Irving Kristol said, almost too memorably, “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” With that definition in mind, an eminent national-security personage put this perfectly phrased query to me over the summer: “Is Obama too arrogant to get mugged by reality?”An interesting neo-con reading of history, that second paragraph. All American wars have been for the purpose of fighting evil (and therefore justified). Just as we learned it in high school in our good citizen text books. Black and white, good and evil, with no ambiguities anywhere in sight.
An excellent question....It is perhaps now dawning on Obama that it is not just neoconservatives who believe in an America that conquers evil abroad. In fact, that conception of American morality is older than the relatively new one Obama espouses. War presidents have appealed to this aspect of American exceptionalism for centuries. Among other things, the War of 1812 was an attempt to eradicate the evil of monarchic rule; the Civil War, a push to eliminate the evil of slavery; World Wars I and II, fights to destroy the evil of totalitarian ideologies; and the Cold War, a triumph over the “Evil Empire.”
If Obama has not yet been mugged by reality, he is at least being shaken by ever-dropping approval ratings. In his role as war president, he may find an opportunity to halt the slide. A new Rasmussen poll shows that 53 percent of voters support President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while 47 percent support his plan to begin a troop drawdown in 18 months. This means a majority — slim though it may be — do not accept the conception of morality advocated by present-day liberals. Perhaps this is a reality up to the task of mugging our commander-in-chief.
But actually Abe is probably correct in his reading of the political realities in his third paragraph.
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