Entries Tagged 'lost illusions' ↓

I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feet at the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.

And, lo and behold, what did I find? That Yglesias’s man Barack Obama went wild at the SOTU last night when Bush put Iran on notice:

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.

One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:

I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.

But can someone tell me what to make of this?

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.

Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.

Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM

A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.

I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)

The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.

But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:

The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.

DIVIDED WE FALL.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM

That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.

Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.

Norman Mailer was full of bons mots, as all the obits and remembrances make plain (more on that another day). Here’s one from 2000 that seems particularly relevant in light of the current strike:

Mr. Mailer acknowledged that few writers are ultimately satisfied with the way his or her work is portrayed on-screen, in television or film. Both are director’s mediums, he said. Mr. Mailer recalled a college symposium which said a screenwriter is “nothing but the towel boy in the whorehouse.”

“That remark still applies, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Mailer said.

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

I was thinking about what a historian would make of this, from The Economist’s blog:

AS EVERYONE knows by now, Larry Craig, a senator from Idaho, was arrested in June for tapping his foot suggestively in an airport restroom

I laughed till I cried.

Then I read Slate, whose editors are all over the map about this story. In the end, though, this pretty much sums it up for me: also from The Economist:

Many people still believe that putting gay marriage on state ballots helped George Bush eke out a win in key states in 2004. Whether this is true is arguable. Whether Republicans sought to do this is not. The Republican Party sought to cash in on homophobia, pure and simple. And Mr Craig signed onto that project. Many feel sorry for the man. I feel sorry for his wife and his children, but he himself is suffering a Hell of his own making. Dante could not have written it better.

Unrelated but also suffering from a hell of his own making:

The Daily Mirror reports (I know: it’s the Mirror. The important part of the story is true enough, though):

Actor Owen Wilson’s suicide bid followed a three-day drugs binge on crystal meth and deadly pills dubbed hillbilly heroin, it was revealed last night.

And the troubled star, who overdosed and cut his wrists, had a history of slashing himself, it also emerged.

The news came as police phone records confirmed they rushed to his home after a frantic call about an “attempted suicide”.

Owen, 38, is believed to have rounded off his narcotics bender by downing a bottle of powerful Oxycodone painkillers.

Sadly, there’s nothing new about actors flaming out. Also, despite Mickey Kaus’s totally valid point from a journalism and business point of view, there’s nothing new about the L.A.Times trying to bury this kind of story, which makes lots of people look very bad indeed.

Which leads me exactly to my point. What has happened to Hollywood? A few years back, there would have been a phalanx of publicists on hand keep the pack of beasts at bay. Instead—instantaneously, and on thousands upon thousands of globally linked news and gossip sites—all the sad, pitiful, deeply private details of Owen Wilson’s private hell are available for the rest of us to relish.

In the Era of No Secrets ^TM, it appears that Hollywood has given up. It isn’t even making an attempt to sell us fantasies anymore.