Dolchstoss 2, Electric Boogaloo

There’s being right and there’s winning the argument and they are two different things.
Those of us who feared the worst of the (unpreventable, post 2000 election, I’m afraid) adventure in Iraq were right in 2002 but we weren’t winning the argument.
The blame-Cassandra tack that the administration-policy apologist dead-enders are taking now, I’m afraid, even if it were right, wouldn’t change the dynamic of who’s winning the argument.
When Cheney denounced Kerry on a split screen showing the Palestine Hotel collapsing in Baghdad….
With the unceasing the drumbeat of stories driven by power corrupting and near absolute power corrupting nearly absolutely….
When rumors of a renewed draft move from the lunatic fringe to bloggers linking to the Congressional record…
When a de-facto draft (“stop loss order”) locks volunteers and reserves into catch-22’s of endless duty…
When the age-old male simian pecking-order masquerade of psychosexual domination and humiliation, familiar from prisons, military organizations, religious orders, and sailing ships for centuries, inevitably occurs dressed in the trappings of digital technology, radical new relationships (historically speaking) among the sexes, body modesty, hedonism, and the cruel streak that lies at the core of many an American soul (my own included, the one that subtly tries to remind all not from the “new world” that they are not really full citizens), shocking and scandalizing the strangers whose country we have intervened in, whom we’ve never bothered to get to know very well, despite their geographical proximity, if nothing else, to the very cradle of our own civilization…*
When even the survivors of Iraq – the only heroes of this sorry war – come home most with scars of one kind or another or with a greater attunement to violence and the nature of chaos…
When Bush’s shakiness on TV no longer makes him look like a man of the people and instead makes him seem like someone who still hasn’t gotten the hang of his job after three years of on-the-job training from the best team corporate money can buy…
Against that backdrop, it’s clear to me now that Cecil was right^ when he said that Bush lost the election last week. Bush has jumped the shark. And I think that Cecil even nailed exactly the moment, in the same sense that Dean’s unidirectional “scream” turned out to be the nail in the coffin (called 18% in Iowa) that many predicted.
So now, watching Republicans and their supporters stuck defending one or another of the shards of their policy~ and it’s like watching Gore in 2000 or say Begala anytime and saying “yes, you may be right but that’s a terrible way to frame it – have you no idea how most Americans think?”
The winds of popularity puffed up the empty materialist anti-democratic neo-Troskyism of the PNAC crowd but no amount of hot air is going to move those sails against this tide.
Shit, I’ll never write as good as Max:
MaxSpeak, You Listen!: DER DOLCHSTOSS, CONT’D
* I mean, what is this, like in those science fiction novels where the colonies on the outer planets eventually go to war against Earth because they’ve become so alientated from it? Have we returned to Mesopotamia another Ozymandias?
^ note to self: insert link to Cecil’s recent post, add sort-by-author-feature, remove this note self
~ and hearing them complain about how hard it is to govern when you control all the reins of power – all those tricks where you blame the compromises for the failures of the ideology don’t work anymore, do they? Don’t get me started! I always thought it was the left that was more comfortable in opposition and ill-prepared to govern. I think I finally get it: Clinton was a conservative of the liberal school. Today’s Republican ascendancy is so far radically to the right that it essentially took on the trappings of an extreme left-wing insurgency in regaining power over the last two-thirds of the last century. The roles really did reverse on that plane, hence my old “liberal conservatives and conservative liberals” post. I think nowadays Republicans envy the centrism of Clinton-Kerry liberals, so much like their own predecessors Willkie and Eisenhower. It’s nice to seem reasonable and to coopt the middle. Similarly, I think the left envies the conservative movement it’s discipline and zealotry.
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