Vic's got the vocabulary. But the average factory or farm worker has better judgment by far than this guy.
Oh, and Vic seems to have fallen off the wagon pretty quickly on trying to stay away from bad historical analogies.
But I'm hesitant to even comment on this one. Because James Wolcott has already taken it on: A-Roving We Will Go 06/24/05. And trying to top or even compete with a James Wolcott takedown is a futile mission. Part of Wolcott's take:
Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson, who's supposed to be one of the Mature Voices on NRO, has pulled a Karl Rove.I would also add that Davis' thoughts on liberal presidents and war are, in addition to what Wolcott described, a repackaged version of an Old Right staple that we don't hear a lot from Republicans these days, the "Democrat wars" line, the idea that Democratic presidents cause wars and therefore the Democratic Party is the war party. With Warlord Bush happily declaring himself a "war president" and posing in military settings and military garb every time he gets the chance, whining about "Democrat wars" in the old-fashioned way isn't considered cool among the Party faithful. So our man Vic has repackaged it this way.
As Karl Rove recently said - well, everyone knows what he oinked. Bush apologists at NRO are falling all over themselves to defend Bush's spongy gray matter, deploying every bit of sophistry they have at their greasy fingertips. ...
And today Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson contributes his own more tasteful flavor of McCarthyism. Ignoring the snickers of the peanut gallery, he argues that conservatives have a harder time waging war than do liberals, which will come as news to the moaning ghost of LBJ. Here is his reasoning: "In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises - as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force - that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction."
It's certainly news to me that the conservative George Dubya nurses a "tragic view of human nature," or even a mildly saturnine one. He is forever thumping on in public about how optimistic he is and in private giving the rhetorical buzzoff to what he calls "handwringers."
Helen Thomas has hinted loudly that Bush is the one president in her long memory who wanted to go to war. Kicking off a war with a "Shock and Awe" extravanganza certainly does not suggest the sobriety and gravity Bush idolators such as Peggy Noonan attribute to him.
Bob Dole kind of buried the old version in his 1976 vice-presidential campaign, using it in a way that came off as a foot-in--mouth exhibition. Jules Witcover descibes the moment in Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976 (1977). During the vice-presidential candidates' debate, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale had just criticized President Ford for having given a presidential pardon to Richard Nixon:
Dole shot back that the issue of Watergate wasn't a very good campaign issue, "any more than the Vietnam war would be, or World War One or World War Two or the Korean War - all Democrat wars, all in this century." (He used, of course, the abbreviated name of the opposition party that has long been an expression of contempt from the mouths of many Republicans.) And then, noting that he himself still carried the wounds of World War II, he added: "I figured up the other day if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."This following part of Vic's column is a good example of how "totally muddled" can masquerade as "profound". Vic lays out a remarkably bizarre description of what he apparently thinks people should understand to be the American liberal position on jihadist terrorism. He uses the term "elite," which for the Radical Republicans means liberals for sure and also Jews, or Freemasons, or whatever bogeyman is convenient at the moment. It's also more than a bit strange that he uses the term "Western liberals," since continental European liberals have a very different ideological approach than American liberals; the word "liberal" just means drastically different things in Europe than in the US.
Mondale, who had shaken off his early nervousness and was crisp and aggressive, was incredulous but calm. "I think that Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight. Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?"
As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.
Extremists who would otherwise be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and their Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, the murder of Christians, suicide bombings carried out by children, systematic torture - all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies' long record of murder and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin's infantile rantings would be showcased on al-Jazeera. [Were Durbin's comments "showcased on al-Jazeera"? Inquiring minds want to know. - Bruce]
When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9/11 of "unity" and "European solidarity" what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic justice from a suddenly empowered other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, and had not yet "lashed out."
I guess if you repeat absurdities long enough, you actually start to believe them. Or at least forget that they're absurd. Let's not forget to note that Vic is defending torture by the US. In the quote above, he contrasts what Evil Muslims do ("torture") with what Americans do (set the air conditioning badly). Complaining about criminal torture in the Bush Gulag, as Durbin did, is just "infantile rantings." Grownups know that Real Men torture prisoners.
Marty Kottmeyer has described UFOlogy as an "evolving system of paranoia" that morphs and becomes more severe over time. Collective psychosis is a pretty mushy concept. But the far-right notion of liberals (American-style) as being supremely evil and anti-Christian and unpatriotic is in some way just such an "evolving system of paranoia." The notion of Democratic Party liberals harboring open enthusiasm for the most radical brands of Islamic fundamentalism is pretty whacko by any "reality-based" measure.
Out here in the real world, the Bush administration installed a religious-oriented, pro-Iranian Shia regime in Iraq.
But it's worth remembering in just what ways this notion of liberals sympathizing with jihadists is daft. In the real world, it is not only plausible but very likely that jihadist groups will find allies among non-Muslim Americans. But it's not likely to be liberals worried about public education, saving Social Security and nuclear nonproliferation. In Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003), Jessica Stern talks about what is really the closest we've seen so far to some kind of "left" sympathy for Islamic jihadists, which are former radical-leftists like Germany's Horst Mahler who have become far-right extremists.
She quotes Mahler as welcoming the 9/11 attacks, hoping that they will initiate "the end of the American Century, the end of Global Capitalism, and thus the end of the secular Yahweh cult, of Mammonism." I suppose if you are an OxyContin radio fan largely innocent of any actual knowledge of the anti-capitalist rhetoric used by the Nazis and some contemporary far-right groups, this might sound like a "left" - or even "liberal" (!!) - endorsement of Al Qaeda.
Stern also writes:
White supremacists and Identity Christians are applauding Al Qaeda's goals and actions and may eventually take action on the Al Qaeda network's behalf as freelancers or lone-wolf avengers. A Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber, who is popular with both Aryan youth and radical Muslims, is calling for neo-Nazis and Islamists to join forces. Huber was on the board of directors of the Al-Taqwa Foundation, which the U.S. government says was a major donor to Al Qaeda. The late William Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, applauded the September 11 bombers. Pierce's organization, the Alliance Nahad, urged its followers to celebrate the one-year anniversary of September 11 by printing out and disseminating flyers from its Web site. One of the flyers included a photograph of bin Laden and the World Trade Center and the caption, "Let's stop being human shields for Israel." Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization one of whose members killed a number of blacks and Jews, is disseminating a book that exposes the "sinister machinations" that led to September 11, including the involvement of Jews and Israelis, in particular, the Mossad.But our guy Vic didn't go into that angle. In fact, it pretty much looks like he was only interested in accusing Democrats of being allies of The Terrorists. Or, in James Wolcott's memorable phrase, pulling a Rove.
[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]
Tags: iraq war, vdh watch, victor davis hanson
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