The Imperial Party
Justin Raimondo: The US will now be ruled by the imperial party
GEORGE W. Bush's thin margin of victory is a mandate for nothing. Instead, it is a testament to the weakness of his political position, the sharp divisions in the country and the frittering away of the most advantageous position any Republican incumbent has held since 1864.
After September 11, 2001, Bush's political position seemed unassailable. This was not entirely a reflexive defiance. The President mobilised the country around him on account of his steadfastness in the face of adversity, his determination to go after the perpetrators and his sense of focus.
As time went on, however, the atmosphere quickly changed. According to the testimony of his closest aides, such as counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Bush was fixated early on Iraq, and there are even reports that he was determined to go to war two years before he even became President.
The neo-conservatives who occupied the upper echelons of the Pentagon's civilian leadership had been agitating for war with Iraq for years, and came to Washington eager to implement their agenda. The war party made a concerted effort to tie the 19 hijackers to Iraq, to materialise "weapons of mass destruction" out of the fantasies of their Iraqi hirelings, and to conjure up visions of Iraqi nukes blossoming over American, or Israeli, cities. In short, they lied us into war and then began switching rationales, finally reverting to the Wilsonian (or, really, Napoleonic) rhetoric of exporting democracy at gunpoint.
In the process, Bush II and the leadership of the Republican Party squandered the enormous goodwill built up in the days and weeks after 9/11 and radically alienated something very close to half the nation. But this isn't the same old red-blue dichotomy that animated the Bush-Gore contest. There is a new intensity here, one that cannot be explained solely in terms of cultural divisions over God, guns and gays, although that is part of it. Republicans will wake up today to a world in which Osama bin Laden may be the last fiscally conservative Republican left standing. "As for the size of the economic deficit," scolded bin Laden in his latest communique to America, "it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujaheddin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy
plan -- with Allah's permission."
The Republican Party has become the party not just of big government, but of global government. If, as seems likely, the President follows the neo-conservative agenda and takes his war of "liberation" beyond Iraq -- Syria and Iran seem to be the next targets -- the transformation of the Republican Party will be complete: it will become the imperial party, albeit not without dissent from traditional small government conservatives.
The Democrats, for their part, can't blame this defeat on Ralph Nader and will have to come up with a far better excuse than "they stole it". The Kerry campaign, from start to finish, was an exercise in "nuanced" double-talk. What they never understood is what Howard Dean seemed to instinctively grasp: if you dare to speak truth to the people -- or just act as if you are doing it -- voters will respond. The American people can respect someone who isn't afraid to utter a few hard truths.
One particularly hard truth Kerry failed to mention was the Israeli spy scandal, in which two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Israeli diplomats were recently implicated in the passage of top secret information from Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, an Iran expert. It was widely reported that this was just the tip of a much larger iceberg, and that Franklin had been outed as part of a two-year investigation of Israeli moles in the Pentagon.
In what other nation on earth would the presence of a spy nest in the highest reaches of government fail to become a major campaign issue? Yet Kerry never breathed a word about it. He pulled his punches -- and lost Florida anyway. Yet he might have gained in other battleground states such as Ohio, Nevada, New Mexico and Iowa.
Kerry appropriated the anti-war movement's arguments, without endorsing the anti-war position. He allowed the Republicans to portray him as indecisive, in contrast with the maniacally single-minded incumbent. This election should have been a referendum on the war, but wasn't: instead the Republicans turned it into a referendum on John Kerry.
Justin Raimondo, editorial director of antiwar.com, is a contributing editor of The American Conservative in Washington, DC
GEORGE W. Bush's thin margin of victory is a mandate for nothing. Instead, it is a testament to the weakness of his political position, the sharp divisions in the country and the frittering away of the most advantageous position any Republican incumbent has held since 1864.
After September 11, 2001, Bush's political position seemed unassailable. This was not entirely a reflexive defiance. The President mobilised the country around him on account of his steadfastness in the face of adversity, his determination to go after the perpetrators and his sense of focus.
As time went on, however, the atmosphere quickly changed. According to the testimony of his closest aides, such as counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Bush was fixated early on Iraq, and there are even reports that he was determined to go to war two years before he even became President.
The neo-conservatives who occupied the upper echelons of the Pentagon's civilian leadership had been agitating for war with Iraq for years, and came to Washington eager to implement their agenda. The war party made a concerted effort to tie the 19 hijackers to Iraq, to materialise "weapons of mass destruction" out of the fantasies of their Iraqi hirelings, and to conjure up visions of Iraqi nukes blossoming over American, or Israeli, cities. In short, they lied us into war and then began switching rationales, finally reverting to the Wilsonian (or, really, Napoleonic) rhetoric of exporting democracy at gunpoint.
In the process, Bush II and the leadership of the Republican Party squandered the enormous goodwill built up in the days and weeks after 9/11 and radically alienated something very close to half the nation. But this isn't the same old red-blue dichotomy that animated the Bush-Gore contest. There is a new intensity here, one that cannot be explained solely in terms of cultural divisions over God, guns and gays, although that is part of it. Republicans will wake up today to a world in which Osama bin Laden may be the last fiscally conservative Republican left standing. "As for the size of the economic deficit," scolded bin Laden in his latest communique to America, "it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujaheddin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy
plan -- with Allah's permission."
The Republican Party has become the party not just of big government, but of global government. If, as seems likely, the President follows the neo-conservative agenda and takes his war of "liberation" beyond Iraq -- Syria and Iran seem to be the next targets -- the transformation of the Republican Party will be complete: it will become the imperial party, albeit not without dissent from traditional small government conservatives.
The Democrats, for their part, can't blame this defeat on Ralph Nader and will have to come up with a far better excuse than "they stole it". The Kerry campaign, from start to finish, was an exercise in "nuanced" double-talk. What they never understood is what Howard Dean seemed to instinctively grasp: if you dare to speak truth to the people -- or just act as if you are doing it -- voters will respond. The American people can respect someone who isn't afraid to utter a few hard truths.
One particularly hard truth Kerry failed to mention was the Israeli spy scandal, in which two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Israeli diplomats were recently implicated in the passage of top secret information from Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, an Iran expert. It was widely reported that this was just the tip of a much larger iceberg, and that Franklin had been outed as part of a two-year investigation of Israeli moles in the Pentagon.
In what other nation on earth would the presence of a spy nest in the highest reaches of government fail to become a major campaign issue? Yet Kerry never breathed a word about it. He pulled his punches -- and lost Florida anyway. Yet he might have gained in other battleground states such as Ohio, Nevada, New Mexico and Iowa.
Kerry appropriated the anti-war movement's arguments, without endorsing the anti-war position. He allowed the Republicans to portray him as indecisive, in contrast with the maniacally single-minded incumbent. This election should have been a referendum on the war, but wasn't: instead the Republicans turned it into a referendum on John Kerry.
Justin Raimondo, editorial director of antiwar.com, is a contributing editor of The American Conservative in Washington, DC
posted by R7 | 11/05/2004 01:54:00 AM
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