Friday, September 24, 2004

The Shorter National Review

Shorter Michael Ledeen:

George Will is neither reactionary nor revisionist historian enough to come to my sage conclusions on Iran.


I love how Ledeen uses South Africa and the Philippines as positive examples of Reaganite regime change. Clue to Mr Ledeen: Ronnie propped up those regimes.

Shorter Nadiya Kravets:

Russia's Single Economic Sphere is something Americans should fight, since S.E.S. is like a Far Eastern European version of NAFTA. Oh, wait..


More evidence of the creep of "American Exceptionalism" into conservative writing. Countries flexing economic muscles to influence neighbours are by nature evil -- unless it's America doing the flexing.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg:

Had the CBS memos been authentic, they wouldn't have been relevant.


Question for Lucianne, Jr: How the fuck can anything "faintly smack.. of collusion"?

Shorter Victor Hanson:

The 1960s, United Nations, PBS, Bill Clinton and Neville Chamberlain are all horrible, and Dan Rather is proof.


Hanson deserves some kind of award or title, perhaps "Most Convergent-Minded Reactionary Hack" for linking wingnuts' favourite targets from the last 60 years together in one column purportedly on the topic of Dan Rather's sins.

Shorter Byron York:

I dug up a better media scandal to compare to Dan Rather's than you guys could find.


Yeah, Dateline:NBC. You didn't really expect him to mention John Stossel, did you?

Shorter Ramesh Ponnuru:

With Bush's Social Security Scheme, you don't have to worry about benefits as long as your privatised SS investments do well.


Shorter Document:

The PATRIOT Act rocks, and without it we'd have been attacked again like 9/11. So renew it, or we'll all die.


Demagogery sounds so much better when put in diplomat-speak.

Shorter Rich Lowry:

We'd win more states if it weren't for those meddling Latinos.


Lowry is educating the choir here, so to speak, and so to crack the intra-party code he employs I suggest the use of infrared-state goggles.

Shorter Denis Boyle:

I can provide 10,000 reasons to hate France, each less truthful than the one before it.


Boyle nicely uses total casualty figures of the UN-led French-supported mission in Congo to "rebutt" American military casualty figures in Iraq. It's also nice to see that Boyle finds the reactionary-credentials of Niall Ferguson (who is the most rightwing Briton around) wanting. I say "nice" because it provides us with essential information with which to place Mr Boyle on the ideological spectrum.

Shorter James S. Robbins:

My interpretation of the polls leads me to conclude that everything is peachy in Iraq, except for the socialistic answers Iraqis gave the pollsters on issues like health care.


Mr Robbins doesn't consider the possibility that those Iraqis who think their country is on the right track might think so because of the insurgency. I also like the "aww, aren't they a bunch of sillies?" tone he adopts when trying to present the pro-socialist Iraqi answers to the NRO readership. Paternalism is a real laff-riot.

***From the Dept. Of Belated Footnotes:

Disclaimer: Shorter concept inspired by busy, busy, busy from an idea by D-Squared; disclaimer concept gleefully stolen from Sadly, No!