“They Look To Sean Hannity And Ann Coulter For Guidance”
Written by Andrew on November 3rd, 2006Interesting article from The American Conservative on the state of the Right on college campuses. Many readers will be especially interested in the paleocon take on the CRs.
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I think its a fair critique. After all, how many CRs have read Kirk, Nock, or even a WFB book?
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As many as quit shortly thereafter, I imagine.
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Paleocons have been obsolete since Pearl Harbor. I can thank paleocons and Democrats for the price supports for dairy here.
They have nothing relevant to say.
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The article has a few valid complaints against the CRs. It is true that too many of our members are motivated by winning on election day and little else.
…but, there is much more to the CRs than that and the author is mainly upset that the CRs largely support killing terrorists in Iraq. And, Pat Buchanan is flat-out wrong on this issue. The idea that Ronald Reagan or any of these guys would have sat back as terrorists attacked us in 1991,92,93,95,96,97,98,2000 is just out of touch. We have been at war for years. What makes George W. Bush different is that he acknowledged it and took the fight to our enemies rather than consistently playing defense on American soil.
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If Pat Buchanan had been president on September 11th, terrorists would be lighting up NYC like Tel Aviv.
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I have never read Weaver, Nock or a WFB book. Though I have read dozens of essays written by Buckley and would label him and National Review as the intellectual foundation of my conservative ideology.
I am familar with the ideas of Kirk but have never read any of books. I think there is a middle ground between this academic/intellectual conservatism and the Bud Light swilling, CR party tool that all of us know so well.
I read this essay a while ago, but didn’t put it up on the blog simply because I thought it applied to very few conservatives my own age that I knew. Despite the fact that I have not read the works of certain conservative thinkers doesn’t mean that I lack the knowledge to form a competant conservative worldview. I think that the study of history alone in its own pure context will create a rock solid conservative out of most anyone.
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“What makes George W. Bush different is that he acknowledged it and took the fight to our enemies rather than consistently playing defense on American soil.”
Except for the fact that we are fighting the war with one hand tied behind our back. Bush is running a PC BS war that is getting men killed for no damn reason. Syria and Iran are still out of control. With Syria now in possesion of the WMDs that we sought to take away from Iraq. Iran is soon to go nuclear and we are doing nothing but taking to the EU and the UN. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have carved out an enclave in Pakistan where we can’t touch them for “political” reasons. So both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq are utter failures to date that could very easily be successes if we altered out strategy when dealing with the enemy.
I am not even going to get into the disaster that our North Korea policy has been.
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Mike, you have made an excellent point. I am sick and tired of hiring about how George Bush is “fighting the terrorists” when he is doing no such thing.
If we are going to pursue a noninterventionist foreign policy, let’s do that. If we are going to use hard power let’s pursue our interests, well, then let’s do that. Instead George uses enough unilateralism and military force to piss everyone off, while still being politically correct and weak enough to guaranteee we lose. It’s the worst of both worlds.