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Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Neighborhood Wingnut Watch

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 Michael on 09/07 at 05:30 AM
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