What Right-Wingers Say When They Think It's Safe

The Independent's Johann Hari went on the National Review cruise. What he heard knocks a lot of credibility out of various naive "it can't happen here" assurances.

"Do you have a child back in England?" she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

That one was from a random female passenger. I remember hearing a lot of Serbs talk like that in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I guess Milosevic is alive and well in the U S and A.

And now for something completely different:

Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them."

You're doing a heckuva job, Borkie. Good thing we had a Democratic majority in the Senate in 1987.

Norman Podhoretz (...) wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and " thank God" for that.

Let's be charitable: maybe he just thanks God for his certainty. He'll thank Him for bombing after it happens.

Next to such raging lunatics, guess who appears too meek and almost smells liberal:

The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, " Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Yes, they are talking about that William Fucking Buckley. They are that insane. As to what Buckley himself thinks:

Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan's approach would have been to "find a local strongman" to rule Iraq.

Would have? I recall the US generously helping a certain local strongman in the 1980s. Hang on...

For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, (Podhoretz) is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 per cent of Iraqis want US troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo" and that Bush is "a hero".

And Chance E. Gardener would make a great next President... No, this is more surreal than that...

Ward Connerly is the only black person in the National Review posse, a 67-year-old Louisiana-born businessman, best known for leading conservative campaigns against affirmative action for black people. (...) There are, he says, "those who condemn the Klan based on their past without seeing the human side of it, because they don't want to be in the wrong, politically correct camp, you know..."

That settles one question for good: Ward Churchill is definitely not the craziest person named "Ward C." in the United States.

Dinesh D'Souza announced as we entered Mexican seas what he calls "D'Souza's law of immigration": " The quality of an immigrant is inversely proportional to the distance travelled to get to the United States."

He almost certainly wanted to say "directly proportional" but was too stupid to get it right. Besides Mexican-bashing, it was meant to be self-promotion, as D'Souza - as well as his audience - came all the way from Uranus.