hold your horses

Gerard Baker thinks he sees a time (when America won’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore) that the opinion elites and Democrats will wish he were still around:

 It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes. [e.a.]

Oh yeah? Andrew Sullivan is already pointing his finger. Admiringly, he quotes a Euro-blogger who knows how things went down: We [in the West] are to blame for the mess we made after 9/11. Sullivan admires the guy for writing about the fact that he was ”complicit.” In our [the West's] ”mistakes.”

This argument—the notion that 9/11 arrived on a blank slate and it is our reaction to 9/11 that has caused all our problems— (which Tony Blair has called a “mad anti-Americanism” and which he has warned against as a fatal inversion of Western liberalism) will become very popular, I’m sure.

The culture wars will continue…until they are drowned out by the shooting wars. Which, I’m afraid, will come.