Posted on 02/05/2003 6:53:40 AM PST by Lib Buster
It’s six above. When I went to work the wind-chill factor made it eight below. I don’t wear a hat, and I keep forgetting my gloves, so you can imagine my discomfort. But then I picked up a copy of the Skyway News on the way into the office, and as I flicked through it while waiting for the elevator, I was warmed by the hot glow of Righteous Fury. Why, I spied Dissent! I morphed into CrushBot, a big spiky metal thing with special missiles that seek out people who raise Questions, and blow them into nice hot bouncing meat-chunks; if I’m lucky the grass catches on fire and I can do the happy War Death Dance as the flames lick my armor, crushing woodland creatures beneath my big CrushBot feet, strewing human goulash as I warble praise to Mars.
Translation: I’m about to go off on a rant, so those disinclined to care are advised to hit the exit.
I voted Green in the last mayoral election, because I knew the guy, and I knew he loved this city. When asked about the war against Saddam, he has been unwavering in his disapproval, but he hasn’t used his job to lobby for the cause. When he cheered some locals heading to DC to attend the antiwar rally, he did so on his own time on the street, not the office. When a member of the Minneapolis City Council wanted to pass a resolution condemning the war, he made it clear he believed foreign policy really isn’t the job of local governments, and they should think about things like snow removal, and murder. In short, I think he’s wrong on Iraq, but he’s a smart, principled fellow, and I respect him. The Greens would have been wise to put him for a response to the SOTU speech. He has an inherent optimism that seems cheerful, not hempy-dopey, and he has enough political savvy to keep him from Sticking It To the Man just so he can say he stuck it to the Man, dude. The Greens could run this guy for national office. They’d lose, hugely, but he’d give the party a professional face.
But no. The Greens trotted out Minneapolis Councilperson Natalie Johnson Lee to give the party’s response to Bush’s SOTU. The Skyway News ran the text of her speech today, because the SN is the paper for downtown, and the skyscrapers and stores of Minneapolis are part of her district. If this is indicative of the Greens in general they have about as much chance of capturing the nation’s heart as the Libertarians have of privatizing the highway system. Her speech is remarkable for unremarkable reasons - it’s full of lurid accusations, unsupported assertions, rhetorical fallacies and utopian hallucinations. Pacifistic socialism? You’re soaking in it!
Greetings from the Green Party, the party of peace!
(Lurch-like mutter.)
Tonight the President promised America a policy of war. War on Iraq. War on minorities. War on the poor. War on regular working people.
See, here’s the problem, right here: you sit down, ready to hear a series of carefully constructed arguments, and you get a big sloshy pail of lukewarm nonsense thrown in your face. (Chemical analysis shows it is actually the spittle of college newspaper editorial writers.) While the speech had a lot to do with confronting Iraq, the idea that it declared war on minorities, war on the poor, war on regular working people is a humid fantasy that only plays well with people who think that a reduction in the rate of budgetary growth is tantamount to genocide. (Racist genocide!) It suggests that Ms. Johnson Lee turned down the volume on Bush's speech and had an aide shout passage from "The Turner Diaries" while the president spoke. She's welcome to believe that the speech was a declaration of war on the parties named above; she’s welcome to believe that you could use individual letters from the speech to spell out the phrase “Someone put the wood to Mumia, ORC STYLE!” Whatever. But when a speech about hydrogen cars, Medicare reform, tort reform and lowering the Federal tax burden for a family of four making 40K to forty-five dollars becomes a declaration of WAR on anyone in the sub-plutocrat class, well, she’s just shot every arrow in her rhetorical quiver.
Everything is a war except, well, war. In the face of real war, she alerts us to the danger of a metaphorical one.
This is utterly typical:
Tonight, in Washington D.C., I must ask: "Who phoned Bush and asked for this war?" "Who phoned Congress and asked for this war?"
Who blew up da Owl? She knows:
I know that America did not dial that number.
Someone else did.
I've got a message for the CEOs of the oil corporations and of the weapons manufacturers. You're tying up the line. America is trying to get through.
You know, I actually called my Senator the other day. They answered on the sixth ring. I expressed my support for liberating Iraq. I cannot tell you how disinterested the voice on the other end was; it was as if they wanted to get me off the line as soon as possible so they could take calls from DeathCo and PetroKill Inc. And this made me feel, well, confused - if “America” is trying to get through the blizzard of telemarketing calls from Warheds ‘R Us and BabyShred Amalgamated - then I must not be part of America.
Ergo my assent is anti-American. No! Help! Delta Force operatives wearing Joe McCarthy masks have me in their sights! I’m turning off the lights, moving to the furnace room; back in a second -
Okay. I’m in a secure location, code-named Boiler Deep. Let’s continue:
America can make peace, not war, by putting a stop to the global trade in weapons. We must stop it at its source. That's here, at home, in the United States. U.S.-based corporations are the prime suppliers of weapons to the world, and European corporations are not far behind. It's common sense. It's time to put the weapons manufacturers out of business.
So she’s calling for the US to stop selling arms to anyone. Okay. Done. End result: everyone else has French, Russian, or Chinese arms. Our allies find their own militaries failing from lack of spare parts, so they turn to the French, Russian and Chinese suppliers. Perhaps Ms. Johnson believes that our example will shame the world, much as a GUN CONTROL NOW! bumpersticker makes a carjacker turn away, abashed. But let’s say that noble Russia and high-minded China join us in our crusade, leaving only France to ship guns to willing hands. Does she recommend that the US Navy board French vessels and confiscate their cargos?
One suspects the answer would be yes, but only if the Stars and Stripes were flying below a certain blue-and-white flag.
America can make peace, not war, only if we are consistent in our support for democracy. The foreign policy of supporting "our" dictators against "their" dictators has been a failure. Saddam Hussein is in power today because the U.S. government once supported him, just as it once supported bin Laden.
By “support” she means we grew Saddam in a petri dish, inserted him into Iraq when the time was right, and sent Angela Lansbury to lay out a series of playing cards that made him rise up with a blank expression and start slaughtering his political opponents. Just to make sure he hewed the company line, we made him a Ba’athist whose party preached a crypto-Nazi socialism. As we all know, Prescott Bush designed the outfits for the SS - it stands to reason that his son and grandson follow the same path. CAN’T YOU SEE? He’s our TOOL, our PAWN, our BOY, and that’s why we keep trying to get the world to let us kill him in plain sight with international approval.
Yes, we once “supported” Saddam when he was fighting Iran, because their brand of nutball militant theocracy was the bigger threat. See also WW2, Stalin, support of. By her logic the Berlin airlift was wrong because we’d sent trucks to the Soviets in WW2. In the pure world of the Greens, a great power is one who does nothing for the right reason. Better to cede a region to the Soviets, for example, than deal with bad regimes.
In any case, isn’t it odd how all most of that military hardware Saddam had in Gulf War I was Russian, Chinese, and European?
It is time instead to consistently support democracy. Perhaps it is unfair to expect George W. Bush to understand democracy, much less consistently promote it -
Ah yes. Selected, not elected. It rhymes, so it must be true. I’ll still take him over Clinton, whose impeachment trials could be described as ERECTED, NOT EJECTED. But tarry if you will over that line: Perhaps it is unfair to expect George W. Bush to understand democracy. The Greens have entered the territory previously occupied by the right-wing fringe who thought Clinton would use Y2K to suspend the Constitution and use FEMA to institute martial law.
America can make peace, not war, by breaking the hold of the oil corporations on Congress. It's time to kick the oil addiction. Right now. America has the technological know-how and the renewable resources to make the break. We can and should build up our solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources now.
Wind cars NOW! Let a thousand sails unfurl! If nothing else, this is proof that she didn’t even listen to the very speech she was critiquing, or she would have slammed the hydrogen-fuel initiative as too-little too-late. For God’s sake, is it too much to ask that her response occupy the same century as the thing to which she objects? It’s like reading a review of “Daredevil” that insists the film was spoiled by Jar-Jar Binks.
(snip)
The President claims the inspections have failed. He is wrong.
And you have that on the good authority of a councilperson from the 5th ward of a medium-sized Midwestern city. Here’s what you need to understand about her mindset: as long as the inspections are ongoing, they cannot fail, because the act of inspecting counts, not the results. I’m sure she also believes that if the US withdrew its forces in the region, the inspectors would be continued to poke around as long as they liked.
Actually, I don’t think she’s thought the issue through that far; if the troops withdrew and the inspections were thwarted, she wouldn’t give a fig. Iraq for her is just a nebulous construct that exists only when Bush points to it. Otherwise it is a dim and distant thing, silent and irrelevant. Lift the sanctions, yes. Buy their oil, yes. But should a sneaker company build a factory in Baghdad, she’ll insist that the City Council pass a resolution forbidding the purchase of footwear from Iraq unless they pay the minimum American wage and have fire-exit doors within 15 yards of all employees.
That’s how you make dictatorships realize you’re serious.
In fact, his attempts to drum up a war fever are what has failed.
Always with the drums. Having passed a few antiwar demonstrations in my time, I’ll just note that drumming seems to be a hallmark of the skanky pierced-for-peace sorts who think that whapping upended pickle-buckets will cause some sort of karmic alignment that makes Rumsfeld fall to his knees, clutching his chest and crying out for Moloch and Baal to save him.
This language is standard on Ms. Lee’s side - taking an issue to the Congress, then the UN, then the inspectors, then the UN again over the course of half a year constitutes “drumming up” a “fever” that has us all whooping like Indians - well, no, sorry. Sorry. That’s an ethnic stereotype that has no place in this discussion. Native Americans never beat drums or waged war, and when they did ride into battle with the blue-eyes they were softly singing sad songs to themselves, their hearts heavy with worry over the effect of Depleted Flint arrowheads on the land. Only Europeans beat drums for war. They also used bagpipes, but "Honking up a bagpipe fever" doesn't have the same rhetorical oomph you get with your drums.
The lives of millions of innocent Iraqi civilians are not worth one drop of Bush's oil, and American soldiers should not be sacrificed for it.
The population of Iraq is around 22 million. “Millions” means, at the least, two million - so Ms. Lee believes that the war will kill ten percent of all Iraqis. Since the population of Baghdad is almost 5 million, perhaps she foresees the US killing 50 percent of the population. The army only numbers 450,000, including the Republican Guard; her scenario thus includes a 100% kill rate. All for “Bush’s oil.” Who knew he already owned it? Hell, forget the war - slap a label on it, son, and start serving it up. Billy Beer was a hit; Dubya Unleaded will be just as popular.
Let us build our security on a foundation of international peace, justice and democracy.
Let us protect our skyscrapers from planes with giant mocking papier-mâché puppets, too. Look, I’m all for international peace, justice and democracy, which is why I’m opposed to most of the unctuous dithering that goes on in the UN. International Peace, Justice and Democracy are fragile things, like a baby. Think of Saddam as Michael Jackson, and the UN as the crowd below - cheering, or gasping, or laughing, but doing nothing but taking pictures and wondering if they’ll be on the news tonight.
Now we get to the important stuff. After a call for slavery reparations, she says this:
We Greens say to the President and to Congress: Immigrants are not the enemy! Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are not the enemy! People of color are not the enemy! It's time to stop your war on minorities.
I missed the part of the speech where Bush asked us all to herd cross-dressers into sports arenas and beat them to death with the hard spine of SUV owner’s manuals. I was unaware that people of color were the enemy. - I thought people of color were actually part of the administration, and that one of them was the son of Jamaican immigrants. But I live in a rarified world here in the middle of the city, and news of the Bisexual Pogroms has not yet reached my distant shores.
Speaking of the “war on minorities” - I’ve searched her speech over and over again for the words “Kurds” and “Shiites” and I can’t find it.
(snip)
Bush calls it an economic stimulus package. Greens ask, "Economic stimulus for whom?" It is time for an economic stimulus package for the rest of us. Where the Washington establishment wages a war on public education,
Bush administration request for the Dept. of Education: $56 billion, which represents a doubling of the budget since 96. It includes a $100 million, 11% increase in funding for inner-city K-3 literacy programs. It includes 11 billion - a 10% increase - for Title 1 grants to inner-city schools that aren’t performing well. It increases the amount of loan-forgiveness for teachers who work in inner-city neighborhoods from 5K to 17.5K.
You should see the new school they’re building in my neighborhood. If didn’t know better I’d think they were assembling Saturn rocket boosters in that thing.
. . . .social welfare, public lands and local government,
You know what? Maybe it’s not the job of the federal government to subsidize free-spending local government. Maybe if there wasn’t a rain of manna on local governments every year you’d be wary of subsidizing stadiums or downtown shopping malls. My property taxes went up 15 percent this year. That’s my reward for believing in the city: a big spear jabbed in my ass. And next year you’ll stab the left buttock, and if I complain, you’ll point out that the right buttock has healed, hasn’t it?
the Green Party takes a very different view. We call for full federal funding to support children, families, the unemployed, elderly and disabled.
If you want a definition of “full federal funding,” think of the phrase “open bar” as applied to the Rat Pack.
There you have it: we’re undertaxed and over-defended. The biggest threat we face is not Islamic terrorism, but a domestic war against illegal immigrants. Let’s close by comparing the last words of both speeches.
Bush:
Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. (Applause.)
We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.
May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.
The Greens:
Together with Greens in 90 nations worldwide, we represent a new kind of politics resting on four pillar values: Grassroots Democracy-Ecology -- Social Justice -- Non-Violence.
No corporate contributors are tying up our phone lines. We are waiting to hear from you.
As the country-western song said: if your phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.
(Excerpt) Read more at lileks.com ...
ROTFL!!!
Heeheeeeeeeee...
Always with the drums. Having passed a few antiwar demonstrations in my time, I’ll just note that drumming seems to be a hallmark of the skanky pierced-for-peace sorts who think that whapping upended pickle-buckets will cause some sort of karmic alignment that makes Rumsfeld fall to his knees, clutching his chest and crying out for Moloch and Baal to save him.
Go Lileks! Tearing the greenies a new cake hole.
(And I'm half Scot, by the way....)
;-)
Me too.
But I loved this line "...Billy Beer was a hit; Dubya Unleaded will be just as popular."
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