A Pilgrim’s Digression

The time has come round again. Today is the day I must unfortunately put this blog on hiatus for the holidays. Oops, I mean, Christmas. My apologies to Mr. O’Reilly and the “Save Christmas!” blowhards.

I hesitate to fix a date for my return to the critic’s seat, since I may be able to squeeze in a post or two next week after Christmas. However, I may not write anything at all until I return from vacation January 3, 2005.

I’ve been thinking about what to write in this my last post of 2004. Unfortunately, 2005 looks to begin much the same as 2004: Americans dying in Iraq; George Bush, still the President; Democrats hopelessly demoralized; Osama Bin Laden alive and well.

On this the 21st day of December 2004, Iraqi insurgents/terrorists/guerillas (choose your terminology) killed 23 and wounded more than 60 in a mortar attack on a mess hall in Mosul, supposedly one of the pacified cities of Northern Iraq. An AP Reporter describes a pretty gruesome scene there (Reporter Provides Account of Mosul Attack).

Ironically, when I first clicked over to the New York Times website and read about this, I had just finished reading Boortz’s blog in which he recommends an article from the New York Post in which the author, Ralph Peters, writes (this is Boortz’s paraphrase) that “things are going pretty well in Iraq and Afghanistan, all things considered.”

This is a regular theme with Boortz and a lot of Conservative media pundits: why aren’t the major media news outlets reporting the good news from Iraq?

Let’s turn that question on its head a bit. Can you imagine for a moment, Neal Boortz or Rush Limbaugh scolding the media following the 9/11 attacks for dwelling too much on the negative? I can almost hear Limbaugh on September 11, 2001: “Why aren’t they reporting the good news that happened today? I’m sure there must be some good news. No, instead the media has to dwell on these terrorists attacks, giving the perpetrators free press coverage and demoralizing our soldiers and citizens.”

No, you didn’t hear that. Conservatives love to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. However, when it comes to Iraq, they’d rather the media wrote about the construction of sewers in Baghdad.

Joe Scarborough has a blog posting today about media coverage of the war in which among other things he complains about the use of the word “insurgent” to describe the enemy in Iraq. He’d rather they be called terrorists. It seems to me we have to use terminology such as “insurgent” or “guerilla” to describe these people, even though they may not have a clear ideology or coherant political goals. Using “terrorist” for every Middle Eastern person with a Kalashnikov empties the word of all meaning. It needs to be applied more specifically, not generally. Anyway, since when is the media supposed to use the most morally opprobrious terms to describe people who do terrible things?

Scarborough seems to have a real chip on his shoulder regarding media coverage of the war. He says that “American and European reporters are so blinded by their cynicism—and their hatred of George W. Bush—that like Hitler’s Albert Speer, they do not recognize evil when its hand is on their shoulder.”

I bring up this subject because it reminds me of an article by Peter Beinart which Conservative commentators have been touting lately. It’s titled Democrats must take aim at terror, and it has as its thesis that Democrats must first take the threat of terrorism seriously, then reach specific proposals for dealing with it in a decisive way. Beinart is editor of the New Republic, generally a liberal publication, and his article has also appeared in the Washington Post.

Democrats should consider it seriously, though I admit to being a little wary myself, considering I came to it on the “advice” of Rush Limbaugh. I feel like Luke Skywalker lured to Bespin on the pretext of rescuing his friends. “Luke, it’s a trap!” Leia says as the Stormtroopers escort her away. Should any article that Conservatives recommend be trusted?

Beinart’s article is interesting on a number of levels. I am still coming to some kind of understanding of it, but what I gather so far is that he compares the present situation of liberals to that of liberals in post-war 1946, when they little grasped the threat of Communism to free societies. Indeed, many liberals were themselves apologists for Stalinism. These “gnarlier elements” of a political ideology, as Garrison Keillor called them in another context, had to be banished else Democrats stood to be made largely irrelevant. Quoting Kenneth Alsop from an article in 1946, with liberalism blind to the Communist threat, “it is the right—the very extreme right—which is most likely to gain victory.”

Beinart writes that by 1949, Anti-Communism had become Democrat Party doctrine, largely through the efforts of Harry Truman.

The comparison Beinart wishes to make should be obvious. “The current “great political reality” is the threat from al-Qaida and totalitarian Islam. And in the shadow of that threat, the right—including the extreme right—has won two straight elections, partly because Americans don’t trust Democrats to keep them safe.” Democrat policy is still based not on facing the threat of Islamic fascism, but the Conservative right in our own country, particularly on domestic issues.

So far, the one problem I have with Beinart’s thesis is that it is predicated on a comparison to a time when Democrats actually held power and could actively fight Communism. Harry Truman was President of the United States during the time in question, 1946 to 1949. I’m not sure what Beinart would have our current Democrats do that could equal Truman’s establishment of the Marshall plan and his inception of the idea of the containment of Communism.

Should they form a think tank whose goal is to advise on how to fight Islamic terrorism? OK. That’s fine by me, but forgive me if I don’t hold out much hope for it really helping Democrats to revise any of their image problems.

Beinart’s central criticism seems to be that Democrats and liberals generally do not take the war seriously; they think of it in overwhelmingly negative terms, as an opportunity for the Right to seize and maintain power primarily. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans feel threatened not by Republicans but by terrorists.

I read Beinart’s article as merely another variation on the theme “Democrats must move to the right.” I don’t know yet whether this is a full-fledged “snare” of which I wrote about shortly after the election, but it seems to me Democrats have to be careful travelling down a road that seems to conflict with how the majority of the base feels. Remember, nearly fifty million voters felt fine allowing a Democrat to sit in the White House, and nearly fifty million voters also felt that the war was being mishandled by the Republican administration. In normal times, that would have been enough votes to place John Kerry in the White House.

Theoretically, I agree that the Democrats need a clear policy regarding terrorism which Americans can either support or reject. On the other hand, Democrats also need to offer a clear alternative to the Republican party for those who cannot vote Republican. Democrat policy cannot be a mere shadow of Republican policy, if Democrats ever hope to win back the seats of power.

I admit I am one of those Beinart sees as a “problem” for the Democrat party. I no longer wholeheartedly believe in the war on terror. I say that not out of any sympathy with the insurgency in Iraq, or sympathy generally with terrorists. I say it simply as one of those “cynics” that Joe Scarborough complains about. I am one of those he criticizes for refusing to “connect the dots” of “the 9/11 murders with the Bali bombing, or the Madrid murders, or the school house slaughter in Russia, or the assassination of election workers in Iraq.”

He rather misses the point, really. Anyone can connect those dots; the events he describes aren’t unrelated. Unfortunately, the one dot Conservatives refuse to connect is our blundering, vengeful response to 9/11 which has made terrorism a much worse threat than it probably would have been if we had contented ourselves with deposing the Taliban and establishing a democracy in Afghanistan. Or maybe not—maybe the insurgency we see in Iraq would have been merely transplanted to the mountains of Afghanistan. Even so, we probably still would have been better off. We’d only be fighting an insurgency and trying to establish a democracy in one country, rather than two.

Depending on what specifically the “new and improved” Democratic Party proposes to do about terrorism, it may have to content itself with the loss of people like me, who have come to believe the war on terror is just a mechanism for social control which allows the Republicans to maintain power indefinitely. The Cold War analogy is not entirely inaccurate. For fifty years, Russia was a good enemy for American politicians. Osama holds out the promise of an equally fruitful, informal arrangement with our leadership. Cynical? You bet. If there is no place for that in the new Democratic party, then I’ll go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, no need to fear that the Republicans are going to take Arnold Schwarzenegger’s advice and move to the left, even as they advise Democrats to move to the right. Here is Limbaugh’s response to Arnold (Let those Republicans move left):

If they think it’s so good, let them go and let them move to the left and see what their political fortunes are. Let ‘em do it. But they’re not going to take the party with them. Trust me on this. That’s not going to happen. And by the party, in this case I mean you and me and the rest of the American people. I mean, Schwarzenegger, Christie Whitman, whoever can come out and say, “You know what, if we want to really get big we need to move left.” No, if we want to lose where we’ve gotten, that’s why we move left. If we want to sacrifice every gain we’ve made, that’s why we move left. Well, we don’t want to sacrifice every gain that we’ve made, and we’re not going to move left. They can go. We won’t stop ‘em. Good riddance, but nobody is going to follow ‘em.

So, if Limbaugh is correct, I should at least have plenty of right-wing fascist material to write about in the New Year.

Funny how these Republicans love to show off their moderate party members at Conventions. It’s like putting your toy poodle in the front yard to lure unsuspecting people to come on in to where you have the vicious pitbull chained up, just out of sight.

Schwarzenegger, McCain, Guiliani … I will be most surprised if any of these men ever become their party’s nominee for President.