[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson moral clarity huge BUMP  [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Victor Davis Hanson articles]

If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-victordavishanson/browse

His NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

[RonHolzwarth]

"No Blood for Oil"

Of course not! We spread it all over our highways instead! Blood is for car wrecks, not for the fuel to power our vehicles!

[bassmaner]

VDH is spot on as usual.

BUMP!

[philetus]

"No Blood for Oil" (never mind the people who drove upscale gas-guzzlers to the rallies at which they chanted such slogans)


Gas goes much higher and some of them will be complaining we're not getting oil from Iraq.

[Gritty]

As usual, a great article by Hanson.

... such invective wears away support for an action that, by any historical yardstick, was as successful as it was noble... the only chance of that disaster happening would arise from our own continual harping that wears down the will of the American people — and those asked to fight for us in the field.

Leftists are fools, and dangerous to boot!

Kerry variously prevaricated,... — employing the entire idiom and vocabulary of those who are angry about Bush's removal of Saddam, but neither know quite why nor what they would do differently.

Kerry is a fool, and dangerous to boot!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I just filled up and paid $2.19 a gallon.

I just paid $1.70. Heeheehee...

[sultan88]

"So here we are a year later. We fuss about the WMD "myth"; enemies scramble over its reality. We talk of our theft of third-world resources — and pay more for gas than ever before while the price of Iraq's national treasure soars. We worry that we are too involved abroad; those in Europe, Afghanistan, and Iraq claim there are not enough of us over there. And we scream at each other that we are not liked, even as those overseas express new respect for us."

Great article ping!!

[NZerFromHK]

Surely one of the most astounding intellectual trends in our lifetime has been this transmogrification of religious fascists and Middle East autocrats — the minions of Saddam, Arafat, Khaddafi, or the Iranian mullahs — into some sort of exploited peoples worthy of Western forbearance for quite horrific dictatorships, theocracies, and all the assorted pathologies that we have to come to associate with the modern Middle East. The way things were going, belonging to Hamas or Hezbollah soon might have earned one affirmative-action status on an American campus.

I'm not surprised by this. The Western world's post-modernist Left has made a de facto pact of alliance with Third World anti-American nationalists. The Third World nationalists may use some Marxist language, but in heart they are old-fashioned statist conservatives (relative to their own culture, not American conservatives). Notice that there is very little internationalism spoken from castro's Cuba or today's PRC. The way Mao Zedong came to power was through appeals to nationalism among Chinese poeple, and not abstract Communist internationalism. Same case with Vietnam and North Korea. They are moral absolutists in that they believe their culture is superior to the decaying West and it is their destiny to make their countries "great". (I can only think of two non-Western countries seriously affected by Western-style post-modernism: Japan and Taiwan. In all other non-Western countries, everyone is either a modernist or even a theist in a broad sense)

Of course, they regard the multi-national organizations and pacts as "useful idiots" to restrain the wider West (not just the US) and allow them to turn the table of "injustice and exploitation" around. The likes of Noam Chomsky are either ignorant to this Third World nationalism, or they believe in a strange sort of karma: it is the THird World's turn to exploit the West back until the fullness of time (and of course, this means that these intellectuals themselves think of playing God).

[redrock]

"The Europeans are never going to risk lives and treasure for much of anything. "

So true.

redrock

[arasina]

BTTT