Max Hastings - Liberal

Just because he wrote for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail doesn't mean he's conservative, even in the English sense. Here are some quotes:

Quotes from Max Hastings:

'1 I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal. Perhaps where some people have made a mistake - possibly even including Conrad Black - because I shoot every weekend and write about the military and so on, they think I'm frightfully right-wing. In some respects I'm more left-wing than Tony Blair.'

"2. To put it bluntly, the Republicans have become the party of America's stupid people. That is not abusive, but a statement of fact. Most of the whites who will vote for McCain next week are demographically among the nation's least-educated: rednecks; drivers of big, tough pick-up trucks with flags on the hoods; Johnny Cash fans; and deer hunters. Sure, in upmarket city suburbs there are still some McCain/Palin boards up, among people who simply vote with their wallets. In the Bush years, the Republicans have justified their reputation as the party which looks after rich people.

The blunt, happy truth is that today there are not enough dumb people in the United States to elect John McCain and his hockey mom Veep." Max Hastings Daily Mail November 2008

3. "A note of hysteria has crept into American politics. It has made the supremely foolish Sarah Palin a Right-wing heroine; spawned the anti-Obama Tea Party movement; made the rhetoric of hate respectable among rednecks, hillbillies and Right-wing TV station - From Daily Mail column on Obama's Health Care Victory."

His Endorsement of Tony Blair
Hastings then resigned and accepted an offer to edit Lord Rothermere's Evening Standard, a post of lesser standing but more to his taste. When the General Election came two years later he wrote the Standard's full page editorial himself, declaring the paper's support for Tony Blair. From a BNET Book review of Editor By Max Hastings

Black on Hastings Book "Editor"
I rarely disputed editorial policy with Max and was as opposed to the death penalty, to apartheid and to the mistreatment of Palestinians and Ulster's Catholics as he was - but I didn't share his simplistic solutions ... He was a better journalist than an editor but he rendered invaluable service to the Daily Telegraph at a critical time. I always liked him and remember him amicably. His book is as refreshing and uneven as its author'

Retribution: Max Hastings hates MacArthur

Max Hastings' book on the last year of the Pacific War is a perfect example of MacArthur Derangement Syndrome (MDS). I've never read a respected military historian who hates an Allied general as much as Max hates Mac. Here are some Hastings' comments from Retribution:

• MacArthur by contrast seemed to reject accountability to any earthly power.(P19)

• MacArthur displayed a a taste for fantasy quite unsuited to a field commander. together with an ambition close to megalomania and a consistently poor judgment as a picker of subordinates.(p20)
• Army insiders held MacA personally responsible for the Philippines debacle, by failures of commission and omission, This was unjust, although his generalship was poor...(p20)
• He shamelessly manipulated communiques about his forces achievements, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures.
• He made no jokes, and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men in an effort to deceive them that he was human (p22)
• His belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil verged on derangement.
• Most distasteful of all his wartime actions was a flirtation with a 1944 run against FDR, whose liberalism affronted his own rabidly conservative convictions Only when he realized he could not defeat Dewey for the Republican nomination did he finally exclude himself. (P23).

And this is just the first 25 pages of a 560 page book! So far it seems that Hastings is the "deranged" one - not MacArthur.