Thursday, January 25, 2007
The Glass is Three-Quarters Empty
I forgot that January 20 has passed, meaning there's less than two years till the inauguration of the new president. So we're in the last throes, if you will, of the Bushies. I'm of two minds as to whether or not the next White House occupant will roll back all the ruinous policies and procedures of the current administration, or if after eight years of grotesque aberrations a new, skewed normality will have set in. Probably somewhere between the two. Some odious features of this president's way of doing things that will likely endure are press conferences full of unchallenged lies, interference into embarrassing bureaucratic reports, and the release of critical information on Friday evenings. When the White House lifts its portcullis to divulge bad news they can't get away from, it's usually after the correspondents' pool has left for the weekend.
So we've only got a couple of years left until (hopefully) we get a Democrat in there, sitting on top of a Congress that is tilted ever more to the left (with 21 Republicans and only 9 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2008, I can't envision a Senate that isn't at least 53-45-2, even accounting for the fact that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and probably Tim Johnson (D-SD) will lose, but that's a tangent).
Even still, the war will hemorrhage our resources and attention. It's clear that the entire affair is gradually being palmed off onto the team (and highly likely presidential ticket) of McCain-Lieberman, the sainted maverick and his loyal bipartisan cover. If they should win in 2008, we'll literally be at war forever. If they lose and Democrats advocate withdrawal from Iraq, the narrative which the right will push with all its might will be that we could have won, but for those weak liberals who pulled out just as victory as only 6-9 months away. And when someone nukes Chicago in 2013, it will be because spineless Democrats betrayed our resolve, not because the U.S. continues to act like a complete asshole. I eagerly await a new generation of gutless warmongers rattling sabers at Teheran, as long as other people's sons and daughters patrol its slums and attempt to differentiate Shiite from Sunni.
Isn't it weird that, for all their self-congratulation and selective trumpeting of facts, no one in the military or federal government even discusses Afghanistan? Korea is called the Forgotten War, but no one seems to remember that we are actually losing two wars right now. Is the American psyche so fragile that our predilections for self-hagiography can't tolerate the fact that we're both hyperpower and double loser? There's no room in the national meta-narrative for losses of this magnitude. It's taboo. If you bring it up, you must be an America-hater on the scale of Jean Baudrillard. Joe Lieberman might still be trotting out the absolutely contemptible falsehood that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the ones who attacked us in 2001 (unless he just means 'Muslims'), but not even Dick Cheney has the gall to crow about how the obviously resurgent Taliban are at the end of their rope.
The point of all this is that while it might feel good to know the clock's ticking on the Bush Administration--especially now that it lost its compliant Congress--I'm skeptical on just how much of a restoration of good governance and truthfulness we can really expect to see. Led by our fawning media, we're doing a fine job of allowing the unacceptable to morph into white noise and unpleasant wars to go utterly unreported.
So we've only got a couple of years left until (hopefully) we get a Democrat in there, sitting on top of a Congress that is tilted ever more to the left (with 21 Republicans and only 9 Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2008, I can't envision a Senate that isn't at least 53-45-2, even accounting for the fact that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and probably Tim Johnson (D-SD) will lose, but that's a tangent).
Even still, the war will hemorrhage our resources and attention. It's clear that the entire affair is gradually being palmed off onto the team (and highly likely presidential ticket) of McCain-Lieberman, the sainted maverick and his loyal bipartisan cover. If they should win in 2008, we'll literally be at war forever. If they lose and Democrats advocate withdrawal from Iraq, the narrative which the right will push with all its might will be that we could have won, but for those weak liberals who pulled out just as victory as only 6-9 months away. And when someone nukes Chicago in 2013, it will be because spineless Democrats betrayed our resolve, not because the U.S. continues to act like a complete asshole. I eagerly await a new generation of gutless warmongers rattling sabers at Teheran, as long as other people's sons and daughters patrol its slums and attempt to differentiate Shiite from Sunni.
Isn't it weird that, for all their self-congratulation and selective trumpeting of facts, no one in the military or federal government even discusses Afghanistan? Korea is called the Forgotten War, but no one seems to remember that we are actually losing two wars right now. Is the American psyche so fragile that our predilections for self-hagiography can't tolerate the fact that we're both hyperpower and double loser? There's no room in the national meta-narrative for losses of this magnitude. It's taboo. If you bring it up, you must be an America-hater on the scale of Jean Baudrillard. Joe Lieberman might still be trotting out the absolutely contemptible falsehood that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the ones who attacked us in 2001 (unless he just means 'Muslims'), but not even Dick Cheney has the gall to crow about how the obviously resurgent Taliban are at the end of their rope.
The point of all this is that while it might feel good to know the clock's ticking on the Bush Administration--especially now that it lost its compliant Congress--I'm skeptical on just how much of a restoration of good governance and truthfulness we can really expect to see. Led by our fawning media, we're doing a fine job of allowing the unacceptable to morph into white noise and unpleasant wars to go utterly unreported.
