Quotations

Quote of the Day

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Quite aside from the nuances of counterinsurgency warfare, nothing would so advance the cause of peace as the fall of the regime in Tehran, and its replacement by a government designed and elected by the Iranian people. I have long believed that can be accomplished peacefully, by supporting a non-violent democratic revolution in Iran. No American president in the last thirty years has attempted it, and most of them have acted as if they were actually afraid of supporting freedom for Iranians. A young Iranian blogger, upon hearing Obama’s love video to the mullahs, reacted with an elegant mixture of sadness and pride:

…people have been tortured on the charges of having connections with the United States. Some have been silent thinking you will come to their rescue. At least Bush had the honesty to separate this regime from the people. How easy you play with the people card. Please do not talk about our people anymore. Engage the regime and leave us alone. We will free Iran, even when you are helping this occupying regime…

That’s the key issue. It should come naturally to any American president, but it doesn’t. I fear we’re going to pay a terrible price for this deliberate refusal to see evil right in front of our noses. Negotiations are a very long shot, and sanctions have never compelled an enemy to change its policy. If we do not support revolution, we will most likely get war, a war far greater and far more lethal than the one the mullahs have been waging against us since 1979.

–Michael Ledeen

UPDATE: See this Melanie Phillips column (via David Foster).

Quote of the Day

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Put together, these three assessments are devastating, even though Cohen has not caught on yet to the fact that Obama is not a reformer, and never has been one. Applebaum has the best description of the underlying fault; Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi are not living in the real world, a world in which nations have histories that can not be reset, constitutions and laws that can not be ignored, and financial problems that can not be solved simply by giving more power to the federal officials who did so much to create those problems.
 
One final, sobering thought: We are accustomed to discounting “campaign rhetoric”, accustomed to assuming that politicians do not believe much of what they say during a campaign. But we must, from time to time, consider the possibility, however unpleasant, that campaigners believe much of what they say. Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi may have believed the attacks they made on George W. Bush, who they depicted as both misinformed and misguided. That would explain why they seem to think that they can simply replace Bush and “reset” things to make them right.

–Jim Miller

Quote of the Day

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The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

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Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

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Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

Alan Guelzo, Conservatism’s Greatest Failure: The Academy

Quote of the Day

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From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama’s career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason.
 
Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students’ absorption of their professors’ lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.
 
At least it’s unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God’s ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world — certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics — with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one’s knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.
 
In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning — after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

–Peter Berkowitz