Free fix for a.. Oh, wait, I can't use that title

For those looking to get their history fix today, I've got three good links. First, the farmer @ corrente posts some prime examples of moral values in red states, circa 1927.

Dance-halls are ticket-offices to Hell.

Need I quote more? Of course I need to!

There are no soul-winning dancing Christians.
I couldn't pray at a dance. Could you?
I wouldn't enjoy reading my Bible after the dance.
No young man will go through the motions of the dance, hour after hour, without thinking impure thoughts.
I would be miserable if I knew God were watching me while dancing.
A girl who dances cheapens herself in the eyes of the finest men in town.

Yes, folks, them's the moral values that the right wishes to enforce upon the populace.

Shifting gears, Kevin Drum devels into WWII history to discuss why Democrats shouldn't become more hawkish against Islamic terrorism.

It's arguable that liberals are foolish to let all this prevent them from seeing the totalitarian danger for what it is. But it's hardly surprising. The fact is that compared to fascism and communism, Islamic totalitarianism seems like pretty thin beer to many. It's not fundamentally expansionist, and its power to kill people isn't even remotely in the same league.

Tom @ corrente responds to Drum's piece and asserts that Bush dug the Republicans into a hole by labeling Islamic terrorism is absolutely evil and so threatening to us that we muct get rid of it at any cost. He points out that Truman did the same thing with communism, and this only lead to him handing over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to the Republicans in the 50s.

I guess my main point is that Truman's approach of trying to ameliorate the conditions that led to communism was certainly the proper one. However, the overhyped threat (and it was overhyped until the Soviets got the bomb in 1949) was what ultimately led to a frustrating decade for the Democrats in the 1950s.

W may have set Republicans up for a similar fall. However, the consequences for the world of W's failure will be doubly disastrous because W and the boys have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that led to the rise of Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism in the first place.

Both Tom and Drum's pieces arose as a retort to this Peter Beinart article in TNR which argues the Democrats need to pay more attention to the threats of Islamic terrorism if they are serious about spreading freedom through the Middle East.

I've been giving thought to this topic of late. A week ago, I was listening to Limbaugh brattle on about how the the genius of the Republicans (read: neoconservative) startegy was that it placed liberals against everything they stood for, and the example is used was that we supposedly supported a dictator in Iraq and now we're against the war which knocked him from power. Now this isn't to say that I've started agreeing with Rush; I certainly don't, but it seems like Beinart has bought into Rush's crapola. While I realize that the right has no concept of what "freedom" means when they are bombing innocent civilians into a million tiny pieces to give it to them, along with waging a culture war to purify the homeland of anyone who doesn't fear God as feverently as they do, I also have to ask myself what other people think. What do the "Democrats" who voted for Bush think about freedom? Do they actually believe that Bush is trying to spread freedom across the globe with war efforts that line the pockets of his campaign contributors? Have the Republicans literally bombed the message of freedom away from the liberals in the eyes of most Americans?

It's an interesting question to pose in a country where the definiton of freedom is at a crossroad. Those who that our soldiers are fighting in Iraq to defend out freedoms and allow others to have the same rights as us also see no problem with restricting the freedoms gays, lesbians, and anyone who doesn't share and worship their extreme views of Christianity. How do we define freedom, and how do we make sure people understand it? How do we make it our message?

...OK, now the right's definition of us "hating" freedom is getting ridiculous. From WaPo's Anne Applebaum, "The Freedom Haters."

At least a part of the Western left -- or rather the Western far left -- is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine.

Uhm, what? The left isn't supporting the democratic actions of the Ukrainian people? We didn't think Saddam was an asshole? Exactly what planet, Anne, do you reside on?