Max Boot: Hey, Let’s Throw Liz Cheney – er, Mark Levin and Ann Coulter – Under the Bus!

posted at 3:20 pm on May 26, 2009 by CK MacLeod
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Continuing an apparent bid to become the David Brooks of the foreign policy establishment – moderate bending over backwards to defend Barack Obama and attack conservatives – prominent defense intellectual Max Boot has used a post at Commentary Magazine‘s Contentions blog to chastise Liz Cheney for having, as he puts it, “stepped over the line” in criticism of President Obama.

In a tone of sorrow and schoolmarmish condescension – that is, “with no joy,” though he’s sure it was “a one-time slip for her” – Boot notes a statement made by Ms. Cheney during an apparently lively public debate, quoted in the New York Times as follows:

Republicans have led the nation to greatness when they’ve been true to fundamental principles, such as a strong national defense, limited government and low taxes. None of those are things President Obama believes in.

Boot’s response:

…[I]t’s not fair to claim the [P]resident doesn’t believe in a “strong national defense.” That’s questioning his motives and suggesting that he will not carry out his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Agree with him or not, you need to grant that Obama believes the policies he is pursuing are designed to enhance, not weaken, our national security. Otherwise civilized democratic discourse becomes impossible. Republicans rightly abhorred such invective against President Bush (”Bush lied, they died,” etc.). They should not make the mistake of mirroring moveon.org-style rhetorical excesses now that a president of the other party is in power.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether Cheney’s remarks deserve to be associated with “invective,” and, if they do, whether “such invective,” abhorrent or not, has its uses.  Let’s even set aside the question, discussed at length in the Contentions comments, whether Ms. Cheney’s statement was “appropriate shorthand” that merely asserted the traditional Republican platform while declining to accept Obamaist definitions.

The question remains:  What purpose is served by nitpicking Liz Cheney’s “one-time slip”? In addition, if Boot is merely trying to be helpful rather than set himself apart from, and above, the crazies – i.e., the Right – why does he feel the need to raise his rhetorical fire further, finishing the post by linking to and implicitly joining a currently circulating attack on popular radio host, author, and Reagan Administration veteran Mark Levin?

This last item has been discussed in the HotAir headlines twice, but, just in case you missed it, last week Levin’s enhanced verbal interrogation of a liberal caller caused fits of the reciprocating vapors among three center-right civility-mongers.   Conor Friedersdorf, Rod Dreher, and David Frum took turns wringing their hands and fluttering their dowager’s fans over Levin’s “petulant,” “indecent,” “disgusting,” “horrible,” etc., performance. Additional blogifications eventually drew in Levin’s fans and even Levin himself.  What neither Friedersdorf, nor Dreher, nor Frum, nor Boot notes, or, in the latter three cases neither was able to note nor thought to consider, was the caller herself:  You need to hear the actual exchange to understand the condescending, smugly self-satisfied tone that set off the often-agitated (because self-consciously agitational) Levin.

You can play the audio file, and exercise your right to your own sensibility, but, when, like Boot and the other members of the moderate civility service, you go searching for pretexts to attack and peremptorily dismiss leading voices on the right, then why should we even consider you a “moderate” or “centrist”?  You’re not occupying a middle position, judiciously weighing views on either side.  You may think you’re resting on whatever conservative credentials you’ve amassed over a long career, but to the extent the presumption is valid, it merely makes your one-sided attacks all the more divisive.

I don’t think Max Boot really wants to push Liz Cheney into the path of a large-size vehicular conveyance.  In his original post he spends almost as much time flattering her personally as he spends associating her with moveon.org, they of the full page newspaper ads accusing General Petraeus of treason.  Yet it’s further indicative of the problem Boot and others like him have that his follow-up replies to commenters and fellow Contentions blogger Jennifer Rubin were devoted to casting Barack Obama’s foreign and defense policy in as positive a light as possible.  It turns out that he doesn’t really just disagree with Liz Cheney’s tone or word choice after all:  He disagrees with her point. In short, he’s effectively an Obama supporter – and in this context a hostile witness.

Now, in the latest follow-up to the original post, Boot finally just throws up his hands and pleads for understanding – and in the process finds another popular conservative to attack:

I don’t think my criticism of Liz was overly harsh. I certainly never intuited bad faith to her. As I pointed out, this is an aberration for a “tough but principled debater.” In fact I took her to task precisely because I have considerable respect for her. I wouldn’t waste my time criticizing a clown like, say, Ann Coulter, because, unlike Liz, she is not a serious person.

So says the guardian of civility, “wasting his time” on someone whom he doesn’t consider worthy of discussion, summarily judging and dismissing her.

The original criticism of Liz Cheney wasn’t “overly harsh”:  It was overly sanctimonious, masking substantial disagreement within a cloud of pettifoggery.  It may be that Boot just isn’t ready to confess, to himself as well as to the rest of us, that he’s in the process of leaving his friends on the neoconservative right for greener pundit pastures. If so, then it may not be long before, with the greatest civility, he declares all of us clowns and fellow travelers of clowns, accuses us of trying to purge him from the circus, and announces his new venue at some pseudo-conservative site, like newmajority.com, that directs ridicule and calumny at all those who criticize Barack Obama and Obamaism too harshly – or too effectively.

(UPDATE: The Other McCain has updated the Levin kerfuffle further in a current Green Room post.)

(UPDATE II:  Link to audio youtube fixed.)

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