Posted on 03/25/2003 6:54:01 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
Novak may be wrong, but he's a true patriot
When a nation is at war, there's a tendency among those who support it to suspect that those who opposed it before the shooting started did so either because they were secretly biased in favor of the enemy or have somehow come to hate their own country. There is a corollary tendency among those who opposed war before it actually breaks out to rally round the troops, regardless of their real feelings about its wisdom.
These tendencies are human and rational. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (S.D.), for example, who was attacking President Bush's competence, judgment and motives before U.S. forces crossed the Iraqi border, was all over the place afterwards, assuring us that he supports the troops and prays for victory. Pat Buchanan, who attacked Bush and his strategists, has done the same thing, as has conservative columnist Robert Novak.
This doesn't mean that any of them feel any differently about the wisdom of the war today than they did before Bush "pulled the trigger" last week or that once the shooting stops they won't reiterate the objections they had voiced beforehand. Indeed, if they felt as strongly before the war as they all suggested, it would be dishonest to do anything else later. That does not, however, make illegitimate the position they now take.
It's perfectly true that, for self-serving reasons, some of Bush's political critics might today be overstating their enthusiasm for the mission on which our troops are embarked. But they are supporting them and that's important. They are not in the streets with protesters likening Bush to Hitler or echoing the anti-Semitism of those who actually do seem to think saving "uncle" Saddam is preferable to protecting ourselves and our friends in the region from whatever lunacy he might come up with next week or next month.
While I count myself among those who from the beginning have believed the action we are now taking is fully justified, I've never believed that men and women of good will couldn't disagree either on the threat posed by today's Iraq or the proper way to deal with it. Those who questioned the strength of the evidence that Saddam had either the weapons we suspected he had or his ability to truly threaten us with them had a point. It looks as if they were wrong, but the early public evidence could lead one to the conclusion they drew from it.
What's more, those who were concerned about the United States taking on a job that could weaken us internally and lead to a fatal over-extension abroad had and continue to have an even better point. We may be moving into Iraq seeking to disarm an enemy and, incidentally, free her people, but there are those in and out of the administration who would have us stay to appoint quasi-colonial military or civilian governors to build a new Iraq. It is thus that liberators become empire builders and should, in my opinion, be resisted by thoughtful conservatives.
The debate over whether we should have adopted the policy we are now pursuing was a legitimate one and the continuing debate about what all this will mean in the post-Saddam world is going to prove to be even more important. It is a debate that won't divide us all along neat ideological lines, but it is one that must nonetheless be joined.
And it is going to be far too important to be decided on the basis of the sort of ad hominem attacks launched against Novak this week by former White House speechwriter David Frum. Frum is among those who can't seem to accept the fact that those who disagree with him may not be in league with the devil. His vituperative attack on one of the nation's most respected conservative columnists marks the man as neither conservative nor intellectually respectable. Like many other conservatives, I happen to disagree with Novak's analysis of what's going on in the Middle East. But to suggest, as does Frum, that his disagreement with Bush's Iraq policy stems from a hatred of the president and the country is scandalously and irresponsibly absurd.
Frum seems to know little of Novak's background or history, but anyone who can read a newspaper should know that Novak was opposing this nation's enemies before Frum was even born. One can question the man's judgment and sometimes even his facts, but to suggest that Novak is no different from the crypto-fascists and Marxists organizing "peace" rallies these days says a lot more about David Frum than it does about Bob Novak.
There is no question that the neocons now control the party and will for the foreseeable future. This fight is about maintaining power - paleos are seen as challengers to the throne or as heretics in the church or as skunks at the garden party.
If paleos would get off the race thang, their credibility might improve.
Oh, and stop the appeasement of every terrorist regime that comes along.
And that is the entire problem of Frum's article. He carefully selects some quotes from the "American Rennaissance" fringers, defines them as the center of a said political faction called the "paleos," and procedes to assign membership in that faction to other more mainstream individuals such as Novak who, by their own affiliations, have no more adoration to the fringers than Frum himself does.
It's all one great big guilt-by-association smear campaign and its designed to discredit a few credible conservative spokesmen by arbitrarily tacking them onto fringers of less credibility. It is no different than the leftist race hustlers who try to discredit us by the same tactic.
As for the emails Frum posted, one cannot honestly believe that they represent an accurate cross-section of those who have written him in criticism of his smear piece. Much to the contrary, he appears to have picked out two or three blatantly anti-semite rants from a few fringer nutcases out there who also happened to be angry about his article (and not because it smeared Novak, who they likely consider another "communist infiltrater William F. Buckley" or other such conspiracy nonsense, but because it also smeared their guys - the American Renaissance fringers or the Birchers or whatever). In an effort at self-vindication, he then posts those two or three kook emails so he can say "See, I was right after all."
Frum did what he did when he did for a reason (beside the fact that he's a neocon liberal). The true conservatives that Frum despises did what any true conservative had the right to do. Disagree until war, but when war starts back the President and his decisions 100 percent. It's a good tactic, given, because he has them both ways. If they don't answer the pro-war, big government National Review wins because no one answered so the charges must be true. If they do, the pro-war, big government National Review comes up and says, 'See, we told you so!! We're more patriotic than they are'
What the childish National Review does not realize is that they've been tearing apart the 'conservative' party for over 30 years. Buckley has turned this into some sort of p@ssing contest between what he considers conservative and what the rest of the world considers conservative. And Republicans sit on the sidelines with their thumbs up their privates wondering why the Democrats keep winning the Senate for 40 years.
Buckley and his ilk have done a great disservice to the conservative party. How a newly nationalized citizen of whatever state he belongs to now from Canada can come down here and tell the citizens of the respective states what a conservative is and get anyone to listen, I'll never know. But it tells me a couple of things. Conservatives by and large aren't listening. He's having to go outside of the country to get his attack dogs and this newest little one bit off more than he can chew. Attacking an entire arm of the party and several respected men with a better reputation than introducing the jingle 'axis of evil' is not smart. It's ignorant and something I would expect of the lowest sort. Say a neocon that can't do anything more than call names
I don't know if I am a paleo but I oppose the war, support free trade, support more open immigration, am optimistic about American prospects, regard Martin Luther King as a great, though flawed, hero, and think that the CSA was a racist regime formed to defend slavery. I suspect that Novak's views are similar to mine on most of these issues. Frum, on the other hand, seems to regard us all as part of the same racist and antisemitic clique. He owes Novak an apology for his ugly McCarthyite smear article.
BTW, Frum doesn't seem to want to research the racist views of Jared Taylor (a friend of Horowitz) who supports the war. It is easy to throw stones at others but it takes courage to clean up your own backyard....courage which Frum apparently lacks.
Speaking of racism, it is worthy of note that most blacks are on our side in this fight, not yours.
You are eating right into a tactic of less than pure motivations. When it comes to some of those american renaissance fringers, I agree with you completely - they are nuts, many of them are anti-semites, and some of their statements are damning of their arguments. But this is not about the out-in-la-la-land fringer kooks. It is about trying to associate mainstream conservatives such as Novak and more extreme but not-quite-kook conservatives like Buchanan with the racist crowd, then discredit them all in one broad sweeping strike. It's guilt-by-association politics and it wreaks of a tactic of the radical left.
If you still don't see it, try applying some scrutiny to Frum's article. A major thesis of it is to declare the anti-semitism of the people he defines as "paleos." And to support this, he offers quotes from Samuel Francis at American Renaissance that do indeed smell of anti-semitism. But then look at who he lumps into that category. One of them is Robert Novak, a catholic convert who is also ethnically Jewish. He also lumps in Paul Gottfried, another Jew. He lumps in several people who subscribe to political philosophies centered strictly around Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist of Jewish ethnicity, and Murray Rothbard, a Jewish economist from New York.
In short, Frum's guilt-by-association charade leads him to write an article implying that two conservative writers of Jewish ethnicity and a whole slate of conservative writers who base their entire political philosophy on the writings of two Jewish economists are all rabid "anti-semites." Orwell couldn't have phrased it better himself.
Being a libertarian I do not suffer the burden by label that conservatives do. From the side lines I observe that with race being used as a political battering ram by the left I do not think paleo's will cease and desist in their defense. The issue even if it is an ugly and devisive one is legit, perhaps not in all its forms but the subject is there and does need some discussion. The debate is part of today's political reality though one paleos are doomed to loose.
stop the appeasement of every terrorist regime that comes along.
In the not so distant past that was considered realpolitik and considered pretty clever.
You are right that the center of gravity is shifting in favor the neo-cons. Of course, if the war is a slow bleed of futile and messy nation building in the next year (which I hope is not true), we could have a grand conservative crack-up...and the neocons could be left isolated.
The post-WWII conservative movement has never been isolationist or protectionist and has consistently been pro-Israel. It has also been full of ex-Marxists. The likes of Francis and Thomas Fleming are open in their detestation of the actually existing conservative movement of the past 50+ years. Francis himself has written, as cited in Frum's original article:
"While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and '60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer." — SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, DECEMBER 16, 2002
If you want to say that pre-WWII America-Firsters, oldline Southern Democrats, Slobodan Milosevic and Jacques Le Pen's National Front are the "traditional conservative movement," that's fine, but there isn't any other sense in which Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis and Thomas Fleming are "traditional conservatives."
Novak, I'll agree, is not exactly a paleo -- he's just a strident apologist for Arab terrorism. And a Democrat, by the way.
The paleo amen-corner (to coin a phrase) can vent their spite on Frum as much as they choose, but the fact is that Frum's original article has condemned the paleo leadership out of their own mouths. That the leading paleos hate America -- the real country that's not an idea in their minds -- is not some outlandish charge or some subtle inference. They say outright that they hate this country. Buchanan trumpets his spite against the America which actually exists on page 6 of his Death of the West:
"We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for--their country, not ours" (p. 6).
The troops in Iraq are not fighting for Pat Buchanan's "good" America of yesteryear. They are fighting for the real America, which Pat says straight out is not his country. Pat can puff and blow about supporting the troops all he wants, but as far as I'm concerned he is a liar and a hypocrite until he publicly apologizes for saying that the United States is not worth fighting for.
Why is it suddenly so important for the all-powerful neocons to silence a few odd "cranks"? Because paleoconservatives are on to their game.
Neocons support continued large-scale immigration from Islamic countries while at the same time propose a never-ending series of wars on those same countries. Obviously, the wars could motivate some new immigrants to engage in terrorism. Why continue the immigration? Because Muslims in our communities can be used as "facts on the ground" to justify curtailment of Constitutional safeguards.
The combination of Islamic immigration and warfare only makes sense if one's goal is to establish a world empire unhampered by Constitutional impediments.
Ben Franklin said "It's a republic... if you can keep it." Paleo (genuine) Conservatives intend to keep it.
"Paleos tend to be protectionist, nativist, isolationist, enthusiastic about waging the culture wars, pessimistic about the future of American prospects, particularly from a cultural point of view, suspicious of the motives of Jews, and indulge a nostagia for the Confederacy."
And they wear stuff like this:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.