THE WANDERER, JANUARY 25, 2007
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Quicksand
Most of the pundits agreed that President Bush's
televised "surge" speech had failed. It was uninspired,
he delivered it without conviction, and it didn't even
produce a slight bump in the polls. The Democrats, no
longer shocked and awed, attacked it, and some
Republicans joined them, Sen. Chuck Hagel calling it the
worst foreign policy mistake since the Vietnam War; few
Republicans were hardy enough to support it. Bush himself
seemed demoralized as he delivered the speech, as if he
didn't even expect anyone to believe him. It struck me as
the weariest hype I have ever seen.
But he hinted that Iran still poses a threat to the
United States. Are we back in the "mushroom cloud" phase
so soon? Will he dare to widen the war, in a desperate,
double-or-nothing bet on fortune? That is of course what
John McCain and the neoconservatives hope he will do.
Will the Democrats dare to oppose him if he does?
Backers of the war demanded that the Democrats offer
an alternative to the Iraq surge; but after all, it's a
lot easier to get into quicksand than to get out of it,
and the Democrats aren't quite bold enough to vote to cut
off funding for the war or to demand an immediate
withdrawal. That would be politically dangerous. Better
to let Bush have his way and take all the heat until he
leaves office. If he's in a hole and wants to keep
digging, why try to stop him? So what if he expands the
war? What's bad for the country may be good for the
Democratic Party in 2008. The "new direction" Nancy
Pelosi promises can wait until then. Meanwhile, any hope
of a conservative agenda is in ruins. Bush's agenda is to
fight to the finish -- endlessly.
It may be idle speculation to ask, but can Congress
declare peace? It gave Bush a vague mandate for his war
on "terrorism" -- an undefined enemy -- and allowed him
to fill in the blanks. Bush has taken his constitutional
role as commander in chief of the armed forces in time of
war to mean that he is a "decider" who can pretty much
define the limits of his own authority.
That way lies dictatorship. The basic idea of the
U.S. Constitution, after all, is the rejection of
arbitrary one-man rule, and it is no accident that the
two presidents the neocons most venerate are the two most
dictatorial, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their motto
seems to be, "George, be a king!" But most of the country
now agrees that if we are doomed to have one-man rule,
the one man should be someone other than George W. Bush.
Obama Nation?
Sen. Barack Obama, the latest Flavor of the Month,
has taken a step toward becoming our next one-man ruler
by announcing that he will soon announce whether ...
well, he's reached the exploratory committee stage. Look
out, Hillary!
Can he be stopped? I think so. Unless I am mistaken,
the Obama craze in the media is already losing steam. It
started when he outshone the drab John Kerry during the
2004 Democratic convention. The nation's journalists,
like a bunch of desperate housewives, were in the mood
for someone new and exciting.
Did Obama lack experience, especially in foreign
policy? Yes, of course, but so what? Older politicians
and their servile "experts" had given experience a bad
name. Even an unknown quantity was more alluring than
what we were used to. Hillary may still have the inside
track for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,
but many Democrats are afraid she can't win. She
irritates too many people, and Obama makes her seem a bit
old hat.
Such an earnest, appealing young man! The trouble is
that Obama is really not much more than a champion
high-school orator. Everyone agrees that he is
intelligent and impressive and has a great future ahead
of him, and a lack of "experience" also means a lack of
baggage. If he has one proven gift, it is for not making
enemies. He is a black who doesn't antagonize whites, a
liberal who doesn't alarm conservatives, a Bill Clinton
who doesn't chase women. Like Clinton, he can leave
everyone in the room feeling he is so reasonable they
can't really disagree with him.
The truth is that nobody can possibly fulfill the
messianic hopes Obama arouses. His advantage at the
moment is that each of his rivals has known negatives,
and he doesn't. Not yet, anyway. But the Clintons are
doubtless working to fix that. Before you know it, Obama
will probably be trying to explain away embarrassing
allegations about his past and our political life will
have returned to what we have come to think of as normal.
Keeping the Dream Alive
As I write, a Spanish newspaper has published an
unconfirmed report that Fidel Castro is finally about to
leave this world. Can it be? Can we pray that he will
finally repent?
At any rate, he leaves a devoted successor of sorts
in Venezuela's odious Hugo Chavez, who presumably thinks
he has no reason to repent. Chavez has blasphemously
called Jesus Christ "the greatest socialist who ever
lived," overlooking the minor difference that Jesus,
unlike Castro, managed to serve the poor without firing
squads.
As the late Jean-Francois Revel observed, most
regimes are judged by their records, but Communism is
judged by its promises. What Revel called "the
totalitarian temptation" is still with us. Men like
Chavez will see to it that it doesn't die with Fidel.
Does Anyone Notice?
Unless you're a bigger lacrosse fan than I am -- or
even if you are -- you probably know more than you want
to know about the Duke University lacrosse team. The
story of the collapsing rape charges is one of those
local stories, like that of the runaway bride a couple of
years ago, that take on lives of their own in the news
media and become unavoidable.
Yet something has been missing in the saturation
coverage. A serious injustice has been done, the district
attorney has acted disgracefully, and so forth. But is
hiring a stripper to entertain at a party now considered
normal behavior for college athletes? Once upon a time,
such a thing would have been grounds for expulsion. Today
it goes unremarked, like the continuing moral
deterioration of American life in general.
+ + +
"If Islam is a religion of peace, why are there so
many fights in the NBA?" REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME --
a new selection of my Confessions of a Reactionary
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--- Joseph Sobran
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