Suggestion

John Derbyshire is tired of thinking about the Middle East or Levant, as it used to be called:

Henry Kissinger was secretary of State he used to tell his aides that if he ever showed signs of taking an interest in the Cyprus problem, they should immediately put him in a straitjacket. If only we could be that indifferent to the Levant!

I know, I know, we can’t. Oil; nukes; Islam; terrorists; Russia and China — the Great Game of our time. We can’t ignore the damn loathsome filthy accursed place. Our statesmen have to come up with policies; we journalistic thumb-suckers have to come up with opinions; all we citizens have to come up with taxes to pay for the warships and armies, the bribes and subsidies, the front men and stool pigeons, the soldiers and diplomats. No, we can’t ignore the Levant. But Lord, how I wish we could!

Perhaps we can't ignore the Levant, but here is an idea -- maybe we should stop trying to run it.

Good News . . .

Our long national nightmare is over. Daniel Larison is back from Summer School at the Rockford Institute, where in open defiance of the Claremont Institute's Thought Police, he consorted with known and certified paleos.

Attention Claremont: while I wasn't there I am positive that not once did the Rockfordians discuss the applicability of the Declaration of Independence to Burundi.

Buchanan Caucus

I wonder if Townhall's "Executive Editor" Hugh Hewitt, who just consigned Townhall columnist George Will to the "Buchanan caucus" for daring to question the wisdom of a war against Iran while our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan swirl down the drain of neocon/Rumsfeldian hubris; is aware that Pat Buchanan is also a Townhall columnist.

I guess it depends on what the meaning of "executive" and "editor" is.

ObSMOOSHion

Now I'm beginning to wonder what is the cause of R.S. McCain's Smoosh obsession:

I suppose the Smoosh girls could have chosen other ways to express their disdain for the president, or they could have just kept their political opinions to themselves. But they didn't, and none of the "adults" -- parents, producers, publicists, record company executives -- who are responsible for guiding these girls thought to intervene.

So welcome to the culture war, Smoosh.

The way he is carrying on over them, you would get the idea that the girls of Smoosh are prattling on like Babs Streisand instead of casually wearing a button that you have to really be looking for to notice.

It must be getting hard to be a Bush supporter/defender these days . . .

Tough Sell

Steve Sailer writes:

War Fever: A friend writes:

2002-2003 is happening again in the blogosphere. I can feel it. Are there enough people to say "NO!" this time?

If, after all the hard lessons we've learned over the last three years, the United States still lets itself get dragged into a war in Lebanon or with Syria or Iran, it will be the stupidest conflict since the War of Jenkin's Ear.

He's right, but they are trying. Jeb Babbin seems to call for a total war in the Islamic world:

The second school of thought I have labeled, "Endgame Conservatism." Those such as I say that history from Carthage to Vietnam teaches that if we fail to prosecute a war in a manner calculated to win it decisively, we will lose it inevitably. We believe that terrorism cannot threaten us significantly without the support of nations, and that those nations that are preeminent in their support for terrorists -- Iran and Syria -- must be forcibly disconnected from terrorism. We believe that waiting for Islam to reform itself is tantamount to accepting defeat and that radical Islam (an ideology, not a religion) must be defeated just as Soviet Communism and German Nazism were.

Babbin is calling for a war totally different than the sort of conflict Americans were sold in 2003 -- a cakewalk accompanied by tax cuts. The war that Babbin and many other want this year will be a much tougher sell.

World War Whatever

Question: if a tree falls in a forest, what the heck's the deal with Jonah Goldberg?

I thought Newt Gingrich did a very good job making the case that we're at the dawn of World War Three on Meet the Press today. My only caveat is that I think those who argue this is World War Four (Norman Podhoretz, James Woolsey et al) have a better argument. According to this view, the Cold War was WWIII. I like this formulation because A) it recognizes what a monumental effort the Cold War really was and B) it provides for more creative thinking about the predicament we're in now.

When you say "World War Three" the average person conjures the image of World War II. But the Cold War is the more relevant episode. The Cold War certainly involved bloodshed (Korea, Vietnam, etc) but it also involved aggressive efforts across a wide variety of fronts including public diplomacy, intelligence, propaganda (the good kind) etc. We understood that we were in a battle of ideas and values as much as a battle of blood and territory. Indeed, the stakes during the Cold War were arguably higher than those of the second World War because nuclear annihilation was in the cards. That, it seems to me, is a better prism through which we should see the current predicament . . .

Meanwhile, the advantage of calling all this World War Three is that it's easier to understand and takes less explanation. Most people don't think of the Cold War as a war so much as an effort to avoid one. But I think it's worth educating the public on why this wasn't the case.

You can tell this is even more fun than a game of Risk for this crowd! Contra Goldberg, I think the image that the term conjures up in most people if you mention World War III is of a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

I can't see how it is useful to label the current conflict a world war other than to inflate the ego of the labeler. In fact, it might promote muddled thinking that leads to fighting the wrong kind of war. In addition, I was under the impression that invading Iraq would avoid a larger war, as Thomas Sowell claimed in 2003.

UPDATE: Derb Dissents.

Be Like Iraq?

Is is possible that the most powerful man in the world is a dimwitted cretin? Yes it is. At a press conference at the G8 summit in Russia President Bush and Vladimir Putin had the following exchange:

"I (Bush) talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing," Bush said.

Putin replied: "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I can tell you quite honestly."

"Just wait," Bush said after Putin's remarks were translated into English.

If it isn't bad enough that Bush insultingly lectured his host, he suggested that he turn his country into another Iraq. Russia has its problems, of course. Being governed by a fool and world-historical embarrassment isn't one of them. That's our burden.

Courageous Rick

National Review Online's estimable editor, Katheryn Jean Lopez sees the heroism in Sen. Rick Santorum, where others only see the shady dealing:

Leave all your Oliver Stone biases at home when you go see his new film "World Trade Center." It's all-American and well-timed. This September will mark the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on American soil. And Americans -- unless they happen to have a family member deployed or had lost someone on 9/11 -- don't generally seem to have a keen sense that we're at war. This movie reminds us we are.

"For no other reason than it was the right thing to do." These are the last words spoken by one of the film's stars, Nicolas Cage, about the rescue workers who risked their lives, coming from near and far, to save the only 20 people who ultimately would be rescued from the rubble -- words that parallel Rick Santorum's steadfastness in the Senate.

Santorum, R-Pa., is up for re-election this year in one of the country's most contentious races. He's behind and he's a lightning rod. But agree or disagree with him on the issues -- abortion (he's against), the war we're in (he's a better articulator of it than most of the White House) -- you'll have to agree there's something fundamentally American about him.

Um, yeah. I suppose it takes lots of courage to occasionally take a break from melding K street with the Republican Congress to address the issues.

Fortunately, just after reading Lopez, I received the July 31 issue of The American Conservative with cover articles by Steve Sailer, James Pinkerton and Bill Kauffman on the problems of the Democratic Party. Kauffman's article is a review of Where Did the Party Go? by Jeff Taylor. To top it off, it has an article by North Dakota Democratic senator, Byron Dorgon. I haven't read any of it yet, but it is comforting just to know that NR and Townhall don't represent the whole of conservatism.

Deranged Right-Wing Bush Supporter Derangement Syndrome

Donkey Cons Coauthor, Robert Stacy McCain finally is addressing the important issues on his blog, me. He describes me as a "lover of Crunchy Cons(not entirely incorrect), defender of Smoosh (sometimes)" who "hates Donkey Cons" (a bit harsher than my actual take). He notes that we both write for The American Conservative and Chronicles occasionally, and we are "both thus clearly associated with paleoconservatism." His point being, more or less, that we should all get along.

Here is the crux of his argument, which I will address in part:

What we have here, then, is a most curious misunderstanding. Mr. Stooksbury and I seem to inhabit almost synchronous orbits within what might be called the paleolibertarian region of the political galaxy, our chief points of disagreement being:

• Mr. Stooksbury's admiration of Crunchy Cons, a book based on the Buddhist economics detested by the libertarian Skousen, and generally panned by conservative critics. (In the latest issue of The American Spectator, Florence King may have outdone us all.)
• Mr. Stooksbury is anti-war and seems to have conceived me as some sort of neocon chickenhawk warmonger type. In fact, as friends will attest, I was a confirmed skeptic of the casus belli for the Iraq invasion -- at least so far as it was publicly articulated by its advocates. But once the war began, I was for victory. In other words, if this is ancient Athens, then I am not the rash and ambitious Alcibiades, but the wise statesman Nicias, who advised against the expedition to Sicily but, once the assembly voted to go, urged them to make the expedition with the strongest possible force.
• Mr. Stooksbury seems to have been afflicted with a variant strain of Bush Derangement Syndrome that is widespread among my paleolibertarian friends.

I'll ignore the bit about the Dreher book and address the other two. McCain is right that I opposed the war from the beginning. His view that once in it, we should try to win is not entirely wrong. In 2003, before a blog captured my every thought, I would have argued that we should try to accomplish something of value before leaving. I think the window of opportunity to has long since closed. Cutting and running looks like a better option every day.

I remember when everything seemed to be coming up roses due to the Bush foreign policy, from Libya giving up some weapons to the color-coded revolutions. How do things look now? Iraq, with in excess of 100,000 American occupiers, is in the midst of an all-but-officially named civil war, the other two members of the Axis of Evil are growing more and more belligerent. I seem to remember that taking out Saddam was key to solving problems among Israel and the Palestenians. And how is that going?

I don't have Bush Derangement Syndrome. I would describe the malady from which I suffer as Deranged Right-Wing Bush Supporter Derangement Syndrome (DRWBSDS). Most of my DRWBSDS comes from reading Power Line, Hugh Hewitt and pundits like Jay Nordlinger, whose creepy fawning over Bush and Rumsfeld inspired an article by me in The American Conservative a few years back.

McCain says that he isn't part of the problem. "Nobody at Official Conservative Movement headquarters has ever solicited my advice, nor do I expect an invite to the next state dinner at the White House." Fair enough. As coauthor of Donkey Cons, he is promoting the idea that conservatives have nothing more to think about than how awful the Democrats are. But the record of rightwing Republican rule for the last six years indicates that the right should spend more time looking in the mirror.

McGill in 06, 10, 12, . . .

I see via Rob Huddleston that my Chronicles/American Conservative contributing, Reactionary Radical leaning, Empire-opposing member of Congress has a primary opponent. Ralph McGill is running against Duncan on the issues that I support him for -- his staunch opposition to the war in Iraq.

McGill also recalls the term-limits populism of Jack Gargan with his call for a limit of one consecutive term for members of Congress:

Get rid of career, lifetime politicians and completely reform Congress by instituting term limits! My proposal - no one can serve more than a total of 12 years in any combination of House and Senate terms, and no one can be elected to consecutive terms in either the House or the Senate - no re-elections! Do this, and maybe people who serve in the House and Senate will be bold enough to do what's right for the country rather than only what's right for re-election!! . . .

What non-sense. How with such a policy restricting members to non-consecutive terms is anyone ever going to accomplish his other goals such as:

Take measures to mute the power of the Supreme Court! How? We have checks and balances in place - use them! When the Supreme Court does something outrageous like the "eminent domain" decision, pass a Constitutional Amendment that overrules the Supreme Court ruling. Why doesn't that happen now? Because we have timid people in Congress who think they will make somebody mad, and they might not get re-elected. (See the bullet above). I also favor limited terms for Supreme Court justices instead of lifetime appointments. I would propose that we limit them to 10-year terms and no re-appointments.

He also wants to, "get the government off the backs of Christians. It seems we have religious freedom and tolerance for Muslims, atheists, and everyone else, but not for Christians. Quit the demonization of Christianity!" Now is this remotely the case? I'm aware that the occasional public school bureaucrat goes berserk at the sight of a sixth-grader with a Bible and that snooty Hollywood types sneer at Presbyterians in flyover country; but is this synonymous with saying that Christians don't have freedom of religion?

I don't know where McGill lives, but it can't be in the second district of Tennessee, where everywhere you look you see churches. And they aren't hiding. They tend to have steeples, signs and Crosses designating what they are. In addition, you see Christian bookstores and schools operating openly and notoriously. It is a tribute to Christianity's central importance in American life today that a politician like Howard Dean, who doesn't seem to have a Christian bone in his body, feels the need to ineptly pander to Christian voters.

Flag-Draped

If I remember correctly, it was Democrats and liberals who complained about a Bush campaign ad from 2004 that exploited 9/11. It features firemen carrying what appears to be a flag-draped casket, set against the wreckage of ground zero in New York. Now the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee has an ad making the right-wing nutballsphere go, well, nuts. It includes a shot of flag-draped caskets, intended to represent Iraq casualties, and unsubtly remind the viewers that Americans are dying in Iraq more than three years after Bush foolishly declared victory. It is a valid point, but done in a way that may offend some families of those who died in Iraq.

I'm guessing, however, that the Republican Echo Chamber is indulging in mock-outrage to score political points. NRO's Katheryn Lopez parrots a Republican Congressman's attempt to exploit the ad that is despicable. Congressman Jeb Hensarling raves:

"The families of the fallen heroes of the War on Terror deserve our utmost respect and compassion," said Hensarling. "They do not deserve to see the deaths of loved ones exploited by Rep. Emanuel and the DCCC."

"As former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, I have seen the Democrats employ a lot of low-brow political tactics over the years, but Rep. Emanuel has sunk to a new low with this video," Hensarling said. Using images of flag-draped coffins of American heroes in this sort of video is shameless and disgusting, and I ask that Rep. Emanuel apologize to military families for any pain that he has caused."

If Hensarling were genuinely concerned about sparing the feelings of "the families of the fallen heroes of the War on Terror"--as oppossed to say, clinging to power-- he would have appealed to the better better nature of Congressman Emanual. Instead he chose to spout partisan invective in a way that is exploits the suffering of Iraq War casualties as much as the Democrats did.

Terrorists & Tomato Pickers

Will the cause of immigration restriction survive its supporters such as Colorado state representative Debbie Stafford(via Kevin Drum), who upset that new citizenship restrictions on state benefits doesn't apply to those under 18 declaimed, "We're helping create the next generation of terrorists." Whatever.

I'm as supportive of controlling the border as anyone, even cretins like Stafford; but I'm aware of the difference between terrorists and Tomato pickers.

Bad Sign

Max Schulz, writing in American Conservatism : An Encyclopedia, says about Regnery Publishing:

The mention of Regnery elicits thoughts of seminal conservative books such as Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953) and God and Man at Yale (1951) . . .Henry Regnery famously said that turning a profit would be a sure sign that they were doing something wrong. . .Recent years have seen the company shed its old reputation for a new one--as a publisher of right-wing polemics bent on bruising Left-liberal icons. . .

Regnery has sold lots of books in the last decade, but they produce ephemeral fluff. The Conservative Mind is more than fifty years old and it will be read in fifty years from now. I doubt that any of Regnery's current crop of best sellers will be read as well.

Have You Now, Or Ever Been . . .

Richard H. Reeb of the Claremont Institute fingers Daniel Larison as a thoughtcriminal:

Larison is a Ph.D. student in Byzantine History at the University of Chicago, who writes at Polemics and Enchiridion Militis. He has also written for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. These credentials, not to mention his criticism, show him to be a certified paleocon.

Hmmm. Where does one go to become a "certified" paleocon? Rockford, I guess. Perhaps it involves some sort of ceremony with Thomas Fleming and/or Pat Buchanan. I have been writing for Chronicles for more than eight years now and I still haven't been certified yet.

Where Did the Party Go?

I received my copy of Jeff Taylor's Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, And the Jeffersonian Legacy, from the University of Missouri Press today. Bill Kauffman mentioned it on more than one occcasion at Reactionary Radicals and has a review forthcoming in The American Conservative. It looks like a good book about the downward spiral of the Democrats ffrom Jefferson to the Clintons and Joe Lieberman.

Our Freedom & Our Liberty . . .

A.C. Kleinheider alerts me to the . . . thoughts of Glen Dean on the subject of "libertarian purity."

A few days ago, a really nice fellow that I knew from a libertarian chat room, emailed me an article from Lew Rockwell.com entitled "In Defense of Libertarian Purity". Lew Rockwell.com certainly isn't the type of website that I normally visit. In fact, I hate it. In my opinion, most of the articles written at Lew Rockwell are written by idiots. I am not, nor will I ever be a Big L libertarian. I am also not, nor will I ever be anything close to an anarchist. No, I am not an Internet/academic nut job who wants to see all government overthrown, I am a rational libertarian.
. . .
where I differ from these so-called "purists", is that I don't believe bombing people who bombed us first conflicts with libertarianism.
. . .
I live in the reality that our freedom and our liberty was not won on the battlefields of Harvard and Berkley, but at Valley Forge and Yorktown, and not by supreme thinkers, but by fighting men . . .

The obvious point to make is that the U.S. military isn't "bombing the people who bombed us first," but occupying a country that didn't attack the United States, and lacked the means to do so. I understand what Americans were fighting for at Valley Forge and Yorktown, although I assume that the most important issue was independence. I can't really say for sure what Americans are fighting for in Baghdad and Samarra.

Encyclopedic

As the link on your right side of the screen indicates, I finally got my copy of American Conservatism : An Encyclopedia. While I haven't started reading it, as such, yet; I have enjoyed checking on all of its subjects and contributors. As of yet I haven't been disappointed when checking to see if a subject is covered. Take publications, for example. It has entries on the publications that you would expect: The American Conservative, the American Spectator, Chronicles, the Modern Age, National Review and the Weekly Standard. But it also has the Sewanee Review and Southern Partisan.

Included among the topics are the America First Committee, General Curtis LeMay and Westbrook Pegler. It's completeness means that an important figure such as Hilaire Belloc is next to a pompous-assed gasbag like Bill Bennett.

I can only assume that it will turn out to be one of the better book purchases that I have made in the last few years, and I look forward to Daniel McCarthy's forthcoming review.

Forgotten Lessons

New American Militarism author, Andrew Bacevich examines the occupiers attitude towards civilian deaths in Iraq, and what that has meant for the war effort in the Washington Post:

But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra . On May 30, U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed. The driver, Jassim's brother, had been rushing her to a hospital to give birth. No one tried to cover up the incident: U.S. military representatives issued expressions of regret. . .

The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration's narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: "We don't do body counts." Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam -- where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success -- and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.

Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It's not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count -- for internal use only -- some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.

. . .

In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.

"You have to understand the Arab mind," one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face." Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: "The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I'm about to introduce them to it."

Con vs. Con . . .

Jason, a reader commenting on Rod Dreher's post about Robert Stacey McCain's "review" of Crunchy Cons in Reason Magazine; invites me to take up the cudgel against McCain's book promotion blog, Donkey Cons. "I hope Clark Stooksbury comes across that web site. He'll have a field day."

Actually I came across McCain's blog a few months back, altough I'm not sure that I have posted anything about until now. I came across it when I was writing a review of McCain's (and Lynn Vincent's) book, Donkey Cons : Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party, which will be published in the August issue of Chronicles.

But as Maria von Trapp would say, er, sing, "Let's start at the very beginning." The June issue of Reason published the aforementioned review, which was in reality a dismissive little sidebar filled with non sequiturs. McCain's follow up post responding to Dreher indicates that he believes that Dreher is simply engaging in conspicuous consumption:

By "non-factory-farmed meat," Dreher refers to modes of production which add significantly to costs. It is all fine and good for the affluent educated elite to seek out organic vegetables and free-range meat, since they have the money, knowledge, and time to do so. This option is not really available to the poor, who must eat cheap or go hungry. Because there are (and always will be) more poor than rich people, the ostentatiously "moral" eating habits of the elite will have no measureable effect on the welfare of feed animals in general.

What Dreher's adoration of the organic diet is really about is Veblenesque conspicuous consumption. In this case, the status display involves moral virtue. Dreher apparently believes that his grocery shopping habits make him morally superior to those of us who just buy whatever's on sale at Food Lion. If I refuse to "engage" such an argument, it is because no sober person could take it seriously.

What nonsense. Factory farming and agribusiness don't produce "cheap" food-- they externalize their costs. It is safe to assume that Robert Stacey McCain doesn't care at all about the environmental damage done by the "meat-industrial complex," but that doesn't mean it that there is no reason for concern.

The real reason for McCain's antipathy seems to be jealousy. In Reason he wrote, "Right now, I'm envious of Dreher, whose anti-materialist conservative book is selling like crazy at Amazon.com." On his blog he added, "Last I heard, Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons was in its third printing, having been promoted with its very own theme blog at National Review Online. But Dreher, not content with having pocketed fat royalty checks from Crown Forum . . ."

I guess more people are into Crunchy than Donkey. I noted in my forthcoming review in Chronicles that, " Donkey Cons holds little appeal for anyone who isn't already a partisan Republican, and it enters a market already saturated with the products of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bernard Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, and many others." It must stick in McCain's craw all the more since, to the extent that the books are aimed at conservatives, Dreher is offering up (organic, hippie-grown) spinach; while Donkey Cons offers ice-cream (store-bought, from factory-farm cows whose unhealthy bodies are crammed with antibiotics -- and he likes it that way, dammit!). It is a big heaping bowl of "DEMOCRATS ARE BAD!!!!!"

I guess that even many on the right want more nutritional value.

David Horowitz "Freedom" Center

In the spirit of the just announced David Horowitz "Freedom Center," I would like to announce the creation of several other new centers:

-The Bill Clinton Monogamy Center.
-The Michelle Malkin Anger Management Center.
-The Bill Kauffman Globalism Center.
-The Hugh Hefner Chastity Center.

The possibilities are endless, and await endowment by Bill Gates or some other rich person.

True Believers

Is it possible that at this late date, people are still saying this sort of thing:

The Clintons -- and the plural is more accurate than the singular -- picked generals for their political fealty rather than military prowess. The worst public examples were Wesley Clark (a Friend of Bill from their Oxford Rhodes scholar days), and Anthony Zinni. Having spent too much time in the company of Arab leaders, Zinni became addicted to stability in the Middle East and opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.

Is Anthony Zinni supposed to be embarrassed about being so obviously right? I would say that there are at least three categories (ignoring the mostly Democratic politicians who voted yes out of political expediancy) of people on the Iraq War issue. The first includes those of us with the sense to oppose it from the beginning. The second is made up of those who were once hawkish, but are now chastened by their initial support -- I would include Andrew Sullivan, John Derbyshire and Congressman Walter B. "Freedom Fries" Jones.

The third category is made up of the dwindling band of true believers, and includes Jed Babbin, the author of the above quote.

Buchanan & Rummy

I have read Alan Wolfe's lengthy article from the Washington Monthy about conservative governance, and there is plenty of good stuff in it. But why does he drop bizarre statements like this?:

For Pat Buchanan to blame the neocons for the failure in Iraq ignores the fact that the man most responsible for the failure, Donald Rumsfeld, has more in common with Buchanan than he does with Bill Kristol. (One prominent neoconservative, however, Paul Wolfowitz, did sign on enthusiastically to Rumsfeld's agenda.) Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home.

Boy Columnist

Townhall's intrepid boy columnist, Ben Shapiro, pens what would have to be the worst Independence Day tribute I have seen. He combines lines from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with some from the Declaration of Independence, presidential war speeches and his own deep thoughts to make the founding of the United States synonymous with a declaration of permanent war. Oddly he neglects to mention William McKinley's plans to "Christianize" and "civilize" the Phillipines or quote from LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin speech:

His truth is marching on. On January 31, 2006, as American troops were engaged in remote areas of the Islamic world, President George W. Bush gave his State of the Union Address. "Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery," Bush said. "Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

That's a brief taste. Read the whole thing only if you have a strong stomach.

Outage

I've been away for a few days, not because I was in a burn ward for a fireworks injury, but because my internet connection mysteriously stopped working. During the interregnum I amused myself with such old-fashioned activities such as reading and watching movies, and discovered how often I get the urge to look something up on Wikipedia or the Internet Movie Database. I watched The Music Man, which is a great Fourth of July movie and started reading John Zmirak's Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist, which makes me look forward to reading the copy of The Social Crisis of Our Time that I picked up recently.

Proud to be an American . . .

I already noted my joy at having Mona Charen join the blogroll at National Review Online, and she isn't disappointing. In a post about patriotism, she succintly illustrates what I dislike about it when it has been appropriated as rightwing Republican property:

The indispensible Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute alerts us to the results of a number of recent surveys on the subject of patriotism. Americans, it seems, are among the most patriotic people on the planet, and large majorities describe themselves as very patriotic. (Only the Phillipines scored higher -- go figure.) But there are differences between the parties. While 71 percent of Republicans "completely agree" with the statement "I am very patriotic," only 48 percent of Democrats did. Asked "If you had the opportunity to leave the United States and live permanently in another country, would you take it?" 8 percent of Republicans, but 24 percent of Democrats answered in the affirmative . . .

Note first the how contemptuous and dismissive she is of the Phillipines; after all, what do they have to be patriotic about? Patriotism in this country is too frequently expressed in terms how much better we are than other countries -- America is the "best country in the world!"

Even if that is true, it is a bad reason to love America. In his closing comment at Reactionary Radicals, Bill Kauffman quoted G.K. Chesterton on the subject from The Napoleon of Notting Hill. "The patriot never, under any circumstances, boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of its smallness." I can't think of anyone who has done more than Kauffman has in the last few years to boast of the "smallness" of America; starting with his own hometown.

Bill Kauffman's America is a great country, and I love it a lot. Mona Charen's and National Review's America is little more than a giant abstraction with a huge gross domestic product and aircraft carriers.

I'm a Busy Man

I am pleased to report that my life is not yet so empty that I have time to actually watch Atlas Nutzed.

Saving Terre Haute

Boy, was I ever wrong to oppose invading Iraq. First, Rick Santorum courageously defied the Liberal Media to reveal the discovery of hundreds of aged, rusty mustard and sarin gas shells. Then, I tell the world about Saddam's secret supply of U-boats and triplanes (full disclosure: I made it all up).

Now, someone who calls herself the Chickenhawk Express (so you know she's not a nut) tells of the discovery of more Memos of Mass Distruction:

JVeritas over at FReeperville is still translating those documents from Iraq. He posted about his latest translation here. Given the announcement by Sen. Santorum last week and the previous document translations, it is getting more difficult for the Libs to continue their "no wmd's in Iraq" meme. Here's some of JVeritas' info...

Document http://70.168.46.200/Released/06-21-06/ISGQ-2003-00044424.pdf dated January 2002 contain memos that talk about finalized research and the plans to locally produce Chemical Materials that can be used as Precursors for Chemical Weapons and that are prohibited by the United Nations for Iraq to produce locally . . . However Iraq was absolutely prohibited from manufacturing it locally because it will not be controlled by the UN and thus it can be used to produce Chemical Weapons . . .

The evidence is mounting day by day. But don't expect the enemedia to report any of this. It doesn't fit their "Bush Lied - People Died" agenda. You can read the full translation here.

Can you imagine the danger America faced from this? First they produce memos. Then they have meetings to discuss said memos. Then they revise the memos on the basis of the meetings. Then a computer crash forces them to start over. Then a temp spills coffee on them. but eventually it happens: Terre Haute, Indiana is a wasteland. And the Liberal "enemedia" don't even care because they never did care much for Terre Haute to begin with.

I've learned my lesson. I'll never question the President and his supporters again -- no matter how absurd their claims.

"East Tennessee Common Sense"

The first district of Tennesee has a real prize, Richard Roberts, running for Congress. He wants you to know that most of all, he supports the president:

I stand in opposition to Monday morning quarterbacks like the New York Times and Ted Kennedy who hurt our troops when they attack our President. They are aiding and abetting the enemy. Period.

And I stand in contrast to those Republicans -- some here in Tennessee -- who try to distance themselves from the President. They do the most damage of all -- and they should be ashamed.

I suppose that is a dig at Jimmy Duncan, who continues to oppose the Iraq quamire, and is thereby doing more harm that even Ted Kennedy! If Roberts really believes that, then he ought to have the guts to name names.

Roberts also shares to the "Ronald Reagan belief that the 'government that governs least, governs best.'" Never mind that government can't "govern the least" while occupying Iraq, and that the president that Roberts supports so strongly has a somewhat expansive view of exective power; it was Thomas Paine who supported governing the least.

Roberts also wants you to know that he has "East Tennessee Common Sense" -- a phrase that repeatedly pops up on his website.

P.S. Why do I have a picture of a "hottie" at the top? She appears, for no particular reason, above the volunteer link on Robert's site.

Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue

Commenting on Dr. Frist, and the Senate's plan to take on the epidemic of flag-burning gripping the country; Daniel McCarthy quotes John Lukacs on what happens to religion when it is mixed with populist nationalism:

The great threat to religious faith in our time (more precisely, to the quality and meaning of faith) is populist nationalism. The democratization of the churches has led to that; but that is only a secondary consequence, inseparable from the democratization of entire societies. The primary element is simpler, and more important. It is that the religion of the nation, the sentimental symbols of the nation, are more powerful than religious faith, especially when they are commingled.

You would think that the pro-religion party would be more sensitive to substituting religious worship with worship of the flag.

Fortunately, there is a compromise position that doesn't turn America into a religion. The Republicans should propose putting a C-130 with a crew on 24 hour standby waiting to fly country music superstar Toby Keith to the sight of any flag-burning, so that he can kick the burner's ass back to France.

Great News!

As if they didn't already have the A-team of the blogosphere, K-Lo informs us that National Review Online is adding a Mona Charen blog. I see they didn't allow the miserable failure of "Can She Be Stopped" to deter them from expanding.

Front Porch Reviews

Alan Pell Crawford has a review of Look Homeward America in the Richmond Times Dispatch:

In this celebration of what Kauffman calls America's "traditionalist rebels," passages of considerable eloquence are all the more arresting precisely because they appear in a work otherwise characterized by such unrestrained jollity.

Kauffman's moving tribute to the Kentucky farmer, poet and pacifist Wendell Berry, for example, is as fine an essay as one is likely to find in American journalism today. It is also an astute work of historical analysis.

Challenging the conventional wisdom from Frederick Jackson Turner to Jack Kerouac, Kauffman offers a useful counter-thesis. "The careless have always been the first to pick up and move -- a coward's game, no matter what the mythmakers tell us," he writes. "As romantic as prairie schooners and the Hesperian exodus to the fruited plain may be, the real honor resides with those who stayed put. They were not timid souls, afraid of a challenge, but the real heroes of the settling of America."

Caelum et Terra does as well:

Besides, anarchist or not, Mr. Kauffman is no ideologue. His book contains paeans to anarchists, certainly (Mother Jones, Thoreau, Dorothy Day, Paul Goodman), but also to Catholic liberals (Eugene McCarthy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan), socialists (Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas), regionalist artists (Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry), antiwar farmer-poets (Wendell Berry), disaffected Republican operatives (Karl Hess) and many even more unclassifiable thinkers, dreamers, and hell-raisers. Kauffman finds his affinities in humanity, not ideology, in those who love land, home, locality and real souls with real faces more than abstractions.

Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward, America will no doubt be categorized with Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, as both books tweak conventional conservatism.

Or rather, Dreher tweaks.

Bueller? Bueller?

Ben Stein. Has this guy accomplished anything of value since Ferris Bueller's Day Off? In today's American Spectator he explains why he is a Republican -- they are so nice:

But Karl Rove is why I am a Republican. He is how Republicans are. Richard Nixon was not kidding fifty-four years ago when he talked about his wife, Pat, not having a fur coat, but instead happily owned ". . . a good Republican cloth coat . . ."

The real Republicans are the hardware store owners in Little Rock, the factory workers in Kentucky who believe in life, the retired aerospace workers in Palm Desert who are concerned about the moral decay of the culture. The wearers of cloth coats. Those are Republicans, to me. The Republican Party is not really about ending the inheritance tax for billionaires. The real Republicans don't even know billionaires. (Most billionaires are Democrats, anyway.) The real Republicans are not about Iraq or the ABM. They are about loving their neighbors and wanting to pass on the same great America they knew as children to their grandchildren.

Real Republicans are not haters. Not ever. It's just not in them to hate, just as it's not in any real American to hate any other American who lives within the law.

Anyway, I left the evening just in a state of amazement about Karl. This is the assassin? This is the thug? Wow, do his critics not know him. But you know what? They wouldn't stop hating him even if they did know him, because that's who they are, no matter who he is.

Really? Because they seem pretty focussed on ending the inheritance tax -- "death tax" in their parlance -- to help the very wealthy. I'm not sure what the Little Rock shopkeepers and Kentucky factory workers are getting from the from the Republicans these days other than biennial political campaigns of "the fags are coming to abort your American flags"; while delivering endless war and a house-of-cards economy based on mountains of debt.

But Karl Rove is so nice!

Take Your Choice

Thomas Jefferson: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none . . ."

Bill Quick: "We are a nation founded on telling the rest of the world to go to hell, and shedding our blood to send it there."

Chronicles Anniversery

I got the July Chronicles, which is the thirtieth anniversery issue of that magazine. I haven't read much of it yet, but has an article by Congressman Jimmy Duncan suggesting that we put America first and a good review of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn by Tobias Lanz that makes an interesting point:

In the past, even city dwellers tended small gardens and often raised chickens, rabbits, and pigeons to provide protein for their diets. Today, keeping a pair of laying hens in your backyard is a crime in most towns, while running a leaf blower at 90 decibels for hours on end is not.

More Revelations . . .

My well-placed sources have informed me (on double-secret deep background) that our troops have discovered more World War I era weapons, in addition to the mustard gas shells, in Iraq:

•13 Fokker Triplanes -- and the plans to make more!
•7 Unterseeboots.
•An undisclosed number of "machine guns."
•Tools that might be used for digging trenches.

This ought to finally convince the liberals and the MSM of the dire threat that Saddam presented in the fall of 2002.

Projectiles

Is it possible that the War Party finally has found the WMD smoking gun that hasn't turned up in the last three years? Led by Glenn Reynolds, they are claiming as much. NRO's Kathryn Lopez laid out the findings that came from Rick Santorum:

Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist. Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market.

Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq.

The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.

The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.

The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions.

While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.

It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons. (emphasis added)

Is this what all of the fuss was about back in 2002? No. As I have pointed out before, we didn't invade Iraq because Saddam had "sarin and mustard-filled projectiles" or "pre-Gulf War chemical munitions." We invaded Iraq because of the grave threat that might end in a mushroom cloud.

As awful as it would no doubt be to be subjected to an attack by mustard and sarin gas shells, assuming that any of them still worked; they didn't pose a "grave threat" to the United States in 2002. In fact, artillery shells, which is what this report appears to be about, wouldn't pose any threat to Americans unless we invaded Iraq. And I have yet to see any reports that Americans have been subject to a poison gas attack.

What Were They Thinking?

Daniel McCarthy has a post about the Fall/Winter catalog from ISI Books, and does it sound awful! Apparently it has not one book about how LIBERALS HATE AMERICA! Nothing explaining that anyone not currently groveling at George Bush's foot is a TRAITOR!

ISI is ignoring the twin threats of HILLARY and BARBARA STREISAND!

Conservatives have a murderers row of brilliant minds ranging from Coulter to Hannity to Hewitt, yet ISI thinks people will actually read books by Russell Kirk and SolzhenWHOtsyn? They aren't even on Fox!

It's A Number

I despise this insane war as much as anybody, but the criticism of Tony Snow for his quote about the 2500th fatality in the war ("It's a number") is silly and off-base. He is right about this. People have a fascination with round figures, and make a big deal out of milestones. The 2500th death in the Iraq war is no more or less significant than number 2499 or 2501, and people should stop acting as if it is.

Beating the Powers That Be

I put a link to Sean Scallon's blog a few days ago. Those of you who subscribe to Chronicles will recognize him as a contributor to that magazine. I also just got a copy of his book, Beating the Powers that Be : Independent Political Movements and Parties of the Upper Midwest and their Relevance for Third Parties of Today . I have only skimmed it, but it looks good. As the subtitle suggests, it is about political movements organizations such as the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota and the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota. It looks like a good companion read to Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America.

Ah Freepers!

It is always a pleasure to follow the banter and exchange of views on this thoughtful website:

To: Sub-Driver

MURTHA = ANTI-AMERICAN PIG

2 posted on 06/18/2006 10:01:59 AM PDT by new yorker 77 (FAKE POLLS DO NOT TRANSLATE INTO REAL VOTERS!)

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To: Sub-Driver

traitor

3 posted on 06/18/2006 10:03:56 AM PDT by samtheman

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To: Sub-Driver

Some enterprising counter-protestor should go to one of these lib rallies and start the chant "We Can't Win"... let that be the slogan of the Democrats!

4 posted on 06/18/2006 10:04:36 AM PDT by thoughtomator (A thread without a comment on immigration is not complete)

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To: thoughtomator

Time to put the old fart out to pasture.


http://www.irey.com/

5 posted on 06/18/2006 10:06:25 AM PDT by Spruce (Keep your mitts off my wallet)

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To: Sub-Driver

Okinawa??? WTF???

6 posted on 06/18/2006 10:06:26 AM PDT by rickmichaels

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To: Sub-Driver

http://murthamustgo.blogspot.com/

Excellent rebuttal to Murtha's rants.

7 posted on 06/18/2006 10:09:47 AM PDT by stopem (God Bless the U.S.A the Troops who protect her, and their Commander In Chief !)

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To: rickmichaels

Okinawa??? WTF???

That was one of the locations that murtha wanted to "redeploy" our troops to. From there, they could "quickly" go back in if it were necessary.

8 posted on 06/18/2006 10:09:59 AM PDT by Bob

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To: rickmichaels

That would require at least 12 days of hard steaming by boat or a bunch of aircraft to move from Okinawa to the Gulf, plus days to unload prepositioning ships.

I have no idea what he think being in Okinawa can do for us.

9 posted on 06/18/2006 10:12:24 AM PDT by USNBandit (sarcasm engaged at all times)

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To: Bob

In other words, he's testing to see if all out carnage breaks loose. And if it does and thousands die, the government goes under, and the police force is in tatters, we should redeploy.

It's beyond moronic.

10 posted on 06/18/2006 10:12:51 AM PDT by CheyennePress

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To: rickmichaels

Okinawa??? WTF???

I think he meant Guam, but he failed to correct himself (even though Tim gave him a chance). I don't think Okinawa wants 100,000 more troops hanging out there anyway.

11 posted on 06/18/2006 10:14:34 AM PDT by operation clinton cleanup

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To: Sub-Driver

This POS is already the most vulnerable incumbent running.

I'd hate to be in his shoes on the day after the election.

12 posted on 06/18/2006 10:15:37 AM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist

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To: Sub-Driver

13 posted on 06/18/2006 10:19:17 AM PDT by mirkwood (Gun control isn't about guns. It's about control.)

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Hadji Girl

Elements of the nutballsphere have entered the advanced stages of hysterics over criticism of the song "Hadji Girl," written and performed (and posted for a brief time at youtube) by Cpl. Joshua Belile, a Marine serving in Iraq. The song tells the story of a Marine being lured into a trap by an Iraqi girl; and who proceeds to kill her jihadi brother and father, while using another young girl as a human shield:

. . . And she pulled up to a side shanty
And she threw open the door and I hit the floor.

Cause her brother and her father shouted

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They pulled out their AKs so I could see

And they said
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah

So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little f***ers to eternity . . .

The most absurd response comes from "Uncle Jimbo" at the milblog, Blackfive. Jimbo writes that the,

USMC has decided that appeasing the apologists at CAIR is more important than, oh say the freaking Bill of Rights. WTF? over. I realize that military service comes with some restrictions, but I must have missed the part where the right to satire during off duty time was revoked. Anyhow me being me I zipped off a message to the spokesweasel the USMC sent out to flog their kowtow to the Islamic lobby.

Ignore fore a minute that someone over fourteen writes, "WTF"; Jimbo claims to have military experience, but he seems to have never heard of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Article 134 of the UCMJ reads in part, ". . . all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, . . . shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special or summary court-martial , according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court."(emphasis added)

A resonable person might consider singing about killing Iraqis, while using a child as a human shield, and "laughing manically"; might "bring discredit upon the armed forces." Jimbo is naive if he thinks that a Marine in uniform, as Belile is partially in the video (still available at Little Green Nutballs), is free to say anything he pleases. Imagine if a Belile got up and sang about how he hates Bush or Rumsfeld. I doubt if he would have many rightwing defenders. And as much as I detest Bush and Rumsfeld, they are in the military chain-of-command, and entitled at least respectful silence if nothing else.

Still, I would hope that the Marine Corps passes on any serious form of punishment in this case. There is nothing wrong with writing and performing such as song for your fellow Marines or soldiers. I assume that it would help to relieve the stress of facing death on a regular basis in a hostile, alien culture. The military should however, impress upon Cpl. Belile and the rest of the troops, how foolish it is to post such a song on the internet; where essentially the whole world can see it.

Once In a . . .

Check for a blue moon tonight. John Podhoretz said something that makes sense. "Whatever Jim Webb is, a 'liberal' he ain't. He's closer to a paleocon when it comes to foreign policy, which is his major issue."

"Mission Accomplished"

Sarah Moore mocks the almost 90 year old Sen. Robert Byrd for, among other things, saying that George Bush declared "mission accomplished" in May of 2001 instead of 2003. It's an minor mistake compared to, you know, being the one who declared "mission accomplished" at the beginning of a long guerilla war.

I Pledge Allegiance . . .

Andrew Sullivan (ignore his "Christianist" nonsense.) notes this humorous mish-mash of historical ignorance from the Conerned Women for America:

Concerned Women for America's (CWA's) Director of Government Relations Lanier Swann will join other conservative leaders in speaking at a press conference tomorrow in support of Sen. Jon Kyle's (R-Arizona) and Rep. Todd Akin's (R-Missouri) Pledge Protection Act. This legislation would ensure the protection of the phrase "under God" in the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance . . .

Swann said, "As Americans commemorate Flag Day, it is also appropriate to remember the importance of keeping God in our Pledge. CWA strongly supports the mention of God in our nation's oath in keeping with our constitutional freedoms. We are free from an established religion and free to worship as we choose. Our country's founding fathers were men of faith who intentionally included the phrase 'under God' in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country.

Sullivan helpfully notes that the Pledge didn't come from the "founding fathers" but from 19th century socialist and Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy. It originally read: " I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." It had numerous revisions, including the addition of "under God" in the 1950s.

Lower Standards

How low have standards become for the right to declare victory these days? Rush Limbaugh provides an answer by celebrating the fact that Karl Rove avoided indictment and, more importantly, the president was able to sneak into Iraq with enough security -- ABC News reported that only Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld knew -- that he avoided being blown up.

This is victory? More than three years after you know what it is still not safe enough to have a normal visit to Iraq and that's reason to brag?

In related news, another partisan hack is smug because deficit is going to be cut in half sooner than Bush predicted. You know, the deficit that was zero when Bush took office.

Saddam's Ties to Terror . . .

Jonah Goldberg points to yet more proof that the United States would be nothing more than a smoking crater if the Bush administration hadn't rushed to meet the grave threat from Iraq in the spring of 2003:

A newly released document appears to provide evidence that in 1999 the Taliban welcomed "Islamic relations with Iraq" to mediate among the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and Russia, and that the Taliban invited Iraqi officials to Afghanistan.

Cobra II

Andrew Bacevich has a good review of Cobra II : The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq in the London Review of Books. It is critical of the usual suspects -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. He, and the book, also give needed attention to the performance of Tommy Franks:

Rumsfeld's chosen military interlocutor was General Tommy Franks, the commander of United States Central Command. In a bestselling memoir published after his retirement, Franks portrays himself as a 'good old boy' from west Texas who also happens to be a military genius. In Cobra II, he comes across as Rumsfeld's useful idiot: a coarse, not especially bright, kiss-up, kick-down martinet who mistreats his subordinates but keeps his boss happy. Franks knew that he wasn't in charge, but he pretended otherwise. Appreciating the 'political value in being able to stand at the Pentagon podium and say that the Bush administration was implementing the military's plan', Rumsfeld was happy to play along.

Not a Good Day to Die : The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, about a battle in the war in Afghanistan, was also highly critical of Franks.

I doubt that if Robert E. Lee, Patton and Erwin Rommel all rose from the grave to tell Rummy that his theories and plans were nuts, that he would have listened. But it seems that Franks didn't even see a problem with them.

The Party's Over

Bill Kauffman officially signed off at Reactionary Radicals this morning, but the website and the book linger on.

The Two Marks

Today's American Spectator carries not one, but two defenses of Ann Coulter's remarks about the 9/11 widows, who had the temerity to tepidly criticize the Bush administration on occcasion. Mark Gavreau Judge latches on to the bizarre notion that to ever describe the death of a loved one in any detail makes you a moral monster:

But the more I saw the Jersey Girls' press release, the more that fissure widened . . . Before the list came this: "Contrary to Ms. Coulter's statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. . ."

I read that, and a thought came to mind. I tried to push it away, ignore it. But I simply could not get that line out of my mind: "there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive."
. . .

What person describes the death of a loved one in such detail?

Think about it. Think about people you've loved who have died, and how they died . . . Ten years ago, my father died of cancer. I can hardly bring myself to say the word, much less describe what he looked like and went through in the last months. When I meet someone who had a loved one suffer a similar fate, the conversation always trails off when we mention our common story. One of us will mutter, "it's a terrible thing," then change the conversation.

Curse me, I know I'm going to hell for this: Why did the Jersey Girls describe the deaths of their husbands with such startling precision?

What is he talking about? "Great detail," "startling precision"? The statement from the press release is descriptive, but hardly constitutes "startling precision. By invoking his father's death, Judge undermines his whole point. He doesn't use "great detail," but he is using the death of a loved one to make a political point in a fashion far less defensible than the "Jersey Girls." I pay little attention to the policy notions of 9/11 widows, but the 9/11 attacks had obvious political consequences. But Judge invokes his father's death to come to the aid of Ann Coulter.

Judge's point is further undermined by the companion article by Mark Golblatt. Golblatt leads off by describing the death of his mother with, you guessed it, "startling precision." "She spent the last two weeks of her life in a hospice, under heavy sedation but still gasping for air and coughing up phlegm." Goldblatt's article almost has a point. He argues that being a 9/11 widow gives one no special policy insight. I say "almost" because Coulter didn't simply denounce the views of the 9/11 widows, she questioned their basic human decency. Which is what she, and many other commentators, does. Her political schtick involves taking the rightwing line and describing anyone who crosses it as a traitor and as an evil person. It does nothing to advance the political debate in this country, and I can't imagine why the two Marks would dredge up the bones of their own loved ones in order to defend such a repulsive person.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

Lorie Byrd has it all wrong. The killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is good news, no matter how you look at it. But she says, "make no mistake about it, there are some people who will not be happy about this very good news just because it might allow the President's approval numbers to rise a tick or two."

That may be true in some quarters, but shame on them. The president is in deep trouble because he is doing a terrible job. He may rise a tick or two, but he will go down again.