A question for Mr. Auster: Would you take the position that this desire to defend liberalism - the very thing that is destoying this nation from within - is the de facto “patriotic” motivation of the Bush administration, which is completely liberal?

In other words, is it accurate to argue that GWB is fundamentally NOT a patriot (in the traditional sense) - which is easily proved by his advocacy of globalism, selling out military technology to the Chinese, etc. - and he has persued this war as one necessary to defend transational liberalism - even if it does happen to coincide with the genuine need to defend the actual America to a greater or lesser degree? This theory would explain Bush’s inability to name our enemy aking with his completely refual to deal with the influx of immigrants - even ones from Islamic countries.

For another insight into the complete suicidal denial of liberals, here’s a recent essay by Hugh Fitzgerald: http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/002334.php

Another thing that strikes me as odd is the fact that the same liberals who are soooo concerned about the civil liberties of illegal immigrants, etc. have no problem whatsoever with expanding hate crimes laws and the like and the using such laws to effectively abolish the civil liberties of US citizens who oppose various aspects of the liberals’ agenda to transform our nation into their twisted utopia. Liberals and Muslims truly deserve one another.

Correction to my previous post: The last sentence in the second paragraph should read:

This theory would explain Bush’s inability to name our enemy along with his complete refusal to deal with the influx of immigrants - even ones from Islamic countries.

When I spoke of the right-liberals and left-liberals “[whose] patriotism is not to their country, but to the idea that will destroy their country,” I meant to be including Our President.

This all males a great deal of sense. A tip of the hat to Mr. Auster for pointing this out. Liberals have re-defined patriotism just as they have re-defined every other traditional virtue and morality itself. That’s why liberals’ flag-waving rings so terribly hollow. The leftists are actually being more honest about their anti-Americanism. GWB, Friedman and the neocons are actually just as anti-American, but either believe their own fanciful re-definition or cynically lie so they can gain or continue in power.

We need to support a war that it is militarily justified, even though the leaders’ motivation, and the propaganda for the war is subversive. How many foreigners, and especially foreign political leaders, believe our propaganda about the reasons for interventions today? Even if it were all sincere, it is too difficult for many to believe. It is as if they were saying that the moslems will often need to be attacked, just because they may cause us to become closed to (or more intolerant of) what is even worse. The hope is that our tolerance will last long enough for damage from which there is no possibility of recovery, to be done.

The answer to Mr. Auster’s hypothetical is, we did, in WWII, when we allied with Communists and Communist sympathizers and dupes like Roosevelt and Truman to defeat the evil German and Japanese regimes. The “Four Freedoms” and New Deal are the 20th century versions of the diversity and multiculturalism of today. But better to live with Barney Frank as president than Osama bin Laden as emir.

I wonder if there is any precedent in history for this kind of transformation in the idea of loyalty among a nation’s elites. We should keep in mind how quickly it has been accomplished. Probably 50 years ago, and certainly 100 years ago, the great majority of this country would have understood their patriotism in the traditional sense as composed of ideological commitments in only a very small part, and mostly commitments of natural human loyalty and high sentiment, which are resistent to ideological explanation, much less ideological formulation.

In short, an enormous number of Americans revolted, almost in unison, against the idea of loyalty itself — and the world has never looked the same since; indeed it has looked darker and uglier.

An intriguing hypothesis by the valuable Mr. Cella: loyalty is now considered of no value. Certainly to the liberal it is valueless unless deduced from liberal premises.

Perhaps a concrete example might be relevant to Mr. Cella’s point. The movie is the wonderful (but somewhat slow) “Artificial Intelligence.” The darling boy was created to love without knowing the reason, just as we were created to love without the knowledge; we will not comprehend why we love until Jesus explains everything at the end of time. Little David, I hope, found his answer in his dreams as we will find our answer our next world.

“But better to live with Barney Frank as president than Osama bin Laden as emir.” - Agricola

I expect that Barney Frank would use the full force of state power to declare any church that refused to marry homosexuals a terrorist organization and proceed to have the jackboots march us all into the gulag or worse if he and his fellow travelers ever came to full power. Frank’s kindred spirits in the EU and Canada are well on the way to implementing such measures.

I therefore have to disagree with Agricola’s statement above. Leftists like Frank have no more regard for individual liberty and conscience than does Osama Bin Laden. Their leftist religion is intrinsically totalitarian, just as Bin Laden’s is.

Indeed, the leftist belief-system is implicitly totalitarian. It wants unlimited power, or unlimited freedom for aggression. If not, then how is the theoretically consistent dystopia to arise? The devaluation of loyalty is another aspect of the valorization of treason, provided only that there is some real value that one is asked to betray. In that case, one can win points for betrayals, on the nihilist code of anti-values. Regarding openness of society; it is only with what we have reason to avoid, that a sort of openness-value would not be thoroughly redundant for the nihilists to promote.

Much too obtuse for the friendly Mr. Bolton. Loyalty is fundamental, not abstract. We are loving co-conspirators.

The blockquote which Mr. Auster has given is yet another example of the self-refuting and self-defeating nature of leftism. One fights one’s enemies in order to allow them to subvert one’s culture by quieter means.

Self-refuting doctrines can only be maintained inconsistently. Isn’t it odd that the people on the business end of that inconsistency always happen to be Christians or part of the old order that prevailed prior to revolutionary hegemony?

It’s as if the prince of darkness, himself, were behind all of this.

The blockquote which Mr. Auster has given is yet another example of the self-refuting and self-defeating nature of leftism. One fights one’s enemies in order to allow them to subvert one’s culture by quieter means.

Self-refuting doctrines can only be maintained inconsistently. Isn’t it odd that the people on the business end of that inconsistency always happen to be Christians or part of the old order that prevailed prior to revolutionary hegemony?

It’s as if the prince of darkness, himself, were behind all of this.

Apart from finding it hard to identify the New Deal with multiculturalism, it is absurd of Agricola to say that we allied with Communists during World War II. It was the Nazis that forced the reluctant Soviets to ally with us. The accusation against Roosevelt and Truman (who was always rather more skeptical about the Soviets) is that they transformed this into illusions about our unwilling partners, not that they were architects of the alliance…. that was Hitler’s achievement.

It is curious that although many people have seen the clips from Al Qaeda training films showing terrorists attacking dummies with crosses on them, neither anti-terrorist liberals like Friedman, nor the more appeasement minded paleocons, can bring themselves to notice this. An interesting comment on Mr. Auster’s point about the liberals transforming the problem into an attack on their values alone, and the ability of some on the right to ignore attacks on themselves and their values….

I think that Bush is a patriot. (Not in the traditional sense, but he does follow a history pattern.) He is very supportive to corporations. This country has a history of serving the interests of corporation at the expense of the public’s health, safety and security. (I mean those 3 terms in a specific sense: protection from illness, physical harm by objects or chemical, and harm from people respectively). We even have a term for it when businesses get involved with government and its bureaucracy: Triangle.
I am reading Zell Miller’s book and although he has some harsh critisms for the Democrats, he admits that the Republicans also commit the same acts, or similar acts in a different way. His main complaint is that the legislative and executive branches are seeking the favor of their campaign contributors at the expense of all of us, because guess who will be hurting the most, second to the families of the deceased if there is another US terrorist attack? Wall Street! That is why chemical and nuclear power plants are begging Congress to free them of all legal liabilty if they are attacked and cause the deaths of people.

“That is why chemical and nuclear power plants are begging Congress to free them of all legal liabilty if they are attacked and cause the deaths of people.”

What’s sad is that this is actually necessary at all. Consider the absurdity of saying that some of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet would be responsible if someone else attacked them and the resulting damage caused fatalities. Maybe someone should have sued the manufacturers of airplanes or skyscrapers after 9/11. I mean, without airplanes or skyscrapers, none of that would have happened.

These remarkable achievments of the human mind are not to blame; the men who destroy them and use them for evil are.

An interesting assesment of Iraq war and misguided attempt to build democracy by the neo-cons while ignoring the culture and history:

The nation-building lessons Washington has to learn By John Keegan, the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/06/29/do2901.xml

Here is an insight into neo-cons thinking:

“The new conservatives who had rejected Left-wing solutions to the world’s problems were nevertheless left with the conviction that any solution would be political. Confronted by the residue of tyranny, as in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, they expected democracy to take its place. Inside any people’s democracy, they might have said, there is a real democracy struggling to get out. In the case of eastern Europe, they were genuinely right. Fifty years’ experience of Marxist orthodoxy had conditioned every intelligent East European to yearn for democracy and to embrace it warmly wherever it showed itself.

The neo-conservatives’ mistake was to suppose that, wherever tyranny ruled, democracy was its natural alternative. So, when planning for the government of post-war Iraq, the lead agency, the Pentagon, dominated by neo-conservatives, jumps to the conclusion that, as soon as Saddam’s tyranny was destroyed, Iraqi democrats would emerge to assume governmental responsibility from the liberating coalition and a pro-Western regime would evolve seamlessly from the flawed past.

To think in such a way was to reveal a dangerously post-Marxist cast of mind. Marxists can think only in political terms. They accept, even if they despise, liberal and conservative opposition. What they cannot accept is that their opponents may be motivated by beliefs which are not political in any way at all. That explains their hatred of religion.”

Wow, Keegan and I are certainly on the same wave-length, on point after point. He even shares my insight that neoconservatives can only understand _ideological_ phenomena and motivations. For the neocons, if a social phenomenon or cultural threat cannot be conceieved in ideological terms (say, the cultural imperialism of third-world immigrant groups in America, or the tribalism of a Moslem society like Iraq), then it doesn’t exist.

Keegan’s most recent book, “Intelligence in War,” shows a serious understanding of the danger posed by Muslims in the West.

My issue with those industries is not that they are targets, but that they are doing very little to close wide-open gaps in their security & they don’t want to make the government to intervene and make the security force government-issue (forgive the pun) that is their right as a corporation to refuse, but then they say that the security upgrades would be too expensive (i.e. making sure that just anybody can’t walk into a chemical plant if they see a literal gap in a fence or just climb over it.) They lobbied against a bill that would even have the government subsidize the security upgrades.

Okay they don’t want that, but if you don’t want the government’s help to protect citizens of the United States, then DO NOT ask for assistance from the government. Why even taxpayer money on the paper to draft such a bill, what a waste of money. Your analogy to the planes, is leaving out that the government currently refused to bail out United Airlines from bankruptcy, which is already a form of federal government protection that they have chosen to take, which they have a legal right to take.

If people did decide to sue airlines or the FAA for having allowing people to bring boxcutters on planes, which are banned in most if not all public schools, and while many U.S. airports banned mace before September 11th 2001, why can’t we trust in our fellow citizens to assess their liability in a civil court of law. By the way how many people actually did sue the airline(s) industry for September 11th related issues?

I must say I agree with Mr Auster’s always incisive analysis. The fact is that a nation that is based entirely around political ideology is simply not viable in the long run, because the organic fabric of society (and it’s failings) simply cannot satisfy ideological principles.

According to Romans, all have sinned and these sins make us unworthy of the kingdom of God. Clearly, people are not ideological, perfectable beings, but highly flawed individuals with personal interests. You simply cannot fit human nature into an ideological frame-work, and any attempts to do so are doomed. Examples include the failure of the Soviet economy, the disastrous US immigration policies, and I might also add, the invasion of Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq has been horrifying for conservatives, because it was an enterprise that was highjacked by leftists (not to mention the Iranians). Paul Bremer refused to accept that stable government would come about by working with the hundreds of clan-leaders and sheikhs that are vital to Iraqi civil society and deferring to their judgment.

Instead he did silly things such as abolishing the death penalty, ignoring religious leaders, authorising Iraq’s appalling and rootless national flag. This was a slap in the face to Iraqis. What the US should have done was install an Iraqi monarchy. Iraq’s society is built for a monarchical governmental structure, not a liberal democracy, because of the high rates of inbreeding and intra-clan marriage. People do not really trust anyone but their own family and thus a democratic nation state is simply impossible as patriotism is tenuous. What is better is a clan-based domestic security apparatus with a small national army run by a constitutional monarch and a council of tribal ministers.

But none of this could have happened because the leftist media would never have allowed such pragmatic judgments to sully their multicultural fantasies.

Now, of course, we have been told by George W. Bush that all Arabs are ready for democracy right immediately. Regardless of whether the social structure is capable of a stable democracy, Bush’s liberal ideology says that they must have democracy. He also implied that anyone who disagrees with him is racist against Arabs, thus confirming that Bush is well and truly indoctrinated with Leftist ideology.

And when you put that next to his support for mass immigration and leftist economics, you have a President who has highjacked the Republican Party via a “neo-conservative” trojan horse of semi-lapsed Leftists.