Turning and Turning

[posted by Callimachus]

From one who turned:

[T]he Republican Party and their supporters have got to start matching their actions to their rhetoric. It is hard to take continued invocations of an "existential war" and a "war of survival" seriously in the face how both the Administration and the Republican Congress has acted over the past 3 years.

We have a President and Commander-in-Chief who allows Congress to insult our war-time allies (the United Arab Emirates) while publicly embracing those dedicated to the subversion of our nation's purpose (CAIR). We have a President, having decided on the boldest of strategies for this war, who has decided to fight it in the most timid manner possible… as if warfare can be conducted in a manner that will not offend. So we have left our enemies in the field, to fight and kill again, because George W. Bush doesn't want to use rules of engagement that might garner him criticism from some Imam in Saudi Arabia.

But most galling to me personally is the fact that the President has refused, at every turn, to trust the seriousness or the resolve of the American people. He has demonstrated, over and over again, that the last people on Earth he trusts are the American People. So rather than put forth the sort of proposals one would expect from the leader of a nation in a war of survival, we have been asked to do little more than step to the sidelines and keep our mouths shut.

Probably a quarter of the bloggers who I had on my original site's blogroll when I started it in 2003 or so -- people who were there in rough agreement with me -- now write more or less like this, if they write at all.

Another quarter write exactly like DKos or MyDD. This one, however, still is on the roll, in part because he also writes like this:

... I am far from denying that there are citizens who, for whatever reason, wish to see the United States suffer a humiliating defeat in the Iraq War. Far from it. Lots of them were in Washington D.C. this weekend. I am forever amused by the fact that when my views come into alignment with their own, some of the Left's more dimwitted denizens feel the need to hold me up as an example as a right-thinking Conservative and/or Republican … as if superficial agreement on a single issue will somehow lessen my contempt for them.

To Air is Human

[posted by Callimachus]

MTak is not minding his anti-war overlords. He wants to "set aside Mr. Bush," along with a lot of other straw dummies he likes to punch up without naming (who is this "Rightosphere" guy who says all these stupid things?) and "give [the surge] a couple of months."

Mr. Bush's enablers did their best to keep us on the path to defeat. We, the rational and patriotic war critics of all parties, can claim credit for this change ....

[Oh, dear, can I assume, based on what he writes, that I'm irrational, unpatriotic, and determined to chauffeur America to defeat?]

What M. Talk doesn't seem to realize is that, since he once supported the war against Saddam and derided its opponents, and he now derides the war against Saddam and supports its opponents, that doesn't entitle him to an opinion. In the eyes of his new allies, it entitles him to a long stay in a political re-education camp.

Just consider some of the comments Dan Drezner got when he recently issued his own mea cupla for his opinions in 2003:

So, dear readers, I definitely erred in the arguments I made in 2002 and 2003. I have and will try to do better. Bear in mind, however, that when it comes to foreign policy prognostications, better is a relative term.

He, and any who sympathized with him, were told:

You all need to go back to school and take some philosophy and literature courses.

... You played fast and cheap with life, and now you need to do penance.

How you can start: look in the mirror and say, "Bush, Cheney, etc. are cynical, selfish criminals, and I abetted them, and I will never be so sloppy and careless again."

Penance! MTak, Penance! Down on your knees, sinner. Your new snark-and-rage commissars will tell you when you are fit to stand again, much less to speak and be heeded. Until then, giving "a chance" to anything Bushco. does, and urging others to do so, is not going to shorten your suffering.

[And you wonder why some people are just not so eager to admit mistakes, even if they know perfectly well they've made them.]

NPR Effect

[posted by Callimachus]

When Andrew Olmsted wrote about the Fairness Doctrine, he tossed off this line:

Conservatives read conservative web sites and listen to conservative radio. Liberals read liberal web sites and listen to NPR (just kidding).

But I don't think it need be kidding. Certainly there's not an equivalency between Limbaugh and NPR. But Ginny seems to me to get it right here:

As I’ve become more political, I’ve got to admit, NPR irritates me more than it used to and I listen less often. But I suspect that I stayed with a much more leftish take on current affairs for years because I liked the rest of what they did; thus, that was where I got much of my information. And I thought, well, they are a little slanted but surely this is the truth. I have more doubts, but suspect most of the time, it is still the truth. It’s just that there is so much out there & they select truths that fit their patterns - patterns I no longer see as quite so valid (about politics, the war, childraising, religion, etc.).

My wife, at home with the baby, has it on all day, though she's good enough to turn it off when I come home. It's been her main source of news for the past few weeks. I get mine off the unfiltered wires and the Internet. Yet when we talk about "what's in the news" it's interesting to me to see what didn't get through on NPR. Like Cindy Sheehan commandeering the microphone from the Democrats and haranguing them about Iraq after their electoral victory. Which seems not to have made the NPR broadcasts. Yet one can imagine what would have been reported there, and in what tut-tutting tones, had the GOP been coming to power and Pat Robertson or someone like him stolen the show to rant about abortion and evil.

Journalism is not the business of reporting reality. It's the business of choosing what to leave out.

Jonah and the Wail

[posted by Callimachus]

This one is sure to be talked-about. Jonah Goldberg at NRO says "The Iraq war was a mistake." For some reason, that's supposed to be a bombshell admission that changes everything.

I never get that. "[T]he Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003." Well, that's some bombshell, isn't it? Maybe I just don't think of it all in terms of red light/green light, mistake/not mistake.

Maybe Jimmy Cater was right and fighting the American Revolution instead of waiting for a peaceful evolution of separation was a mistake. Maybe not standing up to the Soviets in Hungary in 1956 was a mistake. Maybe standing up to them in 1950 in Korea was, too. Maybe not letting the Southern states separate in peace in 1861 was a mistake. Maybe putting a man on the Moon instead of investing in a space station was a mistake.

Maybe the alternatives would have been worse.

In my life, maybe not going to law school was a mistake. Maybe going into journalism instead of teaching was a mistake. Doesn't keep me awake at night. Here I am. The question that matters is, where from here?

Other than that, and I don't know if it's a quibble or a chasm, I think Goldberg makes some sense here:

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein’s bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do. Washington’s more important intelligence failure lay in underestimating what would be required to rebuild and restore post-Hussein Iraq. The White House did not anticipate a low-intensity civil war in Iraq, never planned for it and would not have deemed it in the U.S. interest to pay this high a price in prestige, treasure and, of course, lives.

According to the goofy parameters of the current debate, I’m now supposed to call for withdrawing from Iraq. If it was a mistake to go in, we should get out, some argue. But this is unpersuasive. A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn’t rush to pull the knife out. We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.

Those who say that it’s not the central front in the war on terror are in a worse state of denial than they think Bush is in. Of course it’s the central front in the war on terror. That it has become so is a valid criticism of Bush, but it’s also strong reason for seeing our Iraqi intervention through. If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened.

Bush’s critics claim that democracy promotion was an afterthought, a convenient rebranding of a war gone sour. I think that’s unfair, but even if true, it wouldn’t mean liberty isn’t at stake. It wouldn’t mean that promoting a liberal society in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world wouldn’t be in our interest and consistent with our ideals. In war, you sometimes end up having to defend ground you wouldn’t have chosen with perfect knowledge beforehand. That’s us in Iraq.

"According to the conventional script," he writes, "if I’m not saying 'bug out' of Iraq, I’m supposed to say 'stay the course.' " He rightly finds this manichaean duality ridiculous. He has a potential third option at his fingertips: "I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay."

Intriguing, but I'm not sure it doesn't set dangerous precedents. I'm not such a fan of the tyranny of King Numbers. What if it's 52-to-48? How do you hold a fair election that accurately samples public opinion when one result of the election is "the majority gets to slaughter the minority?" What if all the Kurds say "stay" and all the Shi'ites say "go?"

A World To Lose

"Leaving the Left can be a bit like trying to quit the Mafia," Marc Cooper writes. "You can’t get out without getting assassinated -– literally or figuratively. The Left, infused with a 'class-struggle-a-world-to-win' ethic, tends to look upon its apostates not only as enemies, but as downright traitors."

Cooper's reflection was sparked by this piece in the "Independent" by Johann Hari, the young British writer and playwright who is still a self-described leftist, though he understands the menace of Islamofascism. Hari interviewed his friend and, in some sense, mentor, the uber-apostate socialist, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens tells him why he left The Movement:

He explains that he believes the moment the left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody -- any movement -- that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings."

Hitchens -- who has just returned from Afghanistan -- says, "The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.

(At his personal site, Hari continues the thought-train that left the station during his interview with an apostate mentor. And there he outlines his own difference with Hitchens on the "one issue" support of Bush and presents what strikes me as an honorable and humane multi-issue rejection of Bush -- one of the few I've read.)

Cooper takes the broader view of the modern left:

The truly disconcerting part of all this, to borrow a descriptor from Hari, is that lefties rarely apply this purity test to those who stand to their purported left (but who, in reality, are reactionary enemies of democracy).

Example: Hitchens is drummed out of the left because his interpretation of anti-fascism brings him to support certain U.S. government policies and even the President. But what consequences among leftists does, say, Ramsey Clark reap for joining, literally, in the defense of Milosevic and Saddam? Anybody call him a traitor to the left recently?

What about college-activist favorite Michael Parenti who actually boasts that Slobo was a socialist, and anti-imperialist no less? What price does Parenti pay on the left for peddling such rubbish?

Just who on the left refuses to work with International A.N.S.W.E.R. whose propaganda denounces Bush but praises Kim il Sung? Did anyone care that the Not In Our Name campaign, that got squishy anti-war liberals to line up behind it, was organized by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, by folks who have defended, I might point out, the public execution of drug users?

Oh perish the very thought! Dare to criticize any of those folks from within the left and it’s tantamount to McCarthyism. But trashing a great mind like Hitchens, publicly condemning him as a traitor, a delusional alcoholic or as a queer, as Alexander Cockburn did? Well, no, that’s just sport, comrade.