Slate is conducting an online discussion on the future of conservatism, titled The Conservative Crackup with contributions from Tucker Carlson, Ross Douthat, Douglas Kmiec, Jim Manzi, and Christine Todd Whitman. Kmiec weighs in with, “The Not-So-Grand, Really-Old-Idea Party” and Douthat with a fine and nuanced essay, “No One To Blame but Ourselves.” But then, in a later contribution “Kmiec’s Abortion Folly,” you get the sense that Douthat just can’t take it anymore. He lowers the boom:
What I don’t understand at all is Kmiec’s position, which seems to be that the contemporary Democratic Party, and particularly the candidacy of Barack Obama, offered nearly as much to pro-lifers as the Republican Party does. I am sure that Kmiec is weary of being called a fool by opponents of abortion for his tireless pro-Obama advocacy during this election cycle, but if so, then the thing for him to do is to cease acting like the sort of person for whom the term “useful idiot” was coined, rather than persisting in his folly.
So much for Kmiec and abortion.
But Kmiec’s folly isn’t limited to abortion. He also declares that “Republicans could give up trying to sell us the stale bill of goods that Iraq is the central front of anything or that the surge is working.” But, of course, the surge is working spectacularly. To claim otherwise is indeed, to persist in either self-deception or folly or both.
I make no judgment, however, on whether this makes him a “useful idiot.” With regard to the surge (more properly the employment of the new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq) such uninformed and ignorant declarations are not all that useful to anyone, anymore.
