As much as I'm enjoying the feud between Bill Kristol and Glenn Beck over Beck's paranoid theory that the upheaval in Egypt will lead to a caliphate in Eastern Europe, I'm not entirely sure why Kristol is objecting.
When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
Interesting. National Review Editor Rich Lowry calls this a "well-deserved shot" at Beck's "wild theorizing."
I'm actually a little confused as to where the substantive daylight is between Beck, Kristol, and Lowry on the connections between "caliphate-promoters and the American left." After all, Kristol's group Keep America Safe employed arguments developed by Andrew McCarthy that the Obama Justice Department was filled with terrorist sympathizers for an entire ad campaign, and Lowry's magazine employs McCarthy, who literally wrote an entire book explaining how the American left and "radical Islamists" both have a leader in the current president. Is Beck's incoherent rant really any less crazy than McCarthy's theory that Obama's relatively hawkish foreign policy is actually meant to serve Islamists who think that "al-Qaeda has outlived its usefulness?"
Likewise, The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin applauded Kristol "for his hysterical language and reaction to the Egyptian revolution." But it was Rubin who complained that Obama's position on the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero showed that his "sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens." Rubin then unironically lectures Beck that an "ad hominem attack without any intellectual argument is really not what conservatives should be all about." Could have fooled me!
Anyway, I don't get it. Conservatives have spent the last two years espousing the links between "caliphate-promoters and the American left." Why turn on Beck? Because he's just doing it wrong?
