Sunday Reading.

Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson may be among my standard reads, but today the reason for reading them is particularly compelling. Taken together, their very different approaches to the same issues help clear up a lot.

Steyn launches a typical yet especially well wielded double barrel at the Democrat party in the US (it's an essay from about 3 weeks ago in the NRO but only now widely available, and as relevant now as then).

VDH meanwhile tries making sense of confusion (again for the NRO), and distils the situation into four characteristic prejudices into which people retreat who've had their assumptions upset.

Politically, the link is that the Democrats in the US have become the sink into which the shell-shocked celebrants of a non-existent pre-9/11 peace have drained, and internationally the talking points of the Dems are the talking points (salted to taste) of those whose self-satisfaction has been compromised by events. Thus John Kerry (apparently) criticises people for pointing out that Osama Bin Laden and Michael Moore agree ideologically. Kerry seems to think that the fact that Moore has had no chance of relating to Bin Laden more practically is sufficient to require that they be seen as chalk and cheese, even when they say the same things. Unfortunately they are ideological twins; profiteers of their own sense of superiority.