The Right Thing (ACU's Keene slams Frum over NR article)

American Conservative Union | 3/25 | David Keene

[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.

[Longshanks]

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."

Those emails are the most ridiculous part of Frum's self-defence. Shame on anyone who is fooled by that.

[TLBSHOW]

Careful David Keene they will smear you next like they tried to do to Frank and anyone else that sees through the lies.

[u-89]

I will have to go find the Francis column that your quote is from and see all that he has to say on the definition of paleocons before I could comment on it.

As for the quote from Buchanan's book I really don't have a problem with it as I understand what he is saying. There has never been a perfect human society since the Garden of Eden so when one person cites an example of a better time someone else can always find fault with it. The period before the 60's revolutions is frequently berated for being sexist, racist, etc. and this is one so called arguement used against Buchanan's lament frequently. Funny, I have heard Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams both say how much better life in America was in this very time frame. Obviously they see some virtue worthy of longing for and I seriously doubt they wish for a return of Jim Crow. There may have been some good come out of the last 30-40 years but there has been much change for the worse. Buchanan is right, there are two America's culturally and one is dying off. I can't condemn someone for mourning the change.

About Novak being a Democrat - not sure how that is important but anyway I heard him explain that since he lives in DC and there is no chance Republican candidates could get elected he is a Democrat so his vote has some influence - he tries to keep the worst of 2 Dem's out of office.

[Wavyhill]

Sorry to bust your comfortable little bubble, but the paleos love for the welfare net is not just some accomodation to the neocon reality. The fact is that the paleos have been far more supportive of Medicare, et al, than neocons. Do you remember the budget battle of 1995? Newt Gingrich was the ultimate neocon, and he wanted to turn back the federal programs of the last six decades. During that time, Pat Buchanan opposed the budget cuts, an opposition which made it possible for wobbly Republicans to jump ship (since if a "hard-core conservative" like Buchanan opposed Newt, then he must be extreme). This led to the downfall of the Contract With America, Clinton's reelection, and, indirectly, 9/11. Aren't you proud to be associated with the welfare-loving Pat Buchanan?

[Wavyhill]

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. From the sound of things, you're not a paleo, you're a liberal.

[Wavyhill]

The problem isn't that they think the Fifties were better than today. In some ways they weren't, but in many ways they were. The problem lies in the fact that they say there is nothing left of traditional America in today's America, which is false. They correctly state that the social "revolutions" were harmful, but they falsely state that they were ubiquitous.

[Wavyhill]

In addition to your paleocon quotes, I could add a column by Joseph Stalin, er, Sobran, just a few days after 9/11. (Sadly, I can't find it, since both Sobran and Lew Rockwell wisely dump past columns instead of having archives). In it, he was very glib about the attacks, stating that Americans might think Osama bin Laden old-fashioned, but that since he knew philosophy he was smart enough to know that being old-fashioned wasn't a bad thing. Somehow it didn't seem to occur to him that Americans might have a far bigger issue with Osama than his old-fashionedness. Of course, the 3000 Americans he murdered in cold blood probably watched Friends and South Park, so why would any self-respecting paleo care about them?

[rmlew]

David Horowitz is no fan of Jared Taylor.

[rmlew]

The best ideological test I have found is http://www.selectsmart.com/FREE/select.php?client=zeron

It isn't perfect, as i rate a paleoconservative.
I consider myself a Nationalist Conservative.

Frum and Novak are both petty and prejusiced.

[rmlew]

Oh, yes.
There is nothing that a group with a large number of Zionist and religious Jews want more than the importation of Muslims.

If you bittercons were not so detached from reality, you would take the opportuinity to take the neocon fear of high Muslim immigration and make teh case for general immigration reform. If Bittercons were rational, they would use the current open hatred of the UN by Neocons as an opportunity to push them to accept sovereignty.
The reality is that the self-proclaimed "paleoconservatives" a movement created in the 1980's, prefers to think of themselves as victims and fight neconservatives and mainstreme conservatives, than to promote a nationalist agenda.

[Captain Kirk]

That's a new for me. Source?

[Captain Kirk]

Why in God's name do you think I am liberal? I guess I would call myself a libertarian leaning conservative. BTW, I am also for abolition of the minimum wage, the welfare state, quotas, the public schools, and want to sell off the federal lands in the west. Liberal? Perhaps in the nineteenth century sense.

I never claimed to be a paleo (sounds like something from the Flintstones) but then the free trading Novak, Paul Craig Roberts, and for that matter the libertarian Justin Raimondo, don't exactly fit in that mold either.

[sinkspur]

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.

Other than Novak, what paleo-con named by Frum is "respected"? Buchanan and Raimondo have become synonomous with Jew-baiting, Rockwell and Fleming despise this country, and Sam Francis tries to hide his bigotry behind "race studies."

You better look again. That's a pretty motley crew you're hangin' with.

[Captain Kirk]

Actually, I seem to be wrong about Taylor's view on the war. Sorry about that. His relationship with Horowitz is described here:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j120400.html

[rmlew]

That's a new for me. Source?

1. The e-mail correspondence between David Robert Locke over whether to include Jared Taylor in a symposium.
2. Horowtiz's blog.

[rmlew]

That's a new for me. Source?

1. The e-mail correspondence between David and Robert Locke over whether to include Jared Taylor in a symposium.
2. Horowtiz's blog.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Then David Keene is a fool for believing in their misleading, hypocritical and after the fact cheap talk of support.

Just because someone claims to be a "true patriot" or "liberty loving" doesn't make it true. The biggest gasbags on this board are precisely of this breed.

[rmlew]

So David has published 2 articles by authers form American Rennaisance.
That hardly proves friendship. Horowitz has published plenty of authors who also write for the American Conservative.

Raimundo is reaching and you have ceded logic to the self-hating fairy.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

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. In other words, they tend to believe exactly the opposite of what I believe.

Dittos.