Israel On The Brink

James Bennet:

George W. Bush’s latest half-hearted peace initiative; attempts at accommodation by the moderate Palestinian leadership; the calls by Israel’s realists for uprooting West Bank settlements; and those touching concerts, conferences, and student exchanges devoted to Middle East peace: all remain hostage to Hamas’s ability to start a war at a time and place of its choosing.

Kristol On Buckley

Here’s what he wrote today about what conservatism means:

The basic thought was: Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse.

When was the last time Bill Kristol ever made an argument like that? And hasn’t he spent the best part of the last seven years attacking it relentlessly? Hasn’t he defended every attack on individual liberty that this administration has pursued, even torture and the abolition of habeas corpus? Warrant-free wire-tapping? Vast expansions of executive power? And doesn’t he still hold that Iraq can be made into a model democracy, that there was no serious, sectarian divide in Iraq, that the war would pay for itself, that it would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East, etc etc? And has he ever so much as uttered a single doubt about these utopian ideas since they foundered in the sands of Mesopotamia? One waits and waits for some kind of intellectual accounting from Kristol … and then one waits some more.

The intellectual dishonesty and/or cognitive dissonance just boggle the mind. But they are rewarded with a column in the NYT. For the "conservative" slot.

GOP Sabotage?

A reader writes:

So I’m at lunch today with coworkers, here in Columbus, Ohio, and the primaries of course are the hot topic of discussion. The group, mostly conservative, Republican leaning White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, agrees across the board they will be voting for a Democrat tomorrow because McCain is a lock in our collective opinion for the GOP nomination. 

Now what shocked me was how many of the group (a majority in fact) are voting for Hillary because they like McCain’s chances this fall against her better than against Obama. In fact as I prod more, they to a man admit they’d rather see Obama in the White House than Clinton, but ultimately their allegiance is to McCain, hence the vote for Clinton.

The McCainiacs are trying to select his weakest opponent. Makes perfect sense from their point of view.

Comments

The voting has stayed almost rock solid since the beginning at 60 – 40 against adding comments to the Dish. I didn’t realize but the poll is actually restricted to one vote per IP address. Patrick figured it would prevent robots and people just pressing the button indefinitely. But the poll has only been up a few hours, so if you haven’t voted and feel strongly about this, have your say.