While you’re at NRO reading about Rich Lowry’s dismay over Bush’s low approval rating, be sure to check out William Bennet’s latest anti-Obama piece, in which it is argued, “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history.” Ah yes, meeting with an adversarial head of state is much, much crazier than attempting to turn Mesopotamia into Switzerland. I’m so glad there are still some clear-eyed realists like Bennett around Washington. Bennett makes a lot of the fact that Reagan never met with a Soviet premier during his first term. But as the Gipper would remark later, “The only reason I’d never met with any of Secretary General Gorbachev’s predecessors was because they kept dying on me.” Bennett goes on to wring his hands over the possibility that Obama might “potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies.” Goodness, we wouldn’t want to undo all that good feeling Bush generated during his term. Read on it gets better.   

Over at NRO, Rich Lowry is lamenting that Bush’s approval rating has fallen to 23%.  The reason for this is obvious:  with the possible exception of judicial appointments, Bush has been an abject failure as president, spending most of his political capital on a disastrous war that has cost thousands of American lives and may be costing the country up to $3 trillion dollars, dramatically expanding the size and scope of the federal government, presiding over continued fiscal and trade deficits, as the dollar has plummeted and gas has gone from $1.40 per gallon when Bush became president to what we are paying today, and pushing throughout his tenure for an insane plan that would inundate America with millions of new immigrants, mostly from the Third World.

What we should never let anyone forget, though, is that the NRO crowd and the neocons spent most of Bush’s administration fawning over him and trying to convince the rest of us how wonderful he was, producing such embarrassing tomes as David Frum’s The Right Man and John Podhoretz’s Bush Country.  The neocons have a habit of evading responsibility for their mistakes, but they should not be allowed to run away from their support for this deservedly unpopular president.

All this rhetoric from Hitchens and others about the Holocaust justifying anything in WWII is a bit counter-factual and rings false.  No one at the time thought in that fashion, though Hitler and the Nazi’s many crimes against European civilians were well known and did encourage widespread callousness regarding the rights of German civilians.  Nonetheless, it’s an “ex post facto” rationalization to suggest the Holocaust motivated much of anything the Allies did, not least because most of the Allies were more concerned with what happened to their own forces and people rather than a bunch of Jews with whom they had little in common in the Western Soviet Union and Poland.

The Blitz is notably absent from Pat Buchanan’s article and so too are Germany’s crimes in Poland, and this is a pity.  Because even if British retaliation would not be allowed under the just war tradition, retaliation as a last resort in a proportional way—even to the point of killing hostages—was allowed under the law of war in force in WWII, and that law of war grew from the just war tradition. In no sense did England, France, or Poland inaugurate the brutal tactics—such as mass murder of civilians—for which the German forces were legendary, particularly on the Eastern Front. Further, British orders aside, German Blitz bombing tactics preceded the massive strategic bombing the Western Allies visited upon Germany.

Arguably, since no authority other than retaliation by combatants can enforce the law of war, the British response to the Blitz bombing by Germany had a certain patina of legal justification under the rubric of “belligerent reprisals.” In this view, the crime of bombing London’s residential areas (exacerbated by night bombing) figured far more prominently than the Holocaust in justifying British bombing of industrial and civilian targets in Germany. 

In fairness to both sides, carpet bombing came to the fore because of the difficulties of sighting and accurately hitting industrial targets with the means employed at the time, i.e., the Norden bomb sight coupled with Europe’s foggy skies.  In other words, “strategic bombing” itself was a bit of an ex post facto justification for the crummy accuracy of the world’s air forces’ bombers at the time, which would otherwise have been aimed directly at factories, air bases, and other legitiamate military targets.

Carpet bombing of civilians is wrong, unnecessary, violative of the just war tradition, and needlessly fails to draw distinctions of combatants and noncombatants.  Even so, even among evils we must make distinctions.  There is a notable difference between violence, even unjustifiable violence,, when it is an instrumental tool aimed at victory versus violence in pursuit of the wholesale slaughter of civilians as an end in itself.  This is what distinguishes American and British actions from those of the Germans, and this is why the moral reasoning is out-of-whack among those who equalize German conduct with American and British conduct—such as the writings of the nearly insane Noam Chomsky.  In fairness to Pat Buchanan, I don’t believe he has done this here or elsewhere. But I do believe he does too little to distinguish the nature of the evil in Nazi conduct from that of the Allies, and, for many of the same reasons, I think he exagerrates the likelihood with which the Germans could have been bought off with a few concessions, such as the annexation of Danzig.

This is not to say the Americans and British conduct of the war was always justifiable; it was not.  But their goals were fundamentally defensive, reasonable, and limited in a way those of the Germans’ were not.  Pat Buchanan’s talk of Danzig corridors and tit-for-tat German retaliation for British excesses understates the Darwinian value system and expansive strategic objectives of the Nazi regime.  This is essential context.  There is little doubt the Germans would not have stopped at Danzig, nor any doubt that their early conduct in Poland would have found repetition in the skies over Britain without British encouragement.  Worldwide empire was conceived, as evidenced in Mein Kampf, as a necessary means of German self-protection from other world power and a fulfillment of Germany destiny to reclaim what Hitler saw as the German race’s historical lands. 

The Western Allies’ responses to German violations of the law of war, while cruel and disproportionate, were in the service of practical end:  Victory.  Our later benevolence as occupiers provides further essential context. American and British behavior even in its conduct of evil contrasts sharply with the Satanic and genocidal goals of the Germans, particularly in the East.  The Western Allies’ actions in war and in peace also contrast sharply with the orgy of revenge and rape and theft undertaken by our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. 

Catholic neocons who supported the Iraq War actually had the stones in 2003 to ask that the Vatican revise the Church’s 1600-year-old “Just War” doctrine, to accommodate the unprecedented threat which faced the world: the WMD arsenal of Saddam Hussein. And we should never let them live it down. See my new column about this here.

Jack Hunter, the man known as the “Southern Avenger,” has a great radio interview with Bob Conley, that man who might soon trade in his nickname of “flat-top Bob” for the “Ron Paul Democrat.” I’m not sure whether people like Conley signify the beginnings of a right-wing revival within the Democrat Party, or whether they’re just interesting aberrations. Whatever the case, Conley is clearly well to the right of Lindsey Graham and expresses the limited government, America First views that attracted many of us to Ron Paul’s candidacy.   

Here is Jack Hunter in written form. 

Very Funny

“Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities—unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 years—was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station chief “recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy.” The agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian without realizing that “Murphy” was also the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. She was actually a married woman from a conservative family.”

From Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, p. 459

Not Very Funny

This

From the comedy “Get Smart,” with Steve Carell and Ann Hathaway, directed by Peter Segal

Those who look to the Netherlands as the world’s drug policy bellwether got some disappointing news this month: tobacco may be the wedge that divides pro-legalization liberals and pro-legalization conservatives.  From Reuters:

“Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses. They will be smoke-free,” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told NOS television.

“It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.”

Establishments will not in fact have to be completely smoke-free. Proprietors will be allowed to set up a separate room or glass partition behind which people can smoke, but customers will not be served there to protect staff.

“Employees should not have to work in an environment were they are constantly exposed to the harmful effects of smoking,” Balkenende said after the cabinet’s decision on Friday.

It is legitimate to believe that tobacco’s long-term physical harm outweighs its social benefit, and to believe the same about marijuana’s short-term cognitive harm, but to believe in one and not the other is a perversity of the liberal mind that I had not predicted.

Over at LRC, someone named Paul Gottfried makes a fiery case that America’s intervention in the First World War is just as important to the neoconservatives, if not more so, than taking on Hitler in the Second.   

The real acid test for neocon loyalty is not hating Hitler (after all, who could like this genocidal mass murderer?) but reading back Hitlerian traits into the German Second Empire and even earlier into German history. It is no secret why the neocons really idolize Churchill. Whatever his politically incorrect statements, such as his well-publicized outbursts of anti-Semitism after the Bolshevik Revolution and his explicitly racialist views, Winston was good at getting others to kill Germans. In the neocon view, that makes up for lots of deficiencies.

Gottfried also smashes a few legends of World War II that have been floating around in the critiques of Buchanan’s >new book and, most importantly, makes us aware of some little-known but rather shocking evidence that Churchill might have actually opposed German resistance against Hitler: 

Buchanan has only uncovered the tip of the iceberg in pointing out the unpleasant sides of Winston Churchill’s career. Among his less attractive achievements was having actually discouraged the uprising against the Nazi government in July 1944 and similar initiatives before, because if they had succeeded, the Allies would not have been able to smash the Germans as thoroughly as they had wanted to.

Recent scholarship by German historian Gerd Überschär and the British writer Brian Martin suggest that Churchill had a hand not only in blackening the German resistance, which he did in a speech before Parliament on August 2, 1944, but also in contributing to the deaths of resistance leaders.

The success of an anti-Nazi coup would have damaged Churchill’s war aims, which included, beside the utter devastation of a defeated Germany, cashing in on the good will of Soviet Russia. Churchill went so far in his efforts to keep anti-Nazi German patriots, including moderate leftist like Julius Leber, from prevailing against Hitler that he leaked information about their identities and whereabouts to the Gestapo, with the help of the BBC and the Chief of Political Warfare John W. Wheeler-Bennett.

Such an important discussion would simply not be taking place without the publication of Pat Buchanan’s very necessary book.

Having transposed the Great Transcender’s campaign logo onto the presidential seal, David Axelrod seems to have finally achieved a proper visual representation of our coming Obamian Order. Sure, the thing might be a bit illegal, but then after it’s installed in every small town court house and Farm Service office, people will stop asking questions. 
 

The liberal fascists of old usually had seals with really manly looking symbols of authority, or else lightening bolts or ancient Hindu signs of good luck. Obama prefers the Hope-inducing rising sun and, as Steve Sailer points out, certain “PoMo” touches. “Obama” seems to have now become a substantive noun—“America’s gonna get its Obama! Some Obama we can believe in!” It’s reminiscent of the jokey statue of “Potrlandia” that adorns Michael Grave’s PoMo Parthenon, the Portland Public Service Building. And “E Pluribus Unum” has been replaced by “Vero Possumus”/”Yes We Can!” I think it’s safe to say that a leftist slogan mouthed by college coeds with trust funds sounds even stupider in the original Latin. 

Last night, I attended a live broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Blossom Music Center south of Cleveland.  I have been listening, on and off, to Keillor’s show for many years, and I’ve read several of his books.  The interesting thing about Keillor is not that he is a Democrat, but that, despite his liberal politics, the show he produces has a strong conservative, even reactionary, streak. 

Last night’s show was no exception.  We heard, as is typical for Keillor, a lot of old American music, including a song from the 1932 campaign.  Although an unabashed liberal, Keillor is a Christian, and his show often features old hymns and Gospel songs, and last night’s program had a moving hymn about the Good Shepherd.  We heard a nostalgic essay by Ian Frazier about growing up in nearby Hudson, Ohio, which is unsurprising for a show whose cornerstone is a celebration of small town life, Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon.”  (Last night’s installment directed its humor at a childless yuppie couple—far from the groom’s native Lake Wobegon—who cooked at home so infrequently that they used their oven to store DVDs.)  Is there any program on radio or TV that has as much emphasis as Keillor’s on old American music and small town life? 

There is nothing like Lake Wobegon in my background, or in the background of either of my parents, but it is still a place that seems familiar to me, because Keillor’s stories, while informed by his Minnesota background, still draw on a common American culture.  Looking at the crowd, though, I wondered about the future of that culture.  Cleveland does not have large numbers of recent immigrants, but we do have a fair number of Indian and Asian professionals working in our hospitals, universities, and medical research centers.  But the crowd, while no doubt politically liberal, was virtually all white, with representatives of such recent immigrant groups basically non-existent.  It appears that such immigrants may not have much interest in stories about rural America or the songs that sprang from rural America.  One of the things uniting a people is the stories they tell and the songs they sing.  If the new immigrants do not have an interest in the old America, what does that say about our ability to maintain a common culture in the future?