Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do... (A farewell to Garfield Ridge)

I gave Dave at Garfield Ridge a hard time the last time he closed up his blog. But he means it now. He's got a girlfriend and he's going to grad school and still keeping his day job...and he just doesn't have time for sad sack losers like you and me anymore.

I was there at the beginning, back in late 2004 when Ace of Spades inspired him to create his own forum in which he could tell Ace that all his posts were "old". It covered a bit more ground than that. Garfield Ridge was a great read because Dave would go from, say, an inside-baseball look at military doctrine and geopolitics to, say, a review of a current movie that was pretty helpful and knowledgable without being pretentious to, say, a barely-work-safe video of an orangutan kicking a lingerie model in the face. When someone can handle that diverse range of subjects, they're either schizophrenic or a very good writer, or maybe both. GR was pretty profane and coarse, but I never got the impression that Dave was gratuitously mean or brutal. We just came from very different places--I often felt like I was playing Jackie Broyles to Dave's Dunlap--but I was constantly surprised at how much common ground we found on the issues. (Flattered, too: it's nice to hear someone who does cool stuff for the Pentagon reaching some of the same conclusions as I have out here on my own in la-la-land.)

In some ways it was a refutation of Ryan Sager's constant harping about the faultlines in the Republican party. There are faults tearing open in the GOP these days, but they're around pork and especially the immigration issue and not about social issues or foreign policy or "libertarian" issues. I would say a majority of the blogs I read daily are written by agnostic or atheist conservatives who are more socially liberal than I am, but still see the need for social order and a proactive foreign policy.

Dave, along with Ace, Allah, Patterico, Karol, Geoff, Isaac, and a few more I could add, are not faith-based conservatives, but they sure aren't libertarians either. Like most Republicans they prefer small government, but that's a question of efficiency as well as ideology, because they also recognize that the times we live in call for a streamlined state trimmed down to fighting weight instead of the sclerotic, torpid pork-golem we rely on now. In questions touching the war on terror, these are advocates for winning the war and strengthening the state to neutralize the terrorist threat. I think most of these bloggers supported not only the invasion of Iraq, but also the Patriot Act and most also support some degree of coercive interrogations for captured terrorists. (I invite corrections of course, but don't stop me now, I'm rolling.) Most of them, I would say, also want to know exactly who the immigrants into the country right now are and where they're from, and are looking for some sort of actual, physical obstruction to be built on the country's southern border.

Those are issues that are unifying this very odd crowd. It's Hobbesian national security stuff, law-and-order politics that recognizes a clear right and wrong. They've no more patience for cultural and moral relativism, whether it comes from doctrinaire libertarians like Ron Paul or from doctrinaire progressives like Noam Chomsky. It leaves me hopeful that there still is a conservative backbone in America, and that we still agree on a lot of the big stuff.

Anyway, Dave was a great and goofy part of this community. He'll still be around, and I look for him to stop by here now and then...but Garfield Ridge will be missed.

And dangit, as I wrote this, Garfield Ridge seems to have gone down for good. (You can still see a Google cache of the last shot here.) I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it...