Uh, don’t forget the war, guys…
Ross Douthat, Patrick Ruffini, Greg Mankiw and David Frum all ponder why so many of the young’uns (which technically still includes me, even though I’m at the very edge of the 18-29 crowd) voted for Barack Obama. Frum and Mankiw blame the social cons, while Douthat says that economic concerns were far more of a factor. Ruffini seems to think that young people are just stupid and should probably be prevented from voting all together, though I can’t really tell.
Here’s something none of them mentioned: our current foreign policy of starting wars for no reason.
I’ll put it to you like this: in the aftermath of 9/11, I had a few friends join the army out of what they felt was their patriotic duty. Now, if a commie from Massachusetts like me had friends join the army after 9/11, I’ll wager that lots and lots of politically neutral people my age from across the country had friends who did the same thing. What’s more, I’ll bet a lot of these people were sent off to Iraq in 2003.
After it was revealed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, a lot of people who saw that their friends and loved ones had been put in danger over a non-existent threat were pissed. What pissed them off even more were apologists within the conservative movement who said that it was no big deal if we never found a single weapon of mass destruction anywhere in the country.
I don’t think you guys can begin to understand the sheer amount of damage this did to conservatism’s reputation. Sending people to war for bogus or fictitious reasons is one of the most heinous things any government can do — after all, why should anyone agree to make the ultimate sacrifice if they can’t be sure that their government is telling them the truth? If an entire generation of voters holds this against the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, I can’t say I’ll blame them. If I could pick one faction of the GOP to be forever purged from public life, it would have to be the neocons. As much as the Christian Right and the anti-tax wingnuts bug me, neither of them is as heinous as people whose sole political ambition is to start unjustified wars.
I say, let these denialists continue to ignore the real reasons why the country gets bluer and bluer with each passing election cycle. That way they can just finally fade into oblivion.
I regurgitate my hat and tip it to you Brad.
The Bush administration never happened.
The Iraq War never happened.
Everything is just perfect, and there’s no way the liberals can repair all the damage.
All Clinton’s fault, except for whatever was Carter’s fault or FDR’s.
…practicing my wingnut thought-exercises for the day.
the BBC somehow ended up with David Frum and John Bolton as their conservative election commentators. It was fun watching the host tell John Bolton, politely, to shut up.
the BBC somehow ended up with David Frum and John Bolton as their conservative election commentators.
Gad, they’re both simply awful. Frum is trying to paint himself as a moderate conservative now that the GOP brand is in tatters. Let’s never forget the classic book he wrote with Richard Perle: AN END TO EVIL. It basically advocated invading and bombing, like, everyone.
Ah, Greg Mankiw. He wrote the textbook for my microeconomics class back at Ohio State. The teacher was a real piece of work, too, I think she actually graduated from the University of Chicago economics program.
Free-market nutter, of course, but the thing that I remember the most about her was her incredibly abrasive manner. She shouted every last one of her lessons in a small classroom for like two hours two times a week. The grading was even better. The exams were an all-essay blue-book test that she graded herself, by what criteria I have no idea. I applied a consistent effort and thought I understood the material just as well in both halves of the course, but I got a 20 on the first exam and a 100 on the second one.
Thanks for saying it, Brad.
I’ll even go a step back from there.
Invading countries with whom you are not in a state of hostilities is wrong. In fact, it’s just about the WRONGEST thing a nation can do. It’s what the Nazis did to poland and france. What North Korea did to South Korea. What Napoleon did to Russia. What Japan did to China. And on and on down thru history, the worst of the bad actors were the nations that invaded other nations, looting and slaughtering as they went. It’s against any set of rules that ever existed for civilized nations. And for a modern government to KNOW that, and so to trump up an imaginary “reason” why another nation must be invaded and occupied, knowing full well that at some point that reason would be exposed as a bald faced lie, and doing it anyway only do dance a little shuffle on the carpet and smirk and say fait acompli like that somehow makes it alright, for that modern government to be the one that presented itself as the ultimate “good guy”, well, that’s just obscene.
Hundreds of thousands dead, a nation on it’s knees, a region in turmoil – all for the hubristic ego of a few untouchable white men in DC. It can never be made right. All we can do is say “never again” and hope this time we mean it…
mikey
If I could pick one faction of the GOP to be forever purged from public life, it would have to be the neocons. As much as the Christian Right and the anti-tax wingnuts bug me, neither of them is as heinous as people whose sole political ambition is to start unjustified wars.
Amen. Hell, I even have some sympathy for the anti-tax wingnuts, having encountered far too many incompetent and unnecessary government institutions. Fortunately, I think that the neocons are the group most likely to get purged. The mainline cons never really liked them in the first place–they saw them as big-government conservatives who were too squishy on social issues–and only accepted them grudgingly because they seemed vaguely tough on defense. If you think about it, a lot of the neocons have already been purged: Wolfowitz, Dougie Feith, Perle, Rumsfeld, etc. I think the Rockefeller Republicans are going to get axed too, which is a shame, but I’ll definitely be happy to be rid of the neoconservatives.
My article doesn’t say much about the why, but it’s not atypical. Part of what this election has invovled is the majority of Republican operatives who aren’t dipshit wingnut ideologues abandoning the Party and surrendering any even casual effort at voter recruitment / conversion / suppression.
The GOP had to make ACORN into a national issue to get anything done with it at all. That’s particularly striking, considering that the anti-ACORN screw job (watch it disappear in all but the dumbest wingnuts’ minds this week) is the sort of dirty deed that’s normally done in the dark.
I don’t think you guys can begin to understand the sheer amount of damage this did to conservatism’s reputation.
I don’t, brad. This should have ended that brand of crazy right there.
But it didn’t. Remember all the shouting and chest bumping with regards to teh wonderful surge™?
If it weren’t for the disastrous choice of Sarah Palin, and the effects of the housing bubble bursting appearing a few months too soon for wingnut convenience, this election would have been a whole lot different.
…practicing my wingnut thought-exercises for the day.
You forgot “Bush was always already a liberal.”
No, really. That’s the lesson they took away from the Bush Administration.
Well, besides their repellent approach to government, the opposition, gays, blacks. latinos, the rest of the world, endless wars, spying, torturing, global warming, sex AND education — what could young voters possibly find to be the problem?
According to Glenn, Maureen Dowd at the NYTimes just wrote, “How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry? . . . .”
Well whaddya know? It looks like the corporate war cheerleaders, some of them anyway, are finally beginning to admit that Bush-Cheney deliberately LIED the U.S. into a needless, foolish, disastrous war of choice. And compared to where the U.S. was even just a year ago, that’s something.
On the other hand, the wingnuts’ hypocritical trashing of Obama for his failure to find bin-Laden (whose name we’ll no doubt soon begin hearing again) to begin in five, four, three . . .
Thank you for stating this so clearly Brad. Even I need reminding from time to time. And the hell of it is, the Neoconservatives are not out of power, yet. They won’t even be out of power when Obama becomes president. Seems to me electing Obama was just step 1
This is exactly right. I have friends in the Army and Navy and while they supported Afghanistan, once the non-WMD thing happened in Iraq they were IRATE. And these are guys who are out there every day, to say nothing of the people back home who care about them
Speaking as a healthy young man, both her supporters and her detractors (outside of the pundit class, anyway) regarded Clinton no more sexually – maybe less so – than they did Obama. Meanwhile, a mean-spirited, petty woman twice our age who had married a neo-Nazi and turned her vagina into a clown car was continually pushed on us as a sex object.
Palin is hideous on the inside and artificial on the outside, a grim reminder of what America expects our beautiful colleagues to do to themselves in an endless quest for executive dick. I think more than anything she pretty much stands out as the single unifying example of everything wrong with the Republican Party – its foul strategists and its fouler base and the entire rotten society it strives to rot America into.
Oh, God. Mark Hemingway at The Corner:
Sometimes I think I too know the full value of the chosen word, but as someone who views themself as more of an American than a writer, most of the time I just dribble cerebral spinal fluid all over my keyboard with Lee Greenwood blaring in the background.
I nearly died. I can’t even snark it. It’s not just that I’m an incompetent snarker; it’s that I can’t improve on perfection.
Give them at least a little credit, their motivation is to -profit- from unjustified wars.
Jeebus, Brad!
You simply do NOT get it! They are trying to equate the ideals of Ghengis Khan and Ronald (bow to the Saint, y’all) Reagan, and make complete and total sense of the mess.
Here is the bottom line.
You like beer. I like beer. Drink more beer, tell us about the great beers you have drank and then read all those dudes above again.
Sure, your head will hurt. Sure you won’t remember her name. WTF!
You took one for the team!
What is it with the MSM and their treating Obama like he was Robert Redford’s character in The Candidate (remember Redford’s last line after he unexpectedly won)? So much advice for someone who doesn’t need or want it. I realize they want to make sure he does what they want, but it’s not remotely subtle.
You know what’d be cool. If McCain secretly revealed his secret catch-Osama plan to the powers that be, and they could catch Osama and then announce his capture an hour after Obama is sworn it. Like Reagan and the hostages. That’d be cool.
The media’s efforts to push an unfair infiltration of the highest levels of government by a popular defeated by historical margins being threadbare and obvious is good news.
For John McCain!!!!!11!!
I think it’s more like,
The Bush administration was perfect, but ended in 2006, after which our deniability became difficult, so it’s all the fault of the evil, do-nothing Democrat Congress that stole away the President’s very breath as he slept and traitored the nation into a depression, magically undoing every wonderful thing the President did up to then.
and
The Iraq war was the bestest war ever. It only lasted six days, or six weeks, I doubt six months, and WE WON! Unlike the Democrats, who lost. Whatever is going on over there now is expressly the fault of the illegally elected pretender to the throne, Hussein X.
and, of course,
CLINTON GOT A BLOWJOB!!!
Just thought I’d lend a hand.
And mikey, I don’t know that it could be said better. I’d like to remind everyone, though, that any war where you need to cover up Guernica with a tarp so the U.N. delegates don’t think of its message while you are making your pitch is probably not a just war to start.
Are we going to get a pool together for what the new “Clinton got a blowjob” is going to be? Besides “Obama is a terrorist/muslim/Kenyan/Marxist”. They have to come up with something new, don’t they? I mean, that other stuff didn’t exactly work.
You know, a couple weeks back (seeing I’m in my “wargaming” mode) I deceded to start reading Harold Coyle’s book Sword Point, about a Soviet invasion of Iran and the American response.
The thing is that the Soviet leaders decide to invade Iran, basically, because they need to exert their military power to keep respect among the nations of the world, and Iran is a convenient target after Afghanistan.
The upshot? This flimsy militaristic justification for war was supposed to show how evil the Soviets were, that they would pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world [they] mean business.
Y’ see where I’m going with this?
Step 1, cut a hole in the box…
[…] agree. Some of his friends joined the military after the hype about Iraq and WMDs. And Brad writes (with relevant and supporting links) that Republicans are essentially whistling past a literal graveyard on the war issue, and want to […]
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m still staggered by Frum’s chutzpah. Here’s a guy who wrote an entire book explicitly arguing in favour of policies that increased poor people’s economic insecurity in order to inculcate socially conservative values, and now he’s blaming social conservatives for losing an election in an economic crisis.
Heh. Remember when even saying the “L” word meant you were a super unserious DFH moonbat unhinged from reality? Those were serious times.
It’s only chutzpah if you expect people to actually call you on your bullshit. If you are simply given a free pass to spew whatever you like at the moment, without regard to truth or continuity, and you do what Frum does, it’s just being an asshole.
Brad, you may be surprised to hear it, but many not-so-young people are pissed off, too.
I remember in 2002/3 when (we were told) Saddam bought enriched uranium (yellowcake) from Niger and me and my wife were “oh my gosh, this crazy mustache guy is gonna do us.” With two kids, 1 and 3 years old, we were scared shitless…
OT, but is anybody taking bets on when good old Levi Johnson quietly un-engages with spawn #2 of Mooseburger?
Just thought I’d lend a hand.
Thank you, justme, but your versions are much too long to fit on a bumper sticker. I’ll see what I can do.
…is anybody taking bets on when good old Levi Johnson quietly un-engages with spawn #2 of Mooseburger?
I’d be kind of surprised if he doesn’t fuck off out of Alaska the minute the McCain campaign heavies leave.
krassen,
Like most stories about Saddam, I didn’t believe the yellowcake story for a second. I don’t know if I had a highly tuned BS detector or it was just the fact that the news came from sources that I thought dubious. Pretty much everything smelled of manipulation to me back then.
Ask any wingnut how they justify the last 8 years and you get nothing but a blank stare. They broke it and they aint gonna buy it.
justme explained what may be going through their heads but they still baffle me.
And I am so glad you got the kinks worked out on the blog here. I couldn’t get on yesterday. Didn’t know how much I needed what you do here.
As a combat veteran, I can only say that I voted for Obama, because I failed to love Bush enough.
And by “Bush”, I mean the pig-farmer from Kennebunkport. (righteous – spell check suggested these for “Kennebunkport”: “Outspokeness” and “Drunkeness” – we ARE in yer intertubez, changing yer wurdz)
is anybody taking bets on when good old Levi Johnson quietly un-engages with spawn #2 of Mooseburger?
This would be a perfect time for a young man to sign up with the merchant marines, or maybe a fishing trawler in the Bering Straights.
If I could pick one faction of the GOP to be forever purged from public life, it would have to be the neocons. As much as the Christian Right and the anti-tax wingnuts bug me, neither of them is as heinous as people whose sole political ambition is to start unjustified wars
Except you can’t. All those factions work together. One supports the other. As long as we have the one, the Christian Right, the other ones will show up.
“I don’t think you guys can begin to understand the sheer amount of damage this did to conservatism’s reputation. Sending people to war for bogus or fictitious reasons is one of the most heinous things any government can do — after all, why should anyone agree to make the ultimate sacrifice if they can’t be sure that their government is telling them the truth? ”
You guys really are too young to remember Vietnam, aren’t you? That’s not an insult, just a statement of bemusement. When I was 14, 500 guys a week were getting killed there. And they didn’t have to agree to be sent.
When I was 14, 500 guys a week were getting killed there. And they didn’t have to agree to be sent.
Luxury. When I was thirteen 600 men a week were swallowed by pelicans in Suriname after being dropped through trapdoors in phone booths.
[…] November 6, 2008, 8:28 pm Filed under: miscellany Via Mona, Brad at Sadly, No! takes the pulse of the Great Conservative Recriminations War, and finds … well, he finds exactly what I […]
Like most stories about Saddam, I didn’t believe the yellowcake story for a second. I don’t know if I had a highly tuned BS detector or it was just the fact that the news came from sources that I thought dubious. Pretty much everything smelled of manipulation to me back then.
Hell, I was for the war (sorry people; fwiw I was drinking pretty heavily at the time, much like Bill Kristol still is) and I didn’t even believe that junk. Amazed the sweet Jesus out of me how the Serious Liberal Press bought all that horseshit.
[…] 7, 2008 Brad at Sadly, No! hits a note similar to what I was beginning to think yesterday: “I’ll put it to you like […]
Be careful with Obama he might have some wars up his sleeve too. That’s not an endorsement of McCain, I’m just saying your reality check is in the mail.
Don’t talk about the war!
The fact is, nobody cares about the war except for a few phony soldiers who are traitors and want American to lose to the islamofascists.
These are people that think 3 = 1. Thanks for saying what I was thinking.
Pretty much everything smelled of manipulation to me back then.
You mean like how Saddam’s drones were going to fly across the ocean from Iraq and drop chemical weapons on us? I still can’t believe everyone didn’t call bullshit on it then.
“I still can’t believe everyone didn’t call bullshit on it then.”
The information was out there, it was clear that we were being lied to in real time. I can remember listening to whatshisname, the IAEA inspector guy, telling the UN that the yellowcake receipt was bogus and thinking “well THERE’s a surprise.”
And about Mr. Levi, the former future Mr. Mooseburger, Jr., it cracks me up that he’s about the only guy in history that’s going to have to run away from Alaska to hide from his problems. Just about everybody else living there got there because they were running away from something in the lower 48.
It is to laugh.
Dammit, I meant to say that nobody called BS on it because we were collectively still pants-pissing scared of Al Qaeda and don’t forget the 2002 midterms were coming up so nobody in Congress wanted to be labeled “soft on terrorism.” Recall that it was a huge political manipulation to force an authorization vote in October, just before the elections.
The Bushies were totally incompetent at everything except politics. In that, they were pretty fucking brilliant, for a while.
Still won’t leave the mooses alone, will you. Can’t we have a bi-partisan effort for America’s largest ungulate, the one the French trappers…oh, never mind.
Have to agree: theocons may be intolerant, but only their most emotionally disturbed will hurt anyone (and they might hurt people anyway regardless of what they believe). And while the libertarians might hurt people indirectly by opposing social programs, that is still nothing compared to actively encouraging nations to fight each other.
Douthat has a terrible blindspot about the wars; I get the impression that he didn’t really support the war (which evidence is based on a few mild objections he posted, but nothing particularly apple-cart-upset-y), and right now, he just wants them to go away. Out of sight, out of mind. In one of his more recent bitter posts, he tried to reduce importance of this election by undercutting the significance of the issues facing us today. I was mightily pissed that he didn’t consider two wars a fairly important issue, and something which the Executive branch has a great deal of responsibility for.
And in a lot of ways, this is the worst legacy of Bush II: disaffecting people from what war really is. The “Go Shopping” doctrine. You might win elections with only 51% support of the population, but you simply cannot win wars that way.
One day some of the smarter ones may wake up and realize they’d allowed themselves to get hijacked by the worst elements of their party. Pass the freakin’ popcorn in the meantime.
OT, but is anybody taking bets on when good old Levi Johnson quietly un-engages with spawn #2 of Mooseburger?
Now you mention it, I’ve been wondering that too. The baby’s due next month, no? Not a tweet anywhere about the wedding. I don’t blame either of those kids, although she’ll probably be better off if she doesn’t marry the “fuckin’ redneck.” On the other hand, life inside the Palin household may well warp the offspring for life.
where your argument falls down is the 2004 vote – those folks knew that there were no WMDs in Iraq by that time, that things were getting worse every day there, yet a large number of them voted for bush.
I believe what opened American’s eyes was Katrina. They watched their fellow citizens be neglected for DAYS, and saw bodies floating in dirty water, and realized that their current government was too incompetent to address this situation…… and that opened their eyes to some other things too.
You guys really are too young to remember Vietnam, aren’t you? That’s not an insult, just a statement of bemusement. When I was 14, 500 guys a week were getting killed there. And they didn’t have to agree to be sent.
By “guys” Honus of course means real people. You know, American people. There may have been some Vietnamese involved in some way.