Retro Wingnuttia
So The Huffington Post is up and right now it’s featuring Larry David at the top of the page supporting John Bolton. I guess he really is a conservative just like my favorite mainstream writers Ann Coulter and Tony Blankley said. First David Horowitz, now this. Where will it end, I ask you, where?
It is good to see that David Frum is seriously performing this week’s designated function of rewriting history in ways that would make Stalin proud. He claims that the cold war started on May 9th 1945 when the Russians inexplicably required that they be allowed to celebrate the end of the war on a different day than their allies. This is a new one on me. I had always heard from the wingers that the cold war started at the “sell-out at Yalta.” Frum sees this intransigence as another sign of foreboding which we presumably should have heeded and invaded Russia forthwith. (In any case, he thinks that it’s wrong that we haven’t established memorials to the Gulags in the same way that we established memorials to the Holocaust and I’m sure that liberals are to blame for this because you know how we love Gulags.)
Of course, this mainstreaming of standard John Bircher talk circa 1958 was actually validated by George W. Bush this week when he “apologized” for the so-called sell-out at Yalta in a speech that would have made Joe McCarthy proud as punch. Repeating that old canard was once considered the sign of an bloodthirsty moron who literally believed that it was better to be dead than Red and believed it would have been preferable to start dropping nukes on the Soviet Union at the earliest possible moment. (Think Jack D Ripper.) Hey the Soviets had already lost 20 million, what difference would a few more million make, right? Besides, they were commies, not humans. Lucky for the planet, seasoned battle hardened men instead of chickenhawk baby boomers were in charge at the time and cooler heads prevailed.
The most amazing response to this I’ve read is this one from The Belmont Club in which Bush’s apology was compared favorably to the apologies for slavery and Native genocide. Considering that slavery and native American genocide were perpetrated by Americans and sanctioned and financed by the American governments of the time it’s hard to make the connection between that and failing to invade Russia but I guess if you squint your eyes really hard you might be able to see some correlation. And, of course, one wonders whether we would have been able to actually occupy Russia as well as Europe and Japan, even after the inevitable nuking, but no bother. Russia had already been pretty much destroyed so we should have put the frosting on the cake of WWII and completely annihilated it in order to save it — our favorite rationalization for American bloodlust for the past fifty years. “We’re killing them for their own good.”
But my Gawd, the brass balls of Bush to make this fatuous boast:
We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability,” the president said. “We have learned our lesson; no one’s liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others.”
Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.
The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were “beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: “Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights.”
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the global fight against terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.
Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan’s treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.
The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States’ criticism of Uzbekistan.
And, as we all know, that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is the AQ Khan debacle wherein we have let the man who sold nuclear technology to every Tom Dick and Harry who wanted one, skate. Why? Because our ally, the military dictatorship of Pakistan demanded it and in the interest of the GWOT, we have let it happen. We have the recent presidential “man-date” which just shows how far Bush will go to debase himself tip-toeing through the bluebells with Prince Abdullah for the trivial purposes of showing the people that he’s serious about gas prices. Clearly, the principle of freedom doesn’t weigh heavily in his decision making. And everybody on the planet except the 101st Fighting Keyborders and the rest of the right wing press know it.
This insufferable self-serving sanctimony about freedom and liberty is more than just annoying, however. It’s dangerous. We’re now goading Vladimir Putin in ways that don’t make make sense and he is clearly not impressed. Pretending now that the waging of the Cold War was a mistake, when it was clearly one of the wisest and most intellectually evolved thing a great nation has ever done, is unwise. After a little more than four years in office, the administration has managed to almost completely destroy this country’s hard won credibility and it appears that Junior and his neocon cronies will not rest until it is completely gone. And pathetically, they are now reduced to using old chestnuts from the National Review of half a century ago to do it. Even though we actually won the cold war, apparently it’s more important that William F Buckley be perceived as having been right.
The most astonishing thing about this is that it appears this actually is the product of 40 years of heavily subsidized college Republican bull sessions and right wing think tank white papers. Tired, warmed-over fifty year old McCarthyite crapola. I thought liberals were the ones who didn’t have any new ideas.
Update: I know the Larry David piece is satire. I was being ironic and clearly, it failed.
Update II: Fixed ridiculous error on date of Yalta conference. Never post while doing somethiung else.