Conservatism Deserves Better Intellectuals
Conservatism Deserves Better Intellectuals
Peter Wehner writes his analysis of the Gaza crisis in big, thick crayon:
It is as if a bully on the playground repeatedly assaults another child who is quietly playing on the swings. When the second child fights back, the teacher [read: the international community] criticizes both children for fighting. The problem is that one is fighting in self-defense while the other one is fighting out of aggression. To extend the analogy even further: in this instance, the bully is assaulting a child who set aside a section of the playground to give to the bully, in the hopes that he would be satisfied. Yet it turns out this only fueled his aggression.
I think reasonable people can disagree — even vehemently — on the historical contours of the Israel-Palestine conflict while still agreeing that Wehner’s analogy is deeply silly, and more than a little dishonest. I’m tempted to draw it out even further, going into the history of who kicked who off the jungle gym first, and acknowledging the competing claims to the sandbox, but I suppose it’s sufficient to say that a country which maintains a strangling blockade while aggressively expropriating land for illegal settlements cannot credibly be said to be “quietly playing on the swings.” Wehner’s playground analogy is apt only in the sense that it seems like something he came up with while riding the short bus.
Photo explanation here.
5 Responses to “Conservatism Deserves Better Intellectuals”
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Memo
To: Internationalization, State
From: jps, ThinkProgress Wonk Room comments
Subject: Handy phrases for Hillary
Please translate into Hebrew, Arabic, Pashtun, Hindi, and regional dialects:
1. “You are not getting any windmills unless you stop shooting.”
2. “The solar and desalination plant plans will be delivered when hostilities cease.”
3. “We aren’t going to let you use our battery technology if you get into a nuclear war.”
4. “If you want to see the latest nulling interferometry images in the far infrared, you are going to have to stop using those cluster bombs.”
5. “We are not eager to explain our Safe Routes to Schools programs to those who continue to bomb civilians.”
Thanks!
January 5th, 2009 at 3:40 pmAnd when the second child responds by scattering white phosphorous and leaving cluster bombs in the sandbox? Who gave the child such dangerous weapons?
Where are the parents, after all these are children?
And the police? What if all seven officers on duty have to unanimously agree the problem is significant and warrants police intervention? And what if one of the police officers is related to one child’s parent?
First child-punches
January 5th, 2009 at 3:48 pmSecond child-disproportionately retaliates
Police-UN
Forget “conservatism,” please. It has been Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
January 5th, 2009 at 10:36 pmRecovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
As long as we are going there with the demeaning playground metaphor, apparently. . I think it looks more like this pictorally:
Israel is more like the bully kid, here, on the playground who says invariably to the teacher/parent who winds up breaking up his/her fights. . “But, but – he (or she) (whoever they are busy pummeling – usually smaller kid) started it!”
At this point the teacher or person involved has to shake their heads.. (usually breaking up the fight is the M.O. not egging it on here. . also as the supposed ‘adults’ have done in the media lately)
..teacher or adult anyway s’posed to.. has to normally anyway, break up the schoolyard fight/s though.. and explain to this older bigger kid (Israel) at this point – how they are supposed to “know better” and “act more maturely” and so forth by virtue of them being older, stronger (receipt of U.S. Military subsidies, etc.) than the smaller “kid/s” on the “playground/s.”
Of course in these ’schoolyard’ fights are more than just petty children pointing fingers
January 6th, 2009 at 7:20 amToday, “conservative intellectual” is nearly an oxymoron, with Sarah Palin and Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher numbered among conservatism’s leading lights.
January 11th, 2009 at 7:38 pm