What a lgiht weight! I see a potential good Saturday Night Live Parody of this guy.

Ever ask yourself how a feckless wimp like Clark could make it as high as he did in the US Army??

Disagreeing with the wisdom of our overall strategy in the Middle East as I do, I had hoped that some of the Democratic candidates would voice serious criticisms and hopefully spark a real debate when the campaign gets going after the primaries.

No hope for that.

I think it’s a shame. Aside from the Iraq war even, there are plenty of things that the Administration needs to be pressed on.

I’ve heard that Scott McConnell at TAC is trying to get Buchanan to back Dean. This doesn’t surprise me. McConnell has been doing positive and hopeful articles on Dean for some time now, even fantasizing him to be an immigration restrictionist. So the editor of “The American Conservative” supports a left-wing Democrat, because that Democrat opposes Bush and the war. The enemy of my enemy is my friend: the credo of the moral relativist.

I doubt that TAC is going to be supporting Dean against Bush. On the other hand, I am equally certain that TAC is not going to be cheerleading for Bush either. So I expect to see there coverage of Dean too positive to occur in National Review, and coverage of Bush too negative to appear in NR either.

The article on Dean and immigration is here:
http://www.amconmag.com/07_28_03/feature.html

This paragraph summarized the tone for me:

“Dean’s weakness is the weakness of every Democrat in the last 30 years—a tepid appeal to working- and middle-class white voters, especially males, especially in the South and border-states. The Vermonter has acknowledged the need to “get white males to vote Democratic again,” but federal health insurance and balanced budgets, which he brings up when the question is raised, won’t do it. What could?”

“The obvious choice is immigration.”

It was in July, and more wishful thinking than anything else.

Scott McConnell also has an article on the Democratic race up on the AC web site right now:

http://www.amconmag.com/12_15_03/article1.html

It has one or two statements about crossover appeal, but I did not detect much praise of Dean.

“Yet one looking for some ideological crossover appeal in Dean can always find some glimmer of encouragement. Mine was this: in criticizing Bush at the Gore endorsement event, Dean said he is the ‘most conservative president …’ but then paused to correct himself. ‘Bush is not a conservative; he’s a radical.’”

Once again, we are given a demonstration of the liberals’ core belief, the denial of the reality of human evil. It is seen in the numerous statements of the democratic candidates pledging to subordinate national security concerns to the judgment of others, presumed to be actuated only by reason, and free from any taint of self interest. It is seen in the left press’s (NY Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.) insistence that the Libya breakthrough was due to nothing but diplomacy, as if there were no implicit threat in the background to give it credibility. For the liberal mind, force is unnecessary in human affairs, and everything can eventually be negotiated, because human beings are seen as essentially amenable to reason and to the imposition of rationally elaborated solutions. Haven’t the events of the last two years, nay the last century or more, shown the utter fatuousness of such ideas? Yet liberals cling to them in the face of all evidence, even in the face of disastrous consequences, because this core belief is the essence of what it means to be a liberal. It is a matter of self-identification. And so, we see the enormous hatred for Bush welling up, as events and his leadership, whatever its faults, demonstrate the uselessness of the liberals’ faith. This demonstration is experienced by liberals as an attack on who they are, a threat of annihilation of self - definition. They are threatened with being robbed of their faith, their inner vision of what it means to be human, and how the world works.

That’s an interesting theory by Thucydides about the roots of liberal hatred, and especially of the particularly virulent and irrational hatred they have for Bush. Generally, liberals hate and seek to destroy whatever seems to stand in the way of their vision of perfect equality, of the perfect rule of peace and negotiations in a world without evil and enemies or the necessity for the use of force. But what if someone is not just standing in the way of the liberal vision of perfect peace, but is actively shattering its illusions before their eyes? Such a person is not just an obstacle in the path toward the liberal utopia; such a person, as Thucydides said, is threatening the liberals’ vision and thus their very identity. And, moreover, what if this person is not terribly bright or articulate, and utterly lacks the language and gestures that mark one as a member of the liberal club? In that case, the very thing the liberals most despise has become the greatest threat to them, releasing in them the deepest wells of irrational hatred.

Is denial of evil the core belief of the liberal? Is it not, more comprehensively, the revolt against a reality in which good and evil are given a priori, instead of fabricated by the liberal anointed? Force may be unnecessary in their ideal world, but here and now it is only unnecessary for those defending the divine order of reality, those whom the liberal seeks to disable. Force is fine for those who subvert this order, destroy Christian societies, and build socialism. There are passive, disabling strategies, and aggressive, destroying strategies. The liberal mind Thucydides and Mr. Auster describe is committed to disabling strategies, rendering defenseless people who no longer know who they are, why they live, and why they should care about their own survival. The payoff for the liberal disablers, on one hand, is identification with the rulers of the brave new world of enlightenment humanism, in its varying forms. But more negatively, they measure their virtue by their willingness to see their own kind replaced, destroyed, and humiliated, in a word, sacrificed. To try to condense the image, the rebel is rotten with self-hatred, because he cannot escape the reproach of the real order. President Bush attracts his particular ire because he explicitly acknowledges the relationship between human submission to the divine, and the human duty to defend one’s country and family. He thus embodies the covenant between God and man which the liberals thought they had shattered forever.

The perfect equality and perfect peace Mr. Auster describes are the equality of man without God and the temporary release from resentment that accrues to the liberal who has abolished God. As a practical matter, though, liberals and leftists care far less for equality and peace than they do for destruction of the divine order. Hence the limitless indulgence towards criminal regimes, who deliver no peace and no equality, but the hatred of America which delivers some of both but does not always and everywhere deny the transcendent basis of human nature and society.

Re Bill’s important point, I’ve written at VFR that the liberationism of liberalism, and the totalitarianism of liberalism, are merely two aspects of the same movement. The liberationism is directed at breaking down the authority of the old order that the liberals seek to destroy; the totalitarianism is that of the liberals’ own authority that they seek to impose on us in lieu of the institutions they have destroyed.

Bill is making an analogous point, which I would rephrase as follows: the liberal belief in “peace,” and the liberal rationalizations for enemies, criminals, rioters, and terrorists, are two aspects of the same movement. Liberals are in favor of “peace,” the supposed absence of enemies in a world of perfect brotherhood, when that belief serves to disarm our civilization against its enemies. But they are in favor of or at least make excuses for violence and disorder when it helps destroy our civilization. This explains their typical nonjudgmentalness toward enemies, criminal rioters, terrorists, and so on. Their real aim is not peace, their real aim is that the West become “peaceful” so as to release the violence and disorder of the enemies of the West, leading to the destruction of whatever remains of the old order and its replacement by a new, liberal order.

Of course, the degree to which they hold to this view is a function of how consistently liberal they are. The “moderate” liberal will embrace these ideas but then pull back from their horrible consequences, via the unprincipled exception. The more consistent liberal, the leftist, will push the destruction much harder.

Back to Clark. I thought Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, yet here is Clark wanting to try him at the Hague for crimes against humanity and as an example of one of those crimes he cites the 80 different nationalities killed on 9/11. If Clark expects to get the nominations he better get on the right page.

A mistake on my part. I initially thought that Mr. Rostkowski had caught Clark in a major contradiction about Hussein, and I even added a paragraph to the original entry to reflect that. But Clark was not speaking about how to try Saddam Hussein, he was speaking about how to try bin Laden. Clark’s accusations of crimes against humanity in the 9/11 attack concerned bin Laden, not Hussein.