Traditionally August is the silly season for news, but the Wingnut Wurlitzer is so silly all year ’round that they have to get really outlandish for the ‘pickled-cucumber days’. Roy Edroso has so much rightblogger opposite-of-goodness to share in his latest Village Voice column, this particular tidbit gets shoved to the second page:
… For more rightblogger lessons in history, let us look to a couple of National Review authors. David French celebrated the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by telling us what a bunch of miserable wimps we have become. “In a time when America lacks the strength of will to force an active-duty Army officer (and admitted terrorist) to shave his jihadist beard before appearing at a court-martial,” he snarled, “when we wring our hands in guilt over the use of the most precise weapons ever devised against an enemy of unquestioned cruelty and malice, and when we respond to threats with weakness that merely encourages greater violence, it’s worth remembering a time when this nation understood the necessity — the moral necessity — of decisive force.”
Parts of French’s essay seem to veer off into ether — “Food stamps and single-payer health care aren’t firewalls against evil,” he said at one point, “and we’re fools if we entertain that belief” — but in the main his point was clear enough: “Our nation dialogues with (and funds) Holocaust-denying jihadists and displays little more than worried impotence as a hostile and hateful Iranian regime races towards an atomic bomb,” but once upon a time we knew when to push the button.
Later French’s colleague Michael Walsh went further, not only cheering Hirsohima and Nagasaki, but also that “every major city in Germany was destroyed and both Hamburg and Dresden were incinerated, the bodies of their inhabitants literally blown apart by the force of the bonfire’s incendiary winds: In Dresden, human heads rained down from the sky like bowling balls after the bodies of the victims evaporated in the flames…”
Some readers might wonder if Walsh wasn’t more pleased by the gore than by the military outcome (maybe he’s read Diana West!), but eventually he got to his point: “We’re way too politically correct to do something like that today, of course, and so we fight pointless wars for speechwriter mush about ‘human freedom’ that are all tactics and no strategy, with no apparent political objectives other than to see ‘elections’ staged, some schools built, and some cups of tea drunk. But we did not fight to ‘liberate’ the Germans from Hitler or the Japanese from imperial militarism: We fought them to crush them and eradicate the root of the evil that animated them…”
Thanks again, William F. Buckley!:
Prior to National Review‘s founding in 1955, some conservatives believed that the American right was a largely unorganized collection of individuals who shared intertwining philosophies but had little opportunity for a united public voice. They also wanted to marginalize what they saw as the antiwar, noninterventionist views of the Old Right…
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Apart from big talk from a bunch of blowhards, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
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