Demosophia

Days of Vanishing Infamy

I am struggling yet again to understand the perspective of the Copperhead opposition, not in terms of a policy orientation, but in terms of a psychological predisposition. The latest round of inquisitions aimed at Condi Rice seem couched not to get at the truth of whatever was happening in the days leading up to 9\11, but rather to sew the vague impression that the Bush Administration was exceptionally lax, and somehow missed the opportunity to keep us all safely and securely in our passenger seats.

Now, why the fixation on the notion that the attack was avoidable? Surely we've foiled some attacks in the past, many of which we've never even heard of, and some of which never materialized because of actions we took, but the primary failing of everyone prior to 9/11 was that we weren't on a war footing. And nothing short of a successful attack, on the scale of 9/11, was going to put us on such a footing. Had we, somehow, succeeded in stopping the attack we'd have drawn no more urgency from experience than we drew from the previous attack on the WTC, and probably less. While it's true that a heightened sense of alarm may have contributed to foiling the Y2K plot, that heightened sense wasn't the result of any special measures taken by the Clinton Administration. It was built into the whole Y2K hype. Just who are these hearings supposed to fool, and why?

Moveon.org is currently going for a record, by producing the most irritatingly whiney political commercial in history, and then buying time so that it plays more often than most of us breathe. These are the same folks who claimed all along that the level of threat in the wake of 9/11 has been vastly exaggerated by the Bush Administration. Yet we're supposed be impressed by their argument that Bush failed as a leader before 9/11 because he didn't take the threat of al Qaeda seriously enough? Could this possibly be more ironic?

And then it hit me. As I watched Nina Totenberg on CBS's Inside Washington desperately attempt to keep alive the hope that 9/11 could have been avoided, raising her voice, as she pleaded with Evan Thomas, so that her final words could only be heard by dogs, it occurred to me that this was simply another manifestation of the old wishful thinking that has consistently disinformed these folks. I guess I've come to understand the expectation that government ought to solve all our problems for us, before we're even aware of them, but this current fixation amounts to a wish that government solve all our problems before they even happen. And Bush is to blame because, well, this one got through the veil of verisimilitude that stands between us and the "real world." Damn him!

Ultimately it isn't that I object to the notion that we made mistakes, or that we oughtn't devote considerable energies to fixing institutional problems. But blaming this President, or any US President, for the events 9/11/2001, or 12/07/1941, amounts to a kind of wistful fantasy that's akin to the expectation that one can fly if one simply wishes on a star with enough sincerity and conviction. It's entirely in line with the fantasy among the Left that Bush somehow hoodwinked us into paying more attention to BIG DEMOCRACY, and to the War on Terror (Totalitarianism), than to their small democracy grievances. And taken to its logical extension it explains the conviction among many of those Moveon folks, that Bush actually engineered 9/11 precisely to divert us from the real agenda.

I have to believe, and this might be my own wishful thinking weakness, that Americans are too practical to fall for this nonsense, and that the preposterous nature of what they're being asked to swallow will slowly dawn on them, to the detriment of the Democratic Party. But now we're apparently going to be treated to Act II of this absurd scenario, as Sony Pictures considers turning Richard Clarke's book, Against All Common Sense, into a motion picture.

Hasn't the make-believe gone far enough? What's the next fantasy in the series, a Sci-Fi film where Dick Clarke travels back in time to Jan. 1, 2001, and renders his own book moot? Maybe we could go back to the 1940s and have a heart to heart with Sayyid Qutb so that the book he produces in Nassir's prison is/was/will be the Arab version of The Second Treatise of Civil Government. I'm sorry, but this stuff is beginning to give me the creeps...

Posted by Demosophist at April 10, 2004 09:16 PM | TrackBack