Unholy Alliance

Wretchard at Belmont Club:

"The student who wants to wear a Che Guevarra T-shirt provides an interesting case study. A few decades back the Marxist saints were living figures, or at least very recently dead. Today they are increasingly figures from an ever more distant past. You can tell the vigor of a movement by the age of its hagiography. Marxism is a dead religion compared to Islam."

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What's interesting is the unholy alliance that has developed between the remains of the Marxist Left, especially the Trotskyites, and the Islamists. An old, moribund religion is trying to catch a ride on a newly vital one, united only by their hatred for Western capitalist society.

But the ever-romantic Left is managing to ignore two things that are obvious to everyone else:

(1) The Islamists utterly revile every "progressive" value the Left claims to hold; and therefore

(2) If the Islamists ever succeeded in gaining power, they would immediately celebrate by having the Left for lunch.

With the spectacular failure of Communism, the Left's ideas unequivocally flunked the test of history. Its political/economic program debunked beyond any possibility of salvaging, the Left now seeks a final heroic gesture by going down in flames with Western civilization strapped to its back.

Have we ever seen a death wish played out so publicly?

Byron

Military Recruitment

What's the status of military recruitment? The media has trumpeted the news that, due to Bush's war in Iraq, recruitment is down disastrously, especially in the Guard and Reserves, where it's in virtual free-fall. Page one, broadcast lead, it's been a big, big story.

But recruiting is actually up, across the board.

We can safely predict that this news will be met by something approaching a media blackout (cue sound of crickets). Because while it's good news for the war America is fighting against Islamic terrorism around the world, it's bad news for the media's much more important war against the Bush administration.

Byron