More of Victor Davis Hanson’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism (And yes: He’s still a conservative Maureen Dowd)

Some commenters were mad that I equated National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson with the execrable Maureen Dowd. Only problem is: He keeps making my case for me.

Here he is today, posting at The Corner:

Since January 2009, we have seen plenty of radical Islamists apprehended in the United States while planning mayhem on a massive scale, and even more violence committed by Islamic terrorists abroad in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been a) serially assuring the Muslim world (often literally amid explosions going off nearby) that we are atoning for and hitting the reset button on the insensitive and cowboyish Bush administration that fostered unnecessary tensions, b) making the case that a kinder and gentler United States is apologizing for 200 years of assorted sins, and c) assuring Americans that the days of unnecessary, Constitution-shredding anti-terrorism policies are over (albeit while quietly keeping intact the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, tribunals, etc.). Why, then, are these darn terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, not getting the new “hope and change” message? (Or are they?)

I might not’ve noticed the post if Mike Potemra, another Corner poster, hadn’t commented:

Imagine if someone wrote in October of 2001, “The Republicans promised us that they would be better at keeping the nation safe. But we just lost 3,000 innocent lives to the terrorists — why are the terrorists not getting the ‘tough on national security’ message?” We conservatives would quite correctly have denounced this criticism as both simplistic and opportunistic – but at least it would have been criticism of an actual, you know, failure. The U.S. under Obama, in Victor’s own telling, has been busting the radical Islamists and breaking up the terrorist plots. I congratulate the president and all the federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials involved, and wish them continued success in doing so. There are legitimate questions to be raised about our current anti-terrorism policy; this approach, I think, is wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Right. Hanson has so committed himself to his arch satire of Obama that he’s satirizing success. At least he didn’t use Latin this time.

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is just Maureen Dowd with a better knowledge of Latin

If you’ve never heard of Hanson, here’s an excellent and representative example of his writing for National Review’s blog:

Morituri te salutant [Victor Davis Hanson]

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

He does this kind of thing regularly. He’s supposedly an intellectual because he’s written a book about military history (which was hilariously and devastatingly debunked by an actual military historian) but this stuff is really more his stock in trade these days: Every few days, he writes 200 words or so mocking Obama as a “messiah” — and ask yourself when, despite the missteps, anybody in Obama’s crew has ever referred to Fox News, Limbaugh or the NEA in anything approaching religious terms — collects his National Review paycheck and returns a few days later to do the same thing.

It’s all rather Dowdian, his obsession with issues of personality and symbology instead of using his classics education to actually illuminate his readers on the issues of the day. It makes for rather flamboyant reading experience, but I don’t come away feeling like I’ve learned something or heard an argument that I have to carefully consider or respond to. It’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism masquerading as something deeper.

Obama hates America

Michael Ledeen, at National Review Online, about President Obama:

I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.

This is the face of supposedly respectable, thoughtful conservatism in the United States. God save us.

UPDATE: The always-entertaining Conor Friedersdorf nails it:

Why, if Hitler were alive today, he’d probably forgo setting buildings afire, instead marching right down to Congress to say, okay, enough talk about health care — now pass my bill!

Politically speaking, the “larger truth” is that Israel is harvesting the organs of Palestinians

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg admitted that “death panels” never existed in proposed health reform legislation — but defended them politically, since they hinted at dark possibilities that could possibly happen, supposedly, maybe if reform was passed.

Today, the shoe is apparently on the other foot. Here’s Goldberg’s 11:25 a.m. blog posting at National Review:

You’ve got to wonder if he recognizes how hilarious this is.

Michelle Obama sure is dumb!

I’ve read, re-read and re-re-read this blog post at National Review and still can’t figure out why on earth it was written.

Benjamin Zycher, a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, starts out by quoting a two-month-old WaPo article…

An article in the Washington Post about two months ago bore this headline: “A First Lady Who Demands Substance.”

…proceeds to insult the First Lady’s intellect in racial — let’s call it racist — terms:

Just read her Princeton senior thesis, an intermittently coherent stream-of-consciousness pile of leftist jargon, campus pseudo-seriousness, and racial-identity babble. Can there be any doubt that the Princeton administrators accepted it only because of her skin color?

…and then asks, in insultingly sarcastic terms, why she hasn’t weighed in more fully in the health care debate:

But obviously she is capable of giving us more, of moving the debate forward, of using her background in law, public policy, and management to shoot down the spurious arguments of the special interests and the Beltway obstructionists. We need her now. We need her wisdom. We need her analytic rigor.

It’s satire, I suppose, but why take health care debate potshots at somebody who — as Zycher acknowledges — really isn’t participating in the health care debate? Using a months-old article as the peg? It’s really perplexing.

The only answer I can come up with is that Michelle Obama hasn’t really worked out to be as much of a socialist bogeyman as conservatives — who spent the 1990s doing the same to Hillary Clinton — tried so desperately to make her. Maybe Zycher’s trying to bait her into the fray.

Or maybe he’s just a jerk.

In any case, one wonders if National Review has any editorial standards left. They claim to be upholding the mantle of William F. Buckley, but it seems like all they remember of his legacy is when he called Gore Vidal a “queer” and threatened to punch him in the face. Everything else — the intelligence (if, to my way of thinking, often wrong), wit and respect for one’s ideological opponents –  has been cast aside.

What conservatives don’t understand about Obama and diplomacy

Rich Lowry at National Review repeats what I think is a common misperception about Obama:

For all the talk of Obama’s realism, he is pursuing a policy driven by a fantasy about international affairs—that all disputes can be resolved through negotiations and governments can be talked out of their interests.

Maybe it’s not so much a misperception as a cariacature, this idea that the Barack Obama foreign policy can be summed up as: “Let’s hug it out, bitch.” This might be because the conservatives most prominent in our public discourse have two basic approaches to dealing with America’s rivals in the world:

• Giving them the cold shoulder: That is, refusing to talk to them unless they do what we want.

• Punching them in the face. Metaphorically, of course.

We’re only a few months into Obama’s presidency, so we haven’t seen his full range of responses to international crises. But where conservatives suggest that Obama wants to replace America’s foreign policy tools — sanctions, armed force, etc. — with diplomacy, I think (and hope) the evidence indicates the president sees genuine diplomacy, genuine efforts to talk as one of the tools in the toolbox. Not all disputes can be resolved through negotiations, but some surely can. This attitude isn’t a gauzy hope that governments can be talked out of their interests; instead it acknowledges the differences without treating them as automatically illegitimate.

When diplomacy fails though — and it will, often, because it’s hard and time-consuming and not a panacea — the president will use the other tools. For example: North Korea has (once again) backed out of previous agreements to proceed with work on expanding its nuclear arsenal. There’s probably not much the U.S. can do, short of an unthinkable war, to prevent that. But this is what the Obama Administration is doing to prevent North Korea from spreading nuclear technology beyond its borders.

The Obama administration will order the Navy to hail and request permission to inspect North Korean ships at sea suspected of carrying arms or nuclear technology, but will not board them by force, senior administration officials said Monday.

Perhaps that sounds weak to you — no boarding by force? — but it’s actually tougher and more confrontational than any actions taken by the Bush Administration.

Until now, American interceptions of North Korean ships have been rare. Early in the Bush administration, a shipment of missiles to Yemen was discovered, but the United States permitted the shipment to go through after the Yemenis said they had paid for the missiles and expected delivery.

So what we’re seeing from the Obama Administration, so far, is diplomacy backed up with real but not-necessarily war-provoking action. Conservative foreign policy thinkers seem to prefer angry denunciations backed up with A) even more angry denunciations or B) gunplay. I know which approach I prefer.

John Wayne is a bad mother- Shut your mouth!

National Review has a celebration of John Wayne on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Duke’s death. My friend and nemesis — depends on the day of the week which one I emphasize more — Jim Lakely has a contribution that kind of befuddles me. “John Wayne,” he says, is a phrase uttered on the left only as a slur:

How it must burn the Left that the indelible Wayne persona — it is impossible to separate the on-screen Wayne from the man himself — remains a touchstone of the American culture in spite of their mockery, or maybe because of it. “Wayne lacks nuance,” they cry (falsely). But he possesses hard-earned wisdom. “Wayne is not cultured,” they titter. But he’s taken better measure of how the world works. “Wayne is a mindless brute,” they sniff. But he’s handy to have around when danger’s afoot.

Of course, the Left’s laments about John Wayne are not really about him. They are about America itself — especially the patriotic rubes who, like Wayne, judge their country not by its imperfections, but by its enduring virtues.

My problem: What liberals have ever said “he’s not cultured enough?” When? Where? That it doesn’t look or sound like any liberal critique of John Wayne I’ve ever seen or heard — only a conservative’s suspicion of what liberals might think. Honestly: This sounds a lot closer to the critiques of Bush.

Which leads me to the ways that liberals, when they do use “John Wayne” as a slur, actually do it. Sure, Wayne’s movies were embarrassingly racist at times, by modern lights — but that’s true of a lot of old-timey entertainment. (And, oh yeah, he was a John Bircher — didn’t Buckley try to chase them out of the conservative movement for being nuts?)

But when “John Wayne” is used as a slur, it’s usually directed a real people who think that staging the longest (at the time) fight scene in Hollywood history is somehow a guide to conducting real-world foreign policy. We’re not making fun of John Wayne. We’re making fun of the people who seem to think John Wayne is real, and not an actor from Iowa whose real first name was Marion.

Oh lordy. Jim’s gonna come after me with his six-shooters blazin’.

So. Was the DHS report warning of right-wing violence correct?

Back when the report was released, conservatives sprayed massive amounts of invective against the Department of Homeland Security for tarring righties as violence-prone crazies. My friend Ben, for example, offered this bit of intemperance:

Truth is, the report is just the sort of blinkered, philistine, pig-ignorant analysis we’ve come expect from the career bureaucrats at Homeland Security. The nine-page brief is impossibly vague and open-ended. DHS names no specific groups, offers no specific numbers, and says the threat so far is “largely rhetorical.” With maybe one exception, the report relies entirely on anecdotal evidence — which hardly counts as evidence at all — derived from dubious sources, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group unable to distinguish a Klansman from a policy wonk.

The report is almost wholly conjectural and so freighted with qualifiers and caveats as to be useless as a policy-making guide or as intelligence for law enforcement. Mind you, intelligence professionals wrote the thing! This is what you get when bureaucrats value “intelligence” over intelligence.

National Review sounded similar alarms. So did the Weekly Standard. As did Commentary. The titans of respectable mainstream conservative thought all got very angry.

But the death of George Tiller and Wednesday’s shootings at the Holocaust Museum have raised questions on the left, at least, about whether the DHS report was somewhat prescient. It seems a fair question to me — even though I agreed with Ben at the time that the report was so vague as to be meaningless..

Steve Benen has asked the question. So has Matt Yglesias. As has Talking Points Memo.

Let me be clear: Mainstream conservatives are not in league with Nazi-loving Holocaust deniers. But since mainstream conservatives took such great offense at the DHS report about the extremists, it seems like they would engage the renewed debate about its validity. So far, though, no discussion of the matter at National Review, the Weekly Standard or Commentary. I find the silence a wee bit baffling.

UPDATE: Andy McCarthy at National Review takes up the challenge:

When we said there was a wave of jihadist terror, it was said on the basis serial, related atrocities, tons of evidence, and countless participants. The DHS report was panned because it tried to make the same kind of assertion on the basis of nothing of the kind. But if Secretary Napolitano or the FBI have that kind of evidence, we ought to be seeing it in arrests and affidavits describing evidence that ties in movement leaders, plot masterminds, fundraisers, recruiters, and recruits. We ought to be seeing mega-conspiracy indictments of the kind the FBI has made famous. Where are they?

Lots of lone nutcases, in other words, instead of vast conspiracies. Fair enough.

Conservatives and gay marriage

I’ve been wrestling this afternoon with how to respond to National Review’s editorial that is dismissive of efforts to extend marriage to gay couples. This passage in particular has vexed me:

Few social goods will come from recognizing same-sex couples as married. Some practical benefits may accrue to the couples, but most of them could easily be realized without changing marriage laws. Same-sex couples will also receive the symbolic affirmation of being treated by the state as equivalent to a traditional married couple — but this spurious equality is a cost of the new laws, not a benefit. One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals.

Both as a social institution and as a public policy, marriage exists to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households. It is a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living. State recognition of the marital relationship does not imply devaluation of any other type of relationship, whether friendship or brotherhood. State recognition of those other types of relationships is unnecessary. So too is the governmental recognition of same-sex sexual relationships, committed or otherwise, in a deep sense pointless.

And here’s what vexes me: This conservative defense of heterosexuals-only marriage — and it is the best one they’ve got — basically amounts to social engineering.

Yes, social engineering. That’s a phrase you often hear coming from the mouths of conservatives who argue against affirmative action or against tax structures that place a heavier burden on the rich than the poor. Government is wrong when it tries to fashion society to fit some predetermined ends.

Except, apparently, when it comes to marriage.

The affirmative action comparison is especially telling here. When it comes to race, conservatives argue that minority groups shouldn’t be given state- or institutionally sanctioned privileges — access to jobs or education — because, well, that’s unfair to everybody else who doesn’t get those privileges. It doesn’t matter that folks in those groups were historically excluded from education and jobs, creating a sort of cultural quicksand that has mucked up the prospects of future generations. History be damned.

Except, apparently, when it comes to marriage. Historically, we’re told, marriage has always been between one man and one woman — and this history is important to preserve. And heterosexual couples must be given exclusive access to state-sanctioned privileges — on taxes, in particular, but also on many other day-to-day benefits — and it’s OK that it’s unfair, because of the children.

This ignores, of course, that post-menopausal couples are allowed access to civil marriage, as are heterosexual couples who have no intention of reproducing — facts that seem to make this conservative argument for heterosexuals-only civil marriage a lie. It also ignores that kids are raised in a variety of situations, not all of them featuring married heterosexual couples. Ah, conservatives respond, but a committed heterosexual relationship is the very best set of parents for kids. It’s been proven scientifically!

Perhaps. But even granting — for the sake of argument — that that’s true, that still leaves conservatives in the position of arguing for heterosexuals-only marriage on social engineering grounds. Never mind that plenty of good people survived and even thrived in blended families, with single mother or, yes, gay parents. Never mind that gay adoptive parents tend to take care of kids — with medical issues, or who are racial minorities — who would otherwise be left at the mercy of the foster care system. Only the theoretically optimum style of child-rearing — and I say “theoretically,” because we’ve all known some shitbag still-married parents — will get the respect, recognition and support of the state. And everyone else can go lump it.

Social engineering.

What’s funny about this is that heterosexual couples have been pairing off and raising children for thousands of years, long before government got into the act. Somehow, humanity survived and thrived. Yet now conservatives — folks who usually argue that government should leave us alone to do our own thing — now suggests that the government must defend an institution that survived fine without it.

The ludicrousness wouldn’t be so irritating were it not for National Review’s arrogant dismissiveness of the rights of gay couples to be able to care for and support each other. “State recognition of the marital relationship does not imply devaluation of any other type of relationship,” the magazine says — but it clearly does.

Thanks to my upbringing and college years, I have a number of friends who are opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds. I won’t try to argue with them, frankly; I do believe that religious grounds are insufficient as a foundation for public policy.

National Review, though, deserves little respect for the case it is making. As I said: When it comes to affirmative action and tax structure, conservatives decry social engineering. When it comes to marriage, they embrace it. It’s funny — actually, it’s not — that in each case, the conservative position protects the power and privileges of people who have always had it.

Capping executive pay is the exact same thing as sending millions of people to the gulags to die

The New York Times has a story today about a forthcoming effort by the Obama Administration to more tightly regulate executive pay at big finance companies and perhaps beyond. Over at National Review, Andy McCarthy responds with this little gem:

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.

What an imbecilic and morally repugnant, morally unserious thing to say.

Listen, we’ve got a huge problem in the country: It’s the “too big to fail” problem. Huge companies — in finance and out — stand on the precipice of failure. And they’re so big, so intertwined with the functioning of our broader economy, that the actual failure of those companies could well mean the failure of the American economy as a going concern. This is beyond the “creative destruction” within capitalism that causes some pain in our march to ever greater financial rewards; this about the possible collapse of the entire system. So we’ve been left with two ugly and unpalatable choices: A) the government sweeps in and uses taxpayer dollars (present and future) to keep the system from collapse or B) we let the companies fail and hope the devastation isn’t as bad as it appears it could be. Either way, the citizens of this country through no fault of their own bear the burden of the mistakes made by America’s titans of business.

This is a problem. Conservatives like to critique “big government” as a threat to American prosperity, and to some extent they’ve been correct that excessive regulation and taxation can be a drag on private enterprise. But with a few exceptions — I’m thinking here of Rod Dreher, a “crunchy conservative” blogger and columnist in Dallas — few conservatives seem to acknowledge or recognize that non-government private enterprises can also grow so big and pervasive that they can also threaten the prosperity (and, you could argue, the freedom) of Americans.

The Obama Administration, whatever you think about the solution they’re about to put forward, at least seems to recognize this. (And I’m not endorsing the administration’s moves at this point.) But many conservatives — it appears to me — put their hands over their ears and shout “Free markets! Free markets!” Or worse yet, like Andrew McCarthy they compare the Obama Administration’s policies to a political system that killed millions of its own citizens. This is particularly infuriating coming from a man (McCarthy) and movement that spent the post-9/11 years of the Bush Administration defending torture, warrantless wiretapping and a view of executive power that seemingly shrugged off Constitutional checks and balances. Apparently, the only rights that some mainstream conservatives hold inviolate are the ones that concern the pursuit, acquisition and spending of money.

Many conservatives have spent the post-9/11 years responding to debates about security versus civil rights with an old truism: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Fine. But neither is free-market capitalism. (President Bush, for all his faults, at least seemed to recognize this with his advocacy of the original (and, yes, flawed) bailout.) Conservatives could serve the country and their movement well if they could offer a conservative, market-based method of addressing the “too big to fail” crisis instead of making slanderous assertions and empty paeans to lasseiz-faire economics. They could try to help fix the problem.