No candidate whose cabinet members are likely to include people who espouse the conventional wisdom on the Middle East will get my vote. When we talk about the Middle East, we are talking about the Arabs + Israel; Afghanistan is not in the Middle East, nor is Pakistan, and Persia is plausibly left out. The fact of the matter is the greatest obstacle to peace and prosperity in the Middle East is the apparently congenital assholery and incompetence of the Arabs. For anyone still blinded by their “education,” 9/11 demonstrated that the Arab world is reasserting itself according to its own nature – which is, of course, only natural. But no liberal faced with the reality could possibly prefer it to the USA or any European nation (Russia is not a European nation), and therefore could not maintain his politically manipulative multicultural equivocations. Unfortunately 9/11 had theatrical elements, which the reality-averse among us allowed to eclipse a more natural understanding of that event. It is all of a piece with celebrity culture, since the darlings of the intellectual Left and its allies are not so much genuine philosophers and artists as celebrities. But the bottom line is the Arabs, in their sort of incredible room full of mirrors, do not want to live in harmony: they want to rule. That is the long and the short of it, and no president henceforth should be allowed to avoid that fact – nor should he feel constrained by a by-now obviously ludicrous diplomatic etiquette, according to which one does not mention the fact that that guy in the robe is really just a polygymous barbarian who lives off the liquid rock our corporations and his Philipino slaves extract for him. Because you know what? These barbarians Know this is how it works. Look for yourself if you believe this is controversial – and imagine that what you take for your pet philosophical slogans are, like so many before them, simply Wrong.
