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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thu. 08/05/04 06:53:07 AM
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What If He's Right? Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXLVIII I apologize for delaying so long in blogging this astonishing essay by Tom Junod at Esquire, which I came across late last week. An unusual combination of bluntness and delicacy of thought a remarkable combination of historical perspective and psychological insight it is powerfully and beautifully written. Much of it, I heartily disagree with; but it contains a number of striking passages, including the following (emphasis in original). From Page 1: .... What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find [George W. Bush's] call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.... The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November — no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer — is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated.... From Page 2: .... I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country — the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia — is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.... Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil — and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it — then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.... Of course, Iraq might be a lost cause. It might be a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. But if we permit ourselves to look at it the way the Republicans look at it — as a historical cause rather than just a cause assumed to be lost — we might be persuaded to see that it's history's judgment that matters, not ours. The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing.... From Page 3: .... The question is not, and has never been, whether we can fight a war without perpetrating outrages of our own. The question is whether the rightness of the American cause is sufficient not only to justify war but to withstand war's inevitable outrages. The question is whether — if the cause is right — we are strong enough to make it remain right in the foggy moral battleground of war.... In defending his suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln sought to draw the distinction between liberties that are absolute and those that are sustainable in time of war. Bush seems to be relying on the same question, and the same distinction, as an answer to all the lawyers and editorial writers who suggest that if Jose Padilla stays in jail, we are losing the war on terror by abrogating our own ideals. Losing the war on terror? The terrible truth is that we haven't begun to find out what that really means.... In a nation that loves fairy tales, the president seemed so damned eager to cry wolf that we decided he was just trying to keep us scared and that maybe he was just as big a villain as the wolf he insisted on telling us about. That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? The boy cries wolf for his own ends, and after a while people stop believing in the reality of the threat. I know how this story ends, because I've told it many times myself. I've told it so many times, in fact, that I'm always surprised when the wolf turns out to be real, and shows up hungry at the door, long after the boy is gone. Why is this included among Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode? Because so few of them will see the wisdom in it. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 08/05/04 06:53:07 AM |
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