After reading yesterday's Washington Post column by George Will decrying the Weekly Standard, a Standard fan dug into the archives and sent along this piece (yes, it's a parody) Will penned in early 1942:
FDR and his Critics The Roosevelt administration, justly criticized for its military premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East, East Asia, North Africa, and Europe are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard -- voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, "neoconservativism'' -- everything is crystal clear: Germany is the key to everything. "No Nazi Germany, no Anschluss. No Nazi Germany, no one to prop up the Mussolini regime in Italy. No German support for Quisling ... '' You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says: "We might consider countering this act of Japanese aggression [at Pearl Harbor] with a military strike against German military facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a Nazi Germany can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.'' "Why wait?'' Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate, in the deteriorating wars in the Pacific Ocean area and East Asia. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Louis Napoleon and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than France. And if Hitler's regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard's hoped-for second war, with Germany, does the magazine hope for a third and fourth? As for the "healthy'' repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's powers of prophecy, but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that Japan has inflicted. And regarding the "appeasement'' that the Weekly Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had heeded its earlier (June 1, 1940) editorial advocating war with yet another nation -- the bombing of Italy?