What's Up With David Weigel?

You have to really shake your head at the ideological alliances of today.

Take David Weigel, who's got a piece up today on the GOP, "‘Right-Wing’ Rhetoric on Hold After Museum Shooting." It's a pretty strong attack on those who take exception to the left's smear against the conservative movement as a bunch of "Christian fascist eliminationists."

Weigel's a reporter at The Washington Independent, but previously he was a contributing editor at the libertarian Reason Magazine. In the latter position he'd be expected to advocate small government and the protection of liberties from the expansion of state power. On the whole, Reason would appear to support the libertarian wing of the GOP. But often the ideological lines get blurred, and some hardline libertarian activists are essentially "unpatriotic paleoconservatives" who veer over into hardline leftist territory - and, of course, some of that activity includes not just opposition to robust national defense, but even things like 9/11 trutherism and tin-foil hats.

So it's interesting that Weigel's moved from the Reason bench over to the hard-left Washington Independent, where such Bush-bashing nihilists as Spencer Ackerman also hold court. Such "libertarians" also include the America- and Israel-hating Daniel Larison, and the "liberaltarian" posse at Ordinary Gentlemen. These guys riff on (pothead) Will Wilkinson quite a bit. And they also gain sustenance from the likes of Andrew Sullivan. "Sully," of course, is a deranged Obamaton who feeds on the writings of Charles Johson at Little Green Footballs.

The respectable Matt Welch put the kibosh on these strange dalliances in a recent post. He notes:

The focus on political teams blurs one central, overriding truth: When it comes to bailout/stimulus/econ, there is no significant break in policy between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, no matter how much it benefits enthusiasts and detractors from pretending there's a sharp break between the two.

Welch, of course, is no fan of neoconservative foreign policy, so he naturally opposes the forward role of the U.S. in conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But he's good to distance himself from all the crazed left-liberal hoochy-kootchy.

Anyway, I mention all this just as hardline leftist Steve Benen is citing David Weigel in support of his attacks on the conservative movement.

Folks need to be careful about their allegiances.

I don't know David Weigel personally (although my blog-buddy Robert Stacy McCain calls him a good friend). No matter. Connecting the dots here - even with an admittedly broad brush - gives you some idea of what's really going on with the left-libertarian coalitions today: It's all anti-(neo)conservatism, all the time.

Thank goodness Sarah Palin's a neocon!

Core Values and Foreign Policy

I've been reading Dan Riehl's posts the last couple of days. Dan's fleshing out what it means to be conservative in our new age, and in the context of Ross Douthat's appointment to the New York Times, he's got some particularly pointed words for neoconservatism, and he laments more broadly the disgraced ideological fragmentation on the right:

Any real voice of conservatism today, and it hardly exists, has been all but relegated to radio talk where it's often too easily marginalized as a sort of carnival bark, even in cases when it is not.

Truth be told and in what I hope is a passing mood, I'm mostly sick of it and hard-pressed to find good reason for good conservatives not to simply go off the grid. If the day ever comes for conservatives to have a serious voice again, I'm unconvinced it will be through the GOP and I know for a fact, it'll never be through the New York Times. And the events that would have to take place for conservatives to have a meaningful voice again are so profound, I can't bring myself to entertain the thought just now.

I actually touched on this a bit in my post yesterday, "Core Values Conservatism."

I was writing primarily about domestic policy in that post, however. Recall in particular the point Peter Berkowitiz made the other day, when he suggested the path forward for partisans of the right is to grapple with the realities of big government and to accommodate the sexual revolution. I have some issues with Berkowitz's argument, as I noted at my post, but here I need to reiterate Berkowitz's assumption that the future direction of conservatism includes a robust, forward-looking foreign policy orientation as given. The U.S. is certainly in for some retrenchment in foreign affairs, but much of America's difficulties in foreign policy will be found more so in the economic realm than the strategic. As the news this week showed, for example, for all the talk that China might dump its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, "Beijing has not given indications of any major shift in its current investments or future buying plans." Moreover, at the level of the international system, for all the talk of American decline, there's no viable challenger to U.S. preponderance, and recent poll findings suggest that U.S. public support for the United Nations is at an all-time low. When the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. That is, our economic and political fortunes have dramatic implications for the well-being of the world community. The primacy of America's outward orientation is here to stay, and folks who identify as paleoconservatives, who call for a "come home America" isolationism, are not only near-sighted to America's strategic interests, but unpatriotic as well.

Recall yesterday, in "Soft on Our Enemies," I mentioned Barry Goldwater's libertarian nationalism in foreign policy. Goldwater, whose 1964 campaign is often seen as the beginning of the modern conservative movement, evinced an intense clarity on the nature of the Soviet threat during the early Cold War. His theme? Liberty at home depends on security abroad. This verity is no less appropriate in the age of Islamist terrorism than it was during the era of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary expansionism.

So, let me shift here to a brief discussion of neoconservatism. I want to suggest that not only has neonservatism been wrongly and unnecessarily identified as an exclusive theory of foreign policy, there's also a natural affinity between classically-liberal conservatism and the neoconservative orientation. Indeed, the future of the right will depend on some sort of strategic alliance between "hard classical-liberals"and socially-traditional neoconservatives.

As Robert Stacy McCain recently pointed out, neoconservatives are former liberals who were mugged by reality. While Irving Kristol is usually held up as the central example, I like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their writings on race (Podhoretz, "My Negro Problem - and Ours") and social welfare policy (Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action") are among the best in public intellectualism in the last 50 years. Not only that, the policy successes of the neoconservative paradigm were achieved in the Reagan administration's righteous assault on big-government handouts to "welfare queens," for example, and Charles Murray's argument that public-assistance makes poverty worse was validated by the GOP's 1996 welfare reform legislation. Whereas some have suggested that neocons are indifferent to the right's pro-life agenda, this is more a function of individual policy priorities - and a faltering devotion to the neoconservative moral vision - than an explicity hostility to pro-life politics.

Keep in mind that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin - who is the darling of social conservatives - is doctrinally neoconservative in her robust embrace of inalienable rights worldwide, and in her vision of American's exceptionalism in both the domestic and international realms.

All of this might remain controversial for some traditionalists, perhaps Dan Riehl and others. But folks must keep in mind that erstwhile (neo)conservatives such as David Brooks, David Frum, Richard Perle are soft-and-squishy self-promoters who have abandoned the populist persuasion that's necessary for the rejuvenation of the political right. These people are cancers on the cause. They'll push a fluffy electoral centrism over the clarity and vision of ethical rationalism.

As I noted previously, the way forward for the GOP is to build an alliance between between hard classical-liberals and socially-traditional neoconservatives. If the "neocon" label is essential "toxic" for many on the right, that's fine. Neoconservatism preceded the Bush doctrine and "compassionate conservatism." Its clarity of moral purpose will remain, and for building a victory coalition going forward, I'll simply be advocating a "core values conservatism," one that combines the primacy of the pro-life movement for total human dignity with moral clarity in international politics - a combination that Barry Goldwater advanced for a strong and successul ideological right in earlier decades.

GOP Will Appeal to Craven Prejudices, Essayist Alleges

I've already noted how lefty bloggers are smearing as racist conservatives who highlight the pathologies of black culture (see here, here, and here).

In addition to that, we've now got Paul Waldman, over at the American Prospect, alleging that the GOP's fully gearing up for a campaign of racial prejudice:

For months, I've been predicting that conservatives would delicately prompt voters to see Barack Obama through the lens of race. They'd drop hints, they'd make roundabout arguments, they'd find a hundred subtle ways to encourage people to vote their prejudices, while denying vociferously that they were doing anything of the sort.

It turns out I was wrong. Not about whether they'd try to exploit racial prejudice (that was about as easy to predict as the rising of the sun), but about how they would do it. After some hesitation and baby steps, the conservative campaign against Barack Obama has finally begun. And there's nothing subtle about it.

When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done, starting with famed ad man Alex Castellanos:

"All the sudden you've got two dots, and two dots make a line," said Castellanos. "You start getting some sense of who he is, and it's not the Obama you thought. He's not the Tiger Woods of politics."

As Castellanos knows well, these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife. Castellanos knows what he's talking about -- when it comes to painting frightening pictures for the voters, he's the Rembrandt of racial resentment. Among other accomplishments, Castellanos was responsible for a series of ugly ads on behalf of Jesse Helms' 1990 Senate re-election race against Harvey Gantt, probably the most explicitly race-baiting campaign American politics has seen since the retirement of George Wallace. The story continues:

"It's harder for people to say it's taken out of context because these are Wright's own words," noted Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who helped craft the Swift Boat commercials against Kerry that employed the use of their target's own language when he returned from Vietnam and returned his medals. "You let people draw their own conclusions."

"You don't have to say that he's unpatriotic; you don't question his patriotism," he added. "Because I guaran-damn-tee you that, with that footage, you don't have to say it."

The Republicans are certainly setting down their marker: they intend, as they have so many times before, to wage a campaign appealing to the ugliest prejudices, the most craven fears, the most vile hatreds. It's not that people should vote against Obama just because he's black, they're saying, but you know, he's that kind of black. As Rush Limbaugh said on Friday, "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side." Ladies and gentlemen, your "moral values" party.

Not saying it, as LaCivita noted -- whether "it" is that Obama hates America, or that he's just too black to be trusted -- is actually crucial to making the argument effectively. As Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg argued in her 2001 book The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality, appeals to racism only work when they are implicit:

When a society has repudiated racism, yet racial conflict persists, candidates can win by playing the race card only through implicit racial appeals. The implicit nature of these appeals allows them to prime racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments while appearing not to do so. When an implicit appeal is rendered explicit -- when other elites bring the racial meaning of the appeal to voters' attention -- it appears to violate the norm of racial equality. It then loses its ability to prime white voters' racial predispositions.

In other words, voters presented with racial appeals have two competing forces tugging them in opposite directions: the feelings they carry with them on at least a subconscious level, and their more conscious belief in equality and desire to not think of themselves as racist. In order to convince them to vote their racial fears and animosities, you have to give them a story they can tell themselves that acquits them of any accusation of racism.

By that logic, someone who focuses on the nihilist propensity for criminal behavior among large numbers of urban underclass blacks will be automatically identified as racist.

That's not to mention all of the other pathologies holding down blacks, today, like the crisis of illegitimacy that's destroying the black American family, nor the culture of witness intimidation in the inner cities that's hindering the ability of law enforcement to prosecute black thugs (see, "Witness Intimidation: An Urban Crisis").

But hey, we can't mention these things in the campaign. We wouldn't want to appeal to craven race prejudices.

Antiwar Leftists and Unpatriotic Conservatives

One of the most amazing things surrounding debates over the Iraq war, and now also with Russia's invasion of Georgia, is the odd antiwar alliance between the extreme left and extreme right in American politics.

The coalition of antiwar left and right has recently been in the news with its "Strange Bedfellows" efforts seeking revenge against centrist Democrats who voted for FISA reauthorization in June. Recall, as well, a few years back Cindy Sheehan, the America-bashing antiwar activist, was found posting her attacks on alleged Bush administration warmongering at the homepage of Lew Rockwell, a widely recognized advocate of "right-wing libertarianism."

The latest example of this unprincipled extreme left-right alliance is in Newshogger's anti-neocon hysterics over Robert Kagan's new piece at the Weekly Standard. According to Newshoggers:

Eight years ago I would not have believed that I would ever think Pat Buchanan could be a voice of sanity. But as neocons like Robert Kagan can hardly contain their enthusiasm when they see an opportunity to fire up the cold war again it is Buchanan who comes across as sane. Now the neocons never did like the "War on Terror". Their attempts to turn it into a "real" war have for the most part been dismal failures. Over at LewRockwell.com Pat Buchanan describes how hypocritical the neocon's outrage over Russia's response to Saakashvili's blunder really is.

Buchanan, of course, is the publisher of the American Conservative, a down-market journal of paleoconservative ideology and leading purveyor of the left-right antiwar alliance. The magazine regularly features articles from prominent far-right Iraq oppenents such as historian Andrew Bacevich and political scientist Michael Desch.

In 2003, David Frum identified the far-right antiwar activists as "unpatriotic conservatives":

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.

The antiwar conservatives aren't satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

This left-right antiwar alliance seems impossible from the perspective of political theory.

Yet, if we recall that antiwar conservatives are essentially political reactionaries, found on the extreme right-wing fringe of the political continuum, their hostility to strong-state military power is understandable. Indeed, this anti-statism is where the radical left and reactionary right find common cause. Both elements seek far-reaching change, and some within each side advocate violence to bring about a fundamental transformation of political institutions. The left-right antiwar alliance can be understood, in a sense, by bending the straight-line left-right continuum up into a circle, which brings the two fringes, left and right, together as an anti-American bloc of radical-reactionary commonality.

The Newshoggers are well-know revolutionary socialists. They regularly cheer insurgent attacks on American forces in Iraq, and they routinely demonize neoconservatives who advocate mainstream foreign policy positions on war and peace. By forthrightly joining with the paleoconservative attacks on America's response to Russian aggression, they're furthering the left-right tradition of hating the Bush administration, the GOP, and the country.

Shocker! July 4th Anti-Americanism on the Left

I thought I was through for the night, but I had to share with my readers a couple of great posts on far left-wing anti-Americanism.

Here's this, from Sister Toldjah's entry, "An America-Hating far Leftie Weighs in on Independence Day:

Further proof that the self-loathing that comprises the far left doesn’t take breaks, even for a holiday. The Philly Inquirer’s Chris Satullo scribbles:

Put the fireworks in storage.

Cancel the parade.

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

We have failed to pay attention. We’ve settled for lame excuses. We’ve spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago.

The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner.

The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing.

The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them.

Such abuses once were committed by the arrogant crowns of Europe, spawning rebellion.

Today, our nation does such things in the name of our safety. Petrified, unwilling to take the risks that love of liberty demands, we close our eyes.

We have done such things, on orders from the Oval Office. We have done them, without general outrage or shame.

Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. CIA secret prisons. “Rendition” of prisoners to foreign torture chambers ...

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart...

Things like this just don’t compute with me. Even when I was a leftie, I was never ashamed to fly my flag on any day, especially on days like Independence Day, nor was I hestitant to say how much I loved this country, even during the times when I felt it was veering off course. That continued even through the Clinton years after I saw the light and became a conservative. There were many, many things Bill Clinton did during his tenure that made me ashamed of him, but I sure as hell was never ashamed of my country.

Also, from American Sentinel, "Why Progressives Aren’t Patriotic":

In fact, this comes from the great source, itself, The Progressive:

“It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out. Spare me the puerile parades. Don’t play that martial music, white boy. And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s. You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.”

I was going to comment on this, but this article is one of those rare pieces that speaks for itself–yet says the opposite of what the author intends. Matthew Rothschild manages to fit so much prototypical liberal garbage into a single page that it almost seems like parody.

I guess this demonstrates the old cliche of the glass half empty/half full. Progressives are always unhappy, unpatriotic, un-whatever. They are against oil. They are against tax cuts. They are against personal responsibility. They are against God. They are against carbon. They are against the military. They are against liberty, wanting more government instead. Everything they are for is misanthropic. They favor legislated equality. They favor equal rights for terrorists. They favor trees over people. They favor endangered insects over people. They live in a world of constant anger. Everything is wrong. Everything needs change. America, the awful.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are believers in the idea of liberty and, therefore, believers in people. We believe that people are the products of their choices, not the byproducts of a deck stacked against them. When they go down, we offer them a helping hand–not because the government makes us, but because we want to. We believe America is good enough to defend. We don’t weep when the terrorist dies, but hunt his buddies down wherever we can find them. We’ll chop down a thousand trees and stomp the spotted owl out of existence to save the life of one innocent child.

Our forefathers gave their lives to found a country in which liberty could endure. In their day, they were the progressives. How far that notion has fallen. Progressive now means nothing better than moving farther and farther from the liberty we began with. And, hell no, they aren’t patriotic. That would be too damn much to ask, wouldn’t it?

Read both posts in full, here and here.

And just think: I've been working on getting some patriotic material ready for Friday ... they'll be time, but the work deflecting the left is never done!!

Ron Paul's Storm Troopers

Ron Paul's in the news again this week, following his big fundraising haul on November 5. The Chicago Tribune discusses the Paul campaign liftoff:

No more Department of Education. No more Federal Reserve Bank. No more Medicare or Medicaid. No more membership in the United Nations or NATO. No more federal drug laws. And, no more U.S. troops in Iraq -- or anywhere else on foreign soil.

The Internal Revenue Service would be history in the first week that Ron Paul sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. And the dismantling of the above-mentioned entities and relationships -- plus a long list of others -- soon would commence.

Think that sounds eccentric, strange, even crazy? Many of the libertarian-minded, 10-term congressman's rivals for the GOP presidential nomination think so and have said so.

But, to a growing, Internet-based pool of supporters, the silver-haired obstetrician turned politician is the sanest man at the Republican debates and perhaps in all of Congress. Paul attracts an unusual political potpourri of people of all ages and viewpoints, including a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists and other extremists whose views Paul's campaign disavows. While most supporters ardently oppose the Iraq war, what they all share is a deep disenchantment and distrust of the federal government in its present form and a fervent belief in Paul's plans to change it.

On Nov. 5, they demonstrated their passion for Paul in spectacular fashion, raising $4.2 million, mostly online, in 24 hours, rocketing him close to his $12 million goal for the fourth quarter. In terms of 2008 GOP presidential candidates, Paul's take broke the previous one-day record of $3.1million set by Mitt Romney Jan. 8.

Hammering home a singular message of freedom, free markets, smaller federal government and greater personal responsibility, Paul, at 72, is nothing if not consistent. Personally, he seems very much the same in a one-on-one conversation as he does on the stump: earnest, serious and slightly stunned. Although pleasant, he, unlike most politicians, makes no effort to charm. He leaves an impression that he is out to sell ideas, not himself.

Andrew Walden over at the American Thinker penetrates deep into the Paul internet contributor base to unearth the group remants of the shady side of American politics:

When some in a crowd of anti-war activists meeting at Democrat National Committee HQ in June, 2005 suggested Israel was behind the 9-11 attacks, DNC Chair Howard Dean was quick to get behind the microphones and denounce them saying: "such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic rhetoric."

When KKK leader David Duke switched parties to run for Louisiana governor as a Republican in 1991, then-President George H W Bush responded sharply, saying, "When someone asserts the Holocaust never took place, then I don't believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust. When someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that someone can reasonably aspire to a leadership role in a free society."

Ron Paul is different.

Rep Ron Paul (R-TX) is the only Republican candidate to demand immediate withdrawal from Iraq and blame US policy for creating Islamic terrorism. He has risen from obscurity and is beginning to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Paul has no traction in the polls -- 7% of the vote in New Hampshire -- but he at one point had more cash on hand than John McCain. And now he is planning a $1.1 million New Hampshire media blitz just in time for the primary.

Ron Paul set an internet campaigning record raising more than $4 million in small on-line donations in one day, on November 5, 2007. But there are many questions about Paul's apparent unwillingness to reject extremist groups' public participation in his campaign and financial support of his November 5 "patriot money-bomb plot."

On October 26 nationally syndicated radio talk show host Michael Medved posted an "Open Letter to Rep. Ron Paul" on TownHall.com. It reads:

Dear Congressman Paul:

Your Presidential campaign has drawn the enthusiastic support of an imposing collection of Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Holocaust Deniers, 9/11 "Truthers" and other paranoid and discredited conspiracists.

Do you welcome- or repudiate - the support of such factions?

More specifically, your columns have been featured for several years in the American Free Press -a publication of the nation's leading Holocaust Denier and anti-Semitic agitator, Willis Carto. His book club even recommends works that glorify the Nazi SS, and glowingly describe the "comforts and amenities" provided for inmates of Auschwitz.

Have your columns appeared in the American Free Press with your knowledge and approval?

As a Presidential candidate, will you now disassociate yourself, clearly and publicly, from the poisonous propaganda promoted in such publications?

As a guest on my syndicated radio show, you answered my questions directly and fearlessly.

Will you now answer these pressing questions, and eliminate all associations between your campaign and some of the most loathsome fringe groups in American society?

Along with my listeners (and many of your own supporters), I eagerly await your response.

Respectfully, Michael Medved

Medved has received no official response from the Paul campaign.

There is more. The Texas-based Lone Star Times October 25 publicly requested a response to questions about whether the Paul campaign would repudiate and reject a $500 donation from white supremacist Stormfront.org founder Don Black and end the Stormfront website fundraising for Paul. The Times article lit up the conservative blogosphere for the next week. Paul supporters packed internet comment boards alternately denouncing or excusing the charges. Most politicians are quick to distance themselves from such disreputable donations when they are discovered. Not Paul.

Daniel Siederaski of the Jewish Telegraph Agency tried to get an interview with Paul, calling him repeatedly but not receiving any return calls. Wrote Siederaski November 9: "Ron Paul will take money from Nazis. But he won’t take telephone calls from Jews." [Update] Finally on November 13 the Paul campaign responded. In a short interview JTA quotes Jim Perry, head of Jews for Paul describing his work on the Paul campaign along side a self-described white supremacist which Perry says he has reformed.

Racist ties exposed in the Times article go far beyond a single donation. Just below links to information about the "BOK KKK Ohio State Meeting", and the "BOK KKK Pennsylvania State Meeting", Stormfront.org website announced: "Ron Paul for President" and "Countdown to the 5th of November". The links take readers directly to a Ron Paul fundraising site from which they can click into the official Ron Paul 2008 donation page on the official campaign site. Like many white supremacists, Stormfront has ties to white prison gangs.

Paul's fringe element support's not only among far right strom troopers:

Other Paul donations and activists come from leftists and Muslims. Singer and Democrat contributor Barry Manilow is also a Ron Paul contributor and possibly a fundraiser. There are close ties (but no endorsements) between Ron Paul's San Francisco Bay Area campaign and Cindy Sheehan's long-shot Congressional campaign.

An Austin, TX MeetUp site shows Paul supporters also involved in leftist groups such as Howard Dean's "Democracy for America." MeetUp lists other sites popular with members of the Ron Paul national MeetUp group. The number one choice is "9/11 questions" another leading choice is "conspiracy"....

The ugly mishmash of hate groups backing Paul has a Sheehan connection as well. David Duke is a big Cindy Sheehan supporter eagerly proclaiming "Cindy Sheehan is right" after Sheehan said, "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Stormfront.org members joined Sheehan at her protest campout in Crawford, TX and posed with her for photos. Sheehan is also intimately associated with the Lew Rockwell libertarian website which has posted over 200 articles by Ron Paul as well as some "scholarly" 9-11 conspiracy theories.

The white supremacist American Nationalist Union also backed Sheehan's Crawford protests and endorsed David Duke for president of the United States in 1988. Now they are backing Ron Paul-linking to numerous Pro-Paul articles posted on LewRockwell.com.

Medved's questions surprise many, but they shouldn't. Paul's links the anti-Semites and white supremacists continue a trend which has been developing since the 9-11 attacks. Barely six weeks after 9-11, Paul was already busy blaming America. On October 27, 2001 Paul wrote on LewRockwell.com, "Some sincere Americans have suggested that our modern interventionist policy set the stage for the attacks of 9-11". Paul complained: "often the ones who suggest how our policies may have played a role in evoking the attacks are demonized as unpatriotic."

See my earlier posts on the Paul campaign, here, here, here, and here.

Paul is endlessly fascinating, from a political science perspective in particular. His campaign is like a real-world laboratory on extremist ideology. We sometimes forget all the nasty strangeness lurking in the subterranean fringe of the American electorate. Paul's candidacy brings out the loons, demonstrating the weird power of internet advocacy in a time of political dealignment and policy discontent.

**********

UPDATE: Be sure to check this Buzztracker link, which has an aggregation of some top blog posts on American Thinker's, "The Ron Paul Campaign and its Neo-Nazi Supporters."

The End of Barack Obama's Ideology?

Presidential nominees unusually move back to the center of the ideological spectrum at the conclusion of the primaries, but the pace and scope of Barack Obama's centrist repositioning has thrown political observers across the spectrum into fits.

It's to be expected that the netroots would fly into hissy fits over Obama's new centrism. Over the last couple of week's the Illinois Senator's staked out middle-of-the-road positions on patriotic flag pins, the execution of child rapists, urban gun control, international trade (especially NAFTA), and faith-based initiatives.

Obama's also steadily thrown many of his most controversial political and religious associates under the bus, like William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright (and Samantha Power, and Michael Pfleger, and Wesley Clark, and ... well, you get the picture).

Now, with Obama's vote on retroactive immunity for corporations assisting government surveillance programs, even some top party leaders are scratching their heads in dismay: Where is Obama on the ideological map?

The Washington Post has the story:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama put himself on the opposite side of his party's leadership in the Senate yesterday by reversing course to support a compromise intelligence surveillance bill. His vote was the most dramatic in a series of moves toward the middle that have focused new attention on where he stands and where he would take the country.

Obama's vote was not unexpected, as he had signaled earlier that he would back the compromise legislation. But the senator from Illinois found himself at odds with Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), as well as three of his opponents for the Democratic nomination, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

Just the day before, Obama had denied suggestions that "I am flip-flopping." But in recent weeks, he has softened his once-harsh rhetoric about the North American Free Trade Agreement, embraced the Supreme Court decision overturning a District of Columbia ban on handguns and criticized the high court for rejecting the death penalty for child rape.

After telling reporters last week that he will probably "refine" his position on the Iraq war after he meets with military commanders there this summer, he gathered reporters again to say that he remains committed to ending the conflict and to withdrawing combat troops, conditions permitting, within 16 months, should he assume the presidency.

One factor in Obama's success has been his ability to confound both left and right. But while that may be a measure of a skillful politician determined to win a general election, it has left unanswered important questions about his core principles and his presidential priorities. How well he answers them over the coming months will determine the outcome of his race against Republican Sen. John McCain.

Statements he has made over the past month have ignited a debate about who Obama is ideologically. His current policy positions have convinced some progressives that he is not one of them. Matt Stoller, editor of OpenLeft.com, said that an Obama win in November would be a victory for "centrist government," adding: "Progressives are going to have to organize for progressive values."

Note Stoller's use of the term "progressive," which is essentially the term of choice for the most radical advocates on the political left.

Note, though, that Obama's shift to the center caused nary a ripple among many on the Democratic Party's left side, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

As Barack Obama moves to broaden his appeal beyond loyal Democrats, a chorus of anger and disappointment has arisen from the left. But those voices are a distinct minority because the party has a more pressing concern: winning in November.

On Wednesday, Obama again bucked his liberal allies, voting in the Senate to give legal immunity to phone companies that took part in warrantless wiretapping after the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics chided Obama for the vote -- which put him crossways with dozens of Democratic colleagues, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

The vote, a reversal of an earlier pledge, was Obama's latest perceived step away from his party's base on a range of issues, among them the death penalty, gun control and taxpayer money for religious groups.

Reaction has been swift and - aside from the blogosphere and some newspaper columnists - notably mild.

"We're willing to work through this period," said Richard Parker, president of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, one of the party's most enduring advocacy groups. In the long run, he said, the organization's "serious concerns" about Obama are far outweighed by its disagreements with Republican John McCain.

That Obama has moved so far to the ideological center - essentially coming in from the cold of the ideological left - is a testament to his political skills. But his shifts are dangerous politically, as he's been so solidly steeped in the traditions of socialist ideology and postmodern cultural politics that his current move to the center can only be seen as crassly political or psychologically dissonant.

It is no wonder that Obama enjoyed powerful initial attraction among the most hardline actors on the left of the spectrum. The Illinois Senator's seen as "one of them," essentially a revolutionary in politics, one who will achieve power through non-violent means, but who will nevertheless facilitate a fundamental transformation of the conservative structures of hierarchy and attainment in American life.

The Obama backlash now seen among the netroots is thus completely understandable.

A sustained tour of the left blogosphere is to become submersed in the vile underworld of a nearly unbelievable maelstrom of implacable intolerance, bigotry, and ideological megalomania. It's not just one or two left-wing blogs, here or there: There's an entire radical subterranean establishment that wants nothing less than a wholesale restructuring of American politics, from education to foreign policy to health care to infrastructure to social policy to taxation and beyond.

The FISA debate demonstrated the genuine extremism of the far-left factions. But the big test of their influence lies ahead, during the post-Labor Day political mobilization of the general election campaign. The leftists will stay with Obama, grudgingly, out of sheer hatred for the GOP's governing legacy of the past seven years. But their true agenda is not difficult to discern.

Barack Obama, at this stage of the campaign, will demonstrate how fully he's abandoned his past associations with those on the left - and his indoctrination into state-socialist ideology - by decisively repudiating the extremist agenda of the netroots political establishment.

These people are today's protest generation - the revolution's gone online. If Obama wants to be a man of all the people, he's going to have to call out the left forces for what they truly are: unpatriotic nihilists intent on political retribution and totalitarian power.

The Politics of Political Polarization

Evan Thomas has a fascinating new essay over at Newsweek, "The Closing of the American Mind."

He's looking at the question of political polarization: Is politics nastier today than was true for earlier eras? It's a common perception, and Thomas provides an interesting analysis:

There are, as they say, two Americas. There is the America of the rich and the America of the poor, as Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards likes to point out. There is the America of Red States and Blue States, populated, as columnist Dave Barry likes to joke, by "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks" and "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

These divisions seem to grow, and to grow more antagonistic, by the year. But the real divide, the separation that may matter more to the future of American democracy, is between the political junkies and everyone else. The junkies watch endless cable-TV news shows and listen to angry talk radio and feel passionate about their political views. They number roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Princeton professor Markus Prior, who tracks political preferences and the media. Then there's all the rest: the people who prefer ESPN or old movies or videogames or Facebook or almost anything on the air or online to politics. Once upon a time, these people tended to be political moderates; now they are turned off or tuned out. Aside from an uptick in the 2004 presidential election, voter turnout has drifted downward since its modern peak in 1960 (from 63 percent to the low 50s), despite much easier rules on voter registration and expensive efforts to get out voters, writes Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of "The Vanishing Voter." For all the press hoopla over the coming presidential primaries, turnout rates are likely to dip way below 30 percent, he predicts.

It's axiomatic that democracies need an informed and engaged citizenry. But America's is indifferent or angry. Washington has entered an age of what Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004, calls "hyperpartisanship." Partisanship is nothing new, or necessarily bad—after all, it can offer voters clear choices. But it has become poisonous. In "How Divided Are We?," a 2006 essay in the journal Commentary, conservative thinker James Q. Wilson writes about candidates who regard their competitors "not simply as wrong but as corrupt and wicked." There is in modern political polarization a strong whiff of the old paranoid style of American politics: the left imagines big corporations plotting with neocons to protect Big Oil, while the right imagines a conspiracy of big media, Hollywood and academe to subvert traditional values.

What happened to the "vital center," the necessary glue to getting anything done in a system that is premised on checks and balances? It's hard to imagine the leaders of the two parties sitting down at the end of the day to share a drink and a joke, as President Reagan was able to do with Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill in the 1980s or President Johnson was able to do with Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen in the 1960s. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has referred to President Bush as a "liar" and a "loser." The popular debate is no more civilized: just read the comments posted by ordinary citizens on the Web sites of the mainstream media (much less partisan blogs). They often run along the lines of "Hillary is the Devil" and "Bush is a baby killer."

The causes of this divide—between the angry and the indifferent, the news junkies and the politically disaffected—are varied, deep-seated and, unfortunately, hard to cure. The evolution of the two parties has hardened ideological divisions and driven away moderates.

The historically minded tend to dismiss, or at least downplay, such observations about the present, arguing that it has been ever thus. Jefferson and Adams fought over religion; Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton; on the floor of Congress members occasionally struck each other with fists and canes. All true, but just because the past had its dismal chapters does not mean the division of the moment is any less important, and it is the case that we are in a particularly bleak phase of partisanship.

But how do know we're in "a particularly bleak phase of partisanship"?

As seen in the passage above, Thomas cites the research of political scientist Markus Prior, who has a new book out, Post-Broadcast Democracy.

Prior's thesis holds that the dramatic diversification of the mass media marketplace has created a small but extremely polarized class of political junkies who feed on the endless stream of political news, and subsequently participate in the political system with a substantially more combative style of partisan competition.

It's an interesting notion. I haven't read Prior's book, although his work both challenges and supplements some established research in public opinion which questions the idea of a newer, more profound degree of political polarization in the electorate.

For example, Morris Fiorina's book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, argues that we're not in the midst of a broad-scale culture war in American politics. We do have more intensity in the political system, Fiorina argues, but such intense polarization is found among small minorities - indeed, extremists - and thus such views are not characteristic of the larger mass American electorate.

I might add, however, that (1) Fiorina concedes his analysis is of the traditional, narrow academic variety (and thus might not fully capture the contemporary "political" nature of partisan conflict; and (2) the degree to which the new media - and especially the political blogosphere - influences politics and public policy remains an empirical question.

I'm of the belief that Prior's research points to some deeper conclusions about political dialog and participation in the 21st century. The internet, for example, is new, but as a political medium it has the effect of distributing and amplifying a wide variety of intense views, be they ideological, racist, religious-fundmentalist, sexist, you name it.

In this sense I think we are in a new era, although the scope and significance for the broader American electorate still remains to be seen.

World War II: The War Worth Fighting

Christopher Hitchens has a masterful take-down of Pat Buchanan's World War II revisionism, at Newsweek:

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:

• That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
• Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
• That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
• The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
• That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
• That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.

Read the whole thing.

Hitchens is exceedingly fair to Buchanan, and note that the arch paleoconservative is hardly the first to make the revisionist argument on the origins of World War II (although A.J.P. Taylor's a much more credible source).

For more on American foreign policy and paleoconservative thought, see David Frum, "Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War Against America."

The Wright Path? Race, Patriotism, and GOP Election Strategy

The Republican Party has long been known for developing winning electoral coalitions around the issues of race, rights, and taxes. Often associated with the "Southern Strategy," the focus on the volatile topic of race has opened up the GOP to charges of insenstivity to the problems of minorities and the poor.

The question of race in 2008 is even greater than in past years, with the potential nomination of the nation's first African-American as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer. Can the GOP campaign effectively against a candidate who seems to personify a post-racial appeal?

The Politico takes a look at how questions of race and patriotism have been put on the agenda by Barack Obama's Wright controversy:

For months, Republican party officials have watched with increasing trepidation as Barack Obama has shattered fundraising records, packed arena after arena with shrieking fans and pulled in significant Republican and independent votes.

Now, with the emergence of the notorious video portraying Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning the country, criticizing Israel, faulting U.S. policy for the attacks of Sept. 11 and generally lashing out against white America, GOP strategists believe they’ve finally found an antidote to Obamamania.

In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama’s pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base.

In fact, the video trove has convinced some that, after months of praying for Hillary Clinton and the automatic enmity which she arouses, that they may actually have easier prey.

“For the first time, some Republicans are rethinking Hillary as their first choice,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran media consultant who recently worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Even Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.

It's no wonder.

Wright's preachings are repudiated by nearly everyone in the United States.

The GOP rightly has an election issue of legitmate concern to a majority of Americans - people who truly love their country, and who differentiate between our actions as the leading democratic nation state, a nation in the lead in the West's progess on race, rights and political inclusion.

Civilian Casualties in Iraq: The Hidden War?

War is hell, right?

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

How many Americans appreciate this, especially in the time of an all-volunteer Army, and amid the increasing deligitimization of warfare as a tool of statecraft among the antwar left?

These ruminations arise upon reading Michael Massing's," Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs," in the current New York Review of Books. Massing focuses on the dark side of our current conflict. He reviews new works on the war, written from what he sees as a richer, more personal perspective than what's been available in most newspapers and books:

As probing and aggressive as the reporting from Iraq has been, it is subject to many filters. There are, for example, "family viewing" standards that make it difficult for journalists to write frankly about such sensitive aspects of military life as the profane language soldiers often use. It's also hard for journalists to get an accurate sense of what soldiers really think. Through embedding, reporters have enjoyed remarkable physical access to the troops, but learning about their true feelings is far more difficult, all the more so since soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Finally, there are limitations imposed by the political climate in which the press works. Images that seem too graphic or unsettling can cause an uproar. When, for instance, The New York Times in January 2007 ran a photo of a US soldier lying mortally wounded on the ground, the paper was angrily accused of showing disrespect for the troops. More generally, the conduct of US soldiers in the field remains a highly sensitive subject. News organizations that show soldiers in a bad light run the risk of being labeled anti-American, unpatriotic, or—worst of all—"against the troops." In July, for instance, when The New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by US soldiers, he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.

Books are less susceptible to such pressure and as a result can be far more pointed. The picture they present is not always bleak. They describe many affecting scenes in which soldiers try to do good, administering first aid, handing out food, arranging for garbage to be picked up. For the most part, the GIs come across as well-meaning Americans who have been set down in an alien environment with inappropriate training, minimal cultural preparation, and no language skills. Surrounded by people who for the most part wish them ill and living with the daily fear of being blown up, they frequently take out their frustrations on the local population. It's in these firsthand accounts that one can find the most searing descriptions of the toll the war has taken on both US troops and the Iraqi people.

Massing's main attention is on two books: One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick, and Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, by Evan Wright.

Here's another passage, focusing on civilian casualties in the war:

Taken together, Fick and Wright provide a chilling account of what it was like to be in Baghdad as the city descended into anarchy. A stream of terrified and desperate Iraqis shows up at a cigarette factory the Marines are occupying, begging them to put an end to the looting, but the soldiers feel powerless. At night, the gunfire in the streets becomes so fierce that they don't dare venture out. By this point, Fick has learned that the seemingly reckless way in which his men had been deployed was actually part of a bold Marine plan to attract the fire of Iraqis and distract them from the main invasion force thrusting into Iraq much farther to the west. The plan succeeded, but this seems of little consolation in light of the lawlessness sweeping Baghdad. Fick, Wright observes, "appears to have lost his belief in his mission here." The cause is not so much the disorder itself as his realization that the Americans have no real plan to remedy it.

As Wright's time with the platoon nears an end, he looks back on all that he has seen:

In the past six weeks, I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from aircraft.

Wright leaves it at that. By this point in his book, the death of civilians has emerged as a major theme, and I was sorry he didn't discuss the matter further. To learn more, I contacted Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. (During the invasion, he worked at the Pentagon, recommending targets for air strikes.) Garlasco told me that, according to the most widely accepted estimates, 10,000 civilians at a minimum were killed during the invasion, the large majority victims of the coalition. Few Americans seem aware of this number.

Wright did elaborate on this in an interview he gave soon after his book appeared. "For the past decade," he said,

we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it's important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn't serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they're grown up, and as they've gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they've started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.

I never read Tom Brokaw's book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut—who wrote Slaughterhouse Five—and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there's no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.

His book, Wright added, "goes into how soldiers kill civilians, they wound civilians." In Iraq, the shooting of civilians

was justified in the sense that there were some civilian buses that had Fedayeen fighters in them.... But when you see a little girl in pretty clothes that someone dressed her in, and she's smushed on the road with her legs cut off, you don't think, well you know there were Fedayeen nearby and this is collateral damage.

Overall, Wright said, "the problem with American society is we don't really understand what war is." The view Americans get "is too sanitized."

Just how sanitized is the American view of the war? Notice Massing's theme, that the American public is shielded from Iraq's brutality.

Certainly the public cannot fathom the fog of war, the blood and guts, the true human toll, on all sides, and obviously, the real grunt's eye-view of combat isn't appropriate for family-hour television viewing.

I don't think, however, that the public is systematically deprived of coverage of the war's horrors. Indeed, one could argue the opposite, that the American media has been obssessed with civilian deaths in its war reporting, and on the alleged atrocities committed by American service-personnel.

I'm reminded here some recent scholarship on civilian casualties in Iraq by Colin Kahl, who writes:

Based on field research and an extensive review of primary and secondary materials, I contend that the U.S. military has done a better job of respecting noncombatant immunity in Iraq than is commonly thought. Moreover, compliance has improved over time as the military has adjusted its behavior in response to real and perceived violations of the norm. This behavior is best explained by the internalization of noncombatant immunity within the U.S. military’s organizational culture, especially since the Vietnam War. Contemporary U.S. military culture is characterized by what I call the “annihilationrestraint paradox”: a commitment to the use of overwhelming but lawful force. The restraint portion explains relatively high levels of U.S. compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq, while the tension between annihilation and restraint helps account for instances of noncompliance and the overall level of Iraqi civilian casualties resulting from U.S. operations—which, although low by historical standards, have still probably been higher than was militarily necessary, desirable, or inevitable.

Kahl's research is scrupulously non-partisan, and in personal communications with me he wrote this:

...although the number of casualties caused by the *direct* action of U.S. is relatively low by historical standards, we should not trivialize the fact that 8,000-15,000 Iraqis have still died at their hands, and the failure of the U.S. to plan, prepare, and execute a strategy to bring stability to Iraq in the aftermath of regime change contributed to the anarchy and chaos that has claimed perhaps as many as 100,000 additional lives.

I think this is probably a more productive way to look at the problem of civilian casualties.

There are costs in war and conflict, military and civilian. But it's important to put things in context. While it's true to some extent that, "Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name," it's also probably true that Americans don't like to watch sausage being made. People still eat sausage, of course. Just as there's balance in diet, there should be a balance in how we perceive the costs and benefits of this nation's wars.

Articles like Massing's - and the books he reviews - can help us appreciate the human toll in war. Still, the literary project covered in this article is interested in much more than fostering fuller appreciation of battle. Left-wing journalistic attention to the purported "hidden human costs of war" is part of the broader deligitmization campaign to demonize the use of American military power.

Obama to Rekindle LBJ's Foreign Policy!

Melanie Phillips, with her usual aplomb, concisely lays out the danger of a Barack Obama administration in foreign affairs:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups....

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

There's more at the link, and when you're finished there, check out Daniel Larison, who sees the reincarnation of LBJ's liberal containment in an Obama presidency:

The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.

Larison blogs at the American Conservative, the home of unpatriotic conservatives "at war with America":

They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

I genuinely doubt Obama will send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into foreign hostilities to fight our new "Cold War" against radical Islam!

But you've got to love those paleocons - they do know how to spice up an otherwise slow blogging night!