NOVAE MILITIAE

Derbyshire nails it.  The text:

Leadership   [John Derbyshire]

I agree with this:

As Chamberlain gave a war guarantee to Poland he could not honor, the United States began to hand out NATO war guarantees to six Warsaw Pact nations, the three Baltic republics, and, soon, Ukraine and Georgia. Should a hostile regime come to power in Moscow and reoccupy these nations, we would have to declare war. Yet no matter how much we treasure the newly free Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, their independence is not a vital U.S. interest, and never has been. And the threatened loss of their independence cannot justify war with a nuclear-armed Russia. … As Britain threw over Japan and drove Italy into the arms of Hitler, Bush pushes Putin's Russia into the arms of China by meddling in the politics of Georgia, Ukraine, and Belarus, planting U.S. bases in Central Asia, and hectoring him for running an autocratic state that does not pass muster with the National Endowment for Democracy.
— from Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick J. Buchanan, pp.421-2.

There are some spectacles that are at once tragic and farcical. One such has been the sight of Georgian troops scuttling back from assisting us in whatever it is we imagine we are doing in Iraq, to help defend their homeland, while Condoleezza Rice stamps her foot, George W. Bush watches a basketball game, and John McCain says that he will do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

We are governed by fools. At least Putin knows what he wants, and how to get it. If only freedom had such leaders

Indeed.  Do the logic.

How Good Was the Good War?

Looks like it will be an interesting ride.  I've read a little about Buchanan's revisionist assessment of WWII hither and yon, and have long known that Churchill and Roosevelt weren't the heroes their post-war hagiographers made them out to be. 

So there you have the neocon worldview: Orthodox Christianity is bad, as is any suggestion that materialism is not the answer, much less opposition to forcibly spreading “the global democratic revolution” around the globe.  Hitchens and Hanson’s venting of their own grievances against Solzhenitsyn reminds one of nothing so much as angry pygmies fulminating against a giant, and the fact that these men now enjoy so much prestige among self-described conservatives tells us all we need to know about the intellectual vitality of “mainstream American conservatism” today.

Courtesy of Tom Piatak at Chronicles.   A more apt descriptor of Hitchens, Hewitt,  Hanson and the rest of their pseudoconservative spawn was never seen.

P.S.  As always with Chronicles, some great comments following Piatak's blog entry.  If you do not subscribe to this magazine and read its online version, you simply must.