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July 11, 2006
WWII or Vietnam?
On a muggy Manhattan July day, Pamela covered two protests on opposite ends of town. I saw her at the NYTimes rally and she looked pretty wiped. She really deserved her Elvis Costello concert.
Interesting tidbit from her coverage of the Shalit rally:
. . . . when a member of the RNC asked if they would announce the rally to protest The New York Times pro-terror policies later today, they were categorically denied. No way would they say or do anything against the Democrats PR machine - The New York Slime.
I wonder how many people at the Shalit rally would have also shown up at the NYTimes rally if they'd known?
The rally to protest the NYTimes publication of classified information could have used some extra bodies, although it doubled in size over the two hours we were there. Looking at the rhetoric from both sides of the street, it was clearer than ever that on one side of the street, the paradigm of the War of Terror/Afghanistan/Iraq was World War II. And on the other it was Vietnam.
If you see the war through the lens of WWII, the actions of the NYTimes immediately brings to mind the espionage warning posters that were so cleverly parodied by numerous bloggers. You know our government makes mistakes sometimes but there is a real enemy out there and "loose lips" really do "sink ships." Anyone who doesn't understand this is naive.
If you see the war through the lens of Vietnam, you view the actions of the NYTimes as the latest version of the Pentagon Papers. There may be a real enemy out there, but they can't hurt us half so much as we can hurt ourselves by allowing our government to develop secret surveillance programs, so you are not about to cut our government any slack, and anyone who does is naive.
I talked to a woman who found out about the rally from my blog, and I asked her how she ended up reading Kesher Talk. She said she was socially liberal, so although she appreciated the conservative blogs she didn't really fit there, and most of the Jewish blogs were either very right or left wing, and we were the "liberal hawk Jewish blog" (as it says up on the banner). I know there are others, and there are other large liberal hawk blogs run by Jews (for example Roger Simon), but we may very well be the largest liberal hawk blog with a Jewish focus. Or the largest specifically Jewish blog with a liberal hawk sensibility. (And this focus goes back to the original blog as it was founded by Howard Fienberg, a liberal Republican, in December 2001.)
Everyone I know in the "liberal hawk" demographic (Jewish or gentile) gets tired of being called a "conservative." We are bemused by the idea that people who approve of legal abortion, gay marriage, wilderness conservation, access to pornography, and alternative lifestyles are "conservative." But we are resigned to the fact that the cataclysmic events of the past five years have distorted political labels out of all recognition. So we look for issues that illuminate the divide as it really exists, orthagonally to the conventional labels.
This is one. Regardless of your views on sex, the environment, education, the economy, health care . . . . Do you think we are in World War II? Or Vietnam?
More photos from the NYTimes rally.
Judith | 07/11/06 at 01:22 AM | Categories: - Israel vs. the world
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Blogs which link to WWII or Vietnam?:
» It's a CHOI to Protest The New York Crimes from Atlas Shrugs
So when did treason become patriotic? I don't know but the guys across the spent the entire time trying to shout out, drown out the our speakers. Free speech, my ass There were roughly 150- 200 people who showed to [Read More]
Tracked on July 11, 2006 03:56 AM
Comments
If it has to be one, WWII of course: the moral clarity, the attacks on our soil (included foiled and future ones), the worldwide reach, the threat to Liberal Western civilization.
Vietnam looms too big and lingers too long in our historical consciousness. That conflict would have been just one front of WWII; it was one long, hot front of the Cold War.
For the present and future, we need to keep thinking outstide the box. Defeating Islamofascism is so unconventional, militarily and culturally. "Asymmetrical" doesn't begin to describe it. We still haven't developed a unified national consciousness about what vision of life we're fighting to defend.
(That's just one reason why your "liberal hawkish" perspective is valuable: many viewpoints mix in a common cause.)
Jeremayakovka | July 11, 2006 03:09 PM
Isn't Glenn Reynolds the biggest liberal hawk blog?
And actually some of your bloggers are neoconservatives, rather than liberals.
I'm okay with the moniker classical liberal hawk, but I'm only socially liberal on certain issues, other ones I'm conservative, or centrist or libertarian.
Alcibiades | July 11, 2006 05:29 PM
There are many liberal hawk blogs bigger than us (I also mentioned Roger Simon) but we may be the largest liberal hawk blog with a Jewish focus. (Counterexamples welcome.)
I'm more libertarian on ecomonic issues than your average liberal. But I do support arts funding! Yeah, maybe "real" liberals differed from us more than I think, even back when I voted for Clinton. And sometimes I call myself a neo-conservative too, but I think I am too accepting of "alternate lifestyles" and porn and edgy art, and I'm too crunchy for yr average neo.
Those darn shifting labels!
But it is an interesting question how many large Jewish blogs there are which are not either conservative or leftwing.
Judith Weiss | July 11, 2006 05:40 PM
