American Spectator

Note to Jonah Goldberg: Don’t Waste Your Time With John Guardiano

Calvin Freiburger airport security, American Spectator, blogosphere, conservatism, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, national security, privacy, TSA, War on Terror

Jonah Goldberg doesn’t like the TSA’s new security measures (neither do I), but he thinks some of the outrage over them is disproportionate and misdirected:

I’d bet that the vast majority of TSA employees do not want to touch your junk — or mine. And if any TSA agent gives the slightest indication that junk-touching is his or her favorite part of the job, he or she should be fired immediately.

Obviously, the first people to blame for this mess are the murderers. Without them, flying wouldn’t be the soul-killing experience it is.

Yesterday, he objected to an example of that outrage from our old pal, John Guardiano, who summaries the matter as a dispute between “liberty-loving” conservatives who “see the TSA as it really is” and “authority-loving” conservatives who “see the TSA as they want it to be”:

And that’s really what rankles: the glib assertion of bad faith. How does he know his policy opponents are ensorceled by their love of authority?  Wait five minutes for the next controversy to erupt and many of Guardiano’s liberty lovers may well be on the side of authority and some of the authority lovers will be on the side of liberty.

Fundamentally, Guardiano’s argument is indistinguishable from Obama’s claims that his opponents blindly cling to their bigotry and religion and that liberals are on the side of facts and logic and reason. Only this time the blinkered ideologues are “authority-loving cons” and the intrepid empircists are “liberty loving cons.”

Why can’t Danielle Pletka and Marc Thiessen (colleagues of mine at the American Enterprise Institute for the record) simply be weighing the costs and benefits differently? Why can’t they have concluded such measures are the best way to defend liberty? How does Guardiano know what’s in their hearts?

Today, the American Spectator’s biggest hiring mistake responds with his trademark arrogance:

I’m sorry, Jonah, but if the shoe fits — and it surely does in this case — wear it!

I don’t know if Jonah intends to respond or not. On the one hand, it’s always enjoyable to see somebody like Guardiano slapped down by a more principled conservative. On the other hand, it’s probably not worth Goldberg’s time – Guardiano is, after all, a lap dog for one of the most dishonorable character assassins to ever call himself a “conservative,” and he’s already on the record having lied about one of Goldberg’s National Review colleagues, Andy McCarthy.

Flashback: A Hill to Die On

Calvin Freiburger American Spectator, conservatism, culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, marriage, progressivism

Don’t take my word for it that conservative opponents of standing for marriage – yes, even David Horowitz – are terribly, dangerously wrong. Last April, Robert Stacy McCain penned a must-read American Spectator column on why surrender is not an option:

Grant the radicals everything they demand today, and tomorrow they will return with new demands that they insist are urgently necessary to satisfy the requirements of social justice.

When they refer to themselves as “progressives,” radicals express their own basic truth: Their method of operation is always to move steadily forward, seeking a progressive series of victories, each new gain exploited to lay the groundwork for the next advance, as the opposition progressively yields terrain. Such is the remorseless aggression of radicalism that conservatives forever find themselves contemplating the latest “progressive” demand and asking, “Is this a hill worth dying on?”

My own instinct is always to answer, “Hell, yes.” Nothing succeeds like success and nothing fails like failure. Ergo, to defeat the radicals in their latest crusade (whatever the crusade may be) is to demoralize and weaken their side, and to embolden and encourage our side. Even to fight and lose is better than conceding without a fight because, after all, give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.

This explains much about why I disagree with some conservatives who say we should not expend much effort defending traditional marriage against the gay-rights insurgency.

Some conservatives are wholly persuaded by the arguments of same-sex marriage advocates. Others, however, are merely unprincipled cowards and defeatists. Concerned about maintaining their intellectual prestige, some elitists on the Right do not wish to associate themselves with Bible-thumping evangelicals. Or, disparaging the likelihood of successful opposition, they advocate pre-emptive surrender rather than waging a fight that will put conservatism on the losing side of the issue.

Yet if the defense of traditional marriage — an ancient and honorable institution — is not a “hill worth dying on,” what is? In every ballot-box fight to date, voters have supported the one-man, one-woman definition of marriage. As indicated by exit polls in California last fall, this is one issue where the conservative position is widely endorsed by black and Latino voters. Should such a potentially promising political development be abandoned?

Stacy goes on to expose the seeds of gay marriage in the radical feminism of the 1970s, which sought to confuse gender equality with gender sameness, and point out that the conservatives of the era, busy with the fight against Communism, largely dismissed it as a mere social-issues distraction, thereby allowing themselves to be distracted from the Left’s designs…a mistake, I fear, much of the Right is repeating with Islam.