Saturday, November 15, 2003
(4:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Taking Down the Democrats
I just read The New Yorker's piece on Wesley Clark, and all I could think is, "Man, maybe this guy had better not be president." This month's Atlantic also has a piece that seems designed to provoke that feeling, except this time it's about John Kerry (the cover implies that Kerry became a callous murderer in his time in Vietnam).
I wonder if the high-brow literary/political magazines all drew lots to see who would take down which candidate. I'd hate to be the one who had to bother with taking down Al Sharpton, but whichever candidate was drawn by Harper's would probably get off easy, with a bizarre essay by Lewis Lapham comparing, say, Howard Dean to someone from classical Rome.
The best political position probably comes from Robb, from some comments below:
I'm rather lost in which candidate to back, and really have grown rather politically agnostic (as in..I believe political forces are out there, but am unsure if they really will ever affect or be affected by me, or in any other way acknowledge my presence).
The best quote from the Wesley Clark article is probably this one:
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team—planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. “They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11,” Clark said. “So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem.” Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan.
That pretty well silences the anti-war nay-sayers who ask why we don't topple every terrible regime. I'm sure once we have confirmed our control over the New Caliphate of America, we will head right for North Korea.
