A Liberal Mediates on Bush

[selenite0]

. . . and confronts the painful question: What if he's right?

Liberal journalist Tom Junod calls Bush an "asshole" but goes on to consider:

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. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second.

His conclusion:

Eventually, the president made it easy to believe that the threat from within was as great as the threat from without. That those at home who declared American moral primacy were as dangerous as those abroad who declared our moral degeneracy. That our national security was not worth the risk to our soul. That Abu Ghraib disproved the rightness of our cause and so represented the symbolic end of the war that began on 9/11. And that the very worst thing that could happen to this country would be four more years of George W. Bush. 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.

I believe the wolf is real.

Comments

[mycroftca.livejournal.com]

I've believed the wolf is real for years and years before 9/11; it's typically American to believe that the wolf has been driven away after only a few terrorists have been killed or driven off. It's typical for a liberal to say that a war has made more terrorists; instead, it's brought them to the surface, so that they are fighting our military instead of slaughtering our civilians. Woe unto the leaders of the past who took this threat as minimal...

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I believed the wolf was real, but I was expecting him to stay in the woods and eventually become domesticated. Now we need to take a different approach.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

What a very well-thought-out and well-written article! Thanks for posting it!

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

There are any number of ways for Bush to be wrong about how to best protect public safety in uncertain times. When I hear people wanting to replace him and his policies, I don't hear that as being 'soft on terrorism', so much as wanting to change what so far hasn't worked.

After 9/11/01, it was pretty hard to track down the people responsible for the systems that had failed: they were all out bombing Afghanistan, or so we're told.

I see it as a massive failure of accountability, not a simple red/blue dichotomy of who's right and who's wrong about those dangerous arab terrorists.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Accountability is a separate issue from what we should do next, and really a less important one. What we most need to do is decide how to keep our enemies from succeeding with another such attack, and how to keep them from recruiting more suicide bombers and other terrorists. There's several strategies we can try depending on which input to the Terrorist Production Function (http://www.livejournal.com/users/selenite/53556.html?thread=109620#t109620) we want to affect. But we can't have a reasonable debate about that unless we're willing to admit that how we should deal with people trying to kill us is more important than trying to score points in domestic politics (note that I consider the President's failure to lead that debate a result of his desire to score points).

All the myriad ways...

[p-o-u-n-c-e-r.livejournal.com]

The opposition essentially had the choice of leaning toward Lieberman and a "hard" approach to terror, or toward Dean and an "anti-hard" approach. A coalition based around an "electable" anti-war warrior is clever, but suggests no particular mandate for action.