Aborting Liberals

I was at the conservative site Townhall.com, and saw something there that reminded me that not all Republicans are conservative in any cultural sense. Someone had written a comment appended to a pro-life article excoriating pro-lifers on the basis that aborted children would have turned out to be liberal drains on society. This sort of crap makes me sick to my stomach. That may be anti-government, but it sure as hell isn't conservative. That's like saying that inner city violence is OK because the victims are poor, and probably vote Democratic. Would Edmund Burke have said that despotism and murder are acceptable, so long as its victims favor big government? I suspect that this kind of thinking is common among the people who consider themselves Libertarian. And this is why Libertarianism is basically the same as liberalism. Ugh.

Trouble Free Internationalism

Many in our current debate over Iraq seem to believe in trouble free internationalism. Our position in the world should guarantee us peace with no interruption. They forget that in order to have peace, we must work with other countries, which means occasionally working against violent countries. Take the Korean War, for example. In order to maintain the peace it was necessary to engage in three years of combat in cold weather, with heavy casualties and no end readily in sight. Men were dying, and it was over something that was an abstraction to Americans. South Korea was a place few Americans had visited, and no doubt many wondered why it mattered to defend it from communism. With the Korean war long finished, we can see that it wasn't just an abstraction. Millions of people who currently live under the tyranny of North Korea can attest to the evil and brutality of that regime. So fighting the war in Iraq isn't the black hole its detractors claim it to be. If we withdraw from Iraq, it will have very real consequences for the people of Iraq. And if the Islamic fundamentalists turn Iraq into their domain, it will have consequences for us too.