(no subject)
Nov. 12th, 2009 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randomnessDaniel Larison replies to a recent post by Caroline Glick:
Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.
When we look at policy and the results of policy, however, all of Bush’s love and emotion count for nothing. We also hear all the time how much Bush cared about dissidents overseas, but what we forget to mention is how much stronger authoritarian regimes of various stripes, both allied and non-allied, became on his watch. Bush loyalists very much want to have him and Obama judged on expressions of weepy sentiment and professions of good intentions rather than on concrete results, because they know that their idol has to fare very poorly if he is judged on the merits of what his policies produced. Amusingly, they would like nothing more than to damn Obama for not imitating Bush’s style, which they find reassuring or satisfying for one reason or another.
It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.
But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.
You can’t say any of that about his successor. ~Caroline Glick
Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.
When we look at policy and the results of policy, however, all of Bush’s love and emotion count for nothing. We also hear all the time how much Bush cared about dissidents overseas, but what we forget to mention is how much stronger authoritarian regimes of various stripes, both allied and non-allied, became on his watch. Bush loyalists very much want to have him and Obama judged on expressions of weepy sentiment and professions of good intentions rather than on concrete results, because they know that their idol has to fare very poorly if he is judged on the merits of what his policies produced. Amusingly, they would like nothing more than to damn Obama for not imitating Bush’s style, which they find reassuring or satisfying for one reason or another.
It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-12 10:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-13 09:00 pm (UTC)"illegal, arbitrary detention"? Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners captured on a battlefield that aren't in uniform under the command of a country, or a military force that wears uniforms and acts like an army of a country even if they don't have a specific country, are Unlawful Combatants, which have the exact same rights as spies, which is to say absolutely none at all. Everyone we put in Guantanamo we had the legal right under the Geneva Convention to shoot dead right where we found them. The fact that we put them up and fed them (many have gained significant weight) and have released many of them (about a third of which ended up right back in Gitmo) is going way above and beyond any legal and dare I say moral requirement. Saying otherwise is typical liberal bullshit.
"illegal wiretapping"? Has this fool never heard of the FISA court that has authorized Every Single Wiretap we've done? The only phone calls that have been tapped are calls from the US to overseas phone numbers with known terrorist connections (usually ones we found listed on laptops captured from militants), or from there to here. I call that "prudent". FDR during World War II had *all* communication in and out of the United States monitored. If what Bush did was illegal then what FDR did was illegal ten thousand times over.
"torture"? We didn't do a damn thing to any detainee that we don't already do to tens of thousands of *US soldiers* during their SERE training. Plus, what we did to KSM got us a whole host of information about al Qaeda that directly prevented a host of other attacks. Again, I call that "prudent".
I fear that it's going to take another attack with thousands of more lives lost before people are going to wake up and realize we are fighting people that Want Us Dead At All Costs, and it's fuckwits like the one you quoted that are enabling future attacks.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 03:14 am (UTC)Sadly, if that isn't an American value, nothing is. The more subtle and fucked-up aspect of this is that many of the values that caused Bush to make the worst decisions are ones that almost everybody agrees to. In particular, the chanting of the mantra "Democracy is the natural state of man" -- and who doesn't believe that? -- caused about 99% of the casualties in Iraq.
Traditionally, the Republicans are supposed to be the party of dour realists, and Democrats are supposed to be the idealists. I don't think Obama is an idealist, but it's clear that many people voted for him out of an outpouring of the fantasies they projected onto him.