| The defining legacy of the Bush presidency and the primary cause of electoral disaster for Republicans was the Iraq War. But the war is the one thing the conservative movement will not allow itself to question (...) AEI’s Frederick Kagan “deserved a medal” for conceiving and promoting the surge strategy (...) “If we don’t suppress Iran, Syria, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Sunni terror funding stream in Saudi Arabia, we can’t win in Iraq.” (...) “We should think about what we did there after the invasion” (...) “We have a fifth column in this country that is larger than we like to think” (...) The Bush doctrine [is] a practical guide to foreign policy, while the setbacks in Iraq [are in part to be blamed] on “ingrate” Iraqis. Instead of rethinking the scale of American military commitments in the face of limited resources, Kagan argued for vast increases in defense spending. To those who dissent from this line of argument he asked, “How did we get from 1929 to 1939?” (...) It would be too incriminating to question the justice of the Iraq War. |
We have spoken before, Mr. Bones, about that curious gap in our Muttersprache which has only the single generic product ‘victim’ to plug it. Neocomrade A. C. McCarthy can call his Party’s neosubjects in the former al-‘Iráq ‘ingrates’ even as thee and I can call AEI and GOP and USIP and DoD and AIPAC and ... so forth ‘aggressors’, but the patients of ingratitude and aggression have no crime-specific name to call themselves, apart from one-time jokes on the pattern of ‘murderee’. I was toying with the notion of calling that particular militant neocomrade an ‘exgrate’ when it occurred to me that in New Homelandic one might spell the same noise "ex-great" and thus recur to the happy event of 4 November 2008.
As thee will see from the first sentence quoted, all these sweet puppies’ ex-greatness is a part of the scribbler’s own chosen topic, for in politics ‘legacy’ is mainly a matter of "Aren’t you sorrow now that you kicked us out, O holy Homelanders? Remember back in 2008 when things were bigmanaged competently by the Party of Big Management, unlike . . . ?"
Check back with me in 2012 about the rest of the unlikeness, sir, but meanwhile Neocomrade M[ichael] B[rendan] Dougherty is quite sure, and almost certainly correct to feel sure, that the bigmanagement of invasionism by the extremist Republican Party will be held up as a national treasure and a marji‘ at-taqlíd, "place of returning for emulation." Most of M. B. Dougherty's disquisition is about potentially disputed Bushevik legacies, whether the Homelanders will look back hereafter with longing to the steady adherence to the Fœtus Cult displayed by the Serene House of Kennebunkport-Crawford, whether the Homelanders were put off by the Serene House’s only-too-visible OnePercenterism, should the Elephant Folk flog mostly cultural reaction next time, or mostly economic reaction, or what.
An old song, and not one that appeals to the neocomrade scribbler, who seems to be your run-of-the-mill Buchananite wierdo. Like P. J. Buchanan, M. B. Dougherty thinks it hopeless to expect any of ’em to badmouth the Serene House’s bigmanagement of overseas aggression. The Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™ in particular seems exalted above all detraction by card-carryin’ denizens of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. A hundred centuries hence, the Jerome Corsis of the day will still reverently recall George XLIII Bush as "Him Who Taught Us How To SurGe" -- unless, that is, Neocomrade Dr. Gen. D. H. Petræus of Princeton and West Point eventually manages to add "President of the United State of America" to his C.V., in which case he, not The Brat, will be revered as HWTUHTS.
The Brat, thee see, Mr. Bones, would in that case become an ‘exgrate’, a victim of misunderappreciation. As will Fat Freddy of AEI and a number of other neocomradely Rosencrantzen and Guildersterns from Century XV/XXI be in any case. Unquestionably Serene Houses get to grab the credit for their retainers’ doin’s. (If thee question that principle, sir, thee might as well vote Democratic and be done with it!) Freddy may get his medal someday, but his chances of long-term apotheosis as HWTUHTS are zero.
Bein’ a weirdo, by Wingnut City standards, M. B. Dougherty would prefer that the rest of his pack of sweet puppies had never been taught how to suRGe at all. Since it looks to me as if only other weirdos attend to The American Conservative, it seems natural that the neocomrade should excuse himself from explainin’ what is so wrong about a little high-spirited suRGin’ from time to time. Presumably there are whole issues of the TACky fishwrap explainin’ that point. The closest he comes to ætiology is the "vast increases in defense spending" phrase in my quotation, which is not enough to conclude with any certainty that M. B. Dougherty is a dedicated and conscious agent of the Concord Coalition, one who holds that the only thing wrong with aggression is that Uncle Sam cannot afford it -- "afford it" in the strictly financial sense. [1]
There is also M. B. Dougherty’s bottom line to consider -- once you find it, I mean, since he has whimsically made it the fourth sentence from the end: "It would be too incriminating to question the justice of the Iraq War."
In Buchananite covens and conventicles, to question the basic justice of the Freedom-Means-Peace Circus cannot involve the likes of the International Criminal Court. At least, I don’t think it can. Neocomrade M. B. Dougherty probably deployed the verb ‘incriminate’ only to establish that he is really, Really, REALLY! opposed, not because he wants indictments and prosecutions literaliter. Come to think of it, though, Concord Coalitionism itself might call the Freedom-Means-Peace Circus ‘unjust’, meanin’ no more, however, than that all those bucks that the Serene House has thrown at Afghanistan and ex-‘Iráq properly belonged to somebody else, probably the endlessly put-upon taxpayers of the Blessèd Middle Class. [2]
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[1] Even when good guys argue like that, they argue neither well nor strongly. Prof. Dr. Stiglitz, for example, scribbled abusively and tendentiously in an attempt to rouse some rabble against his alleged Three Trillion Dollar War, yet in the wake of Mortgagegate 2008 and the Crawford Crash, what is $3,000,000,000,000.00 between friends?
[2] Taxation being one species of the crime of larceny, its victims too are in need of a specific designation. ‘Taxpayers’ will not do AEIdeologically, what neocomrades of the Political Capitalism factionette of the militant extremist GOP require is some expression featuring the passive voice. (Thee will notice, Bones, that ‘taxees’ is too like the common abbreviation of ‘taxicabs’ to work well.)
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