And both of them get it wrong. In yesterday’s News, local radio talker Mark Davis recounted his interview [reg. req.] with The Donald. Although the Nation’s Number One Publicity Seeker doesn’t have a prayer of winning the GOP nomination, Davis wanted to hammer a nail in his coffin. After asking him several times about the Iraq invasion, Davis triumphantly jumped on his answer:
“So taking steps to topple him was wrong?”
“Yes, we should have used our power elsewhere.”
I had my answer, and I had my conclusion: “You just lost the Republican nomination,” I told him…
Later, Trump tells Davis, “Well, you’re a very conservative guy.” To which Davis replies in print, Yes, sir, I am.
Both Trump and Davis are wrong. Davis is not a very conservative guy. His pro-Iraqi War stance derives in a direct line from Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to make the world safe for democracy and spent American blood and treasure in an earlier failed effort to achieve it. So far, the Iraqi War has cost over $3 trillion, lost us 5,000 American lives, damaged the U.S. economy, sent out deficit soaring, damaged our standing abroad, and done little or nothing to increase American security. There’s nothing conservative about it. Which is why William F. Buckley, Jeffrey Hart, and other intellectual pillars of conservatism denounced it.
If the current revolutionary wave sweeping the Middle East — in which the U.S. has no part — teaches us anything, it is that we should not meddle or intervene in places we do not know to push utopian, idealistic schemes on people whose history and culture we do not understand.
I have no doubt Mark thinks he is a conservative. After all, he daily pushes the same talking points as others who claim to be conservative. He runs with the herd, and we all know that the herd provides comfort in numbers. But I also think Mark is an intellectually honest man. I recommend that he read William Graham Sumner, Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, and others in the great tradition he claims to support. He might find that the herd to which he belongs has been running in the wrong direction.
