Bush hosts a little neocon book-talk coffee klatch at the White House

[DeepModem Mom]

And what a lovely group!

WP, "The Sleuth," by Mary Ann Akers
Neocon Coffee Klatch at White House

President Bush, noted bookworm, held a private confab with leading neoconservatives in the dining room of the White House residence Wednesday afternoon, hosting British historian Andrew Roberts, author of one of the president's favorite recent books, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.

The president's remarks at the off-the-public-schedule event were...off the record. But one participant in the room described President Bush as "very funny and very lively" and said Vice President Dick Cheney "didn't say a lot" but "looked terrific for a guy who just flew around the world."

Cheney actually took a copy of Roberts' book with him on his surprise trip this week to Afghanistan, where a suicide bomber struck all too close by while the vice president was on Bagram Air Force Base near Kabul.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. of The American Spectator asked the Veep, "Were you carrying Roberts' book as reading material or as a shield?"...Others who attended the coffee klatch included: historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the wife of Irving Kristol -- a founder of the neoconservative moment -- and mother of Bill Kristol; Allen Guelzo, author of the book Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and Irwin Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, which lists a "senior advisor" named Lewis Libby....Also in the room were White House chief of staff Josh Bolton and Karl Rove, the man who needs no introduction.

Besides history and discussion of the United States' English-speaking allies, the neocons talked fleetingly about one of their favorite topics: the Clintons.

Tyrrell hawked his forthcoming book, The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After The White House, and Roberts joked that if Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) becomes president, then Tyrrell is welcome to come live in the basement of his home in London.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/03/neocon_coffee_klatch_at_white.html

[Virginia Dare]

1. Where was Lady Chimp the librarian?

off doing other important stuff?

President Bush "very funny and very lively", translation, he was drunk.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Indeed! Mother Kristol was there, so it wasn't an all-male gathering. nt

[peacetalksforall]

3. Review from Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly
"The English-speaking nations—America, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies—are a "decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self-sacrificing imperium" and "the last, best hope for Mankind," argues this jingoistic peroration. Roberts (Napoleon and Wellington) treats them as a political-cultural unity, thriving on respect for law and property, laissez-faire capitalism and the Protestant ethic, and standing together against Nazism, communism and Islamic terrorism. (Ireland is the black sheep—backward, unruly, pro-fascist and Catholic.) His rambling, disjointed survey celebrates their achievements in science, technology, sports and Big Macs, but the book is mainly an apologia for an allegedly benign Anglo-American imperialism. The author defends virtually every 20th-century British or American military adventure, from the conquest of the Philippines to the Vietnam War, finishing with a lengthy justification of the invasion of Iraq; his villains are domestic critics and leftist intellectuals whom he calls "appeasers" and who sap the English-speaking peoples' resolve by propagandizing for totalitarianism (also Mel Gibson, whose anti-British movies sabotage English-speaking peoples' solidarity). Roberts writes in a bluff, Tory style, mixing bombast with jocular Briticisms like a running leitmotif of whimsical geopolitical wagers placed at London clubs. Lively but unsystematic, sometimes insightful but always one-sided, this is less a history than a chest-thumping conservative polemic. 16 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

[peacetalksforall]

4. Another review from Booklist

"Roberts has written a lengthy, ambitious, and interesting but flawed work intended as a sequel to Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,which ended with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Robert eschews straight narrative history. Instead, he provides a series of vignettes covering various topics that range across the English-speaking world. He offers descriptions of the Boer War in South Africa, the role of capitalism in promoting economic development, and the American-supported coup that overthrew the Allende government in Chile. Roberts strains to show the fundamental unity of English-speaking peoples. He is somewhat convincing when dealing with Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. When he includes the U.S., he often goes to ludicrous lengths to find commonality. For example, he equates American neoconservatives with Britain's "empire men" in their supposed desire to spread civilization. In conflicts from the Boer War to the American suppression of the Philippine insurrection, Roberts consistently sees only the purest motives of "Anglo-Saxons." Still, this is a useful, if slanted, look at some key events of the twentieth century. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved"