Neocon Men
Another Glenn Beck Brainstorm
There is no denying Glenn Beck’s great popularity with many Americans who see themselves as conservatives. Joe Carter of First Things recently offered a reminder of why this popularity is unfortunate. In an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s program, Beck denied that legal recognition of gay marriage would harm the United States and stated, “I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?” To Beck, the redefinition of the bedrock institution of human society is apparently of less concern than the fasces found in American architecture from the 1920’s.
Confessions of a Cleveland Sports Fan
Recently, the national media focused its attention on my hometown. As is generally the case when that happens, the focus was not positive. Here is AP reporter Tom Withers, offering his objective analysis of the event: “New York, Chicago, New Jersey, Los Angeles and every other [city] came up short, finishing out of the money. So did Cleveland. As it always does. This time, losing was tainted with bitterness.” The way in which all these cities “came up short,” of course, was in persuading LeBron James to play for their NBA franchises.
An Anniversary Ignored
Tuesday was the 43rd anniversary of an event that many want to see vanish down the Memory Hole. On June 8, 1967, Israeli airmen and sailors killed 33 American sailors and one civilian during their attack on the USS Liberty, and wounded another 171 American sailors.
Frum’s Firing
By now, many Chronicles readers have no doubt heard that David Frum was fired from his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, following an online column claiming that the passage of Obamacare was the GOP’s “Waterloo,” which could have been avoided if the GOP had been more willing to negotiate with Obama. Frum is now charging that AEI tossed him because it was responding to pressure from its donors, a charge eminent AEI scholar Charles Murray has denounced at National Review Online as “despicable,” since it is unsupported by evidence and is calculated to appeal to the leftist media. But if Murray is only now discovering the nature of Frum, he has not been paying attention.
I Love What You Do For Me, Toyota!
It’s always nice to have one’s beliefs confirmed. I was traveling this week, and wasn’t able to follow current events closely, but as the bad news around Toyota continued to mount, I figured that someone at NRO would be flacking for the Japanese and suggesting that it was all part of a government plot to help GM. Sure enough, when I came home, I discovered that John Miller was suggesting that the federal government, with its ownership stake in GM, wants Toyota to “drop dead,” citing as evidence Secretary of Transportation LaHood’s comment that “if anybody owns any of those vehicles, stop driving it, and take it to a Toyota dealer.”
The Hate That Never Dies
Jonah Goldberg has a piece in yesterday’s USA Today defending television loudmouth Glenn Beck from his critics. In the course of his piece, Goldberg takes a swipe at Pat Buchanan for not being a Republican and for writing a revisionist history of the start of World War II, making the same sort of arguments that used to be made in books published by such conservative publishers as Regnery and Devin-Adair.
How Not To Read A Papal Encyclical
The overarching flaw of the neocons is arrogance. It was arrogance that led them to believe that we could remake the Mideast when we invaded Iraq. It was arrogance that led Catholic neocons to lecture John Paul II on Catholic just-war teaching as they lobbied the Vatican to endorse our disastrous invasion of Iraq. And George Weigel displayed a comparable arrogance when he penned a reaction to Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, the same day it was released, claiming that the passages he agreed with were “obviously” written by Benedict, while those he disagreed with were just as clearly written by unnamed Vatican bureaucrats. Although Weigel is a papal biographer, he seems to think he is a pope, possessed of his own personal Magisterium. It is one thing for a Catholic, after serious reflection, to respectfully disagree with a noninfallible papal teaching; it is another to flippantly dismiss an encyclical as a “duck-billed platypus” and “the warbling of an untuned piccolo” less than 24 hours after reading it.
Not Your Father’s National Review
What held National Review together during its heyday was anticommunism. The kiddies who post at NRO either don’t know this, or are embarrassed by it. Yesterday, Mario Loyola, commenting on the prospect of the Obama administration potentially prosecuting members of the Bush administration for encouraging torture, ruefully notes that there is historical precdent for this.
Fat Henry Is Still Dead
It’s bad enough that yesterday was Earth Day. Over at NRO, Andrew Stuttaford reminded us that yesterday was also the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s becoming the King of England. Except that Stuttaford, an English atheist who left England for New York, sees this anniversary as an occasion for celebration, and Henry as a “Liberator” and a far greater hero than the man he murdered, Thomas More.
We’re Shocked, Shocked! To Find David Frum Engaging in Character Assassination
Over at NRO, the online home of David Frum until January of this year, Frum’s former colleagues are expressing shock and dismay at his attacks on Rush Limbaugh, most prominently in a cover story for Newsweek. Today, Andy McCarthy noted that Frum had insinuated to Chris Matthews on television that Limbaugh might be racist. McCarthy offered sarcastic congratulations to Frum on his notoriety and wrote, “David has arrived. From nowhere to Newsweek in a nanosecond.”
