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Podhoretz the Younger actually thinks this is a serious refutation of Derbyshire’s assertion of mission creep in Iraq:

What has occurred in the Iraq war has occurred in countless wars—the enemy gets a vote and events do not transpire according to some neat plan. Stubborn resistance and the need for greater exertions are not the same as mission creep. Our mission in Iraq has never changed; the nature of the enemy and therefore of the war on the ground has—that is not mission creep. President Lincoln requested 75,000 90-day volunteers to subdue the rebellion of Southern states in one or two Napoleonic battles. What we got was a grinding four year struggle to restore the Union and end slavery that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That was not mission creep, even with the added goal of full emancipation since both restoration of the Union and freeing the slaves required the same outcome—a Northern victory. One could also say that, to paraphrase Mr. Derbyshire, no one on December 8, 1941, expected to bring the Axis powers to unconditional surrender (an “end state” announced more than a year after Pearl Harbor) only to embark on that other “long war,” the Cold War, following VE and VJ day. Was it therefore purely “mission creep” to remain in Europe and Asia as occupiers simply because we didn’t envision that in the days following Pearl Harbor? Did we expend all that blood and treasure merely to see Soviet dominance established over half of Europe? Did the American people sign on to the Berlin Airlift or to halting the North Koreans in 1945? Was the formation of NATO and other Cold War-era alliances (entangling alliances, one might say) a form of mission creep that Americans need not support? I could go on, but you get my point. Moreover, if we alter the “mission” in order to defend our principles, freedoms and way of life because the nature of the enemy has changed, does that reduce the legitimacy of that mission? The evolution of the Cold War fits the definition of mission creep far better than the war in Iraq does but that didn’t mean the Cold War was not worth fighting.

There’s a larger point here, though, one beyond the notion of mission creep. When things got rough and the sacrifices exceeded our pre-war expectations, we could have cut deals and declared “victory” in 1863, 1943 or 1963. Even though, again to paraphrase Mr. Derbyshire, during these earlier conflicts our leaders got us into situations we never wished to be in and were never asked whether we would wish to be in, we recognized our moral obligation, “as citizens of a democratic polity,” was to fight and win, not cut and run.

How does any of this deny the demonstrable fact that no one – no one – was told that the primary reason we were going to “war” was to create a stable and unitary democracy in Iraq and that we would stay there until Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds lay down and play nice with each other. In fact, the sole reference to democracy in Iraq in the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq is this:

Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;

So, the American people were supposed to somehow understand that supporting “efforts… to promote the emergence of a democratic government” was actually aa commitment to endless occupation in pursuit of world demokratic revolution? That wouldn’t be credible to future historians, much less those of us who are capable of remember the events of four years ago, especially given that this one reference, buried deep within the measure, came well after scary references to 9/11, nuclear and biological weapons and “Iraq’s demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction”.

Again, Podhoretz the Younger demonstrates a weird grasp of logic, to say nothing of recent history. Post-facto cheerleading for past mission creep is no justification for presently unpopular mission creep, still less is it proof that no such mission creep exists.

Finally, that “moral obligation” cited by Professor Conversino no more exists and binds the American people than Rousseau’s mythical, unsigned “social contract”.

Malkin(s) Watch doesn’t seem to think the issue through:

Vox Day’s column this week laments the shift of the conservative movement to (and its subsequent dry-humping of) The Left, and he finally does what none of us have had the courage to do: Peg down Michelle’s politics with a single label based on a single controversial stance on a nonexistent issue.

Indeed, what with Michelle Malkin pushing FDR’s internment program, Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity and numerous others pushing Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, Larry Kudlow pushing Richard Nixon’s monetary policies and the editors of National Review harboring a Harry Truman-style crush on the United Nations, one has to wonder if a liberal media is redundant these days.

There you have it. Michelle is a New Deal Democrat because she wants to lock up the undesirables. If this seems a bit farfetched to you (as it does to me), take solace in the fact that you are not a genius like VD. We’ll never get to hang at those hot MENSA orgies. American politics is, like, totally hard to understand.

So, did I miss it when Me So abandoned her pro-war stance and cheerleading for the Wilsonian World Demokratic Revolutia? Has she come out strongly for shutting down Social Security or returning to a gold standard? Does she promote pulling out of the United Nations or does she instead concern herself with who represents us there?

Correct me if I’m wrong, as I don’t read the woman these days, but I’m pretty sure that every single faux conservative stance I cited in this week’s column applies as well to Malkin as it does to Shapiro, Kudlow or NRO’s Lopez.

A liberal is an individual who is upset by the idea that someone, somewhere, might be doing what they want:

And while we’re at it, how dumb does Pennsylvania look for not making helmets mandatory? I heard a state legislator on the radio this morning say that this accident wouldn’t cause him to change his mind. It’s about human rights, he said. Riders should not be forced to wear a helmet.

I’ve got one for you, Mr. Politician. Let’s repeal seat-belt laws, and gun laws, and minimum drinking ages, and let’s just let America be the Wild, Wild West. Do what you want, when you want.

You mean, let’s just let America be free? By all means, I say. And if it is appropriate for politicians passing laws against things that are bad, they should certainly pass a law to forbid the porcine Mr. King from eating what he wants.

Where is the good news? That’s been the constant whine of war cheerleaders practically since the absurd, staged-for-the-cameras toppling of the Hussein statue. I cracked up when I listened to the Fox News anchors rambling on about the historic moment and how they had goosebumps watching approximately 35 Iraqi people performing a very bad reenactment of the Berlin Wall coming down.

Every time the camera pulled back, you could see that there was hardly anyone there; it wasn’t exactly the spontaneous mass movement of the sort that was seen in Berlin.

Anyhow, to ask the question is to completely miss the point. People have been making the same complaint about the local and national news for decades. News is, by functional definition, bad things happening to other people. We may think that Zarqawi getting killed is good news, but in truth, the only reason it is newsworthy is that it gives the media a chance to put another corpse on the cover.

There really isn’t any other practical definition of news, otherwise, we wouldn’t see coverage of a murder in Houston, a flood killing 20 in the Philippines and 20,000 dying in a train wreck in Bangladesh. None of these have any relation to our lives, except, of course, the ghoulish appeal of bad things happening to other people.

This is why it doesn’t matter how many Iraqi kids happily receive candy or how many hospitals and schools are built. No one cares and you can’t sell newspaper or television space by surrounding it with “good news”. There is no such thing as “good news” in the modern media, and the sooner you get that through your head the sooner you can begin to put the news in its proper perspective. Which is to say, ignoring most of it.

Between fiction and real life:

A little over a year ago, we conducted a survey of women readers to find a “watershed” women’s novel – the book which, above all others, had sustained individual women through key moments of transition or crisis in their lives. We began by polling women who were prominent in the arts and the media, then moved on to women journalists, academics, university students, schoolteachers and sixth formers. By the end we were polling every woman reader who crossed our paths; in total, 400 women responded to our inquiry.

Absolutely every woman we spoke to had her favourite. The top titles that emerged were surprisingly varied. They ranged from The Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Catch 22, Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Heart of Darkness and The Golden Notebook. This was alongside such perennial favourites as Jane Eyre (our way- out-in-front eventual winner), Mrs Dalloway, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. Jeanette Winterson’s Passion and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale had bands of loyal followers.

This year, we tackled the obvious next question: what do men read to get them through life? If polling women’s reading habits had thrown up such an astonishing variety of reading, surely men’s reading would be equally revealing. After all, as two female researchers, we might have been prepared for women’s reading choices; in the case of men, we admitted we really hadn’t a clue.

Our sample of reading men was selected on exactly the same principles as the women – that way, we felt the results could be directly compared. The first thing we found, unexpectedly, was that the men were more reluctant than the women to discuss the influence reading might have had on them. Or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say, they seemed suspicious of the question. Women had responded to our questionnaire without hesitation, producing a number of key moments in their life at which they unselfconsciously acknowledged that fiction had offered them guidance or solace. Many men we approached really did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices.

Because it’s a ridiculous question! What sort of moron associates imaginary characters with life choices? I’ve read thousands of novels, I’m an avid reader and not one ever “sustained me through a transition or crisis”. I couldn’t name one such book, let alone five, nor could any other sane human being. Can you? Anyhow, if you don’t manufacture imaginary crises for yourself every other month you probably won’t find yourself requiring fictional solace.

What this study actually reveals is two things. First, it shows that people lie about books they claim to have read or found significant. They might as well have asked the question: “name five books that will make people think you are an intelligent and educated individual.” I’d bet more than half the people who claimed that Jane Eyre or The Outsider were the most significant book in their lives have never read more than a chapter or two.

(The correct answer to the question, of course, is American Psycho or maybe the Executioner series. “Because, you know, The Executioner really consoled me when I hit this confused period in my life, I was sort of wandering and just fell into this rut of tracking down and killing Mafia hit men.” Another quality answer would be: “Watership Down, because I honestly feel that I’m a rodent trapped in a man’s body.”)

Second, it demonstrates that the average women’s grasp on reality can be more than a little shaky. If a man told you, in all seriousness, that reading an HP Lovecraft novel had changed his life, you’d surely back away slowly and attempt to avoid making any sudden movements.

Catkiller! poses the question:

If the conservative movement survived the New Deal, it will survive George W. Bush and Bill Frist.

It’s interesting that you set yourself apart from a movement that would be more than a little thrilled to see most of your agenda implemented. Moreover, is libertarianism really a “progressive” or “innovating” political movement? I’ve never seen it as such. The difference I see in conservative thought (books, not radio hosts) is that we want the right to live in communities whose uniformity goes no further than the local level. To me, that is the only road to diversity and liberty. I honestly don’t see how either conservatism or libertarianism seek to improve the human condition through government policy.

I have no doubt that most conservatives would be delighted if I were king for a day, or at least they would be once they got over the shock of seeing what I had in mind and saw the results of removing sovereign power from the central government and returning it to individuals and the states.

The reason I separate myself from conservatives is threefold. First, I have little in common with most of the politicians and commentators who call themselves conservatives. Second, I reject the popular conservative concept of using government to impose moral, communal and business standards on individuals and organizations. For example, conservatives want to use government to protect marriage – like that will work – whereas I want to see the separation of marriage and state.

Third, there is little about American society that I want to conserve. I believe it was Josh that described conservatives as those who see yesterday’s defeats as tomorrow’s victories; I think that is a cogent summation. Of course, as I pointed out in my column today, the word “conservative” has become rather nebulous, so perhaps we had better define the term more precisely before discussing whether or not it applies to various individuals.

As for survival, I’m not so sure. Conservativism itself will surely survive, but the movement in which it supposedly resides today may not.

The two soccer seasons are over just in time to collapse on the couch, watch the World Cup and let my body try to recover from the abuse. We won the championship with fingers crossed as our late-season collapse left us needing a win over the team that had just usurped our rightful position in first place the previous week. Things didn’t look good in the first half, but our tactically challenged manager made an astute change for once in making the astonishing decision to put two players on the wings who could actually run, and we finished with a 2-0 win, a 13-3-6 record and a two-point advantage in the final standings.

I had a lousy season myself, having spent most of it playing out of position at attacker. This confused me, until I realized that any manager who regularly starts not one, but two players who lumber like crippled oxen on the wings simply doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m not sure if the team’s promotion will mean more or less playing time, so I’m contemplating a move to a different club next season.

The kids did about as well as they could, considering that we were starting three six-year olds against teams comprised entirely of eight year-olds. We finished 11th out of 16 and 10th out of 12 in our last two tournaments, and if it was a little frustrating to watch teams we beat handily for the last two years win it all, well, not only is everyone back next year, but more than half of them will be back for the year after that.

The most amusing thing was the big area church tournament. Our pastor asked me to put together a team, but we didn’t have nearly enough players to field one, so in addition to recruiting every warm body over five feet tall, I told the more serious players to bring a friend along. This was contrary to the rules, but the option was to simply not show up.

The problem was that we won our first three games too handily, prompting complaints, especially about my Dutch friend. He’s excellent in the air and I could throw the ball into the center of the area on the small field, so we were scoring whenever the other teams gave up a throw-in. So, we found ourselves disqualified even though he had to depart at noon in favor of a tournament in which his son was playing.

We ended up beating the eventual champions even without him; ironically, I later learned that three of the other teams, including the champions, were fielding more “illegal” players than we were. In the process, I also learned that black women are completely insane, as the girlfriend of an African player kept shrieking that the reason we’d been disqualified was due to the racism of the tournament directors.

The fact that the other four “illegal” players were white and no one had any problem with the five black players who belong to our church didn’t seem to register with her no matter how many times I tried to explain it. But the nadir of the farce wasn’t reached until the referee stormed off the field towards the end of our last game claiming that our goalie had punched him after he wrongly tried to award a goal to the other team on a free kick that he allowed while our team was just assembling its wall. (The ref was a total drama queen, I was standing ten feet away and the goalie merely laid a hand on his shoulder while providing some much-needed remonstration.)

I rather doubt we’ll be invited back next year, but the craziness did have the positive result of creating a genuine team bond among the players. This morning at church, it was amusing to see how Jamaicans, Nigerians and Italians who hadn’t really known each other before the tournament were greeting each other by shaking hands, bumping shoulders and bursting out laughing together.

As for the World Cup, I haven’t been favorably impressed by anyone except perhaps the Argentines, who are not as bad as I expected. Germany looks very weak in the backfield, Ivory Coast even worse, Sweden can’t break down a defense with eighty-percent possession, (and that #20 striker was simply disastrous, blowing no less than three excellent chances), T&T played hard and stayed disciplined in back but simply don’t have enough talent to go out and beat anyone and England doesn’t have any dependable goal scorers up front.

This is looking more and more like Brazil’s tournament. But we’ll see….

The delicate Captain Ed is overcome once more by the vileness of it all:

Whether Rall or Coulter says it, impugning the grief felt by 9/11 widows regardless of their politics is nothing short of despicable. It denies them their humanity and disregards the very public and horrific nature of their spouses’ deaths….

This represents the downside of provocateurs, even those entertaining enough to enjoy for 80% of the time. Instead of arguing facts or philosophy, the provocateur usually relies on ad hominem attack in order to degrade and dismiss their opposition. A little of that goes a very long way, and unfortunately Coulter delivered it in droves yesterday. She owes these victims closest to 9/11 an abject apology and a retraction of her remarks, and she should pray that she doesn’t ever experience the kind of loss that these people have had. Regardless of their politics, their grief was and is all too real, and that drives their public engagement. I doubt a single one of them wouldn’t gladly trade their influence for one more day with the ones they lost. Shame on Ann for implying otherwise.

How, precisely, does questioning the obvious enjoyment and employment which these women derive from their dubious celebrity – however tragically it was obtained – “deny them their humanity”? They’ve been grieving publicly for nearly five years now! This is politically correct nonsense of the first degree and full credit to Ann for pointing out the complete lack of credibility possessed by these women to speak out on anything but their grief.

Perhaps in the Captain’s kinder, gentler world, no wives ever leave their husbands and no one ever kills a family member for the insurance money. Sure, it’s possible that some of these women would trade in the money, fame and influence to have their husbands back, but it’s equally possible that they cackle gleefully in secret at the Faustian deal they have so visibly accepted. I don’t know and neither does Captain Ed, but Coulter’s point would not have inspired such a reaction if everyone didn’t know exactly what she was talking about. The idea that there are holy women ennobled by grief whose pronouncements must be accepted unquestioningly is absurd; given that there are no shortage of similarly grief-stricken 9/11 widows that Coulter is not criticizing, it should be clear that the Captain’s point is just another attempt to showcase indignant drama.

And his point, such as it is, is particularly ironic considering how Ann Coulter is the one pointing out relevant, if uncomfortable facts, while the Captain himself is doing nothing but pointing his finger and decrying others, again demanding an apology is rather less likely than seeing the Stanley Cup settled on Hell’s home ice.

Another day, another example of faux outrage. When did the conservative movement come to be dominated by such a bunch of whiny, oversensitive scolds?

UPDATE: The White Buffalo points out a similarly “despicable” post from the Captain robbing the famously bereaved Cindy Sheehan of her humanity:

SOTU Psychotics On Parade

The inevitable parade of nutcases will be in full flower tonight as the President delivers his State of the Union speech. (Sheehan is one of the two individuals mentioned.)

Given that the good Captain previously accused Sheehan of having “gone seriously off-balance with grief”, I can only think that he owes her “an abject apology and a retraction of [his] remarks”. What’s more offensive, accusing someone of enjoying fame, political influence and millions of dollars or accusing someone of being a seriously unbalanced nutcase?

Equus Pallidus vs the Gay Mustachio: a transcript:

We go to Forth Worth, Texas, and Gregg, you’re on the Michael Medved show!

Hi Michael. I disagree with you about your mischaracterization of Vox Day’s article on deporting illegal aliens. You basically called him a Nazi, he’s not a Nazi and I don’t know how anybody could compare a libertarian to the National Socialist party.

I’ll tell you how, now hold on, let me read you a quote from the article that led me to say he was basically taking a Nazi position. He was talking about the idea of deportation. He said this. He said “Not only will it work, but what can actually estimate how long it – meaning deportation – would take. If it took the Germans four years to rid themselves of six million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”

Now doesn’t that sound like he’s saying we ought to follow the example of the Nazis?

No, I think what he’s saying is, if you read on in the article, that Bush is just not telling the truth, that we can do this. That it can be done.

Wait, wait, wait! The Nazis did it by murdering people! They put people in death camps!

He never suggested murdering people, did he?

But he said that the Nazis showed how it could be done! Isn’t it close to saying – listen let me read it to you again –

No, it’s not close to saying that! You made that up in your head.

I didn’t make it up, I read you the quote from his own article. He wrote that, I didn’t! Are you there?

He said nothing about killing people.

Listen again. “Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take”

To deport.

Okay, the Germans didn’t deport Jews, they murdered them.

So what? You’re comparing the final example of the Jews, what he’s talking about is deportation.

No, he is not talking about deportation! Do you see?

That’s exactly what he’s talking about.

Unless, he is denying that the Holocaust took place. First of all, he’s an ignorant fool, because the Holocaust, of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, about 200,000 of them were German. Most of them were Polish, they didn’t even live in Germany. They weren’t deported from Germany. Secondly, what he’s talking about is murder, here, and he’s talking about it approvingly.

No, he’s not.

“If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of six million Jews…” let me ask you, Gregg, how did the Germans rid themselves.

Well, the Germans, that’s the end. They killed them. They gassed them.

Okay, if it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of six million Jews, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens! What he’s saying is that he approves of the Nazi program of deportation and execution.

I tell you what. Inference doesn’t equal implication. You’re putting words in his mouth that’s in your head.

I read you his own words. Don’t you think that it hurts the case for deportation to analogize the Nazi persecution of Jews?

I don’t know whether it does or doesn’t. He was making a point. He doesn’t even support the deportation of illegal aliens. He was pointing out that George Bush was lying that it can’t be done.

Okay, first of all, it cannot be done in the United States of America. Secondly, it couldn’t even be done, in other words, in the Nazi regime, they, many of the six million Jews who were killed – and again this is his ignorance and you need to know it too – many of the people who were killed were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in their own villages. They came in and they lined people up in their own villages and they never got deported anywhere. They just got shot by firing squads and then put into ditches and then buried over. That’s what happened in Babi Yar in Ukraine. And people were killed that way. But you see, if you’re comparing the way we want to treat illegals in the United States to the slaughter of millions of German Jews – and European Jews and Ukrainian Jews and Romanian Jews and Hungarian Jews – if you want to compare it, then you’re giving the worst possible association to the anti-immigrant movement. Appreciate your call, nice try.

What a contemptible fraud! Now I’m not just a “Nazi boy” and a “Nazi-lover”, I’m also ignorant and a Holocaust denier, at least in Michael Medved’s Happy Faux Conservative World. Notice first that he never even attempted to answer EP’s question regarding the rather obvious difference between a libertarian and a member of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. Second, one can see how in this short dialogue, Medved commits six blunders, although he managed to catch himself just after committing the last and most fatal one.

1. Compare these two Medved quotes referring to me: (1)“he was talking about the idea of deportation” and (2)“he is not talking about deportation!” So, in an article devoted to the question of immigration and a border wall, which one do you think it is, Mustache? Make up your little mind.

2. Medved talks about 200,000 German Jews killed in the Holocaust, which is correct to the best of my knowledge. But he omits to mention that the Jewish population in the June 1933 German census was 600,000, and as Robert Wistrich notes in HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST “nearly 10 percent of German Jews had already fled the country by the end of 1933”. So, the Germans managed to remove around 430,000 Jews from the population – 512,000 if you count German-speaking Austrian Jews as German – without mass slaughter or even mass deportations. Only a very shallow thinker or a propagandist could believe that there is nothing to the historical example but bloodshed.

3. Identifying and locating illegals is the primary logistical challenge at hand, not transportation. So, for the purposes of the illegal alien debate, it makes no difference if the Jews of the analogy were deported or killed by the infamous Einsatzgruppen. Considering that 25 million children are bused to school every weekday in the United States, it is silly to assert that transportation is the challenge. Furthermore, Wistrich not only has 29 references to deportations, but, with regards to Poland, has the following in the index: “Poland: and deportation of Jews, 59, 74, 82, 97, 138, 208, 214, 224-5”. Medved is simply flailing about here.

And on behalf of the quasi-illiterate, let me quickly assure everyone that in using the schoolbus analogy, I am not calling for the forced public education of all illegal aliens….

4. More comparative Medved: (1)“They weren’t deported from Germany.” (2)“the Germans didn’t deport Jews, they murdered them.” (3)“What he’s saying is that he approves of the Nazi program of deportation and execution.” So, Medved is outraged by what he infers to be my approval for what he declares is a nonexistent program of deportation. While I am ignorant of many things, logic isn’t one of them. It’s clear one cannot say the same for Mustache.

5. Medved, in attempting to correct my accurate statement about “many German Jews”, makes a mistake in saying that “most of them were Polish”. Historians estimate that about three million of the 3.3 million pre-war Polish Jews were killed, but three million is half of six million, it is not “most” of it. Medved puts himself in the unique position of simulataneously denying that between 200,000 and 700,000 German Jews are “many” (depending on if y
ou count only the dead or if you include the self-deported) but one-half is “most”. Even his pedantry is incompetent.

6. Medved himself referred initially to the slaughter of “millions of German Jews”, before realizing it and quickly correcting himself. In doing so, he was making use of the common rhetorical shorthand that I was using in the original column, but since he has chosen the role of the outraged and overly pedantic critic, he’s no longer in a position to do so.

As I have said before, Michael Medved is a peddler of false outrage; his schtick depends upon having something to get worked up about, however imaginary. Last week it’s Nazi Libertarians, perhaps next week it will be Communists Under Your Bed. Like Michelle Malkin, he prefers to destroy his own credibility and look like a fool rather than admit to making a mistake that is obvious to everyone. That’s bad enough, but what’s contemptible is his cowardice in hiding behind a microphone rather than directly confronting those he is so willing to criticize from the safety of screened phone lines.