TAC is surely the only conservative magazine where an editor will receive hate mail for endorsing the GOP candidate—however backhandedly. I am at best a hypocrite, at worst—shiver to say it—a Republican.

My favorite response:

I was reading Kara Hopkins and had to stop. She said one thing that disturbed me highly, ‘a war we cannot win.’ There is no such thing as an un-winnable war. There is always a winner and a loser. Some people naively believe there are no winners in war. Tell that to the Sioux. The U.S can win a war in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else. It will not for one reason alone. The political elite, like this writer that you’ve in your magazine, don’t know what it takes to win.

Let me explain it to you. Understanding the fundamentals of winning a war is quite easy. It means killing your enemies and those who help them. It means snuffing out towns, cities, and countries with nerve gas and nuclear weapons and then clearing out the scraps with flame throwing tanks. It means sticking bayonets into anyone and everyone that resists.

A war should be short and ruthless. General Sherman, Genghis Khan, General Patton, and Sun Tzu, understood this. The Russians and Chinese understand this. Even Saddam Hussein understood this. War is war. It isn’t monopoly. It has only one rule as does love, all is fair. Any illiterate gang-banger off the street understands this yet the educated cannot?

He goes on to say that he will deprive us of his subscription. (Whether or not he intends to liberate my house with a flame-throwing tank is an open question.)

Now allowing that Genghis Khan comes immediately to mind when recalling great men of the Right and leaving aside the moral component—since the cliché says “all’s fair” it must be true—one wonders whether my correspondent has considered what would happen after we finished “clearing out the scraps.” Surely the “scraps” (charming designation there) will leave behind no embittered relatives, and neighboring countries will be cowed by our brutal display rather than motivated to fortify their arsenals and ally against the aggressor. History argues otherwise, but apparently only “elites” read history.

It’s easy to dismiss my penpal as a brutish outlier. But he’s only repeating what he’s heard through official channels over the past six years. When radio bombardiers call for leveling the Sunni Triangle, conservative opinion-masters advocate nuking Mecca, and all the president’s men chastise him for not prosecuting his war with sufficient ferocity, why would the rank and file remain temperate?

It’s quite a feat to crash an economy, outspend Democrats, and lose two wars. But perhaps the greatest corruption of the Bush years—indeed, a component in all of these failures—is the notion that freedom, defined as an absence of limits, is conservatism’s highest end. A quieter understanding suggests instead that conservatism is a recognition of limits on human perfectability and governmental prerogative. But that’s much harder to set to music or wrap in bunting or stick on to a bumper. So damn the defeatists, full speed ahead!

Filed under: Books, Election, Immigration