Monday, January 29, 2007
Posted by: Dean Barnett at 8:57 AM
Over the weekend at the National Review-sponsored conservative summit, Bill Kristol debated former Reagan-lackey-turned-leftist darling Lawrence Korb over the merits of the surge. I’ve seen Korb in action before; he’s not your father’s liberal.
When I last saw Korb, he was debating Victor Davis Hanson and blithely dismissing the deaths of 2 million Cambodians and Vietnamese with the rhetorical equivalent of, “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” The “omelet” in question was the American victory in the Cold War which Korb directly attributed to the United States’ abandonment of Vietnam.
And no, I’m not making this up. For some reason, Korb is a representative of the left in such forums, probably because he’s got that résumé item about serving under Reagan. In regards to intellect, though, Korb isn’t exactly a formidable entity.
The Kristol-Korb debate was probably the biggest mismatch since Super Bowl XX (Bears 45 – Patriots 10 in a game not nearly as close as the final score indicates). Korb was up to old tricks yesterday; according to Paul at Powerline, Korb asserted that any bloodbath caused by a precipitous American withdrawl from Iraq would be the Iraqis’ problem. Had I not witnessed Korb apply the identical moral construct to Vietnam, I may have suspected that Paul had missed some nuance in the man’s presentation.
Speaking of nuance, John Kerry continued to do as John Kerry does, cozying up to a former Iranian dictator on Saturday while belittling his own country. Peggy Noonan on Friday published a column lauding Kerry’s lachrymose farewell to the ’08 presidential campaign and predicting that it might be a beginning of a new seriousness. Whoops!
The John Kerrys of the world, and there are many of them in both parties in Congress, may be very serious about their political ambition, but they are fundamentally frivolous about matters of greater consequence.
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