Posted on 01/31/2003 9:07:10 AM PST by missileboy
President Bush's audience was clearly most stirred, Tuesday evening, when his State of the Union address turned to the promise of a thrilling patriotic war on Iraq.
"If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning," the president said after detailing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's cruelty. "We seek peace, we strive for peace, and sometimes peace must be defended," the president said, to booming applause. "If war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military, and we will prevail."
These were stirring words, and true, if taken in isolation. The problem, as with Lincoln's Gettysburg address 140 years ago, is that they are not appropriate to the case at hand.
Lincoln — as most schoolchildren recall — declared over the fresh corpses of the fallen at Gettysburg that the Civil war was a great struggle, "testing whether ... any nation" dedicated to the principle of "government of the people, by the people, for the people ... can long endure."
That was true. Problem is, the people fighting for that principle wore gray, not blue. An overwhelming majority of the populace of the South wished to set up for themselves a new government free of Washington, just as Jefferson and Washington had decided to break their bonds with England 87 years before.
The Confederacy — despite the horrible flaw of retaining slavery (but remember, Lincoln repeatedly said the South could keep its slaves if only they'd come back into his Union) — was in fact a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," whereas "Reconstruction," under armed occupation from 1865 to 1877 ... clearly was not.
Lincoln's goal — like that of Cornwallis and Howe a century earlier — was in fact to invade that newly independent nation and subdue it by the sword. And he didn't care how many ways he violated the Constitution (mandatory conscription, jailing newspaper editors, martial law, a socialist income tax, worthless greenbacks) in the process.
So as it turns out, the principle Mr. Lincoln so movingly voiced, was the one he was fighting ... against.
Similarly, Mr. Bush is correct when he paints Saddam Hussein as a cruel and murderous dictator. But he's not the world's only cruel dictator — when do we mount our invasion to liberate Tibet, or Chechnya?
Nor is the assertion that Saddam's Iraq is a direct threat to the United States — that war has been "forced upon us" — clearly established. In fact, the notion that Iraq (hardly a sea power) could effectively attack the U.S. or our merchant shipping is quite far-fetched.
(I happen to support Israel's right to exist. But if attacking Iraq is really all about Iraq's potential to threaten Israel — Israel now being our 51st state — shouldn't we at least have been told, so we could sew another star on our flags? And when do we indict for treason the Israeli/Americans who shot up the U.S.S. Liberty?)
Anyway, Mr. Bush faces a more serious problem — at least, the way politicians look at things.
Because of the quick success of his father's war against Iraq a decade ago, the president today faces a conundrum of heightened expectations: Anything but a quick victory and regime change in Iraq is now likely to raise questions about the current president's constancy and competence, while even a sharp success runs the risk of being greeted with the same, "Ho hum, what about the economy?" fickleness that turned George H.W. Bush into a one-term president.
It was thus no surprise that President Bush, Jr., spent the first half of his rousing State of the Union address Tuesday focusing on the domestic economy.
At the heart of President Bush's domestic agenda lies a $674 billion plan to revive the economy with tax cuts and Medicare and medical liability reform — as well as what is arguably his most questionable initiative: efforts to offer federal tax subsidies to religious groups offering community services.
(Donations to churches are already tax-exempt — why risk ensnaring them in a soulless civil bureaucracy with direct tax funding, instead of trusting Americans in a lower-tax environment to simply fund their own voluntary charities? Taxes are still collected by men with guns who will set your furniture out on the sidewalk if you don't cooperate, right?)
Challenging Congress to help him create more jobs, the president asserted: "The nation needs more small businesses to open, more employers to put up the sign that says, 'Help wanted.' Jobs are created when the economy grows; the economy grows when Americans have more money to spend and invest; and the best, fairest way to make sure Americans have the money is not to tax it away in the first place."
A profound truth, articulately stated. But if this is true, why do we need to spend $674 billion in additional tax money, doing something that'll happen by itself if we simply cut taxes?
The president was inspiring when he called for reform of the actuarially bankrupt "Social Security" Ponzi scheme by "giving younger workers a chance" to invest in retirement accounts "that they will control and they will own."
Only, I thought we all had that right already. What new right is it, precisely, that the Congress would be "giving" us ... and why will only "younger workers" get it?
Does the president mean he will now set some limited portion of our savings free of the income tax? Then why not simply repeal the whole thing — or declaratively rule that it never applied to wages, in the first place? Think of what that would do for our economic growth.
And finally, the president asserted "Instead of bureaucrats and lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and patients back in charge of American medicine."
But "These problems will not be solved with a nationalized health care system that dictates coverage and rations care," the president was quick to warn. "Instead, we must work toward a system in which all Americans ... choose their own doctors. ..."
This all sounds great, because what Mr. Bush has described here is the free market.
So why did the president then promptly propose billions of dollars in new spending over the next decade to offer tax-funded prescription drugs to Medicare recipients willing to use alternatives such as managed care — slyly pointing out this benefit would be "just like you in Congress" enjoy?
All the president needs to do, in order to "put doctors and patients back in charge of American medicine," is to declare that medical practice in America is henceforward free of any government intervention, as it always should have been — seeking an advisory ruling from the Republican-dominated Supreme Court that medical liberty is protected by the Ninth and 14th Amendments, and that Medicare, Medicaid, the FDA, state licensing of doctors, and the War on Drugs are all thus thoroughly unconstitutional, and therefore banned.
In the next few days, expect discussion of the president's speech to focus on his rousing call to war in Iraq. But — as the Bush family knows all too well — this president's political future is more likely to hinge on the domestic economy ...
An economy which would be in much better shape, could we believe for a minute this president's free-market rhetoric — instead of the concrete evidence of the ballooning welfare state he still so devotedly funds.
Not worth reading a second sentence from this embittered little jerk off.
But, the notion that Saddam could develop weapons of mass destruction for use by terrorists against our nation is a reality. But, liberaltarian pacifists don't have the IQ to figure that out.
This is a complete, total lie. The Confederacy was a socialist institution. Rationing, price controls, etc. What a load.
I know the question was rhetorical, but someone recently suggested volunteering to assist the families while the reservist were away. If you can fix a broken toilet or replace a part on an old car, you can keep a spouse from being at the mercy of a $60 per hour professional. I don’t remember who to call, perhaps a reservist station or recruiter
(RE the thrilling patriotic war, the author was belittling us as just being prone to having our buttons pushed by BS.)
Sounds like typical Libertarian anger that real world government necessitates actions beyond their crippled model. Acting to preserve majority support in a divided nation while promoting ideals through rhetoric is considered doublespeak by them. They have nowhere else in their flawed theoretical system to categorize it.
So as we see, they maintain a high level of ideological purity as they talk about people who really hold office.
The most recent legitimate poll I have seen shows more Democrats support the war than not. More than half of all Demcrats support the war. Look at the vote totals and the names of the Democrats in congress who voted for it.
On the other hand, without benefit of a poll, I have unscientifically polled most of the libertarians I know and they are overwhemingly in favor of removing Saddam's regime when they are convinced that he is a threat. They all support the government's legitimate function of defending our rights from thugs like Saddam. Not all of them are convinced that he is a threat which justifies this action at this point, but neither are many conservatives.
On this forum, many loudmouths call anyone who shows the slightest hesitation to sign on to everything the President says, traitors. It seems that those types value your right to dissent, as long as it is dissention to Democrats.
Precisely. I'd go so far as to say that if I could see evidence that Sadaam were involved in the attacks of 9/11, provided logistics or support in any way, I'd support a US military campaign, after war was declared, against him. Turn his cities into rubble and barbeque his goats. That would be fine.
The neocons will argue that the evidence is alrady there. I of course disagree, but the point here is that that is my standard. Not supporting the war does not automatically make one a pacifist.
I'm getting rather tired of this old wheeze. Can this author show me how that, because we desire for a number of reasons to overthrow one dictator, this somehow commits us to overthrowing every dictator in the world? In point of fact it does nothing of the sort. Changing a tire on your car does not obligate you morally to changing all the tires that are flat in the world.
Ah, there’s that embittered rant again… Upset because he struggled so long to understand an ideological system that’s as consistent and without contradiction as it is disconnected from the annoying complexities of human nature in large social systems that get in the way of its implementation. Crippled by his n dimensional world view in an n+1 dimensional world, everything looks like a contradiction. Just as a ball dissecting a plane simply looks like a circle to the creature living only on the plane, politicians promoting ideals while behaving in such a way as to be electable simply looks like they’re doublespeaking to him.
And we see that any use of the phrase “real word” triggers a pavlovian response to claim the speaker simply doesn’t posses the intellect to understand the imaginary system he promotes.
And so he stews in his anger, recognizing that his supporters are unpersuasive, powerless and loosing ground in a political system running away without them.
This applies because one of the arguments put forth (amid the many) for the invasion of Iraq is that Sadaam is a cruel and murderous dictator. Therefore, if this is reason for war, then it stands to reason that all murderous, cruel dictators are subject to forceful removal by the US military. So to go back to your analogy, the Bush administration is saying that your tire must be changed because it is black. This begs the question - why not change all tires? In other words, Vin's argument has validity because the Bush administration used the excuse in this way. If they hadn't, that would be a different story.
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