Starting today, blogging will have to be cut back significantly.  Unlike previous (failed) attempts to get away from Eunomia, this time I will be out of town for some extended periods and will be increasingly busy in the coming quarter.  Thursday I go to Boston/Brookline for a conference on patristic studies, where I am talking about (what else?) monotheletism and St. Anastasios of Sinai (he was agin’ it, if you couldn’t have guessed).  The following weekend I will be down in my old college-day stomping grounds of Virginia for an ISI conference on liberty and community in the American tradition, where I expect I will be meeting a few of my blogging and magazine colleagues for the first time in the person.  Then comes the start of the quarter and the class that I will be working on as a T.A., followed by Holy Week and then shortly after that another ISI conference up in Mecosta.  In May, the medievalist conference at Kalamazoo awaits.  Happily, I got a head start on both conference papers earlier, so both have been ready for a while.

So, since time is limited this week, I do not have time to critique fully the piles upon piles of nonsense that D’Souza and Sullivan have dumped onto the Web this week.  Most people will not even bother to read this drivel, and I don’t blame them.  D’Souza threatens to dump still more text on those intrepid readers who dare to click the first two links.  Suffice it to say that no one espousing the mad, “if you can’t beat them, join them,” ecumenical jihad proposal of D’Souza would be allowed to write a defense at NRO or anywhere else on the jingo right if he were not blindly, unswervingly supportive of interventionist foreign policy.  Indeed, those who question or reject that foreign policy on patriotic and traditionalist grounds will sooner get raked over the coals and denounced with quasi-religious zeal than they will ever receive a fair hearing from these people, while the civilisational traitor D’Souza is held warmly to their bosom and gently comforted after all the mean things that have been said about him.  

The theocons can take care of themselves against Sullivan’s aimless rambling, but given the current atmosphere in which blaming the Christians seems to have taken on new importance for secular and “libertarian” conservatives they might not want to wait too long to dispute the conflation of their views with those of D’Souza, even when it is Sullivan making the argument.  Some of the less principled “atheist conservatives” might just pick up that argument and run with it, which will cause everyone a lot of headaches down the road.

Update: Ross has taken up the challenge, and knocks down Sullivan’s review without even having to warm up.