Blogging's been light of late -- why?   cuz there's so much good stuff out there and folks are beating me to the punch.    We're at war, making forward progress towards goals I consider worthwhile and hence my worldview is solemn but optimistic.    Still there are some example of blood curdling behavior at the periphery of this whole mess.  A few recent examples --

First, Den Beste talks about the sheer hypocrisy from formerly idealistic organizations like Amnesty International.   This kind of crap makes US's firm stance against the ICC easier and easier to justify.   Why the hell an erstwhile Good organization has its sights focused on the slightest *potential* American transgression while letting Saddam's meat grinder go unchallenged is simply unmentionable.   Moral & cultural relativism is apparently a thousand-fold multiplier of rights transgressions by West on non-West versus non-West on non-West.   (UPDATE:   SDB extends his article here)

Second, paralleling an article I wrote a while back about Wars within the Right, Bill Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard about the Wars within the Left.  I think Kristol gives far too much credit to the assumption that the Right has successfully excorciated the Pat Buchanan's, statists, and old fashioned social conservatives.  

Parts of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, fell into a similar trap in the late 1990s, hating Bill Clinton more than Slobodan Milosevic. But this wing of the GOP and conservatism lost in an intra-party and intra-movement struggle, and has now been marginalized--Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican, and his magazine these days makes common cause with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.

The battle lines may be clear for folks who watch these trials as some sort of spectator sport (like moi).    But the are entirely unclear for many in the middle and just somewhat left-of-center - a fact easily leveraged by the Far Left in paper tiger attacks.  NeoCons & the Libertarian right tend to view the Trent Lott squeeze out as a victory over the PaleoCons.   But many in the Left don't distinguish between Paleo and Neo and view it instead as a case of the true colors of the Right overall shining through.

Kristol sees a similar phenomena happening in the Left -- they're facing a deep division driven by Foreign policy disarray.   Kristol does a great job of illustrating the order of battle between these groups:

Today, ... after a Clintonian interregnum which papered over ideological differences, American liberalism is in the process of dividing again, into the Dick Gephardt liberals and the Dominique de Villepin left.

The Gephardt liberals are patriots. They supported the president in the run-up to this war, and strongly support the war now that it has begun...a majority of Senate Democrats, less than half of the House Democrats, Democratic foreign policy experts at places like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a smaller number of liberal commentators and opinion leaders--most notably the Washington Post editorial page.

The other group includes the Teddy Kennedy wing ... a large majority of Democratic grass-roots activists, the bulk of liberal columnists, the New York Times editorial page, and Hollywood. These liberals--better, leftists--hate George W. Bush so much they can barely bring themselves to hope America wins the war to which, in their view, the president has illegitimately committed the nation.

The Ted Kennedy wing is home to the Actors out of touch with the Audience, and Professors out of touch with their students (credit to VDH).

Finally, an example of someone who probably clings to the "Ted Kennedy" wing -- Michael Kinsley-- has the following dumb OpEd chastising the administrations duplicity in international treaties.

the United States, are pretty clearly violating the Geneva Conventions ourselves in our treatment of Afghan soldiers we’ve imprisoned at Guantanamo, and we’ve justified this (to the extent we’ve bothered) with the same “don’t be naive” arguments used for ignoring the Security Council about Iraq.

Hold on buddy, the Geneva convention doesn't apply to all combatants.   POW treatment isn't a Right in strict sense -- it is neither a priori nor universal.    Instead, the Geneva convention specifies something more akin to a contract.   By adhering to one set of conventions when fighting a soldier earns the right to be treated via another set of conventions if captured.   In this case, the convention pretty clearly requires that combatants not target civilians and clearly identify themselves relative to civilians.   The folks at Gitmo -- as well as the Iraqi's -- are clearly in violation of this.

---