Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Taking Trillions

(Reprinted from the issue of October 6, 2005)

At long last, some Republicans in Congress have declared, in a formal statement, that President Bush’s overall spending, particularly on entitlements, contradicts everything the GOP has been preaching about limited government for the last generation.

These aren’t silly “Bush-haters,” like the filmmaker Michael Moore or Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, who are always pouncing on the slightest occasion to find fault with the president. These are Republicans who are now finding themselves forced to confront the full price of their undeviating loyalty to him. It’s one thing to make enemies by being true to your principles, but quite another to make your friends rue their friendship.

When I heard about this mini-rebellion on the hourly radio news, I assumed it would be a front-page story in the newspapers the following day. It wasn’t. In fact I couldn’t find a word about it anywhere, not even buried in the back pages, in any of the three New York papers or the two Washington papers I read every day.

Only the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal carried a short piece by one of the Republicans, Jeff Flake of Arizona — and even that was a very mild protest indeed.

By following Bush’s leftward lurches with blind loyalty, conservatives have not only violated their own creed; they’ve pretty much obliterated their identity. They swapped their birthright for a mess of pottage, in the form of Republican electoral victories; but now that Bush’s popularity has gone south, his war is failing, and the bills are coming due, he looks as if he may become the kind of liability to his party that Johnson, Carter, and Clinton became to the Democrats as soon as their presidencies ended.

The Democrats tried to pretend that these disastrous presidencies hadn’t really happened, but that didn’t work too well, and the Republicans took full advantage of their failure.

But can the Democrats capitalize on the Bush calamity? They have their own identity problem, a left-wing core that repels voters and prevents the emergence of moderate leaders who might compromise and win elections. They have a knack for losing. In 2008 both parties are likely to offer unprincipled and uninteresting presidential candidates, with their incumbents in Congress keeping their seats.

It’s always risky to predict what the burning issues will be several years in the future, but my guess is that we’re in for a period of even more partisan recrimination as both parties are forced to cope with the chaos Bush will have left: war, debt, entitlements, and promises that can’t possibly be kept.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, listen to the economist Bruce Bartlett in The Washington Times: “The unfunded liability of Social Security in perpetuity is $11.1 trillion. The unfunded liability of Medicare is $68.1 trillion, of which $18.2 trillion is accounted for just by the recently enacted drug benefit” — which Bush refuses to reconsider. He calls this a “reform” and threatens to veto any attempt to repeal it. To paraphrase Everett Dirksen: A trillion here, and trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Meanwhile, both parties now agree that the federal government must Do Something about every immediate vexation, from hurricanes to illegal aliens to gasoline prices to ... well, whatever comes up.
 
SOS (Same Old Smears)

Also writing in the Journal, the neocon David Frum insinuates, yet again, that Patrick Buchanan and other conservative opponents of the Iraq war have been motivated by you-know-what: anti-Semitism. By now this smear is not only hoary, but obsolete. Frum doesn’t even bother trying to back it up.

War on Iraq has been pushed for years, as many besides Buchanan have pointed out, by many open Likudnik sympathizers, who have argued that it serves the interests of the state of Israel, and several of whom — Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith — have achieved positions of power in the Bush administration. Others of their persuasion are influential figures in journalism. How is it “anti-Semitic” to point this out? Is it “anti-Christian” to point out that many Christians, chiefly fundamentalist Protestants, have supported the war because they unabashedly support Israel too?

Far from fearing persecution, Jewish neocons like Frum positively gloat about their power and success; they even joke about it. But the moment they are criticized on perfectly factual and rational grounds, many of them whine about a resurgence of anti-Semitism, instead of answering the criticism on its own terms. Some of them now insist that there is no such thing as a “neoconservative” — a label they used to glory in — and dismiss the term as a code-word for “Jew.”

Does mounting opposition to the Iraq war mean there has been a corresponding increase in anti-Semitism? Have we seen more persecution of Jews lately? Lynchings? Pogroms? Even nasty graffiti? Where?

Freestyle motive-hunting of this sort is one of the more vicious traits of democratic politics — “You’re against affirmative action because you’re racist!” — but it’s losing its sting as a result of decades of overuse. High time, too.
 
Dirty Words

Of all the fashionable smear-words — “anti-Semitism,” “racism,” “sexism” — the most absurd, for my money, is “homophobia.” If you oppose anything under the heading of “gay rights,” including what I like to call “sodomatrimony,” you’re just asking for this one.

Like the others, it purposely conflates principled opposition with irrational hatred. It insists there can be no decent motivation for resisting the homosexual agenda.

“Homophobia” is a stupid coinage anyway: literally, “fear of sameness,” I suppose. Should disapproval of child molesters be called “pedophobia”?

How did the great masters of the English language manage to do without these gauche coinages? Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Dickens, and Joyce conveyed their meaning very vividly with simple nouns and verbs. Only fanatics rely on these grotesque abstractions.


SOBRAN’S asks how a noted dove during the 1991 Gulf War became a leading hawk during the 2003 Iraq war. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran