The Ultimate Conservative

Power Line’s Scott Johnson has an excellent post this morning, disemboweling a think piece by Matt Bai in today’s NY Times Magazine, which is yet another hymn to Kerry’s vaunted multi-lateralism. According to Bai, if elected, Kerry would begin his new administration “by going immediately to the United Nations to deliver a speech recasting American foreign policy.

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What a guy. Never mind that the United Nations has done nothing against a whole litany of contemporary carnage from Rwanda to Darfur. Never mind that the United Nations under Oil-for-Food has put the Mafia to shame as a brokerage house for mass theft. Mr. Kerry will run back to the Society of Kleptocrats to reassure them it’s going to be business as usual. No more of this unilateralism that upset the gravy train. No more of this macho American behavior which resulted in such “disasters” as the Libyan demarche, the handcuffing of the Khan nuclear network, the birthing of incipient democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq – countries that had been viciously totalitarian for their entire histories – and so forth. Enough of that! President Kerry would right the ship.

Scott Johnson traces these policies of the Senator back to Jimmy Carter. Possibly. But I see it a little differently. Carter was and is a closet ideologue. (Witness his eagerness to certify the Chavez election with an almost comic alacrity.) Kerry is something else. He is the Ultimate Conservative – not in politics, mind you, but in temperament. He is the man of the status quo par excellence. Nothing changes or should change in the World According to Kerry. All this talk of nuance is simply a mask for stasis. These “subtleties” of thought are almost never original, merely idea rotation for its own sake, going nowhere and deliberately so. The real(motivating) idea is not to move. No wonder he is so appealing to the solons of the Mainstream Media who benefit so greatly by this status quo. The problem is – the status quo these days is death.

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(hat tip: Ron Wright)

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