Desperation of the X42 apologists: Hugh Hewitt on Joshua Marshall's bitter attempts at redemption

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | January 1, 2003 (Happy New Year!) | Hugh Hewitt

[JohnHuang2]

It took more than 30 years for the achievements of the World War II generation to come completely into focus, and the appreciation of their valor grew steadily for the next 20 years. Herman Wouk and Stephen Ambrose were among those who captured the drama and the sacrifice, the bravery and the stubborn determination of the men who fought and won the battle against fascism. Those who came of age shortly after those epic battles have lived in their shadows, and the enormity of the threat and the evil of the '40s eclipsed even the enormous courage of the men who fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The passage of time and events has also reduced the reputations of the leaders who shrank from confronting the evil in those times, and there is no way to redeem the indecision and craven timidity they displayed then.

We have entered another era of epic events, and we are on the cusp of a year that almost certainly will be as consequential for the world's future as any of the early years in the struggle with fascism. Iraq will be invaded, North Korea confronted and al-Qaida pursued throughout 2003. If the resolution of free peoples to follow these three courses flags in any significant way, the results will be as serious as the consequences that flowed when the French and the British did nothing when Hitler first began to re-arm, then sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936 and then absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938. The various peace caucuses sputter at such obvious comparisons because of the undeniable instruction they provide.

The awful toll of World War II was not inevitable. It could have been prevented. But the people who would have prevented it were not in power. They were backbenchers, and they were widely derided by the powerful forces of appeasement, which in those days was not a pejorative term. Those who warned against Hitler and who counseled re-armament and blunt opposition to Germany's many provocations were mocked and scolded. Only the horrible results of their being ignored would prove them right – the sort of comfort no decent man ever covets.

Which brings me to Joshua Micah Marshall, rising star of the left, and a recent convert (June 2002, by his own admission) to the necessity of toppling Saddam, though still trying hard to make the Clinton gang other than the total dupes they turned out to be on North Korea. Marshall is a bright fellow and very witty. As is usually the case with the left, witty is mistaken for wise, clever arguments are mistaken for persuasive arguments and wishful thinking is mistaken for hard facts.

It is tough, after all, to be a defender of positions and people exposed as terribly incompetent and foolish.

I don't mind Marshall trying his best to cover for the foreign-policy sins of eight years of Clinton fecklessness. To assess the effort as "threadbare" would be generous. It is a lot like the dilemma faced by the friends of Chamberlain, Baldwin and MacDonald: There are some political decisions that cannot be defended, and silence is the best tactic.

Marshall and others, however, have decided that the best defense is a good offense, and are trying to pin the perfidy of North Korea – abetted by the see-no-evil resoluteness of the Clinton team – on the Bush administration. In doing so, Marshall uses an absolutely childish tactic of attributing psychological defects to the people who were correct about North Korea and most other matters all along. Marshall wrote just this week that:

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

I can't give you precise lunch-money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I'm getting at.

I do know some of these guys, and I do know what Marshall is getting at: He's getting at the fact that for eight long years of Clinton amateurism, these guys were right on every major foreign-policy issue. To be specific on just one issue: When the sands of the hourglass were running out on Clinton, just prior to the orgy of parties and pardons, the great legacy hunt was leading to a Clinton visit to North Korea and "normalization" of relations with the despot who was cheating us then, even as he starved his own people.

It was Gaffney, Perle and a few others who raised the alarms and prevented another massive, self-inflicted wound. In short, what Marshall is "getting at" is that there are experts who have been right for so long that they deserve to be listened to, and will be listened to unless the media is schooled in ignoring them. Thus the mockery. Marshall and the others who cheered the Clinton team then and now have no credibility on North Korea. They are bitter. And the bitterness shows in such taunts as the Web makes easy to dispense.

It can't work, of course, because the events are too serious and the record too clear. You can't blame 9-11 and the growth of al-Qaida, or North Korea's permission slip to cheat, or Iran going nuclear on the Bush administration any more than the invasion of Poland can be laid at Churchill's feet. To even try is to reveal either an intellectual desperation or a fundamental incoherence so extreme as to disqualify the writer even from areas where he or she might actually have some insight.

2003 will be a momentous year, and those who want to comment on its events would do well to prepare to do so by reading the second volume in William Manchester's biography of Churchill, "Alone." Clinton's presidency, like the governments of Baldwin and Chamberlain, cannot be redeemed by attacks on the Bush administration, and the foreign policy "elites" of the left cannot have their tattered credibility restored via attacks on the experts who were first right about the Soviets and who have now been shown to be right about our current set of enemies.

In fact, given the record of Gaffney and his colleagues, Marshall might want to link to the Center For Security Policy and start reading. Talent is a terrible thing to waste.

[JohnHuang2]

January 1, 2003 (Happy New Year!)

Quote of the Day by owl

[JohnHuang2]

Hugh Hewitt Mega Ping!!

[Howie]

Bullseye! Good one!

[backhoe]

-The Atomic Genie- what we know about North Korea's Nuclear program--

-Bush and Clinton and 911- some facts... --

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

There is a difference between WW2 and now. Back then, we had a minority party, the GOP, which fully supported the war effort. Today, we have the McDermit and terrorist pardoning party that hopes desperately to put that old TV monopoly blanket over our heads again. Maybe if they can limit free speech on the internet, that might help them. And there are subtle, devious efforts at just that.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

[Bowing to your majesty with a flourish.] Thank you for all you do, Your Majesty. FReegards....

[kassie]

Clinton amateurism

Those two words say a lot.

[Sgt_Schultze]

I was in jr. high school. I remember the shakedowns for lunch money. The confrontations weren't conducted by the "cool kids" as Mitchell describes it. These muggings were by the disaffected leftist thugs. The Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the school were always the bad guys.

Why all the attempts to recussitate the lagacy of X42? It seems to be just an attempt to bolster clinton so their contemproaneous support of the impeached former president isn't shown to have been a colossal intellectual failure.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

That's funny.... I thought outrage as a result of an injustice done was a legitiminate emotion on the left. Instead, stealing lunch money appears to be seen as "cool" on the left.

Ah, well, as one of the small, glasses-wearing kids, who was regularly beaten-up in grade school, I learned something around 6th or 7th grade. How to put up enough of a fight to protect myself. Putting on a few extra pounds didn't hurt, either, though I stayed short and glasses-wearing.

But here's what cold-eyed realism taught me. You fight back -- act as a hawk -- and the burnout bullies backed off.

[RonDog]

"...I don't mind Marshall trying his best to cover for the foreign-policy sins of eight years of Clinton fecklessness. To assess the effort as "threadbare" would be generous. It is a lot like the dilemma faced by the friends of Chamberlain, Baldwin and MacDonald: There are some political decisions that cannot be defended, and silence is the best tactic.

Marshall and others, however, have decided that the best defense is a good offense, and are trying to pin the perfidy of North Korea – abetted by the see-no-evil resoluteness of the Clinton team – on the Bush administration. In doing so, Marshall uses an absolutely childish tactic of attributing psychological defects to the people who were correct about North Korea and most other matters all along. Marshall wrote just this week that:

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

I can't give you precise lunch-money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I'm getting at.

I do know some of these guys, and I do know what Marshall is getting at: He's getting at the fact that for eight long years of Clinton amateurism, these guys were right on every major foreign-policy issue. To be specific on just one issue: When the sands of the hourglass were running out on Clinton, just prior to the orgy of parties and pardons, the great legacy hunt was leading to a Clinton visit to North Korea and "normalization" of relations with the despot who was cheating us then, even as he starved his own people.

It was Gaffney, Perle and a few others who raised the alarms and prevented another massive, self-inflicted wound..." - Hugh Hewitt

See also, from one of Hugh's favorite left-wing rags, The New Republic - FROM 1998:

Is there an anti-missile gap?
Playing Defense

By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Issue date: 08.17.98
Post date: 07.31.98

As an intercontinental ballistic missile streaks from the Middle East toward the United States, an apoplectic American general stands before an array of flashing computer consoles. Grabbing a red telephone, he exclaims, "Mr. President, I can't shoot it down! We don't have a defense. There's nothing I can do about it." Does this sound like a scene from a Hollywood thriller? Guess again. It's an excerpt from a new videotape made by the Center for Security Policy, a think tank run by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney. The videotape's title: "America the Vulnerable."

Until a few weeks ago, the video might have seemed the stuff of right-wing paranoia. Gaffney himself has consistently been the hardest of the hard-liners. But then, in July, a bipartisan commission led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld released its report on missile technology. Overnight, the debate changed.

The report said that official U.S. intelligence assessments have grossly underestimated the time it would take countries such as Iran or North Korea to develop and field an intercontinental ballistic missile. According to the report, these countries are using huge underground laboratories (invisible to U.S. spy satellites) to test weaponry, and it would take them only five years, not the 15 predicted by the Clinton administration's November 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, to build it. "Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads," the report said, "pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and its friends and allies.... We are unanimous in our assessment of the threat, an assessment which differs from published intelligence estimates." Days later, Iran tested the Shahab-3 medium-range missile.

The Rumsfeld Commission set out to diagnose a problem--not to prescribe a solution. But for conservatives, who have been searching for a foreign policy wedge issue ever since the Berlin Wall fell, the report was heaven-sent. "If we do not decide now to deploy a rudimentary shield," New York Times columnist William Safire warned, "we run the risk of Iran or North Korea or Libya building the weapon that will enable it to get the drop on us." "It's a missile-gap problem," says Frank Gaffney. Gaffney had just gotten off the phone with an adviser to Steve Forbes--who, like every other GOP presidential contender from George W. Bush to Gary Bauer, plans to back a missile defense program come 2000.

Ever since March 1983, when Ronald Reagan--to the astonishment of his own advisers--announced in a nationwide address that the United States would develop a space-based missile defense known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, liberals and conservatives have fought over the idea. Democrats argued that arms control was the only way to go. A leakproof, invulnerable missile shield was impossible to build, they said, not to mention prohibitively expensive. In the end, the skeptics won. Although Reagan himself never abandoned the dream of SDI, he also turned out to be a great arms controller. He signed sweeping arms-reduction agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaffney and other hawks resigned from the Pentagon in protest..."

CLICK HERE for more

An interesting man, Mr. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. - eh?

.

If you listen to Hugh Hewitt, or read his WND commentaries,
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Please post your comments, and BUMP!

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[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[bonesmccoy]

The retrospective view of history can be coolly focused on productivity and fact. The parallels between first two terms of FDR and the two terms of Clinton are interesting.

Clinton's economy ran on the lies of leftist executives who falsely elevated their stock valuation. FDR's economy had no such opportunity, but leftist economists like Kennedy ran the early SEC.

Clinton had poor gov't foreign policy tactics. FDR also had poor foreign policy tactics. Under FDR, Hitler expanded across Europe, Italy in Africa, and Japan in Asia. Under Clinton, AQ expanded a "religious" totalitarian regime across Arabia and North Korea developed nuclear weapons.

Happy 2003. Let's make it a better one than previous years.

[RonDog]

Marshall wrote just this week that:

"It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids..."

See also, from:

Feeley's 'chickenhawk' blunder: Hugh Hewitt slams 'all hat, no cattle' Dem
WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, October 2, 2002 | Hugh Hewitt
Posted on 10/02/2002 0:04 AM PDT by JohnHuang2

Colorado's 7th Congressional District is an "open" seat, created by judicial order and carefully balanced between registered Republicans and Democrats. It is a shame that the Democratic candidate for the seat, Mike Feeley, couldn't have been as balanced as the district he seeks to represent.

This is a story of one candidate's meltdown, but it also an indictment of the leadership of Tom Daschle and Al Gore. Feeley could understandably claim that these two leaders made him do "it."

What is it that he did? Feeley branded the president and vice president as "chickenhawks" and called Cheney an "SOB" to boot. Then he tried to squirm out of having done so.

Here's what happened.

The Republican candidate is businessman and community stalwart Bob Beauprez. Beauprez is believed to have a small but significant lead in the race which both parties have targeted. Beauprez and Feeley met to debate on the same night that Tom Daschle melted down on the Senate floor, two days after Al Gore went hard left in a bid to lead the Democratic peace caucus.

Feeley must have been carried away by the rhetoric he heard that day, as he used the debate to demand an apology from the president. If the president didn't apologize to the Senate, Feeley said, "we'll play politics." He continued, "I'll talk about every chickenhawk Republican running for office – who never served a day in uniform defending his nation – asking for your vote so they can go to Washington and send someone else's child to war."

Reaction was immediate and negative..." - Hugh Hewitt

CLICK HERE for more

-- snip --

The definitive analysis on this "chicken hawk" fallacy was written in a Washington COMPost article - which we are not allowed to post the FULL TEXT of here, but here is the HEART of that unassailable argument:

"...The second variant of "chicken hawk" is that veterans per se are uniquely qualified to make judgments on matters of war and peace.

How does that work, though? Does a former airborne ranger get twice as loud a voice as an ICBM crew chief? Does the stateside finance corps lieutenant count more than the civilian who came under fire running an aid mission in Mogadishu?
According to this view, to fill a senior policy position during a war one would of course prefer a West Point graduate who had led a regiment in combat, as opposed to a corporate lawyer turned politician with a few weeks' experience in a militia unit that did not fight.
The former profile fits Jefferson Davis and the latter Abraham Lincoln. Not only did Davis turn against the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, he was a poor commander in chief, while Lincoln was the greatest of our war presidents.

Being a veteran is no guarantee of strategic wisdom..."

more

-- snip --

To: RonDog

Many thanks for the excerpt and the link. That is absolutely brilliant ! And to think that this was actually printed in the Washinton COMpost, is even more stunning !

I wish that I could have heard that show. The posted article is mighty good . :-)

11 posted on 10/02/2002 0:38 AM PDT by nopardons

-- snip --

Hard to believe, but it is still there:

washingtonpost.com

Hunting 'Chicken Hawks'

By Eliot A. Cohen

Thursday, September 5, 2002; Page A31

See also, from http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens.asp

The historical record illustrates that the judgment of soldiers is not always on the money. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1990, Colin Powell preferred sanctions against Iraq to the use of force. Eliot Cohen, author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, pointed out in the Post the day after Webb's article appeared that George Marshall, the greatest soldier-statesman since Washington, opposed arms shipments to Great Britain in 1940. Most of the policymakers who involved the United States in Vietnam were veterans of World War II...

15 posted on 10/02/2002 0:50 AM PDT by RonDog

[tom paine 2]

Bush will be cleaning up Clintoon's messes for as long as he is in office.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks for the ping to another great article from Hewitt!

Thanks for posting this John!

Bush Doctrine Unfolds :

To find all articles tagged or indexed using Bush Doctrine Unfold , click below:
	click here >>>	Bush Doctrine Unfold	<<< click here
(To view all FR Bump Lists, click here)

If you want on or off this list send me a note!

[Rocko]

Bump.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Perhaps you are referring to this?

Outflanked Democrats Wonder How to Catch Up in Media Wars

[SierraWasp]

"As is usually the case with the left, witty is mistaken for wise, clever arguments are mistaken for persuasive arguments and wishful thinking is mistaken for hard facts."

This one sentence is so "loaded" with accurate articulation of a correct perspective on the liberal leftists, who as he also says "mock" and "taunt" the ideas of those they oppose at every opportunity!

Sadly, the media find this "mocking" and "taunting" so sensational and entertaining, even "newsworthy" to the point of intentionally misleading the public, who respond to their polls with the "conventional wisdom" they learned from said media.

Unfortunately, the vicious "news" cycle compounds the falsity of the snearing and smearing! These leftists become celebrity "opinion leaders" who succeed in suffocating debate through the extreme prejudice of "Political Correctness!" They rule our institutions with false premises based on false promise, in spite of the democratic process!

I also enjoyed his statement about the time before "appeasement" became a pejoritive term. The left continually change the language and keep moving the goal posts through this same preversion of the "process!"

How many examples have each of you seen, even at the local level, from the school district meetings to the council/board meetings of this "taunting" and "mocking," smearing and queering of common sense and right thinking individuals proposals to stifel and suffocate opposing views? How often have you seen it succeed?

[Grampa Dave]

Ernest, your link to that great article is a must read.

Below is my reply to this article and it applies to this article:

Again the NY Slimes shows that it has totally lost even the little perspective they had.

The only way that socialism, communism and enviralism can last is with total control of the media.

Now the NYSLIMES, LA SLIMES, DC COMPOST, ATLANT URINAL, SF GAYRHONICLE and ABCNNBCBS no longer control what we read, hear and see. So they are upset with conservatives views and the real news getting out.

The party of death, abortion, elite racism, gay pandering, tax and spend for the perverts and Political Correctness for the first time is faced with truth and reality from conservative sources. This is driving people away their moderate base and making broken glass republicans out of many of us. This has and will cost them elections.

They will scream louder and shriller in 2003/4 about our bias. The reality is that we are getting real news instead of their left wing biased PR pushing DNC mantras and policies of self destruction. The genie is out of the media bottle, and they can't put it back in.

Good Morning and Happy New Year to both of you. We didn't get rid of the last of our party until 2:30 this morning. By the time we go the place cleaned up, we were well into the New Year. So I'm getting a slow start.

[RonDog]

Ah, well, as one of the small, glasses-wearing kids, who was regularly beaten-up in grade school... - Celtjew Libertarian

I think that you might have identified what the psychiatrist's call "projection" from Mr. JMM's personal experience with "being attacked by the cool kids" to his imputation of this experience to Frank Gaffney...

See, for instance, THIS analysis from http://www.flakmag.com/web/jmarsh.html:

Joshua Micah Marshall's bio photo

Joshua Micah Marshall is an indisputedly good writer. His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The American Prospect and Slate. Of course, where a writer has been published is only the beginning of the story. Newspapers make humiliating mistakes. The New York Times, for example, runs a regular column by Maureen Dowd.

But Marshall keeps it real, self-publishing The Talking Points Memo, a thoughtful rumination on public affairs that is braced by the inclusion of links directly relevant to events of the day.

In fact, he typically exercises such good judgment about the things he writes that it's easy for readers to expect him to be a paragon of perceptiveness and sanity.

Not quite. J-marshall.com prominently features a photo of Marshall himself. There is, of course, no shame in showing yourself off a bit, as long as it's done with a modicum of thought.

But Marshall's photo does not betray a modicum of thought. It betrays an eight-pound brick of thought. It hints at a focus group of five or six J. Micah Marshalls, crammed into a big padded booth at a deli, arguing late into the night about the best shot to use.

J-Marsh #1: We can't use that one! Do we look smart in that one? NO! We're just sitting there!

J-Marsh #2: Sitting there wearing the Princeton sweatshirt.

J-Marsh #1: Enough about the sweatshirt already! Christ, the bio already mentions that we went to Princeton! Let's get an action shot!

J-Marsh #3: An action shot? We're a writer. Do want some sort of motion-blurred shot of us on a playing field, cogitating?

J-Marsh #4: Hey, can one of you guys pass the syrup over here?

J-Marsh #2: Take the damn syrup. Look, I like the one with the Princeton sweatshirt.

J-Marsh #1: Action shot.

J-Marsh #4: Wait, guys. How about this one? You can see the sweatshirt – but not so much it looks like we're showing off. And how about that gesture, huh? You want extreme cogitation? There's your damn action shot. That's burnin' up the page.

J-Marsh #5: My god, he's right. Boys, we've got our glamshot.

But sadly, they screwed up. While cogitation is clearly happening, the photo is not even slightly discreet about the writer's academic background. In fact, it's the precise visual equivalent of the following infamous exchange:

Person 1: So, where did you go to school?

Person 2 [coyly]: Oh, in Boston.

Person 1: Really? What school?

Person 2: Oh, you know. Harvard.

Person 1: ...

Shirt aside, perceptive J-Marsh fans might ask: Is the finger thing an accident? Of course not. In fact, it's a little awkward to contemplate how many versions of this photo were probably produced to generate this exact conjunction of head-tilt, pursed lips and weird, writerly gesture.

In fact, the name of the file itself suggests an exhaustive photo-selection process. "DESKLOOK.JPG" whispers at the existence of a secret directory stuffed full of similar images. One can easily imagine J-Marsh leaning forward over his laptop, his fashionably-ensconced eyes scanning down a list of a dozen possible choices:

DESKLOOK.JPG
DEEPTHOUGHT.JPG
IWENTTOPRINCETON.JPG
IWENTTOPRINCETON2.JPG
IWENTTOPRINCETON3.JPG
PENCILSHARPEN.JPG
STERNLOOK.JPG
WHIMSICAL!.JPG
YALESUCKS.JPG

Did he choose well?

If you ask the hoi-polloi, maybe. The ultimate barometer of the public's affections — Hot or Not? — gives Mr. Marshall's agonizingly staged glamshot a respectable 8.3 on the hot-o-meter. The Greeks only gave him a 6.3, but, hey — we all know about Greece, right? So, the general public's reaction is "favorable," to say the least.

But J-Marsh is presumably reaching out for a more sophisticated crowd than the Fritos-eating hockey fans that clog Hot or Not's virtual dive bar. And by plucking out the most elaborately staged shot imaginable, he inadvertently created an image of himself that will lead to intelligent young people flinging snowballs at his head wherever he goes, in the fond hopes of breaking his glasses...

CLICK HERE for more