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Logan and Preble at NRO

A few weeks back, Jonah Goldberg gave nation-building a big hug.  Chris Preble and I pour buckets of cold water on his article here.

Yeah, It Does Sound Like That, Doesn't It?

Interesting quote from US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton:

"This has the look of disagreements among politicians with rival security forces."

Unfortunately, he was talking about East Timor, and why we shouldn't send troops there.  I bet if we tried real hard, we could come up with at least one more example of a very similar phenomenon.

NR's "50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs"

Yeah, it's pretty bad.  Thankfully, Charles Pierce says (some of) what needs to be said:

I liked it so much better when conservatives weren't trying to be cool. I liked their, stern, iron-jawed parental disapproval of everything that happened since Calvin Coolidge blew town. I liked it when they thought it was all devil music sent by Khrushchev to take advantage of a young populace already weakened by fluoride in the water and Elvis on the electric television set. Becoming a young conservative meant you made a conscious choice to be the least cool person in your immediate social circle. You made a principled, rational decision to be a humorless little prig, and you were proud of it. People knew where they stood then. Now, though, we have boomer conservatives playing with popular culture and hurting themselves. Trust us, when you refer to some of the songs on your list as “little-known gems,” you’re already pretty much blown what little cred you may accidentally have picked up on your shoe.

This is how we get Jonah Goldberg and The Simpsons. This is how we get “South Park conservatives.” This is how, a few years back, we got that completely hilarious sports issue of The Weekly Standard, a fall-down-funny catastrophe that actual sportswriters haven’t stopped laughing at yet. It can be amusing, though, like watching a seal play the trumpet or, more precisely, like watching a fakir tie himself in knots and throw himself off a bridge into the raging torrent below.

QOTD

“She had a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. … They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn’t interfere with policy.” (emphasis added)

--Marina Ottaway of Carnegie, commenting on Liz Cheney's appointment to and work at the State Department.  (Side question: "They" who?)