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What’s In A Name?

The website where you’re reading this is called “The American Conservative,” as is the magazine with which it is affiliated. I admit to being ambivalent about the name – partly for my own personal reasons (I don’t particularly identify as a conservative these days) and partly for marketing reasons (I’d like us to reach an […]

The website where you’re reading this is called “The American Conservative,” as is the magazine with which it is affiliated. I admit to being ambivalent about the name – partly for my own personal reasons (I don’t particularly identify as a conservative these days) and partly for marketing reasons (I’d like us to reach an audience beyond self-identified conservatives and opinion journalism junkies, and I think the name gets in the way of that – in a way that a name like, say “The American Scene,” where I used to write, would not).

But we have that name for a reason: because the magazine is dedicated to framing itself as a coming from a conservative perspective. We writers all disagree on precisely what that might mean, and we also may disagree on how much it matters whether a perspective is so defined – but to those who edit and publish the magazine, it matters a lot.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my whine that, in a post entitled “Can Conservatives Be Persuaded To Raise the Minimum Wage” there’s no recognition that a year ago “The American Conservative” published a big piece by the publisher calling for a substantial rise in the Federal minimum wage, and followed it up with many subsequent pieces on the same subject.

We’re not going to persuade anyone, after all, if people don’t remember what we’ve argued.

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What's In A Name?

Incidentally, people often pronounce “Rye-hahn” as “Ray-hahn.”  I don’t lose too much sleep over it. ~Reihan It’s a good thing that I don’t rely on Bollywood movies to guide my pronunciation. On a serious note, Reihan is right that it isn’t a huge blunder to misremember Zardari’s name or mispronounce Ahmadinejad’s name.  It probably should undermine McCain’s […]

Incidentally, people often pronounce “Rye-hahn” as “Ray-hahn.”  I don’t lose too much sleep over it. ~Reihan

It’s a good thing that I don’t rely on Bollywood movies to guide my pronunciation.

On a serious note, Reihan is right that it isn’t a huge blunder to misremember Zardari’s name or mispronounce Ahmadinejad’s name.  It probably should undermine McCain’s claim to be some kind of legendary master of foreign affairs just a little, but I am reminded of Clinton’s difficulty pronouncing Medvedev during a primary debate, which was not as important as the fact that she knew who he was and what role he was playing in Russian politics.  The thing that is troubling about McCain is not that he said Ahmadinejad’s name wrong on one occasion, but that he thinks demagoguing against Ahmadinejad is the equivalent of having a real Iran policy or that he thinks Ahmadinejad is in charge of the Iranian nuclear program.  I would rather have someone who didn’t pronounce Putin’s name correctly but didn’t want to go to war with Russia over Caucasian states in which we have no vital interests rather than having the reverse.  The thing to bear in mind is that on substantive policy questions McCain fails the test time and again.  He could be fluent in Farsi, and nothing would change his horrendous judgement on foreign policy.

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