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

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.

David Frum's response to a couple of the items:
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary032603.asp#005991

Hecklers’ Corner

Reaction to last week’s NR story on paleo continues to be heard. Two pieces that appeared yesterday seem to me to require some comment.

One of them appeared on the Lew Rockwell site by a writer named John Zmirak, who suggests that the secret of my politics is that I am a “fiscal conservative but a social liberal.” He does not support this point with any quotations or citations – for the very good reason that there are none to be found. In fact, the record shows exactly the opposite: that I began arguing the conservative case on issues like the defense of the traditional family from the time I began writing about politics in the early 1980s. Nobody is going to be much interested in reading through back issues of the Yale Daily News. But if interested in my background on these issues, readers might wish to take a look at my debate with Andrew Sullivan over gay rights in Slate in 1997, among many, many other examples.

The larger point is this: I don’t personally regard myself as a “neoconservative.” (The term seems to me to describe that generation of writers and thinkers who began as anti-communist liberals and moved right in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not my biography.) Nevertheless, it was social issues – crime, urban disorder, the turn from civil rights to racial quotas, the attack on the family – fully as much as foreign-policy debates that transformed the hawkish liberals of the 1950s into neoconservatives in the 1970s.

Midge Decter’s classic essay, “The Boys on the Beach” – a critique of the homosexual lifestyle and culture of the 1970s – appeared in Commentary all the way back in 1980, before anybody had ever heard of such a thing as a “paleoconservative.” William Bennett and Terry Eastland published the first prophetic attack on affirmative action, Counting By Race, in 1979 – and then refused to institute quotas at the National Endowment for the Humanities when he was appointed chairman in 1981. Irving Kristol denounced Roe v. Wade the instant the decision was handed down. And so on and on. Whatever else the dispute with the paleos concerns, it isn't traditional morality.

A second negative comment on my piece comes from David Keene of the American Conservative Union in yesterday’s edition of The Hill, a newspaper about Congress now being excitingly transformed by new editor Hugo Gurdon.

Keene claims that “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.” And he goes on to argue that I have irresponsibly besmirched Robert Novak merely because of the latter’s s “disagreement with Bush’s Iraq policy.”

I suppose one of the dangers of writing a 7,000 word piece is that you run the risk that busy people – and Keene is one of the busiest conservatives in Washington – won’t have time to read it very carefully. So let me restate for the record: I did not criticize the antiwar conservatives I discussed in NR for mere opposition to the president's Iraq policy. In fact, I explicitly praised those conservatives who questioned that policy for their valuable contributions to public debate:

“Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?”

I meant those words sincerely. In the very same issue of NR I also had a back-page column lavishly praising Heather MacDonald’s new book about policing – and Heather is an opponent of the Iraq war, which she regards as unwise and distracting.

It was not for disagreeing with the president’s Iraq policy that I criticized antiwar conservatives like Robert Novak and Patrick Buchanan (whom I note David Keene does not defend), but for succumbing to paranoid and anti-semitic explanations of that policy – a paranoia which led some of them, including Novak, to move to direct and indirect opposition to the Afghan campaign as well.

Let’s remember: The very day after the terrorist attacks, Novak was already writing his first column pinning the blame for the atrocity on Israel. On September 17, 2001, he alleged that the administration would never find bin Laden and would instead attempt “to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” By year’s end, he was saying on television that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This is something beyond mere dissent. David Keene concluded his piece with the observation that “Robert Novak was opposing this nation’s enemies before David Frum was even born.” That is true. Which makes it all the more disturbing that Novak has been so unwilling to live up to his own past record in the 18 months since 9/11.

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Frum's not attacking Keene in this, but he does explain why he wrote what he did, and it's a solid explanation that is backed up with examples. Not something seen from the paleo-cons.

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

Nonsense. I suspect that David Keene knows Robert Novak better than either you or David Frum, and therefore place more credibility in his assessment than either of yours. But more than the issue of supporting the war or not, the greater issue of Frum's smear piece is his unduly strong dependence upon guilt-by-association tactics.

The entirity of his piece had a central message of tagging all those he named with "anti-semitism." To accomplish this, he pulled a carefully selected array of quotes from a few fringe wackos of the "American Rennaissance" type, identified their authors as "paleos," and then tagged mainstream writers like Novak onto those fringers despite the fact that, as Novak noted, he does not even know many of those people and has never affiliated with any of them. Its entire purpose is to discredit Novak by drawing an association - and a completely fabricated one at that - between Novak and a few anti-semitic fringe nutcases. The fraud he perpetrated is easily exposed under the simplest scrutiny, as it reveals a glaring inconsistency in Frum's conclusions. Among those he associated to the fringe with his broad brush stroke of anti-semitism are an ethnic Jew (Novak), a second Jew (Gottfried), and multiple conservative-libertarian types who practically worship the writings of two Jewish economists (Von Mises and Rothbard). His entire smear piece boils down to nothing more than a claim that two Jews and several followers of two other Jews are all "anti-semites" because of their supposed affiliation with a small group of known anti-semite fringers who they aren't really affiliated with in the first place beyond David Frum saying so. Frum perpetrated an intellectual fraud with that article and it shows. Now he is suffering deserved criticism from his intellectual superiors on the right. His expected whining in response to them also shows.

What Is Paleoconservatism? Man, Know Thyself!
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal. This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe—including "neoconservatives"—and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican variety, seemingly bent on eradicating as much of the primeval stain as they can from their consciousnesses while apologizing for the faint discoloration that remains.
Identity—like patriotism and loyalty, among other things—is a problem for conservatives to the extent they see it at odds with the concept of Economic Man, for whom the term has no significance unless preceded by the word "brand." For the left, the only valid human identity is economic status, which determines one’s political position in the context of the class war: Other identities (racial, ethnic, tribal, cultural, religious, national) are dangerous because they distract from all-important economic distinctions, and because they create enmity among groups who the dialectic has determined should be allies. The left, which (with the help of drugs and other deviant social behavior) in the 80’s created the crisis of homelessness, is and always has been homeless itself: men and women without a country, without a people, without a history—without God.
But there is another reason why the left, especially in societies that retain so much as a vestige of their historic character, despises traditional identities. For leftists, these imply something enticing yet, for them, unattainable: a self-possession to be envied, a self-confidence to be resented, an assurance to be feared. What they perceive is not simply a threat to their political blueprint, to their vision of the future. It is an affront to themselves: their bogus identity, their false self-perception, their absurdly inflated sense of their own strength, most of which they owe to the bureaucratic institutions that protect their soft ineffectual selves the way a nautilus shelters a snail. This sense of affrontedness has produced a satanic hatred which, for the past 40 years, has been fueling a kind of public conspiracy—entirely unprecedented in the annals of history—whose end is the total deconstruction of a civilization by the elite responsible for its welfare and survival.
In this campaign of chaos and destruction, the chief and most effective tools have been the weakening of the Christian religion and Christian institutions, the promotion of multiculturalism—and virtually uncontrolled immigration from the Third World. Given their strong sense of identification with the American Republic as well as, in many cases, family trees rooted in the fertile abundant soil of colonial America, it was inevitable that it should have been the paleoconservatives who sounded the alarm over immigration and carried the anti-immigration battle to the enemy, whose response (entirely in character for it) has been name-calling from a safe distance rather than hand-to-hand fighting in the field, plus redoubled bureaucratic and propagandistic efforts beyond the sidelines. Given, also, the distraction of the general population by sports, sex, the internet, and a booming economy, the paleos seem to be losing most of the battles, and the war. The numbers of first-generation immigrants are approaching critical mass, while a Gallup poll taken during the last election season showed that a majority of Americans no longer believes that immigration to their country ought to be curtailed.
Such being the case, what should the paleoconservative response be? (Not the paleoconservative political response—there aren’t any genuine paleoconservatives in positions of real power—but the public, as well as the private, one.) My answers are either practically inutile, or else useful only in the long run. These are: pray; wait ("Catastrophe," Ed Abbey thought, "is our only hope"); carry on as if nothing were happening; be strong.
Last fall, I received an academic calendar from my alma mater, The Trinity School in New York City. Having not paid a visit to 139 West 91st Street since my 20th reunion in 1985, I paged, astounded, through glossy four-color photographs depicting scenes from the daily life of the school. Gone were the awe-inspiring faculty, serious but not necessarily severe men in tweeds, dark suits, and rimless spectacles. Gone were the ranks of schoolboys uniformed in navy blue blazers, button-down shirts, striped ties, and oxfords (shoe-shine inspection promptly at 8:45 before Chapel, and an ear-tweak for the boy who’d forgotten to add his display handkerchief before leaving home that morning). Gone the straight rows of tablet armchairs, the teacher’s imposing desk, the youth in the corner holding his chair out in front of him by its hind legs and blubbering (the Trinity of my day wouldn’t have included him in a calendar, either). In their place were teachers dressed like college kids, coatless and tieless; students garbed as junior versions of their instructors; casual arrangements of tables to form mini-classrooms promoting fuzziness in feeling and in thought. In addition to the Episcopal service (Trinity, founded in 1709, was originally the scholastic appendage of Trinity Church on Wall Street), there are now Jewish Chapel and Kwanza Chapel. The school, which shuts down for Rosh Hashanah and Kwanza as well as for Christmas and Easter, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day as well as Winter Vacation, etc., is apparently closed more than it is open to accommodate the sensibilities of a multicultural student body. The school went coed shortly after my graduation, and the incidence of non-Western faces has since greatly increased.
Flexibility in facing the vicissitudes of life is one thing, unlearning your upbringing another—a thing principled people wouldn’t do even if they could. Trinity School, having educated generations of students for life in the Old America, has—for the past 30 years—been cooperating enthusiastically in the work of destroying that America and displacing those it once trained to operate and inhabit it. All right: We are becoming strangers in our own country.
What to do? In addition to the foregoing list, I add several further suggestions. Be true to your forebears, and to the culture they created and—for nearly four centuries—sustained. Wear a coat and necktie in polite society, even on an airplane. Speak out! Make yourself heard as loud and as strong as your lungs, and the co-opted press and electronic frequencies, permit. Keep your sense of humor, ALWAYS. . . . Go to Church.

Chilton Williamson, Jr., is the senior editor for books at Chronicles.

Wheer does it say that the US should be a world empire?

Quote from civilian Goldberg: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business."

Quote from Michael Leeden: "First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia"

Later he mentions Lebanon and doesn't even talk about Afganistan or Libya.

they are willing to fight a war, that Pat wishes away

Unlike in the past, today's military is made up mostly of low income rural Whites and inner-city minorities. Members of the ruling class have virtually no family connection to those who fight and die in our foreign wars.

[Neocon] poisition on immigration is suicidal

If it were just immigration, we could write that off as just a silly desire not to appear "racist" like those badboy paleos. It is the combination of immigration with warfare on the "crappy" countries listed above that should make us especially concerned.

paleocons are being overrun by neo-confederates, anarchistic language, and isolationism.

As Neos on this forum never tire of pointing out, Paleocons are currently powerless so we have no real institutions to overrun. Any conservative out of step with the neocon party line is branded a paleo and, sure, that includes a wide variety.

If the ruling clique is suicidal as you say then times are desperate. True conservatives must find alternatives to the Neocon establishment that has sold us down the river.

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