The Reactionary Utopian
                      April 12, 2007


THE SCIENCE OF EXPERTOLOGY
by Joe Sobran

     All the experts agree: Global warming is really 
happening, and man is to blame. Only more powerful 
government (and less personal freedom) can save us. Slam 
dunk.

     Observe that no crisis ever warrants less government 
and more freedom. So why don't I believe in global 
warming?

     Because I get just a wee bit suspicious when all the 
experts agree that we should lose our heads about 
something and surrender our liberties to the mammoth 
state. We need one more science: expertology.

     I got my first lesson in this badly needed 
discipline when I discovered that all the experts had 
been wrong about who "William Shakespeare" was; as it 
happens, I'm writing this on April 12, the birthday of 
the real author, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

     So it is in politics. Our rulers' authority over us 
depends heavily on the expertise available to them, most 
of it kept secret from the rest of us. The very fact that 
we aren't allowed to know what it is has actually been 
used as an argument for trusting them -- even when our 
own common sense says otherwise! "The president knows 
more than we do."

     How many times did we hear that, and say it to each 
other, at the beginning of the Iraq war? This allowed our 
rulers to pull cognitive rank on us and assure us, again 
and again, that there was "no doubt" that Saddam Hussein 
payrolled terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction 
-- probably nuclear -- so that preemptive war was urgent. 
After all, that's what their experts were telling them: 
"Slam dunk, Mr. President."

     Neoconservative pundits, Mecca-nukers, and courtier 
journalists such as George Will followed the experts and 
cried for war. In retrospect, the hysteria is already 
amazing. It may have reached its highest pitch in a 2004 
book titled, with metaphysical absurdity, AN END TO EVIL. 
The authors, both neocons, were Richard Perle, a 
certified expert, and David Frum, a journalist and Bush 
speechwriter who gave us the phrase "axis of evil."

     The book enjoyed rave reviews in the conservative 
press, notably from Newt Gingrich, now pawing at a 
presidential run, in NATIONAL REVIEW: "a very solid 
introduction to serious thinking about the War on Terror 
and the scale of the threat to the United States.... 
Every serious citizen should read it and ponder its 
arguments." (And by the way: "Biological weapons are the 
greatest threat we face.")

     And what did this masterly volume say? Perle and 
Frum warned that nothing less than "our survival as a 
nation" was at stake. Saddam was getting nukes, plotting 
with al-Qaeda, et cetera. In the apocalyptic war with 
Evil, the two proclaimed, our alternatives were simple: 
"victory or holocaust." Well, by now the holocaust must 
be at hand!

     A skeptical liberal reviewer commented that Perle 
and Frum sounded "like Bush on crack." Others suggested 
that they had eaten on the insane root that takes the 
reason prisoner; but Patrick Buchanan, while agreeing 
that the neocons had "lost their grip on reality," 
shrewdly noted the detailed congruence between the agenda 
of Perle and Frum and that of Ariel Sharon's Likud Party, 
which Perle had a few years earlier favored with his 
expert advice. Now the book favored an American invasion 
of Syria and action to foster regime change in Iran.

     Over the last half century, certified experts, with 
all the can-do self-assurance of the Maytag repairman 
changing a gasket in your washing machine, have enticed 
us into wars in Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, 
and the Muslim world, and they are still very much in 
business, hoping to finish up in Iran. Soon.

     Meanwhile, bills forbidding Bush to attack Iran 
without congressional approval have been stifled in both 
houses of Congress, not by Republicans but by Democrats 
-- Charles Schumer in the Senate and Rahm Emmanuel in the 
House, both severe critics of the Iraq war. For some 
reason the news media haven't been covering this 
paradoxical little story.

     The neocons now snort that Bush has bollixed up the 
war. Not much given to contrition, the only thing they 
regret is having trusted Bush. They want to make it clear 
that this mess isn't at all what they had in mind. And if 
he makes an even worse mess in Iran, why, that won't be 
their fault either. Not that they seem very worried about 
it.

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