Posted on 07/28/2004 1:30:14 PM PDT by oldtimer2
Esquire does not allow any posting of its content. Here is a link to the article, which is from a "liberal" author in a "liberal" magazine. His conclusions will surprise all Freepers.
Well done.
Maybe common sense is dawning on the far left. Kerry will get us all killed, that is the bottom line. Even the village idiot knows it.
They hate Bush because he didn't allow Gore to steal the election. They thought they had it in the bag, just like Chicago and the 1960 election, when Daly delivered dead voters to the polls, just the number JFK needed to take the state and the presidency. Same play from the playbook in 2000, only this time Bush decided to play hardball and Gore was left with egg on his face and no job.
If he knew the history, he would know that Lincoln was not regarded with much respect. His strength was in the ar,y and in the federal bureacracy. In hius own party had had tittle support. I remember reading that someone said that "there are no LINCOLN men."He was renominated in 1864 only because his was able to outmanuever Salmon Chase his chief rival in the government. He won re-election only because of his popularity in the Army, whose generals made sure that the tropps would get to vote. Without Sherman's taking of Atlanta and his rampage in Georgia, even the soldier vote would not have won him victory.
The sense I get from most of my liberal friends is a profound longing for a world in which the U.S. government is only one of many participants in a world collegium of negotiation and mutual sacrifice. It is the illusion promoted by the Clintons, the Chiracs, the Chretiens, the Schroeders and yes, the Kerrys. All problems settled by consensus, and the U.S. in particular and the West in general will have to accept less wealth and redistribute the rest to those from whom it was expropriated by - by what? - well, by "capitalism," or "colonialism," they don't usually reason it much further than those abstractions.
This is simply not a world the Islamic radicals have any intention of joining. Their own illusion is one of world domination. Time and historical accident have withheld from them the power to effect this. Technology has placed it again within their grasp if not to conquer, then at least to destabilize and destroy, hoping to become lords of the ruins. They aren't the first.
The vehemence with which this is denied by the left is indicative of a beliefs that (1) the threat is minor, (2) it is directed against the inherently guilty, and (3) if we ignore it the damage done will be no more than a metaphorical mosquito bite. At one time that may even have been true, at least partly. No longer.
Their preferred course of action is to wait and to pretend, and hope that when the big blow comes it will be against someone other than themselves. By then we really will be flinging nuclear weapons about, or just as likely, surrendering them to international control to avoid it. There is a practical alternative - let Bush (for the domestic left) or the United States (for the international one) do the dirtywork and pick up the reins again once it's safe. That is precisely what they did to Churchill, but at least then they waited until the war was won to do so.
Recommended reading. You will see similarities that should help you get through the next 3 months. Check out post #85, he expresses similar insights.
I enjoyed your take on the author and wholeheartedly agree with you.
It might not be a bad idea for you to express your opinion directly to him via email - writers like to be honestly critiqued.
We should hope that it does not.
When I ask Democrats what they would have done after 9-11, most of them don't answer.
I've told them that Bush would have been condemned if he did nothing, and he is being condemned because he did something.
They all agree with that assessment. They just shake their heads and say that I am right.
Now, there are other issues that people disagree with the president on, but the democrats aren't championing those causes. Outsourcing and open borders to name a few. In the Bay Area of California, there are lots of debates about those issues. Neither the republicans or the democrats are doing anything about it.
Read Modern Times by Paul Johnson. His history of 1919 to the early 90’s spells out 2 main issues, moral relativism and lack of personal responsibility. The last 80 years have been replete with these issues to the detriment of many. The idea that the left was unable or unwillingly to identify and defeat true evil, such as communism, is a central theme in the 20th century. We are faced with the same question, if the left wins this election, and appeases our enemies, we will pay an awful price.
dirt, if you haven't been here yet, you've got to read this!
In other words, Democrats.
I found this to be remarkably written. Well done, Mr. Junod.
THanks for the article.
It's a fascinating read.
I just emailed the link to all my friends.
Great article.
I seem to remember reading a thread here somewhere that
compared the number of dead during the civil war as a percentage of population, TODAY the number of killed would mean FIVE MILLION.
Today, even most of us, and I'm speaking of conservatives
although there may be perhaps a liberal there somewhere,
cannot grasp the fact that we may have to kill millions of
Muslims before this is over, they are certainly going to try and do the same to us. We cannot separate out the "peaceful" muslims as though they were the wheat and
the terrorists the chaff. We could not do so in our fight
against Germany or Japan, that we did NOT do so to those who were Americans of German or Japanese decent (In America.) stands as a credit to our country all harping about "internment" aside. We may have to intern American
muslims if for nothing else but their OWN PROTECTION.
It is not a future we wish for, but it may be all we get.
"Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege."
But liberals do flatter themselves that it's more moral to be without morals. They have lost the ability to recognize evil just as much as the French have. They have done everything in their power to dissolve the entire nation into the meaninglessness of "me first" privilege. In fact they have done everything they can to dissolve the nation and it's institutions, even allowing illegals to vote in national elections in order to upset the almost 50/50 party split in the nation.
"The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated."
that's a keeper!
Yikes! (I don't perform well under pressure. :)
I'll gladly offer my opinion, but accompanied by a request that you then honor us with yours as well. Fair enough?
It's a fascinating article. Just when I'm sitting on the edge of my chair, ready to stand up and applaud this guy for a long series of examples of sheer brilliance, he throws in a small piece of 'insight' that is so far off base it's out in the nosebleed bleacher section.
That's how this whole article affected me. All of it is eloquently (capital E) written. And, substance-wise, about ninety percent of it is right on the mark (I believe that's a record in the annals of liberal punditry :). About five percent takes a surreal combination of hard fact and gauzy fiction and offers a conclusion that sounds convincing, but has deep flaws in half of its premises. And another five percent is no more than speculation based on his previous (apparently leftist) indoctrination.
When I finished reading, I was left with the impression: Man, this guy could coax a fish out of the water, and convince it that it was meant to be a bird instead.
The author freely admits -- if not directly, at least by inference – that his political leanings have a history of sitting significantly left of center. And yet this article leaves me with the strong impression that he is not yet hopelessly entrenched in the leftist catechism, or the leftist penchant to toe the party line and toss truth aside for the sake of ideology. It appears that there is yet hope for Mr. Junod. Unlike the way I feel about most left-leaners, I kinda like him. He appears to be willing to learn ... which makes him exponentially more open-minded than avowed leftists (which, I'll admit, is akin to saying that he's more damp than a desert).
Just a couple of uplifting examples of the fact that he appears to be well on the road to at least beginning to get it (Junod is in bold):
What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his [Bush's] call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.
Beautifully said! Appeasement and 'inaction in the face of evil' (and much more sinister stuff than that) were rampant during the dark era of '92-'00. Even more, incompetence in the face of evil was rampant during many of the previous administrations (with '81-'89 serving as the sterling exception). As a result, we have allowed ourselves to be inculcated with both an inability (as a result of cowardice) and an unwillingness (as a result of faux-'tolerance') to either sharply define evil, or to react to it decisively. Doing so unsettles us.
IN 1861, after Confederate forces shelled Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus from Philadelphia to Washington and thereby made the arrest of American citizens a matter of military or executive say-so. When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court objected to the arrest of a Maryland man who trained troops for Confederate muster, Lincoln essentially ignored his ruling. He argued that there was no point fixating on one clause in the Constitution when Southern secession had shredded the whole document ... During the four-year course of the Civil War, he also selectively abridged the rights of free speech, jury trial, and private property.
All of this is true, and Lincoln's unconstitutional dictates serve as an unfortunate precedent that dislodged our very underpinnings, and has not boded well for our republic in the ensuing century and a half. And the author is correct in connecting Lincoln's defiance of the Constitution with at least the suggestion of that occurring now, again in a wartime situation (with the Patriot Act being the most glaring example of a similar atrocity that portends long-term anti-liberty ramifications).
But … whenever I hear a left-leaning columnist complain about the potential unconstitutionality of Bush's war policies, a little red 'hypocrite' flag is raised in my head. If he hasn't already, I'd like Mr. Junod to write a column about the 'constitutionality' of many of Bush's domestic spending policies (his prescription drug plan, his dramatic increases in federal spending on AIDS research, support of Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Department of Education, amnesty for illegal immigrants ... ). I suspect that Mr. Junod supports all of those unconstitutional programs and policies ... and maybe even thinks they don't shred the Constitution finely enough.
One can't have it both ways, Mr. Junod. One can't revere the Constitution when a war is being prosecuted, and desecrate it in the name of socialist/entitlement ideology. (Should I ever come across a Junod column in which he consistently decries socialist programs, I'll gladly eat my words.)
Neither am I looking to justify Bush's forays into shady constitutional ground by invoking Lincoln's precedents with the same; I'm not a lawyer. I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country—the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia—is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
Now if he would only permanently embrace the beautiful clarity of thought/analysis exhibited above, without any regression back into the left-leaning netherworld, we could someday consider him one of our own. And what a permanent step into the light that would represent for him, huh? :)
Junod's open-mindedness, and his placing of our national sovereignty and security at the top of his list of political concerns, reminds me of Ed Koch ... only Junod appears to be more cerebral and eloquent. The former mayor of NYC recently admitted that, although he and President Bush are politically/ideologically poles apart, he intends to vote for Bush/Cheney in November, because America’s security, and very existence, are at stake, and he believes that Bush will defend and preserve both better than the democrat alternative. Junod and Koch are clearly not among the ranks of the dopiest leftists, but even those on the far left of the spectrum have got to realize that one can't continue to strive for the global socialist utopia if one is dead.
I have a slight sneaking suspicion that Junod might at least consider the Bush/Cheney option in November as well (after all … there's a curtain around the voting booth … and his publisher will never know).
~ joanie
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