July 17, 2006

Hugh Hewitt, or The Beautiful Calm of the Hysteric

I see that Hugh Hewitt has labeled this blog a leading contender for titular leadership of something he's calling the "American Appeasement Blogs" (is this like the American Idol sweeps, or something, as it sounds about as inane?), demoted me to being part of the "center-left establishment", and taken to calling me a weak-kneed Etonian Whitehall type a la Geoffrey Dawson (wrong "GD", good one Hugh!). Well that's rich. Look, I'll go toe to toe any day of the week with Hugh on who is advocating a more robust, albeit intelligent, approach to the defense of the American national interest. Hugh, all rapture-like, appears keen for the coming of the apocalypse, replete with the US marching heroically into Damascus and Teheran next (it's WWIII!). But there's a little problem with all this Hugh. We're bogged down in Iraq, where a low-grade civil war could get much worse in a hurry, and where we've lost almost 3,000 men, and, more generally, Bush's ill-fated messianic, neo-Wilsonian naiveties (presto, elections!) have not worked in Palestine, have not worked in Iraq--nor are moderating impulses afoot in Egypt, or Lebanon, or Iran, or Syria. All Hugh is offering, really, is faith-based adventurism, really just a bogus, non-strategy. But it's all charming, to a fashion. Over a beer or two with David Rieff yesterday, we mentioned Hugh, and David in reference to him quoted one of Sigmund Freud's teachers Charcot, who once quipped about: "the beautiful calm of the hysteric". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Hugh Hewitt, so evocative of "the beautiful calm of the hysteric". Must be fun, this blissful reverie, eh Hugh?

Posted by Gregory at July 17, 2006 12:27 PM