The Reactionary Utopian
                     July 27, 2006


THE BUSH REVOLUTION
by Joe Sobran

     At certain moments, you realize with stunning 
clarity how empty and absurd our political cliches really 
are. "Democracies don't start wars," Condoleezza Rice 
repeated the other day. What can that possibly mean in 
the real world?

     Taken literally, this simple formula implies that 
any time a democracy is at war with a nondemocracy, the 
nondemocracy must have been the aggressor. Since the 
United States is a democracy, it's unthinkable that it 
may be even partly to blame. Thus the Iraq war must have 
been Iraq's fault.

     As you see, the logic tends to be rather, well, 
Soviet. You may recall that the Soviet Union was never 
the aggressive party in any conflict. It was always 
defending itself against capitalists, reactionaries, and 
fascists, just as the United States is now defending 
itself (and world freedom, democracy, et cetera) against 
Islamofascists. Whenever the Soviets invaded a country, 
they said they were "liberating" it, the very verb the 
United States now adopts to describe its military 
mischief abroad.

     By the same token, the state of Israel, another 
democracy, is always the victim in any conflict. 
Apologists like Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and Charles 
Krauthammer have made this point so often that you may 
wonder if the laws of probability have been suspended. 
One could believe that Israel is in the right more often 
than not, considering some of its enemies. But is it 
possible that the Israelis are never, ever even partially 
at fault, just a wee little bit?

     Another beloved old saying may have expired at last. 
Though I grew up with it and used to believe it, I 
haven't heard it lately. It ran like this: "In times of 
crisis, America produces great leaders." The revised 
version may take a different form: "In times of Bush, 
America produces great crises."

     Shortly after September 2001, many Americans took 
President Bush for the Anointed One, the heroic, eloquent 
man of destiny who brought moral clarity to an 
unprecedented national challenge by the forces of 
darkness. Even the Democrats rallied behind him, none 
more avidly than Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. To 
oppose Bush's war on terrorism was to risk charges of 
disloyalty. "Old Europe" had its doubts, but it was 
irrelevant, even contemptible, and could be ignored.

     Five years later, Bush's name draws surefire guffaws 
when Leno and Letterman merely mention it; not since 
Monica Lewinsky have their gag-writers had it so easy. 
Lieberman is fighting for his political life, may well 
lose even his party's nomination for his Senate seat this 
year, and has been reduced to asking Bill Clinton, whom 
he famously rebuked for immorality, to campaign for him.

     Fortune's wheel has made one of its notorious 
revolutions. The Republicans, forgetting Lyndon Johnson 
and Richard Nixon, were planning on consolidating their 
rule for the foreseeable future behind their invincible 
war president. Karl Rove was a strategic genius. Even 
this year, Rove had decided to stake the Republicans' 
election hopes on the Iraq war; the idea was to accuse 
the "cut-and-run" Democrats of weakness against America's 
enemies.

     Today Bush has become a synonym for arrogance and 
ineptitude. He is losing even his conservative base. 
Interviewed by CBS, William F. Buckley -- the country's 
senior conservative, bosom friend and intellectual patron 
of Ronald Reagan -- has declared that Bush is no 
conservative and observed that if he were a European 
prime minister his failed war would have forced him to 
resign from office. George Will has been equally 
scathing.

     Liberals have loathed Bush since his dubious 
electoral victory in 2000, but now he is equally despised 
by their adversaries. He has achieved a remarkable 
consensus: Nearly everyone who adheres to any political 
principle, left or right, agrees that he is a dreadful 
failure, indeed a disaster. And we are doomed to more 
than two more years of his rule, not to mention 
generations of aftermath.

     Nothing has made America more hated around the world 
than Bush's "global democratic revolution," whose chief 
fruit has been more of the grisly terrorism that 
democracy was supposed to vanquish. Even worse than the 
harm he has already done is the future he has sentenced 
us to -- endless war, crushing debt, and other 
irritations.

     Let's hope our great nation's comedians will still 
be able to see the funny side of it.

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