Still it?

It was worse than naivete to believe these things. It was ignorance and gullibility. It was an igorance of the way governments have historically worked. It was an unwillingness to look at the data that was readily available to anyone with access to the internet. And it was, in the end, representative of what is, in my opinion, the worst quality America represents – that rah-rah, jingoistic, rally ’round the flag and all doubters and naysayers be damned mentality that makes the rest of the world look at us like we’re bullies and dummies and worse. It’s the mentality one should bring to pro football, but should try to leave out of politics. It’s the willingness to go along with the crowd because they appeal to your instincts that was so roundly condemned by the work of men like Stanley Milgram.

There really *wasn’t* a consensus on the things you claim there was. Whatever consensus there was ended at the borders of Afghanistan. And the rhetoric toward Iraq was grounded in a position paper released by PNAC in 2000 called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. This position paper was rooted in rhetoric that the PNAC think tank had been spouting since at least 1996. In fact, if you hunt through their archives, you can find a letter there urging Bill Clinton to declare war on Iraq. One of the signers of that letter is Dick Cheney. Take a look at the authors of the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” paper, and you’ll see some familiar names there, as well.

The best thing about that particular paper is that in the end, if you follow the recommendations it lays out to the letter, you’ll find yourself in a hot war with China. Now, I’m no military history expert or anything, but just the phrase “war with China” is enough to make me want to wet my pants. If we try that, we’ll lose – and we’ll lose very, very badly. It’s a nightmare scenario out of a Hieronymous Bosch bad acid trip.

I’m not linking to anything here, because I just can’t even see the point at the moment. This information has been around for five to fifteen years now. It’s not particularly hidden. It’s just that nobody takes it seriously. This, ironically enough, is another one of those creepy parallels between our current political situation and the situation in Nazi Germany. Mein Kampf was published in 1925. One of the big themes of the book was the need for Germans to push eastward, into Russian territory, for their lebensraum. Hitler’s vision for the eastern frontier was a series of Aryan metropolitan regions surrrounded by vast farmland which would be worked by populations of slavic serfs. This, as a historical curiosity, was supposed to be the end purpose of the Autobahn…to connect those islands of “civilization” in the wasteland of the East.

And yet, despite the fact that this had all been in print and readily available for almost twenty years before Operation Barbarossa, Josef Stalin *still* had a nervous breakdown when Hitler crossed the Polish border.

I’m not blaming you, HG. I’m not trying to call you out or single you out here. I’m past blaming people at this point. To my mind, there’s something sort of sick about standing next to a pile of six hundred thousand corpses and trying to point fingers at who started it, anyway.

It’s just that this sort of thing provides a really good illustration of why I think that this country is sick to the very marrow of its bones; probably sick beyond repair at this point. Intelligent, well meaning people aren’t able to avoid falling into dangerous, deadly thought patterns like these. This is the shit that fertilizes concentration camps, ladies and gentlemen. And we have a nation of people who cannot avoid it, even when they know better.

Like I said, I’m past blaming or even being mad at this point. I’m just depressed. I don’t see a way to fix this.

(Kim Henry was my Oklahoma History teacher in 9th grade. Really.)

In September of 2001, I thought rather highly of Bush. I admit it, I was wrong. America had been attacked and the country and the world rallied together. I remember those days. The consensus was that the US had to go into Afghanistan. The consensus was that the US had been attacked and steps had to be taken to prevent another September 11th. I thought the US needed to rally, the world needed to rally. A terrible event had taken place and it wasn’t a time for petty bickering or partisan politics. After all, in World War II, the Left and Right had united to help defeat Nazism. Forgive me for being naive in thinking another moment was at hand.

I think my waking up from George Bush is the next Churchill moment was the Axis of Evil Speech. Prior to it, I had thought the Patriot Act as a power grab and some of the rhetoric towards Iraq had been disquieting to say the least. But the notion that somehow Iraq, Iran and North Korea were a reincarnation of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan made me realize that George Bush was a ) an idiot and b) Was only interested in using 9/11 as a means to fulfill his own political objectives.

Should I have realized on September 11th, 2001 that the US was in trouble because George Bush was in charge? In a perfect world, yes. Was the evidence there that he would go into Iraq if he got a chance to do so prior to the 2000 election, again yes. Was a war of choice in Iraq likely doomed from the get go? Again, yes. As I said to my friends in March of 2003 when they asked what would happen, I said something on the order of “The US will get to Baghdad, that much is certain. What the hell happens after that, I have absolutely no idea.”

But we don’t live in a perfect world in which all of our decisions are made after careful consideration of everything and the examination of likely outcomes of our actions. We make mistakes, rush to judgment and more than anything else, sometimes we accept things as truth because “everybody says (or does) it.” The critics of the war were right and no amount of “well we’re here now and can’t do anything about that” can change that simple fact. I’ll go even further and say that the critics of Bush in 2000 had it right, and people including myself desperately, in the wake of the horrors of 9/11, wanted a proper leader at the helm. I made a mistake. I believed (at least at first) what the US government was saying and what it’s cheerleaders in the media were urging. I was wrong but I wised up. In life, as in politics, there are plenty of times when we will be wrong. Hopefully, we are smart enough to learn from those mistakes, so we can make different ones.

But it’s NOT a necessary qualification to run. I’m not about to throw half the Party’s senior leaders under the bus because they give in to the same political pressure that most of their colleagues gave in to. For all I know, the Party might’ve been buried if it had chosen to fight Bush whole-heartedly just then, taking on his strongest suit while his power was at or near its height.

Granted, I always opposed the war for reasons that have held up real well over time, and I would’ve liked to have seen that fight. But I’m not going to give the political death penalty to Democrats who went along with most of the other Democrats. Just not gonna do it. It was a low point for my Party, but it’s still my Party. (I have no real choice about that.)

Now the candidate’s CURRENT position on Iraq is a horse of a different color, necessary-qualification-wise. Kerry and Edwards have managed to circle around into acceptable territory. Hillary hasn’t–yet. If she doesn’t, she’s toast not just for me but for the Democratic electorate at a whole. But if she wants to come out early in 2007 and start talking sense about Iraq, I’ll be listening.

I’m not really interested in playing the “I knew, why didn’t you?” game — but I’m even less interested in being told that the only reason I could have been skeptical about the administration’s claims is irrational hatred.

1) Osama bin Laden escapes from Tora Bora
2) WMD – the adminstration doesn’t focus on nuculear weapons but the ubiqutous WMD which includes both mustard gas and botulism
3) Cheney is running around the Sunday shows telling everyone he knows where the weapons are. Meanwhile Hans Blix is saying call me because we are not finding any. The inspectors then have to leave the country since we need to get our war on
4) Iraq was a secular socialist state who had fought a bloody war with their theocratic neighbors. Not exactly likely to get in bed with a group intent on restoring the caliphate
5) When talking about Iraqi ties to terrorism the US only had payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (includes about every gov’t in the Middle East) and the fact an anti-Iranian group was in Iraq in the region above the no fly zone controlled by Kurds. Oh and Atta was in Prague.
6) The hijackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia is the number one financier and exporter of wahabi clerics and militant Islamic groups. Instead of getting tough with Saudi Arabia there is Bandar advising the president.”

Except for #2 these are all peripheral/irrelevant arguments. Yes, Osama escaped from Tora Bora; did that mean Saddam didn’t have a weapons program? Yes, Blix and Ritter said Saddam didn’t have any weapons. The news was full of stories of how the inspectors were being given the runaround, meanwhile the administration was saying we know there are weapons, we know where they are, and we know there’s a program. Yes, Iraq was a secular state; did that mean Saddam didn’t have a weapons program? Yes, the talk about ties to 9/11 were obviously bullshit, even then; did that mean Saddam didn’t have a weapons program? Yes, the hijackers were mostly Saudis and Bandar was advising the President; did that mean Saddam didn’t have a weapons program?

The administration lied up and down about how Saddam had a weapons program. Tenet said it was a slam dunk. Powell said, “we got pictures!” Rice said, in my professional opinion as National Security Adviser we have to act now based on what I know. We The People don’t have access to the intelligence; we have to rely on these people to be straight with us. And they weren’t. Therefore our decisions were based on flawed premises, and I’m sorry but I refuse to take the blame for that. That’s not fair, that’s not just. It may make you feel good to crow about how vindicated you are and how wrong I was, but I’m still a citizen of this country and I’m not going to sit in the corner with the dunce hat on because I was lied to successfully.

Finally, my good buddy RobW (I want my initials back, BTW):
“So, if you know someone is a liar and a thief who will stop at nothing to aggrandize himself, subvert democracy itself, and destroy anyone in his way… is it “IRRATIONALâ€? to hate the bastard?”

No. If you KNOW all those things. I moved to Texas in mid-1996, and wasn’t really interested in state politics until after 2000. I knew he was a Republican, he was his daddy’s son, he’d owned the Rangers, and that was about it. I basically regarded him as a machine Republican, not a neocon ideologue (hell, I didn’t even know about PNAC until after 9/11). It never entered my mind that an American President would be willing to lie to the American people to try to start a holy war (what would this be, the 16th Crusade?). It never seemed possible that someone of the party of Historical American Values would interpret the Constitution as saying that the President is a King, directly in contradiction of the Founding Fathers they so love to refer to. I could not conceive of an American President sanctioning indefinite secret detention and torture on par with that of the Soviet Union, with Cuba our new Siberia and Lubyanka all rolled into one. All of these horrors have come to pass, and now stand revealed; but in the Winter of 2002 and the Spring of 2003, there were still dark, festering secrets.

“That YOU, a supposed Democrat, have twice repeated a GOP-bred meme (irrational Bush hatred) makes you look like you are STILL believing their lies.”

Well, you tell me what I’m supposed to call it then. From my perspective, in 2002 you had no basis for believing that Bush would do what he has since done. All I knew was that you hated Bush and all his works, and would search for the ulterior motive if he helped old ladies across the street. And now you want to string me up as an enabler and DINO because I based my decisions on what I knew at the time. You and others like you want to run me off of any blogs I post on, regardless of what I say. You automatically suspect my motives, and accuse me of being a “concern troll” (which term you misuse, I’m not expressing ANY concern, but it’s fun to call people concern trolls) because I don’t hate Bush purely enough for you. If that’s not irrational, what the hell is?

“Well, this is a snark-heavy site. That means people will be insulted and feelings will be hurt.”

No problem. I’m going to stick up for myself though.

Smiling Mortician said:
“I keep waiting for Feingold to take the national stage and start giving people what for. I’ve never thought he was dumb — but now I’m wondering why he doesn’t just get all alpha about it, you know? Take charge.”

He’s put himself out there a couple of times. But he got almost zero support from his colleagues, and the “gang of 14″ and their stupid gentleman’s agreement not to make waves in the Senate have ensured that he gets no traction. Also, he’s not Paul Wellstone, I’ve never seen him thundering away in righteous indignation. He seems to just calmly and coolly go about dismembering the opposition. My kind of guy.

We do need more Paul Wellstone types on our team.

There’s an Obama backlash right now, based on some perceived notion that he hasn’t been an all-conquering Hero of the Left. He’s a second-year senator in the minority party, for chrissakes. Reserve a little judgment.