THE WANDERER, FEBRUARY 9, 2006
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
No Retreat
Samuel Alito was finally sworn in as an associate
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, just in time to attend
President Bush's State of the Union address. I wonder if
he wishes his swearing-in could have waited just one more
day so he wouldn't have been expected to show up.
With all its pomp and circumstance, this annual
pseudo-event gives new meaning to the old phrase "empty
ritual." There are times when conviviality requires us to
show polite hypocrisy, but the only excuse for this
exercise in mass genuflection is that it's the one night
in the year when you can hear a Bush, other than Barbara,
speak in complete sentences. The Bush males have to rely
on their speechwriters to provide syntax.
(I once heard Mrs. Bush give a perfectly delightful
speech. Apparently the gift of articulate utterance has
been carried only through the distaff line.)
After an opening tribute to Coretta Scott King, the
president began with yet another warning against the
grave sin of "isolationism," saying we must avoid
"retreating within our borders." This confirmed my
apprehension that we were in for a bad night,
uncomplicated by rationality. The peculiar thing is that
this sin, which owes its name to a moral theologian
called Franklin D. Roosevelt, is a sin only for the
United States. It used to be known as "neutrality."
Other countries are expected to stay within their
borders, or they are guilty of "aggression"; those who
want our own country to stay within its borders are
guilty of "isolationism." When we commit what would
otherwise be called "aggression," it's called "defending
freedom." When radical Islamists get nuclear weapons,
they will be "weapons of mass murder." And when we have
them?
But we were just getting started. For the next hour,
the president continued playing head games with my common
sense, inducing the awful fear that I'd neglected to take
my medication. In bewildering succession, pausing for
breath only for his party's frequent applause, he touched
on the topics of optimism, defeatism, terrorism,
education, entitlements, Islamic radicalism, oil, tax
cuts, Iran, Medicare, democracy, immigrants, nuclear
weapons, doctor-patient relationships, New Orleans,
cloning, equal opportunity, domestic surveillance, and
love, each point buttressed by statistics.
"Drug use among youth is down 19 percent since
2001," he said, confounding those pessimists who had put
it around 17 percent. Various initiatives, most of them
bold, were proposed. Near the end of the speech,
favorable reference to Abraham Lincoln was made.
In his 1862 State of the Union message, Lincoln had
proposed his own bold initiative, a constitutional
amendment to encourage "free colored persons" to leave
the United States. The do-nothing Congress took no
action, however, and now look. Today, opportunities for
white youths in basketball are severely limited.
One of Bush's previous bold initiatives, his
proposal to send a man to Mars, was neither repeated by
him nor even remembered by the commentators. This just
goes to show how very empty these empty rituals are.
Their multitudinous bold initiatives, after immediate
success as thunderous applause lines, sink without a
bubble.
After Bush had finished, the Democratic response was
delivered by Virginia's new governor, Timothy Kaine, who
barely a month after taking office is already being
spoken of as a future presidential candidate.
As an orator, however, Kaine appears unlikely to
dominate the next edition of BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR
QUOTATIONS. If he ever becomes president, don't expect
the State of the Union address to become sizzling
entertainment.
Meanwhile, in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, executive editor
Fred Barnes praised Bush for having "redefined the right"
with his "strong-government conservatism." I'd prefer to
call it Constitution-free conservatism; Bush has managed
to make both Medicare and the Mideast even more chaotic
than they already were, saddling posterity with trillions
of dollars of additional tax debt.
It seems like rather a nasty trick to play on
posterity. But as yet, posterity doesn't suspect a thing.
Democracy Scores Again
The big news in Washington this week has been the
latest shock to Bush's hopes for democracy in the
Mideast. Yes, democracy is spreading, all right, but not
quite the way our president expected it to. When he
speaks of promoting a "global democratic revolution," he
assumes it will bring benign results, wholly favorable to
the United States. How can it fail to bring peace,
freedom, and security for all?
Like posterity, Bush is in for some unpleasant
surprises.
The radical group Hamas, whose solution to the
Palestinian problem would be to get the Jews out of
Palestine (every last one of them, and not necessarily by
peaceful coaxing), won a huge upset victory in the
Palestinian legislative elections.
Condoleezza Rice quickly made it clear that
democracy doesn't mean allowing parties to win when they
are committed terrorists and/or refuse to recognize
Israel's right to exist.
Having themselves chosen leaders like Menachem
Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon, the Israelis are
keenly aware that terrorists can win elections like
anyone else. Alas, they forgot to inform Bush of this.
The neocon press corps scolded the Bush
administration for failing to foresee the Hamas victory.
Its crack intelligence apparatus, it seems, had no
inkling that Israel and the United States were so
unpopular in the Muslim world.
Still, even the neocons are beginning to realize
that extending the War on Terror to Iran, Hamas's ally,
may not be so easy, and that they may have trouble
persuading the American public that this would be another
"cakewalk" like Iraq.
This one has "unintended consequences" written all
over it. Even the usually hawkish Robert Kagan thinks a
military attack on Iran right now would be ill-advised,
remarking that the Iranian regime may want nuclear
weapons because it is "paranoid about its security."
Paranoid? Maybe they suffer from the insane delusion that
their enemies have nukes?
But perish the thought that the United States should
consider retreating within its borders!
Exceptions to the Rule
Despite their well-earned reputation for mendacity,
a friend reminds me that politicians can be startlingly
candid -- "usually when they don't realize the microphone
is still on."
+ + +
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--- Joseph Sobran
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