O.K,

this is off topic but I gotta know. Am I the only one who only gets about half this web-page to load before it inexplicably stops???

MIE 4 users only see the part of the left-hand column that doesn’t go beyond the right-hand column. That sounds like you. (Netscape 4 users see an incoherent mess, so it could be worse.)

The problem is that older browsers don’t interpret the cascading style sheet I use, which is a modification of the default style sheet that ships with movabletype. The next version of movabletype is promised for later this month. It will ship with revised style sheets that may fix some of the problems.

One you look past the first few sentences, Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan are making the same argument. We haven’t seen that since the Berlin Wall came down.

(OK, actually they didn’t agree ten years ago. Buchanan wanted us to withdraw our troops from Germany, while Krauthammer demanded we firebomb Dresden again.)

Krauthammer is all for “open borders.” This increases the very problems neocons wail about. How will Krauthammer like it when Muslims have real political power in this country?

“Krauthammer is all for ‘open borders.’ This increases the very problems neocons wail about. How will Krauthammer like it when Muslims have real political power in this country?”

That’s a question I’ve repeatedly posed to neocons in both public and personal communications over the years and never gotten an answer. However, in the light of the September 11th attack, I do believe some of them would support a specific reduction in Muslim immigration, though I haven’t seen that view expressed in public.

By the way, Krauthammer is so liberal on social/moral issues that I’m not sure he could be called a neocon. He is strong on U.S. projecting itself as a power in the world, strong in support of Israel, and strong (in contradiction to his support for Israeli nationhood) on the abstract universalist view of America. In all these things he is seems like a neocon. But on cultural/moral/sexual issues, he comes across as a moral libertarian, which differentiates him strikingly from most neoconservatives. For example, he thought Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky scandal was something of no importance and ought to be ignored.

Neoconservatives believe that America’s consumerist culture will transform Muslims and in time make them just like the rest of mainstream America: wearing Nikes, eating at McDonalds, following the Knicks, etc.

Just as Americans of European Christian descent have largely given up their traditions and racial/ethnic sensibilities, Muslims will eventually give up theirs too. Or so the neoconservatives believe. Many if not most of the neocons are Jewish and their faith in this vision of America as a materialistic, consumerist “proposition nation” derives, I believe, from special anxieties.

I may have told this story before, but at a talk given by Norman Podhoretz in the mid nineties, he complained that Americans, in the face of such threats as multiculturalism and bilingualism, had “lost their voice,” no longer having the ability to oppose these things. I said to him, “Haven’t they ‘lost their voice’ because of the very view of America that the neoconservatives have pushed, that America is nothing but an idea? Why should people care about protecting their national language if the only thing that defines America is the belief in freedom and democracy?” He didn’t answer directly, as I remember. Afterwards, another person who had been present, also Jewish, said to me that Podhoretz and the neocons did not want America to be seen as a nation, because, if it was seen as a nation, they were afraid that they wouldn’t be seen as members of it. I do believe this explains a major part of the Jewish neocons’ motivation. In order for them to feel 100 percent American, they feel compelled to turn America into an abstraction.

Krauthammer, by the way, was a speechwriter for Vice-President Walter Mondale during the 1980 presidential race. This was when Jimmy Carter and Mondale were running (unsuccessfully) for re-election against Ronald Reagan.