{"id":3673,"date":"2007-06-26T08:08:28","date_gmt":"2007-06-26T15:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/26\/conservative-crack-up-cont\/"},"modified":"2007-06-26T08:09:07","modified_gmt":"2007-06-26T15:09:07","slug":"conservative-crack-up-cont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/26\/conservative-crack-up-cont\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Crack-Up, Cont."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Johann Hari reports that the latest <em>National Review<\/em> cruise wasn&#8217;t all caviar, pasty skin, and Pacific sun. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/doc.mhtml?i=20070702&#038;s=hari070207\">There were also tempests<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who&#8217;s &#8216;we&#8217;?&#8221; Dinesh D&#8217;Souza asks angrily. &#8220;The left won by demanding America&#8217;s humiliation.&#8221; On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D&#8217;Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, &#8220;of course&#8221; Republican politics is &#8220;about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>The panel nods, but it doesn&#8217;t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan&#8217;s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: &#8220;The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You&#8217;d think we&#8217;re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren&#8217;t covered. We&#8217;re doing an excellent job killing them.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of <em>National Review<\/em>, announces, &#8220;The American public isn&#8217;t concluding we&#8217;re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They&#8217;re looking at the cold, hard facts.&#8221; The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, &#8220;I wish it was true that, because we&#8217;re a superpower, we can&#8217;t lose. But it&#8217;s not.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The crowd ignores <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ithaca.edu\/depts\/img\/2120_photo.jpg\">babyface<\/a>. Other highlights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/commentisfree.guardian.co.uk\/brian_whitaker\/2006\/05\/the_history_man.html\">Bernard Lewis<\/a>: <span class=\"articlecontent\">&#8220;The [2006] election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<li>When Norman Podhoretz screeches that there <em>were so<\/em> WMDs, Bill Buckley responds, <span class=\"articlecontent\">&#8220;Aren&#8217;t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?&#8221; One cruiser accuses Buckley of cowardice; more compassionate souls blame dementia.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"articlecontent\" \/><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/1114\">Midge Decter<\/a>, Podhoretz&#8217;s wife and a Muslim-hater extraordinaire, bellows that Muslims are <strong>right<\/strong> to condemn &#8220;American decadence<em>.<\/em>&#8221; (So if &#8220;they&#8221; are right to &#8220;hate our freedom,&#8221; then what, exactly, are &#8220;they&#8221; wrong about? Oh, of course. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Israel\">The only topic that really matters<\/a>.)<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>[Hari link via <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/blogs\/wolcott\/2007\/06\/in-the-latest-i.html\">James Wolcott<\/a>, who has more to say.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Johann Hari reports that the latest National Review cruise wasn&#8217;t all caviar, pasty skin, and Pacific sun. There were also tempests: &#8220;It&#8217;s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who&#8217;s &#8216;we&#8217;?&#8221; Dinesh D&#8217;Souza asks angrily. &#8220;The left won by demanding America&#8217;s humiliation.&#8221; On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3673"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}