Neocon Men
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.”
Israel First, Again
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment of the former ambassador to China and Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, to head the National Intelligence Council. During that time, Freeman’s appointment was the subject of five posts, two from Michael Rubin, two from Jonah Goldberg, and one from Mark Steyn. The grave threat posed by Freeman would probably come as news to most Americans; indeed, most Americans (I include myself) have probably never heard of Freeman before.
Hanson’s Hubris
Over at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson is denouncing “messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete.” NRO was so pleased with Hanson’s denunciation that it prominently displayed it on the cover page of the website. You might think that Hanson finally got around to reading Bush’s Second Inaugural, in which the Decider declared that the United States would eliminate “tyranny” from the face of the earth, or the neocon propaganda that preceded the invasion of Iraq, in which we were assured that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk,” that our soldiers would be welcomed as “liberators,” and that the invasion of Iraq would cause the Mideast to be transformed from a snakepit of conflict to a garden of democracy.
But you would be wrong.
George Washington, Call Your Office
Over at NRO, Mona Charen announces that she will be attending a rally to support Israel in front of the Israeli embassy today, and she asks NRO readers to “please come and help demonstrate that millions of us passionately support Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
One wonders how it would be possible to distinguish a rally for Israel from the standard, daily fare at NRO. One also wonders what our first (and greatest) President would think of our indulgence in such a “passionate attachment of one nation for another.”
Every Foreign Dollar Counts at NRO
National Review Online has run numerous editorials against the idea of a federal loan to the Big Three, without, so far as I can tell, any dissenting voice arguing for such a loan from any of its columnists, most of whom have also attacked the idea of a loan for Detroit. NRO’s opposition to a loan for the Big Three cannot credibly be explained by any general opposition to government loans to private enterprises or concern for fiscal restraint, since NRO was an active proponent of the Wall Street bailout, with National Review editor Rich Lowry going so far as to chide House Republicans who had argued against Treasury Secretary Paulson’s plan for being “extremely irresponsible.”
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