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Journalist who sees continuing terrorism as compatible with democracy and “victory” chosen as top Bush advisor
Over the last couple of years, Karl Zinsmeister, editor of the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, has been an over-the-top proponent of the idea that “we are winning in Iraq,” or even (the title of an article of his in June 2005) that “The War is Over, and We Won,” a statement that went beyond even Vice President Cheney’s notorious “last throes” comment. Zinsmeister has just been chosen to be President Bush’s chief domestic policy advisor. Given his view that ongoing terrorist mass murder in Iraq amounts to nothing more than “periodic flare-ups in isolated corners,” I am not sanguine about the sort of advice Zinmeister will give President Bush about how to deal with U.S. Muslims and the danger of domestic terrorism. While I don’t remember off-hand what position he has taken on immigration in recent years, Zinmeister was the co-author with Ben Wattenberg of a happy-go-lucky lead article in Commentary in 1990 calling for continued mass immigration into the U.S. and dismissing all concerns to the contrary.
There is a further connection between Iraq optimism and open-borders optimism. In the VFR entry linked above, a reader—who had previously carried on a long correspondence with me in which he assiduously argued that we were “winning” in Iraq and consistently dismissed all evidence to the contrary—wrote: “I’m scratching my head” at the very idea that the Iraq situation was not going well. This echoes Lawrence Kudlow’s complacent remark, “What’s all the fuss about,” in his article promoting a tripling of legal immigration into the U.S. under the fraudulent rubric of “temporary” workers. On Iraq, on immigration, neocons have made their happy refusal to think the centerpiece of their politics. Email entry |