Sunday, January 30, 2011

Crediting Bush With the Revolutions
Elliot Abrams Edition

Although Bush cannot, of course, be blamed for any of the national security, foreign policy, military nor economic disasters that packed his presidency from beginning to end, he is, of course, responsible for any good thing that is even tangentially related to anything he said or did, into the indefinite future. For example, despite Obama's evil and incompetent response to...well, everything...Bush still managed to bring about the Egyptian revolution... And so on...

You'd think this stuff was made up if it weren't of a piece with the delusional dreck we've come to expect from hacks like Abrams.

For my entire lifetime, the GOP has not only tolerated dictators but positively venerated them--so long as they were on our side. When liberals raised objections to the fact that we were aiding brutally repressive regimes, we were told that we were too naive to understand the harsh realities of global affairs. Then, when "our sumbitches"--brutal as ever--became inconvenient, suddenly the banner of freedom and democracy was raised, and we were told that justice demanded that we remove them with force (Noriega comes to mind, but, more importantly, Saddam). The liberal solution--don't support them (added bonus: then you needn't remove them)--was derided. But what has always guided conservative foreign policy is American interest; freedom and democracy have been smokescreens. And Bush's invasion of Iraq, and the fog of rhetoric surrounding it, was no exception. Democracy was never the real motive, and it only showed up rhetorically when it became irrefutably clear that there were no WMDs to be found. But Bush's hollow rhetoric is still being used as a hook on which to hang phantom successes and attempts to retroactively justify the disaster that was his administration.

But no one seems to have sent the GOP the memo, as they are still standing with their beloved strongman Mubarak...no surprise there.


Conservative critics have not yet decided whether Obama has been insufficiently anti-Mubarak or excessively anti-Mubarak... One wonders whether they'll even choose; maybe they'll just go with both...

2 Comments:

Anonymous Lewis Carroll said...

Winston,

It's not that Abrams's thinking isn't profound and insightful, it's that he doesn't go far enough with it.

You see, the credit really goes to Mohammed Atta and crew, who had the foresight commit such an atrocity that the Bush administration could use it to justify a completely unrelated war which could only result in burgeoning Jeffersonian democracy throughout the middle east, as we are now seeing in Tunisia and Egypt.

Really, what can one do except salute those 19 brave and heroic game-changers.

1:08 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

LOL that's a downright brilliant point.

1:38 PM  

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