The Golden Gate

The first is The Strange Metamorphosis of Senator Clinton.

“I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.”

Who recently blurted that out?

Pat Buchanan? Congressman Tom Tancredo? Nope, it was Hillary Clinton.

Which Democratic senator has expressed little public remorse in voting for 23 counts to authorize war against Iraq, and has scoffed, “Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade”?

Yep, Clinton again.

And who frowned on frequent abortion, hoping that it “does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances”?

Need I even answer that?

We all know that the New York senator is moving ever rightward, but why so brazenly and all of a sudden?

The depressing answer is clear for any Northern liberal who wishes to be president: No Democratic presidential candidate has been elected without a Southern accent in the half-century since 1960. If the country in the last half-century has grown more conservative, the South is emblematic of that shift.

John F. Kennedy’s long-ago success was by a razor-thin margin. He pulled it off by emphasizing national defense, space exploration and tax cuts that apparently created the necessary patina of conservatism that Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton later found naturally in their drawly good-old-boy personas.

In contrast, given the defeats of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it seems that liberals from above the Mason-Dixon line have little chance anymore of winning sufficient red states to capture the Electoral College. A sort-of-Southern-sounding Al Gore came close and won the popular vote in 2000.

Many on the left, however, feel that the medicine of moving the party to the center is worse than the disease of remaining irrelevant. That said, triangulation for a chameleon Sen. Clinton relies on an emotional base that will still cry Hillary, right or wrong.

Like her husband, Hillary Clinton generates just that diehard loyalty. Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill for which George W. Bush would have been demonized. Without a cry from Barbara Boxer or Al Franken, he pre-empted and bombed in the Balkans despite neither U.N. approval nor a vote of the U.S. Senate.

And another is actually a review of “The Myth of Islamic Tolerance” on Hanson’s site by Bruce Thornton. Read it all here.

One of the greatest impediments in our war against jihadist terrorism is the misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies about Islam entertained by many of our public intellectuals. Examples are easy to find; here’s one from the otherwise intelligent Gregg Easterbrook, Atlantic Monthly contributor and senior editor at The New Republic, from his recent book The Progress Paradox: “Most Muslims are good-hearted, peace-loving people, just as are most Christians and Jews. A small minority of Muslims are vicious fanatics. But then the Christian ethos has spawned its share of hideous killers, among them the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and this tells us nothing about the typical Christian.” The obviously false analogy in the last sentence — McVeigh didn’t kill with the sanction of Christian theology or belief, which has no doctrine remotely close to jihad, and millions of Christians didn’t dance in the streets after the bombing in Oklahoma City — could stand as a textbook example of this logical fallacy.

Such ignorance — on display everywhere in the media, especially among those eager to rationalize away the Islamic roots of the latest terrorist murder — makes a book like The Myth of Islamic Tolerance particularly important. Robert Spencer, in earlier books like Islam Unveiled, Onward Muslim Soldiers, and the recent The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, as well as on his invaluable website Jihad Watch (jihadwatch.org), has already done yeoman’s work in documenting Islam’s fundamental intolerance, martial aggressiveness, and sanctioning of violence against non-Muslim infidels. The 58 essays in the current book attack root and branch the widespread Orwellian myth, recently given cinematic sanction in Kingdom of Heaven, that Islamic societies have been historically more tolerant and friendly to minorities than has been Western culture.