Week of June 2, 2008

As John Taylor pointed out a couple of days ago, Obama’s victory speech had an odd passage:

I honor [McCain’s] service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine.

It was reminiscent of another speech, from 1962. The speaker had just suffered a crushing defeat, and was physically exhausted. As he later acknowledged, he let fatigue and disappointment get the better of him.

I believe Governor Brown has a heart, even though he believes I do not. I believe he is a good American even though he feels I am not.

Thus went a certain leader’s “last press conference,” following his loss to Pat Brown for the governorship of California.

For a moment at least, Barack Obama in victory sounded like Richard Nixon in defeat.

The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity. I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant….

IMAGINE if Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken to calling Adolf Hitler the “leader of the National Socialist Aryan patriots” or dubbed Japanese soldiers fighting in World War II as the “defenders of Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

To describe the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Army in terms that incorporated their own propaganda would have been self-defeating. Unfortunately, that is what many American policymakers have been doing by calling terrorists “jihadists” or “jihadis.”