HOW DID THIS GET PUBLISHED?

Sam Tanenhaus has a new book on the death of conservatism in America and it was given a truly bizarre review in the New Criterion by James Piereson.. The author states that Sen. Taft was thoughtful:

To be sure, there were some thoughtful conservatives to be found, such as the author Russell Kirk and Senator Robert Taft

when in fact Taft was close to bi-polar on foreign policy because he wanted America to be at one and the same time both isolationist and anti-Communist. Piereson goes on revise history at other points in his review, such as this howler:

This did not happen by accident, but rather because conservatives succeeded where liberals had failed in ending the Cold War, rejuvenating the American economy from the “stagflation” of the 1970s, and restoring order and fiscal health to the nation’s cities.

The conservatives no more won the Cold War than Richard Nixon put a man on the Moon. Further, stagflation was ended by Paul Volcker, a Carter nominee, not Saint Reagan. Finally, what order and fiscal health?

Piereson gets worse the closer he gets to the present:

President Bush, in addition, justified the war on liberal or Wilsonian grounds, so that if the war discredited anything, it was the liberal ideal of achieving collective security through the promotion of democracy.

As I have shown before, WMDs were the primary justification for the Iraq War.