You've done a terrific job Fisking Buchanan, DC. But however clear you were, it would never drag Buchanan from the torture chamber inside his skull. He's chained to the wall there and licking his own blood. No man acts this way and respects himself.
We have to assume he isn't stupid, or suffering from some mental disease or temporary moral corruption. So the only explanation for his miserable ideas is that he has a miserable soul.
Somewhere in the strange political cosmos, the direction from both the left and right fringes seems to turn back and intersect, and a KosKid becomes indistinguishable from a Buchanan.
I never respected this yammering bozo in the first place. Ever. Even when was he posing as a conservative he behaved like a self-soiling goon. He's a weakling, in every way. He's always been long on the destructive, loaded question, and even longer with the cheapest kind of analysis and description, but very short on solutions. I've never heard this dope offer a constructive solution to any foreign policy of defense problem.
He has no ideas of any importance. He never did, and like most evil men, he's lived long enough to have matured in public into the monster we all suspected he was, and everyone knows for sure. There's a moral in here somewhere for those disposed to look for it.
If I have so much power and influence, why don't I have more money? You know how we like money!
Ronbo,
Appreciate the humor. There is much that could be said. I will give Buchanan the doubt as to what informs his views ultimately, but regardless of what it is, he is just wrong.
Rhod ... you keep outdoing yourself. How is this so? A "yammering bozo", indeed. A "self-soiling goon". Now there's some imagery for you.
I would pay good money to watch you debate him.
And you hit on a real key point when you mentioned the total absence of solutions in any of Buchanan's proposals. Every one has done wrong, except for him. That's because he's done nothing.
Now, he turns back in history and devalues the service of every American who has died from WWI on. He bears no resemblance to the conservatives whose name he invokes to borrow credibility.
Regarding Buchanan's critique of Bush's democracy "crusade", I think I should note that the prospects for democratization succeeding in the Middle East is still an open question. That is, the whole effort is fraught with tremendous risk, and I think one can legitimately question whether Muslim countries will tolerate dissent and respect the individual conscience sufficiently enough for democracy to really succeed.
Yet, the point I am making above is that Buchanan questions every act of what he considers overly "interventionist" policy ... from WWI, WWII, on ... everything.
That is, his specific criticisms of the Bush policy of democraticization are really no more than a subset of his view that we shouldn't be involved anywhere, and in any capacity. This is lunacy.
He has no ideas other than to do nothing. One can make the case that the Bush Administration was overly optimistic re: democracy changing the Middle East. The jury is still out on that one.
But at least Bush has a policy. Buchanan and the do-nothing-until-we're-surrounded chorus is estopped from complaining until they have some ideas, and until they blame the actions of Israel's and the West's totalitarian jihadi enemies on the bad guys instead of people just trying to live as free people.
DC, you've isoloated the bitter perspective of the Buchanans and most of the left. Hating the present policy, they scold and carp. But all the contention about details is just, as you said, packed around the lunatic isolationism. One could accept the isolationism if it wasn't also wedded to moral indifference, and an unnatural compulsion to blame the good guys.
The Bush Doctrine is dead. I think most of us who supported that policy have been educated in the unfathomable brutality of Muslim sectarianism. But a policy is a set of consistent ideas and principles that exist over the long haul, and strategies and campaigns are not the policy. If one fails, the principle remains but the policy is intact.
Our policy is to fracture the petrified arrangements in the morbid and retrograde societies of the Middle East. Even if it means simply demoralizing and exhausting our enemies of the potential to attack The West, we are succeeding. Shake the tree enough and everything lands on the ground. Who cares if they lie there and rot?
The romantic fallacy is that we need to attach sentimental ideas about extending democracy and enlightenment to appease the flowered monsters of liberalism. Those ideas were bad enough before JFK came along, having taken root under FDR, they metastasized in the 1960's, and the malignant idea of American specialness is now almost entirely held by the isolationists.
Buchanan's isolationism is bound to the notion that somehow we're too good and powerful to get down and dirty in raising a new pallisade by clearing out the enemies outside the walls and extending our zone of safety.
Simply put, Buchanan is a man of moderate intelligence, hugely overrated because of his former political job and his status as a media parasite. His end is to be a footnote in history, to be found under the categorical of "Appeasing As*holes" in historical dictionaries. He's also ugly.
Rhod,
There's a whole series of ideas there. I think you may be right re: the Bush Doctrine being dead. I hope not, but it is at least in critical condition.
Still ... the hate-Bush-all-the-time crowd sees this, hyper-ventilates and misses the larger point that you make -- that is, democracies or not, we are succeeding in changing the way things have been going in the Middle East for at least the last 30 years. Sometimes it's a step forward and two back, but still I think we are on offense. And given the rise in power and influence of the jihadis, we have to do this.
We can't stay in the walls. Those who do and simultaneously criticize those who venture out to protect our freedom deserve all the scorn that can be heaped upon them.
In some ways, maybe the democratization effort is the official name that is used publicly for our attempts at remaking the way the M.E. works. It sort of reminds me of the "religion of peace" mantra at this point -- mainly for public consumption. But there are lots of people in that religion who have nothing at all to do with peace.
Still, there is no doubt that a lot of people's lives in M.E. are better off because of the hard and dirty work that troops like your sons have done. No question. And I won't hear of their service and sacrifice being dishonored.
In the end, I think whether democratization holds comes down to this: Who controls the Muslim world, the "moderates" or the jihadis? If indeed there are Muslim moderates who are willing to take risks for the sake of the greater good of preserving freedom long-term, then we will find out. Unless there is room for dissent on matters of importance, i.e., faith and concience, then I don't think democracy will work.
whats wrong with isolationsim (ie America first and foremost)? i dont want to fight a foreign nation's war nor pay for it nor force my children to pay for it. big war big govt big taxes
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