My right-wing friend Pete Peterson offers the following:
“By far the biggest success in this war has been the defeat of John F. (wrong war, wrong place, wrong time) Kerry as the standard bearer of the apologists.”
Hmm. Not the overthrow of the Taliban. Not the capture of Saddam Hussein.
No, the biggest success on our war against Al Qaeda and/or Iraq is that a Democrat lost the last presidential election. Well shoot, maybe we should have wars more often.
Discuss.
these mo****f*****s are running away with the country, ball tucked in arm like the lumbering old white running backs of the early 20th century, all lumbago and absent grace. i’m down to let ‘em do it, as apparently things need to get reeeeaaaalll bad before a large chunk of americans receive any kind of shock to their cozy system. we can have these discussions in 10 or 15 years when the repercussions of all these innumerable actions on the part of our ruling elite are not longer christmas wishes in the houses of the holy and actual reality. i don’t think there is any way to stop this momentum. in the long run, it’ll serve art & revolution & evolution, but it’s a very long run.
and john roberts is a phantom insertion long-planned. a secret weapon.
sorry, this has nothing to do with john kerry, who just isn’t a very skilled politician. he’s not a fine enough liar.
We didn’t need a war to keep John Kerry out of the White House. His ugly mug was enough to do that. So why do right-wingers insist on making such assinine statements?
If things had gone a different way, we’d all be claiming that the defeat of the psychopath Bush was the greatest success of the war. It’s just another way of saying that the war was poorly conceived, planned and executed, with no disernable benefits in any but the most optimistic long term scenario.
I feel cramped by this question here. I’ll post on it later. I think he’s probably right, in a way and from his POV, though LYT will most likely disagree.
And here it is.
Argh, it ate my HTML. Just click on my name.
Not to take up too much space, I hope, but Dave Scott is very close to divining what I was trying to say. The ‘war’ I am referring to is that of words/ideas between the apologists/appeasers-and those who actually believe we are at war. You know, us chicken-hawks.
Kerry wanted to pull out of the conflict and give up the field, which meant that he didn’t take it seriously, which would be a victory for the enemy, which I believe is bad. Thus it was a very important victory that he did not become President, if maybe not the biggest (I’m a blogger- I do love hyperbole).
Kerry brought up the Vietnam War innumerable times in his campaign not because of any battles won or lost in this or that war, but because it was a turning point in history when the government couldn’t hold the populace to the idea of victory (wrong war, etc.). Now that the anti-war left is half of the establishment it felt it could rerun an old winner to get their guy in.
Aside: The pandering racist comment from justin stone encourages the notion that the left has no ideas, just insults; including calling Kerry a bad politician (and liar) for losing.
And thanks for the post Luke!
Just for everyone’s edification, who doesn’t know them personally:
Justin isn’t a racist, and Pete is not a mo****f*****. Both, however, are smokers.
But Pete: Wouldn’t conservatives agree with Justin that Kerry wasn’t a good liar or good politician?
Also: Kerry didn’t want to pull out of Iraq. Even though he said we shouldn’t have gone in there, he did want to stay the course. Far-left websites like Counterpunch.org crucified him for that, saying it made him no better than Bush.
And I would also add that I don’t think wanting to “understand” the enemy is necessarily a cop-out; as I’ve written before, understanding an opponent is essential to defeating him. Merely saying or thinking “we’re good, they’re evil” is a tactical mistake, IMO, as well as bad hyperbole. I liked that Kerry had a grasp of nuances, but I don’t think nuance can win elections in America any more, if it ever could.
I think nuance going over very well has been the exception rather than the rule throughout history, frankly. And I would actually agree with Counterpunch.org–Kerry seemed like Bush lite, except old and warmed-over. Kind of like he was the conservative instead of the liberal, I guess.
“And I would also add that I don’t think wanting to “understand” the enemy is necessarily a cop-out; as I’ve written before, understanding an opponent is essential to defeating him”
I actually agree entirely: this is one very good thing the left can offer, if they don’t get as partisan as the right (I was just posting about that).
One thing I think is a problem is just sort of getting in the habit of thinking like your enemies. It can be extremely useful to sort of step out of things and say ‘yeah, we really must look like the bad guys to them. I can see why they’re upset, when I think about it.’
But I think some people get in too much of the habit, and just start to blame America for everything. Yes, we are the giant of the world, and we tend to step in a lot of stuff. No, it’s not far to blame us for radical Islam, which has been around for more than a thousand years longer than we have.
Yes, we’ve stirred up some people and supported some bad people in the Middle East. No, we can’t survive without oil right now. Etc.
Oh, and by some people I generally mean the extremists.
actually i am a racist. i could go on and on and on about all the people i hate. i have a very long list, and usually only sleep a couple hours at night due to the constant scribbling, the further addition of names; today there are a few more.
aside: pp contributes to the notion that those on the right are somewhat if not a great deal humorless and handling their late victories very smugly. but i’m sure pp is a good guy and we should smoke together some time on a patio maybe and wax impolitic, bold, like lovers even.
aside: i should stay away from luke’s political posts as a poster. i forget how serious bloggers are, with their capital letters, linked names. ideas. i would kill somebody (there’s a few i can think of) for an idea. i am not an astute observer. i am not rational. i hate my irrationality, my bad jokes, my lower case name. i am a crank. and not even a funny crank. i’m mad and i’m not even funny. i’m mad i’m mad, even though i’m mad because of actual life experiences and not made up things, i’m mad, and i yearn for a vocabulary to express these things, a solid theoretical construct to which i can turn time and again, because everything seems to me like so much disappearing air, like air trumped up on charges and running out of the room.
aside: the blogosphere is full of great ideas. this is definitely known.
aside: pete peterson is a great name, and i mean that.
aside: i am sorry. i am so very sorry. i am truly sorry. i am sorrysorrysorrrysorrysorry. i am the new chief apologist, and i’m sorry about that too. i was born into this. i was born in a single-room school house, to which my mother had walked a very long way, and she didn’t know she was pregnant, and she said to me on that day, she said, “son, you will be a democrat. i’m sorry.”
aside: bush is a great president, and will be fondly remembered for a number i can’t even imagine of generations.
aside: i should really put the money that i can’t earn–the idea of my money–near the region of my mouth, and I should join the armed forces for once. i am such a bold bold pansy, and i talk too much, invest too much importance in myself. i figure out there on the front line i can get a grip, check back in. i mean this.
aside: the war brewing in our country excites me. tittilates me, you might say. the war out there in that other place, that’s pretty hot too, but not as hot. in general though, i can’t even keep my pants on. i wanna get up every day and put myself to it. i don’t know what i’d be doing with myself if it weren’t for this war.
JS, I like your writing style, tho’ your ideas come off as a bit odd.
Justin is a total genius in many ways.
(shameless plug) he also appears in the movie “Forking” as linked on this very site’s Film section.
the piece I quote from the American conservative magazine on the message board… http://www.lytrules.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=rant;action=display;num=1122498639
(can’t do hyperlinks here it seems)
points out that the biggest failures of the west in understanding “why suicide bombers?” is in occupying what is perceived as their territory,
check it out.
I personally thought Clinton was a bad liar before all the other cool Republicans did. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even a Republican then, and he wasn’t even President yet. He also taught me how ‘not’ to bite my lip when I lie.
Kerry has been winning elections for quite some time, so I don’t agree that he is simply a bad politician. It has no nuance.
As far as Kerry not wanting to pull out of Iraq, one only need to look to his core supporters and their expectations; minus the bomb throwers of the far-left. I think the public figured it out.
Of course there’s always the Karl Rove as mastermind theory.
As far as understanding the enemy I think they’ve made themselves quite clear. As their actions have backed up their words without any po-mo quibbling, the proper response is to believe them.
In a nutshell for those who haven’t been listening: They want back the Caliphate. Then they want to expand it.
In reading the message board item listed above on suicide terrorists and why they do what they do I agree with the basic theory presented: it’s about the territory. I find the rest of the analysis wanting and I’ll try later to address it on my own blog.
“As far as Kerry not wanting to pull out of Iraq, one only need to look to his core supporters and their expectations”
People can’t have this one both ways.
I remember when Bush was first running, his supporters would say that you couldn’t label him as being like other right-wing Republicans because he said that he wasn’t — he was a “compassionate conservative” who never said a bad thing about gays, for example, and seemed noncommittal on abortion.
Conservatives still get mad when we don’t take Bush at his word, like for instance when we say that he “lied” over “he had bad intelligence.”
Yet Kerry is not to be taken at his word; rather, on the word of his “core supporters.”
Fair’s fair, Pete: If you get to judge Kerry based on what anti-war protestors say, I’ll judge Bush based on what televangelists say.
Actually, I’d prefer neither of us do that. But you catch my drift.
“As their actions have backed up their words without any po-mo quibbling, the proper response is to believe them.”
Indeed. Saddam said he had no weapons of mass destruction, and he didn’t!
It gets shorter, it gets longer. Believe it or not the following is edited.
Luke, I’m simply talking about reading the tealeaves. When a politician talks he’s trying to get elected. During the primaries he’s talking to his philosophical base, when the general election comes he hopes the other side wasn’t paying close attention as he/she moves to the center.
As you consider the pol you’re obliged to split the difference and decide where to add weight. Was the candidate just pandering to the base in the primaries, or did he mean it and think he could get away with it for real? Everybody wants it both ways and a politician’s job is to give it to them.
The enemy I was speaking about is al quaeda and the other radical fundamentalists. As for Iraq, we had been in a state of war since 1991. There was a ceasefire in order to allow him to comply with demands to allow the war to end. One of those demands was to prove that he had destroyed certain weapons that he had; it was not up to us to prove he still had them.
Though it was nice to ask permission to finish him off, technically it wasn’t necessary. Continuing to oppose us and not cooperate when we had other fish to fry was Saddam’s decision. Iraq could still be all flowers and butterflies if he had only played nice with the UN weapons inspectors.
Aside: The suicide terrorists now blowing up Iraqi women and children prove further the main theory of occupation that Bob Pape suggests in his interview, this time concerning his finding on religion. The Sunnis consider the Shiites to be occupiers as well as the Western troops, not to mention the Kurds. It has never been wholly about us, but includes schisms even within Islam. Only Saddam’s boot had kept the ‘peace’ there.
Not to stretch this out too much (though I’m happy the comments section is alive), I remember things differently:
Kerry was NOT an antiwar candidate in the primaries, nor particularly leftist. Dean, Kucinich, and Sharpton were the ones who ran in opposition to the war, and all three were ultimately written off by the general public as crazies. Kerry voted for the war, was always in favor of staying the course, and only as the war dragged on did he start saying “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.” He never advocated premature withdrawal, ever, which is why the hard-left (and I mean the real hard-left like Alexander Cockburn, not mainstream Dems like Hillary Clinton) disowned him. One of the major reasons he was the chosen candidate is that he was considered more “electable” due to being less antiwar than many of the rest.
Regarding Saddam — come on, the current war had little or nothing to do with UN inspections. The invasion started before the inspectors were finished. And I’m not sure how you can absolutely prove that someone doesn’t have something.
But I am glad that you make a distinction between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
On an unrelated note: Have you moved out of town for good? If so, you coming back to visit anytime soon?
You’re right about Kerry being the most conservative of the bunch, striking Lieberman, who really did support the war effort. But again, reading the tealeaves is what I’m talking about. The whole war hero construct was for the purpose of burying his anti-war past, because by the way he served in Vietnam cutting off ears and all that. I didn’t believe the theatrics, and I think most other people didn’t either.
The inspectors had a list. Saddam kept throwing them out and denying access. That’s not just not playing nice; it’s downright stupid if you believe you will face consequences. He didn’t believe he would face consequences. Before 9/11 we were happy to let the inspectors work on their own timetable; after, it became ours as the problem became too big.
It also didn’t matter if the inspectors didn’t think they were finished because by then politics and corruption had entered the UN fray. One of the former inspectors made a movie on the dime of an anti-war Iraqi-American and the administration was likely looking into whether certain actors were breaking the arms embargo by supplying weapons and whether others were skimming from the Oil for Food program. The last is a surmise based on later known events.
I agree this is getting old and the blogosphere is full of it already. I promise to give you the last word because, um, you have admin privileges.
As for out of town for good, I’m just getting the joint ready for a housewarming party next weekend. As I have a year lease I’ll be here at least that long. Come on down, I got room, and I can sure do something about getting you kissed, no matter what your hobbies.
I will be coming to visit L.A. in late August – early September for a week or two so we should have time to get together. We could even hit a coffee bar or two in Little Saigon.
this is a really cool discussion. you guys are very intelligent & thoughtful.
For my last word, then, I’ll say this. If I were a conservative, and I had to choose the greatest victory in the war of ideas, I would probably have to go with either the elections in Iraq, or the capture of Saddam. Why? Because almost no-one on the left had a bad word to say about those actions. Some said they were minor victories at best, but only the tiniest of minorities, if anyone, said that they were actually negatives.
I wouldn’t choose the defeat of John Kerry, because it was a close election, and even had he won he would have been hamstrung by a Republican house and senate. Left-wingers would have seen it as a vindication, perhaps — but many are convinced that Bush “stole” Ohio anyway and that Kerry really did win. This is a victory that won you no recruits, methinks.
For my part, I think there was some fraud in this election, but likely no more than in any other.
And given the comments spawned here, I think I’m going to have to call out other bloggers more often. Cathy Seipp is evil! Matt Welch is a homo! Glenn Reynolds is a fag heeh heeh heeh! Mickey Kaus is bald!
By “tiniest of minorities,” incidentally, I don’t mean dwarfs or African pygmies. I mean in terms of numbers.
I tried calling out. It actually worked, once, with Cathy… That’s what her blurb on my blogroll is from…