POLITICAL QUIZ
What does Dick Cheney have in common with Elliott Abrams,
Dick Armey (don't say that too many times or you'll get a really
disturbing mental image), William "I'm so fucking moral it hurts"
Bennett, Pat "kill the fags" Buchanan, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich,
Phil Gramm, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh, Trent Lott, Kenneth
Starr, John Wayne, Vin Weber and George Will have in common
that Richard Gephardt, David Bonior, Tom Daschle, Al Gore and
Jonathan Winters
don't? All the former chickenhawks sought and received deferments
from military service while all the latter didn't (Winters was a Marine,
by the way).
The military service credibility schtick - a really, really big deal when
Clinton was running for office - seems to be no longer such a pressing issue amongst the shrieking heads.
Military and foreign policy (same thing, really) street cred is now
automatically granted to any apparatchik - no matter how minor - who performed the requisite sabre rattling during the Reagan/Bush era. Even the non-shrieking heads are babbling incessantly
about how Shrub, Cheney, a hypothesized Colin Powell in the
Cabinet, and
another handful of simpering toadies like
Richard Perle are going to constitute
some sort of ninja master foreign policy squad.
Their true talents can be found, for instance, by comparing any
account they've written on the bombings of Yugoslavia,
Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan during the Clinton years to their
accounts of the bombings of Libya and Iraq and the invasions
of Grenada and Panama during the Reagan/Bush years.
Any and all of the former are inevitably either smokescreens to
mask unpleasantries on the domestic scene or the ill-advised (if not
downright evil) misuse of sacred military power in a situation where
the life and death of the commweal is not at stake. On the other
hand, Reagan's serial bombings of Libya were strategically brilliant
brushstrokes by the Rembrandts of foreign policy. Indeed, even
after the
evidence against Libya was shown to be as weak as that
against Syria was strong, it was
still spun as a masterful way to "send a message" to the current Hitler of the Century of the Week.
Equally masterful was the invasion of Grenada which, although
undertaken less than a week after the bombing death of 240 U.S.
troops in Beirut, was an unavoidable defensive action to protect
American soil and citizens rather than a feckless misuse of the military to
get the poll numbers back up.
Basically, the same group of people who painted a picture of Khaddafy
as the ant-christ and found any excuse given to bomb Libya
powerfully compelling - no matter how weak or thin the
evidence - since he was, after all, a well-known terrorist figure,
found the bombing runs made on
Osama bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan and Sudan (in supposed retaliation for U.S. embassy bombings in Africa) horribly wrong
and nothing more than smokescreens attempting to obscure the
President's domestic problems.
By the way, many people in this same ex-cold warrior group
are also card-carrying members of the counter-terrorist
brotherhead that regularly churns out reams of fearmongering
screeds about the latest and greatest evil dark-complected people out
to get our chilluns, and you'll never guess who's been at or
near the top of their boogeyman lists for over a decade - that's right,
our man Osama, who was the embodiment of evil until the greater
evil called Clinton deprived him of his civil rights.
And what foreign policy expertise has Shrub's cadre of cold
warriors exhibited other than the aforementioned spinning vis a vis
who's wagging whose dog? Well, they want to piss more money
away on a missile defense system than Clinton has and, of
course, they're going to ride bigger, whiter horses while
exhibiting grimmer looks of determination, wearing darker
suits, mumbling more apocalyptic warnings, and carrying
bigger sticks (to be thrown at the Hitler Flavor of the Month
when the poll numbers decline).
Masterful, that. Whenever I hear these idiots braying I feel the
need to let forth with a loud, nasty fart to inject an element of
the rational into the discussion.
posted by Steven Baum
7/26/2000 10:46:08 AM |
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