Salon: In the Lion's Den (Reporter attends wingnut retreat)

America's highest-powered conservatives invited me to their posh weekend retreat, expecting me to bash the left. I'm afraid I wasn't a very good guest.

By Michelle Goldberg

PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The roomful of Republican activists booed when I said that George Bush was the most dishonest president in living memory, but otherwise my conservative hosts at Restoration Weekend were quite cordial. David Horowitz, the radial leftist turned radical rightist, invited me to his ritzy confab, held at Palm Beach's posh Breakers resort, to speak on a Sunday morning panel about the antiwar movement. I agreed to go in order to eavesdrop on the conservative elite and see what they were thinking as their dream of a new Middle East withers in Iraq's growing violence. For two days, I skulked around a crowd that included House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, ultra-right strategist Grover Norquist, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris of Florida, and neocon ideologue Daniel Pipes.

Here is what I learned: The self-regarding humanitarianism that the right wrapped itself in before the war with Iraq is beginning to fray and chafe. At Restoration Weekend there was anxiety about the postwar situation, and anger. Senators and congressional representatives avowed their faith that Bush's fabled steadfastness made victory assured in Iraq, a stance they struggled to reconcile with the White House's recently announced decision to expedite the transfer of power to Iraqis and scale back the occupation by election season. Meanwhile, the right's intellectuals and activists had largely scrapped talk of democracy. Some suggested that the Iraqis themselves are our enemy, that we owe them nothing. Pipes referenced "The Mouse That Roared," the 1959 film in which a poor country declares war on America, hoping to lose and be rebuilt like Germany and Japan. The implication seemed to be that Iraq is both lucky and greedy.

Meanwhile, those troubled by Bush's decision to cut and run blamed it on Democrats and the liberal media, who through their unfair scrutiny of irrelevancies like Bush's uranium claim and the Valerie Plame affair were sapping the national will. Horowitz accused Salon itself of compromising the country's security by sniping at the commander in chief, repeating the phrase "ideas have consequences," over and over. It wasn't quite clear which ideas he was talking about -- that Bush's case for war was mendacious? That it would be preferable to have a different president? Yet the consequences, he was clear, would be catastrophic.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/11/18/lion_s_den/index.html

and a strong stomach.

But the link doesn't seem to work.

Salon reporter goes to a Manhatten bar for a Bush "meetup". Interesting, but kind of a sad commentary on average Republican thinking.

It is linked on the last page of Michelle's article, which I finally got to.

very worth reading.

http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/11/18/lion_s_den/index.html

This was interesting:

Now, though, (Pipes is) contemptuous of the idealistic case for war, the case that wooed some liberals to Bush's side in the first place. "We have no, no moral responsibility to the Iraqi people," he said. "Our moral responsibility is to ourselves. I very much disagree with the name 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' It should have been 'Operation American Security.'" This met with applause.

(snip)

As people left, though, I was somewhat stunned to be approached by Katherine Harris, who was gracious in complimenting me and saying she agreed that we must not betray the Iraqis again.

What, then, did she think of the news that Bush planned to end the official occupation next spring? She said it all happened while she was gone and no one had told her. She seemed to want to distance herself from it.

Perhaps she was one of the few who'd actually believed in the glorious promise of democratizing Iraq. Perhaps, Caddell suggested later over lunch, Bush had even believed it himself.