Jack Kelly: Quotable Quotes

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, a current newspaper columnist, and a new blogger via his site Irish Pennants. He holds forth on a variety of subjects in John Hawkins' interview: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China's rise, and of course the media.

Quite a few bon mots, too. For instance, on journalism:

"It used to be an honest trade and now it's a bogus profession."

Yeah, we've noticed. C. Blake Powers has the applicable history... maybe not quite so honest there, Jack, but we get your point.

On Iraq:

"Within Iraq, people from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen could no more be called insurgents in Iraq than the people who flew airplanes in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 could be described as insurgents within the United States."

But Michael Moore and the "Democratic" Underground types can be depended on to try anyway - on both fronts.

On the "cycle of violence":

John Hawkins: In relation to that, one of the oddball notions that seems to have gained traction on the left is that it's impossible to defeat terrorism because every time you kill a terrorist, it just inspires more terrorists to join the cause. So, in effect, it's a hopeless cycle of violence. What do you think of that concept?

Jack Kelly: It's ridiculous. It's just a subset of the overall argument that nothing is ever settled by violence when, in fact, if you take a look at history, most things, for good or ill, have been settled by violence. So violence never settled anything except slavery, fascism, communism, you name it.

On which topic:

"To say that there's no connection, or a limited connection, between these events [in the Middle East] and what President Bush has done, particularly with the liberation of Iraq, is like saying there was no connection between the end of slavery and Abraham Lincoln waging the Civil War."

Fouad Ajami seems to agree after his trip to the Middle East. Then, too, some of us remember the parallel left-liberal idea that Reagan, Thatcher, & John-Paul II were just surprise beneficiaries of the Soviet Union's collapse rather than the people who engineered it in the face of left-lib opposition by insisting on moral clarity and discarding left-liberalism's core principles of accomodation and support. Then there's more recent times - "Brutal Afghan Winter," anyone?

Jack, buddy, we've seen this movie before. Numerous times. But it's good to point it out.

On China, and Barnett's thesis that China won't resort to war because of the damage it will do to China's economy:

"I'd be much more cautious than Barnett, especially since historically -- and I mean thousands of years historically -- Chinese rulers have attempted to deflect domestic unrest by attacking a foreign devil. So if there are severe economic reverses in China -- as there well could be -- the assaults on Taiwan, the verbal assaults and so forth, could take on so much momentum and so much proportion that they could be pushed into doing something that they don't want to do -- don't really want to do with truly ugly consequences."

A good summary of stuff we've discussed in depth here on Winds. So, why did he start blogging anyway?

"I stopped buying newspapers, period. I'd rather read stuff online and most of it's there. I'm an unlikely candidate being a middle-age man who grew up with print, used to read 3 newspapers a day and likes newspapers as a concept, and if I'm not reading them, and my daughter certainly isn't, she gets her news from other sources, if this is the wave of the future -- I'd better get accustomed to it."

Anything else about the media?

"(There is) no understanding (in the MSM) of keeping up with what’s popular and who's doing it. Of course, there aren't that many conservatives, period, but who do they run? Even on the liberal side? Why would you care what those people think?"

Don't be so shy, Jack. Tell us what you really think. (via Conservative Grapevine).