Stand By Your Man

Jay Nordlinger stands by his man in the face Jonathan Chait's(reg. required) ridicule. Nord still has more faith in Don Rumsfeld than in The New Republic and thinks that saying that war is a "dirty job" shows how direct and "uneuphemistic" the secdef is.

I prefer my take on Nordlinger's worshipful Rummy article in the Dec. 31, 2001 issue of National Review that The American Conservative published three years ago:

The cover was a low point for a once serious magazine, featuring a caricature of a smiling Rumsfeld mimicking a Betty Grable, come-hither pose. The article reported on Rumsfeld in a manner more appropriate to People magazine than to a respected intellectual journal. Nordlinger breathlessly revealed that Rumsfeld was a sex symbol (!) and a pop-culture icon (!!): "Reports have it that people gather round to watch Rumsfeld press conferences the way they do Oprah . . .Women confide that they have . . . well, un-defense-policy-like thoughts about the secretary of defense. . ."