Reply #1: Comments on Sam Tannenhaus's Views by TPM's Jim Sleeper..

[KoKo]

The Cloud Over Sam's Book Club
Jim Sleeper's picture
By Jim Sleeper | bio

A former editor at the New York Times Book Review who read my remonstrance here about its war-hawkish bent referred me to something I’d missed: In July, Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus took to the literary section of The New Republic to pen his second elegy to American conservatism in those pages. His meditation on the allure and dangers for writers of false promises of politico-moral clarity could have been an elegy for his own stewardship at the Times. And maybe it was.

Reminding us that the anti-Communist crusader Whittaker Chambers eventually escaped the "haunted air" of ideological crusading in his later years, Tanenhaus decides that were Chambers alive today he would dismiss the Bush Administration’s zeal to rid the world of Evil: “Not every good fight is a millennial fight. George W. Bush's worldview is precisely the one that Whittaker Chambers outgrew. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how Chambers himself would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better.”

I think that Tanenhaus is signaling that he knows better now, too. It is too late for him to say that he knew better all along.

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His earlier elegy for conservatism in The New Republic came in a twilight portrait of William F. Buckley, Jr., and it put me in mind of a younger conservative -- Scott McConnell of The American Conservative magazine -- who “knew better” what had happened to American conservatism years before Tanenhaus and Buckley acknowledged it. Regrets like theirs might have mattered in 2004 had they and other conservatives joined McConnell to oppose George W. Bush's re-election.

In an American Conservative editorial McConnell ignored the quasi-triumphalist reviews of pro-Bush books which Tanenhaus was then pumping into the national bloodstream (one lauded tabloid mini-con John Podhoretz’s pugilistic defense of Bush). Instead McConnell tendered an anguished endorsement of John Kerry because, he warned, Bush’s “continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations.”

more...and it's a great read...
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/oct/10/the_cloud_over_sams_book_club