The NR Cruise story

Everybody's talking about the New Republic's account of the National Review post-election cruise. I've had several people write me and say, "You used to work there, what do you think of this piece?" My answer is pretty much this: these kinds of pieces are fun to read, but cheap and easy to write. These fundraising cruises are popular, but I tell you, you could book passage on any one of these cruises, no matter who sponsors it, and end up with a funny piece. Garrison Keillor does a Prairie Home Companion cruise, and I'd bet you my paycheck that any writer with the smallest scintilla of smart-assery could go on that thing and come back with a hilarious piece making fun of the cruisers.

Why? Because those cruises are basically floating comic-book conventions for hard-core fans of conservatism/progressivism/Wobegonism/whatever. All the pathologies of fandom will be present. And when they're not -- that is, when people come across as normal -- they don't make it into snarky journalistic accounts. I remember the very first story like this I read -- P.J. O'Rourke's 1984 account of sailing up the Volga on a "peace cruise" with readers of The Nation. It was the first time I'd ever read anything by him, and it was so brilliant and hilarious a send-up of dyspetic elderly leftists that I can tell you precisely where I was when I read the thing. It was that memorable. This genre will never die.

Still, I find myself where Ross is on the piece: identifying amid the snark the important essay yet to be written about Bill Buckley and Norman Podhoretz and the split in the broader conservative movement over Iraq. Here's the key passage from the TNR piece:

Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley--two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party--begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking--"I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too," he rants--and Buckley says to the chair, "Just take the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National Review in 1955--when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction--and he has always been skeptical of appeals to "the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused ...

There's also this amazing moment in which Rich Lowry speaks truth to the cruisy-cons:

Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, "The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor.

That's what happens when ideology becomes more important than reality. There's a really good piece to be written about that too.