Posted on 03/19/2004 5:11:27 PM PST by swilhelm73
Me too. He doesn't see that we must win this war. If we don't, Catholics all over the world will eventually get to kiss the scimitar or die. I also have real trouble with that attitude coming from someone as smart as Buchanan and who was a cold-warrior. He doesn't have the excuse of being either stupid and/or a life-time liberal (being a life-time liberal makes you stupid, even if you are smart).
He had no trouble seeing thru leftist sophistry about the intentions of their Soviet and Chinese masters. But he is blind to the intentions and capabilities of Islam. Sometimes I suspect that the problem is that he hates Jews, that he just cannot stand the idea of any US policy that would assist a Jewish state, and that this hatred just blinds him to the big picture. That would at least explain his weird inability to see the obvious.
PS: I have heard (but only once) that the Madrid voters gave their majority to the Parti Populaire - and it was Madrilenos who were killed. Do you know anything about this?
Here are a few: --
. As for Spain-and I say this with real remorse given their suffering and national catastrophe-not since Theodosius and the late Romans paid their annual bribe money to Attila have we seen such success in bullying and terrifying a Western nation. It is right off the pages of Gibbon in his discussion of how weak, wealthy, and fearful Westerners paid Goths and Huns before Adrianople and Chalons. And this is the beginning not the end of it, as we shall soon see.
All Americans feel terrible about the Spanish mass murder, but how can we express our solidarity when the reaction is to repudiate both us and Spaniards who were allied with us? And contrast the American example: 26 days after 9-11 we were in Afghanistan attacking the Taliban and al Qaeda; the Spaniards n 48 hours were turning out to apologize. A sad day for the West.
------snip----
It may well be that the Europeans are angry with us not despite our principled help and NATO basing, but rather precisely because of it. And I don't mean our too visible presence, but rather due to deep-seeded feelings of inferiority, envy, and spite that they are weak militarily and being protected and thus vent with the antics like what we just saw from the newly-elected Spanish minister.
Perhaps a very quiet, very professional downsizing of all our troops from the Mediterranean would send a powerful message to our allies that our alliance is based on friendship and mutual sacrifice, and does not rest in perpetuity, but only as long as there is a group effort to combat a common threat. Those circumstances simply no longer exist.
Again, we really are a different people if you contrast the American and Spanish reactions to al Qaeda's unprovoked mass murder on their shores. So sad-this idea that bin Laden knows far better than we the true nature of the Spanish citizenry. Why John Kerry would wish to hint that such leaders who are angry with the United States praise him through back channels, I don't know. That may play well with his wife's foundation friends and at the Kennedy School of Government, but out here in middle America it would seem to me the kiss of death.
***I certainly hope he is correct about middle America.***
FP: Kerry’s behavior, of course, is part of a long leftist tradition of siding with our totalitarian enemies. Tell us a bit about why the Left is now so excited with siding with the bin Ladens and Husseins of this world. As always, it admires the tyrants that extinguish all supposed sacred leftist values themselves. Give us an insight into the psychology here.
----snip----
Rather they start with the premise that what America does is probably wrong, and therefore its enemies de facto can claim the moral high ground. Lately this deductive anti-Americanism is becoming laughable. Look at the rogues' gallery of our dethroned opponents--the Grenada thugs, Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam are hardly national liberationists.
While there is genuine disagreement in America over foreign policy, this shrill near-hatred of the United States government is largely a different phenomenon of a very pampered elite in the media, universities, bureaucracies, and entertainment.
Perhaps because they are divorced from the real world through their wealth, they demand instantaneously their own utopia for the rest of us 'victims'--or else. They feel guilty about their privilege, of course. but rather than moving to more pedestrian digs or teaching at a JC or sending their kids to the local public school downtown, they sign petitions and go to up-scale rallies.
---snip---
Throughout the 20th century leftist Western intellectuals worshipped Stalin, Mao and other mass killers. They went in droves to visit the communist concentration camps and they praised these societies while the killing fields were in their highest gear.
It is not just a coincidence that leftists venerate every despot that opposes the United States. The Left’s embrace of militant Islam today is just a logical continuation of Western intellectuals who travelled to Soviet Russia in the 1930s and worshipped Stalin -- and of Jane Fonda praising the North Vietnamese despots.
What I am getting at here is that there is a malicious and sinister objective within the heart of the Left. It craves totalitarianism, because totalitarianism will suffocate freedom and, ultimately, human life itself – which the Left hates the most. That every communist revolution ate its own children reveals a pernicious death wish in the heart of the Left, and I think it is very much in prominence once again in the War on Terror, in which the left is now in love with those despots who, once again, offer them the dream of extinguishing their own civil society and the freedom within it.
Hanson:
Again, while there were a few deluded who really did cut sugar cane in Cuba, [NB:reference to Robert Kennedy's children, among others] committed treason of sorts in Hanoi, and went down to idolize Daniel Ortega, most on the radical Left are really indistinguishable from most Americans in their patterns of consumption, tastes, jobs, etc.
So we are not confronted with Stalinists, hard-core Marxists, or fifth-columnists as much as those afflicted with the "Western disease"-a sort of glib self-hatred of the very society that imparts such freedom and affluence.
Of course we don't want to downplay the pernicious effects of such a malady. These fakers are serious and in fact pose our greatest challenge in the current struggle by unleashing a constant stream of negativism that encourages our enemies and weakens our resolve. The hysteria over the looting, the missing WMD, and the President's aircraft carrier landing--all that and more have clouded a stellar military victory and a largely successful effort so far to foster consensual government under impossible circumstances --something that 50 years from now we will look back on with awe.
---snip---.
So I am talking about a secular religion of anti-Americanism brought on by our very success that allows such utopianism and cheap caring-and it does weaken and tire our efforts to win this war.
A final example: the President has raised domestic spending by 8% per annum, lavished funds on health care and education, offered near amnesty to illegal immigrants from Mexico, appointed a plethora of minority judges, cabinet officials, and administrators, and committed more AIDs relief funds than all prior administrations put together-and is still hated by our Left, simply because his demeanor, accent, religion, and even appearance don't validate the aristocratic Left's rhetoric about sex, class, gender, and the other. It really is a make-believe world in which a Barbra Streisand, Gore Vidal, or Arianna Huffington cheaply sound off from their estates about some purported cosmic evil fostered by poor deluded Americans hooked on K-Mart and NASCAR.
Quite possibly, but who can say. Islamists regard Spain as their territory, taken from the Moors centuries ago. In addition, the UN has hardly been a fan of the U.S.-led War on Terror, yet their Iraq installation got bombed as well. Terrorists hate without reason.
Would 3000 Americans have been murdered on 9/11 if we didn't have troops in Saudi Arabia and backed dictators all over that region? No.
Yes. Ultimately, bin Laden wants to kill us all because we are not Islamic, just like him. He didn't kill 3000 innocent people to get us out of Israel. After all, Palestine will get their state regardless. Bin Laden has few legitimate political objectives. You'll notice that he didn't present a list of "demands" after 9/11, as one might expect of a terrorist who hoped to achieve some political end. No, his language is peppered with "killing the infidel" language. He kills because he hates us.
I would too except that the Europeans seem to be dying trying to be conquered by someone or another. If it's not Germanic Nazis they're caving into, it's Islamic Nazis. If it's not those, it's Socialists. They seem to be a people who can't help but be taken over.
From the sounds of it, I don't think Europe is all that Catholic or Christian. We probably should have done something more for the Christians including Catholics in the Sudan and Nigeria. Millions of them have been slaughtered and we did nothing --- Europeans won't even try to defend themselves so why worry over them?
I wasn't trying to make the point that we should fight this war for the Catholics. I was responding to a previous poster who remarked that it was odd that a Catholic like Buchanan would take such an odd position on the WOT.
Intervention here and there in Sudan, Nigeria, Rwanda . . . to prevent massacres is far less important than removing the infrastructure that supports Islamic terrorism--oil money and Madrassas in the hands of terrorists or toadies like the Saudis.
The war in iraq and afghanistan is a first step in that direction and long-term, will save many more human (including Christian lives) than would specific interventions. We only have so far we can extend ourselves and, overall, I think the allocation of resources has been pretty good.
The best thing we can do for Europe now is to send missionaries there to preach the Gospel. Maybe we can shake them from their post-modern, godless stupor. Without that, Europe will be a just-barely-above-third-world muslim outpost in 30 years.
What makes it more brilliant is that these are VDH's thoughts in real-time, not ideas honed over days for a column.
Because they volunteered to defend their country and put their lives on the line so that you can whine about it. They did so as part of step one in the destruction of militant Islam, which, in case you hadn't noticed, declared war on us about 15 years ago and recently demonstrated the ability to strike in a way that will destroy our economy.
I suspect this is part of the problem. But Pat stopped being a American conservative some years ago on a lot of other issues that do not involve Israel at all. He sounds today much more like what they call conservatives in Europe--racial-centric, anti-capitalist, protectionist, and ostrich-like in foreign affairs. Today, he sounds like a leftist, but for white-guys. That is, he makes all the analytic mistakes the left makes, but instead of making them against white guys, he makes them for white guys. But in any event there is more squirming around in Pat's head than mere hatred of Israel.
I just hate seeing a former stalwart member of the VRWC with a fine mind and great communication skills go over to the dark side--and he has.
Did you hear his discussion with Hannity? The man is so out of touch with reality. Sad!
Islam is a religeon of war and assimilation. There is no other religeon on this globe that holds beliefs of subjugation and conquest of the unbeliever as Islam does. People can hem and haw to the high heavens about how Christians or whatever other religeon did X or Y in the past (and it was mostly IN RESPONSE to aggresive Islam) but there is NO POINT WITHIN THE TEACHINGS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT where it says to harry unbelievers, kill them, tax them, enslave them, etc...
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