Well worth reading is George Willโs column today, engaging in the debate sparked by Peter Beinart, on the need to โfundamentally reshapeโ liberalism to address the reality of Islamic fascism and terrorism.
Money quotes:
Beinart aspires to change the Democratic base so that it will accept a presidential candidate who espouses 1947 liberalism โ someone for whom anti-totalitarianism is the organizing imperative of politics.
But how do you begin reforming a base polluted by the Michael Moore-MoveOn.org faction?
Moore says โthere is no terrorist threatโ โ that terrorism is a threat no greater than traffic accidents.
MoveOn says that โlarge portions of the Bill of Rightsโ have been โnullifiedโ โ presumably, then, the federal judiciary also has been nullified.
When Moore sat in Jimmy Carterโs box at the 2004 Democratic convention, voters drew conclusions about the partyโs sobriety.
Liberalismโs problem with the Moore-MoveOn faction is similar to conservatismโs 1960s embarrassment from the claimed kinship of the John Birch Society, whose leader called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a Kremlin agent.
The reason that Moore is hostile to U.S. power is that he despises the American people from whom the power arises. Mooreโs assertion that America โis known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globeโ is a corollary of Kuttnerism, the doctrine that โmiddle Americaโ is viciously ignorant.
Beinart is bravely trying to do for liberalism what another magazine editor โ the National Reviewโs William Buckley โ did for conservatism by excommunicating the Birchers from the conservative movement. But Buckleyโs task was easier than Beinartโs will be because the Birchers were never remotely as central to the Republican base as the Moore-MoveOn faction is to the Democratic base.






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