DOUBLE
YOUR DISPLEASURE
This
doubles the disappointment of the warhawks. On the one hand,
we have Max Boot noisily
bemoaning the lack of American casualties in the Afghan war
this, even before the real numbers are known and, on the
other hand, we are deafened by the silence coming from those
who screamed loudest that the source of the anthrax had
to be Iraq. The usually voluble Bill Kristol, who gloatingly
pinned it on the Iraqis in the first days of the anthrax panic,
has nothing to say on the subject. Andrew Sullivan, who called
for nuking Iraq in retaliation and ridiculed the
idea that this might be a homegrown crackpot has also been
struck dumb.
LIFE
IN WARTIME
Life
in wartime is grimmer, darker, even online, where the Weekly
Standard has morphed into the Daily Standard. Yes,
war has energized the neocons. The prospect of blood has quickened
their pulse, made them breathe a little heavier, but they
have a problem over at the new daily: since there are only
17 or at most 22 neocons in the whole world, they have trouble
filling up the empty void of cyberspace. It doesn't matter
that 15 out of 17 are newspaper columnists: such a minuscule
cadre can only churn out so much propaganda. So, to fill up
all that empty space, they have resorted to posting a stylized
drawing of the author next to the articles, not a photo, mind
you, but a very magazine-y caricature. Linkless as well as
clueless, the daily pieces are short without being succinct,
and oddly inconclusive. I see, also, they have given up the
idea that people will buy their crappy little magazine on
the newstands if they make half the articles inaccessible
online. We now get to read all of the Weekly Standard
all the time. Winston Churchill promised his people "blood,
sweat, and tears" in wartime, but I have to ask: are we to
be spared nothing?
GO,
BILL, GO!
William
Safire's recent
column attacking the Bushian usurpation of the court system
and the installation of military tribunals to bring accused
terrorists to trial was a shot in the arm for defenders of
the Constitution. I particularly liked the way he targeted
attorney general John Ashcroft as "frustrated," "panic-stricken,"
and "misadvised": as for Bush, the President had been "intimidated
by terrorists" into assuming "dictatorial power" and replacing
our system of justice with "military kangaroo courts." While
Clintonoids like the execrable Alan Dershowitz tout the virtues
of torture, it's people like Safire, Phyllis
Schlafly, Lew Rockwell,
Grover Norquist, Rep.
Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and Rep.
Ron Paul (R-Texas) who are carrying on the fight for civil
liberties abandoned, post-9/11, by fickle liberals.
CHOOSING
UP SIDES
Yes,
it's interesting to see who is for the demolition of the Constitution
and the overthrow of our old Republic, and who's against.
Conservatives of the old-fashioned or libertarian variety
are horrified, while our prefixed conservatives, the so-called
neo-conservatives, are only too eager to give the federal
government near-absolute power to jail anyone, for any reason,
indefinitely; to impound their property, or search it, without
a warrant; to read your email, to track your Internet surfing
habits, tap your phone and read your snail-mail all in the
holy name of the war on terrorism.
JONAH
HAS A HISSY
Was
anyone really surprised when National Review Online
editor Jonah Goldberg lashed out at Safire in a particularly
disrespectful and deliberately abrasive manner? Goldberg,
after all, is married to Jessica
Gavora, a former speechwriter for former Tennessee governor
Lamar Alexander,
and now Ashcroft's chief speechwriter and policy advisor.
"Badly advised," eh? Goldberg, famously described by Ann Coulter
as a "girly-boy,"
threw a hissy fit, and snidely referred to Safire, a veteran
of the Right, as "the columnist the New York Times
claims is a conservative.'" Why, how dare this Safire,
this interloper from the New York Times fer
chrissake, impugn the integrity of Goldberg's beloved let
alone accuse her and her boss of conspiring to set up a dictatorship!
In any case, Goldberg typically misses the whole point of
Safire's polemic, despite citing the relevant paragraph:
"Mr.
Bush is claiming for himself the authority to unilaterally
exempt a class of people accused of particular crimes from
the protections of the Constitution."
OUT
THE WINDOW
Goldberg's
point that the new edict only applies to "foreigners," and
not citizens, is irrelevant: what bugs Safire (and a host
of others on the Right) is that all of this has been done
by decree. The constitutional process, the system of
checks and balances set up by the Founders, has not just been
thrown out of kilter it has been thrown out the window.
TEMPORARILY
FOREVER
Oh,
but this is only temporary, and only applicable to the Bad
Guys, or so Goldberg assures us. But how can he be so sure?
If we give that much power to the feds in an "emergency,"
will they ever cede it? Of course not. Just as many if not
most of the "emergency" taxes and controls enacted during
World War II, and the cold war, remain intact to this day,
we will be stuck with these draconian measures forever because,
remember, the "war on terrorism" is a "new" kind of conflict,
one with a beginning but no end.
FAMILY
FIRST
Given
the family connection, Goldberg's defense of Ashcroft is understandable:
what is incomprehensible is that he failed to reveal that
connection in his apologia. Since he writes about himself
even when he supposedly isn't Goldberg habitually inserts
a little personal anecdote or reference into the most earnest
disquisition on High Theory his failure to do so in this
instance seems passing strange. Of course, if you've been
reading his column since its inception, and remember everything
he ever wrote, you'll recall that he did mention the little
matter of his marriage, way back when, crowing over the Ashcroft
connection. But the average reader, or even the occasional
reader, is not going to know this; he or she isn't going to
know that Goldberg is not just defending the policies of this
administration, but his spouse's employer. Goldberg
owed his readers at least that much. Aside from being the
professional thing to do, full disclosure would have showed
a little class. It would've been the intellectually honorable
course to take and, gee, no wonder he didn't take it
.
BIG
GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES
Not
that Goldberg wouldn't have endorsed Ashcroft's police state
in any case. He is a
well-known neoconservative, and the neocons who have
been defined as "liberals
who've been mugged" never really cared about the conservative
devotion to small, unintrusive government. They were, and
are, "Big Government conservatives," as neocon journalist
Fred Barnes once put it. What got them excited about hitching
their wagons to the Right was its cold war hyper-interventionism:
when right-wingers talked about "rolling back" the Soviet
empire, the neocons didn't need to hear the rest of the conservative
spiel. They were converted on the spot. In the post-cold war
world, however, the neocons were getting restless: with no
more Soviet Union to crusade against, and with the Clintonians
embracing a hyper-Wilsonian interventionism, the GOP was going
"isolationist," i.e. conservative Republicans were rediscovering
the foreign policy of the Founders, who warned against "entangling
alliances." At one point, when the Republican-controlled House
was threatening to withhold support for the Kosovo war, Weekly
Standard editor Bill Kristol threatened to walk out of
the Republican party. With John McCain's presidential ambitions
on hold, albeit temporarily, the neocons were in danger of
becoming irrelevant, even marginal, in spite of their backing
from large foundations and wealthy allies such as publishing
magnate Rupert Murdoch. September 11 gave them a new lease
on life.
ET
TU, CATO?
The
reaction of many on the Right underscored the necons' near-absolute
control of the main institutions of the conservative and even
the libertarian movement. No surprise that the Heritage Foundation,
the American Enterprise Institute (and nearly all the left-liberal
thinktanks) gave unconditional support to this war: but even
I was shocked by the capitulation of the Washington-based
Cato Institute, once a bastion of anti-interventionism in
the world capital of globaloney. A
statement by Ted Galen Carpenter sternly declared:
"President
Bush has indicated that the air strikes are merely the first
stage of the US response. It is imperative that this be so.
Cruise missile launches and bombing raids alone will not root
out Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network or destabilize Afghanistan's
extremist Taliban regime. Only a follow up campaign using
ground forces can hope to accomplish those goals."
And,
no, he wasn't talking about the Northern Alliance: Carpenter
meant American ground forces this, before our Afghan allies
had even begun their offensive. The statement also criticized
the Bush administration for differentiating between the Taliban
and Al Qaeda, flatly averring that the former had to be brought
down as well. The call for a wider war, in Cato's view, was
"premature" for that would mean declaring war on a billion-plus
Muslims, "a risk not to be incurred lightly." But not out
of the question.
HOW
THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN
Oh,
how far and fast the Catoites have fallen since their founding
in the late Seventies. The libertarian philosopher and economist,
Murray
N. Rothbard the real founder and ideological lodestar
of the Cato Institute at its inception must be spinning
in his grave; for surely he would have hated this war,
and the smug triumphalism that goes with it. As I relate in
my biography of Rothbard, An
Enemy of the State, the founder of Cato eventually
broke with his epigones
and severed all relations with the Institute except, of
course, to denounce them as sellouts and traitors. At the
time, I thought Murray was taking a personal squabble to extreme
lengths, and, in the process, being more than a little unfair
in his characterization of the Catoites. Now, all these years
later, I can see that he was absolutely right, and I only
regret that Rothbard is no longer around to hear my mea
culpa. They
are sellouts, dammit, who, in the fallout from 9/11, have
taken on the same ideological colors as the neocons. I hate
to say it, but we are living in a world in which Ted Galen Carpenter
has become indistinguishable from ugh! John McCain.
WHEN
LIFE IMITATES ART
Thanksgiving?
You can keep it. What have we got to be thankful for? As the
braying and howling of the War Party reaches fever pitch,
and the victims of 9/11 are invoked as justification for yet
more senseless carnage, what strikes me is the cartoonish
absurdity of it all, like a nightmare so frightening that
it is almost funny. What could better epitomize the hysteria
and propaganda that permeates the post-9/11 world than this
story, floated by the London Times and dutifully
touted by Matt Drudge, that papers had been found indicating
that Al Qaeda was actively constructing a nuclear device:
these, we were assured, were the plans for a "dirty bomb."
As
it turns out, the partially burned papers were copies
of a spoof article, "How To Build An Atomic Bomb In 10 Easy
Steps," that originally appeared in the satiric Journal of Irreproducible Results.
The piece described how to create a cheap nuke that "is a
great ice-breaker at parties, and in a pinch, can be used
for national defense." The mistake or hoax was exposed
by Jason Scott of rotten.com, but what was really
funny was the "spin" put on this incident by the Telegraph:
"Although
the partly burnt documents may well confirm that al-Qa'eda
was trying to get hold of weapons of mass destruction, they
also indicate that the group had little idea what it was doing
and absolutely no sense of humor."
REALITY
GAP
But
how does anyone know that the Al Qaeda took the document
seriously could these be the same ruthless folk who planned
and executed the hijacking of four airliners and pulled off
the single most spectacular terrorist act in modern times?
And who is really lacking a sense of humor here? Apparently
our intrepid journalists of Fleet Street are so humorless
that they can't admit they've been had. The funny thing is,
they ran a satire as "news" and practically nobody noticed.
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