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Bring It On
David Skinner in the Weekly Standard
Bush the Heavy
Frankly, I liked the Bush performance. His energy clearly flagged in the middle, as it often does for Bush about 20 or 30 minutes into a presentation. But he did a good job of depriving Kerry of the opportunity to make Bush look like he was sitting in his seat.
Contra MSNBC, Kerry may have won on points, but he didn’t look much better than a pretender.
Jay Nordlinger in the National Review
Don’t Shoot the Messenger…
I thought Kerry did very, very well; and I thought Bush did poorly – much worse than he is capable of doing. Listen: If I were just a normal guy – not Joe Political Junkie – I would vote for Kerry. On the basis of that debate, I would. If I were just a normal, fairly conservative, war-supporting guy: I would vote for Kerry. On the basis of that debate.
When the right wing flak comes up with Bush did poorly and his energy clearly flagged we don´t need to debate who has won. Now to follow through is very important and I am not sure yet that Kerry and his campaign will bring it on.
Some pictures:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
I decided to check out what the guys at LGF are saying:
In a conversation with a co-worker today, I conceded that Bush gave the inferior performance last night. However, I told him that I would probably be willing to trade that bad performance for those two words “global test”.
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When I heard that last night, I thought in a week, Kerry’s “global test” would be the only thing remembered from the debate. Looks like Bush is trying to make it so.
STAGE ONE:
So, your preferable candidate did botch a debate. What do you do? You take two words out of context, give them a vile interpretation and repeat ad nauseam.
Sadly, illiteracy is strength. It allows one to avoid cognitive dissonance (*) by being unaware of a contradictory fact. Out of the hundreds of comments at LGF, only a few dare to repeat the full sentence:
But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you‘re doing what you‘re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
Unfortunately, the LLL, MSM and Kerry will be able to speak their way out of the above quote. Kerry infers that you only need to pass it by your country men before you act and, I guess, hope that the world approves after the fact.
STAGE TWO:
So, you are confronted with the contradiction. You simply resolve the dissonance by ignoring the part about “legitimate reasons”. Instead, assume it means “foreign acceptance afterwards”.
If you take a look at the full quote and the preceeding paragraph, Kerry’s intentions are obvious:
KERRY: The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the cold war. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control. No president through all of American history has ever ceded and nor would I the right to pre-empt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim, you’ve got to do it in a way that passes the test. That passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
BUSH: Let me—I‘m not exactly sure what you mean, “passes the global test,” you take preemptive action if you pass a global test.
My attitude is you take preemptive action in order to protect the American people, that you act in order to make this country secure.
Bush did not get it. The guys at LGF basicly applaud him for that.
MY “NUANCED” INTERPRETATION:
1) pre-emptive war as a tool is fine, when:
2) you have a reason. It must be an important reason, so important, that it is legitimate to strike first.
3) you explain the reason to your countrymen. they understand and accept it (democracy, you know?)
4) when your reason is legitimate it does not matter whether other countries like your decision or not.
5) you can prove the reason afterwards. you could have good intelligence, that could not had been made public before the strike because of security reasons.
Kerry said that in an obvious context: Bush said that his reason is Iraq’s violation of UN SC resolutions on WMDs. That reason was legitimate. Bush pretended that he has some darn good intelligence that noone else had (“We know where they are. They are around Tikrit”). It turned out that he COULD NOT PROVE IT at all.
This guy tried to explain it to them:
having read the entire postings to this point I can only say in the name of fairness (FAIRNESS) that Senator Kerry’s “world test” remark was the one suppossed gaff my fellow Republicans can hang their hat on. The coalition Bush’s father put togeather would pass that test… the current one simply does not. I heard no mention of surrender of America’s national interest to foreign powers. I heard no mention of surrender of America’s national interest to the U.N. I did hear that the current coalition is a joke and as a life long Republican I agree. As a Vietnam era Veteran having proudly served my country I also railed against that illconcieved and misexecuted mess upon my return to the world. Iraq (not the war on terror) is a mess and if this administration intends to pursue its current course there I will be voting for a Democrat for the first time in my life.
He got a “mixed” response.
The sad thing is that sound bites propagate quickly through the system. 90 minutes of debate had been reduced to two words. You can expect a storm of: “global test”, “wants to give away sovereignity”, “won’t protect the American people”.
On a bar-talk level this boils down to: Bush always kicks ass. And Kerry thinks too much.
This one is really funny, though. 😉
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* Cognitive Dissonance — if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know — particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge — they are likely to resist the new learning.
Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Oct 2 2004 1:14 utc | 31
@alabama: I’m not sure we can neatly disentangle Israel and oil… the Anglo-Americans have been occupying bits of the Near East for over a century now, and for the last century a big chunk of the motivation has been oil. Finkelstein kind of snapped my eyelids open a couple of years ago when he said (in his controversial book The Holocaust Industry) that the US hadn’t the least interest in Israel until after the Six Day War. When the Israelis flexed some muscle and beat up some Arabs, then all of a sudden State Dept suddenly started looking on Israel in a new light… and some (I tend to be of this opinion myself) think that light was spelled “regional gendarme”. A cynic might say that Israel, having “made its bones,” was suddenly eligible for the Don’s particular friendship.
According to this line of thought, Israel was then cultivated as a valuable asset, a proxy “peacekeeper” (read satrapy, gendarme, hired gun) to keep the uppity wogs (read Arabs) in line — so as to maintain a “balance” of power (i.e. one that was properly imbalanced in favour of the AngloAm bloc). And the AngloAm interest in the region is oil, oil, oil.
The US played all sides as imperial powers tend to do, continuing to cultivate relationships with Egypt and with the House of Saud, but the lion’s share of the funding seems to flow to Tel Aviv — what is it now, $2B per annum or something similarly astonishing? As I understand it some of that is merely welfare for US arms merchants, as Israel is more or less contractually bound to spend its allowance on US-made munitions — correct me if I’m wrong on this. So the end result (as so often) is to transfer money from the US public coffers to US private pockets, with Israel as the compliant money laundry in between.
The question of who’s wagging whose dog here is vexed and easily obfuscated. I can’t figure it out. Traditional antisemitic gossip/rumour, ever-durable, suggests a Vast Jewish Conspiracy controlling the US, in other words the US as a puppet of Israeli policy. Certainly the neocon/Likudnik cabal offers fuel for that fire. Yet no one can explain, if this is the case, where the lever of control is. The money flows in the other direction; it’s Israel that depends on US aid, not the other way around. Jewish Americans are not a very large percentage of the US population, hardly a majority — if there’s a scary religious power bloc here it’s the fundies. So if the US is the puppet, then what’s the powerplant for the string-pulling? Where’s the leverage?
Conspiracy theorists suggest some kind of blackmail (Mossad has the dirt on CIA or State for something ghastly) — but State and CIA are red to the elbow with ghastliness revealed and documented, have been for years, and none of it has shaken the foundations of power. Thus I remain skeptical about claims that Tel Aviv is running DC.
Still, at present it does seem that the Iraq invasion and the sabre-rattling directed at Iran fit Israel’s geopolitical agenda rather neatly, whereas they do little for the US except drain its coffers and make it look a fool on the world stage. My resistance to WJC theories makes me skeptical of the whole “Israel the puppet master pulling strings in Washington” story, even if Ariel brags about it, so I’m not sure how to explain this problem of the US acting apparently against its national interest. Policy hijack (coup by any other name) by egomaniacs (Rummie at the head of the pack?) at the highest level may be a pretty good explanation.
Hmmm I guess we could say that Israel’s agenda and the US agenda are coterminous in the sense that both fear the possibility of a viable Pan-Arab movement, or even the success of any modern secular state (complete with industrial infrastructure) in the Muslim world. So anything that damages pan-Arab solidarity (stirring up sectarian discord, destabilising governments, promoting chaos) probably looks tasty to both players. Israel, oil-poor, is probably up for any scheme that takes control of Near Eastern oil fields away from Arabs/Muslims and into the hands of its Very Good Friends the US and UK, which ensures its supply (NB the new pipeline to Haifa).
And then there’s the wild card: the incalculable and (to me) terrifying element of religious mania… the Rapture mythos now saturating US popular culture, the ultraZionist claptrap being spouted by profoundly antisemitic religious rabble-rousers on the US “Biblical Right”, the suspicion that high level members of the present regime partake of this cultic fascination with the restoration of “Greater Israel” and belief in imminent Armageddon.
Apologies for rambling on as usual, but I find this stuff really frustrating and hard to understand. It’s a bit like trying to reassemble one of those 1000-pc jigsaw puzzles; but I have the weird feeling that not only have some of the pieces been filched from the box — the various pieces we do have look like fragments of several different pictures. If anyone can make some sense of this mess, I could do with some help here. Got any edge pieces? how about a corner? Awww don’t tell me there’s a pattern on both sides?
Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 3 2004 6:51 utc | 70
@anna_missed — what a leading question If bourgeois authenticity is sold to the American public as individualism, how would religion, in the sense of American fundamentalism, be compatable? It is surely in contradiction to individualism. I can’t resist.
caveat lector: I’m sure a good theologian or Church historian can shoot this down w/o even aiming, but I’m taking a wild swing at it based on my limited literacy in theology and history. everyone load up, here comes the skeet…
imho the Protestant heresy was at heart the assertion that the individual has a private relationship with God, a connection not mediated or controlled by State/Church hierarchy. the bitter war between Catholic (establishment) and Protestant (rebels) was largely over freedom of information and personal choice — the Catholic Church asserted “copyright” over the Bible and would only permit it to be printed in Latin, the language of the scholarly and Church-educated. ordinary people were not supposed to be able to read and understand the Gospel (the source code) but were supposed to accept a vernacular sermon based on it (the compiled executable) handed down to them by a trusted functionary of the Party, er, Church. there was a time when it was a death penalty offence to own or carry a Bible in English (plain text). serious intellectual property war going on there.
so in a way we could see Protestantism as the idea of individualism colliding with the Christian faith as it had been reified and ossified — institutionalised — in the established Church. some of the rules of society under the old Church were explicitly collectivist in nature, designed to favour the community as a whole over the personal ambitions of individuals: “fair price” fixing, restrictions on invention and competition, ritualising the occasions of the agricultural year to ensure all tasks were complete in order and exactly as they had always been done, preserving traditional occupations, shaking down rich people for alms (income redistribution) etc. Protestantism was radical by comparison, the religion of pushy upwardly-mobile merchants and traders chafing at these restrictions on commerce and profit.
OK, to be fair, they were also chafing at the Church’s radical monopoly on learning, literacy, arts, literature and private morality. intellectual freedom was at stake (in more than one sense) as well as itchy, greedy, sticky commercial fingers. a potent combination.
so in that sense, the Protestant flavour of Christianity which is America’s state religion, is indeed an individualist innovation — a product of the Enlightenment and all that jazz. kind of ironic that the class of professional middlemen (merchants, traders, shopkeepers) objected to a religion controlled by middlemen (the priestly caste of the Catholic Church). maybe they knew exactly why middlemen should be regarded with mistrust!
anyway, is US Christianity Enlightenment/individualist or not? in theory, taking the Gospels as source code and compiling it for oneself as an individual, they are still a strong, devastatingly direct and passionate catalogue collectivist/communitarian directives: love thy neighour as thyself; blessed are the poor in spirit; turn the other cheek; let him that is without sin cast the first stone; judge not; even as ye have done unto the least of these; give all that you have to the poor, and follow Me — etc. nbne of which seems to jibe well with the American Dream (grab it all quick before the other guy and de’il take the hindmost).
there’s a serious discord between what you would theoreticall get if you crossed the rational/individualist thread of Enlightenment philosophy with the Gospels, and at least two (imho scary) countertrends that shape US fundamentalism.
one countertrend is Calvinism with its weird spin on the individual relationship with God. instead of salvation through works and faith, Calvinism asserted salvation through predestination, a kind of divine lottery in which a few persons were Elected (alabama, wake up and pay attention, we’re getting near one of your pet peeves) or Chosen of God. and contrary to the old Christian mythos in which Chosen-ness is not such a great deal for the Chosen and generally leads to a messy and untimely end — so that the Chosen if they have any sense, duck behind the nearest cover and mutter “let this cup pass from me, please!” — the Calvinists decided that God showed His divine favour to his Elect in this world, rewarding them with success, wealth, etc. forget that old camel and needle stuff, Wealth makes Righteous.
thus the Calvinists managed to twist the Gospels inside out and “prove” that the rich man is rich because he is beloved of God. since Election had nothing to do with works, the rich man was not even obliged to show his excellence of spirit by deeds of kindness and charity (as any Big Man would have been in, say, a NW N Am indigenous society). seems like kind of a Christianity 4.0, improved, a feel-good version for the discerning upper class consumer. so that’s one way in which American individualism with its emphasis on material accumulation, can dovetail neatly with a version of Christianity and in the process, ironically, muffle or silence the voice of individual conscience, substituting smugness and the assurance of being Saved no matter what. “Jesus loves me this I know, my McMansion tells me so; all the wealth that I control, proves the virtue of my soul.”
typical Till Eulenspiegel stuff really — the end result of Calvinism, anti-Catholicism, is a Catholicism come full circle — instead of buying off God with donations, Masses and candles, the rich man (far more efficiently) simply assumes that his money is a sign of divine favour (that God has bought him off, as it were) and therefore keeping it is virtuous. in either case the essence of an individual relationship with God, the struggle for daily virtue and right livelihood, is conveniently obviated.
the other countertrend in Fundie America is both contra-individual and contra-conscience, and that is the tradition of pseudo-orgiastic group ritual, with the concomitant abandonment of individual sense and sensibility. US fundamentalism has a strong tribal/ritual aspect, with bonding rituals that appeal to the irrational/superstitious/unconscious mind and erase the individual as moral agent. we probably all know about Revivalist preachers and the mass hysteria they can whip up on demand — snake handlers — glossalia — miracle cures and the like. now I’ve nothing against firewalking or snake handling per se, but it’s not exactly Enlightenment individualism of the kind that the cautiously Deist, aristocratic Founders had in mind. abandoning the rational altogether deprives us of the use of reason in working out thorny problems of conscience and once again short circuits that personal, demanding, troubling relationship with God, substituting a warm/fuzzy sense of tribal togetherness around the campfire, with lots of chanting and drumming for a solid bonding experience. I kinda like campfires myself, but it’s not individualism.
what turns it back into individualism is commodification (oh boy here we go) where people pay to experience the tribal rituals, or (and this is sad and eerie) watch them on TV and participate vicariously. and that winds me so far around the sociological lamp post that I can’t get loose and will have to let someone else figure out whether it is individualism or collectivism that fills the pockets of televangelists. one thing I do know for damn sure, it’s not authenticity.
I have now exceeded my posting quota for several weeks, qualifying as a Genuine Bandwidth Hog, and grim-faced men in black suits are going to come and take my keyboard away. (Comrade Slothrop probably sent them.) oh no, here they c0987q59u a[df9u q[r0eiogf uasd’pfjk //…
Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 4 2004 0:41 utc | 92
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