Billmon on Andrew Sullivan and others complaining about being attacked from the right.
It’s very hard, after more than three years of anticipating, dreading and now watching
the catastrophe blossoming in Iraq, to tolerate the pathetic whimpering
of former hawks who’ve finally managed to drag themselves into the
searing light of reality — and feel ill used because they must suffer
the slings and arrows of the deluded goons who still refuse to leave
the cave of winds. Welcome to the camp, guys. Ivan over there will show you around.
Billmon also points to a depressing post by one, Gregory Djerejian, whom I’ve never read before. Mr. Djerejian used to say he felt more ideologically aligned with the American Enterprise Institute than with the Brookings Institute. I guess he never read the AEI’s stuff, because he doesn’t care for Phase Two: Syria. His pleas for sanity are welcomed. His plea for forgiveness probably requires a period of penitence and making amends. This post is a start:
Three years ago, I would have poo-pooed anyone using the word “radicals” to describe the neo-cons. No more. Any group that can so brazenly (and breezily) avoid a real reckoning with the continuing crisis in Iraq–which is descending into civil war as we speak–any movement that has the gall to suggest as some panacea that we mount significant military operations in Iran and Syria and god knows where else (with Israel in Lebanon to boot), well, their credibility is at a very low ebb indeed, and they very much need to be urgently reined in. Yes, it is scary when, in the pages of respectable papers like the FT, one hears more and more the intimations there is something of a bona fide radical-wing in Washington. Could it be, you know, true? Well, we’re getting there, it seems…To help stem the follies, it is time to call spades, spades. Is it not, for instance, and as George Will has pointed out, a grotesque misnomer to describe the neo-cons as resembling anything remotely conservative anymore, given that they appear blissfully unawares of the resource strains we are operating under given the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given how gungo-ho at the ready they are to pursue their neo-Trotskyite fantasies by moving into wars Nos. 3 and 4 in the ‘region’?
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues his path on the road of contriteness:
Hugh Hewitt loses it today – against the treacherous bourgeois revisionists on the right. He urges that the Politburo have them in for a talking-to. He seems to believe that many conservatives’ dislike of massive spending, a huge increase in the welfare state, politicization of the Constitution, an untrammeled, often illegal executive branch, torture, and a spectacularly botched war is due to … being excluded from power-lunches!
It isn’t pleasant to face up to being wrong, so wrong. It’s also not easy to forgive those that questioned our patriotism or suggested whether we might become a fifth column in the war against al-Qaeda.
As events unravel in the middle east and Condi Rice and her cohorts cheer the violence on and send in emergency airlifts of 5000 lb. bombs for the Israelis to use on the Lebanese, a few right-wingers are finally starting to see the light. Maybe the problem isn’t with we blogofascists. Many Islamofascism isn’t the main problem eithre. Maybe the main problem is that the neo-cons want to do a little creative destruction. Maybe the neo-cons are really an outcrop of Italofascists.
If you want peace and security, stop whining about Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin and help us railroad the warmongers out of the White House, Pentagon, and anywhere else they hold power.
