After spending a harrowing evening in the Gerry and Cookie Fleck Hospitality Room without a View, Jonah Goldberg low-tailed it back east on the earliest plane that would let him fly in the cargo hold. He tries to put up a good front, but the fatigue betrayed by his Corner posts indicates his stay in Chi-town was hell on earth. Ditto John Derbyshire's report, where he complains about the heat in Chicago and swiftly changes the subject, not wanting to relive his horrible experience. Using my superior powers of inference, I divine that the fundraiser in Chicago was the biggest bust since the Broadway opening of Carrie the Musical.
Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson, who's supposed to be one of the Mature Voices on NRO, has pulled a Karl Rove.
As Karl Rove recently said--well, everyone knows what he oinked. Bush apologists at NRO are falling all over themselves to defend Bush's spongy gray matter, deploying every bit of sophistry they have at their greasy fingertips. From Koufax Country, the counterstrike has been swift and furious. Steve Gilliard, answering John Aravosis' call for action at Americablog, eloquently bugles the battle cry, "Hammer those fuckers with their words". The Rude Pundit rudely pundits, "Karl Rove To America: Suck It," and notes some fine distinctions that seem to have been overlooked. "When Howard Dean speaks, he's speaking as the chair of the Democratic Party. The Democrats pay him. If Democrats around the nation don't like what Dean says, then they can cease donating to the party. When Dick Durbin speaks, he's representing the people of Illinois, to whom he will be answerable when he's up for re-election. When Karl Rove speaks, he's talking as an official with the White House. The only person he's accountable to is the President, who, as Scott McClellan so dismissingly pointed out, won't ask Rove to apologize. Rove's paid by each and every tax-paying American. He represents all of us." And DCmediagirl speculates that Karl Rove may discover in his deteriorating years, as Lee Atwater did, that karma is a bitch.
Now I don't expect Rove to apologize for his slander, any more than I await an act of contrition from a sociopath. And I spy a similar beam of hope that Billmon does in his brilliant analysis of Rove's calculated affront.
"...I actually think Rove's rant should be seen as a somewhat encouraging sign. Rove and his idiot chorus aren't roaring at the top of their lungs to try to drown out the liberals -- that would be absurd overkill, given how effectively the corporate media has ridiculed and/or demonized the likes of Howard Dean and Dick Durbin. No, Rove's hate rally is aimed squarely at suppressing the growing doubts of the great silent majority -- and even, to a certain extent, those of the conservative true believers, some of whom are showing ominous signs of war weariness..."
"Things are even worse, in fact, than I had thought. In a previous post, I misreported the results of the latest Gallup Poll when I wrote that only 39% of those surveyed by Gallup had answered yes to the question: 'Do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq?' The question actually was much more straight forward (and forward looking): 'Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq?'
"In other words, nearly 60% of the American people are now willing to say, flat out, that they oppose the war in Iraq. That's a remarkable statement. I'm not sure 60% ever opposed the war in Vietnam, even after it had been lost. You don't turn those kind of numbers around with PR spin -- the casualty lists now speak louder than the microphone, even one as powerful as the White House's.
"Add to that the prospect of still higher gas prices, unfilled (and probably unfillable) economic expectations and the black ring of scandal widening around the DeLay-Abramoff-Reed-Norquist axis of weevils, and it's clear that recycled Reaganite optimism -- the 'morning in America' brand of propaganda -- isn't going to cut it.
"So Rove is falling back on his classic strategy of rallying the base. What's more, he's mainlining it a much rawer and more savage version of the conservative message than the White House usually permits itself. While the customary surrogates -- Fox News, Rush, the blogger hyena pack -- have snarled and snapped, the results apparently have been found wanting. Now Bush's 'brain' is stepping into the ring himself.
"But, like fellow psychopath Mike Tyson [Billmon says psychopath, I say sociopath: we're probably both right], Rove isn't just telegraphing his punches, he's also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn't have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He's pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can -- leaning on them, in fact -- in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands."
Rove will no problem rounding up a posse. They're already galloping ahead of him. Bill O'Reilly wants the hosts of Air America rounded up. Ann Coulter routinely conflates liberals and traitors. Etc.
And today Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson contributes his own more tasteful flavor of McCarthyism. Ignoring the snickers of the peanut gallery, he argues that conservatives have a harder time waging war than do liberals, which will come as news to the moaning ghost of LBJ. Here is his reasoning: "In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises -- as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force -- that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction."
It's certainly news to me that the conservative George Dubya nurses a "tragic view of human nature," or even a mildly saturnine one. He is forever thumping on in public about how optimistic he is and in private giving the rhetorical buzzoff to what he calls "handwringers." Helen Thomas has hinted loudly that Bush is the one president in her long memory who wanted to go to war. Kicking off a war with a "Shock and Awe" extravanganza certainly does not suggest the sobriety and gravity Bush idolators such as Peggy Noonan attribute to him.
Sobriety and gravity aren't conspicuous among his neoconservative Iagos either. The sort of libertarians and paleocons who publish at Lewrockwell.com and in the pages of The American Conservative may recoil from the glorification of the mystique of war but neocons revel in it, taking testosterone infusions from the powerful drumbeats to arms from Max Boot, Robert "Indian Fighter" Kaplan, and Hanson himself. Norman Mailer once quipped that Norman Podhoretz's idea of amour was wrapping his arms lovingly around a missile, and the ideological Sons of Norman are even more besotted with the West's destructive capability to wage democracy.
Here is the graf that indicates Hanson is getting as offensively defensive and defensively offensive as Rove. He writes:
"If one examines the infomercials of a bin Laden or Zawahiri, or the terrorist communiqu\0xC3\0xA9s sent to the Westernized media, they are almost all rehashes of the Michael Moore Left, from 'Bush lied' to 'Halliburton' to 'genocide' and 'Gulag.' This now famous 'Unholy Alliance' of radical anti-Americans and reactionary jihadists is really a two-way street: Islamists mimic the old leftist critique of the United States, and the Western Left hopes that they in turn can at least tone down their rhetoric about knocking walls over gays or sending all women into burka seclusion -- at least long enough to pose as something like disposed Palestinians minus the Hamas bombs laced with feces, rat poison, and nails."
What an ugly and poorly written paragraph that is. Hanson's bad faith in what he's doing sabotages and perverts his usually stentorian prose. Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with Imperial Hubris knows that the bulk of bin Laden's addresses--speeches which span decades--devote themselves overwhelmingly to Muslim history and what he considers historical injustices inflicted on Islam by the belligerent, expansionist West. Any reference he makes to Halliburton or Gitmo is mere garnishing. Hanson implies that the bin Laden and Zawahiri are simply reading from the old radio scripts Sartre left behind at the Cafe de Flore. The direct or indirect pipeline between bin Laden's wraithful-wrathful fundamentalism and Michael Moore's scruffy populism exists only in Hanson's head, just there's no "Michael Moore Left" except as a figment of the right's imagination. Ditto the "famous 'Unholy Alliance,'" which sounds like something Michael Ledeen and David Horowitz dreamed up after passing out in the sauna together. I've yet to meet any of these notorious Western Leftists who supposedly support Islamofascism except for the women-in-burkas bit. They certainly don't monopolize the cafe tables at Daily Kos or Atrios. No, Hanson is doing what Rove is doing what Rush is doing what Coulter is doing what Michelle Malkin is doing what O'Reilly is doing what they're all doing: trying to erase any distinction between suicide feces bombers and liberals who enjoy the occasional latte, smearing everybody with the same slime brush. Well, they've been doing it successfully for years but, as Billmon suggests, their arms are beginning to flail and the spatter effect is a Jackson Pollock of desperation.
What amazes me is that more Americans now blame Bush for provoking the war with Iraq than blame Saddam Hussein. That's not an argument I've heard anyone make on cable talk or on the op-ed pages. Somehow Americans drew that conclusion all on their own! The tide of popular opinion turning against the war is washing away walls we didn't even know were there.
