Quick Notes #10
Opportunistic: There’s a news story which is as sad as it is unsurprising: al Qaeda is making money off of Iraq. We already know that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has enormously swelled the ranks of al Qaeda. By going into Iraq, Bush has weakened the United States military on a fool’s errand, and strengthened our enemies to no end. Well done.
But here’s my thought: on September 11, 2001, even before the shock of the day’s events wore off, a good president would have asked himself, “How can I fix this?”
Instead, what we had was a president who asked, “How can I use this?”
3,422 U.S. troops dead. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. So many more to come. This is how great piles of corpses are made.
Well, what you had on 9/12 was a President with a negative mandate, and sliding further negative, with the command from the Republican hierarch that put him there to undo FDR’s new deal.
That’s his job undo the new deal. everything else is secondary.
A normal President would have called for conscription on 9/12, and then used Harry Truman’s template for fighting a multigenerational ideological war – containment, creating a Super-NATO. It would have propelled the developed and developing world to new levels and new heights, causing the President to receive unprecedented alcolades.
Instead, Bush used the event to prop up his power stature so as to pursue his job of undoing the New Deal.
It’s that simple. Make America look more and more like Mexico or any other banana repubic or just crumble to pieces altogether.
And that he has nearly done – he still has until 2009 to complete the job and he’s almost there.
The Republican party is a constituency of resenters:
Those that resent the progress of history
Those that resent the New Deal (the wealthy elite)
Those that resent the outcome of the Civil War
Those that resent the outcome of the Vietnam war
Those that resent the civil rights movement
Those that resent the civil liberties granted by the constitution and realized after WWII, including abortion
Those Conservative Catholics that resent democracy for taking away their divine right to confer legitimacy on government.
You take away the resenters, grudge holders really, and you have virtually no one left in the republican party. But together, well, that’s a sizable angry mob, throw in some fear mongering and some good PR fronts and they get near majority numbers. Beat up the balloting regime and you get the rest.
None of those resenters mind the destruction of the American republic.
Thus, their credo is: “We have to destroy the Village, er Republic, in order to save it.”
This is essentially the instinct that impelled Hitler and the Nazi’s. They simply simmmered with resentment.
They were either going to win it all, or go down in flames. Either outcome served their purpose.
Same here.