Of course it was, just as almost every charge made by our enemies have been bum raps. The accusations are not intended to be either truthful or debatable. They’re mere slanders, intended to allow the other side to have their way unimpeded. It’s fashionable these days to bash Ann Coulter, but she’s certainly right about this. It’s been the Left’s weapon of choice since way back…which explains perfectly why neocons like Goldberg don’t hesitate to use it.

Something like 70% of the American people were opposed to intervention in Europe until the attack on Pearl Harbor–and even then, the American people only agreed to go after the Germans because Japan was allied with them. So according to the Left, 70% of Americans were blatanly anti-semitic, and it was only by being taught the error of our ways through fighting and dying in Europe that we came to our current enlightened state. It’s all obvious horsesh**, of course, but that’s the official dogma believed not just by the hard Left, but by neocons as well.

Whether Lindbergh was right or wrong, it was a reasoned argument. I tend to believe that once St. Woodrow bit into the forbidden fruit of intervention, US intervention in World War II became Nemesis, almost impossible to avert.

Opposition to intervention today makes even more sense than it did then both because no hostile power threatens to dominate all Europe or all Eurasia, and we have learned just how ineffective our cultural ignorance and our institutional failings make military intervention a clumsy and ineffective means of spreading what we perceive to be our virtues.

Because the rhetoric of intervention favors terms like “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy,” as opposed to realist concepts like “national interest,” its opponents are invariably denounced as opposed to all three (never mind that the first and last of these are often opposed to each other), and therefore not merely mistaken but wicked.

His was the only reference defaced in this manner. Does anyone wonder why?

Jonah can test that infuriating “ideas have consequences” tripe quite simply by walking into a room of average people. suggesting something like “If I say something stupid, please beat me with this chair”, and then proceed to speak. If the “beat me” idea has no consequences, he’s safe and he’s vindicated himself and Ramesh.