically superior in intelligence to the mere flotsam of un-Jewified caucasians sloshing around the country?

Well, I guess I spoke my unspoken hypothetical a bit too soon. It turns out that Will does seem to think Jews may be the product of intellectual superior genetic stock, as he argues in this Slate piece from earlier this month. His discussion is based in part on a panel he attended at AEI, with panelists including Charles Murray, on the topic.

I don’t have any strong argument for proving that higher average IQs for American Jews (which predominantly means European or ‘Ashkenazi’ Jews) is rooted in culture and child-rearing as opposed to genetic programming. But reading Will’s piece it doesn’t seem that he has much of any argument for the converse either. I guess a little broader familiarity with history provides a sense that it’s not uncommon for ethnic groups or nationalities with a marginal or partly alienated relationship to the dominant culture to excel in rates disproportionate to their numbers. Look at the Scots in British culture in the 18th century.

In any case, put me down as unconvinced. It’s quite true that there are no topics we should leave unexamined when evidence of new realities are clearly before us. But it’s equally true that there are some topics that are odd to speculate about if there’s no evidence for them at all, like the genetic intellectual superiority of the Jewish ‘race’. As Yglesias says, there’s something distinctly prurient about the fascination.

And as long as it’s just free inquiry we’re interested in, can we move ahead with that study into the Jewish propensity to dominate host nations and guile them into hopeless wars for their own enrichment? Or at least suss out the implications if the theory turns out to be true?

NY Times bags John Harwood as new political writer.

Joe Lieberman goes on Fox to demand that Dems start acknowledging progress in Iraq.

So does Mitt Romney follow racial or religious quotas in doling out political jobs? Apparently it depends on whether you’re black or muslim …

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was looking at some polling charts at pollster.com. And I had what I can only call a computational epiphany. Those of us who are watching the races at least somewhat closely know that the basic tension in the Republican race is that Rudy Giuliani has been consistently in the lead nationally but Mitt Romney appears poised to do well in the early contests that usually determine the nominee.

But when I looked at this trend line charts put together by Professor Charles Franklin for Pollster.com I suddenly thought it was much more likely than I did that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee.

I’m reproducing these charts from Pollster.com. But I’ve had to shrink them down a bit to get them to fit within the space I have here in the blog column. So if you want a clearer view click on the graph and the link will take you to the appropriate page at Pollster.com.

So what do we have here? Let’s cut to the chase. In each graph, Mitt Romney is the brown line and Rudy Giuliani is the purple line.

The pattern jumps right out at you. In each of the three states, Romney has been gaining support consistently and fairly rapidly since the beginning of 2007. In two of the three states, Giuliani has been trending downward with a similar pace and consistency. The exception is New Hampshire where Rudy has trended down a bit but basically held his own. There too Rudy’s numbers may be dipping as the two most recent polls, which I don’t believe are included in the New Hampshire chart, have Rudy down to 16%

Another thing jumps out at me in the Iowa poll. We’ve given a lot of editorial attention to Huckabee’s surge in Iowa and the consequences it could have for Romney. I still believe that. But the graph makes pretty clear that the issue is Huckabee’s surge, not any drop off in Romney’s support. He’s still rising, albeit at a slower pace. And that may simply be due to the fact that in a large field it gets harder to keep up the rate of increase in support as you near 30% of the total.

You can’t ignore the national numbers. I grant that, though I think there are some decent arguments that they’re based on name recognition and on those who are not most actively engaged in observing the candidates. But the consistency of Romney’s strength in these three states is striking. And we’re getting close enough to the voting and caucusing now that absent any big new facts to shake things up that these trends will continue.

I’ll follow up tomorrow with some more thoughts, contrary theories of what the numbers mean and so on. But I can’t look at these numbers without thinking that Romney’s in a much stronger position than people think.

Bernie Kerik — and by extension Rudy Giuliani — dodges a bullet.

Trent Lott may not have been good for America. But he was pretty good for TPM. So in honor of his announced resignation from Congress, in today’s episode of TPMtv, we take a walk down memory lane to remember some of Trent’s best moments (definitely don’t miss the special Larry Craig/John Ashcrot duet moment) …

Watch this episode on Blip.