Making the World Safe for Leave it to Beaver

Sidney Blumenthal's latest article for Salon is an analysis of the cultural ramifications of the Bush Defeat, and it's quite good. It explores what kind of America Bush is fighting for, contrasting it with Reagan's vision of the inherent decency of small town America.

Under Ronald Reagan, conservative kitsch was the last nostalgic evocation for a glowing small-town America before the New Deal, with its raucous city dwellers, brain-trusters and an aristocratic president gleefully swatting "economic royalists." Reagan drew his raw material for "morning again in America" from an idealized view of his boyhood in Dixon, Ill., where his father was the town Catholic drunk, rescued at last only by a federal government job. Reagan also had a well of experience acting in movies romanticizing small-town life, produced by the Jewish immigrant moguls of Hollywood for whom these gauzy pictures enabled them to assimilate into a country that had richly rewarded them but in which they remained outsiders.

Bush's America contains no nostalgic evocation of small-town life. The scion of the political dynasty, raised in the oil-patch outpost of Midland, Texas, where the streets are named for Ivy League universities, and whose family retained its summer home in its New England base of Kennebunkport, Maine, attended all the right schools as a legacy, one of the last of his kind before more meritocratic standards were imposed and religious and racial quotas abolished. George W. Bush's inchoate resentment at the alteration of the world of his fathers impelled the son of privilege to align with the cultural warriors of faux populism.

The pathology of Bush's kitsch is the endless reproduction of vicarious hatred of the "other," who is the threat to the sanctity of what kitsch represents. The "other" lies beyond the image of the lurking terrorist to the lurking Democrat -- "America loses." "You're either with us or with the terrorists," Bush said famously. You either have a "pre-9/11" mind-set or a "post-9/11" one, according to his strategist Karl Rove, who carefully set the terms of demonization. In the great act of kitsch, Bush et al. apotheosized their fiasco in Iraq into a battle against Hitler -- "appeasers" ... "Islamofascism." By impersonating a historical context, they projected themselves into it.

Unlike the kitsch before and during the Reagan era, the Bush warriors' kitsch lies beyond unintentional camp. Their kitsch lacks more than irony or self-consciousness. It is deliberately sarcastic, mean-spirited, fearsome and fearful.

The article is well worth sitting through a brief ad to read, in my opinion.

Constitutional Crisis

Sidney Blumenthal's has done an interview for Los Angeles City Beat, in which he talks about the Neo Conservatives and their history. He ends with this sobering statement.

We're headed into a potential constitutional crisis if the Democrats get one or both houses of Congress. They will certainly have subpoena power and I think the Bush administration is likely to resist the production of documents.

The idea in my book is that Bush has created a radical presidency that is unaccountable. And if a check-and-balance is introduced for the first time to Bush, instead of one-party rule, we're going to have another crisis. The conflict will increase, not diminish. As Bette Davis said, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride."

I don't entirely agree with Mr. Blumenthals suggestion that Democrats taking power is going to trigger a constitutional crisis; I would rather say that we are already having a constitutional crisis. We have a presidency who believes in the unitary executive and does not believe that the other branches of government should have any oversight. Thus far the Republican Congress has abdicated their responsibilities, and let this state of affairs continue.

So a Democratic Congress is cure to this disease, not the disease. Yeah it might make things rough for a while, far enough. But it will be better in the end.

The Way of the Bush

Sidney Blumenthal's latest article for Salon is all over the place, and that's a good thing. The hook is his revelation that Former President George H. W. Bush campaigned to replace Rumsfeld and even selected a possible replacement. President Bush rejected the deal, which is his perogative as the decider.

But Mr. Blumenthal doesn't stop there - moving on to discuss Haditha and how President Bush's illusions of victory have led him into fighting this war in a less effective way.

The Bush way of war has been ahistorical and apolitical, and therefore warped strategically, putting absolute pressure on the military to provide an outcome it cannot provide -- "victory." From the start, Bush has placed the military at a disadvantage, and not only because he put the Army in the field in insufficient numbers, setting it upon a task it could not accomplish. U.S. troops are trained for conventional military operations, not counterinsurgency, which requires the utmost restraint in using force. The doctrinal fetish of counterterrorism substitutes for and frustrates counterinsurgency efforts.

Conventional fighting takes two primary forms: chasing and killing foreign fighters as if they constituted the heart of the Sunni insurgency and seeking battles like Fallujah as if any would be decisive. Where battles don't exist, assaults on civilian populations, often provoked by insurgents, are misconceived as battles. While this is not a version of some video game, it is still an illusion.

. . . Above all, the Bush way of war violates the fundamental rule of warfare as defined by military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz: War is politics by other means. In other words, it is not the opposite of politics, or its substitute, but its instrument, and by no means its only one. "Subordinating the political point of view to the military would be absurd," wrote Clausewitz, "for it is policy that creates war. Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa."

I particularly like that last paragraph because I hadn't thought of it like that before. Let's be blunt; the Limbaugh Conservative wants war and conflict, and sees anything less than war and conflict as unmanly and futile. So they see foreign policy as the servent of the war machine, not war as the servent of our foreign policy. This mentality has hurt us in Iraq and it's hurting us in Iran. For, make no mistake, on this issue, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are Limbaugh Republicans.

Anyway read the article - if you aren't a member of Salon, you will have to watch an ad to read it, but it's quite good.

What about War?

Burt Prelutsky, in his latest article, argues that War gets a bad rap.

I realize that some folks are going to bring up innocent bloodshed as an argument against war. But, the truth is that, one way or another, everybody dies. Why is it only a big deal when they die during warfare? For instance, in America, alone, 35,000 people will die this year from influenza; another 50,000 will die in traffic accidents; well over 100,000 will die of tobacco-related diseases.

Most of them will perish because they neglected to get flu shots or because they insist on drinking and driving or because they'd rather risk cancer than give up their cigarettes. So, while Americans go nuts every time a soldier dies while doing his duty, you don't see people demonstrating in the streets against the flu, and you don't see Susan Sarandon all over the tube haranguing against booze, and you sure don't see Michael Moore producing message movies about the horrors of nicotine and tars!
The reality is that while bad people--be they Napoleon, Hitler or Hussein--fight bad wars, good people fight good ones.

A few points.

First of all in the first season of the Awful Truth, Michael Moore did take a "voice box choir," made up of people who had lost their voices to cigarette related diseases, around to sing Christmas Carols to Tobacco Company Executives, which I always thought was a strong image.

Not technically a movie though.

Secondly, I'm so tired of the "everybody dies" excuse. I mean come on - imagine a murderer sitting before a judge, arguing that he or she only killed one person; cigarettes kill many times that. The truth is we make a moral distinction between people who die and people who are murdered. Granted it can be a fine line in some cases. Some people don't want to hold factory owners or mine owners responsible for creating unsafe conditions, while others do.

If Iraq were a legitimate war fought for legitimate reasons, than the deaths of American soldiers is the price we would have to pay. Regrettable but necessary. If the war is illegitimate and unnecessary (as many people believe) than how many lives do you want to piss away fighting it?

Which brings me to my third point. I totally agree that bad people start bad wars, and I'm grateful that Prelutsky noted that. I leave it up to my audience to consider whether President Bush is good people or bad people.

At any rate, Sidney Blumenthal notes that the Bush Administration shares Prelutsky's warm feelings towards war in his latest article.

In the beginning, the elements of the war paradigm appeared to be expediencies, conceived as a series of emergency measures in the struggle against al-Qaida. But, in fact, their precepts were developed in law review articles before Sept. 11 by John Yoo, promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where Vice President Cheney's office assigned him to write key secret memos on torture, surveillance and executive power. Once Bush approved them, the clerisy of neoconservative lawyers, at least as tightly knit as Opus Dei, put them into effect. The war paradigm is Bush's "Da Vinci Code," the difference being that its high priests acknowledge in private that it is real.

They fervently believe that the Constitution is fatally flawed and must be severely circumscribed. The Bush administration's "holy grail," another phrase officials use in private, is to remove suspects' rights to due process, speedy trial and exculpatory evidence. The war paradigm, which they contrast with a caricatured "law enforcement paradigm," is to be constantly strengthened to conduct a permanent war against terror, which can never be finally defeated. There is no exit strategy from emergency.

I do have one question for Blumenthal. Is it you or is it the Bush Administration who sees terror as something that "can never be finally defeated." Because I agree that it doesn't seem like we can really defeat it; but I'd be surprised if the Bush Administration felt like that. Shades of 1984 there. While there are plenty who believe the Bush Administration that sinister, I see them more as ideologically driven dunderheads.

Setting that aside, the Bush Administration's ideologically driven dunderheads do seem to be getting a lot out of the "war paradigm."

The Generals

Sidney Blumenthal's latest article covers the revolt of the generals (as the media have taken to calling it), and it contains some interesting tidbits.

Serving their civilian neoconservative superiors, they endured contempt. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's closest aide, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, joked that the problems of the Army "could be solved by lining up fifty of its generals in the Pentagon and gunning them down," report Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor in their new book on the Iraq invasion, "Cobra II." It was the sort of joke that Uday Hussein could have made. On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumsfeld held a Pentagon town meeting at which he declared the "bureaucracy" -- the career military professionals -- to be "a serious threat to the security of the United States."

I don't know how that sounds to you - but that just doesn't sound very good to me.

While you are logged into Salon you might want to check out a pair of articles on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article for the London Review of Books, entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." The article has raised a lot of hackles and Salon presents two opinions on the subject. Jaun Cole generally agrees with the article and Michelle Goldberg thinks it makes some good points, but overplays it's hand. Anyway both articles are pretty interesting and meaty, so if this is a subject that interests you, they are well worth checking out.

What is the Definition of a Fanatic?

Poor President Bush. Not only has he had to weather charges or corruption and cronyism in his White House as well as the anger over the Harriet Miers nomination, now it turns out he's not really a Conservative. Conservativism, if it were actually put in place, would work 100%. President Bush's Presidency has not been a success. I'd call it a pretty complete failure; but even President Bush's supporters would acknowledge it's hardly been smooth sailing. So President Bush must not really be a conservative.

Or to put it another way, consider these words from Sidney Blumenthal.

Despite Bush's faithful implementation of conservative ideas, disloyal ideologues blame him personally to deflect attention from the failure of their ideas as they position themselves for whatever or whoever is next. Like Trotskyists for whom communism always remained an unfulfilled ideal, conservatives now claim that conservatism has not been tried, and that Bush is a "betrayer" and "impostor." In his attempt to avoid the nemesis of his father, he is reliving it.

Or to put it yet another way, it's unlikely that they have learned their lesson.

That said, it would be nice if this climate provoked a little humility on the part of the Conservative Movement; rather than being convinced that they are 100% correct and anybody who disagrees with them is a filthy traitor. But I'm not holding my breath.

Oh and the definition of a fanatic? According to George Satayana, "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."