Victor Davis Hanson: The Boxer Metaphor (A longer version of the Tribune Media column)

The symbolism of the recent heated exchange between Senator Boxer and Secretary-of-State Rice was telling. For hours on end, speaking without notes, a proud, poised African-American professional woman from Birmingham, Alabama parried withering cross-examination from a succession of liberal senators angry over the war.

Boxer, the Bay Area’s premier progressive and crankiest of the questioners, has had a history of defining political disagreements in terms of personal partisanship, of us-versus-them rather than of mere opposing ideas. The senator once went after erstwhile rival Bruce Herschensohn, Senator Packwood, and Clarence Thomas for their purported sexual insensitivities — but urged forgiveness for President Clinton’s more egregiously inappropriate conduct, whose preemptive bombing of Milosevic she supported despite the absence of either Senate or UN approval.

The climax of her latest attack on Condoleezza Rice came when Boxer alleged that Rice had misled about weapons of mass destruction, the supposed casus belli of the Iraq war, even though Rice had explained that there was a variety of reasons — “the total picture” — that led to the decision to depose Saddam.

Boxer protested, “Well you should read what we voted on when we voted to support the war,” noting proudly that she was among the minority of senators who had dissented. Then Boxer proclaimed of the professed reason to go to war: “It was WMD period.”

Victor Davis Hanson answers to an Angry Reader critique ( http://victorhanson.com/#Anchor-Th-61321).

February 7, 2005
Editor's Note: This section is in honor of our critics—some angry and some not so angry.
Editor:
With his latest dispatch from the green hills of Hoover Farms, Hanson adds his modest wind to a right wing tempest.
If Boxer’s moment is a metaphor of our age, then Hanson is one of our age’s symptoms: the well paid, reality-capsizing pundit whose lack of analysis is concealed by stupefying rhetorical inversion.
There are two issues of language here: Hanson’s racialized “metaphor” and his use of the word “reactionary.” In the first, Hanson claims that the Boxer-Rice exchange demonstrates the feverish irrationality of the moribund opposition party. Just look: “liberal senators” were rude to the African-American professional woman from Birmingham.
By describing Rice this way—focusing on her race and her Birmingham origins (a move that immediately evokes the brutalities of the segregated South)—Hanson erases the substance of the confirmation hearing: the lies that have directly led to as many as 100,000 deaths.
Rice’s blackness, then, and liberals’ manners, are what concern Hanson. With a subtle race-baiting feint, he presents Rice as a victim. Liberals were rude to Condi! Don’t they know she’s an African-American woman from Birmingham?
It’s hard to imagine anything ruder than being blown into fist-sized chunks, something that happens with great regularity in the newly freedomized Iraq. Yet for Hanson, murder and torture pale beside Boxer’s impoliteness. Funny thing about pundits: they find it easier to stomach catastrophic human suffering than incivility.
Hanson:
1. As far as the quip about Hoover Farms: I will make a challenge to this critic: each of us can put a tandem disk on a Massey 265 and then see who covers a 20-acre vineyard outside my window first without taking out a vine. Or if that sounds too inorganic for his sensitivities: each of us can stake out a row of 25 Black Amber plum trees down the road, and see who prunes them all before dusk. Or both of us can see who first forks 20 tons of fruit on a Semi in the barnyard. Or I am sure from his vast practical experience he can dream up some such contest to test our relative knowledge of farming.
2. “Reality-capsizing pundit whose lack of analysis is concealed by stupefying rhetorical inversion” illustrates why this critic is not a pundit. Perhaps he thinks “racialized” and “freedomized” are witty.
3. Race: My first point was manners, not race. For all the advantages of her upbringing, Boxer proved the boor, Rice the gracious partner in the exchange. And as far as race, I was curious why Alberto Gonzales and Condoleezza Rice encountered a greater degree of confirmation opposition than any Secretary of State or Attorney General designee in recent history—though a Janet Reno or John Ashcroft were not uncontroversial. As in the case of Clarence Thomas, there is a certain fury reserved for conservative minority figures since they refute much of the ideologies of modern progressive paternalism, but especially the idea that liberal white gate-keepers are “owed” fealty for “helping” the underprivileged. The irony is lost: those of the La Raza movement of Black Caucus are always given deference by the likes of Boxer (as I can attest when Nancy Pelosi’s Hispanic activist aide once disrupted a lecture I gave on grounds that I was a “classicist” and thus believed in “class” strife—with no apology from Pelosi’s office.). And if hypocrisy about Rice was not a subtext of the exchange, envision the following scenario: a Tom de Lay on a House oversight committee calls in a Andrew Young or Jesse Jackson nominated for a cabinet post and calls them a liar on global television in a heated exchange, after himself distorting the facts and then going on the networks to brag of his invective. What would be the progressive reaction to that?
4. The lies told were by Boxer when she said her colleagues voted on “WMD period”—when the record clearly showed Senators adduced 23 writs of complaint that formed their basis for authorizing force.
5. “100,000 dead”. The writer knows no more than I how many Iraqis were killed, so why not 1 million or 2? Or is he talking about the 1 million killed by Saddam or including thousands of jihadists and Baathists who died trying to kill Americans and Iraqi forces? If so, the analogy would be to worry about the 100,000 Nazis killed in the Bulge or Japanese at Okinawa. At some point the writer should ask himself who exactly were those Iraqis who butchered for 30 years in Kurdistan, Iran, and Kuwait, and where did they suddenly disappear to?
6. Iraq. I will make a wager with the inquirer: there will be fewer killed per year in the new Iraq in the next 30 years than were butchered each month under Saddam. The choice in Iraq was never between perfection and failure, but something better and something worse.

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