Comic Book Foreign Policy (or the Batman Theory of Foreign Policy)

Readers may be familiar with the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics (short version: the US can do whatever it wants if it just has even willpower). Now, it appears we can add another member of the Justice League to our understanding of foreign policy. On Friday, author Andrew Klavan had a piece in the WSJ comparing Batman ...

Obama = Charismatic = Hitler = Armageddon

Arthur Silber is, as am I, fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama.  He notes some anecdotal creepy gushing on a local radio show and then Reactions of this kind to Obama are fairly common. No, they are not this extreme much of the time, but such statements are far from unusual. And many of Obama's less obviously deluded ...

U.S. Kills Jihadists with Stroke of Pen, Creating Violent Extremists as Byproduct

The war against Jihadists and Islamo-Fascists has been won; each and every last one of these vermin has been eradicated courtesy of the United States Government. Unfortunately, the victory is quite literally in name only. The Bush administration has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language. Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department ...

Wilders Film ‘Fitna’ Incites Muslims

Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders has debuted a new film that compares Islam to fascism. No rioting has yet ensued. Iran and Indonesia on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, while Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint. Islam critic Geert Wilders launched his movie on Thursday evening. Titled "Fitna", an Arabic term sometimes translated ...

Getting it Right on Iraq

Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens' book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War. Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn't particularly hard, frankly. It's a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always "bad" in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if ...

Goldberg, Coulter, and Savage

Goldberg, Kevin Holtsberry, and Steve Dillard take exception to the assertion in my recent post on The Conservative Minority that "the modern Conservative Moment seems to be dominated by the shrill nonsense of Coulter and Jonah Goldberg and Michael Savage and Neil Boortz." First, it's a good sign that conservatives at least recognize that being associated with these people ...

On Bookstores And Conservative Books

There's been a lot of discussion around the blogosphere about the, um, difficulty some brick-and-mortar bookstores seem to have in ensuring that customers can acquire a copy of Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Amazon sales rank as of this posting: #6). Prof. Reynolds has posted ...

McCain and Giuliani GOP’s Best?

Linda Chavez argues that, of the Republican candidates seeking the presidency, only John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are qualified. Many of the Republicans, whatever else their appeal, simply don’t have the experience to lead America during wartime. Mitt Romney doesn’t have the gravitas needed; he’s too eager to please, willing to shape his positions according to the polls. Much the same ...

Islamofascism

Monday's essay by Christopher Hitchens defending the term "Islamofascism" drew quite a bit of blogospheric reaction. Matt Yglesias responds to it with what amounts to a straw man and yet backhandedly makes a valid point. [The term] provide[s] a spurious patina of unity and sameness to diverse phenomena involving Muslims Behaving Badly so that al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Assad, ...

I’m Confused

In what Universe can Islamofascism Awareness Week be called "racism"? Oh, I get that the kids who made the flyer don't understand want to admit that there's a distinction between someone decrying the theological/political concept "Islamofascism" and the rather more general issue of someone being "Islamophobic." But the former is not simply a subset of the latter. And, anyway, Islam isn't ...