What the Right Wing Is Thinking Now

Salon.com | Right Hook: Former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, now a Fox News correspondent, is relaunching a rather tired conservative argument: By criticizing President Bush's foreign policy, the "liberal" media is nurturing America's enemies.

In the December issue of Commentary magazine, New York writer Stephen Vincent, who spent more than a month and a half living in U.S.-occupied Iraq during the fall, scolds antiwar activists from around the world for whitewashing Saddam's horrifying human rights record.

Battling Iraqi guerrillas, Israeli-style is controversial even among conservatives as Newt Gingrich goes public with his disagreements.

Mark Levin, a contributing editor for the National Review Online, says that as the U.S. military uses harsher tactics in Iraq, President Bush is a hypocrite for condemning Israel's construction of a massive barrier to separate it from the Palestinian occupied territories.

Syndicated columnist and former Nancy Reagan speech writer Mona Charen acknowledges that promoting the "civilizing institution" of marriage for gays makes sense -- in theory. But because gay men notoriously have "hundreds of sexual partners," claims Charen, in practice, marriage would not make them any less depraved:

Though obesity is one of the most serious health threats Americans now face, James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, heckles Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman for taking up the issue.

Using the same batty logic as Taranto, New York Post contributor Deroy Murdock is defending Ronald Reagan's record on the AIDS epidemic in America during the 1980s. Perhaps HBO's high-profile production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and the recent controversy over the CBS movie "The Reagans" compelled Murdock to explain why the former president didn't do more to stop the deadly disease: Apparently Reagan, too, was a little too busy to handle an urgent national health crisis.

Not in Right Hook, David Brooks sees Howard Dean as The Internet Man as he has no past and will take a controversial position and its opposite the same day. "At each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest. But over time he is incoherent and contradictory. He is, in short, a man unrooted. This gives him an amazing freshness and an exhilarating freedom."