Is Rod Dreher the last honest conservative?

Surly asks of her Prophet,

Are you the last honest conservative?

His leftist commenters today overwhelmingly seem to think so for his bravely taking on a Megyn Kelly broadcast probing whether George Bush was not in fact right all along about leaving Iraq too soon.

Dreher doesn't deny he was ferociously for the Iraq war himself when he was taking NRO's checks and that was the popular thing to do, before subsequently being against it when the political weathervane swung around one-eighty and threatened to clock him in the head. And because Rod lives in TAC CEO Wick Allison's Obamacon lap these days, Barack's has now become Dreher's master's voice as well.

But we don't have to drop back through too many conservative posts on cooking and American Girl dolls to find the honest conservative shaking his booty on the right side of his stage this time, swaggering fashionably tough on ISIS, albeit using liberal Christian foils as his ostrich feather dancing fans in doing so.

When we finally wade through the typical obfuscating clutter there we find ourselves face to face with the honest conservative: loudly exhorting everyone while strategically committed to nothing at all himself. By all means, somebody should do something about ISIS. He's just not sure it would be prudent to advocate it should be him, or rather, the service men and women of his country acting on his behalf. Better to blog from behind.

Someone should stop those ISIS field trip bullies from pulling Rod's pants down, but we can't possibly expect the honest conservative himself to be the one to do the stopping, can we? Grownups! Grownups! Listen to Rod's cries of calculated, reader-maximizing ambivalence and quit stepping over him in indifference!

Protect this honest conservative Rod Dreher from ever having to take a stand - on anything.

He read the tea leaves...

...and he doesn't even drink tea. Romney from 2007:



On the other hand, we have Joe Biden's, uh, "prophecy" from 2010:



If Mitt Romney was President, do you think he'd be fundraising and golfing at a time like this?

H/T IJ Review.

Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter?

Gloria Berger from CNN serves up a good analysis of the political situation for Barack Obama. Excerpt:

It's strange, really, that the man who touched so many during the campaign has failed to connect in the same way during his presidency.
The president, for all of his success in checking off his to-do list, is now seen as just more of the same...

It's not that we don't see Obama; we see him more than just about any other president. So why is it that we still can't figure out who he is? Because a Zelig-like devotion to announcing one more agenda item or one more stimulus project or give one more speech just isn't enough.

Visibility doesn't guarantee connection. Connection guarantees connection.

That's where Bill Clinton comes in. There's no one who was better at empathy. And so, as Obama and the Democrats trudge toward an election bound to make them unhappy, the question is this: If Obama loses seats (or even control of the House), who will he be? Will he be Bill Clinton (a la 1994, after losing the House to Newt Gingrich and the GOP), adjusting to his new circumstance, working to pass welfare reform and a budget agreement? Or will be Jimmy Carter, who went from bad to worse, sulking with not much to show for it?

The other thing I liked in the article is her noticing how President Obama wouldn't mention in his victory speech the surge strategy which he opposed while a Senator and which worked in Iraq and which he used himself is employing in Afghanistan. I guess we'll assume that he really didn't think it would work back in 2007 and go with the "on the job training theory."

Fouad Ajami on 9/11, Obama and Afghanistan

Fouad Ajami's WSJ article is a good way to kick off our 9/11 readings. Excerpt:

No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see.

While denying that somehow the Afghanistan war "is" Vietnam—good for Mr. Ajami—he does offer parallels.

This is LBJ in 1964, from a definitive history by A.J. Langguth, "Our Vietnam," published in 2000: "I just don't think it is worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damn mess." He would prosecute what he called that "bitch of a war" with a premonition that it could wreck his Great Society programs. He knew America's mood. "I don't think the people of the country know much about Vietnam, and I think they care a hell of a lot less." Yet, he took the plunge, he would try to "cheat"—guns and butter at the same time, the war in Asia and the domestic agenda of civil rights and the Great Society. History was merciless. It begot a monumental tragedy in a land of no consequences to American security.

Wars are great clarifiers. Barack Obama's trumpet is uncertain. His call to arms in Afghanistan does not stir. He fears failure in Afghanistan, and nothing more. Having disowned Iraq, kept its cause at a distance, he is forced to fight the war in Afghanistan. So he equivocates and plays for time. Forever the campaigner, he has his eye on the public mood, the steel that his predecessor showed in 2007 when all was in the balance in Iraq is not evident in Mr. Obama.

Steel is useful in warfare, or so I've heard.