Mr. Joshua Trevino has a penchant for repeating the cliches, the tropes of American Conservatism, by way of Samuel P. Huntington, Bush The Younger and the muscular present day American Fundamentalist Christianity. Add to that list of precursors the names of Leo Strauss and his sub rosa ally Carl Schmitt. With a kind of unctuous self-congratulation, Mr. Trevino tell us – and be reminded elegantly- that he is displaying and arguing self-evident truths. His essay titled Too Good to Win, Is the West Losing the War appears on The Brussels Journal website, that advertises itself as 'The Voice of Conservatism In Europe'. This was originally a speech before delivered to the California Republican Jewish Coalition (RJW) on Saturday, 21 June 2008. Mr. Trevino manages to touch on the deeply held beliefs, even the prejudices of his audience, he is nothing if not politic. The audience is Jewish, Conservative, Republican, Neo-Conservative, American Likudnik? Or is the last sentence a glaring tautology? And more importantly is the label American Likudnik Anti-Semitic? I'll have to leave that pressing question for another occasion. To those who find this collection of the hackneyed, the shopworn less than edifying, he will dismiss your comment as irrelevant or worse. When angered, Mr. Trevino reverts to childish taunt, his poise and self-satisfied rhetorical elegance deserts him and a pathos, of sorts, takes the lead.

Day One of his Politics begins on September 11, 2001. He celebrates the American Wound as the genesis of his fable of the benevolence of the American Hegemony, and the mendacity and bad faith of 'The Muslim World', with assurances of his knowledge of the benighted political/existential and geographical spaces that comprise that construct. But the real story here is Mr. Trevino's touching and revelatory re-imagination of his nine year old self, discovering the political truth and magic of Ronald Reagan. It has all the heart warming sentimentality of the dull black and white of a 1940's Hollywood movie, and the lethal, pernicious nihilism of the Republican Party of our own age.

Political Observer