Freedom's Fidelity

Monday, January 03, 2005

Happy New Year

It's the new year and I'm moving shortly so things will be quiet around here for a few weeks, probably.

So here's some year end reading you might find interesting:

Ed Driscoll, offers up his Top 10 blog moments of the year.

It looks like the invaluable Steven Den Beste is really retired from the blogosphere for good, you can find his best of here, it's all worth reading. In particular, this essay regarding the assertion that Iraq was a distraction from shutting down Al-Qaeda I found particularly compelling.

Okay this wasn't that recent, but it was one of the most powerful posts I read this year. I read it several times, I'd be interested to know what others thought of this essay from Wretchard at the Belmont Club.

Not much I can say about this next one, probably my favorite post-election essay out there. A beautiful mix of humor and truth frames the oft-mentioned Red State/Blue State divide, "Red State Blue State Me State You State"


Rumsfeld has come under a lot of scrutiny lately, Victor Davis Hanson has a nice article where he says to give Rumsfeld a break:

The blame with this war falls not with Donald Rumsfeld. We are more often the problem — our mercurial mood swings and demands for instant perfection devoid of historical perspective about the tragic nature of god-awful war. Our military has waged two brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been an even more inspired postwar success in Afghanistan where elections were held in a country deemed a hopeless Dark-Age relic. A thousand brave Americans gave their lives in combat to ensure that the most wicked nation in the Middle East might soon be the best, and the odds are that those remarkable dead, not the columnists in New York, will be proven right — no thanks to post-facto harping from thousands of American academics and insiders in chorus with that continent of appeasement Europe.

Out of the ashes of September 11, a workable war exegesis emerged because of students of war like Don Rumsfeld: Terrorists do not operate alone, but only through the aid of rogue states; Islamicists hate us for who we are, not the alleged grievances outlined in successive and always-metamorphosing loony fatwas; the temper of bin Laden's infomercials hinges only on how bad he is doing; and multilateralism is not necessarily moral, but often an amoral excuse either to do nothing or to do bad — ask the U.N. that watched Rwanda and the Balkans die or the dozens of profiteering nations who in concert robbed Iraq and enriched Saddam.

It's hard to argue with that.

Other good stuff:
Varifrank's election-eve photo essay on Saddam's Iraq.

Donald Sensing's Thanksgiving photo essay is worth a gander as well.

Also see Jonah Goldberg's "Shame, Shame, Shame" column.

And finally, a reminder of the very necessarily empty throne.

Enjoy, and thanks to all of the readers out there, you keep me going. Best wishes for 2005. See you in a few weeks.

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