In some truly amazing and important news (and unlike earlier sightings
of willie nelson and courtney love lookalikes, this was the real
article) washed up CHIP off the old block Eric Estrada was on Anderson
Island on Monday and Tuesday filming an infomercial!
More on that later.
Quickly moving on to something that nobody cares about - at all - I
let Ted Rall speak for me. I only disagree with him on one significant
point - McGovern offered a real alternative to Nixon. Kerry promised
to by a crueler, more ruthless Bush, and people didn't want that.
Nader offers what people really want, but they're brainwashed into
thinking that Caligula and the Kennedy Clone were the only choices we
had. Otherwise, go Ted!
Victory is Ours
A Majority of Americans Now Oppose George Bush's War. It's a Bitter
Victory for Those Who Opposed the War All Along.
BY TED RALL
When voters went to the polls on November 7, 1972, they possessed more
than enough information to pick the right president.
Republican incumbent Richard Nixon had reneged on his promise to
withdraw from Vietnam, instead expanding the war into Cambodia and
Laos. Debt from the war had triggered runaway inflation, requiring
wage and price controls. In June Nixon's burglars had gotten caught
inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee.
Everyone knew the guy was a paranoid, corrupt, lying warmonger.
Faced with this simplest of decisions, the American people screwed up.
Sixty-one percent of the electorate voted for Nixon over George
McGovern, one of the most fundamentally decent candidates to have ever
run for the White House and the first to propose a national healthcare
plan. McGovern scored a pathetic 38 percent of the vote.
In January 1973, two months after he carried 49 states, Nixon's job
approval rating was at 68 percent. By the time Nixon resigned in
August 1974, however, only 25 percent still backed his performance.
Watergate had gotten uglier; Vietnam had dragged on a little too long.
Had there been a Nixon-McGovern rematch in 1974, the senator from
South Dakota would have prevailed.
Reminiscing about Watergate in 1997, journalist Haynes Johnson
reflected the mainstream rah-rah view to PBS's Jim Lehrer: "The system
worked. The press did its job.... The judges did their jobs. The grand
jury did its job. The committee, Congress headed by people like Howard
Baker and Sam Ervin did their jobs, and the public did its job..."
Actually, the public didn't do its job when it mattered��that would be
on Election Day 1972, by voting for McGovern. During the two years it
took for the public to turn against Tricky Dick, thousands of
Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians
were killed or wounded in a futile, losing war. History heaps praise
on Nixon voters who reconsidered, but these morons merit only
contempt. Nothing changed between 1972 and 1974. No new information
became available. They didn't see the light until the sun had begun to
set.
George W. Bush's war against Iraq is the subject of a similar dollar-
short/day-late opinion shift. Only 39 percent of respondents to a June
20 CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll��down from 71 percent in 2003��say they
still favor the war. Bush's personal popularity has also plunged, from
91 percent just after 9/11 to 57 percent after his January 2005
inauguration to 47 percent. Were the 2004 election held tomorrow, John
Kerry would defeat Bush.
Most Americans, in other words, have finally come around to my way of
thinking. They see the war as a waste of blood and money and the war
on terrorism, Bush's signature issue, as fiction. (Only 23 percent of
Americans tell CNN that they trust Bush to protect them from future
attacks.) Lefties like me ought to be crowing. After four long years
of being insulted as "un-American," "terrorist apologists," and
"traitors" by racist scum too dumb to understand that you don't bomb
Osama in Afghanistan when he was in Pakistan all along and that you
don't make friends by putting bags over people's heads, lefties who
opposed Bush's war have been proven absolutely right: no WMDs. No
rose-petal-paved streets. No turned corners. Not even cheaper gas:
Oil, now $60 a barrel, was just $22 in January 2002.
Everything turned out exactly as we predicted. A rump Iraq, minus
Kurdistan, is being ripped apart by a religious civil war. Iraqi
women, once citizens of the Arab world's most secular and gender-equal
nation, have been forced under the hijab. The museums were looted by
local criminals; the oil fields were looted by Halliburton. Chaos has
replaced autocracy as U.S. forces murder Iraqis faster than Saddam
could ever have dreamed. Opponents of the war have been vindicated!
Everyone knows we were right. Hurrah for us.
But this national change of heart prompts the question: Why did you
fuckers change your minds?
Surely it's not the staggering mass murder of more than 100,000 Iraqi
civilians. That shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. That's
what happens when the world's best-equipped military bombs a nation
incapable of fielding a single jet to defend itself.
It can't be the incessant death toll among American forces. We're
losing two to three guys a day, not a huge increase over the one to
two we were sacrificing to the search for nonexistent WMDs a year ago.
Or maybe you were a member of the Chris Hitchens Muslim Liberation
Brigade. Pro-war liberals said we needed to atone for installing
Saddam's dictatorial ass; fortunately for the budget deficit they
didn't suggest pursuing the same policy everywhere the U.S. had backed
a despot. Democracy might spread throughout the Middle East, the
Liberation Brigade argued, and Saddam was so evil that any successor
regime would inevitably be an improvement. But Afghanistan, where the
U.S. occupation had brought about a brand of anarchy that Afghans
considered even worse than the Taliban, had already debunked this line
of thinking. Entropy can always make a bad situation worse.
Afghanistan had also provided a case study of how the Bush
Administration runs its wars��on the cheap, relying on unpopular and
easily corruptible puppet politicians, wallowing in sleazy deals with
oil companies and White House�Cconnected contracting firms while
construction projects to help ordinary people went unfunded. Bombs
started raining on Baghdad a year and a half after they fell on Kabul.
The United States didn't build a single house or pave an inch of road
anywhere in Afghanistan during that period. We were torturing at
Bagram before Abu Ghraib. No one should be surprised that the same
idiots conducted their wars against Afghanistan and Iraq the same way.
Only a sociopath could rejoice in being proven right about the
pointless carnage and mayhem in Iraq. I was correct, yes, but why
didn't people listen when I played Cassandra on Sean Hannity? Hundreds
of thousands of us marched through America's cities to warn of the
perils of preemptive war. Why did you ignore us? How could you have
voted, well over a year after he declared "Mission Accomplished," for
a Bush without a single WMD to show for the thousands he killed? You
didn't trust me then, but please believe me now when I say that we
would have loved to have been proven wrong. The sight of Iraqis
rejoicing in the streets of Baghdad (as opposed to the phony
Saddam-statue photo op staged by 150 guys working for the army's
psychological warfare division) would have been glorious to behold.
A perplexed Donald Rumsfeld wonders why so many Americans have changed
their minds about a war that puttered along in the same gear for the
last two years. Indeed, the news is always the same during the morning
drive: "Three suicide bombers killed at least 67 Iraqis and four
American soldiers in cities throughout Iraq yesterday... an Apache
helicopter crashed in the Sunni Triangle, killing all seven men
aboard...." Drip, drip, drip��you can live with a leaky faucet for an
hour. After a week you'll pay the plumber anything he wants to fix it.
Day after month after year of consistently bad news from Iraq has
finally convinced J. Q. Public that past performance is a likely
predictor of future returns.
If the 24 percent of the public who changed their minds about Iraq and
Bush since the election had learned from their folly, well, then there
might be cause for quiet celebration. But there's no reason to believe
that. Consider, for example, a June 22 Rasmussen Reports poll about
the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Years after reports of
torture, mass suicides, and murder at Bush's Cuban gulag first
emerged, a full 70 percent of the American public continue to believe
that detainees are being treated "about right" or "better than they
deserve."
As they have on Iraq, a significant portion of these torture
apologists might come around to understanding the truth about the way
America mistreats its Muslim POWs. But the damage��to the inmates, to
our international reputation, to our souls��will already have been
done. You may well have changed your minds, but you'll still be scum.
��
Ted Rall, the syndicated cartoonist and columnist, is working on a new
book about Central Asia.
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