Hugh Hewitt loses it today - against the treacherous bourgeois revisionists on the right. He urges that the Politburo have them in for a talking-to. He seems to believe that many conservatives' dislike of massive spending, a huge increase in the welfare state, politicization of the Constitution, an untrammeled, often illegal executive branch, torture, and a spectacularly botched war is due to ... being excluded from power-lunches! Oh, how I wish I could leave Ptown for a few minutes with Karl Rove. All would be forgiven. Then we get this Malkinesque flourish:
The front rank of the round-heeled commentariat are in a way far worse than the left's pacifists or the Chomskyite America-haters.
So now reality-based conservatives are "in a way worse than Chomskyite America-haters"? Later on, Hewitt calls former war supporter Jon Chait a "blind pig." This is what he's reduced to, when he isn't ascribing my entire worldview to my sexual orientation.
Many of us are still committed to winning a war against Islamist terror. We just don't believe we have to suspend all independent criticism of the administration as a price for doing so. And we also believe that anyone who retains exactly the same views on what to do in the Middle East today that he had three years ago has - how to put this politely? - stopped thinking. Have we learned nothing from the chaos in Iraq? Nothing from revelations from inside Pakistan and Afghanistan? Nothing from the shifts within Iran? Nothing from the Bush administration's often-bizarre methods of policy-making? Nothing from the blowback from our abandonment of the Geneva Conventions? I'm still as philosophically opposed to Islamism and terror as ever. Today, I'm attending a small vigil to remind people of its evil. I don't recall my "appeasement" of Islamism during the Danish cartoon affair, or during the vile attacks on London last year. My concern is with the manner of the administration's conduct, the incompetence of its war-management, its refusal to correct itself until it is too late ... and the appalling consequences of its arrogance and hubris in Iraq. If Hugh Hewitt thinks face-time with Karl Rove will persuade us from the evidence in front of our lying eyes, he's projecting.