scriptbabe451 's List: Liberals & the left

• But his portrait of the Atlantic alliance was curiously passive, as if it defeated totalitarianism by example, by believing what it believes, and not also by challenging the Soviet Union, and blocking it, and deploying missiles, and supporting dissenters, in ways that many progressives found “destabilizing.”
• declared that “the work of freedom is never finished,” which is true enough, but the urgent question is what he means by “work.” Consider an example. A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration of that happy day in the history of their dictatorship was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents. Obama’s response was to intone wanly that “the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.”
• does “witness” count as “work”
• We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down--it collapsed, pathetically, on itself; but we assisted keenly in its collapse.
• Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not. Our Iran policy seems not to have discovered the connection between Iranian nuclearization and Iranian liberalization.
• It is no longer a fantasy to contemplate a new Iran. For this reason, American support for the democracy movement in Iran (he sounds like Bush! and he calls himself a liberal!) is not only a moral duty, it is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse.
• Anti-communism, after all, was a doctrine of human rights.
• Liberals no longer remember that anti-communism was once a glory of liberalism.
• The president is so busy breaking new ground in foreign policy that he may not see that the ground of his foreign policy is broken. His renunciation of idealism has brought none of the rewards of realism. Conflicts that were supposed to be transformed by his magic are immune to his magic. He has no magic. There is no magic.
• hen he gets back, perhaps he will meet with the Dalai Lama, but not for the purpose of “strategic reassurance.” That blessing is reserved for Hu Jintao
• It makes sense that the man who refused to meet with the Dalai Lama did not make it to Berlin.
• She was not wrong, but she was vaporous.
• ome of the ills that she noted are the result of walls, but some of them are the result of the lack of walls. When she mentioned “the walls that exist in the mindsets” of suicide bombers, I recalled the undeniably hideous but undeniably life-saving wall in Israel.

• Walls exclude and walls include. In one of his notebooks, Frost scribbled a little epitome of his great poem about the versatility of such hindrances:

   

  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

   

  Something there is that does and after all

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