The American Conservative

TAC‘s front page has had a redesign — check it out.

There may yet be a few gremlins in the system, and we’ll be tweaking things a bit over the next couple of weeks. The big change, other than the look of the page, is that from here on out there’ll be a new article spotlighted every weekday, so be sure to check back regularly.

My old colleague Ed West, a TAC contributor no less, is writing an interesting new blog for the Daily Telegraph.

The blog’s blurb says it well: “Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. Embarrassingly, he once wrote a book entitled How To Pull Women.”

To be more precise–sorry, Ed–it was actually called How To Pull Women: the Science of Seduction.

I can’t claim to have read this tome on womanizing. But I can say that Ed West is a very lively and witty writer who can be funny about virtually everything. If you want bleak-yet-hilarious insight into trash Euro multi-culture–and who doesn’t, right?–he’s your man.

See his post today on how Britain’s Labour government is effectively bribing Muslims for votes.

Of course not, but bureaucrats in my home state of Missouri evidently think otherwise. Or maybe they’re just hungry for attention.

As it happens, the new, March 23 issue of TAC carries an important essay by Philip Jenkins on the regularity with which hysteria about “far Right” movements recurs during Democratic presidential administrations. It’s like clockwork. With FDR, we got the “Brown Scare” of the 1930s. In the Kennedy-Johnson era, there was much angst about the Minutemen and John Birch Society. And under Clinton there was the Great Militia Panic of the 1990s, which saw a budding Timothy McVeigh in every gunowner. Obama has been in power barely three months, and already the Left (and law enforcement, which has a financial stake in whipping up hysteria) is conforming to the pattern.

You can read the Jenkins piece on-line right now if you’re a subscriber to TAC by logging in here. (And if you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up now and get instant access to our current issue and full archives in PDF form.)

During Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and I, free for a few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour of Beijing. Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we toured the grim city of Chairman Mao in the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The interpreter: Charles Freeman — the same Charles Freeman Adm. Dennis Blair chose to chair the National Intelligence Council that prepares National Intelligence Estimates on critical national security issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.

Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, Freeman has served his country in Delhi, Taipei, Bangkok, and Beijing. He was Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa and Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. George Bush I named him ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman was our man in Riyadh when Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and 500,000 U.S. troops arrived to evict the army of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council — and he began to speak out.

He opposed the bombing of Serbia and said aloud what few privately deny: Reflexive support for Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world. Read More…

Gideon Rachman is in my mind the world’s best foreign-policy journalist– I may have said that before on @TAC. He is always clear, informative, and very rarely ideological, even on his blog.

At the moment, he is in Afghanistan. His post yesterday is worth reading entirely and quoting here at length:

The Nato people here are very keen to drum home the message that “Kabul is not surrounded”. Still, if you want to visit the “forward operating base” of the US troops based forty miles south of here, in Logar province, you most definitely do not drive. We took a Blackhawk helicopter out there (as in the movie “Blackhawk Down”). Half-way through the journey, our machine-gunner began to fire bursts of bullets into the deserted-looking mountains below us. It was too noisy to ask him whether he had spotted some “bad guys” as the Americans like to call them. But it later transpired that he was just having a laugh, or rather “testing my weapon” by shooting at barren ground. …

You can see the problem in the way that Nato forces drive around Kabul. They are so worried by the threat of suicide attacks or roadside bombs that they travel only in full body-armour and in armoured vehicles. They are also under instructions never to stop, since that makes them vulnerable. As a result, they are the worst road-hogs you have ever seen. Getting a lift back from Kabul airport with the British, our vehicle got held up in traffic. So we simply drove across the central reservation into the opposite lane and straight into the oncoming traffic, scattering vehicles and pedestrians as we went. I told this story to a western civilian, who sighed – “great way to win hearts and minds.” Some diplomats here argue that the military are misapplying “Baghdad rules”, to a situation that is actually less perilous.

Isn’t that story about the “road hogs” a perfect metaphor for the bungling Western interference in the Greater Middle East of recent years?

Bernard Chapin at Pajamas Media offers one of the more revealing glimpses inside the cultish bubble that movement conservatism has become. Opining on the tired Limbaugh Frum Controversy, Chapin states:

Sadly, merely pillorying Limbaugh on his blog was not enough for Frum. A week later he published a cover story at Newsweek entitled “Why Rush Is Wrong.” His choice of media outlets was suspicious. Newsweek does not present information; it sculpts, manipulates, and slants it . . .

That Frum excoriated Limbaugh in the pages of a roach’s den of radicalism tells us much about his loyalties — he doesn’t have any. Like money deposited from the Reichsbank in the 1940s, there’s blood on the gold from which he was paid. His is a betrayal of biblical proportions: David slept with Goliath.

There is no point in being sensitive in regards to this fellow. He’s crossed the Oprahcon. Despite his Harvard education and bloated curriculum vitae, David Frum is not worthy of licking the tobacco from Limbaugh’s famously nicotine-stained fingers. In the foxhole that is contemporary politics, would you rather fight alongside a lion like Rush Limbaugh or a fop like David Frum? I’ll let readers decide for themselves. (emphasis added)

It is clear from Chapin’s rhetoric that he doesn’t so much believe that Frum’s criticism of Limbaugh is incorrect, though he does believe that, but that it is an act of treachery. In the brief passage I quote, he calls Frum disloyal, compares publishing for pay in Newsweek to Nazis stealing the valuables of Jews and indulges in some bizarre imagery. What kind of sick person imagines David Frum licking the tobacco stains from Rush Limbaugh’s fingers? Chapin seems to consider Limbaugh to be a religious figure who must be treated with reverence. It isn’t a matter of who is right or wrong, but of questions one dare not even raise.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds posts a letter from a bubblefied reader:

I think there is a very serious, very important issue here.

The President publicly identifies a private citizen (Limbaugh) for vilification, and his spokesmen repeat it several times. Then a “major” publication calls for his silencing on their cover. Furthermore, this citizen is already controversial, and he is supported by only one-third of the people, making him a sort of pariah and easy victim.

There are many deluded wackos out there like Sirhan Sirhan and Hinckley who might take all this as orders to kill Limbaugh. God forbid such lunacy! It would constitute a giant step towards the nazification of America, and it would have been instigated by the President and the press.

I wrote a letter to my Congressman Frank R. Wolf today after reading his Washington Post op-ed defending the defenestration of Charles Freeman.  If any other TAC readers are in the 10th congressional district of Virginia they might want  to also write to the congressman if they feel strongly about the issue.  Here is what I wrote:

“Congressman Wolf, I am a lifelong Republican who has voted for you six times, but will not do so again as long as the Democrats come up with a candidate who is more acceptable than Judy Feder.  Your op-ed in today’s Washington Post was a disgraceful bit of pandering.  You describe Charles Freeman’s claim that he was torpedoed by the Israel lobby as “disingenuous,” but it is you who are disingenuous when you twist the argument to make it appear that Freeman somehow supports Chinese civil rights violations, atrocities in Sudan, and Islamic fundamentalists.  You know perfectly well that he supports none of those things, and besides which, how is it a disqualifier to serve on the board of a Chinese company or a council partly funded by Saudi Arabia when it appears perfectly acceptable to serve in the Israeli Army and still become chief of staff to the president of the United States?  Did you speak out against Rahm Emanuel?

“I respected your sponsorship of the Iraq Studies Group which was basically discredited by the same people who have gone after Freeman using the same tactics, namely wholesale distortion and ad hominem attacks.  Are you claiming that the Israel Lobby did not mount a sustained effort to smear Freeman?  Did you not read about how that effort was headed by Steve Rosen, former AIPAC official who is currently in court facing charges of espionage on behalf of Israel?  Doesn’t it disturb you that a powerful well funded domestic lobby supported by an enabling media is able to skew US foreign policy in an important part of the world and even stifle dissenting views such as those expressed by Freeman?  Your pretense that the Israel lobby and its defense of Israel right or wrong was not the major element in the smearing of Freeman will just not wash.  Your colleagues in congress Senator Schumer and Congressman Steven Israel were a lot more candid than you, admitting that it was about Israel, so why this red herring from you?  Just once I would like to see Congress do something that is in the US national interest and not just a payoff to some powerful interest group.” 

 

By the choices we make, we define ourselves. We reveal our biases and beliefs. And so, too, do our institutions.

In writing the $789 billion stimulus bill, Congress revealed that, for all its “Buy American” blather, it does not truly put America first. It does not believe that 10 million jobless Americans, in the country their fathers built, should receive any preference in hiring 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens who broke into this country and owe her no loyalty, allegiance or love.

Is this a slur on the patriotism of some of our congressmen? You betcha.

What other conclusion can one reach after Congress refused to require that employers on construction projects, paid for by U.S. tax dollars in the stimulus bill, verify that their workers are Americans?

For that is precisely what Congress did.

The first paragraph of the front-page story in USA Today says it all. “Los Angeles–Tens of thousands of jobs created by the economic stimulus law could end up filled by illegal immigrants, particularly in big states like California where undocumented workers are heavily represented in construction, experts on both sides of the issue say.”

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal aliens will take 300,000 of the 2 million construction jobs to be created by the stimulus bill. The CIS figure is based on Census Bureau estimates that 15 percent of all construction workers are illegal aliens or immigrants who are not authorized to work in the United States.

Robert Rector of Heritage Foundation concurs with the figures on the number of jobs Congress just voted to give to non-Americans.

“Without specific mechanisms to ensure that workers are U.S. citizens or legally authorized to work, it is likely that 15 percent of these workers, or 300,000, would be illegal immigrants.”

Other experts put the figure far higher than 15 percent, and certainly higher in California and other Southwestern states, where illegals tend to congregate.

In taking these jobs, illegals will be shouldering aside unemployed Americans. Yet Congress could have, with one vote, guaranteed that virtually every job paid for by U.S. taxpayers would go to U.S. workers.

How? By mandating that all beneficiaries of stimulus money use the E-Verify program of the Department of Homeland Security, which lets employers check the validity of the Social Security number of all new hires. E-Verify is available on a voluntary basis. It is simple, swift and easy to use.

Indeed, E-Verify is becoming standard operating procedure for U.S. businesses that wish to obey the law. According to NumbersUSA, U.S. businesses have used E-Verify in 3 million inquiries this year alone. That is almost half the total of 6.6 million inquiries for all of 2008 and five times the rate of use in 2007.

E-Verify is a smashing success with an accuracy rate of over 99 percent that holds out promise of a day when every employer in America will be able to ensure that every employee is an American or someone authorized to work here. At its rising rate of use, one-fourth to one-third of all new hires could soon be checked by E-Verify.

Isn’t this what we all want, what we have all sought — an easy, verifiable, non-intrusive, inexpensive way for businesses to assure that those they hire are in our country legally?

No, it is not. For Tuesday night, the Senate voted to strip away this protection of American workers from the unfair competition of illegal aliens.

The Senate voted 50 to 47 to end E-Verify in six months, when current funding runs out. Sen. Jeff Sessions’ proposal to give this successful program five more years was rejected 50 to 47.

Republicans and seven Democrats voted to save E-Verify. But only Democrats voted to kill it.

How did Harry Reid kill the E-Verify provision that was in the House version of the stimulus package? The Senate was not even allowed to vote on it. And when the two bills were reconciled in the Pelosi-Reid conference, E-Verify disappeared.

This was a huge victory for La Raza and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose lobbyists have labored long to ensure that their member companies pay no price for dumping U.S. workers and hiring illegal aliens.

Yet, this battle is not over. If Americans understand that the Pelosi-Reid Democrats have no problem with illegal aliens taking jobs from unemployed Americans, that party can be made to pay a price in 2010.

As of today, there exists a Republican-Blue Dog Democrat coalition in both houses that is serious about putting our country and countrymen first, be it on spending bills or trade measures. This is a foundation to build on.

E-Verify is not dead. For the Reid-Pelosi-Obama Left cannot survive the perception that it is aiding and abetting illegal aliens in taking the jobs of unemployed Americans.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a post calling me “thuggish”– twice in one short post actually. He doesn’t like that I wondered whether he might soon call Sen. Patrick Leahy an anti-Semite for comparing the plight of the Palestinians to that of his Irish ancestors –”hunted because they had fought to practice their own religion… hunted because they wanted to keep their land..”" Jeffrey’s answer is No, definitely not, he has the highest regard for Leahy, etc. How on earth could I have suspected such a thing?

It was probably this , Goldberg’s long review of Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby”. Instead of engaging the arguments made by two very serious and highly regarded scholars about Israel and its status as America’s most treasured ally, Goldberg took his readers on a three thousand word tour through Osama Bin Laden (and his distaste for “usury”) Father Coughlin, David Duke, Mel Gibson while very drunk, Louis Farrakhan, before asking why Walt and Mearsheimer would want to join this “odious tradition.” (He actually called the tradition “negative Judeocentrism” but that was simply being clever.)

Anyway, his resort to smearing those whose foreign policy views about Israel he dislikes by claiming they have joined the “tradition” of Coughlin, Duke, etc. made Jeffrey a pretty big mover in the labeling of (gentile) critics of Israel as anti-Semites game. Maybe, given his umbrage over how I thought he might treat Leahy, he has regrets about that review. If so, I’d like to hear them, and I’d revise my opinion of him.

I was absolutely, positively surprised when Ambassador Freeman was selected for the position of Chairman of the NIC and absolutely not surprised when the idea was attacked by the usual suspects, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration. Like Gideon Rachman from the FT I believed that being a Realist was the main reason why Freeman was chosen for the job, which was quite refreshing move after eights years of having the members of the Faith-Based Community dominating the thinking in Washington. You don’t have to be a genius to conclude that Obama didn’t want to pickup a political fight with powerful players in Washington at a time when needs every vote in Congress and over an issue that he doesn’t care about. In any case, after marginalizing Zbigniew Brzezinski (who had served in the Carter Administration) and getting rid of Robert Malley (who had served in the Clinton Administration), much of the Obama’s Middle East policy is being managed now by uninspiring figures committed to the conventional wisdom, including the lifeless George Mitchell (who had served in the Clinton Administration), reflecting the White House’s decision to place the Mideast on the backburner while creating the impression that it’s “doing something.” I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I’d prove to be wrong on this.