Today is Saturday, and as such, the blogosphere is generally quiet - as happens most weekends. Tomorrow will be even more dead, and then things come back to life on Monday. As such, you can expect a shorter post today, none tomorrow (unless something crazy happens), and a return to the new 'normal' on Tuesday (Monday is a holiday up here). Without further ado, then, here are today's brief points of interest:

• Victor Davis Hanson, emminent historian and classicist, has issued a report card for the Iraq war, and I find myself nodding as I read.
  

  Strategy A
  
  ..............
  
  Tactics: B-
  
  ..............
  
  Message: D
  
  The standard wisdom repeated ad nauseam in the New York Times is that we were clumsy in our statecraft and gratuitously offended the Europeans and Arab "moderates." In fact, the former were never going to participate in Iraq and do little in Afghanistan, and the latter mostly wished us to lose in both places The problem was not that we were unable to build a gigantic coalition - dozens of nations after all are with us in Iraq - but that we failed to explain the moral issues at stake to billions watching.

  As usual, VDH wields his razor insight well.


• Bill Whittle's latest additions to his online book are up. If you're like most readers in the blogosphere, you'll head over immediately.


• After a 'flurry' (read: two) of emails, Stephen over at DoggerelPundit has added the all-important RSS (actually Atom) feed to his site. What does this mean to you? Well first, you can now all add him to your Bloglines databases. Second, you can note that he's listed in my own. And third, you can go experience the fantastic talent and wit that this poet has. He's very much in the vein of Will Warren's Unremitting Verse (RIP), and if he's not careful, he might wind up drafted by a classy political journal - like von Dreele and National Review. Say, there's an idea! Steve should do for von Dreele what Frank J. is doing for Jonah Goldberg. Anyone want to organize things?


• Continuing the discussion from yesterday over at NRO, here are some highlights of what went on after I posted [Scroll way down, until you hit "Liberal Roots Cont'd" - they aren't big on differentiating post names].
  

  I entirely agree that American conservatives, by and large, are inspired by the classical Liberals of the 19th century and in that sense this is all an argument within liberalism. Sam Huntington wrote an amazing essay in 1957, I think, on Conservatism as an Ideology which pointed out in detail that American conservatives were trying to conserve liberal institutions. This is why Hayek excludes American conservatives in his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative."
  
  ...............
  
  all the professional libertarians and most of the amateur ones I've ever met know their philosophy and history very, very well -- quite often better than their conservative peers. As conservatives we may not always agree with them, but I would stack any random intern from Reason or the Cato Institute against almost anyone at the Center for American Progress when it comes to arguing philosophy. Yeah, I'm overstating things, but not by that much.
  
  ...............
  
  I think there are reasons for all of this and I don't think they all reflect poorly on liberals. American Liberalism -- "progressivism" really is the better word -- has always been more devoted to action than ideas. Action may leave more buildings and bodies in its wake, but it doesn't leave that many books. Conservatives and libertarians -- sibling movements at first and now certainly no more distant than cousins -- have always felt like they were on the outside looking in.
  
  ...............
  
  [P]rogressives constructed the welfare state and defended it against attackers -- often by viciously demonizing them -- for so long and so successfully, they've forgotten why they're inside the castle walls in the first place and they are now instinctually and culturally hostile to ideas which question the philosophical status quo, even though many of them can't explain or adequately defend the ideas which support the status quo.

  Golberg later clarified his remarks [scroll down to "Liberal Roots Cont'd" - a different one from the first]:
  

  This is the point I've been meaning all day to clarify. Of course there are many liberals well versed in a coherent "liberal" (Trans: progressive) philosophy. I'm sure that Josh Marshall knows a lot of history and philosophy (he's a PhD, right?) and I know that a few guys at the New Republic do.
  
  ...............
  
  My point isn't that there aren't smart and educated liberals, of course there are. My point is that the weight of their own intellectual history does not seem particularly present in their arguments, their movement or their journalism and it's especially absent compared to libertarians, leftists or conservatives. I can't think of the last time I've heard a liberal politician or activist invoke Rawls...
  
  This is a point that I think a great many liberals not interested in scoring points or worried that they might be seen agreeing with me in public would readily concede (I have had this conversation with liberals outside of the blogosphere, you know). Also, last month I read Rorty's Achieving Our Country and Rorty basically made exactly my point. He bemoans how so many college students and professors can tell you how Karl Marx was and what he believed, but couldn't talk seriously about what John Dewey or Hebert Croly had to say...
  
  The whole reason this conversation began in the first place was that in the course of researching my book, I discovered so much I never heard or read about the "progressive" intellectual tradition and what I did know about it I generally learned from conservatives not from liberals.

  Given that this is the topic his book is addressing, I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it in the future.


• I'm back in Hamilton for the Victoria Day weekend; my father safely returned home after two weeks in Central Asia; and I'm going to do some shopping this afternoon. Then comes the all-important work out (number four this week). I'm probably not going to get much work done on my book, though, as I'm reading like a madman for these summer courses - but when I do make some progress, I'll let y'all know.
  
  On a similar subject, the email conversation I was having with Stephen yesterday pricked my poetic muse, so you can expect some more poetry soon, as I try to work out my own creative muscles.