Taki’s Primo Stash

Taki Theodoracopulos—Greek shipping heir, sailor, skiing enthusiast, one-time inmate, columnist for the London Spectator, and (formerly) self-described anti-Semite—has just launched an online magazine. Taki's Top Drawer used to be an infrequently-updated web archive of Taki's "High Life" column, but starting yesterday it's a full-blown paleocon roundtable, with all the suspicion and isolationism that goes with it. Taki and Friends ("conservative and libertarian luminaries like Paul Gottfried, R.J. Stove, Justin Raimondo, Steven Sailer, John Zmirak, Robert Spencer and many others") are poised to pour their wit and wisdom into the blogosphere like a methuselah of the Widow Clicquot

I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion. For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars. Thanks to the tragedy of September 11—and a compliant and dim-witted president—these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests. And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran—which is no threat to the U.S. at all. One thing I can tell you for sure, there may well be some atheists in foxholes—but you’ll never find a neocon. They prefer to send blue-collar kids out to die on their behalf, so they get to feel macho—and make up for all the times they got wedgies in prep school. It shall be our considered task to take on the chicken-hawks of this world, and give them wedgies again.

Now that's odd. Taki has been opposed to the Iraq war from the very beginning, but on the cultural side of things nobody's done more than he has to make "conservative" indistinguishable from "jet-setting, soulless billionaire." He wound up in jail, remember, for getting caught with coke at Heathrow—was that coming from or going to Gstaad?

Taki can be good for a laugh, sure: Few people as closely resemble a cartoon come to life, and few people, thankfully, are less likely to have their Buchananite sentiments taken seriously by anyone who matters. (Though that doesn't mean he'll stop getting party invites, safe to say.) But the real value of this site is a glimpse at a significant current in opposition to our Middle East policy: the idea that if we ignore a problem, it just might go away.