Thursday, September 01, 2005
(11:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Anti-Bush Venom
It's at least plausible to think that some of "President" Bush's past missteps have set the stage for the New Orleans situation to be worse than it needed to be -- primarily the fact that so many National Guardsmen were fighting a large-scale insurgency in Iraq rather than piling up sandbags in New Orleans. Every political leader has to make choices, and apparently whatever historic achievement it is that we're supposedly accomplishing in Iraq this week was more important than minimizing the damage from a major natural disaster on American soil. This casts the doctrine of preemption in an interesting new light, certainly, and I don't think it's unnatural or unreasonable for people witnessing the large-scale destruction and suffering in New Orleans to blame Bush for not doing all he could have done or for limiting the resources available and therefore limiting what was possible to do. Others who deeply and sincerely believe in whatever cause we happen to be advancing in Iraq this week may well say that Bush's calculation was absolutely necessary and that, even in the face of such a disaster, it was the calculation that needed to be made. This is a discussion we can have. The people who think Bush's priorities were correct are, of course, deeply and troublingly wrong, but we can discuss this.But with this as with virtually every event that could possibly reflect poorly on Our Leader's decision-making, we get the inevitable preemptive defense from the usual suspects -- those who criticize Bush are instinctively spewing their anti-Bush venom, the poisonous and irrational hatred of Bush that makes it impossible for them to see reality objectively. These angry leftists would hate Bush no matter what he does, and so they are not worth listening to -- just habitual nay-sayers, full of resentment, disconnected from any reality except their own blinding hatred. Poor Dubya just never gets a fair hearing, does he? It remains for his reasoned supporters to counteract the blind hatred of those whose goal in life is to drag this great man's name through the mud.
In any situation, such a rhetorical tactic would be dishonest, but in our current situation, it is simply dispicable. Arguably no president has gotten more of a sympathetic hearing, particularly after the questionable manner in which he came into office. Many Americans -- wrongly, it turned out -- trusted that no one who bore the burden of the presidency in the wake of 9/11 would do anything other than what was clearly necessary: track down and punish those who planned the attack and destroy their organizational capacity to prepare for and coordinate similar future attacks. Bush betrayed that trust, by failing to find bin Laden and then by botching the Afghanistan operation and allowing the Taliban to regain substantial control of most of the country. The American public at large trusted that surely no president would exploit the tragedy to forward some esoteric, pre-determined agenda, and thus the American public -- and to its shame, the Democratic party -- basically gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iraq, and Bush betrayed that trust. It is time and past time to have made up one's mind on Bush. It is more than reasonable to detest the man given his track record, and more than reasonable to assume that he is going to short-sightedly botch anything relating to the actual interests of this country, as opposed to whatever set of fantasy-land proposals his ideologue advisors push on him.
The ones who are blind in this situation are those who look at the New Orleans disaster and think that the most important thing to worry about is that Bush's reputation not be harmed or disparaged in any way.
