Mark Steyn, describing President Bush’s recent interview with a group of conservative journalists:
The president’s view is that before it was Iraq it was Israel; with these guys, it’s always something. Sometimes it’s East Timor — which used to be the leftie cause du jour. And, riffing on the endless list of Islamist grievances, Bush concluded with an exasperated: “If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.” That’d make a great slogan: it encapsulates simultaneously the Islamists’ inability to move on millennium-in millennium-out, plus their propensity for instant new “root causes,” and their utter lack of proportion.
* * *
Bush said something, en passant, that I brooded on all the way home. Asked about poll numbers, he said that 25 percent of the population are always against the war — any war.
* * *
Too many of us are only good at enjoying freedom. That war-is-never-the-answer 25 percent are in essence saying that there’s nothing about America worth fighting for, and that, ultimately, the continuation of their society is a bet on the kindness of strangers — on the goodnaturedness of Kim Jong Il and the mullahs and al-Qaida and what the president called “al-Qaida lookalikes and al-Qaida wannabes” and whatever nuclear combination thereof comes down the pike. Some of us don’t reckon that’s a good bet, and think America’s arms-are-for-hugging crowd need to get real.
Post a Comment