Drash: It’s frustrating beyond words that it has taken this long for the conservative Christian commentators (such as Vox Day) to begin to understand the chicanery and duplicity involved in the corrupt Bush Administration. Better late than never? No, in my mind it’s just a Pavlovian response to a situation that has already been consigned to the dustheap of history. Sadly, the worldly Church is invariably in reaction mode to the world and its evil.
(Vox Day) For the last seven years, Republicans have made excuse after excuse for George W. Bush. An entire book could be compiled about the risible claims made for him; an entire political generation of theoretically conservative pundits is quietly hoping that no one will ever ransack their archives and reveal how completely off-base they were regarding the current president. My personal favorite was the way that Peggy Noonan, an otherwise sober commentator, once proclaimed that all America had come to know that Bush was “Reaganesque.”
There were no nukes, no biological weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons program, no evidence suggesting involvement in the 9/11 attacks, no violation of any peace treaty with the United States – in short, no justification for war…
That was in the autumn of 2000. By the time Ronald Reagan was buried in June 2004, only a few Fox commentators were still trying to force the comparison. Now, after seven years of his governance and with his departure rapidly approaching, conservatives are forced to admit that “Wilsonesque,” “Rooseveltian” and “Trotskyite” are all much more accurate descriptions of President Bush the Younger. Why anyone ever thought for one second that a man who subjected the English language to worse tortures than anything the Guantanamo Bay prisoners have endured could compare to “the Great Communicator” will remain a mystery for the ages.
“The Great Torturer” is departing none too soon. Bill Clinton was a terrible president, but his legacy of perjury, presidential sexcapades and perambulating corpses was far less harmful to the nation than George W. Bush’s War on American liberties. The Patriot Acts have already been proven to be worse than predicted; the U.S. military is openly serving as the mercenary muscle of the United Nations; the laws are being rewritten to allow for the structure of an unelected supra-national ruling commission, and the borders have been opened to accommodate the desires of a horde of left-wing immigrants, many of whom actually speak less English than the president himself.
But for all that this supposed conservative’s legacy will be one of national self-destruction – as Jonah Goldberg once wrote of Adolf Hitler, just try to name one thing he actually wanted to conserve – few have ever accused him of actual political corruption. Even the dark whisperings about Darth Cheney and an alternative evolutionary tree tend to be intrinsically exculpatory; the chimpanzee might appear to smirk, but at the end of the day, it’s just a chimpanzee. You can’t reasonably blame it for a failure to comprehend the concept of human liberty or a failure to grasp the Clausewitzian physics of war.
The lies that surrounded the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq are well known. There were no nukes, no biological weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons program, no evidence suggesting involvement in the 9/11 attacks, no violation of any peace treaty with the United States – in short, no justification for war other than the fact that Hussein was a cruel and murderous dictator presiding over a sovereign nation. (I must confess that, unlike the alarmingly prophetic Patrick J. Buchanan, I was dumb enough to fall for the latter justification myself, at least until I finally looked it up and discovered that the only relevant treaty was between Iraq and the United Nations.)
However, as the indefatigable Justin Raimondo has documented, the lies surrounding the Iraqi invasion are likely to pale in comparison to those being told in order to justify an invasion of Iran. The neocons are frantically looking for a justification, any justification, to continue to beat the war drums in light of the recent National Intelligence Estimate report which declared that Iran stopped its weapons development program in 2003.
The truth is that the reason underlying many wars is internal, not external. It is the freedom of the American people that is dangerous to the mahouts of the governing elite, who ride uncertainly on top of the elephant of the great unwashed, never quite sure that they are actually as in control of events as they would like to believe themselves to be. In the past, it was enough to mutter ominous threats about non-existent bogeymen to get the elephant moving in the right direction (Remember the Maine?), but the combination of a genuinely free Internet press with two post-ironic generations that assume that the official story cannot possibly be true means that this is no longer a safe assumption. This leaves the elephant riders with two choices, give up their war or invent a better reason, even if they have to burn the Reichstag themselves.
Actually, come to think of it, if they’d do the American people the favor of burning down Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court while all three were in session, I suspect America might be inclined to let them have their invasion out of sheer gratitude. What’s one more occupation to a nation that boasts troops stationed in lands ranging from Araby to Iceland? In any event, if the psychologists are correct and the enthusiasm with which invasion enthusiasts fling around the term “islamo-fascist” tends to reflect an aspect of their own character, the only reasonable conclusion is that the Democrusaders will opt for invention, no matter how much the truth must be tortured.