A specimen that is not up to "ideology" and also lacks any faintest sense of loyalty, yet somehow swerves and twists exactly like the political undistributed middle, might be well worth investing in. (That canary down the mineshaft is useful even though nobody ever dreams of asking for her bird-brained opinions.) Still, how did anybody first notice that Neocomrade R. Morris, as he now is, possesses his uncanny knack of divining what Americans who "hate politics" -- that's Dr. Dionne's diagnosis from the late 1990's -- want from their politicians? Any single banality would only be what millions of other politics-haters think also at such-and-such a point in time; what makes Tricky Dickie special is that he has embraced a long series of banalities that is the same, or close to the same, as those chosen by the unaccountable fickleness of Ms. Swing Voter. The peculiar nature of this talent makes it very difficult to detect, surely?
Once detected, the talent remains almost impossible to discuss critically, because nobody has the faintest notion how it works. It might as well be witchcraft. Should Tricky Dickie someday wander off in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Ms. Swing Voter, presumably that would be the end of him, yet his termination would be as mysterious as his commencement. In between, how is one to judge whether Dickie deploys his trickiness well or badly? The obstacle is not merely that one cannot performs this man's tricks oneself, as Dr. Johnson observed about the violinist, it is that one can't begin to imagine how anybody can perform them.
Nevertheless I'll venture upon a small bit of criticism, basing myself upon a negative conjecture about how Mr. Morris does not do his magic. It cannot be important, as I guess, that Mr. Morris is a political insider in the sense of knowin' lots of pols personally. If he lived in a yurt in Central Tibet (a yurt with good Internet service, naturally), Dickie could do his characteristic shtik just as well.
The substance of my criticism is that probably he could do it even better from Tibet. That is to say, knowin' pols and polesses personally probably degrades Dickie's performance, at least a little. After all, Ms. Swing Voter has no such acquaintance with them, although very likely as a faithful subject of Televisionland, she kids herself that she does. (Dr. MacLuhan has much to answer for! But that's another scribble.) Admittedly one does not understand either the lady's fickleness or the clown's, but surely it is unlikely that the clown bein' in a radically different situation from the lady helps him read her mind better?
Which brings us to Dickie's Other Lady, the junior Senator from New York. Dickie detests her. So far, so good, considering that the pollmongers inform us that quite a number of Americans detest her also. The trouble is that Dickie detests Mizz Hillary personally, which only a tiny percentage of Americans are in a position to do, even if having shaken her hand once is to count as personal acquaintance. One can't really say "Visceral loathing might warp Mr. Morris's political judgment," for the shtik in question cannot possibly be judgment-based. If it was, the audience would not be completely in the dark as to how the tricks are done. All the same, it seems reasonable to speculate that havin' all his hormones run berserk at the very thought of Senator Clinton might interfere with the clown's performances somehow. (Who would care to engage a mine canary that nurses a bitter, and perforce a bird-brained, grudge against the Warbucks Coal and Smog Trust LLC in particular?)
And now, perhaps we may begin:
Iraq will become Hillary’s war / By Dick Morris It’s a good time to read Robert Dallek’s new book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, an agonizing presentation of the difficulty the two men had in figuring out how to pull out of Vietnam and end the war “honorably.” Their problem was familiar to anyone who has been following the war in Iraq: we were losing. Any move to pull out American troops would inevitably be followed (as it was) by a collapse of the South Vietnamese military resistance. Impaled on the horns of their own indecision, Nixon and Kissinger kept troops in Vietnam for the administration’s entire first term and only pulled them out five years after inheriting the war from Lyndon Johnson. If she is elected president, Hillary Clinton will probably have to follow the same trajectory whether she wants to or not. What she called “Bush’s war” in the televised debate on Sunday night in New Hampshire will inevitably become Hillary’s war before her first term in office is over. No American president will be able to pull our troops out and watch the Iraqi government dissolve in chaos, only to be taken over by the very terrorists who are planting IEDs to kill our troops. And if a male American president can’t do so, a female president certainly cannot. |
Dick Canary may know by knack how Televisionland and the electorate would react to his proposed scenario, but his qualifications to write scenarios about the former "Iraq" are nonexistent. If we politely attempt to take him seriously, "the very terrorists who are planting IEDs to kill our troops" must at least mean that it would be the natural masters, the Arabophone Sunnis, who prevail after the GOP extremists finally go away. Not entirely impossible, but not outstandingly likely either. But Dick Canary almost certainly means something far narrower than that, probably that al-Qá‘ida will hit the jackpot, and the odds against that are very high indeed. We might edge backwards into Mr. Morris's proper sphere and guess that his "expert" advice to whoever succeeds Little Brother would be to label whatever faction clearly triumphs in the GOP's Peaceful Freedumbia -- supposing that any one faction does so, itself a risky bet -- "al-Qá‘ida" without any regard to indig opinion about such things, without any feeble attempt at reality-basing. At the moment he is "advising" Sen. Clinton, however, and that plan would, by his own account, get her into the hottest hot water in sight. This may not be an accident.
| As a woman, as a Democrat, from the first moment Hillary Clinton were to take office as president, she would face the task of proving herself tough enough for the job. Even if foreign leaders and our enemies do not doubt her on this score, she will feel the need to prove herself. Any signal of weakness, such as a withdrawal from Iraq, would embolden our enemies and weaken her credibility. Remember how President Eisenhower let Khrushchev threaten to “bury” the United States without pointing out our huge lead in missiles? As a former general with an illustrious past, he had no worries about his credibility on military issues. But former 2nd Lt. John F. Kennedy had reason to worry that his bona fides as a military leader might be questioned, and he hastened to tell the world that the U.S. had a huge lead in missiles (after winning the election of 1960 campaigning on the “missile gap”). The price for JFK’s insecurity was, ultimately, the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Khrushchev felt he had to close the gap Kennedy had publicized. Hillary Clinton will not be able to pull out of Iraq. |
As always, Dick Canary's substantive view is a banality, something millions of good folks who are not paying much attention would assent to -- without paying much attention. Before his last turn of coat, he would doubtless have spun Ike and JFK quite differently, although that would have been banality too. Today's spin is a bit off the mark, insofar as Republican Party extremism does not have any candidate in sight with military credentials as good as Sen. Kennedy's, not to speak of Gen. Eisenhower's. (The Flyboy Hero from AZ does not count, since bein' a pilot scarcely made him a Clausewitz. It didn't even give him any command experience of the sort that JFK had at least a little of.)
| Pay no attention to her politically motivated vote to “end” the war by cutting off funds or her support for a mandatory withdrawal schedule. Both votes were cast in the heat of a presidential race in which she cannot allow Edwards or Obama to flank her to the left. But do pay attention to her interview with The New York Times a few months ago in which she said that she would keep sufficient troops in Iraq to provide training, logistical support, air support and intelligence to Iraqi forces and to police the border with Iran to prevent infiltration and to hunt down al Qaeda operatives throughout the country. As much as she would like to, Hillary cannot back away from these missions. |
It's quaint, if nothing better, to listen to Mr. Dick Morris pooh-pooh "politically motivated." That is as if Dr. Einstein had told the world that physics is not really so very important.
Apparently our mine canary does not detect anything "political" in that particular occupation policy, which is of course not peculiar to Sen. Clinton by any means. If being "bipartisan" after the fashion of the CFR and ISG gentry removes one from "politics," Dickie is quite right, although not very significantly right, because this is an issue of words rather than facts. Anyhow, what does Dick Canary want us to do, once we have paid attention to that article? Above all, what does he want us to do specifically because it was Mizz Hillary that wrote the article and not somebody else who happens to be running for President?
| Remember how long it took Bill Clinton to withdraw even a token force from Somalia after the Mogadishu killings? It was almost six months before our forces pulled out. We couldn’t be seen to be fleeing after our troops were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets by the local warlords. A withdrawal from Iraq would be even more complicated. The most likely course of events is that Hillary will undertake a limited withdrawal (if Bush has not already done so) but will be forced either to keep a substantial force on the ground or to add to it if the military situation proves untenable. |
Dick Canary is a little weak on logic, as well as Mil. Sci. How can the lady be "forced" to do what she herself has proposed doing? Has she changed her mind since writing what she wrote? Was she only kidding her readers in the first place? (Golly, what if the article was "politically motivated" after all!)
| The Democratic left does not realize that simply pulling out is not a viable political or military option and that no president, of either party, is going to pursue it. And particularly not a woman with hawkish inclinations during her first year on the job. , |
Since you and I are no doubt part of Dick Canary's notion of "the Democratic left," Mr. Bones, let us engage in a moment of self-criticism. Do we, or do we not, "realize that simply pulling out is not a viable political or military option and that no president, of either party, is going to pursue it"? It looks like the answer has to be one of those shifty yes-and-no contraptions with subordinate clauses in it that arouse such suspicions in the honest breast of the wombscholar: "Yes, Mr. Canary, we understand that our irresponsible withdrawal is not likely to happen, but No, we cannot agree with you that the policy would necessarily not be "viable," should somebody competent undertake to pursue it from the White House."
Meanwhile, back in darkest Dickmorristan, what's "the Democratic left" doing in an anti-Clinton piece? Few of us unpatriotic fiends are going to vote for the lady in the primaries. Dick Canary probably wishes that more of us felt inclined to do so -- that way he could rub off a little of our fiendish unpatriotism on Sen. Clinton, who is pretty well dug in against that line of attack. Exactly why he, of all people, should take such trouble to point out how strongly defended she is in her bunker of Responsible Nonwithdrawal is mildly puzzling: this scribble would make more sense if Tricky Dickie himself preferred some other invasion and occupation policy, but there is no sign that he does.
It's also a puzzle why he allows himself to sound at some points as if the Senator's Presidency were a sure thing, everything already settled except the actual count of votes. Does Mr. Morris really and truly believe that? It seems unlikely. Certainly he can not want that. Maybe he's just havin' a nice comfy wallow in pessimism, hobgoblinizin' himself with the worst of all possible worlds. That seems a bit out of character, though, and if it is really the case, this guy's usefulness as a political mine canary ceases to exist at once.
Oh, well, although it is an important and interesting question exactly how the Responsible Nonwithdrawal marketing campaign is going to be conducted, the big push has not yet begun, and when it does begin, it will not be conducted on a level where Dick Canary's special knack is likely to be pertinent. The marketeers must begin with the assumption that what Televisionland and the electorate want in their ignorance is of no consequence. Ms. Swing Voter therefore does not matter, and if she doesn't matter, neither does Mr. Dick Morris, whose opinions are only of interest insofar as they cast light on hers. Q.E.D.
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