Category: Old Dish

Today, July 8, is a day of protest against the Jihadist dictators in Tehran. Here’s a useful list of planned demonstrations, if that’s your bag. This is also a day for checking out some pro-democracy websites/blogs. Here’s one. And another. Send me more and I’ll keep linking throughout the day.

Kate O’Beirne has an interesting follow-up to her previous complaint about the lack of “Bush Republicans” in the New York Convention line-up. But what is a “Bush Republican”? I think it has to be a combination of the social policy of the religious right (the FMA, bans on embryo research, government support for religious charities, etc), the fiscal policy of the Keynesian left (massive new domestic spending combined with “deficits don’t matter”), and the foreign policy of liberal moralism (democratization as a policy in the Middle East). So it’s not surprising, is it, that there aren’t many principled “Bush Republicans.” Again, the GOP crib sheet on Edwards is interesting in this respect. He gets zinged, for example, for opposing the new Medicare entitlement. So how many Republicans positively believe in creating a new and fantastically expensive entitlement for the wealthiest segment in American society? I don’t mean defensively explain it as unavoidable. I mean positively endorse it as an element in their conservative philosophy. The sad truth is that if Bush Republicanism exists, it’s one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an “ism”. The only compelling conservative message that Bush can use to appeal to the country as a whole is that he stands between us and a new wave of terror. So his campaign will have to be based in fear. I’m not sure that, in America, that works very well. But we’ll see.

Mickey Kaus opines that Peggy Noonan “has done the Democrats a big favor by coming up with [a winning message for Kerry]. The message is that America wants a respite from all the headstrong history-making of the past four years.” Noonan argues in her recent WSJ column that

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let’s hire someone who’ll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless. I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. “A return to normalcy,” with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

I agree – but then I wrote something almost identical last February in Time:

Here’s what a really smart Democratic contender could say to the president this fall: “Thank you, Mr president, for your leadership in difficult times. You took some tough decisions and we are safer as a result. But the very qualities that made you a perfect pick for the war so far are the very ones that make you less effective from now on. You are too polarizing a figure to bring real peace to Iraq. You are too unpopular to allow European governments to cooperate fully in the attempt to hunt down terrorists. And your deep unpopularity in half the country makes it impossible for you to make the necessary compromises that the country needs domestically. Thanks for all you’ve done, but bye-bye.”

And two weeks ago, I wrote in the Sunday Times in London:

Americans, moreover, are somewhat drained. War is a terrifying and enervating thing. The fear of annihilation at any moment at the hands of terrorists with WMDs is a difficult thing to live with – and, fairly or unfairly, they associate this fear with the Bush administration. The soothing dullness of a Boston Brahmin can appear somewhat attractive in contrast.

No I’m not saying anyone is copying anyone else – these ideas are common enough, framed differently, etc. But it seems to me that Noonan didn’t “come up with” this scenario for the Dems. I saw it coming months ago. Kerry, of course, is far too politically stupid to play this card, even passively.

THE RACISM OF RALL: I guess he needs more attention. But Ted Rall’s latest cartoon depicts his revenge fantasy on Condi Rice. She defends herself thus: “I was Bush’s beard! I was his House Nigga!” Her prison guard (in the fantasy, various members of the Bush administration are treated the way Saddam now is) then tells her: “You’re not white, stupid. Now hand over your hair straightener.” And she is sent to “Inner City Racial Re-education Camp.” If a white right-winger ever said such things about a black woman, do you think he would still be syndicated? And celebrated?

Wouldn’t it be helpful to read the Langston Hughes poem? Here it is in full. It is indeed beautiful and lyrical if a little trite at times. But it is also clearly a call to Communist revolution, as Tim Noah first observed and Bill Buckley noticed. The poem is rooted in the notion that the ideal of American freedom was a lie from the beginning for many people, and that public ownership of private property was the only hope:

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

Then there’s this:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Now I know Kerry is a liberal, but does he really want to cite a man who wanted to abolish private property and loved Stalin? Again, the right-left double standard. If a fascist poet in 1938 had called to remake a pure racial America on the lines of Hitler’s Germany, would he now be quoted by any leading politician? But the communists get a pass. Again. And again. And again.

How long are we going to hear “Let America be America” and Hughes references before someone, other than Bill Buckley, points out exactly what sort of America Hughes was hoping to see? This sounds like it’s turning into the official Kerry-Edwards slogan, good enough I guess, assuming you have to borrow, and I guess it’s a nice poem and all, but apparently someone forgot to tell someone else that Langston Hughes was not just a poor, black, populist poet, but a Marxist one. The America he was looking for is an interesting one. Guys, you gotta vet the poets you quote.

From “Goodbye Christ” (1932) — Langston Hughes

Goodbye, Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all –
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME.” – More feedback on the Letters Page.

He’s a big lefty who hates the president. But he has a lot more intellectual integrity than Paul Krugman. Check out his evisceration of Michael Moore. Funny how something like this only appears on the web.

Finally, a conservative objects to the fact that social liberals are all going to be given the prime speaking spots at the Republican convention. Kate O’Beirne wants to know where the real leaders of today’s GOP are: Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist. She’s right. If it’s a sign of weakness that Kerry picked Edwards, why is it not a sign of panic that Republicans are showcasing people who have opposed much of Bush’s domestic agenda at their convention?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Many of us feel discomfort at confronting this issue. I sure don’t like writing about it. Shouldn’t we live and let live? But as Dobson points out, history demonstrates that initial appeasement just worsens the eventual ramifications. When the countries of pre-World War II Europe noticed Adolf Hitler’s emerging aggression, they said, “It’s not my business.” But, as we now know, it was their business. How much sorrow might have been prevented had they recognized that burying their head in the sand wouldn’t help?” – columnist Shaunti Feldhahn, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, comparing gay couples seeking marriage rights with Nazis.

The veep pick was the right one. But did you hear Kerry’s speech yesterday? It was so bad, so vacuous, so dumb-liberal it strained credulity. If this is Kerry’s message, Bush will continue to be one of the luckiest politicians alive. I fisk away here.

Two new developments. Another horrifying mass murder by the “insurgents,” i.e. Jihadists and Baathists. This time, they underlined their message by murdering fourteen mourners at a funeral for a public official that the Jihadists murdered earlier this week. They kill and kill again. This particular incident cannot in any way be attributed to the presence of the Coalition forces. It’s designed to terrorize Iraqi civilians into a new dictatorship. You have to believe that most Iraqis can see this for what it is. In fact, I do believe it. After the transfer of sovereignty, you can see the potential contours of the struggle that will now define that country and the region: terrorists versus democrats, Jihadists versus Muslim patriots. Remember this has never happened before. In the police states of most Arab countries, there’s no democracy to fight for or against. But now there’s a chance that there will be. And so we will get tough Arab democratic leaders (like Allawi) cracking down on terror; and we will also get new vigilante groups targeting the Jihadists. Here’s a fascinating quote from a video made by a group of viglantes who are now targeting Zarqawi:

“We swear to Allah that we have started preparing … to capture [Zarqawi] and his allies or kill them and present them as gift to our people… This is the last warning. If you don’t stop, we will do to you what the coalition forces have failed to do.” (My italics).

Notice what these people must have absorbed to put the battle in that context: that the coalition did indeed liberate Iraqis from tyranny, that they have been unable to prevent terrorists from exploiting the subsequent power vacuum, but that Iraqis themselves will now do the job. The silver lining of the U.S. failure to pacify Iraq just widened a little.

The news of Iranian officers caught with explosives in Baghdad is also an important turning point. The truth is that the “resistance” to the liberation was always formed around Baathists, Jihadists and Iranian and other foreign meddlers. But until sovereignty was transferred, they could always be portrayed as fighting America, not fighting Iraq. Now, within days of the power transfer, we are seeing the new dynamic. It seems to me that the best reason for voting for Bush this fall is Iran. We know they will fight back soon. We also know that Kerry is closer to the “see-no-evil” French approach to the Iranian mullahs. This is the next phase of the war. It has already started in Iraq.

FISK ON SADDAM’S TRIAL: Reading Robert Fisk’s sympathetic treatment of Saddam Hussein’s trial is an eye-opener. The language is particularly revealing. Norman Geras guides you through this terror-excusing hack’s rhetorical nihilism.

WHAT GOVERNMENT COSTS: When you add up all the taxes, red tape, bureaucracy, subsidies, pork, and entitlements, the cost of government now consumes well over half of national income. At least, that’s what Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform outfit argues in this PDF document, released today. That makes the average American someone who essentially works for the government each year until July 7. So congrats. You now to get to keep your own money. Woohoo. But the small print also suggests that, with the explosion of government spending under the big-government Bush Republicans, this number could go much higher in the future. It’s perfectly possible that, if John Kerry wins in November and immediately raises taxes, government’s take of the people’s wealth will have been ratcheted up a whole new permanent notch. That could be George W. Bush’s domestic legacy: the man who made the new liberalism possible.