Eric Margolis: The Good, the Bad and the Lucky (Chirac, good; Bush, bad and lucky)

POPE JOHN PAUL II: This noble, heroic man soldiers on in spite of his crumbling body. Acting as the world's conscience, the Holy Father has championed the rights of the downtrodden, the voiceless, the oppressed, opposing current militarism and capitalist excesses with the same force with which he battled the evils of communism and socialism. Who, one wonders, will replace this truly great man?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Managed by brilliant political handlers, the U.S. president wins big time on the domestic front. Tax cuts, subsidized drugs, a rebounding economy and the capture of Saddam Hussein will likely win Bush re-election. But he is the worst foreign policy maker in memory.

Middle America loves Texas Ranger Bush, who claims to take his orders from God. But Bush's divinely inspired mission has run up a $400-billion-plus deficit and is gravely undermining constitutional rights and liberties at home. Two unresolved wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost $166 billion, over 3,000 U.S. casualties, and growing anti-American feeling around the globe. Terrorism continues unabated.

Much of the rest of the world abhors Bush's extremist, Christian fundamentalist, neo-conservative agenda. His faux "war on terrorism" is seen abroad as a crudely disguised imperial power grab

OSAMA BIN LADEN: The man who made Bush's presidency. Still on the lam, still encouraging attacks on the U.S. and its allies. A fanatic's fanatic, he commands undue respect across the Muslim world. Ironically, the U.S. military-industrial-petroleum complex owes this Islamic wild man a great debt: he alone justified an imperial agenda and the Pentagon's bloated defence budget that accounts for 33% of total world military spending. Bin Laden has said he will die this coming year in a spectacular "martyrdom operation."

DICK CHENEY: Bush talks to God; Vice President Cheney talks to the Pentagon. He runs Washington's militarized foreign policy through a network of neo-conservatives. Cheney's repeated warnings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida sound dangerously out of touch with reality. His close links to the Halliburton company may be a major campaign liability in '04.

TONY BLAIR: Unrelentingly sanctimonious and preachy, Blair's servile behavior towards the White House in 2003 made many Britons, who detest their government's war policies, wonder if Merrie Olde England had not quietly become a colony of the United States. Blair's hopes of joining in the economic rapine of Iraq's oil wealth have, so far, been unfulfilled.

SADDAM HUSSEIN: The Father of All Disasters, he failed miserably to head off impending U.S. attack, just like in 1991. Conducted a pathetic defence of his country. Deeply humiliated by his U.S. captors. A disgrace to the Arabs, who already have disgraces to spare. He should be sent for trial in The Hague.

JACQUES CHIRAC: The quintessence of a grandiloquent, slippery, scandal-plagued French politician, Chirac has nonetheless gained genuine stature as the voice of "old" (that is, not for sale) Europe. The contrast between Chirac's good sense and reasoned policies and Bush's crusading religious zeal could not be sharper. France remains the land of reason — French drivers excepted.

This guy is an idiot.

Jacques Chirac was bought by Saddam. He and Saddam were tight buddies. The Iraq reactor (providentially bombed by the Israelis in the early 80's) - was nicknamed after Chirac, who pushed for the sale.

Jacques Chirac was a big time supporter of the sale of Iraq oil - "Oil for Palaces" program, and he wanted to end sanctions on Iraq.

Chirac was totally unconcerned about the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam ... and his big concern was that France get the debts paid by Iraq (those same loans that will now be written off!!)

As I said, the author is an idiot!

Mike

cake_crumb wrote: The HAGUE?? Cheny runs foreign policy? Chirac has good sense?? If that's a "paleoconservative" then paleoconservatives are not very conservative at all. This author is a socialist.

Well no, paleocons aren't really part of the contemporary conservative movement, to wit:

This is the place to digress for a moment and say a word about the paleoconservatives, as they have been labeled. Commonly thought to be the heirs of Kirk and the traditionalists, paleoconservatives in fact dissent from what Kirk considered true conservative principles. They are not conservatives so much as reactionaries or pseudo-radicals. The paleos can fairly be said to despise much of contemporary American life and would like somehow to move beyond the modern American political debate.
Paleoconservatives were largely unknown to the general public until the 1990s when Patrick Buchanan championed many of their ideas in his efforts to remake the Republican party. Buchanan’s goal was not to restore an older conservative ideal but to initiate a right-wing reformation instead. In 2000, he made his radical intentions clear by bolting from the Republican party and running as the Reform candidate. “With this campaign,” he declared, “I intend to redefine what it means to be a conservative.” Buchananism stood for anti-free trade and anti-globalism in economic policy; anti-immigration and pro-life in social policy; and isolationism in foreign policy. Yet despite his strong pro-life position and frequent religious appeals, Buchanan was rejected by rank-and-file religious conservatives and their leadership. He may have declared a “religious war” for the heart and soul of the nation, but religious conservatives did not choose to support him. They sided in the Republican primaries with President Bush in 1992 and Senator Robert Dole in 1996 — neither of whom was known to be strongly supportive of the religious right’s agenda. The media largely missed the salience of these alliances, which greatly damaged Buchanan’s electoral viability. The paleos’ agenda, as it turns out, is more quixotic than anyone quite realized, and the religious right more bourgeois than is generally supposed.
The very term paleoconservative is misleading. Unlike the traditionalists, the paleocons contend that we have become irrevocably cut off from a living, sustainable tradition. In their view, the acids of modernity have left us entirely disinherited from old customs and ways, and conservatism’s project of conservation is but a glittering illusion. They have thus gone in search of new gods. Thomas Fleming, editor of the paleoconservative journal Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, has looked to sociobiology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology — hardly traditional conservative guides — for a new beginning. Paul Gottfried, another influential paleo theoretician, has sought solutions in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt as well as varieties of historicist ideology. Samuel Francis, political editor for Chronicles, has called for “radical opposition to the regime.” Meanwhile, Gottfried, in his book The Search for Historical Meaning, has spoken sympathetically of a return to “spiritual heroes who enhance civilization by further illuminating the ground of being.” In another of his books, The Conservative Movement, Gottfried has summed up the paleos as follows:

Above all they raise issues that the neoconservatives and the Left would both seek to keep closed, for instance, questions about the desirability of political and social equality, the functionality of human rights thinking, and the genetic basis of intelligence. In all these assaults on liberal and neoconservative pieties, paleoconservatives reveal an iconoclastic exuberance rarely found on the postwar intellectual Right. Their spirit is far more Nietzschean than neo-Thomistic, and like Nietzsche they go after democratic idols, driven by disdain for what they believe dehumanizes.

(Adam Wolfson in The Public Interest, Winter 2004)
http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html

"GEORGE W. BUSH: Managed by brilliant political handlers, the U.S. president wins big time on the domestic front. Tax cuts, subsidized drugs, a rebounding economy and the capture of Saddam Hussein will likely win Bush re-election. But he is the worst foreign policy maker in memory."

Margolis is an uneducated idiot. Bush's foreign policy just caused Libya to give up its WMD programs without firing a shot, something that could hardly be said about any previous administration in any government on this planet, save for those who convinced South Africa to give up its WMD programs decades ago.

And even on war, Bush had UN resolution 1441 supporting him, whereas Clinton went to war in Yugoslavia in 1999 without even *going* to the UN.

In short, Margolis is trying to re-write history according to his uneducated perspective, rather than on easily demonstrable facts.

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