Early midterm blogging.
After having depressed myself by reading one too many rightwing blog yesterday, I was shocked to stumble on what looks like some intellectual honesty, or perhaps a genuine bit of self-questioning, at National Review:
What happened? Why does a man who served in the Reagan administration now embrace the very party that, since Vietnam, has denigrated the martial virtues he epitomizes? Part of it is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Webb is no knee-jerk Bush hater, and his opposition to the Iraq war is based on strategic considerations — he is concerned that by committing such a large force there for an extended period of time we have weakened ourselves in the long run against a rising China.
More to the point, though, is his growing anger at the Bush administration for what he sees as a McNamara-like disregard for military advice, and even worse, a tendency on the part of too many Republicans and conservatives who did not serve in the military to attack the service of veterans like Jack Murtha who oppose the war. Webb's New York Times op-ed of January 18, "Purple Heartbreakers," was a clear harbinger of his break with the Republican party. There he wrote:
"[I]n recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha."
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who have thus far decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.
The piece is written, of course, in response to James Webb (Reagan's ex Secretary of the Navy)'s apparent decision to run for George Allen's Senate Seat in Virginia. Hugh Hewitt, of course, has the exact same deferential reaction over on his awful blog. So is this a strategic pandering initiative designed to address what the GOP worries will become a media focus on disconnect between the Administration and the military brass (and a coup in the DC/SCC's "Fighting Democrats" strategy)? Or is it a more genuine concern that Republican ruthlessness may be souring the "Scots-Irish" pro-military voters whom Webb epitomizes, and also risking the permanent alientation of the realist-nationalist part of their base, which would leave them with a combination of starry-eyed neocons and grassroots anti-Muslim populists (Paul Wolfowitz and Little Green Footballs)?
I'm not very familiar with Webb or his novels, but a look at his commentary over the past ten years suggests a pretty impressive character. His opposition to the Iraq War was awfully damn prescient, not just in the general "bad idea" sense, but in the emphasis and details. But just because Webb's no hack doesn't mean he's a liberal. Actually, he reads like the sort of old-school Kissengerian conservative who views neoconservatism (and probably also liberal internationalism) as a hyper overcorrection to McGovernite-Carteresque dovishness (Webb uses the term "McGovernite" a lot) and who viewed the Clinton White House as the epitome of the dovish dilletantism of the 60s counter-culture.
He expresses the latter view in this fairly recent piece on Clinton and Carter:
As one who shares Mr. Clinton's ethnic background, and whose family was not afforded the opportunity for higher education until this generation, it is irritating beyond words to see commentators repeatedly refer to his actions as "redneck" or typical of "white trash" behavior. Rednecks might hang a velvet picture of Elvis on their living room wall, but precious few would tolerate any sort of conduct that might demean the greatness of their country, much less take part in it. Check the casualty lists in any war. See who stands tall and salutes when the flag passes by. Note who wasn't sleeping in Lincoln's bedroom when Bill Clinton occupied the White House.
Instead, Bill and Hillary's misadventures provide an echo of a different time and place, another set of values. Of bright students brought to good schools and becoming convinced, as Ben Stein wrote of his years at Yale Law School with the Clintons, "that we were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us." Of young men who not only avoided service when 58,000 of their peers were dying, but who persuaded a softie like Jimmy Carter to say that they were right, all of them, without distinction. The law? The law was what you made it.
More interesting is his take on the 2004 campaign (not to mention his would-be Senate colleague):
To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (WAW). In the early 1970s,this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million- became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.
...Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan. "With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology.
...But in the zero-sum game of a presidential campaign, to go after Kerry is to give a free pass to Bush, whose actions then and now deserve no prizes. Recent statements defending Bush claim that the National Guard was not a haven for those who wished to avoid Vietnam; but it clearly was. According to the National Guard Association, only some 9,000 Army Guardsmen and 9,343 Air Guardsmen served in Vietnam. Considering that nearly 3 million from the active forces did so, one begins to understand why so many of America's elites headed for the Guard when their draft numbers were called.
Clearly, Webb sees his differences with Bush and the PNAC types as larger than his differences with the party of the 60s-70s anti-war movement and its aftermath. That's interesting in itself. But U.S. liberals from the late-60s on worked long and hard to establish and maintain a distinction between Vietnam-era campus radicalism and lawful, mainstream opposition to the brand of Cold War Great-Powers realism that defined establishment conservative thought and that, in their view, made the world so terrifying. There's little suggestion in his writings that Webb sees that very fundamental, very necessary distinction between figures like Clinton and Kerry who worked within the system to stop what they considered a terrible, misguided war built on a flawed worldview (Webb's worldview) and, say, the sort of campus and Hollywood-based radicalism that Webb talks about in this article (in which he takes additional swipes as potential future Senate colleagues like Chris Dodd).
In a way, Webb (D-Va) is terrfying to Republicans because he stides onto a middle ground -- hawkish, pro-military, anti-meddling-in-the-Gulf, personally conservative -- they like to pretend disappeared with Sam Nunn. But he's also the type who doesn't seem to see the gradations that made mainstream liberalism in the US possible over the past 20 years, that (arguably) brought us close to cementing a neoliberal governing majority. It's the worldview that allows one to view Kerry's 1971 anti-war activity as fair and honourable while still rejecting the ideological or pacifist left. That could end up being a problem once the campaign is over.
What happened? Why does a man who served in the Reagan administration now embrace the very party that, since Vietnam, has denigrated the martial virtues he epitomizes? Part of it is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Webb is no knee-jerk Bush hater, and his opposition to the Iraq war is based on strategic considerations — he is concerned that by committing such a large force there for an extended period of time we have weakened ourselves in the long run against a rising China.
More to the point, though, is his growing anger at the Bush administration for what he sees as a McNamara-like disregard for military advice, and even worse, a tendency on the part of too many Republicans and conservatives who did not serve in the military to attack the service of veterans like Jack Murtha who oppose the war. Webb's New York Times op-ed of January 18, "Purple Heartbreakers," was a clear harbinger of his break with the Republican party. There he wrote:
"[I]n recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha."
The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who have thus far decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.
The piece is written, of course, in response to James Webb (Reagan's ex Secretary of the Navy)'s apparent decision to run for George Allen's Senate Seat in Virginia. Hugh Hewitt, of course, has the exact same deferential reaction over on his awful blog. So is this a strategic pandering initiative designed to address what the GOP worries will become a media focus on disconnect between the Administration and the military brass (and a coup in the DC/SCC's "Fighting Democrats" strategy)? Or is it a more genuine concern that Republican ruthlessness may be souring the "Scots-Irish" pro-military voters whom Webb epitomizes, and also risking the permanent alientation of the realist-nationalist part of their base, which would leave them with a combination of starry-eyed neocons and grassroots anti-Muslim populists (Paul Wolfowitz and Little Green Footballs)?
I'm not very familiar with Webb or his novels, but a look at his commentary over the past ten years suggests a pretty impressive character. His opposition to the Iraq War was awfully damn prescient, not just in the general "bad idea" sense, but in the emphasis and details. But just because Webb's no hack doesn't mean he's a liberal. Actually, he reads like the sort of old-school Kissengerian conservative who views neoconservatism (and probably also liberal internationalism) as a hyper overcorrection to McGovernite-Carteresque dovishness (Webb uses the term "McGovernite" a lot) and who viewed the Clinton White House as the epitome of the dovish dilletantism of the 60s counter-culture.
He expresses the latter view in this fairly recent piece on Clinton and Carter:
As one who shares Mr. Clinton's ethnic background, and whose family was not afforded the opportunity for higher education until this generation, it is irritating beyond words to see commentators repeatedly refer to his actions as "redneck" or typical of "white trash" behavior. Rednecks might hang a velvet picture of Elvis on their living room wall, but precious few would tolerate any sort of conduct that might demean the greatness of their country, much less take part in it. Check the casualty lists in any war. See who stands tall and salutes when the flag passes by. Note who wasn't sleeping in Lincoln's bedroom when Bill Clinton occupied the White House.
Instead, Bill and Hillary's misadventures provide an echo of a different time and place, another set of values. Of bright students brought to good schools and becoming convinced, as Ben Stein wrote of his years at Yale Law School with the Clintons, "that we were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us." Of young men who not only avoided service when 58,000 of their peers were dying, but who persuaded a softie like Jimmy Carter to say that they were right, all of them, without distinction. The law? The law was what you made it.
More interesting is his take on the 2004 campaign (not to mention his would-be Senate colleague):
To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (WAW). In the early 1970s,this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million- became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.
...Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan. "With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology.
...But in the zero-sum game of a presidential campaign, to go after Kerry is to give a free pass to Bush, whose actions then and now deserve no prizes. Recent statements defending Bush claim that the National Guard was not a haven for those who wished to avoid Vietnam; but it clearly was. According to the National Guard Association, only some 9,000 Army Guardsmen and 9,343 Air Guardsmen served in Vietnam. Considering that nearly 3 million from the active forces did so, one begins to understand why so many of America's elites headed for the Guard when their draft numbers were called.
Clearly, Webb sees his differences with Bush and the PNAC types as larger than his differences with the party of the 60s-70s anti-war movement and its aftermath. That's interesting in itself. But U.S. liberals from the late-60s on worked long and hard to establish and maintain a distinction between Vietnam-era campus radicalism and lawful, mainstream opposition to the brand of Cold War Great-Powers realism that defined establishment conservative thought and that, in their view, made the world so terrifying. There's little suggestion in his writings that Webb sees that very fundamental, very necessary distinction between figures like Clinton and Kerry who worked within the system to stop what they considered a terrible, misguided war built on a flawed worldview (Webb's worldview) and, say, the sort of campus and Hollywood-based radicalism that Webb talks about in this article (in which he takes additional swipes as potential future Senate colleagues like Chris Dodd).
In a way, Webb (D-Va) is terrfying to Republicans because he stides onto a middle ground -- hawkish, pro-military, anti-meddling-in-the-Gulf, personally conservative -- they like to pretend disappeared with Sam Nunn. But he's also the type who doesn't seem to see the gradations that made mainstream liberalism in the US possible over the past 20 years, that (arguably) brought us close to cementing a neoliberal governing majority. It's the worldview that allows one to view Kerry's 1971 anti-war activity as fair and honourable while still rejecting the ideological or pacifist left. That could end up being a problem once the campaign is over.
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