Thursday, February 28, 2008

Re: Prediction   [John J. Miller]

Jonah: Liberals will have two types of anti-conservative responses to WFB's death. One will be exactly as you describe—those that try to suggest that WFB's successors are betraying his memory, which they find much easier to praise now that he's gone. This is an old trick, and we saw it when Reagan died. With WFB, they may focus on Iraq, noting that WFB became a critic of the war. What they may fail to point out is that WFB also supported the troop surge and last year wrote a check to the presidential campaign of John McCain. (The New Yorker performed its own bait-and-switch a few years ago when it argued that conservatism betrayed its noble founding when WFB seized the reins from the likes of Peter Viereck. This is preposterous, as I tried to point out here.)

The other type of response will be vile nonsense such as this, in which WFB's influence is described as "evil."

02/28 11:53 AMShare