The New Republic

The speech, like most reactions to it, was so far above [and irrelevant to] the real world, it could pass as an episode from The Twilight Zone.  

Or maybe we are IN an episode of The Twilight Zone.

It might take a mind like Stephen Hawking's to put together all the pieces. Or somewhat more optimistically, take them all apart.

george walton

- iambiguous

January 16, 2009 at 12:10am

This all has an Alice in Wonderland feel to it.  Down is up.  Wrong is right.  Bush's failings were so great and the mess he is leaving behind is so awful we don't have the time to punish the perpetrators lest we neglect rebuilding the economy, the military, and our very souls.  The banks were so incompetent that we cannot let them fail but must rescue them with a government bail-out lest the entire world economy crashes.  The quagmire in Iraq is so deep we cannot simply leave lest the entire middle east explodes.  Now Bush's apologists, starting with Krauthammer, tell us that

"[t]he Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these past seven years.....Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success."  As Alice would say, failure is success.

- raylward

January 16, 2009 at 8:38am

The character Bush reminds me of is in Tora! Tora! Tora! where Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is portrayed saying after his attack on Pearl Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."  Like Yamamoto Bush has also provoked a giant. That giant is the New Deal. However it was already fully awake and functioning during his presidency. Now it's really pissed off.

- lesserliz

January 16, 2009 at 9:16am

Eve writes, "'If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led': It's an echo, although a less eloquent one, of Lincoln's 'last, best hope of earth.'"

I don't agree. Lincoln was speaking about the United States (more particularly, about the Constitution) as the last best hope of humankind, and he was speaking within a tradition dating to Winthrop's sermon on Christian charity that saw the United States as an passive example, not an assertive leader. The promised land, not a crusader state, as McDougall formulated it. Maintaining and perfecting republican self-government, with the three pillars of independence, union, and liberty, would prove to the world that people can govern themselves prosperously, righteously, and successfully, and thereby inspire others to seek and obtain their own freedom. Merely by existing, the United States puts the lie to the tyrant's claim to necessity, and in the long run, thought Lincoln and those who came before him, that would be enough to transform the world.

Bush was not speaking of that at all. Bush was speaking of the United States as an active agent of securing others' freedom for them. Our system is so good that we sin by not imposing it on others not fortunate enough to have found their way to it, is the fundamental thesis inherent in Bush's formulation. The problem is that many great nations have come to think thusly, and in only one case has the nation in question survived its crusading ethos with its own system intact. From Athens to Rome (the latter of which did, admittedly, have a pretty good run) to the Ottomans to revolutionary France to the Soviet Union, nations that get it into their head that they have an affirmative duty to spread their enlightened systems of government to their benighted neighbors have come to bad ends. Imperial Britain is the only counter-example of a nation that took seriously the idea of leading the world in bringing civilization to the darkies and didn't wind up with its own civilization destroyed in the end. Which is not to say that Britain necessarily thought that fighting two world wars and losing armed insurrections in Ireland and India was particularly fun at the time. So even the one historical example of a nation that acted as Bush would have us act and wasn't ruined does not offer a happy example.

This is a case where Lincoln was right, and Bush is wrong, and their difference is precisely measured by the incompatibility of the statements that Eve compares.

- rhubarbs

January 16, 2009 at 10:31am

How does one sum up the exhilarating last eight years? So much has happened — much of it, let's be honest, fairly terrible.

- Anonymous

January 16, 2009 at 12:08pm

You can shove your misplaced "pity" in your Whole Foods bag.  Not a single historical president except for Carter and Clinton would have done anything differently after 9/11.  Washington would have laid waste to the whole Middle East.  A little taxation on tea versus a direct homeland attack?

- jwl2672

January 16, 2009 at 3:02pm

What's a historical president, jwl?  Did you mean "historical precedent"?

- ironyroad

January 16, 2009 at 4:19pm

No, he meant "historical president," and jwl apparently thinks that any past American president would have responded to a foreign attack on American soil by sort of fighting the people who attacked us for fourteen months, but not actually sending the Army or mobilizing the nation, and then giving up and declaring war on a totally unrelated enemy, and then spending the next six years not winning both wars.

(In point of fact, jwl is wrong. George Washington responded to several significant foreign provocations with cautious diplomacy, not declarations of war. And when Washington did fight, he won. George W. Bush, by comparison, is a chickenshit and a loser, and I question the manhood of anyone of my gender who expresses the least bit of admiration for George W. Bush as a leader.)

- rhubarbs

January 16, 2009 at 6:58pm

Eve writes, "'If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led': It's an echo, although a less eloquent one, of Lincoln's 'last, best hope of earth.'"

George:

I click onto the TNRtv videos, and most times all I see are these "kids" pontificating about things going on in the world they almost certainly have had no first hand experiences with. And today I am watching Hardball and Mathews is talking to someone at Politico. Again, another fucking "kid". You can see people sitting in front of all these computers at Politico. And, yet again, they all look like freaking "kids".

Me, I'm sixty years old now. But I grew up in the belly of the working class beast outside Wilkes Barre. The family moved to Baltimore and I was in and out of street gangd until Reverand Deardoff hooked me on God. After high school I worked in the shipyards and the steel mills. I was drated into the Army in 1968 just after the fucking Tet Offensive, and ended up in the jungles there less than a year later. I went over there as I conservative Christian and came back as a radical atheist. I spent 6 years in college and there wasn't anything I didn't try at least once. Meanwhile for about 20 to 25 years, I was in and out of half a dozen radical communist, socialist and social democratic groups.

Indeed, that is where I kept bumping into the name John Judis. Like me, not a "kid" anymore. And I know Marty ain't no kid.

Call me crazy, but I have always believed that you have to go out into the world, have a million experiences, be up and down a zillion times and then, inbetween, go down deep into the historical evolution political philosophy----from the Pre-Socratics to Noan Chomsky.

Otherwise you are living in world of words; which you end up exchanging with others just like you.

george walton

- iambiguous

January 16, 2009 at 10:03pm