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• Guesst // Mar 17, 2009 at 10:55 am

  Good video.

  Have you ever read Levin’s comments on Free Republic? He’s been going off the deep end there for years.

  The guy’s a bully, and worse, he just doesn’t “get it”. Most points go over his head. I’m disillusioned with Rush and his whole cabal, because they are nothing more than flea marketers selling their wares at CPAC and profiting from fear-mongering and hate-mongering.

  Rush used to claim to be a Republican, but in recent years, he stopped. He’s taken on the same values held by the crazies at WorldNutDaily, including David Limbaugh. Core beliefs that compel them to champion government intervention into our personal lives at all levels.

  Ack.

  Levin posts as ” holdonnow ” at Free Republic. What a putz.

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• pampl // Mar 17, 2009 at 1:51 pm

  Bloggingheads is great. You should do one with Megan Mcardle or Matt Welch to draw out the differences between your vision of a center-right coalition and their libertarianism.

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• JJWFromME // Mar 17, 2009 at 1:59 pm

  I miss conservatism’s old foreign policy ideas: “The problem with the neoconservative version of liberalism is that it is not really liberal at all. Classical Anglo-American liberalism was emphatically not a “fighting faith.” It was sceptical of all extreme faiths, religious and political. And although it fought when it had to, against aggressors such as Napoleon and Hitler, its preferred means of promulgation were trade, enlightenment and international law. The new liberalism is quite different. It is no longer cosmopolitan, but nationalist; no longer pacific, but warlike; no longer sceptical, but zealous.”
  http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7335

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• JJWFromME // Mar 17, 2009 at 2:00 pm

  My point is similar to the point Francis Fukayama made to Charles Krauthammer:

  “Krauthammer speaks of the United States as being in the midst of a bitter and remorseless war with an implacable enemy that is out to destroy Western civilization. This kind of language is appropriate as a description of Israel’s strategic situation since the outbreak of the second intifada. The question is whether this accurately describes the position of the United States as well. Are we like Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than an iron fist? And in general, does a strategic doctrine developed by a small, vulnerable country surrounded by implacable enemies make sense when applied to the situation of the world’s sole superpower, a country that spends as much on defense as the next 16 most powerful countries put together? I believe that there are real problems in transposing one situation to the other. While Israel’s most immediate Arab interlocutors are indeed implacable enemies, the United States faces a much more complex situation. In Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups, we do in fact confront an enemy that hates us for what we are rather than for what we do. For the reasons given above, I do not believe they are an existential threat to us, but they certainly would like to be, and it is hard to see how we can deal with them other than by killing, capturing or otherwise militarily neutralizing them.

  But the radicals swim in a much larger sea of Muslims-1.2 billion of them, more or less-who are not yet implacable enemies of the United States. If one has any doubts about this, one has only to look at the first of the United Nations Development Program’s two Arab Human Development reports, which contained a poll asking whether respondents would like to emigrate to the United States if they had the opportunity. In virtually every Arab country, a majority of respondents said yes.”

  Should Israel’s enemies be automatically our enemies? No.

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• JJWFromME // Mar 17, 2009 at 2:01 pm

  I am not familiar with Chas Freeman. But you mentioned in this interview of the importance of solidarity with democracy. I forgot that this Radio Open Source show from 3 years ago was with John Meirsheimer. This was before his *Israel Lobby* book (you’ll notice I have a number of comments in the comment thread):
  http://www.radioopensource.org/the-classroom-lessons-of-iraq/
  I was just remembering the show. He makes the point that Nationalism is a stronger force than Democracy and Neoconservatives tend to think it’s the other way around. A big question, I think, is should we act in our interest as a nation, or act as a union of democracies? I think we should act as a nation first. Is it in our interest to make the enemies Israel has made, automatically our enemies? I say no, especially when we don’t have control over what Israel does, and there may be times when it’s advantageous to be on good terms with nations that may not be on good terms with Israel. This may even help Israel sometimes because we can be a “good cop”, independent broker, etc. and also urges the Israelis to do the hard work of working out their own neighborhood problems. This is spoken as a supporter of Israel, but rejects certain right wing conceptions of what is good for Israel.

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• petty boozshwa // Mar 17, 2009 at 8:34 pm

  I think any benefit gained by stopping Freeman’s appointment will be more than offset by the ammunition this will give to the conspiracy theorists out there. I think it was a mistake for the usual suspects to oppose it, then say of course it had nothing to do with Israel. And I really wish Obama would stand by his appointments a little better, he’s starting to look like a weather vane.

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• JJWFromME // Mar 18, 2009 at 12:50 pm

  One of the people who designed our constitution also wrote Federalist 10. People who support Likud and American interventionalism in the Middle East are an interest group, a faction, as Federalist 10 puts it. Our democratic system was designed to call interest groups out and countervail them, especially if they’re acting extreme and have power. Sorry, this situation is no exception.

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