Right Hook

While demonstrators flock to the RNC in droves, there may be almost nil in the way of celebrities -- and that's a good thing, says Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn.

"One of the most agreeable aspects of the Republican Party is that there's minimal risk of running into celebrities. At a Democratic political get-together, the only way to tell who the senators are is that they're the only two guys in the room you don't recognize: Everyone else is Meryl Streep, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Ben Affleck, the Dixie Chicks."

Steyn says Hollywood's A-list brings good cash but bad vibes.

"John Kerry's raised nearly 50 million bucks from Hollywood, and, short of divorcing Teresa and the pre-nup kicking in, he's not going to find that kind of money anywhere else. So he's obliged to go along with, for example, Whoopi Goldberg comparing President Bush with her own, ah, intimate areas, as she did at a recent all-star Kerry gala. Or with Meryl Streep musing, 'I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families in Baghdad.' The financial benefits of the celebrification of the Democratic Party are unquestionable. But the surest sign of its limited appeal in the broader sense was the Kerry campaign's refusal to release the video of the Goldberg-Streep gala. Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity."

Steyn focuses his point around an incident "a few years back" when Sir Elton John allegedly berated a hotel waiter in Italy for a breeze coming across his balcony.

"So when celebrities venture into politics it's hardly surprising they're as deranged about that as they are about everything. These days Sir Elton mutters darkly that there's something in the air and it's not just the f---in' wind. No, it's a 'deadly atmosphere of fear in America.' The poor lad's going to too many parties with too many other paranoid show biz plutocrats. The feeling that the entire country is one big scary police state is, after all, only a heightened version of VIP Lounge Syndrome."

Neocons at war -- among themselves
There is a deepening dispute among key ideological architects of the Iraq war, according to the New York Times. In a recent interview, influential intellectual Francis Fukuyama said that he had harbored private doubts prior to the invasion of Iraq, though he kept quiet about them at the time. "I figured it was going to happen anyway, and there wasn't anything I could do about it," Fukuyama told Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick. "I believed it was a big roll of the dice, and I didn't believe it was a wise bet. But on the other hand, it was a roll of the dice, and for all I knew, it might have worked." But, he added, "It turned out to be even worse than I anticipated."

According to the Times, Fukuyama is now under fire from other influential neoconservative voices, including ally and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who rebukes Fukuyama's current polemic as "breathtakingly incoherent." In turn, Fukuyama describes a recent speech by Krauthammer on unipolar American power as "strangely disconnected from reality. One gets the impression that the Iraq war has been an unqualified success," Fukuyama said, "with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based vindicated."

While Fukuyama argues that neoconservatives were overconfident about turning Iraq into a democracy, too quick to dismiss arguments of longtime allies and too willing to give up the practical advantages of partnership with other nations, others maintain that attacking Iraq was the proper first step in ridding the Middle East of terrorism -- and that Iran could be next. "Like anybody else in the world who is sane, I am very much worried about Iran gaining nuclear capacity," said Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary magazine and a founder of the neoconservative movment . "I am not advocating the invasion of Iran at this moment, although I wouldn't be heartbroken if it happened."

Also a longtime colleague of Fukuyama's, Podhoretz, too, questions Fukuyama's analysis. "Some things went wrong, but things always go wrong in every war. It is always a question of compared to what?"

"Have we not suffered enough?"
Meanwhile, former Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is also attacking President Bush over the Iraq war. According to the Times' David D. Kirkpatrick, Buchanan's new book, "Where the Right Went Wrong," argues that Bush's policies have nothing to do with true conservatism.

"[Buchanan] aims some of his fiercest attacks at Mr. Bush's frequent statement that perceptions of weakness, not the use of force, invite terrorist attacks. Mr. Buchanan contends that containment has often proven an effective strategy, while intervention sows the seeds of terrorism.

"Noting that he criticized the first President Bush for the first gulf war, Mr. Buchanan quotes himself campaigning as the Reform Party candidate in 2000. 'How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution?" he said then. 'Have we not suffered enough -- from Pan Am 103 to the World Trade Center [bombing of 1993] to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on U.S. soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire?'"

If Buchanan sounds oddly similar to the antiwar left, he's also got some love for the antiwar presidential candidate Ralph Nader, though it's not entirely unconditional.

"I like Ralph very much," Buchanan told the Times. "He has been enormously courageous on trade issues and on the war issue, but I am right-to-life all the way."

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