It’s not Sunday…but boy, is this Wankery. I’ve read some pretty insane columns on the Petraeus testimony and the Preznit’s Big Speech (Status Quo Eternal) this week, but this one (Weekly Standard, natch) was so bad it ripped a hole in spacetime and pushed the Sunday Wankery watch to Saturday.
Strap in kids, the Neocons have apparently achieved temporal distortion technology through the sheer power of lying and denial.
I give you…the power of the Gelerntertron!
Defeat at Any Price
Why Petraeus’s testimony was a nightmare for the Democrats.
by David Gelernter
09/24/2007, Volume 013, Issue 02
Gelernter, as in ge-learn-ter fear EVERYTHING WE TELL YOU TO FEAR.
To prepare for General David Petraeus’s long-awaited testimony on Iraq to Congress last week, the liberal pressure group MoveOn.org wrote itself into the history books with an anti-Petraeus ad so repulsive it ranked with Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 TV spot in the campaign against Barry Goldwater: A little girl picking flowers dissolved into a mushroom cloud, and then the screen went black. (Evidently by voting for Goldwater, you expressed your support for nuclear holocaust.)
Didn’t Goldwater…lose? Wasn’t it a Johnson landslide?
But gleeful Republicans who are certain that MoveOn has finally tipped its hand and shown America what the left is all about should remember that Johnson won that election, in a landslide. Because MoveOn headlined its ugly ad with an ugly rhyme (“General Betray Us”), it will stick in the public mind. But it is just possible that the public will invite MoveOn to take their ad and ShoveIt.
What the hell is it with neocons trying to score touchdowns by starting from the negative fifteen yard line in a stadium in another time zone? Now you have to spend the whole damn article trying to dig yourself out of a hole…but is Gelernter up to the task?
Democrats at the hearings themselves found it impossible to look this capable, thoughtful, distinguished man in the face and endorse the MoveOn ad. But don’t get them wrong: Leading Dems had dumped on Petraeus often in the past, and were dumping furiously in preparation for the hearings. Petraeus is guilty of “carefully manipulating the statistics,” Senator Dick Durbin announced; in fact the general has “made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual” (in strict contradistinction to Majority Leader Harry Reid), said Majority Leader Harry Reid. Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden plunged their knives in also.
The Democrats were scared for a reason. They worried that Petraeus would impress the country as dispassionate and serious–which he did. He called Bush’s troop surge no unqualified success, said that much work remains–but that Iraq has turned a corner; has achieved tangible, important results in its fight against terrorism and inter-sect violence since the surge began. It was a Democratic nightmare.
Oh I see, now you’re trying to blow the argument so badly that you actually end up bending spacetime so that you never dug the hole in the first place. That’s ballsy.
Fueled by the power of pure denial, watch as Gelernter ignores the fact that America didn’t believe Petraeus before his testimony and aren’t buying it after!
The fairest thing you can say about the Petraeus testimony was A) it moved opinion little and B) what little gains it did make got wiped away when Dubya showed up on Thursday night to remind everyone exactly why we’re shooting 3 for 18 in the benchmark department, and that we’ll be in Iraq for years and years to come.
But I digress from the time-altering power of Gelernter.
America’s ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, had the harder job of reporting on political progress. He said, too, that much work remained; Iraq’s political health is bad in some ways, improving in others. But one fact towers above the rest like the ghost of the World Trade Center: If we stay put until the patient is stable, we face a tough job; if we panic and run, we face catastrophe.
Again this message was bad news for leading Democrats. But their reaction was just what it should’ve been, given that President Bush is the enemy–and, like the man said, politics ain’t beanbag. Surely it’s only natural for leading Democrats in Congress and the presidential campaign, and their vicious lap dogs on the web, to hope for the president’s policies to fail.
I am reminded of the opening few moments of just about any episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where Dr. Weird (with no pants!) invents something completely moronic, and yells BEHOLD!
Yes, behold the Gelerntertron, its powers have turned the worst strategic military blunder of our age into DEMOCRATS WANT AMERICA TO FAIL!
Americans are so accustomed (or inured) to this attitude that they rarely step back and ask, What the hell is going on here?
The issue isn’t tactics–doesn’t concern the draw-down that the administration has forecast and General Petraeus has now discussed, or how this draw-down should work, or how specific such talk ought to be. The issue is deeper. It’s time for Americans to ask some big questions. Do leading Democrats want America to win this war? Have they ever?
Of course not–and not because they are traitors. To leading Democrats such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Al Gore and John Edwards, America would be better off if she lost. And this has been true from the start.
Yep. Not only is he implying the Democrats in Congress are traitors (which isn’t the reason they want America to fail) but that Democrats just want America to get taken down a few pegs. And the great thing is, the power of the Gelerntertron implies that anyone who supports the theory that the Iraq war is a blunder, you know, say, a majority of America or something silly like that, are in fact traitors too! But it’s okay, us poor souls really want simple humility in foreign policy. Really, it’s fine that you beat your wife and have always hated the country you live in, humility is a reasonable foreign policy objective.
Time, she is bendy like wax to Gelerntertron!
To rephrase the question: Why did Harry Reid announce months ago that the war was lost when it wasn’t, and everyone knew it wasn’t? The wish is father to the deed. He was envisioning the world of his dreams.
The Democrats’ embrace of defeat is inspired by no base desire to see Americans killed or American resources wasted. But let’s be honest about it, and invite the Democrats to be honest too.
The Gelerntertron is impervious to your logic. Even though the GAO, the American people, multiple retired generals, Democrats in Congress and the Iraq Study Group has said that there is no military solution to Iraq, and ergo that our current strategy — a military solution — is incapable of victory, it plugs on.
So yes, let’s be honest.
Appeasement, pacifism, globalism: Those are the Big Three principles of the Democratic left. Each one has been defended by serious people; all are philosophically plausible, or at least arguable. But they are unpopular (especially the first two) with the U.S. public, and so the Democrats rarely make their views plain. We must infer their ideas from their (usually) guarded public statements.
Yes, “honesty” means “I honestly love being a chickenhawk” and “Demotraitors fear the Gelerntertron!”
Globalism and Euro-envy are explicit, sometimes, in Democratic pronouncements–about the sanctity of the United Nations, the importance of global conferences and “multilateralism” (except in cases like North Korea, where the president already is moving multilaterally), the superiority of the Canadian or German health care system, and so forth. The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the “Philosophical” and Conservatives the “National” party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions–and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.
Again, “honesty” means conservatives are patriots, and Democrats just don’t love America. They aren’t entirely non-traitors, they just don’t explicitly hate everything America stands for while they dance their pagan rituals and sacrifice virgins. They just don’t honestly admit to the sacrifice and the not-quite-hating of Jesus and apple pie and baseball part.
The Democrats don’t conceal their globalist ideas, but their appeasement and pacifism are positions they can only hint at.
That’s honesty, boy.
The Gelerntertron staggers off into right angles from reality from this point onwards, but here’s the Cliff Notes From The Event Horizon.
“But if we only remember the dead and not the cause for which they died, we dishonor and make nonsense of the noblest of all sacrifices.”
I’m sure the Iraqis we killed and displaced and basically destroyed would agree with you, GT.
“It is incomprehensible that the administration so rarely discusses the moral side of our achievement in Iraq. No doubt it’s still impossible, in today’s world, to launch a major war and depose a government merely for the sake of humanity, merely to rescue a people that is being torn apart and eaten alive by its rulers, merely on principle–although it is fair to wonder, 60-odd years after the Shoah, when it will be possible. But Americanism has long held that when we are forced to fight for our interests, we ought to fight for our principles too.”
See the above. The fact that we’ve spent 54+ months raping the country for oil, directly and indirectly killing tens of thousands indiscriminately, displacing millions more in a refugee flood and reducing a secular nation into a barely coherent group of ethnically cleansed city-states was all this time a moral act.
We had to destroy Iraq in order to save it. The Gelerntertron feels no remorse, for that is a feeling reserved for puny Demotraitors.
It’s proving a harder fight than we anticipated. We’ve made serious mistakes along the way. Both statements apply to most American wars. The difference today is that some leading Americans would prefer defeat to victory.
Yep, Iraq is just like every war we ever fought. Because every time an American GI picked a weapon in our history, it was to go kick the shit out of a country because our President had daddy issues. Just ask John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Gelerntertron can ask them with his time-altering powers.
Compare today’s war in Iraq with the American fight to clear the Japanese out of Guadalcanal, from September 1942 through early February ’43. Obviously that was a vastly shorter stretch than our time in Iraq–but losses in the South Pacific were incomparably greater. Imagine Harry Reid’s reaction to news like this: During our first landings, four Allied heavy cruisers (three American) were sunk and a fifth chased away in a battle lasting 32 minutes; nearly 1,300 Americans died. (Multicultural enthusiasts who teach our children that white men are the bane of the earth should explain why Guadalcanal’s native Melanesians “were uniformly hostile to the Japanese,” according to Samuel Eliot Morison, “and friendly to the Allies.”)
And just like Japan in the Pacific Theater, the Iraqis attacked us at Pearl Harbor and allied with the Third Reich. Gelerntertron remembers that day when Saddam came on the radio to say how he had struck a blow at the heart of America with his warriors of God…
You might argue that World War II has nothing to do with Iraq; after all, the Japanese started the fight by attacking our fleet at Pearl Harbor. But even the Japanese never succeeded in slaughtering civilians on the U.S. mainland. And those who think that our war in Iraq has nothing to do with the 9/11 murderers, or their friends whose ultimate target is America, are living in Fantasyland.
Because Iraq had EVERYTHING to do with 9/11, so much more than say, Saudi Arabia, that we just had to invade the place. The Gelerntertron has spoken!
If you believe in appeasement, defeat in Iraq would show that we were wrong to stop talking and start fighting. If you believe in pacifism, defeat would demonstrate that war is futile even if your motives are good. If you believe in globalism, defeat would suggest that we should have acted strictly in concert with world opinion. In short, if you do believe in appeasement, pacifism, globalism (and many leading Democrats do), your wish for defeat is no evil or traitorous urge. It is merely logical.
The Democrats are secretly Vulcans! Watch as the Gelerntertron battles the horrific and America-hating forces of logic with his towering cannons of complete bullshit!
“Pacifist globalism was so popular it lost World War II for the tragically underprepared French and nearly lost it for the British. The British pulled themselves together and made a heroic stand, but the French will never live down (least of all in their own minds) the humiliation of being overrun by German armor in a matter of weeks; of choosing not even to defend their beloved capital city. Poland put up a stiffer fight than France in the Second World War.
America proved immune to pacifist globalism, until Vietnam. The Vietnam war was nothing like World War I, despite the implicit analogies that emerged later. At first it was run badly, but when General Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as supreme American commander in May 1968, our strategy changed dramatically. With Abrams in charge the war “was being won on the ground,” wrote the historian Lewis Sorley, “even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress.” Americans continued to support the war effort nearly until the end. The 1972 presidential election was a referendum on Vietnam; “Come home, America!” preached the antiwar Democrat George McGovern–and lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Of all U.S. population segments, 18- to 24-year-old men–who were subject to the draft and manned the front lines–were consistently the war’s strongest supporters. “It was not the American people which lost its stomach,” wrote the British historian Paul Johnson, “it was the American leadership.”
Get that? WW I was nothing like Vietnam, but both are exactly like Iraq. Because the Vietnamese bombed the Twin Towers, but Gelerntertron is working on going back in time to stop it from ever happening!
Ronald Reagan turned things around. He brought Americanism back; he repeated what John Winthrop had written in 1630 about America, the shining city on a hill. Americanism had weathered its greatest crisis since 1861. Or so it seemed.
But then Reagan was bombed by Charlies in the trees! Gelerntertron was there and saw it all! The Demotraitors helped them!
But Iraq has made everything fresh and new for the Democratic leadership. If it can paint Iraq as another Vietnam and relive its great triumphs of the 1970s, the damage done to the American psyche might be permanent. Americans might stop believing in liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind and retreat to the revised European version: liberty, equality, and democracy (of a sort)–for us. Instead of believing Lincoln’s words–“with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in”–Americans might become self-satisfied and complacent pseudo-Europeans. Hollow men. Without Americanism, America joins the European robot republics that have no spiritual life and don’t even miss it.
Because when Gelerntertron thinks of the political party in this country that represents liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind*, it’s the Bush-era Republicans!
(*Offer not valid for gays, lesbians, transsexuals, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Blacks, Mexicans, Free-Thinking Women, the French, anyone who lives in a country we’re currently bombing the shit out of, anyone who lives in a country we don’t like, poor people, people who speak out, uppity minorities of any ethnic background, any combination of the above, anyone whose parents, lover(s), friends, brothers, sisters, or relatives of any type meet any of the above criteria without totally being renounced, disowned, or ignored by said person seeking liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind, and Hillary Clinton just on the principle that she’s the Whore of Babylon. Also, Jews are ok as long as they support Israel killing anyone in the above categories.)
But it’s also possible that the Democratic leadership’s wish for American defeat in Iraq will make it clear to this nation (to conservatives and liberals) that today’s Democratic party is no longer a responsible party of government–at least at the national level where America’s security, vision, and honor are at stake.
After all, the Republicans have been doing such a wonderful job with that so far.
Possibly “New Democrats” à la Tony Blair will rally round such lonely voices as Joe Lieberman’s–but remember that New Labour fought its way out of the political womb and all the way to Number 10 only because of the Tories’ ongoing nervous breakdown. More likely, America’s political spectrum a decade or more in the future will be defined by two parties both born of today’s GOP after a natural and painless mitosis.
The Gelerntertron will be assisting this mitosis by ratting out all non-Party members to the coming secret police states.
There’s at least as much distance between a Rudy Giuliani and a Mike Huckabee as there ever was between JFK and Nixon, or even Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. Americans traditionally like their two opposing parties to differ on domestic affairs but agree on basic foreign policy–not because things are nicer that way; rather because foreign-policy arguments are good for our enemies, bad for our friends, and hugely dangerous to ourselves–especially in an age when swarms of maniac, murderous jihadists blacken the Middle East like toxic locusts.
Only the Gelerntertron can save you from THE COMING BETURBANED HORDE(tm).
Listen to what the Democrats are really saying. Consider what they actually want. And pray God they never get it.
Pray we never get out of Iraq, because the Gelerntertron will then be out of a job and forced to work for a living.
Hah. And you people didn’t believe me when I said spacetime was fucked. Can you begin to comprehend the ninth dimensional powers of Gelerntertron?
Seriously, can anyone? I can’t grok this guy at all, he’s just insane. I hope Big Daddy Bill Kristol gives this guy some more columns, because I want to see if he can write something that contradicts spacetime so completely that he erases himself from the timeline, like Marty McFly almost did.
Clearly, more flux capacitors are needed.