Touring the progblog: Taylor Marsh

Taylor Marsh has a great site. What do I like about it? It’s graphically a cut or two above most other Lefty blogs. It uses the web as a visual medium, whereas most blogs (including this one) are primarily text-driven, with an occasional picture thrown in. She’s definitely a member of the Liberal blogosphere, but also seems to have a slightly different angle than the “core” Lefty blogs I tend to reference: Eschaton, Hullabaloo, Daily Kos, and Unclaimed Territory. For links, see the sidebar. (Andrew Sullivan, perhaps my most referenced blogger, is a conservative and is often loathed by the right for criticizing the war and torture, and by the left for his derisive comments about Dems and previous enthusiasm for the Bush administration and its reckless fiscal policies.) She deals a lot with military matters, and seems to get her material from a wide variety of sources. If you want some visual polish with your sharp pro-Democrat commentary, you could do worse than to check out her site.

I like this quote she posts from Chuck Peña of The Washington Note:

The key to winning the war on terrorism, then, is not a liberal internationalist version of neoconservatism or going back to the future by applying Truman anti-totalitarian liberalism against the radical Islamic threat. Rather, what is required is a real overhaul of U.S. foreign and national security policy based on an understanding that U.S. interventionism is a root cause of anti-American resentment in the Muslim world -- which breeds hatred and becomes a steppingstone to violence, including terrorism. Accordingly, the guiding principle for U.S. policy should be to stop meddling in the internal affairs of countries and regions around the world, except when they directly threaten U.S. national security interests -- i.e., when the territorial integrity, national sovereignty, or liberty of the United States is at risk. This is especially true in the Middle East and Muslim world.

(There’s some interesting discussion after the post. I don’t agree with everything Chuck Peña says, especially his claim that the current Iraq invasion and Clinton’s Balkan interventions come from a similar political philosophy.)