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The Bush Revolution
 At
certain moments, you
realize with stunning clarity how empty and absurd our political clichés
really are. “Democracies don’t start wars,” Condoleezza
Rice repeated the other
day.  What
can that possibly mean in the real world?
Taken
literally, this simple formula implies that any time a
democracy is at war with a nondemocracy, the nondemocracy must have
been the aggressor. Since the United States is a democracy, it’s
unthinkable that it may be even partly to blame. Thus the Iraq war must have
been Iraq’s fault.
As
you see, the logic tends to be rather, well, Soviet. You may recall
that the Soviet Union was never the aggressive party in any conflict. It was
always defending itself against capitalists, reactionaries, and fascists, just
as the United States is now defending itself (and world freedom, democracy,
et cetera) against Islamofascists. Whenever the Soviets invaded a country,
they said they were “liberating” it, the very verb the United
States now adopts to describe its military mischief abroad.
By
the same token, the state of Israel, another democracy, is
always the victim in any conflict. Apologists like Abe Foxman, Alan
Dershowitz, and Charles Krauthammer have made this point so often that
you may wonder if the laws of probability have been suspended. One could
believe that Israel is in the right more often than not, considering some of
its enemies. But is it possible that the Israelis are never, ever even partially
at fault, just a wee little bit?
Another beloved old saying may have expired at last. Though I grew
up with it and used to believe it, I haven’t heard it lately. It ran like
this: “In times of crisis, America produces great leaders.” The
revised version may take a different form: “In times of Bush, America
produces great crises.”
Shortly after September 2001, many Americans took President
Bush for the Anointed One, the heroic, eloquent man of destiny who brought
moral clarity to an unprecedented national challenge by the forces of
darkness. Even the Democrats rallied behind him, none more avidly than
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. To oppose Bush’s war on
terrorism was to risk charges of disloyalty. “Old Europe” had its
doubts, but it was irrelevant, even contemptible, and could be ignored.
![[Breaker quote for The Bush Revolution: We've only just begun, I fear.]](2006breakers/060727.gif) Five
years
later, Bush’s name draws surefire guffaws when Leno and Letterman
merely mention it; not since Monica Lewinsky have their gag-writers had it so
easy. Lieberman is fighting for his political life, may well lose even his
party’s nomination for his Senate seat this year, and has been
reduced to asking Bill Clinton, whom he famously rebuked for immorality, to
campaign for him.
Fortune’s wheel has made one of its notorious revolutions.
The Republicans, forgetting Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, were planning
on consolidating their rule for the foreseeable future behind their invincible
war president. Karl Rove was a strategic genius. Even this year, Rove had
decided to stake the Republicans’ election hopes on the Iraq war; the
idea was to accuse the “cut-and-run” Democrats of weakness
against America’s enemies.
Today Bush has become a synonym for arrogance and ineptitude. He
is losing even his conservative base. Interviewed by CBS, William F. Buckley
— the country’s senior conservative, bosom friend and
intellectual patron of Ronald Reagan — has declared that Bush is no
conservative and observed that if he were a European prime minister his
failed war would have forced him to resign from office. George Will has been
equally scathing.
Liberals have loathed Bush since his dubious electoral victory in
2000, but now he is equally despised by their adversaries. He has achieved a
remarkable consensus: Nearly everyone who adheres to any
political principle, left or right, agrees that he is a dreadful failure, indeed a
disaster. And we are doomed to more than two more years of his rule, not to
mention generations of aftermath.
Nothing has made America more hated around the world than
Bush’s “global democratic revolution,” whose chief fruit
has been more of the grisly terrorism that democracy was supposed to
vanquish. Even worse than the harm he has already done is the future he has
sentenced us to — endless war, crushing debt, and other irritations.
Let’s hope our great nation’s comedians will still be
able to see the funny side of it.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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