Bigger, better bullshit, Egypt edition

Conservatives may not be able to agree whether the unrest in Egypt is a good thing, but you can be sure they'll all eventually jump on the Duhbya/neocon vindication bandwagon:

"We might be in a better position if we had more closely followed President Bush's prescription for support of greater democracy in all parts of the world," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said as he stepped off the Senate floor Monday. "If we had maintained that position and had that reputation in the world….then our calls today for restraint would have more credibility because the people of Egypt would know our heart was with their desire for greater representation."

Kyl (R-sow's ear) is saying that Egyptians would luuuv us if we had just remained fully committed to killing hundreds of thousands more of their fellow Arab Muslims, if we hadn't stopped there but had proceeded to attack Saudi Arab and Persian Muslims.  Then we would have credibility when calling for restraint, whatever the hell he means by that.  He's blithely relying on the complete captious ignoramus stupidity of his base and the vast wasteland of American media (o.k., no longer so vast).

Of course, Duhbya did convince a majority of Americans to go to war in the first place because his advisers from the PNAC thought we could swoop into the crossroads of the Middle East and impose Western democracy without the least goddamn bit of nation-building.  Hell, god was just going to show up, kick allah's ass, and everyone would kiss his ring.  Does Disney have the rights to that bullshit?  Better aim that animated nonsense at preschoolers - everyone old enough to disbelieve in Santa Claus would know better.

So maybe Kyl's not an idiot for supposing he can get away with this malodorous bullshit.

Republicans are confused by the obvious doom that faces the Mubarak/mukhabarat regime.  The protesters are showing him their shoes, but at least they aren't winging them at him.  When Mubarak concedes to his own term limits, he thinks he's compromising.  Moron.  Rulers don't win by saying they'll go away at some future time.  He's toast.

Still, Republicans want to know how can they bend the facts to their advantage.  (Hint: Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin!)  Mohamed ElBaradei, whom they despised when he was pursuing inspections and non-proliferation with Iran, looks o.k. - not too-too Islam-y - but what if the Muslim Brotherhood is the real power?  What if self-government in Egypt is anti-American?

(Republican note to self:  Be of good cheer.  Remember that Americans don't remember shit.  If it stops being on TV, well, outta sight outta mind.)

The aspiration to self-government is a good thing (except in poor people who might like ACORN).  While the panicky and mercurial two-year-olds who compose so much of American society these days still like Egyptian rebellion, here's the bigger, better bullshit that kneecaps Jon Kyl's thin luuuv for Duhbya:

• Duhbya and the Republicans made war in the Middle East, which inspired zero popular movements to depose autocrats.
• President Obama has taken only a few steps toward peace, and, voilà, the yearning for self-government has broken out all over the place!
• QED, bitches!  (Just please skip that French word in the previous bullet.)

But, of course, buy on rumor, sell on news.  The dream of Egyptian (and Tunisian) self-government is everything in the world you could possibly imagine.  The reality will be difficult even if it overcomes its poor odds and winds up a net positive.  The Arab street hates Israel - and America.

We are in bed with local authoritarians precisely because they can be bribed to suppress the street.  Whole peoples are hard to bribe - for a reasonable price, anyway.  Mubarak could cream off his cut of our foreign aid every year and build a fine set of overseas investment accounts.  (Dictator 101 - it's right there in the handbook: In case of revolution, you'd better have some swag somewhere else.)

Half a billion dollars a year (wild, unsubstantiated guess) can pay for one very decadent family - just ask Paris Hilton - but it doesn't go that far when split 80 million ways.  We can't pay them all off!  (That would be socialism anyway!)

I'd reckon Mubarak's presidency less than a week to survive.  Then there will be a caretaker, then who knows?

The Republicans will attack Obama at every turn.  When Mubarak flees, Obama will not have stood by a stalwart ally.  When the caretaker comes in, Obama will not have steered another sovereign nation well enough to get our boy into office. (The Republicans use the word sovereign situationally.  For us, it means absolute unfettered authority.  For other countries, it means absolute unfettered authority - for us!  We win!)

When the caretaker is ousted (anyone remember Shahpour Bakhtiar?), Obama will not have stabilized his government enough.  When there's any hint of Islam, even an innocent hint and the hints are not likely to be limited to innocent hints, it will be Obama's fault that he didn't cast a nationwide spell over every Egyptian first-born in order to get America's interests looked after first and foremost (sovereignty).  If we object to that expectation, the GOPers'll say that we thought all along that Obama is the messiah.  Never mind that they projected that on us, the media will run with it.

Because it's just stupid enough to have universal appeal.

Minor combat operations have ended

It's great and all that the last combat brigade is out of Iraq a couple of weeks early, but:

Scatterings of combat troops still await departure, and some 50,000 will stay another year in what is designated as a noncombat role.

Even better than careful gradations of Pentagon bureaucratese, American casualties are waaay down in Iraq. It's still important to keep track of the fact that they were actual human beings with names and not just numbers. The most recent and surely not the last was Jamal Rhett, age 24, of Palmyra, NJ.

President Obama kept his promise, rather slowly, to finish up in Iraq. Good for him. But, like many of the better moments of his administration, it's a two cheers moment, not a three cheers moment.

In the end, the neocon Project for a New American Century got what it wanted - a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. The rest of the rationale for going in was all marketing and bullshit. Now we have permanent bases there, more outposts in the empire the PNAC explicitly wanted to proclaim.

Stock in trade

Wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - will believe whatever Karl Rove tells them to extend the lies and the obvious bullshit that led us into Iraq. Wingnuts want to say that they were honorably motivated. They weren't. Ordinary conservatives want to salve the consciences (which wingnuts lack) about the imperial rush to a war of choice. (Aside: Are there any ordinary conservatives left?)

The truth is the Bushists wanted to invade Iraq. Duhbya was no doubt tired of hearing how his father had left Saddam Hussein in power. Darth Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to project American power into a permanent client outpost at the crossroads of the Middle East, in short to implement the neocon PNAC plan.

Republicans lie. Karl Rove lies for a living - and quite a handsome living at that. They do it to get what they want. Because all you have to do to Americans and especially Washington Democrats is wave a bloody shirt, they succeeded. That shame should be on all of us. Instead, the wingnuts revel in it.

His own Ron Ziegler

All those claims that we invaded Iraq because it was the "central front in the war on terror"? No longer operative.

The Bushists took office with the PNAC plan to remake the Middle East in their hip pocket.

Play Cheney for me

Mitt Romney is so desperate to be President that he's willing to whore himself out as the handsome second coming of Darth Cheney.

The truth is that the Bushists pissily and irresponsibly dismissed the concern the Clinton administration had about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. (Note to wingnut trolls: Sure, Clinton could have succeeded against these enemies, and he didn't, but he at least identified the priority problem, where Mayberry Nero told his briefers that they had covered their asses.) The Bushists were focused instead on redeeming Bush I's PNAC-deplored failure to depose Saddam Hussein.

Romney's varmint-huntin' (see, really a country boy despite the $5000 suit!!!!!) is so lame he's going to need to shoot a friend to prove he's really the NRA's boy Cheney successor.

As a bonus, he's happy to defend the so-called free market's allocation of life-saving to those who can pay the most for it. Hey, works for him (and screw you).

Mitt Romney is the perfect expression of Republicanism - willing to say any bullshit, filled with rhetoric that misrepresents reality, a whore for the ruling class. He is the most obviously insincere politician since... Man, I'm having a hard time coming up with a politician who's more insincere than Mitt. Mostly, it's talk show hosts. Except John Boehner! Strom Thurmond, maybe - staunch racist shtupping the colored help but still making his black daughter come in through the back door.

I was slow to see the essential dishonesty of Romney, but I'm making up for lost time.

Permanent bases, check

Darth is happy with Iraq. Of course.

The point of invading Iraq was to implement the PNAC program: Project American power into the center of the Middle East permanently.

Settlements vs. settlement

If you were an Israeli, why would you want to build more settlements in the West Bank?

1. West Bank? Where's that? We're building our birthright in Judea and Samaria. This is the Zionist fanatic's answer. It assumes that YHWH granted the land in perpetuity to his chosen people. There is no prospect of peace down this path.
2. The settlers are an important coalition partner. This is the domestic politician's answer. It trades electoral success now for more difficulty in the future. In the long run - is there any other? - it condemns Israel and the Palestinians to perpetual conflict.
3. We're creating facts on the ground. This is the statesman's (Risk-player's) answer. What they're not saying is that these facts will eventually have to be traded away for the Palestinian right of return, which for Israel is a never-happen, non-starting method of slow suicide. But see #2.
4. It's our answer to terror. Settlement expansion provides a goad to the Palestinians to seek peace whenever they choose war ... or vote for Hamas. Uh, how's that working out so far?
5. What have I missed?
   

I used to think without any claim of particular insight that the shape of an eventual settlement between Israel and Palestine was obvious:

• Palestinians give up right of return.
• Israelis give up the settlements. They'd probably have to retrench the wall to the 1967 border, too, but I have no problem with the wall itself.
  
• Palestinians get the old Arab Quarter in Jerusalem for their capital.
• Palestinians commit to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
  
• Compensation and economic aid for both sides from the U.S., Europe, and Russia (yeah, sure). After all, we midwifed this problem by expiating our guilt over the Holocaust onto contested land.
• No heavy weapons for the Palestinians, but outside military guarantees, probably from Europe since neither the U.S. (too pro-Israeli) nor the U.N. (too pro-Palestinian) would be seen as an honest broker.

As time passes, though, I'm much less sure that a lasting Israeli majority or anyone on the Palestinian side would make any kind of deal other than the unconditional surrender of the other side. And that just isn't going to happen.

If Duhbya bought the PNAC program that intervening militarily in Middle East religious conflicts could solve the Israel-Palestine problem, and it appears he did, maybe he invaded the wrong place. Yeah, sure.

Maybe a solution has to bubble up from the bottom? How about two changes:

• A guaranteed job for every Palestinian male between 17 and 65. Help them have something to lose and keep most of them too tired for conspiracies.
• The end of blanket military deferments for all groups in Israel, notably the ultra-orthodox. Help them have something to lose, too.

Ideas? Anyone? Because what we've had so far sure as hell hasn't worked.

Update (6/24/2011) - minor editorial improvements.

Schwarzchild radius of a doomed empire?

Andrew Bacevich writes:

By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration's entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country's vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

This is a stiff test, not the work of a speech or two, but of an entire campaign. Whether or not Obama passes the test will determine his fitness for the presidency.

Amen. Usually, I'm an incrementalist. Not now.

The ideas and ideals that have been the best of America for two centuries may be doomed. So few Americans seem to care about them any more, preferring instead to maintain the illusion of our superiority in all things as the empire Duhbya and the PNAC neocons wanted crumbles around us.

We may be helpless in a canoe trying to paddle back from the edge of Niagara. We may have crossed the Schwarzchild radius of doomed empires.

Maybe the tribalism of a proudly uneducable ignoramus in the threadbare favorite Bud Lite T-shirt from high school that no longer covers his beer belly has already thrown back the Enlightenment. Maybe when he shouts "USA number 1" at a Republican rally and it's not just a feel-good slogan but the sum-total of his so-called thoughts, we've already reached the point at which asking Americans to make themselves, our shared nation, and our impact on the world better is - stupidly, vapidly, absurdly - too much for him to bear our asking.

This ignoramus sees it as an insult to ask USA-number-1 to improve. This ignoramus sees the flag as more important than the Constitution because the flag is a tribal totem to him and engages his balls and his ample gut, while the Constitution is just fancy words that would engage what he imagines is his mind. But those words might puzzle and confuse him if he ever read them, so he doesn't. This willful ignorance is the path to death as a leading civilization.

There are signs that end times are coming, though they have nothing at all to do with the Rapture, but only with the social and political rot in our heartwood. Even so, I still hope, mostly because I can't give up on the founding ideals of America.

(h/t Tom at the Inverse Square, in turn from Talking Points Memo)

Problem with the truth

... is that people start to expect it, at least those who still thirst for it.

This New York Times story quotes from a 1985 article about one of poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's criticisms of the Soviet system:

“The session was a closed one, but even so the poet’s strong words against distortion of history, against censorship, self-flattery, silence and privilege in the world of letters were strikingly bold.”

At that time, it was not yet obvious that the Soviet Union was doomed, though there had been signs for some time. In the late 1970s, my political science professor Thane Gustafson brought back a joke he had heard in Moscow. It went something like this:

Brezhnev hasn't seen his ancient grandmother in some time, and he wants her to see how well he's done for himself. So he sends a man from his security detail to pick her up and bring her to his palatial (ahem) apartment in the Kremlin.

She comes in but says nothing. Brezhnev is a little put out but calls for a Zhiguli limousine to drive them to his posh mansion in the best Party enclave in suburban Moscow. Again, his grandmother is silent.

Brezhnev calls for his helicopter, which is always on standby for his use. He whisks her away to his dacha on the Volga. Yet, after all this, grandmother says nothing, and Brezhnev can't keep the impatience out of his voice.

"Babushka, I show you all these wonderful things, yet you say nothing. Are you not impressed at what I have achieved from humble beginnings?"

She pauses and thinks before replying.

"Leonid, it is all wonderful what you have. But what will you do when the Communists come?"

How different is the American empire that the PNAC advocated and the Bushist neocons so badly botched in delivery?






Certainly, on the good side, we are not censored, and Ari Fleischer's infamous warnings didn't provoke silence, though they did slow down the popular realization of the war in Iraq for the debacle it still is.

We Americans are, however, thoroughly enamored of flattery from any source. This is why the McCain campaign tries to make hay whenever Obama tries to depart from the self-reverential formulas of capitalist realist art. Americans can't be bitter or discouraged! They're too heroic to admit that anything about America needs to be changed.

Distortion of history? Check. Eurasia had always been at war with Oceania. The Bushists are happy to distort the present. Why would they hesitate to rewrite the past, all the while using the timeworn but practical propaganda technique of charging that your opponents are revisionist historians?

Of course, our thirst for privilege and our assumption that privilege will always be ours is not a Bushist innovation. They've merely exploited it to divide us, rather than taking policy steps that would secure our future. Instead, they have sold our birthright to all buyers, especially the seldom open Chinese, for a mess of pottage (or is that a Mess'o'potamia!).

If America is to continue its leading role - even to escape the threat of economic and political ruin - we need to reacquire our taste for the truth over the treacly, sweetened bullshit fluff of voter flattery that currently dominates our political conversation.

Public domain images from Wikimedia Commons. Click images for info.

Non-defense of TNR

On Philosoraptor:

I'm not saying that the TNR diary is true, and TNR has had lots of trouble over the years with fact-checking and PNAC-worthy neoconservatism, but you'll need a helluva lot better source to disprove it than freaking Ann Althouse quoting the Weekly Standard quoting an unnamed source and a military investigation that had significant incentives not to uncover any dismal realities that may have existed.

So, the most that Bushists can claim is that they have a little tiny piece of the truth that liberals like me didn't have first. They can't then "reason" that we don't have any of the truth, though that's what they're trying to do.

And, by the way, let's recall that the whole Stephen Glass embarrassment happened when Michael Kelly - one of theirs - was in charge of TNR. Mighty convenient how that has gone down the memory hole.

Why is bin Laden still alive?

The Bushist and neocon target was always Iraq. Their goal was always permanent bases in the Middle East but outside of Saudi Arabia. (Relocating our bases outside of bin Laden's oyster was actually a rational desire among PNAC wishful thinking.) Iraq has the perfect location, had it only been empty of those pesky and fractious Iraqis.

The purpose of invading Iraq was not to spread democracy - that was pure marketing - or to topple Saddam Hussein - beneficial ceteris paribus but also a marketing feature. The true purpose was the projection of American power into this region so essential to our economic security without any consideration of change in our policy with respect to Israel.

I still have trouble understanding why the Bushists didn't fear the voters enough to make sure they got bin Laden anyway. It would have made their GWOT cover story more credible.

I guess they thought they could manipulate opinion however they needed to. That worked for a while, too.

(On Philosoraptor.)

Thought experiment

Suppose there were a Republican who is a paragon of personal virtue who thinks well and moderately about foreign and domestic policy. Suppose that nonetheless this man (we are talking about Republicans, after all) could win the Republican nomination for President. Frankly, I think he'd have to stuff the ballot box at the RNC to get anything approaching reason past the fundies, the anti-tax fanatics, and the PNAC imperialists (not to mention the industrial and tribal pro-war interests).

So, with those ridiculous counterfactuals in a suspension of disbelief that J.K. Rowling would laugh at, what government would you get? You'd get the permanent policy apparatus of the Republican Party. This is what gave us Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, the vast and vapid neocon network, among others. You'd also retain the permanent political apparatus of the GOP, and you'd better believe that Karl Rove is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is no sale. There is no Republican for nationally significant office who deserves a vote. Not a single one.

Originally a comment on Philosoraptor.