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Not everyone share’s Mr. McCain’s view that the defeat in Vietnam was a “disgrace,” or that the result of a war carried out “Not In My Name” nonetheless has bearing on the worth of one’s country. ~Bret Stephens
I should hope that no one shares the view that the outcome of a war has bearing on […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Another thought on Lieberman’s McCain endorsement. Even taking into account the bizarre awe in which modern Democrats hold JFK, I thought it was extraordinary that Lieberman said that the “one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.” That’s amusing–John S. McCain.
It’s never made sense to me […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
You never know when Bolingbroke is going to come in handy. In his thoughtful post on the subject, Reihan replied to one of my arguments:
(4) Daniel rejects the notion that patriotism is primarily about the state my sense is that patriotism is commonly, and properly, understood as “constitutional patriotism.” If it is not about the […]
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Filed under: politics, Bolingbroke
As a follow-up to this post at the Scene, I should make a few clarifications. I don’t like, and generally try not to use, the word isolationist, because the word is pretty much meaningless and leads to all sorts of misunderstandings. The word isolationist is inherently pejorative and is an extremely loaded term, and moreover […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
A couple of items to ponder for those hoping or fearing some significant change in how the U.S. relates to Israel and Palestine under an Obama administration: Gen. McPeak rejects the attacks against him here, and The New York Sun editorialised in defense of Obama against charges that he was insufficiently “pro-Israel” over two months ago.
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
The main American Conservative blog is now up, and the contributors are rapidly outpacing me in producing new posts. If I’m not careful, they’re going to make me look downright lazy. Read Tom Piatak on Jonah Goldberg, Kara Hopkins on the response to Prof. Bacevich’s Obama article, Tim Carney on lobbying, Kelley Vlahos on McCain and […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: miscellaneous
Following up on the continuing patriotism/nationalism debate, Reihan explains why he is a nationalist, and I try to explain why I am not.
1 Comment »
Filed under: politics
My thanks to Scene colleague Matt Frost for his post on Kateb, Wilkinson and patriotism. I generally agree with his remarks, and I should have more to say about it in coming days. Let me note that I agree with something Wilkinson said in the comments to Matt’s post:
But please don’t forget the role of the “national […]
5 Comments »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Will Wilkinson does get this much right:
The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s pastor is in large part about whether the man is patriotic enough.
Instead of rejecting this kind of attack or pushing back against it, he then proceeds to applaud Obama for his allegedly “inferior patriotism,” which he takes as a given because Obama does not […]
2 Comments »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Kateb also said:
In truth, if strict self-defense were ever at stake, patriotism would be unnecessary: people would not require any inflated passion to defend what was not an inflated purpose.
But if we followed Wilkinson’s recommendation and loved freedom while being faithless to any particular country, we would need to have patriotism to inspire us to defend a […]
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Filed under: politics
Replying earlier this month to his critics, George Kateb continues to miss the point:
If patriotism — devotion to the country and obedience to its state for the wrong reasons — has to exist, it should be defensive in temperament and parsimonious in the expenditure of life, including the lives of its enemies, and not mobilize […]
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Filed under: politics
But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly. […]
4 Comments »
Filed under: politics
Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. ~Will Wilkinson
That’s probably true. It just happens to be the case that a lot of the people who think this tend to be egoists or pinched individualists unable to value a common enterprise, or more […]
2 Comments »
Filed under: politics
As I mentioned earlier this week, McCain currently leads Obama 52-41 in Virginia. There seem to be two different kinds of states this year with respect to Obama’s support among young voters. In previous posts, I have pointed to the strong resistance to Obama among 18-29 year old voters in certain traditionally “blue” and “purple” states […]
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Filed under: politics
Powell and Rice, appointed by Bush, are the kind of post-racial figures the US, deep down, longs for. ~Geoff Elliott
The failed and incompetent kind? Yes, I know what Elliott is saying, but wouldn’t it be better if our so-called ”post-racial figures” were, well, not complicit in waging an unjust war and generally making a hash of […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Now it takes an especially obtuse reader to conclude from these posts that I think that the Republicans have even a remote chance of retaking either house of Congress this year. I said nothing of the kind. I have been saying for almost a year that Republican chances in House and Senate races were terrible, and […]
4 Comments »
Filed under: politics
This will have to be one of those occasions when I disagree with Ross, who wrote:
To a war-weary nation, Obama’s cool pragmatism has obvious appeal, but on a fundamental level McCain’s calculus is the right one. America’s responsibility for the current stability and future prospects of Iraq — a poor, tyrannized nation that our policies […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Jim Antle writes:
If McCain carries swing states like New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico or runs up huge margins in red states like Kentucky or even Virginia, it could make the difference in the Senate contests.
If the current Kentucky polling holds up, local Democrats are going to want to stay as far away from […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: politics
There has been a fair amount of chatter about VP choices this week, spurred on by Romney appearing with McCain at a campaign event and remarks by a McCain campaign staffer, Bloomberg’s introduction of Obama earlier this week and by the Casey endorsement of Obama. The idea of selecting Casey seems far-fetched, and not only because […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: politics
This citizen reporter video giving a post-mortem on the Huckabee campaign was interesting enough, but the most bizarre part was the man’s complaint towards the end talking about how “the money” changed Huckabee over the course of the campaign. Yeah, that’s it–it was all the piles of money that Huckabee had that pushed him in the directions he went […]
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Filed under: politics
Ross talks about the Bacevich and Kmiec endorsements of Obama, which I am likewise inclined to see mainly as statements of how utterly unacceptable they find McCain and the modern GOP, at The Current and also here. It seems clear to me that both endorsements hinge on foreign policy disagreements with the Bush administration, and both […]
5 Comments »
Filed under: politics, foreign policy
The problem with having idealists form your foreign policy is that idealists tend not to care for the grotty details that upset their world view. ~Dean Barnett
So says someone writing for The Weekly Standard. I wonder if he appreciates the phenomenal irony of that statement. Oh, wait, of course he doesn’t–it’s Dean Barnett.
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles. ~Stanley Kurtz
This is one thing, and probably the only thing, that Kurtz and I can agree on. […]
7 Comments »
Filed under: politics
There is no better way for NATO to move forward than by extending full membership invitations to Albania, Croatia and Macedonia and by beginning the process to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance in the future through membership action plans (MAPs). ~Donald Rumsfeld
I can think of at least five better ways NATO could move […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
I’m not likely to take Ryan “Social Conservatives Have a Death-Grip on Republican Politics” Sager’s analysis seriously in any case, but as someone who hails from the “interior West” I am going to cry foul on any attempt to explain the political changes of the Southwest that does not so much as mention two obvious long-term demographic reasons for shifts […]
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Filed under: politics