This love affair has been blossoming ever since Obama wooed the pro-war, any war crowd with prospects of more of the chest-thumping, second-hand thrills of overseas conquests that W had given them. But Obama’s latest moves in Afghanistan have made them positively giddy.
Here’s David Horowitz ordering war supporters to tone down their criticism of Obama’s domestic Big-Government agenda:
Even as astute a conservative thinker as Mark Steyn has been swept up in the tide that thinks Obama is a “transformative” radical. But look again at his approach to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, as noted, he is carrying out the Bush policies – the same that he once joined his fellow Democrats in condemning. And that should be reassuring to anyone concerned about where he is heading as commander-in-chief.
After all, what’s a little socialism among fellow war supporters?
But for sheer bloodlust masquerading as patriotism, you can’t beat this post entitled, “Obama’s Neoconservative Pragmatism”:
Of course, “losertarians” like Justin Raimondo have made common cause the leading factions of the neo-Stalinist left, and here we have Daniel Larison excoriating the Iraq deployment as “folly,” as if U.S. forces under General David Petraeus had not engineered the greatest military/strategic turnaround since World War II. And this is after even some of the most hardline “paleos” have conceded to reality in acknowledging the magnitude of the American victory.
Holy cow, where to start? This kind of happy war talk warps right past “willful suspension of disbelief” into the realm of the hallucinatory.
First, what military masterminds are calling the Iraq timebomb a victory on the scale of WWII? I may not be an historian, but I do know the Allies didn’t win by paying off Nazi war leaders and allowing them to organize their own militias, which is what’s behind the momentary lull in Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite civil war.
But then, what else can we expect from a blogger who believes the Battle of Kasserine Pass was an Allied victory over the Axis? Is it possible an alleged Neocon has never watched “Patton”?
And those “hardline ‘paleos’” he claims have conceded to the magnificent victory in Iraq are not paleoconservatives, but libertarians who acknowledged the lull in Iraqi violence. But there’s an even deeper problem with that statement: there’s no such concession of victory. One of the libertarians cited, Thomas Knapp, even demanded this of the author in the comments: “I would appreciate that your lie either be redacted or corrected.”
But that ain’t gonna happen. In the phantasmagoric world of the vicarious warrior, sweet victory shines bright upon every display of Imperial power. Can’t you see how that luster reflects the goodness of those who cheer it on? Of course you can.