I also think the idea that one can be a soldier without any physical courage or physical risk, where one can get wealthy in the process and also benefit from public honors, is a joke. It’s the Mercurian principle par excellence, where all physical endeavor and physical risk and physical courage is passe or made the equal of other kinds of important, but distinctly different, courage. Moral courage is courage too, but it’s not a soldier’s courage. Incidentally, Libby appears to have little of either.

This idea that these “brave” neoconservatives and ex-liberal (or I should say ex-openly liberal) draft-dodgers like Wolfowitz, Feith, and Libby are brave, warlike, and otherwise worthy of that kind of honor is truly a joke and a corruption of language. But the equation of physical courage and facility with ideas is an important component of the modern, Mercurian, and also of the agenda that dare not speak its name.

It’s not for nothing guys like Ross from Friends and Woody Allen have replaced the strong, silent types from the less alienated Hollywood of yesteryear. We’re supposed to think these wimps are real men and forget what a real man acts like. Needless to say, he doesn’t act like Libby.

Some of his defenders, of course, are hysterical and hyperbolic, as Daniel in his almost ultraviolet prose points out.

The Vietnam era, I suppose, was the tragedy, in which case the Iraq era must be the farce.

Also, and perhaps I’m being churlish, but I’m more than a little annoyed at being lectured on the true meaning of patriotism and sacrifice for the republic by foreigners like Ajami and Frum, who were more than happy to bolt here when the grass was greener than in their home countries. No wonder they’re propositionalists.