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The Hippies Under the Bed

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Eschewing the notion of trying to cook up an original thought, Jacob Weisberg wastes no time descending into self-parody:

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush’s faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

Does Jake bother to source any of this? Can he provide a citation of a single Democrat making the above argument? Of course not; by the simple fact of opposing Joe Lieberman, Democrats become pacifists ready to hand the keys of the city to Osama Bin Laden. Weisberg even acknowledges that the Iraq War has been a tragic error, and has reduced the security of the United States. But the bigger mistake, for Jake, is opposing this tragic and disastrous effort, since doing so surrenders to the Republicans the issue of national security. Indeed, one wonders what sort of criticism of Bush administration foreign policy is legitimate at all.

We know this because we have been here before. The Lamont-Lieberman battle was filled with echoes and parallels from the Vietnam era. Democratic reformers and anti-establishment insurgents weren’t wrong about that conflict, either. Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. In turning viciously on stalwarts of the Cold War era like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, anti-war insurgents called into question the Democratic Party’s underlying commitment to challenging Communist expansion. The party’s Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense—and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism—helped push a lot of Americans who didn’t much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.

Right. Weisberg is afraid of the hippies under the bed. He’s internalized a set of Republican talking points saying that opposition to the Iraq War was concentrated among a group of raving left-wing pro-Mumia radical leftists, ignoring that the vast majority of critics of the Iraq War were supportive of military action against Afghanistan. Undeterred by any kind of informed discussion of 1972, Weisberg goes on:

It was not George McGovern’s opposition to Vietnam but his larger tendency toward isolationism and his ambivalence about the use of American power in general that helped him lose 49 states to Richard Nixon. In a similar way, the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad. Nixon had the gift of hippie demonstrators and fellow-traveling bluebloods like Ned’s great uncle Corliss Lamont as antagonists. Today’s Republicans face an anti-war movement with a different tone and style, including an electronic counterculture of enraged bloggers and callow entrepreneurs like Ned himself. Yet the underlying political dynamic is not altogether different.

Yep, just as George McGovern was a friend of totalitarianism except when he was fighting against it in a war, Howard Dean is a pacifist except when he advocates invading other countries. It’s gotten a lot easier to be a pacifist these days; you can advocate the use of military force in all kinds of situations.
I have to wonder what kind of political activity Jacob Weisberg DOES find acceptable. It’s not as if one cannot assert that invading Iraq was a mistake, because Weisberg himself does so in this column. To base one’s vote on this question, however, is to be a hippie pacifist. I am left to conclude that acknowedging the error of the invasion of Iraq is a route only available to those who supported the war in the first place. If attacking Iraq sounded like a terrible idea in 2003, likely to undermine the campaign against Al Qaeda, then you’re a hippie. If you believed George W. Bush’s nonsensical rhetoric, and fell for the notion that Iraq could be turned in short order into a utopian liberal paradise, then you’re a sober, well-informed commentator on the political scene. In other words, you become serious about fighting global jihad by not being serious about fighting actual terrorists.

But for Weisberg, the politics of national security are never about working out a reasonable, well thought out policy designed to protect the citizens and interests of the United States. Instead, it’s about hiding from the hippies under the bed. Joe Lieberman can’t be relied upon to fight Republicans or Al Qaeda, but we know that he’ll take on the hippies. That’s all that matters.

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