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
Teriffic insight and a cogent analysis.
Kudos,
knews hound
Amen!
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.
It might not be a "conservative" view point, but it comes darn close. Thanks for the usual wisdom and eloquence.
The problem for all too many of them, I think is that they really *don't* realize that the terrorists' ultimate aims are to kill or enslave everyone. To them, the terrorists despise America, and President Bush, and big business/capitalism/technology/etc., for the same reason that the *leftists* do. In their myopia, they think that the terrorists are just variants of the 60's radical leftists bombers and "revolutionaries".
They completely fail to understand that while the most prominent *targets* of the terrorists overlap strongly with the institutions and entities and ideologies despised by the leftists, that doesn't mean that the terrorists are attacking those targets for the same *goals* or *motivations* as the leftists.
The leftists fail to realize that although the terrorists want to destroy the things that the left dislikes about the West, they want to destroy what the left *likes* about it at the same time. And what the terrorists want to raise up in its place is something that will utterly horrify *any* leftist -- if any are left alive by that time to see it.
But in short, the leftists on the whole still don't "get" that the wolf is after *them*, too.