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A Sinking Ship
 As
President Bush’s approval ratings hit the
canvas, one of his oldest supporters, a man he recently honored at the White
House on the occasion of his 80th
birthday,  has
decided to admit the obvious. William F. Buckley now describes the Iraq war as a
“defeat” for the United States.
In Buckley’s words,
“One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.”
He adds, in the wake of the bombing of the ancient Samara mosque,
“Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved
uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans.”
Allow me to gloat. Schadenfreud,
thy name is Sobran. During my last years at National Review,
Buckley’s magazine, I argued in vain against his fervent call for war
against Iraq; he called Saddam Hussein a “global menace.” I was
rebuked and eventually fired. Not long afterward, Buckley turned control of
the magazine over to a new generation of Republicans who could be relied on
to favor any war against any Arab.
So the conservative brat pack has
been cheering on the latest Bush war and sneering at its opponents, those
lousy liberal peaceniks — and a few America-hating conservatives too.
They assumed they enjoyed the blessing of the magazine’s founder,
who has never opposed a war in living memory. Bombs away!
Now the old man has pulled the
ultimate patriarchal dirty trick by yanking the rug out from under his own
heirs. How are they going to explain to their readers that the Ancient Mariner
has decided to jump ship? How humiliating! It’s as if Hans and Franz
had been bitch-slapped by Ahnold himself!
My guess is that they will minimize
this defection, if indeed they mention it at all. After all, National
Review has a long tradition of what might be called ostrich
journalism. It operates on the principle “What our readers don’t
know won’t hurt them,” which assumes that those readers get
all their news from National Review and no other source, so no
embarrassing news will reach them.
In this case, however, Rush
Limbaugh has already spilled the beans by expressing his puzzlement that
Buckley would give up on the Iraq war, just when it is going so awfully well.
(“We Are Winning!” a National Review cover
boasted last year, and that remains the party line, no matter what the hated
liberal media may say.)
![[Breaker quote for A Sinking Ship: The Bush disaster]](2006breakers/060228.gif) Buckley
suffers from that common affliction of the aging
celebrity: reverse Alzheimer’s, when everyone forgets who you used
to be. And conservatives now think it’s clever to accuse liberals of
everything liberals used to accuse them of: Isolationism, nativism, anti-
Semitism, and so forth, as they shatter all the liberals’ records for
deficit spending and outdo them in Constitution-twisting.
Meanwhile, Lewis Lapham, editor of
Harper’s, has called for Bush’s impeachment.
With a Republican Congress, he concedes, this is unlikely to happen,
especially given “the apathy of an American public reluctant to
recognize the President of the United States as a felon.” But
it’s desirable that someone should go on the record as proposing it,
just so future generations will know that at least a few of us were keeping
score.
Lapham shouldn’t despair.
More and more Republicans are edging away from their president, and more
and more conservatives — even at National Review
— are asking why Bush was ever mistaken for a conservative. Another
conservative, Bruce Bartlett, has written a book calling Bush an
“impostor” and “pretend conservative” on several
grounds, quite apart from the Iraq war. The polls suggest that for most
Americans, Bush’s impeachment would be something less than a
trauma.
As Lapham says, impeachment
isn’t a punishment; it’s a constitutional “remedy”
for the wayward use of power. In the words of John Dean, best known for his
testimony against Richard Nixon in the Watergate days, “Bush is the
first president to admit to an impeachable offense.” Namely, his
directive to the National Security Agency to snoop on suspected terrorists
without warrants, “a felony,” Lapham notes, “under the
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (punishable by five years in prison
and a $10,000 fine).” That’s a little more serious than perjury
about Monica Lewinsky.
Conservatives are going to have to
repudiate Bush loudly, en masse, and soon — unless they want
conservative to become a synonym for psychotic,
criminal, and lousy at arithmetic.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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