And Then She Had This

She (H. Cobban) knew in advance that this was comin' from him (G. W. Bush):

And then we have this... I knew it had to come into the speech somewhere! "The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank today is a struggle between extremists and moderates. And these are not the only places where the forces of radicalism and violence threaten freedom and peace. The struggle between extremists and moderates is also playing out in Lebanon -- where Hezbollah and Syria and Iran are trying to destabilize the popularly elected government. The struggle is playing out in Afghanistan -- where the Taliban and al Qaeda are trying to roll back democratic gains. And the struggle is playing out in Iraq -- where al Qaeda, insurgents, and militia are trying to defy the will of nearly 12 million Iraqis who voted for a free future. Ceding any of these struggles to extremists would have deadly consequences for the region and the world. So in Gaza and the West Bank and beyond, the international community must stand with the brave men and women who are working for peace."

However, once put in firm possession of it, the analyst offers no further comment. I'm afraid it looks as if she doesn't take this particular slice of Boy-'n'-Party baloney very seriously in conection with the just pacification of Planet Earth. "Extremism" is, chez Dubya , only a verbal tic or psychological symptom, a sort of King Charles's head that is bound to pop up sooner or later in any reasonably long stretch of George XLIII bloviation about international aggressions and occupations and so forth and so on. "Kids say the darndest things. Why, there's little Georgie playin' with his tin moderates and extremists again!" It would go over the line to add "Ain't he cute?, because clearly Dr. Cobban and the orthodox Cobbanites don't find it ingratiating. We need not dispute about their taste in kiddyisms, but it is of some political importance that they are not the least bit afraid of militant Republicans who come bearin' "moderation." The Cobbanites do not rise in wrath and attempt to snatch the tin figures out of his hands as being so many matches that could lead to serious problems in hands like those. They don't even seem to want to protest that The Boy is playin' with toys that more properly belong to themselves.

Over at the other end of the spectrum, however, where perpetual conflagration is devoutly and, as it were, immoderately wished for, they take their Little Brother more seriously. The dossiermongers and jihád careerists need not annotate yesterday's oration specifically, for they have already complained of their Party leader's strange blindness to exactly what it is that he has in his hands. In a sense they, too, consider him typically juvenile, but not because he likes to play silly verbal games. Far from it, their trouble with the laddie is that he cannot connect up obvious dots the way a grown-up should. Given dots like Gaza and the Lebanese God Party and the Taliban and "al Qaeda, insurgents, and militia," how can he possibly fail to grasp what he's up against? Didn't he attend Yale? Yet obviously he can and does. After only a week or two of screechin' the alarm against "Islamic fascism" last fall, he abruptly gave it up. [1]

Now according to our established guidelines, Mr. Bones, we are to assume that the Crawfordites actually believe the baloney they talk. Very few people in politics are clever enough to be cynical, and the current crop of GOP geniuses are most assuredly not among the few. If Little Brother talks up his Kiddie Krusade as bein' about moderates-versus-extremists, not Western Civ. against Eastern Barb. or the like, that must be what he really thinks he is doin'. [2]

Expressions like "false consciousness" or "ideology" are not automatically excluded, but that school of political psychoanalysis should never be one's first resort. Such categories are not to be recurred to until after one has decided that the patient cannot possibly mean what she says and say what she means. Highly intelligent people (in the strict IQ sense) can go badly astray here if they have not enough imagination to fancy others believing what they themselves know is absurd and contemptible. It seems a very easy exercise to imagine that Boy and Party really do believe themselves moderates and all their enemies extremists, although one's final judgment on that belief be not far from "absurd and contemptible." The Crawfordites and their base-and-vile undoubtedly ought to know better than that, yet it is as plain as day that in fact they mostly don't. [3]


Pater dimitte illis non enim sciunt quid faciunt. [Ev. Luc. XXIII:34]

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[1] Oddly enough, those theorists of the Kiddie Krusade that I read frequently have never mentioned that interlude afterwards, to wonder, like their Neorabbi Bernie Lewis, about "What Went Wrong?" that it was aborted. As a matter of mere fact, it appears that Dr. Rice and Neocomrade K. Hughes asked Himself Above to please knock off the Anti-Islamophalangiterianism shtik because it was tendin' to make it harder for them to handle the lesser breeds without. Since he did indeed knock it off, one speculates from afar that K. Rove advised that it did not pay enough dividends in domestic politics to merit bein' persisted in. Considering how little the invasionist crew care for alien opinion, the perceived rewards at home must have been very scanty indeed. Or so I guess.

"Mere fact" does not go very far in Crawfordology, however. Had Deep Ideology persuaded the cowpokers that Islamophalangitarianism is the true ultimate enemy of all decent Dynasty and Party values, the fact that Televisionland and the electorate are not much interested in buyin' that product would not have deterred them from purveyin' it, no more than minor factual complications of diplomacy would have. One can only infer that they sincerely don't believe it. (Dr. Pipesovitch and Bob Cardinal Spencer take that view of the case also, although they are aghast at such a failure of insight whereas I but note it with interest.)


[2] The orthodox Cobbanites do not, I think, agree with this estimate, although the matter is not altogether clear. Dr. C. professed to detect "racism" in yesterday's presidential performance:

Bush goes on, embedding some fairly racist assumptions about the nature of Palestinians into his discourse: To make this prospect a reality, the Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope -- not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror. The Palestinian government must arrest terrorists, dismantle their infrastructure, and confiscate illegal weapons -- as the road map requires. They must work to stop attacks on Israel, and to free the Israeli soldier held hostage by extremists. And they must enforce the law without corruption, so they can earn the trust of their people, and of the world. Taking these steps will enable the Palestinians to have a state of their own. And there's only way to end the conflict, and nothing less is acceptable. Israel has a clear path. Prime Minister Olmert must continue to release Palestinian tax revenues to the government of Prime Minster Fayyad. Prime Minister Olmert has also made clear that Israel's future lies in developing areas like the Negev and Galilee -- not in continuing occupation of the West Bank. This is a reality that Prime Minister Sharon recognized, as well. So unauthorized outposts should be removed and settlement expansion ended. At the same time, Israelis should find other practical ways to reduce their footprint without reducing their security -- so they can help President Abbas improve economic and humanitarian conditions. They should be confident that the United States will never abandon its commitment to the security of Israel as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people.

If there is any envenomed sting of "racism" there at all, it can only be at the very end, with the Tel Aviv statelet to be not just plain recognized like everybody else, but recognized-as-Jewish-Homeland. Insofar as that formula implies anything more than, or different from, acknowledgement of the Czech Republic as "Bohemian Homeland" by the conventional exchange of ambassadors et cetera, the formula might be racist.

Or then again, it might not. There is no need to resort to political poison gas like the R-word merely because Mr. Bush blatantly expects the occupied to make 95% of the concessions in Palestine, their occupiers only 5%. Especially at the moment, that asymmetry could easily be only a natural solidarity of right-wing occupationist régimes that has nothing to do with anybody's racial affiliations.

The Party perps themselves are of course "color blind." Everybody knows that. Haven't they insisted on that point often enough and loudly enough in other contexts?

What they are not is "lobby blind," so to call it, and if they were, that would be a deficiency in them also. M. Pascal and I don't award anybody points for thinking well on the basis of not seeing what is obviously there. Once in a while it is meritorious for a statesman to judiciously pretend not to see, but the Palestine Puzzle is not an exception in this respect. The lobby blindness of the militant Republicans is matched, though scarcely counterbalanced, by a lobby obsession on the part of most Arabs and Gentile Palestinians, as if my poor Uncle Sam had never been anything but a shameless pro-Zionist liar about allegedly wanting a fair settlement.

Fundamentally irrelevant developments since September 2001 have reinforced this misapprehension. The lobby-obsessed no doubt collect awful examples of Anti-Islamophalangitarianism in much the same way that MEMRI carefully culls its stinkfruits from the indigenous press of the Levant, failing to notice that the terrorized or careerist Pipesovitches and Spencers do not control Rancho Crawford but rather complain of it. The lobby-obsessed already "know" what Uncle Sam is "really" up to, they know it so well that all evidence to the contrary might as well be invisible. If Dr. Cobban had been briefed for the opposite side of the controversy, she might, with equal looseness of epithet, call that "fairly racist."

A more accurate and neutral description of it might be Big-Party Spirit, a hypertrophied narcissism that accounts blindness a badge of loyalty, as if devotion to Wunnerful US somehow consists mainly in deliberately making oneself deaf to almost everything THEY say, attending only to this week's Awfulest Examples Ever. Some of the offenders on both sides no doubt conceive the wunnerful usness of their own preferred US in ways that can legitimately be considered race-based, maybe even racism-base. Most, however, do not. Race-basin' undoubtedly can lead to the misbehavior in question, but so can quite a number of other factors. Further research is required.


[3] Anyway, what do we want? Would we approve of militant GOP extremism any better if it frankly reverted to Barry Goldwater and annouced that certain Dynasty or Party values are so precious that even immoderation in pursuit of them should not be accounted vicious?

As things stand, one may at least hope to be able to practice a little political ju-jitsu on them from time to time, persuading these avowed Knights of Moderation to abandon at least a few of their wilder schemes of thuggery and self-preference.