A Rebel, Not A Heretic

John B. Judis on Buckley. This rings very true:

When he was at officer’s training school, Buckley, who was only 18 at the time, couldn’t get by on his good grades and brilliance, and found himself not only disliked, but on the verge of being flunked out of officer candidates’ school. In the letters he wrote, Buckley revealed a fear and anguish about his place in the world and how people thought of him. He got his commission, but he also learned that he had to leaven his own political and intellectual convictions with a tolerance for people who didn’t share them. He would sometimes condemn their views, but he would not condemn them. By the time he arrived at Yale, he was pretty much the Buckley whom we’ve known for the last sixty years–witty, arrogant, but always with a certain restraint, even at times a gentleness and consideration. And I think that same sense of limits and boundaries–a sense of how far he could and couldn’t go–affected the way he conducted himself politically.

Buckley And The Surge

John J Miller admirably concedes that, in fact, Buckley had been a skeptic:

It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?

It’s amazing how today’s right don’t seem to realize that Buckley was, you know, a conservative. Once you remove the WMD issue and the threat to Western security, there is no conservative defense of the Iraq war, let alone a conservative defense of a permanent Iraq "nation"-building occupation. In fact, it is very hard to think of any foreign policy objective that is less conservative than permanently occupying, and re-making, a foreign country, whose subtleties we know nothing about, whose destiny we have no business directing, and whose people resent as a religious imperative the presence of any non-Muslims in their territory. To engage in this task for five years, propose it for fifty, and defend it by the kind of rhetoric used in the Second Inaugural is one of the biggest assaults on conservative principles in a very long while. It takes a Bush.

There’s a reason NRO is now citing Angeline Jolie and not William F Buckley on this matter.

Re-Thinking The Terror War

Fallows on Ignatius on Sageman. The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two – not necessarily exclusive – possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was over-rated. I suspect that technology, good police work, and plenty of heroic stories that neither you nor I know about have made a difference. But seven years is a long time. And Bush is not exactly Mr Competence, is he?

Have we misread the world – and over-estimated the threat – even more profoundly than we realize? That is the question.

We Are All Sodomites Now

Maybe I should have been explicit. I wrote:

Homosexual sodomy was always subjected to more scrutiny and disparagement than heterosexual sodomy, even when sodomy became – as it did in the 1960s with the advent of the pill – the overwhelming sexual practice of the straight.

By sodomy, I mean the technical term of non-procreative intercourse. That includes the use of condoms, the pill, oral sex and butt-fuckery. That was what the church meant when it invented the entire category. We are all sodomites now. I wrote a review essay in 2003 for The New Republic with that very title on the history of sodomy. Check it out.

Steroids And Pro-Wrestling

Many of you objected to my pooh-poohing of Congressional investigations into steroid use. You pointed to articles like this one about the unseemly and alarming death rate of pro-wrestlers, caused, almost certainly, by rampant steroid abuse:

USA TODAY’s examination of medical documents, autopsies and police reports, along with interviews with family members and news accounts, shows that at least 65 wrestlers died in that time, 25 from heart attacks or other coronary problems — an extraordinarily high rate for people that young, medical officials say. Many had enlarged hearts.

That’s awful, but why should it be any business of the government? These are grown men, aware of the risks, and taking them, and dying young. It’s their choice, their lives, their bodies. Leave them alone.

Torture Doesn’t Work

A helpful historical analogy:

There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only “real men” know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn’t. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they’d thought he’d be tortured.