| We can expect many supporters of the war on Capitol Hill to be ham-handed. Few moments in American life are as depressing as listening to a back-bench Republican in the House yammering party talking points he barely understands in the few moments he has between desperately looking for a few dollars to support a cauliflower museum in his district. |
The ideologically blue-blooded youth of 2007 do have a problem than José Antonio would have recognized in the 1930's: a lot of Daddy's old friends are sadly bogged down in silly notions about parliamanetarianism and "democracy" and panderin' to the Cauliflower Lobby. Some bright young fogey like Iván Normánovitch will have written those Big Management Party talkin' points, of course, that the poor old elected boob is makin' look bad, so naturally he does not much enjoy the show.
Over in the e-gutter at National Review on Line, we find Don Ricardito de Lowry expressing more than personal pique and whippernapperism. It appears that some of Daddy's brain-dead buddies are a menace to Boy and Party as well as a disfigurement unto it:
| There is an easy way for a Republican senator to burst from semi-obscurity to the front pages — offer a compromise plan on Iraq. Sens. John Warner (Virginia), Dick Lugar (Indiana), and Lamar Alexander (Tennessee) have all done it. Warner even double-dipped. He had dissented from President Bush’s Iraq policy in July by sponsoring a compromise plan with Lugar, and then garnered headlines in August for a much-hyped break with Bush that was only a continuation of his previous break. How many times can a senator break with the president until [sic for "before"?] he just stays broken? No contribution to the Iraq debate is as analytically pathetic as that of these halfway Republicans. Their reflex toward compromise — honed in their collective 12 terms in the [S]enate — leads them to believe that any problem can be negotiated away, so long as enough members of the world’s oldest deliberative body get together to deliberate earnestly (and a little pompously). |
Well, at least Neocomrade Senator Warner of Virginia had the residual good sense to announce his retirement the other day!, although who can say what havoc he and Dr. Altzheimer might work upon the hopes and schemes of Podhoretzides and Lowriettes before January 2009? RL is undoubtedly a smarter little Boy-'n'-Party cookie than JP is, Mr. Bones. Should you read his whole scribble, you will find that he does not pick on the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in any detail, although he lambastes his Party neocomrades Alexander and Warner at some length.
Mr. Lugar is never mentioned again after the passage already put in evidence. That silence is so judicious that perhaps Master Lowry is gettin' old enough to wear long pants someday soon. If the Senator from Indiana disagrees with certain of the self-evident maxims of Planet Whippersnapper such as "Never apologize, never negotiate," it is not because he fails to understand those memos the señoritoly tank-think element keeps churnin' out from AEI and Heritage and Hoover. Even "when considering war strategy in a conflict 7,000 miles away, where terrorists, tribal leaders and Iranian agents won’t conform to the just-so assumptions of Washington lawmakers," the old geezer still has a good deal more than cauliflower between his ears.
The grand issue of the moment between senility and infantilism in the Party of Grant is summed up for the infantry by Master Lowry:
| [T]here is no consensus to be had. We either continue with the surge, or give up on the war. Senators trying to find a halfway solution entice the headline writers, but demonstrate only their own self-involved irrelevance. |
Now that, Mr. Bones, is sufficiently definite a proposition to be capable of Popperian refutation, and if our own views about the bushogenic quagmire are correct, the refutation ought to be arriving fairly soon. The military operatives of GOP extremism can't keep surgin' on indefinitely, yet when the Ever-Victorious Surge of '07™ falters for lack of bucks and bodies, that will only mark the dawn of Responsible Nonwithdrawal. Certainly there is not likely to be any silly nonsense like "give up on the war."
The insolent señorito might have lectured his stodgey elders a little better had he noticed that "halfway solution" can be taken other ways than he takes it. The quest for Victory and Success for Boy and Party in the former Iraq had scarcely begun when it became apparent that the aggression-basers don't give a hoot exactly what what kind of Success and Victory they obtain, so long as they do attain it. Accordingly, a "halfway solution" need not be contaminated by any unspeakable negotiatin', whether on Capitol Hill, or with international or regional "coalition pardners," or out in the Big Party's semiconquered provinces either. All the perps, juvenile or superannuated, have to do is decide exactly what sort of half a loaf or quarter of a loaf they'll settle for in their Peaceful Freedumbia. Real peace and freedom are doubtless too much to hold out for at this late date, but there is no reason militant Republicans can't still hope for a more or less normal Greater Levantine sort of Party client state, one that, though engaged in never-endin' Petraeo-MacNamaran "counterinsurgency" operations, is yet in no serious danger of overthrow (from the direction of its subjects, anyway).
Don Ricardito Lowry's thinkin' otherwise seems to be predicated on a technical assumption about the violence-professional situation in the former Iraq that he may be unconscious of himself. The brat assumes that poor M. al-Málikí is completely dependent on the bounty of Rancho Crawford and wouldn't last ten minutes without it. One might even say that he considers Peaceful Freedumbia on a Vietnam-the-Model basis, overlookin' the rather significant detail that his Party's current quagmire contains no plausible equivalent of North Vietnam. The vast Republican Noise Machine keeps tryin' to twistify either the evil Qommies or its own curious notions about al-Qá‘ida into a North Vietnam equivalent. Regardless of whether they believe their own agitprop baloney, the neocomrades would do better to pick one hobgoblin or the other and stick with it instead of switchin' back 'n' forth the way they do.[1] Even then, of course, there won't exist any real North Vietnam equivalent, no Ho Chi Minh, no single party that would "win" the former Iraq should the GOP extremists ever decide to pull a kissinger and "lose" it.
The Party of Grant is not in quite so bad a jam as its whippersnapper señoritos make out. If they could "lose" their semiconquered Mesopotamian provinces altogether without anybody in particular "winning" them, as seems to be the case, then they have a great deal of leeway to fadge and fudge with when it comes to findin' themselves an acceptable half or quarter loaf of Responsible Nonwithdrawal. Naturally they'd have to clear their minds of cant to do so well, and that may be too large a sacrifice of their basic Party identity to be contemplated. That issue is strictly up to the Elephant People themselves. All one can say from outside the OnePercenter conspiracy is that if they did decide to think clearly for a change, outsiders are most unlikely to be able to compel them to "lose" "Iraq."[2]
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[1] Pastin' their two bogies together as "extremism" may perhaps score some Party points in the holy Homeland, but naturally it can have no effect on the problems that invasionism faces out in the colonial boondocks. To say "Militant Republicans lost their control of the former Iraq to militant Extremism" would be compatible with almost any state of affairs imaginable -- other than Peace and Freedom actually breakin' out all over, that is.
[2] In addition to a switch from hormone-basin' to brain-basin', a certain sacrifice of amour propre would be required as well: they can't have their whole loaf -- whatever that would have been like after all their contradictory rationales for the aggression! -- and even the achievable half loaf cannot be 100% theirs. Non-Party proponents of the Responsible Nonwithdrawal product would have to be allowed to share in the trumpeted Success and Victory to come at least a little. It's rather more than ordinary human nature can bear to be asked to pull the militant GOP's chestnuts out of the fire for 'em and then get no reward at all.
One could loosely sum that line of thought up as "You gotta go along to get along," which is perhaps what the brat-despised superannuated fossils of the Big Management Party vaguely have in mind. But God knows best.
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