Get Up, Stand Up! Stand Up for Your Rights!

Via Balloon Juice, it appears that yes, to steal the title of the Juicy post, “John Hindraker is a total idiot.” Presumably no one able to put the letter to the phoneme to the word to the clause to the sentence needed such judgment to be confirmed by the likes of me, but it is awfully fun to type.

You can follow the links to read the poesy. The gist: “One basic question emerging from the midterm election is: to what extent did the terrorists win?” Just one basic question, emerging sui generis from the bubbling, primeval cauldron of The Elections. More accurately phrased, it might read: “One question that I am going to yank out of the results of the midterm elections like a Damned Abortionist yanking a partial-birth baby piece by piece out of its brainwashed liberal mother is . . .” Well, when you’ve got the hind rocket blasting with such force all day, it’s easy to speed by the details.

Arthur Silber finds another gem, here supposing that John Conyers is actively in league with Osama bin Laden, perhaps hoping that when the swarthies with scimitars show up at the gates of Vienna, he will be rewarded for his anti-Western perfidy with a sweet gig as chief eunuch to the Caliph's harem, perhaps even including an occasional kiss or two, Bagoas to the 21st-century Bizarro Alexander.

The dauphin, meanwhile, used his radio address (they still give radio addresses!? And love root beer floats at the soda fountain, and baseball, cracker jacks, and Chuch Yeager, the fastest man in the world) to reassure Americans and the world that although they loved terror before the elections, now that they’re poised to overrun Washinton’s divey-er bedroom communities, The Democrats hate terror just as much as you and me and The Troops®.

From the Democrats, meanwhile, I hear precisely what I predicted, which is a somewhat more tempered bellicosity and, if anything, a more condescending and uncomprehending attitude toward the targets of our Most Excellent Occupation. I made the mistake of listening to NPR today, during a segment of interviews with Demotrons, each programmed to say that America must move forward—toward what? away from whom?—and that Iraqis must now “stand up” and take responsibility for their own democracy, cause, hell, it’s America that’s been doing the heavy lifting over there.

Iraqis did not choose to inherit a rudderless state fraught with horrific violence and cursed with a total absence of civil authority other than a scared, confused, monolingual American military zipping from here to there in skittish convoys and shooting the hell out of anything they don’t understand, which is just about everything. I am an advocate for as swift and soon a withdrawal as possible, but only because the other option is to keep making it worse. To say that we ought to predicate the morning-after walk—dash—of shame on this paternalistic nonsense in which Iraq, having just been handed a bag of flaming shit by the America next door, is counseled to build a castle, is to leap beyond arrogance to lunacy. It is safe to say that most Iraqis remain profoundly ambivalent about Western-style representative government as a concept. To ride into power as the nominally antiwar party all the while hanging on for life and limb to the canard that whatever The Troops® are doing in Iraq is protecting us is contradictory to say the least. To imply that the problem with the Bush Plan for Total and Forever War in Iraq is that it doesn’t adequately empower Iraqis, as the recycled therapy-speech goes, who must “stand up” and “take responsibility,” as if they knocked Humpty off the wall--Well, that, friends, is the definition of audacity.

Democrat or Republican, the problem is the same: they won’t confront the most basic reality, that currently we are the problem. We may never know what Osama bin Laden roots for, if root he does, but we can be sure that whenever an American of any stripe grabs the mic and starts pulling his hair over the failure of this or that Muslim society to drag itself into the modern world, in particular a society already mashed and smashed by American hubris and American bombs, the Saudi Sage is not displeased.