Buckley must really be getting senile. President Bush's speech was crystal clear: It's open season on the bad guys, and we're going to roll them back like no one's business.
Really? How?
"Buckley must really be getting senile. President Bush's speech was crystal clear: It's open season on the bad guys, and we're going to roll them back like no one's business."
That's not it. Buckley understood the speech, like Noonan. They didn't LIKE it. There exists a division within American conservatism, between those some call the "neoconservatives" and the "traditional" conservatives (including "paleo-" conservatives). Traditional conservatives never liked "nation building", thinking it not realistic. Neoconservatives think that it is the only realistic way to have peace in the long term.
Traditional conservatives have been sniping at the "Neocons" in the Bush Administration for a long time: Rumsfeld and Cheney, mutedly, Wolfowitz more openly (because he is politically expendable).
Traditional conservatives could always paint George Bush as being much more of a middle-of-the-road conservative, being pushed further to the Neoconservative side because of the weight of so many advisors.
With this speech, which Bush operatives say the President has planned for a month, Bush just squarely and specifically declared that he, personally, is a Neocon, that he himself, personally, believes in nation building.
Traditional conservatives do not like that, at all, because it means that the Republican Party itself is a ship being intentionally steered by its captain into waters they think are full of shoals. So they are expressing their frustration. President Bush is himself, personally, unambiguously a Neocon, and American policy is going to be Neoconservative - full stop - for the next four years. Traditional conservatives have to decide whether they are going to quietly oppose the policies of their party, or grudgingly accept the new party line, which Bush just unambiguously declared and underlined three times. Buckley, and even Limbaugh, have to decide whether to divide their party or to support a policy of intentional, overt nationbuilding which they have long opposed.
My bet is that they will grumble and grouse, per Noonan's and Buckley's articles, but go along. What choice do they have?
This is exactly what I got out of it as well. Frankly, I am surprised that conservatives like William F. Buckley and even Peggy Noonan (for crying out loud) are having trouble with this part of the speech. Someone needs to send them a memo to the effect that the world changed after 9/11 -- which is exactly what President Bush said yesterday with a crystal clarity and persuasiveness that most of us understand perfectly. It will no longer do to be the turkey who wrongly assumes that he is safe because we are still several months away from Thanksgiving and nothing bad has yet happened to him.
Wow. I guess that old phrase, "the world's policeman" - as in "we can't be the world's policeman" - is now, um, what would be the word? Quaint?
Why is it when Reagan announces the "Reagan Doctrine" of liberating Soviet states, no one has a problem, but when it's ending the sewer-breeding grounds of these Islamofacists, all of a sudden it's "too ambitious"? Nonsense.