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We all know how impossible it’s been to debate the right on Iraq.  They truly believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) or that Iraq wanted to help with 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) or that Iraq was planning something more or less like 9/11 (or the anthrax attacks) at some point in the future, and that’s why they think of Bush as a resolute, heroic president with a spine of steel.  Trust me on this one—when they hail Bush as a straight talker, it’s not because they’re thinking, “I know I can trust George Bush to offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them, just like he said in his acceptance speech.  Hell, yes.  Bush is just the kind of ‘tax-credit-to-encourage-small-businesses-and-their-employees-to-set-up-health-savings-accounts’ president we need in wartime.” Nope, it’s about Iraq, always about Iraq.  We haven’t been able to make a dent in this one, nor will we.  Here’s why.

When we say, “He based his case for war on Saddam’s possession of WMD and then didn’t let the inspectors do their job,” they say, “Damn right!  Bush would never give the girlie-men of the UN sovereignty over the United States!”

When we say, “He approved the use of torture and created the conditions for the rape, abuse, torture and killing of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, thus ensuring that Al-Qaeda would have a deep pool of recruits in the Arab world for years to come,” they say, “Shit yes!  None of that John Kerry yes no maybe bowl of mush for terrorists!”

And when we say, “He cooked every piece of intelligence on Iraq, refusing to hear from CIA and DIA officials who dissented from the Feith-Wolfowitz fantasy that the war would be a cakewalk and Americans would be showered with roses,” they say, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!!  Bush is a man through and through—he didn’t move until every piece of intelligence was thoroughly cooked.  None of that femmy liberal-elite ‘steak tartare’ intelligence for Bush—when Dubya cooks intelligence, he does it Texas-style!”

OK, now that we understand there’s nothing we could say that would convince them of anything, let’s take a look at a new essay by Yale computer science professor David Gelernter in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard.

Gelernter opens by noting that Bush’s opponents are even weirder than lunatics:

IT’S OBVIOUS not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy. The “special quality” of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

I should note at the outset that Gelernter’s essay is not one of those faggy affairs in which you’ll find that flip-floppy French “nuance.” In fact, if you skip ahead to the end of the essay, you’ll learn that Bush is a “progressive president in the best sense,” and that opposition to Bush is the work of “reactionary liberals” who “want everything to stay just the same.” Worse still, Gelernter points out, liberals’ attacks on the president and on “uppity white conservatives” are in fact racist attacks.  No, I am not making this up—Gelernter really says that the “liberal elite” has been launching “racist attacks” on Bush.  (And then, as Gelernter should have added, they take another sip from their chardonnay and denounce racism.  What hypocrites!)

But if you skip ahead to the end, you’ll miss the best part—Gelernter’s analogy between Iraq and Kitty Genovese.  I’ll give you a second to go and put on your Mylex “Irony-Off” protective outergear . . .

OK, good.  Now here we go.  Take it away, Professor Gelernter:

For years the Iraqi people had been screaming, in effect: “Oh, my God. Please help me! Please help me! I’m dying!” How could America have answered, “We don’t want to get involved”? We are the biggest kid on the playground. If we won’t help, who will?

I have just quoted the death-cries of Kitty Genovese, who died on the streets of New York 40 years ago. And I have quoted the response of an onlooker who didn’t feel like helping. Her case still resonates in America’s conscience, and tells us more than we want to know about the president’s enemies.

The New York Times ran the story in March 1964.

“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

“Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”

The left wanted America to watch Saddam stab Iraq to death and do nothing. That is the left’s concept of moral responsibility in the post-Cold War world.

Miss Genovese screamed: “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”

The Iraqi people were dying. The left had no pity. The Bush-haters were opposed to American “arrogance.” The New York Times shrugged.

So let’s think this one out slowly.  Iraq cried out piteously for an American invasion to deliver Iraqis from Saddam.  But the left refused to listen to Iraqis’ pleas—and that’s the left’s concept of morality for you!

(And I should add that this is not a new phenomenon, either.  Surely Gelernter remembers the travesties of the early 1980s, when Donald Rumsfeld’s organization, “Conservatives for Peace in the Middle East,” held a candlelight vigil for Saddam’s victims while Jimmy “Friend to Thugs” Carter snuck into Baghdad in a daring pre-dawn mission and gave Saddam caches of chemical weapons while the rest of the left rolled over and went back to sleep.)

Now, some of you might be shocked and awed at Gelernter’s audacious Iraq-is-Kitty-Genovese gambit.  Sure, one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy.  Because it helps to explain why the warfloggers think they can claim the moral high ground even while supporting and defending everything that went on in Abu Ghraib.

Imagine that the U.S. armed forces came to help poor Kitty Genovese—and then she responded by screaming, “I didn’t want to be occupied by the United States” and blowing up about a thousand American soldiers.  Suddenly she’s not a damsel in distress any more, is she, now—no, now she’s a murderous bitch, and the sooner we can slap a Hefty bag over her head and feed her to the dogs, the better.  If Iraq is somehow Kitty Genovese, then the prowar right’s sense of its unique moral virtue and the prowar right’s vicious rage at Iraqis actually enhance each other.

Against a set of assumptions like Gelernter’s, there’s literally nothing the left can do:  if things were to go well in Iraq, that would prove that Bush was right to invade—and if things go badly, as they have gone for over a year now, it proves a fortiori that Bush was right to invade.  Thus we have the mind-numbing spectacle of a war in Iraq that so far has fulfilled nearly every single one of our predictions and defeated nearly every single one of theirs, but their side turns out to be right and just, because it only goes to show that Bush had the cojones to take it to those [innocent, pleading] [vicious, ungrateful] Iraqis.  We came to save them from Saddam, and this is how they repay us?

The logical problem here is, of course, much wider than Iraq—it applies to the entire War on Terra.  If there are no terrorist attacks, that proves that Bush is right, because he is a strong leader who defeats terrorists; and when terrorist attacks occur, they prove a fortiori that Bush is right, because these terrorist scum remind us of what we’re fighting against—unlike the left, which would prefer to let terrorists stab Kitty Genovese to death and do nothing.

And that is why this humble blog suggests that if you do come across one of these “Bush-is-great-because-he-led-the-charge-to-Baghdad” warfloggers in your neighborhood, you should not attempt to reason with him.  He is extremely dangerous, and may in fact attempt to “liberate” one of your female neighbors.  Instead, report his presence to your local liberal blogger for immediate satirization.  If you insist on taking matters into your own hands, you should first establish a Neighborhood Watch to try to fend off particularly delusional warfloggers with concealed irony, pepper-spray parodies, and other weapons of mass derision.  Check out the Doug Piranha Society nearest you for more details.

Posted by on 09/07 at 05:30 AM

  1. Alas! But I have not had the sweet in-depth training in esoteric rhetorical skills that one obtains in fine humanities departments at liberal arts colleges. I don’t even know any French—I learned German. The best I can do is croak along with all the grace of a Rammstein concert.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  09/07  at  10:21 AM

  2. But PZ, if you can speak German, then certainly you can help us out with the military application of the funniest joke in the world. . . .

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  10:51 AM

  3. Okay. I hereby report Tacitus:

    “I said elsewhere that Democrats don’t care about foreigners, and indeed this does seem to be the case: the party that prides itself most upon inclusiveness seems curiously indifferent to the fates of strange peoples in faraway countries of which they know nothing [this is a Neville Chamberlain quote]. Which is in keeping with the past generation’s activities, not only of the party, but of John Kerry himself.

    To put it generously, the liberation of suffering humanity is not their forte. Not that they care: it seems unlikely that Kerry loses sleep over the slave camps [this links to the Human Rights Watch page on Vietnam] and genocides [this links to a page on the Cambodian genocide] resultant from his first policy victory, and the party as a whole is contentedly quiet over its general failure to support the steps that forced the end of the Cold War… .

    More sage leaders might wish to impart some meaning to the deaths of the brave Americans who have fallen in Iraq: for example, by allowing them a legacy of a free society in the heart of a benighted region. Men with more backbone might set themselves to seeing a thing to its completion, rather than confusing a completion with an end. But what else could we expect? This is the Democratic way. This is more or less what this party has stood for in the realm of foreign policy since 1972. No task too perplexing to run from. No friends too dear to betray. And when it comes to valuing the lives and futures of faceless masses of foreigners, Democrats like John Kerry are forever willing to toss them, deaf to pleas and heedless of promise, to the killers and tyrants among them.

    So it shapes up in Iraq: John Kerry wants out. And he will get out. All it will take is for sufficient numbers of Americans to walk into the voting booth on November 2nd, give a passing thought to the inevitable slaughter, shrug, and vote Democratic. The insouciance of uncaring. The banality of evil. They’re just foreigners. “

    “The banality of evil” of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

    Read the whole thing!

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  10:52 AM

  4. Good catch, Katherine!  Let’s take Mr. Classical-Latin-Allusion to the Satire Squad and give him a motto to work with:  “American Conservatives-- caring about foreigners (except the ones in Abu Ghraib, who got what was coming to ‘em) since 2003.”

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  10:55 AM

  5. Where were YOU when a giant cartoon hedgehog was terrorizing the streets of London?

    Were you cowering behind your computer, writing objectively pro-giant hedgehog fifth columnist filth, or cowering behind your computer, denouncing the objectively pro-hedgehog fifth column?

    Posted by Norbizness  on  09/07  at  11:52 AM

  6. Well, he did condemn Abu Ghraib. But he did call Barack Obama a liar for saying that “if an Arab-American family is rounded up without a hearing, that threatens my civil liberties” because it implied that families of U.S. citizens of Arab descent had been rounded up, but really the only Arab families rounded up in the U.S. were not yet citizens--legal permanent residents are still foreigners, obviously--and any U.S. citizens of Arab descent were arrested individually, not as families.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  12:06 PM

  7. Why, Mr. Norbizness, I was right there when it all happened!  When Andrew Sullivan and the boys of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders came out smearing the “decadent Left on the coasts” and its “Blame Dimmesdale First” ideology, I denounced them in turn.  But I also supported “smart sanctions” against the giant cartoon hedgehog and insisted that a “mature, legitimate, popular” left should reject the “Solidarity with Giant Hedgehogs” position of the far-left International Animation Center!  This laptop has always criticized extremists on both sides!

    And Katherine, thanks for the further info on Tacitus.  Never let it be said that the right can’t do nuance when it comes to the civil liberties of legal-permanent-resident-but-not-citizen individual-but-not-family roundups of Arabs!

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  12:11 PM

  8. Just curious--isn’t Gelernter one of the Unabomber victims? And does anyone know if he was prone to wingnut rantings prior to being rather badly injured (he lost several fingers)?

    As far as the kids on the playground and Kitty Genovese analogies--gawd. “Weakly” Standard--indeed. 

    Posted by Michael (in Louisiana)  on  09/07  at  12:38 PM

  9. Gelernter was indeed a recipient of one of the Unabomber’s packages in 1993, and the letter-bomb did extensive damage to his abdomen, face, chest, and hands.  Kaczynski followed up two years later with a vile letter which began, “Dr. Gelernter:  People with advanced degrees aren’t as smart as they think they are. If you’d had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn’t have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.” (Remember, grade-A nutcase Ted K. thought he was striking a blow for freedom against the technocratic intellectual Left.) Gelernter’s response, in the book Drawing Life:  Surviving the Unabomber, was to rant against feminists, leftists, moral relativists, and intellectuals.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  01:04 PM

  10. Ummm, what if you’re married to one (who swears his"gut" tells him Kerry is bad for the country)?

    Posted by Ms. Not Together  on  09/07  at  02:08 PM

  11. Oh, that is a problem-- satirizing one’s spouse hardly ever works.  Well, you could always ask him to poll his other internal organs:  for example, my gut tells me that Bush has already been a complete and total disaster for the country, and almost every single one of my major organs (including the skin!  people always forget to poll the skin) agrees.  Right now the liver is holding out for Zell, on the “Bourbon and Bile for an Angrier America” ticket, and the appendix, as usual, is abstaining.  But otherwise, it’s an organ landslide for Kerry-Edwards.

    So ask your marriage partner to look into his heart-- and his gall bladder, his pancreas, his duodenum, his middle ear, etc.  Because sometimes, the way to a man’s brain-- and his vote-- is through his duodenum.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  04:47 PM

  12. Speaking of bodily responses.  My stomach is in a rage after my having TRIED to read in its entirity the Galerntner rant.  That is not to mention my brain which these days is constantly trying to refocus on reality when faced with otherwise intelligent friends and colleagues whose logic (or is it?) runs parallel with Galerntner’s.  There is a weird disconnect that leaves this brain reeling.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  05:30 PM

  13. Gelertner calls himself a computer “scientist” and publishes this kind of non-falsifiable claptrap in the “Journal of Non-Falsifiable Claptrap?”

    He should be ashamed of himself.  And it sure doesn’t speak well of “computer science” either, when a leading practicioner wouldn’t recognize a provable hypothesis if it bit him on the ass.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  06:59 PM

  14. Michael, did you see that Tristero has figured your trickl out?

    http://tristero.blogspot.com/2004_09_05_tristero_archive.html#109458817933229202

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  11:00 PM

  15. Don’t forget, Gelernter was injured by the Unabomber.  Perhaps it affected his judgement.

    And the Weakly Standard publishes all sorts of crap.

    Posted by  on  09/08  at  02:05 AM

  16. Yes, Ana, I did.  And I’m preparing my response even as I type.

    Posted by  on  09/08  at  03:15 AM

  17. I’m glad you mentioned the anthrax attacks. Once in a while (wind blows from north, three green lights in a row on Main Street) I remember those attacks and wonder why we never found out what happened. 

    Brain demon says that investigators know the answer, but it was unpalatable to the administration, never made known.

    Posted by Bean  on  09/08  at  08:16 AM

  18. I heard that the anthrax culprit was some South African on the CIA payroll.

    Of course, there’s always the chance that Salvador Allende was to blame, operating from his South Seas hideout while his housemate Jim Morrison drinks Tequila and watches reruns of Survivor.

    Posted by Charlie Bertsch  on  09/08  at  08:26 AM

  19. mac, computer scientist only sort of relates to the scientific method and what have you.  Mostly, it’s a polite title for “code drone”.
    If he’s like any other computer science major I’ve met, the all-nighters spent chasing down no-doz with red bull have fried his brain quite a bit.
    Or who knows (not me, certainly, because I haven’t bothered to research it)?  Maybe he programs for Diebold.

    Posted by EC  on  09/08  at  02:30 PM

  20. Michael,

    For some reason, my blog attracts wingnut trolls, and I occasionally ignore them, but one guy actually insinuated that my co-blogger was wishing for higher U.S. casualties and I couldn’t let it go

    I actually engaged him in a debate.  I don’t think I changed his mind, but I hope I’ve made him think twice about the simplicity of his notions of patriotisms.  Then again, he may be shooting a pistol at his neighbor’s dog.  I really can’t tell.

    Posted by thehim  on  09/08  at  09:16 PM

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