The King’s English

May 18, 2004

All the recent bad news from Iraq may distract us from the good news.

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Despite the mounting casualty toll that gets so much attention, it’s important to keep our heads and remember that we haven’t lost a single neoconservative.

The indispensable men who provided the brainpower for this war have, so far, escaped entirely unscathed and may live to plan another war. In fact, not content to rest on their laurels, they are already planning one or two, with Syria and Iran. Cynics may argue that you can only build so many democracies at a time, but that won’t stop these dauntless idealists.

Their brains are badly needed in the cause of freedom, because, frankly, the Übergoy, President George W. Bush, doesn’t have any. His father, Aitch Dubya, wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but no mere genetic explanation can explain the son, who appears to be a mutant. His mother, Barbara Bush, can hardly have known she was conceiving a future president of the Republic and was probably hoping for just a normal, healthy child. Look what she got.

Dumb? George Dubya is barely photosensitive. His conservative admirers, who hang on his every grunt, would have us believe that, though he isn’t exactly eloquent, he harbors deep Burkean reserves of implicit wisdom and an unsophisticated but basically sound “moral clarity” that are denied to glib liberal intellectuals. That must be why he’s adding trillions to the national debt. How on earth did he get through two Ivy League universities? Did Ted Kennedy take his tests for him?

The brilliant success of the Iraq war suggests that Bush’s lack of superficial polish is by no means compensated for by a superabundance of common sense. He has turned the world’s only remaining superpower into a global superpariah.

[Breaker quote: Versus the president's]

Like rap music, Bush is an alarming sign of America’s cultural decline. When the president of France and the king of Jordan speak better English than the successor of Jefferson and Lincoln, something has gone wrong. It’s not just that he has trouble with big, fancy words; he even misuses prepositions like to and for. At his most recent press conference, the reporters could have gotten more thoughtful answers from a Magic Eight-Ball.

Yet, in some dim way, Bush seems to sense that his grand project of democratizing the globe is already an irretrievable failure. When he defends his policies, he speaks obsessively of his “beliefs” and “convictions,” as if he should be judged by his good intentions, not his objective impact on the real world. Disowning the actual results may be a step toward cutting his losses.

On top of his other intellectual and verbal shortcomings, Bush is staggeringly naive. He was so preoccupied with justifying “preemptive” war that he failed to foresee the sort of things that always go wrong in wartime, no matter what the moral pretexts under which it begins. Apart from the well-known tendency of conquerors to torture their captives, such things as the Abu Ghraib horrors are harder than ever to conceal when they occur. Bush has been caught flat-footed by the revelation that our occupation forces aren’t endearing themselves to the Arab world they are supposed to be liberating.

Once upon a time, “Yanqui, go home!” seemed to be a sectarian slogan of Latin American Marxist students. It turns out it can be translated into Arabic and other languages without loss. Even foreign politicians who have supported Bush are in trouble, while his approval ratings plunge at home. He has reduced American diplomacy to rubble.

The idea of conservatism is to conserve. Bush’s faith is in force, which only destroys. Oddly enough, Colin Powell, the most liberal member of his inner circle, seems to be the only one who grasps this simple distinction. But in an administration badly in need of adult supervision, one Powell isn’t nearly enough.

What’s amazing, and appalling, is that so many traditional conservatives, not just the neocons, are still groveling before Bush, who has not only abandoned but flagrantly violated their once-sacred principles of limited government and prudence. It will be a tragedy for conservatism if it comes to be identified with a president who is a deadly enemy of nearly everything conservatives used to espouse.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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