31 posts tagged “conservative”

I have been working at a new job recently, and I have had little energy for blogging.  But today I took the time during lunch to pen a few thoughts on the Barack Obama problem.
Additionally, my wife found my first gray hair this evening.  I am ecstatic, having desired a touch of gray since I was 17 or so.  I think that optimally I would affect a George Clooney or a Reed Richards, one or t'other.  Now, without much ado, my first bloggable thought in weeks.

********************

Lately I've been ruminating on the specter of an Obama candidacy.  Hillary is not done yet, but it looks grim.  The Democrats have decided that they can safely abandon Mrs. Clinton in favor of the charismatic Senator from Illinois.  Obama presents some unique obstacles to a reasonable discourse.  No criticism of the man seems to be allowed to stand...for this, that or the other reason.  He was handled with kid gloves during the early part of the primaries.  
The crux of the issue with Barack Obama is that he is an inexperienced candidate who has some very questionable associations that may affect his ability to lead us, but we are being prevented from seriously exploring his weaknesses because of a heightened sensitivity to matters of race and identity.
There is a legitimate fear that his association with avowed anti-American radicals as well as his long membership in a church which prides itself on being the cutting edge of black liberation theology are less a circumstance of his political upbringing and more a reflection of his own personal beliefs.  Americans, I feel it safe to say, want in their President a basic quality - that of the ultimate Spokesman.  To my thinking, a President should at the very least be altogether in love with America.  Not blithely accepting this or that policy as sacred, no, but echoing Stephen Decatur's toast:

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.

A man who could share this sentiment looks clearly at things and sees the plain truth that America, for all her faults, is a force for good in the larger world.  A President of the United States should ever and always be the first to sound the praises of America, even as he claims to chart a new course.
Obama's attempts to avoid jingoism and immodest displays of patriotism bespeak a very cool attitude towards the country he thinks he is qualified to lead.  The question again intrudes upon us:  what exactly are his beliefs about America?  We must have an answer, but we are consistently thwarted in our attempts to procure one.
I am inclined to believe, as are others, that Obama's immaculate status is preserved by unfair means.  Why is it legitimate, even mandatory, to question Cindy McCain's tax returns, but entirely unfair to bring up the subject of Obama's radical colleagues and mentors?  If there is a scale of relevance, Mrs. McCain ranks in the bottom quarter...or eighth.
But, as ever with liberals, we find that when it comes to their pet causes every action is judged on a sliding scale - a relative measure.  Obama is spared from deserved criticism because he is held to a different standard.  I posit that this is due to his race.
It is not a direct relationship.  Obama is not spared because he is black.  But he is.  What we have to understand is that the culprit in this case is the very worst sort of identity politics.
Think about it.  To liberals, a person's identity takes center stage.  Every aspect of that person makes up the very essence of who they are, their identity.  This is opposed to character, which can be judged to be good or bad.  Criticizing a person for their character flaws, long thought to be acceptable as a means of improving character, has of late been replaced with a drive to affirm the individual's sense of identity.  Iconoclasm is the new old vogue, and so to criticize a person like Barack Obama is to violate a taboo of liberalism. 
Another thing that makes up your identity, as opposed to your character, is your race.  So, to criticize Obama's actions is to criticize his identity.  And to criticize his identity is to criticize, however tenuously, his race.  And thus we are faced with the uncomfortable realization that criticizing Barack Obama has a slight odor of racism about it.  I doubt Obama intentionally cultivates this, but he certainly benefits from it.  And I'd liken the scent to a manufactured odor, sort of the way that Febreze doesn't really smell like fresh linens hanging on a line. 

When we view Obama through a lens of identity, it is not possible to judge him fit or unfit for the Presidency.  When we look at him through the prism of character, it is eminently doable.  This is the great problem we face in our current political climate:  Identity politics is the order of the day, and until we distinguish between the false, relative view of identity and true personhood we will never be free of it.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the neoconservative movement?  It often feels like folks who support the Iraq War in particular and the War on Terror in general are unreservedly labeled neoconservative, neocon, neopig, baby-killer, etc.  In truth, support for the war has never been the exclusive domain of neoconservatism, which philosophy is a convenient political ally for conservatives like myself. 
There are some differences between neoconservatism and what I would consider an archetypal American Conservative.  Neocons are not, in my experience, all that committed to social conservatism.  This isn't bad, per se, at best it means they are simply focused on other issues.  Their actual beginnings are quite interesting for someone who has only learned of the neocons through the media.  Burned by liberalism many ages ago, these intellectuals brought their considerable smarts to bear in the fight to spread American notions of liberty and representative government while preserving American interests.  At least I thought so.  The real truth is slightly different.
I read a piece by Jonah Goldberg on the topic.  Here's a snippet:

Obviously, supporting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to support the Iraq war. But it works the other way around as well. Support for the Iraq war doesn’t automatically make you a neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense after 9/11, argues in his new memoir, War and Decision, that democratization didn’t rank very high among the Bush administration’s early priorities. Moreover, the administration’s mistakes in Iraq — perhaps including the war itself — have less relationship to ideology than many think. “It is possible,” as Kagan notes, “to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine.” (Just ask newly hired Hamas spokesman Jimmy Carter.)

The question I ask myself is whether the current political climate allows the liberals to step back and really examine their views.  For the liberal leaders, this is obviously not in their interest.  But for the people who mindlessly condemn neoconservatism without being able to explain its basic origins and principles...there's hope they will see sense before they are duped into electing a person who will put us on the path taken by Europe.

National Review Online has a tremendous piece by Frederick W. Kagan on Iraq.  Specifically, the common myths associated with the war that many on the left side of the spectrum continually cite as reasons we have lost, will lose, or must withdraw from the present conflict.
Do the nattering nabobs really know the counterpoint to their arguments?  I would think not.  So often I see a parroted claim about the war that can be no more supported than the rantings of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  Conservatives who have conviction but not the knowledge to back it up must educate themselves so as to better exploit this weakness.  Liberals who wish to better defend themselves may also find the article useful.

Let's just ignore for now the sobering fact that no amount of information will make any of us actually change our minds, and just enjoy the opportunity to learn.

The article's long, as something like this would have to be, but it's not overlong.  Five years of the left pulling out every conceivable objection to the war have left Kagan a big job.  He tackles it handily and you should read the whole thing.  However, I provide a snippet to draw you in:

The War Costs Too Much
An increasingly popular talking point of the antiwar party is that the war simply costs too much and that we must end it and refocus on domestic priorities. This talking point has a number of variants:

The “$3 trillion war.” Simplistic economic analysis declares that the war has cost the taxpayers $3 trillion since its inception, implying that this is a $3 trillion dead loss to the economy — a price too high to pay.

• Modern economics has long understood that the notion of a one-for-one guns-versus-butter trade-off is simply wrong. A high proportion of money spent on defense goes back into the U.S. economy in the form of salaries paid to the more than 5 million Americans employed directly or indirectly by the Defense Department, and payments to the defense industry and the long and complex supply chains from which they draw their raw materials. Military spending has traditionally been a form of economic stimulus, and wars more commonly end recessions or depressions than start them. That’s not a good reason to start a war, but neither is it a good reason to lose one. The impact of the current war on the U.S. economy, finally, is far smaller than the impact of previous major conflicts. Military spending in World War II ranged from 17.8 percent of GDP to 37.5 percent; in Korea from 5.0 percent (in 1950 — 7.4 percent in 1951) to 14.2 percent; in Vietnam from 7.4 percent to 9.4 percent. Current expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars bring total defense expenditures to something well below 5 percent of GDP. Even granting the simplistic and misleading $3 trillion figure, $3 trillion is about 5 percent of the nearly $60 trillion American GDP over the five years of the war.

I think this paragraph from Jonah Goldberg of National Review is a tidy summation of my feelings on what some have called "one of the finest speeches ever." 

Why do voluptuaries of racial argy-bargy want yet another such dialogue? For some, it’s to avoid actually dealing with unpleasant facts. But for others — like La Raza or the college professors scrambling to follow Obama’s lead — when they say we need more conversation, they really mean their version of reality should win the day. Replace “conversation” with “instruction” and you’ll have a better sense of where these people are coming from and where they want their “dialogue” to take us.

Ultimately, Obama's speech is nothing so momentous, so awe-inspiring.  In fact, Obama's refusal to distance himself personally as well as professionally from the man who condemned America in no uncertain terms while giving an award to real hate-mongers like Louis Farrakhan is troubling.  Is it weakness of character, which might be forgivable, or is it that Mr. Obama finds the words of his pastor not particularly offensive? 
One thing I think we can agree upon is that the President of the United States cannot be too patriotic.  He is not only our leader in matters foreign and domestic, he is also America's preeminent spokesman.  When a man tolerates sentiments such as Jeremiah Wright's and refuses for years to repudiate them, that man is demonstrating a quality that no President should possess. 
Is Obama's speech really a call to dialogue?  That remains to be seen.  Currently, it amounts to nothing more than a grand changing of the subject.

John McCain made a stop in Norfolk, VA today to discuss foreign policy issues and receive some glowing praise from a number of his colleagues.  Always keen to learn more about international relations and, well, see famous people, I managed to weasel my way in and was treated to a sensible, realistic acknowledgment of the threat of radical Islam.  This is from some of the most knowledgeable authorities on national security in Congress. 
Chief among these in my eyes was John Warner.  A Southern gentleman in the truest sense, Senator Warner has been a strong advocate for the military and if he believes that John McCain will do well as the President then I am prepared to believe him.
The major point today was that we absolutely must confront radical, militant Islam.  I agree with that sentiment 100%.  Senator Sam Brownback made some very excellent statements, bringing the focus onto Africa where a significant amount of Muslim extremism is fomented.  Brownback is also extremely prominent in the pro-life community.  His endorsement of McCain puts any doubts about McCain's pro-life credits to rest.
In addition to these two men, the endorsement of former Secretaries of the Navy William Ball and John Lehman spoke volumes about their beliefs in McCain's strong military stance.  Rebuilding the military is key, as the Clinton years saw too much military reduction.  Rumsfeld made an error before Iraq and Afghanistan by not focusing more effort on building up force levels to avoid long, repeated deployments.  But another point made today was that we must maintain the All Volunteer Force by increasing recruitment and increasing opportunities for soldiers.  As McCain said, there is a market out there and young people have to know their needs will be met should they choose military service.

It is well within the interests of my region of Virginia to elect a man like John McCain. 

McCain is strong on the social issues.  Period.  McCain is obviously strong on foreign policy (his strong language regarding Iran was particularly impressive), though conservatives still need more assurance about the illegal immigration issue.  When I informed my good friend W that I was in attendance, he cut to the heart of the matter quite succinctly:  "...if they serve lunch order the enchiladas.  I hear they taste really good with a side of amnesty."  No lunch, but it is important to keep from getting star-struck.  Thanks W!
On a side note, I just saw myself on TV.  Some guy blocked my handshake with McCain and the annoyance on my face is pretty obvious.  I wish I had a picture.  It's ok, because I did get to shake Sam Brownback's hand and let him know I appreciate his pro-life stance.  He said we've got to push harder on that issue.  Agreed.
I got a picture of McCain answering questions from the press, which I have provided.  Forgive the quality.  I didn't think I'd actually be allowed inside and neglected to bring a camera!  If I can locate a bit of that video with my handshake fiasco, I'll post that too.  UPDATE:  Here's that video...Note the disappointed looking young man at 56 seconds in.  That old guy in front of me was such a fanboy, he jostled me out of the way just to tell McCain something the man wouldn't remember in 10 seconds anyway.

McCain!

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror," Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Well, the writing has been on the wall since Tuesday, I think.  After Romney's loss in California on Tuesday my mood has been one of resigned acceptance of John McCain as the Republican pick. 
That, and a brimming displeasure with Mike Huckabee for playing the destabilizing factor in this race.  I have never understood the frustration with evangelical voters until this very year.  Huckabee has nothing to recommend him for the Presidency, but he has been propelled by pandering to evangelicals and by downplaying his inexperience.  He is gunning for that VP spot right now, but I am confident he will not get it.  A VP has to be much more than just a replacement these days.  He has become an assistant to the President in many ways.  Huckabee's lack of experience again comes into play here.
While Huckabee has certainly outmaneuvered Romney politically (throwing the "no whining" comment in Romney's face was somewhat triumphalist and nasty), it is obvious to me that he has been outclassed.Mitt Romney has exited this race in the way that Mike Huckabee should have done long ago.  His acknowledgment of the more pressing issue of our time, the fight against radical Islam, and his willingness to close ranks in the face of inevitability is an indication that he is a man of character and principle.

John McCain is doing exactly what I needed him to do.  In speaking to the CPAC, he is as I write addressing his record and telling us what he plans to do.  He is telling us that he will listen, which is all we can hope for in a leader.  His conservatism is real and his deviations from it are forgivable.  I believe him when he says he'll do his best, and now that he has been straight with me and other conservatives I can support him.

Mark Levin has issued a call to conservatives:  Act now, or you will have John McCain as your Republican nominee.
With McCain's win in Florida there has been this air of inevitability about the man...well take a step back and you see that it's all hokum. 
I will reiterate something I've said in previous posts:  The man has broken with conservatives, repeatedly, on some of the central issues of our time.  Immigration is one.  His ability to work with Democrats is admirable, but shouldn't the measure of a compromise be that we at least get something resembling our goal?  His support of liberal immigration reform is damaging in the extreme because it makes him indistinguishable from your Democrat frontrunners.  Riddle me this, Democrats to whom McCain supposedly appeals:  Would you vote for a white guy with the same ideas as the first woman or first black?  Especially one who still supports the war?
McCain's crossover appeal is over-hyped by spinmasters with an agenda.  In an age where the media can destroy a candidacy simply by ignoring it (Giuliani?) one must question their motivations for actually reporting on someone favorably.
His wish to close down Guantanamo Bay is foolhardy, as it will put us in the ridiculous position of trying to acquit our own sworn enemies.  The same enemies who, if released, will gladly take up the mantle of jihad and resume their efforts to reduce Western influence in the world.  These men in Guantanamo deserve what they get, which apparently includes things like their own Koran and plenty of halal food to eat. 
And I would remind the Senator that his opposition to water boarding is also a bit silly when we're dealing with people whose interrogation methods include beheading.  Or wait, aren't those their standard methods for hostage-taking?  I'm confused, someone help me.  Do radical Muslims behead before or after they've forced a video conversion to Islam/denunciation of the West?
McCain is an old man who has been in the Senate too long.  His compromises are a sure indication that his principles lie elsewhere from a majority of conservatives.

Rally for Romney Conservatives need to act now, before it is too late. By Mark R. Levin I have spent nearly four decades in the conservative movement — from precinct worker to the Reagan White House. I campaigned for Reagan in 1976 and 1980. I served in several top positions during the Reagan administration, including chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese. I have been an active conservative when conservatism was not in high favor. I remember in 1976, as a 19-year-old in Pennsylvania working the polls for Reagan against the sitting Republican president, Gerald Ford, I was demeaned for supporting a candidate who was said to be an extremist B-actor who couldn’t win a general election, and opposing a sitting president. And at the time Reagan wasn’t even on the ballot in Pennsylvania because he decided to focus his limited resources on other states. I tried to convince voter after voter to write-in Reagan’s name on the ballot. In the end, Reagan received about five percent of the Republican vote as a write-in candidate. Of course, Reagan lost the nomination to Ford by the narrowest of margins. Ford went on to lose to a little-known ex-governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. But the Reagan Revolution became stronger, not weaker, as a result. And the rest is history. I don’t pretend to speak for President Reagan or all conservatives. I speak for myself. But I watched the Republican debate last night, which was held at the Reagan library, and I have to say that I fear a McCain candidacy. He would be an exceedingly poor choice as the Republican nominee for president. Let’s get the largely unspoken part of this out the way first. McCain is an intemperate, stubborn individual, much like Hillary Clinton. These are not good qualities to have in a president. As I watched him last night, I could see his personal contempt for Mitt Romney roiling under the surface. And why? Because Romney ran campaign ads that challenged McCain’s record? Is this the first campaign in which an opponent has run ads questioning another candidate’s record? That’s par for the course. To the best of my knowledge, Romney’s ads have not been personal. He has not even mentioned the Keating-Five to counter McCain's cheap shots. But the same cannot be said of McCain’s comments about Romney. Last night McCain, who is the putative frontrunner, resorted to a barrage of personal assaults on Romney that reflect more on the man making them than the target of the attacks. McCain now has a habit of describing Romney as a “manager for profit” and someone who has “laid-off” people, implying that Romney is both unpatriotic and uncaring. Moreover, he complains that Romney is using his “millions” or “fortune” to underwrite his campaign. This is a crass appeal to class warfare. McCain is extremely wealthy through marriage. Romney has never denigrated McCain for his wealth or the manner in which he acquired it. Evidently Romney’s character doesn’t let him to cross certain boundaries of decorum and decency, but McCain’s does. And what of managing for profit? When did free enterprise become evil? This is liberal pablum which, once again, could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton. And there is the open secret of McCain losing control of his temper and behaving in a highly inappropriate fashion with prominent Republicans, including Thad Cochran, John Cornyn, Strom Thurmond, Donald Rumsfeld, Bradley Smith, and a list of others. Does anyone honestly believe that the Clintons or the Democrat party would give McCain a pass on this kind of behavior?   As for McCain “the straight-talker,” how can anyone explain his abrupt about-face on two of his signature issues: immigration and tax cuts? As everyone knows, McCain led the battle not once but twice against the border-security-first approach to illegal immigration as co-author of the McCain-Kennedy bill. He disparaged the motives of the millions of people who objected to his legislation. He fought all amendments that would limit the general amnesty provisions of the bill. This controversy raged for weeks. Only now he says he’s gotten the message. Yet, when asked last night if he would sign the McCain-Kennedy bill as president, he dissembles, arguing that it’s a hypothetical question. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, he said he would sign the bill. There’s nothing straight about this talk. Now, I understand that politicians tap dance during the course of a campaign, but this was a defining moment for McCain. And another defining moment was his very public opposition to the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He was the media’s favorite Republican in opposition to Bush. At the time his primary reason for opposing the cuts was because they favored the rich (and, by the way, they did not). Now he says he opposed them because they weren’t accompanied by spending cuts. That’s simply not correct.   Even worse than denying his own record, McCain is flatly lying about Romney’s position on Iraq. As has been discussed for nearly a week now, Romney did not support a specific date to withdraw our forces from Iraq. The evidence is irrefutable. And it’s also irrefutable that McCain is abusing the English language (Romney’s statements) the way Bill Clinton did in front of a grand jury. The problem is that once called on it by everyone from the New York Times to me, he obstinately refuses to admit the truth. So, last night, he lied about it again. This isn’t open to interpretation. But it does give us a window into who he is.   Of course, it’s one thing to overlook one or two issues where a candidate seeking the Republican nomination as a conservative might depart from conservative orthodoxy. But in McCain’s case, adherence is the exception to the rule — McCain-Feingold (restrictions on political speech), McCain-Kennedy (amnesty for illegal aliens), McCain-Kennedy-Edwards (trial lawyers’ bill of rights), McCain-Lieberman (global warming legislation), Gang of 14 (obstructing change to the filibuster rule for judicial nominations), the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. This is a record any liberal Democrat would proudly run on. Are we to overlook this record when selecting a Republican nominee to carry our message in the general election?   But what about his national security record? It’s a mixed bag. McCain is rightly credited with being an early voice for changing tactics in Iraq. He was a vocal supporter of the surge, even when many were not. But he does not have a record of being a vocal advocate for defense spending when Bill Clinton was slashing it. And he has been on the wrong side of the debate on homeland security. He supports closing Guantanamo Bay, which would result in granting an array of constitutional protections to al-Qaeda detainees, and limiting legitimate interrogation techniques that have, in fact, saved American lives. Combined with his (past) de-emphasis on border-security, I think it’s fair to say that McCain’s positions are more in line with the ACLU than most conservatives.   Why recite this record? Well, if conservatives don’t act now to stop McCain, he will become the Republican nominee and he will lose the general election. He is simply flawed on too many levels. He is a Republican Hillary Clinton in many ways. Many McCain supporters insist he is the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama. And they point to certain polls. The polls are meaningless this far from November. Six months ago, the polls had Rudy winning the Republican nomination. In October 1980, the polls had Jimmy Carter defeating Ronald Reagan. This is no more than spin. But wouldn’t the prospect of a Clinton or Obama presidency drive enough of the grassroots to the polls for McCain? It wasn’t enough to motivate the base to vote in November 2006 to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker or the Democrats from taking Congress. My sense is it won’t be enough to carry McCain to victory, either. And McCain has done more to build animus among the people whose votes he will need than Denny Hastert or Bill Frist. And there won’t be enough Democrats voting for McCain to offset the electorate McCain has alienated (and is likely to continue to alienate, as best as I can tell). McCain has not won overwhelming pluralities, let alone majorities, in any of the primaries. A thirty-six-percent win in Florida doesn’t make a juggernaut. But the liberal media are promoting him now as the presumptive nominee. More and more establishment Republican officials are jumping on McCain’s bandwagon — the latest being Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has all but destroyed California’s Republican party. Let’s face it, none of the candidates are perfect. They never are. But McCain is the least perfect of the viable candidates. The only one left standing who can honestly be said to share most of our conservative principles is Mitt Romney. I say this as someone who has not been an active Romney supporter. If conservatives don’t unite behind Romney at this stage, and become vocal in their support for him, then they will get McCain as their Republican nominee and probably a Democrat president. And in either case, we will have a deeply flawed president. — Mark Levin, a former senior Reagan Justice Department official, is a nationally syndicated radio-talk-show host.

Allow me to share my final opinion of Mike Huckabee.  This man has been and continues to be the worst aspect of the 2008 Republican race.  Not only is he unfit to be President by virtue of his inexperience, but he has troubling tendencies towards big government.  Just because he touts the Fair Tax doesn't mean he'd be able to enact it!
He may have taken on the Clinton machine in Arkansas, but how would he deal with the Putin machine, or the Ahmahdinejad machine?  Considerably higher stakes, and I don't trust the man's experience.

Now here's my real problem with him:  He has consistently impeded the progress of men who are better qualified to win this race, to the benefit of one John McCain. 
First, Huckabee snatched up evangelicals and social conservatives ahead of Fred Thompson, whose conservative credentials are quite solid.  He effectively tripped up that horse right out of the starting gate and Thompson never recovered.  This was his first offense.
And now, his newest offense is that he will not drop out of the race.  The only thing he is doing is benefiting John McCain at the expense of Mitt Romney...the better candidate. 
John McCain is, for all his "straight talk," willing to break with conservative principles and has had a little trouble suppressing his scorn for the conservative base of the Republican Party.  He is a Washington bigwig and isn't shy about telling people.  His partnerships with Kennedy and Feingold on legislation that is almost directly contrary to conservative principles are immensely important in our judgment of the man...and why he should not be President.

So, thanks Mike Huckabee.  Thanks for your folksy down home nonsense that has effectively handed the Republican nomination to John McCain.  Thanks for disrupting not one, but two of the more viable campaigns.  And thanks for ruining my opinion of Chuck Norris.  You were funny, Mike, and likable, but you should have stayed in Arkansas. 

Damn your eyes, sir.  Step aside now.

Well, with Fred Thompson gone it's time for me to pick a new candidate.  I've chosen Mitt Romney for his economic experience, his stated commitment to pursuing our foreign interests, his executive credentials and because he's just so gosh-darn presidential looking.
I believe his conversion on the pro-life issue is genuine and I am willing to give this man my support.  Of the remaining Republican candidates he offers the best hope of winning in November.  You can go to his site, here, and explore the issues.

Of course, I am certainly up for a discussion on his relative merits.  I will need practice defending/promoting him, so let's get started, Vox friends.

You may fire when ready.

I defy anyone to argue with Mark Steyn.  The man is simply a genius.  He makes me depressed by exposing how utterly screwed up the West's collective head is.  Is it any wonder that an Islamic group in Canada was trying to have him muzzled?

At some point conservatives will have to abandon the polite tolerance we've had for liberal inanities and fulfill their expectations by calling out the militia and rounding them up, Planet of the Apes style.  Har Har, of course I'm joking.  Or am I?  I've been accused of worse while arguing about less important things.

What's at issue here is that the absurdity of this generation's anti-war stance is without bounds.  Steyn drags it out into the light and clubs it like a baby seal.

UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but ... fake.

By Mark Steyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered: “Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”

Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.

So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.

The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.

In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.

A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?

Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.

Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?