John Mark Reynolds - Fool?

It's appropriate for me to inaugurate my blog for the 2008 campaign season with a critique of this post by Mr. Reynolds. I'm one of those prune-faced people who's interested in being right that he's so upset about.

Mr. Reynolds offers the sort of political argument that I really despise. Ron Paul is wrong, to Mr. Reynolds, because he is too concerned with being right. The way to be right, apparently, is to not give being right any thought whatsoever. This is the sort of intellectual drivel the Bush conservative base is left with in these late days.

After two terms of a President who proudly did the wrong thing at nearly every turn, perhaps the time has come for someone with a prune face to step in and balance the scales a little.

Reynolds is far too typically modern in his disdain for the concept of right and wrong and his enthusiasm for an amoral pragmatism. He resurrects the tired argument that worrying about being right gets in the way of practical policy:

"They are right, very, very right, but that is it. They have no humanity and no ability to make their rightness work out in the real work [sic - I assume he meant "world" here]."

Mr. Reynolds, on the other hand, demonstrates his humanity by favoring continuing a policy of pre-emptive war, and demonstrates his make-it-work practicality by arguing that equality between the sexes is a bad thing because it leads to "no children". More evidence of his robust practicality is his claim that "the goal of life is to balance all the competing interests of church, state, family and the individual in a working whole." It might be interesting to hear him describe a church "interest" that I need to be required by law to balance with my individual interests - or if not interesting, at least good for a laugh.