William Saletan: Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid
The conservative case against this study is easy to make. Sure, we’re fonder of old ways than you are. That’s in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. If you studied the rest of us in real life, you’d find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do, so in terms of complexity, ambiguity, and critical thinking, it’s probably a wash. Also, our standard of “information” is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they’ve served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.
In fact, that’s exactly what you’ve done in this study: You’ve manufactured a tiny world of letters, half-seconds, and button-pushing, so you can catch us in clear errors and keep out the part of life where our tendencies correct yours. And now you feel great about yourselves. Congratulations. You haven’t told us much about our way of thinking. But you’ve told us a lot about yours.
Ann Coulter: From the halls of Malibu to the shores of Kennedy
But liberals soon began raising yet more pointless quibbles. For most of 2003, they said the war was a failure because we hadn’t captured Saddam Hussein. Then we captured Saddam, and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean complained that “the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.” (On the other hand, Howard Dean’s failure to be elected president definitely made America safer.)
Next, liberals said the war was a failure because we hadn’t captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Then we killed al-Zarqawi and a half-dozen of his aides in an air raid. Then they said the war was a failure because … you get the picture.
The Democrats’ current talking point is that “there can be no military solution in Iraq without a political solution.” But back when we were imposing a political solution, Democrats’ talking point was that there could be no political solution without a military solution.
Owen West: America’s soldiers are committed to the war. But they’re not going to lie about its progress.
Monday’s MoveOn.org advertisement, which depicted Gen. Petraeus as a traitor, has been dismissed by Sen. Reid as an inconsequential distraction. But according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group, the ad reflects the growing distrust of a Democratic Party that may be taking cues from its leadership. Last month 76% of Republicans expressed confidence in the military to give an “accurate picture of the war,” while only 36% of Democrats did.
This explains the collective skepticism surrounding Gen. Petraeus’s comments but does not excuse it. For while the country can thrive as a politically divided nation, its ability to defend itself diminishes alongside faith in the fidelity of the military. The unbalanced portrayal of the conduct of our soldiers has done damage enough. To impugn our warriors’ motives as political is thoroughly corrosive and hurts all Americans.
Norman Podhoretz: Six years after 9/11, it’s notable how little the politics of the left have changed
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on us that took place on this very day six years ago, several younger commentators proclaimed the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941, had done to the old isolationism, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001, had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural fallout of that war–all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960s and ’70s–would now follow it into the grave.
I could easily understand why they thought so. After all, never in their lives had they witnessed so powerful an explosion of patriotic sentiment–and not only in the expected precincts of the right. In fact, on the left, where not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning, the sight of it–and it was now on display everywhere–had been driving a few prominent personalities to wrench their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute. One of these personalities, Todd Gitlin, a leading figure in the New Left of the ’60s and now a professor at Columbia, even went so far as to question the inveterately “negative faith in America the ugly” that he and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more.
Charles Krauthammer: Iraq divided
It took political Washington a good six months to catch up to the fact that something significant was happening in Iraq’s Anbar province, where the former-insurgent Sunni tribes switched sides and joined the fight against al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, Washington has not yet caught up to the next reality: Iraq is being partitioned — and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up.
Times Online: Hardline takeover of British mosques
Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood†for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.
Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, according to a police report seen by The Times.
As far as London is concerned, it’s very hard to make the argument that the Islamist threat consists of only a few bad apples. Presumably, these 600+ radical mosques are not empty.
Jacob Laksin: ‘Israel Lobby’ Redux
It’s not every day that a book is discredited by the simple act of its publication. But that’s precisely what will happen with the release this week of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, an expanded version of the now-notorious London Review of Books essay by professors-turned-provocateurs John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard‘s Kennedy School of Government.
Jonah Goldberg: Storm of Malpractice – Katrina was a media disaster
This hurricane of hurricane retrospectives was no doubt long in the works, as editors like to put stories “in the can†for vacation time. The media seemed to cover every angle, particularly the Bush administration’s missteps in response to the disaster. And while some might quibble with this or that characterization or selection of facts, ultimately the media were doing what they’re supposed to do: hold government accountable.
But there was one thing missing from the coverage of this natural, social, economic, and political disaster: the fact that Katrina represented an unmitigated media disaster as well.
Lenny Ben-David: Do Israel’s critics have anything original to say?
The Passover Seder liturgy contains a pessimistic verse: “In every generation an enemy arises seeking to eradicate the Jewish people.” In the last hundred years, those enemies included the Russian czar, Stalin, Hitler, Gamal Abdul Nasser and more recently, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Reviewing recent publications and utterances by some of the most vocal detractors of Israel and its American supporters, it appears that every generation also sees new critics who arise to assail American support for the Jewish state. Sometimes the criticism is actually anti-Semitic utterances masked by euphemisms (I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist). And sometimes the criticism is actually an echo of statements made a generation ago. Indeed, recent anti-Israel essays, claims of ‘Jewish Lobby’ cabals, and accusations that support for Israel runs counter to American national interests are old hat. We’ve heard it before.
Andrew C. McCarthy: No More Illusions
NRO’s Andrew C. McCarthy reviews fellow NRO contributor, and Iran scholar, Michael Ledeen’s latest book: The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.
His latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, is released today. It is required reading for anyone — which ought to mean everyone — desirous of understanding the existential threat we face and why its beating heart is Tehran. Ledeen — incumbent of the American Enterprise Institute’s Freedom Chair, Reagan administration adviser on national-security matters, long-time National Review Online contributing editor, peerlessly insightful thinker on the ongoing war, and (in the interest of full disclosure) my good friend — has painstakingly laid out an indictment in two irrefutable counts: the Iranian regime’s unremitting determination to supplant the United States and establish a global Islamic hegemony; and the U.S.’s unremitting determination to deny (indeed, consciously to avoid knowledge of) reality, notwithstanding the mounting evidence … and body count.
