Conference Blogging

Madeleine Albright is proposing a new "militant moderation." "I want to see militants on the march," she said, "militants with a swagger." Then she invoked Harry Truman (of course). It's not clear what any of this means, but it's annoying. Aside from being alliterative, why exactly would you want your movement to be "militant?" Is that really a positive adjective? And it's telling that in this era of far right foreign policy making, when the liberal critique has been proven right again and again, Albright still feels compelled to ostentatiously announce her distance from those bad leftists -- whoever they are, whatever they believe -- as well.

Update: Matt has more on the Truman comparison:

If there's some very specific thing Truman did that you want to do again, that's great, but overwhelmingly the only point Truman-invokers are making is that they want a foreign policy that's not too hot and also not too cold. This is nice, of course, and Goldilocks agrees, but it's really not an especially deep point or one that carries a ton of analytic bite.