RSS Feed MenuThe final round of my debate with David Horowitz about Glenn Beck and the future of the Republican party appears on Frontpage.
Some excerpts:
FRUM: You think that conservatives lose when they are insufficiently vocal, insufficiently confrontational, insufficiently mobilized. You see a national majority in Palin’s politics of cultural grievance, and the paranoid alienation Beck offers his Fox television audience. But the evidence is against you on all counts.
Angry protest politics did not work for the Left in the 1960s. Angry protest politics will not work for the right in the 2000s.
That’s not to deny the importance of this bloc of voters or the significance of their concerns. Rather, I’m saying that we have to join this bloc to the other blocs conservatives also need – married women, the educated, upwardly mobile immigrants. The wild, extreme and sometimes racially tinged talk we unfortunately hear from the most visible personalities on the right is detrimental to this effort.
HOROWITZ: I think Republicans generally want a fighter. You can be a centrist and a fighter. Why not? But in the first nine months of the Obama Administration, it is Palin who has set the standard in facing down the Left.
You say that angry protests did not work for the Left during the 60s. Are you forgetting that our angry protests were aimed at the Democrats and that by destroying the Democrats we elected Reagan governor of California, and Nixon president in 1968? Psychotic anger worked for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and brought them victories in Congress and the White House. What can you be thinking?
You can read the whole exchange here.
anniemargret // Oct 5, 2009 at 5:44 pm
sinz: absolutely agree about the left during Vietnam. The ‘babykillers’ rhetoric was not as widespread as it was commonly thought and was limited to the extreme radicals . Most of the country toward the end of the latter years of that war were against it, particularly after the draft was implemented.
However, no matter who said it and how, it was despicable. And no, today’s liberals are not the radicals of the 60s, no matter how hard ‘escape’ tries to make it so. That was a deplorable time, all around. There were then, as now, many liberals who were appalled at the rhetoric.
No man or woman in uniform who are ready and willing to die for this country should be smeared in any way, shape or form. And we all have to remember that political sentiment disappears on the battlefield. There are Republicans and Democrats and Independents risking their lives now in Iraq and Afghanistan. We honor them all -each of them, no matter where their political loyalities may lie. They die for country, not political parties.
And that is why I am so adamantly opposed to unnecessary war. Because there are soldiers, families and innocents that pay the ultimate price. The politicians who design and create the wars almost always never have to face that price. So we must hold them to absolute truths and be accountable. I voted for President Obama, but if I thought he was lying to me about why we are going to war, I would feel the same. My sentiments about war end at the political door.
I lost my boyfriend of 22 y/o in the jungle of Vietnam . He came back in a closed casket. He was one of the 58,000 that sacrified their lives in that war. I hold his memory dear and for his memory and all the others, I demand that our elected officials and military don’t send them into harm’s way unnecessarily. We can agree on that hopefully .
Thanks.
sinz54 // Oct 5, 2009 at 6:31 pm
midcon: While there were indications and evidence that he was or at one time was pursuing nuclear, chemical, and perhaps biological WMDs, there was no primae facie evidence that he had been successful or would have been successful.
That’s the problem.
It’s highly unlikely we’re ever going to get prima facie evidence on enemy super-weapons. The USSR wasn’t kind enough to let CIA agents peek inside their ICBM silos or nuclear weapon labs either. What we had were surveillance photos, electronic “chatter,” and some information from defectors.
You may recall that in the 1970s, there was a HUGE split in the intel community as to how to interpret the data we had on the USSR’s military potential. The CIA commissioned two analyses: The first, “Team A,” done by their mainstream analysts; and the second, “Team B,” done by a more hawkish group of analysts.
These teams were looking at the exact same raw intel data. But each team viewed it through the prism of their own background and judgment calls. And they came to remarkably different conclusions.
“Team A” concluded that the USSR was constrained by its economic stagnation. “Team B” concluded flatly that the USSR was striving for, and getting closer to, world dominion–and the U.S. needed massive rearmament to head that off. (Reagan won the 1980 election, and acted on the recommendations of “Team B.” In fact, he hired most of them for his Administration.)
And that’s a similar situation we had with Saddam as well. I heard George Tenet’s talk in 2004 on the intel they had. It consisted of knowing what the U.N. inspectors had found as late as 1998 before Saddam kicked them out, combined with extrapolations as to how much more Saddam’s scientists could have accomplished by 2003 if his WMD program had continued at the same rate.
In the end, as with “Team A/Team B,” how you viewed the intel on Saddam depended on how you viewed Saddam: As a regional jerk who had been thoroughly clobbered in the Gulf War, or as the worst terrorist menace America had ever faced.
What most Americans were unaware of, is that a number of Bushies had bought into the second theory–that Saddam was an even bigger terrorist threat to America than al-Qaeda. They got this theory, not from the CIA or FBI, but from one of their own favorite analysts: Dr. Laurie Mylroie, who maintained that the whole concept of al-Qaeda was vastly exaggerated, if not a total fiction; the real terrorist threat to America was Saddam. When 9-11 happened, she blamed it on Saddam, not al-Qaeda. And the Bushies were listening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Mylroie
midcon // Oct 5, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Actually, sinz, we have prima facie evidence of many nations nuclear weapons. We get this evidence from highly reliable national intelligence systemsthat tell us when there are events that identify a nuclear test, along with other evidence. We’ve had that capability for years. Additionally, we collect other intelligence and evidence, such as that from nuclear accidents that either are empirically proven or are admitted. We know what we know and are well versed in analyzing the evidence. Again I caution you that I speak semi-knowledgeably on nuclear detection, not on chemical and biological.
Your Team A/Team B example is not whether they had the military potential but whether they intended to use it. We knew what their capabilities were. What we did not know is whether they would dare employ those capabilities and whether that employment would be via a first strike.
Folks like Mylorie were focused on intent rather than capability. There are many that wish us harm. When the intent without capability is different than intent with capability. Mylorie’s argument was simply that Hussain was a significant threat because he sponsored terrorism (intent plus capability). The capabilty in this case was not WMD. Rather it was money. Saddam if he was sponsoring terrorism had the money to sponsor it. But, then if that’s all it takes, I would have said there are a lot of threats out there who have both the intent and the capability. Mylorie doesn’t enter into the WMD debate (for which there should be no debate .