The Few, the Proud, the Marins – A top conservative is wrong about John Walker. Scott Shuger:

It is, to say the least, hard to believe that a young American could have ended up in the Taliban. But saying the least is not the conservative’s discourse of choice. And so it was that soon after John Walker’s dirty, bearded face was beamed worldwide, conservative commentator Shelby Steele appeared on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page with a 1,100-word unified Walker theory, which boiled down to this: The 20-year-old Walker could do what he did only because his formative years were spent in hot-tubbing, wine-loving, liberal Marin County, California. Steele explained that in Marin “there are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights and wrongs … just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool,” and that there, “a little anti-Americanism becomes a sophistication, a mark of authenticity.”

A few days later, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, detecting a rash generalization, begged to differ. “I am willing to wager,” Cohen wrote, “that most of the kids born in 1981 (or any year, for that matter) are still in America. In fact, there may be more of them with the U.S. armed forces than with the Taliban. I am way out on a limb on that one, I know.” Slate